Quoting Aristedes Maniatis on Thursday December 20, 2001:
| I think that generic words are by their very nature less memorable.
| books.com can be very easily confused with book.com. And it becomes a very
| difficult branding to sell when the name of your company is just "book".
| Interestingly Barnes and Noble owns book.com but markets themselves at
| bn.com.

I can point to a few counter examples:

  * register.com -- one of the leading domain registers
  * cdrom.com -- was the leading software repository
  * news.com -- a leading tech news site

I don't think your reasoning is correct. Generics make up only a tiny
fraction of registered names, so it stands to reason even if there were
amazing successful they would still make a minor number of successful
and notable businesses.

This is even more obfuscated by the example you use -- big corporations
with the money to register their related generics* without making use of
them. Of course Barnes and Noble is not going to trade as book.com --
they are the biggest book store in America and have huge mindshare, and
they have an equally memorable (IMHO) domain name in bn.com.

There are 3,006 generics opened up in Australia. Even if we were to
broaden the definition of generic and say there 50,000 generics in .com,
there are 23 million .com addresses in total. It therefore stands to
reason that there would be a considerable number more success stories
with non generics.

kim

* like P&G did in 95 that was arguably the first major case of
  speculation: http://www.urbanlegends.com/products/pg_domain_names.html