In 1885 Karl Benz construct the first automobile.
It had three wheels, like an invalid car,
And ran on alcohol, like many drivers.
Since then about seventeen million people have been killed by them
In an undeclared war;
And the whole of the rest of the world is in danger of being run over
Due to squabbles about their oil.
-Heathcote Williams (Autogeddon extract).
If you had identical (very close) interfaces to the same content. It then becomes a moral choice.
Currently I'm more satisfied with the illegal offerings, I've tried a subscription service: Lovefilm (which isn't amphibious), and look at many of my DVD boxsets, that have no value added content whatsoever.
I have three seasons of very poor quality Star Trek episodes on DVD. Now I think the studios owe me a better quality version. Which I don't think I should pay for. In my mind you should just pay for the license to watch, listen, read... and it doesn't really matter about the medium of delivery.
The Start Screen still brings me nothing over the menu. The way I used to use the Start Menu, was Windows Key + Type. With Windows 8, the search interface eels all wrong: the search being in the top right (awkward), search results to left of search box (awkward), thinking that your search brought up no results, only to then arrow down (Ubuntu lens) and try again.
The mystery meat navigation/control of Windows 8 is the hardest part. I remember the first time I used a tablet with Win 8, and I felt totally lost. I had to Google how to use it. And I've since forgotten all the gestures.
Sure add power shortcuts, but let us have a discoverable user interface.
Also I have Win 8 on a 32inch TV, with fonts and tile sizes increased, and it's still not very usable. I always end up on the floor in front of it cursing.
Not to mention application switching (metro and desktop) etc. It just feels like a very beta interface, and the said plasters in the update don't sound as if they change much.
(Tip: Windows D, Alt + F4, Enter to shutdown lol.)
They have application in URIs. And there is a matter of building trust relationships through them. The domain alone isn't enough to do that. I tend to lean on search engines to affirm the genuineness of a domain.
Domain names provide an abstraction in that you can hide web services behind them with routing, ports and protocols.
Personally I'd rather something like the Star Trek computer interface and not care about domain names and urls.
Me: Computer, surmise the article by Foo Bar about Such and Such please.
If ambiguities were presented the computer would interrogate me to help filter them. The computer being the interface abstracting away how and where the info came from. Unless I asked of course! This isn't a million miles away from a modern search engine, it's just I have to do further filtering/querying.
Slightly off-topic but what about the alternative of sub-domains?
For web sites I tend to use the www subdomain, because it offers convenience and flexibility with CNAMEing, but I absolutely loathe the www subdomain. Almost as much as 'com' as a tld. I assume com is an abbreviation of company. Many websites aren't companies so that doesn't make much sense to me.
Despite my personal gripes, it's mainly aesthetics, and these fall into the background, you fail to notice or care.
I rather a general identifier. Ambiguity isn't all that terrible: Apple Records and Apple Computers. Coke the drink, the drug, the fuel etc.
A name by itself doesn't always mean that much without context.
And there are counter examples of this too. Del.icio.us, was just a damn awkward domain name. So it morphed into delicious.com. I assumed we had Web 2.0 domain names like Flickr arrive as a result of most of the dictionary being registered/parked. I.e. flicker.com. It had the added bonus of being slightly different and memorable. Though I struggle a little with that domain name because of the awkward non-standard spelling.
Prefixing with an i, is a sneaky namespace hack work around.
Then people jumped on alternate tlds, country coded tlds, from obscure and war-torn countries. Again that opens up your options. For a time.
I'm increasingly coming around to just a boring old .com. Even the guardian news outlet, moved from their .co.uk to .com recently.