Very interesting thoughts... I believe that years matter, but people will remember something meaningful.
Com is meaningful, TV is meaningful (plus easy to remember), and how meaningful is co, what do you think?
As for me, I will always confuse co with com
I actually like CO .. because a great deal of companies are using it for their company name, e.g. BrandSupplyCo LLC... Its shorter than COM and business owners actually know it stands for company. People just dont know that COM means company.
If it wasn't for DOT COMs recognition, I would prefer supply.co over supply.com or I would prefer software.co over software.com. It's short and it works and stands for the very same thing: COMPANY
But DOT COM is not just any extension. The brand trust associated with it is why businesses around the world prefer it.
The internet has been around long enough for consumers to develop an "affinity". They know a great deal about how the internet works now and are willing to embrace novel ways to consume content.
It is no longer the 90's when only geeks knew what the internet was. Everyone knows what it is and many even know what cookies are, what protocols are, what a firewall is. That knowledge has developed over time. Only geeks knew that stuff. It sounds ridiculous but consumers just didnt care about cookies until privacy issues entered public domain.
So, what we have now is an educated consumer who can recognize www.mycompany.me or www.thisservice.co - they know its something they can enter into their browser. It's not so difficult too imagine that they will soon embrace new gTLDs. When Google makes that change I spoke of, it will be right in their face every single day. When that happens the awareness will explode. What we have then could turn into a major event for the entire domain industry and Google has already announced a date range.
I am seeing type-in traffic for domains already and it's great. I own a few ultra premium keywords like software in some extension and consumers are actually entering it into their address bar. I havent quite figured out how it works, because when I enter "software tips" into the address bar, I dont land at software.tips - I get redirected to Google instead. So I will need some time to further dig into that, but the development is very exciting and I couldnt be more happy with my early adopter investments, especially since I already have offers in the 4-figure range. But I will sit on my names for a few years before I sell anything. There's money to be made here, a blind man can see that. This isn't the end of the story, it's the beginning and DOT COM owners are afraid. Change is always "scary". But as I pointed out, owners of premium DOT COMs have nothing to fear because of 30 years of building trust and recognition. That just doesn't go away over night, that would take a decade or a technological disruption.