Office.com acquired by Microsoft
Microsoft recently acquired office.com. The price paid is a closely guarded secret and as with any sale of this calibre, speculation abounds about the price Microsoft paid for the domain.
At most domaining forums speculation is anywhere between $2 million and $10 million with the majority of estimates from experienced domainers being in the $5 to $7 million range.
This is an obvious name for Microsoft to own and one can only wonder what took them so long to make the acquisition. I would imagine Microsoft have been after the name for years and perhaps in these economic times, the price was finally reduced to an acceptable level.
The business that was on office.com has been moved to a new domain with the following notice being placed on the office.com landing page. This would indicate that the sale was for the name only which was registered in 1999.
Office.com, some interesting facts
The current whois shows a creation date of 20-apr-1999 wheras the image below indicates that it was archived as early as January 1998. Whoever had it registered and allowed it to drop must surely be kicking theselves now.
Updated Date: 04-aug-2009
Creation Date: 20-apr-1999
Expiration Date: 20-apr-2019
“Dear Office.com Users,
As you know from the recent email we sent you, we will be transitioning the operation of your Virtual Office account to ContactOffice.com during the next 30 days.
As part of this transition, on Monday, June 29, 2009, we changed email addresses in the office.com domain to ones in the contactoffice.com domain.
To access your existing account, you will now need to log in at http://office.contactoffice.com
As of Friday, July 31, 2009, Office.com will no longer be available so please be sure to bookmark this URL for future use. Also, if you use POP or IMAP with Office.com you will need to change your settings to pop.contactoffice.net and imap.contactoffice.net respectively.
For new users looking please visit us at http://office.contactoffice.com to register for your free subscription.
We are committed to making this transition as seamless as possible and are working hard to minimize any inconvenience these changes may cause. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact me by email at tom@contactoffice.com or by telephone, toll free, at 1-866-675-1776.
Sincerely yours,
Tom Graham and the Office.com Team”