The big news in the domaining market is the recent acquisition made by Microsoft of the office.com domain. This domain is just made for Microsoft and is ideal for marketing its suite of office productivity tools. Just to give you an idea of the value that buyers put on domains, toys.com was recently bought for $5.1 million by Toys ‘R’ Us.

The previous owner of office.com was a Brussels based company that marketed a web based suite of collaboration and productivity tools called Virtual Office for small and medium sized businesses. According to TechCrunch “the domain name was owned by a U.S. resident and simply operated by ContactOffice”.

The office.com product sounds like Microsoft’s Office Web Applications, doesn’t it? Office.com even positioned their product as “the internet alternative to Microsoft Outlook – only better!”. There was a free version and also a subscription based service offering more resources and features.

There is much speculation about how Microsoft intend to use the domain. One option is for the company to use it for the new Office Web Applications.

Webmaster Corner

This section is for those techie webmasters out there who are interested in seeing how powerful a domain office.com really is. It’s hard to see what PR shows in the Google Toolbar as the domain is redirected to the Microsoft website. However, PR checkers show that the domain homepage has a PR of 5, which is handy indeed.

The domain was first registered in 1999 making it a nice round ten years old.

The site has two dmoz listings and two listings in the Yahoo! Directory.

Yahoo! Site Explorer shows the site as having a solid 60,000 inbound links. Formidable!

By far the most useful attribute this domain possesses, though, is its catchy, memorable and ideally suited name. I wonder how much type in traffic it will get.

Tags | domains, office.com