| Date: | April 14, 2006 / year-entry #134 |
| Tags: | history |
| Orig Link: | https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060414-07/?p=31523 |
| Comments: | 14 |
| Summary: | I remember some time ago getting a piece of email that basically said, "Hey, is anybody using start.com?" I have since learned that that domain was registered by the marketing department, presumably to "synergize" with the "Start Me Up" campaign or something like that, but nothing ever happened with it. Nevertheless the registration kept getting... |
I remember some time ago getting a piece of email that basically said, "Hey, is anybody using start.com?" I have since learned that that domain was registered by the marketing department, presumably to "synergize" with the "Start Me Up" campaign or something like that, but nothing ever happened with it. Nevertheless the registration kept getting renewed year after year. (Perhaps we should also put marketing in charge of renewing passport.com since they seem to do a better job of keeping on top of expiring registrations than whoever is in charge of Passport.) It was probably at about the time I got that email that the start team (except that wasn't their name yet) was looking for a domain name they could use to host their little experiment, and they stumbled across start.com and wondered whether anybody was using it. Nobody was, so they took it and did something interesting. The rest is history. (Oh wait, this was history, too.) |
Comments (14)
Comments are closed. |
I thought it get its name from Windows "Start" button :) i was wrong!
wow, i can’t imagine someone who owned start.com would let it expire. the domain name alone probably brings in thousands of visitors (read: advertisement!!)
Nobody let start.com expire. Assuming they registered it back in 1995, most domains were available. The registration wasn’t for a limited period of time because you didn’t have to pay for them back then. Once registrations required payment, MS just kept renewing it, only to actually start using it 10 years later.
Isn’t start.com historical reference now, replaced by http://www.live.com?
When I invent my time machine, I’m going back to the early 1990s and registering download.com, computers.com, news.com, and so on.
wouldn’t it be more profitable to short pets.com
I’d like to know why Apple owns mammals.org?!
http://www.mammals.org/
http://whois.domaintools.com/mammals.org
… and then sell them to ZD for one million dollars *pinky*
Well, it’s not like MS is bound by who owns a domain, as they are quite happy to bypass DNS:
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/431027/30/0/threaded
Yet another way to Do Security Right ™
While we’re on the topic of the origin of MSFT domain name, how ’bout doing "contoso.com" ?
To Mike Dunn:
What about sex.com? $14M the last time I read about it!
Coward: It doesn’t look like they’re bypassing DNS there. It looks, instead, like they’re bypassing the hosts file and *always* using DNS.
Which is just as broken in certain cases, and reduces my trust in the entire DNS client API in Windows by at least an order of magnitude. But they still don’t "bypass" DNS. ;-)
I would have registered microsoft.com and sold it for a zillion dollar.