August 07, 2009

Microsoft has registered a new domain in an effort to retain Office customers who might be considering a shift online to Google Apps. The company grabbed the office.com domain earlier this week.

It had previously been farmed out to the Belgium-based ContactOffice Group that licensed the site name from a third-party under a sharing deal, according to Robin Wauters at TechCrunch.

The WHOIS database confirms Redmond as the new owner of the domain as of 4 August 2009. I Started Something’s blogger Long Zheng was first to spot that Microsoft had scooped up the site. The software titan - which for now is remaining silent on what exactly the new domain will be used for - is clearly ramping up its online efforts in readiness for its Office 2010 assault next year.

Last month the company released a test copy of the next version of its Office suite for the desktop. At the same time it made rather a big deal about its Office Web apps, which will be squeezed out to users in three distinctly different portions.

Source:-http://www.theregister.co.uk