What happened with Live-Documents.com launched by Sabeer Bhatia, the founder of Hotmail.com? Live-Documents.com was launched in November 2007 and attracted a lot of media attention that time. It should be noted that Sabeer Bhatia is the person who invented Hotmail and sold it to Microsoft for $400 million in 1998. I can see that the site of live-documents is still up and running but unfortunately the domain is still hyphenated. They have not been bothered to acquire the proper one without hyphen. Has this site been taken over by Microsoft, as many people suspected that time? Any informed person please shed some light on it.
AFAIK,they have operate independent of Microsoft. For the domain,its not a good idea to change to new domain coz it will affect their site PR and back link.
livedocuments.com is owned by some idiot who uses FrontPage. And what do you mean about "proper, non-hyphenated"? Hyphenated domains work fine as long as you brand them correctly. There is also no way the Microsoft will want to buy live-documents. First off, they already have Live Office, which I use on occasion. Second, if you read through live-documents, they bash Office fairly extensively. Nothing really happened to them, they just slipped out of the limelight like many web apps do after a period of time.
At the time of the launch of the product, people were talking about conspiracy theories and they predicted that live-documents.com would be taken over by Microsoft, as Microsoft has a history of acquiring half-baked products. This time IT pundits seem to be wrong, I reckon. I did some Google search and reading blogs of big boys as well as comments on them I discovered that the main concern of commentators at the time was hyphenated domain name (among many others). For example, in techcrunch.com of Michael Arrington, one commentator says: “I can’t predict if this will be successful or not. The only thing I know is the domain name is a huge mistake. Dashes are only used in crappy, slimy, cheap, knock off, bad websites. He MUST change it before he goes any further.†As we know CNN used to have i-report.com but eventually after a lengthy conversation they acquired iReport.com from Rick Schwartz. SEO’s etc are not an issue for big boys. They get such huge publicity for silly things that all back links bring them on top. The IT community owes Sabeer Bhatia a lot, as he gave so much joy to the world by inventing web based email. I hope Sabeer Bhatia will bring something better this time whatever he brings.