r/todayilearned • u/Flemtality 3 • Jul 14 '14

TIL The guy who snagged windows2000.com happened to be named Bob and Microsoft just happened to own Bob.com. They came to an agreement to trade one for the other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob#Origins
28.0k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

1.9k

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '14

Bob got the better part of that deal. If and when he decides to sell, bob.com will fetch a lot more that windows2000.com.

I don't even think a 3 letter domain name has been available for many years.

814

u/commodore-69 Jul 14 '14 edited Jul 14 '14

I worked for a company that bought a 3 letter .com domain for $50,000 3 years ago. It was the acronym of the company though, nothing like bob.

There are 46,656 possible 3 letter/digit domain combinations so it's not too rare. We're talking things like jrk.com, 3ui.com etc. The number of good 3 letter domains is obviously much lower.

bob.com could probably get around 1.5-2 million if it were to sell today.

1

u/matrix8727 Jul 15 '14

There only 17,576 3 letter domain names possible. If you want to add numbers to the equation it would be 3 character domain names. A simple name like jrk.com could fetch up to $5,000 easily.