There is speculation doing rounds that Microsoft is now the owner of the domain Office.com. And they will use it for their cloud-version of Microsoft Office.

This speculation is based on ContactOffice’s (previous owner) mail to Office.com users, explaining its present and future developments. The letter says

Dear Office.com Users,

As you know from the recent email we sent you, we will be transitioning the operation of your Virtual Office account to ContactOffice.com during the next 30 days.

As part of this transition, on Monday, June 29, 2009, we changed email addresses in the office.com domain to ones in the contactoffice.com domain.

To access your existing account, you will now need to log in at office.contactoffice.com

As of Friday, July 31, 2009, Office.com will no longer be available so please be sure to bookmark this URL for future use....

Microsoft is not leaving any stone unturned in the battle royal with Google. Google is not far behind in the one-upmanship either. When Microsoft introduced Bing, Google retaliated with Google Chrome OS.

After the Microsoft-Yahoo deal, Google is going all out to promote Google Apps as a worthy or even better replacement for Microsoft Office. In the search engine scene, Microsoft had the disadvantage of branding issues. With Bing, Microsoft rectified this, though nowhere near Google’s popularity.

With the acquisition of the domain Office.com, Microsoft is negating any chance of branding issues for Office. However, Office already being a well-established brand, they need not have worried about this.