14 DAY TRIAL // Google announced yesterday that it was restructuring into Alphabet, a bigger company in which Google will be a part alongside other previously started ventures.
Along with this announcement, Google also revealed the Alphabet website at abc.xyz, which contained a number of Easter Eggs and was even the target of some sneaky trolling from Microsoft.
Curious from Google's part was the fact that the company didn't buy the alphabet.com domain for its new business, as it did with Nest and nest.com, and all of its previous business ventures.
alphabet.com is owned by none other than BMW
The reason is that the alphabet.com domain name was not previously held by a domain squatter or some other smaller company, but by German car manufacturer BMW.
While many would have considered selling alphabet.com to Google as their golden ticket to the Willy Wonka chocolate factory, BMW just doesn't care.
The German car manufacturing giant isn't interested in selling its long-established domain name, which it registered back in 1997, as a company spokesperson told The New York Times.
alphabet.com is not parked, BMW actually uses the domain
BMW uses alphabet.com to host the website for its fleet service offering, which provides companies with large car fleets.
If you think this is a small part of BMW's services, you're wrong. BMW's Alphabet International GmbH fleet service business operates in 18 countries and provides around 530,000 vehicles to various corporate entities, as AutoEvolution reports.
This isn't a side project for the German company, and chances are that Google, or better yet Alphabet Inc., should just lick its lips and move on.
When writing this article, alphabet.com is down, probably due to the huge traffic site it started getting since Google's Alphabet announcement.