Dallas Cowboys buy, then pass, on pricey Cowboys.com domain

It pays to check out what you are bidding for in an auction, and the Dallas Cowboys certainly got a shock when they realised what they had bid for cowboys.com! Thinking they had bid US$275, they were rather surprised to find they had bid $275,000!Speaking to ComputerWorld, Rich Dalrymple, the Cowboys spokesman said, “We didn’t realize what the price was. Our representatives misunderstood what the pricing system was, and it was a simple mistake,” he said. “So we just said we didn’t understand the structure of the auction and we basically withdrew our bid and decided we weren’t going to pay that amount.”However Monte Cahn of Moniker finds the whole situation a bit surreal as to how it came about. The domain name was listed on the Moniker website as likely to be sold in the range of $100K to $500K.”It was probably the most surprising bidding process or bidding situation in one of our live auctions that I’ve ever experienced,” Cahn said to ComputerWorld. “They submitted an absentee bid form; the price range of the domain name was posted on our Web site in the $100,000 to the $500,000 category and the opening bid started off at $225,000.”Cahn admitted that it was possible his phone representative didn’t say the word thousand after every bid and that could have confused the Cowboys.”Now just like with [traditional] auctions, the auctioneer doesn’t typically say ‘thousand’ at the end of every single confirmed bid on the floor. Once it starts off at $255,000, the next bid goes to $260 and $275 and so on and so forth, but our tapes reveal that $275,000 was repeated on the floor, but the phone representative might not have repeated $275,000,” Cahn said. “However it is Cowboys.com, it’s a premier domain name, and the minimum bid price was $250,000 and it was known.”While Moniker could have got the Cowboys to honour their bid, he decided against it. But the domain name had interest from other people so he let it go.To read more on the story in ComputerWorld, see computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9043718