HotOffice

» see hotoffice.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

For most of 2001 the front page of hotoffice.com was a letter from a law firm. Holland & Knight LLP, writing on 13 April 2001 for Kenneth A. Welt, the assignee for the benefit of creditors of "HotOffice.com, Inc. f/k/a HotOffice Technologies, Inc. f/k/a Linkstar Communications Corporation f/k/a Powerlink Communications Corporation". The case had been commenced on 19 December 2000 in the Circuit Court for Palm Beach County under Chapter 727 of the Florida Statutes. Enclosed, the letter says, please find a bid package for what is left.

What was left: the trademarks, the registered domains and the source code. The assignee lists HOTOFFICE in the United States and in Canada, HOTOFFICE & DESIGN beside it, and a phrase the company had gone to the trouble of registering across seven classes, ANYTIME ANYWHERE OFFICING. The same letter contains the plainest description of the product anybody ever wrote, because a lawyer had to explain to strangers what they would be bidding on: private company email, a group calendar, a group contact manager, a shareable database, chat rooms, a bulletin board and discounted services for small businesses.

HotOffice had been selling that since 1996, which is early enough to matter. It was unveiled in beta at Comdex in November 1996 by a Boca Raton company then called LinkStar Communications, inside what the organizers billed that year as the first Internet Innovators Pavilion. The December 1996 homepage calls it "The World's First Virtual Office Service" and promises an office on the internet with no setup at all, under a toll-free number spelled out as (888) 4HOTOFFICE. Intel and Staples were both investors. So was a partnership that included an affiliate of Goldman Sachs.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the pitch ~

That first page is worth reading line by line, because each line is something a small business in 1996 could not otherwise have: publish and share documents without owning a server, hold private conferences, make free long-distance calls over the internet, work directly against Microsoft Office, get automatic backups. No setup required. One low monthly fee. Take the dates off and it is the sales page for most collaboration software sold since.

I was twelve when this launched and sixteen when it closed, and the customer it wanted was an American small business with a few employees and no server room. None of that was reachable from a house in Turkey on a 33.6k modem. What I can judge from here is the idea, and the idea was early by about eight years.

~ nineteen december ~

Clint Boulton's story at InternetNews on 8 December 2000 is the only contemporary notice I can find, and it is short. The company could not raise capital, so it would close indefinitely on the 19th. Mickey Freeman, senior vice president of marketing, is the only person quoted from HotOffice. About 750 customers had already begun moving to Intranets.com, a competitor that agreed to take them, and thousands more were expected to follow before the doors shut.

Then the lawyers. An assignment for the benefit of creditors is the orderly version of going under: no bankruptcy filing, an assignee appointed to sell what there is and pay whoever he can out of it. The one thing it does better than a press release is fix the date, which is why this grave gets a day where most dot-com deaths get a month.

~ the second HotOffice ~

Someone bought the name at that sale. From early 2002 hotoffice.com served Thruport HotOffice, a collaboration suite from a different company making almost the same promises, down to the line about forgetting email file-size limits. That version ran quietly for a decade and the domain only began returning 404 in December 2012, twelve years after the company that invented the name stopped existing.

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