Imagine that you ran a dairy company which owned the domain cottage-cheese.com, and the person in your organisation responsible for renewing domains just let it expire. What would you say to that fool? If it were up to me I would he or she would be fired right away. It is terrible to let anything like that happen, to just let a generic industry domain back in the open for registration pool. Any domain it is worth attempting to sell before letting it drop even if it is not a premium domain. And the company I am thinking about could have made a very nice amount of money had they tried to sell the domain. The company is in a industry that I check on once in a while, and I first thought that this domain had been hijacked. It happens, it happens very quickly when you forget to lock your domain names. There are pirates in China and Eastern Europe that keeps a close watch on changes in zone files. I just had to email them and find out what had happend.

Here is the response I got from them:

boo hoo =) it was not important to us… would you have bought it from us?

Yes I would, and so would a lot companies in this industry. It was pretty studid of them to let it intentionally drop. The domainer that manage to grab this domain could resell it very quickly, right now the domain hosts a landing page with advertising.

NOTE: cottage-cheese.com and the dairy industry are only used to illustrate the story, this is about a different domain and a different industry.