Microsoft Aiming to Take the Domain Registrar Market?
- By: kidmercury [privmsg - website] On 18th Apr 2006 In
Microsoft's web business suite initiative, Office Live, recently opened up for public beta, gives business a number of free tools, including a free web site and domain name. Unsurprisingly a surge in their domain registrations has occurred, and this has led to some speculation that Microsoft may be aiming for a piece of the domain registrar market. From Yahoo News:
Since the waiting list for the service was dropped April 5, the number of domain names had jumped to 43,169 on April 12 from 28,623, according to Ipwalk.com, a statistical service for the Web operated by the Swedish company Ipwalk AB.
If the number of Office Live users continue to rise as expected, then it could hurt the businesses of domain registrars who charge for their services, particularly their low-end products, Joe Wilcox, analyst for JupiterResearch, said. Microsoft, which is known for quickly dominating markets by undercutting competitors' prices, also offers paid Office Live services with more advanced features.
Can Microsoft make a dent in the domain name market? And how long can they really give away free domains for?
It depends
I for one will not take up on their offer. I am sure that most web professionals will do the same.
After all, what is cheaper than a domain name ?
I do not see the big deal of
I do not see the big deal of what MS is doing...right now they are offering three services, all free, after the beta ends two of the services will be paid, costing 29.95 per month which is 3x the cost of a domain...and that is one month. In addition to that the free services offered in the totally free package could be ad supported...one of which will be email...google knows the value of user (ad $$$) and I think this is MS's attempt at it.
There was talk of google doing the same for blogger...in which a user could get a free domain(they are a registrar), hosting(blogspot/base), blogging system(blogger), email(gmail), etc...and get a share of the earnings(adsense)...this would be more likely to hit registrars where it hurts and attract many more users since it is not targeted to businesses.