Brand TLD Success story: how .microsoft has boosted customer experience

A defensive move

Microsoft became one of the pioneers of brand TLDs when it submitted eight TLD applications to ICANN (including .azure, .microsoft, and .xbox) in 2012.

A move that employees of the company based in Redmond willingly admit was originally motivated by brand protection and a unique opportunity to gain potential assets. “Keep your options open” was the mantra of the moment. There were no plans as to what to do with these TLDs, just an intuition that not taking part in this new adventure could represent a competitive disadvantage.

Once its dot brand TLD applications were approved by ICANN and the launch stages were completed, Microsoft’s man in charge of these all-new TLDs spent a long time in the wilderness, as he puts it. Because despite his enthusiasm, perseverance and abundance of ideas inspired by uses seen among other pioneering brands, his remained an isolated voice and the company’s TLD languished unused other than the odd redirect. In a world where dot com was king, his arguments fell on deaf ears.

The arrival of cloud.microsoft: the answer to a pressing need for naming consistency and optimisation

Until one day in 2020, when the Office product team enlisted his help. The problem? Vast quantities of domain names registered over a period of twenty years with no consistent naming. The significant inconsistencies between brands also caused technical problems such as single sign-on when switching from one domain to another, as well as for IT administrators forced to include endless lines in their allow-lists. This chaos threatened to disorient both customers and distributors. So order was needed, but how to go about it?

The .microsoft TLD provided the perfect solution! This proprietary TLD held the key to solving the problem and bringing the desired consistency to the product range and its users.

Thus the cloud.microsoft project was born. Microsoft’s Cole Quinn explains: “Within the company we talk about a unified domain initiative encompassing Microsoft Saas products in order to unify domain names by consolidating customer endpoints under a single root domain.”

Targeting innovation-generating use

And the icing on the cake is that the project also drives customer-benefiting innovation. One of the risks identified in the preparatory work was that microsoft.com was so firmly entrenched that it had become a conditioned response for people. So what could be done to help users reflexively adding a .com at the end of a cloud.microsoft address, for example? The goal was to be proactive and user-friendly so as to optimise the user experience. Thanks to the technical feasibility of the DNS, a generic redirect was introduced into the redirect service developed by the US corporation’s teams so that if a user makes an input error, it is parsed to identify the searched product then corrected to reach the correct destination. And it was this plus that earned it management approval for the go-ahead.

The project reached its pinnacle in 2023 with the first publication on the Microsoft Tech Community Blog announcing the consolidation of all Saas products under cloud.microsoft. Problem officially solved!