Microsoft Giving Away Free Domains

I wrote awhile back on the Office 12 Watch blog about Microsoft’s Office Live project and the ability to get a free website domain by joining their service at the lowest tier.

If you didn’t catch it yet by keeping up with Digg, then the ability get a free domain will be news to you. Obviously if it’s gotten listed on Digg, it’s big news. My question though is why?

There’s not alot you can do with the domain actually. I’ve not figured out a way to access the domain webspace with anything other than Microsoft’s provided online HTML editor, which seems to work alot like FrontPage 98. The domain is locked down too, and it can’t be deleted/transferred, etc. Here are the settings from the WHOIS at GoDaddy.

Name Server………. ns1.officelive.com
Name Server………. ns2.officelive.com

Registry Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK
Registry Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Registry Status: clientTransferProhibited
Registry Status: clientUpdateProhibited

So, sure it’s free, but locked down there’s not a lot of FREEdom to do much with it apart from Microsoft. Let’s see what other people do with it.

Source: Free domains??? Thank you, Microsoft! on Digg.com
Source: Free domains??? Thank you, Microsoft! on NewsForge