Microsoft Using .MS TLD

mqudsi writes "Microsoft is using the .MS top-level domain, assigned to the Caribbean island of Montserrat, for its Web 2.0-flavored Popfly project. You can get your own .MS name if you really want to — there are no restrictions on foreign ownership — at $180 US for 2 years. As of this writing microsoft.ms is available." In an obliquely related note, TechBlorge has up a rumination on the resemblance of the Popfly logo to Tux.

Comments

why not?

[WrongMonkey]

Why don't major corporations have their own TLDs as part of the system? It would cut back on a lot of phishing and ICANN doesn't seem to be reluctant to do whatever they can to make a buck.

Re:why not?

[jd]

Well, as I understand it, the theory of having the .com domain is that the corporation buys their name and puts in subdomains below it. So, you might have cornflakes.kellogs.com, for example. One corporation, one namespace. Makes things very simple. The problem with moving the corporations to top-level is that they'll do exactly the same thing they did with .com, which is pollute the namespace as much as possible. At which point, the whole system becomes totally unworkable and unusable.

I'd personally prefer it if the .com domain was cleared of all products, individuals, trademarks and other superfluous crap. If you aren't a company, you aren't a .com. If you're an organization, you're an .org, and that's final. In fact, I'd go one further - anything that is directly off a .com, .org, .net or .gov should be international in some respect. If it's more local than that, the name should reflect that. (For example, I would exile the US Government to .gov.us, the same way most other governments do their websites. There should be no exceptions.) When something expands in scope, it can always buy the name for the next scope out.

Wouldn't this impinge on privacy, freedom, etc? Not really. Whilst governments should be honest about location (I can dream - they're rarely honest about anything else), the only constraint I'm suggesting is that the type of name should reflect the type of scope. If you're running a website for a metropolitan area, I'd say you should have a metropolitan-level domain name. Doesn't have to be the same metro, the same country or (when NASA gets round to it) even the same planet. This gives people plenty of room for satirical/joke names, etc. It just adds a few more dots to it. Big deal.

It'd be almost trivial to make the DNS hierarchy deeper. Most users would be unaffected as most people outside of the US already add country codes to the names and as far as US users are concerned, Slashdot is an international forum. Everything else you get to through links.

This really would help for domain spoofing, because when unicode domain names start to come online, it will be possible to generate visually identical domain names that are physically different. That's been the claimed problem all along, although since browsers have a language attribute, I don't see why the browser can't just recode names for your language anyway. However, apparently that is a no-no. Given that, I can't see why you can't validate that the string uses a consistent character set AND a character set that the user has pre-approved for use with the country-code that I'm arguing should be there in most cases. In such a system, spoofing names should be impossible.

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[MarkRose]

There are a surprising amount of words that end in "ms". /usr/share/dict/american-english contains almost 500. Some are interesting in that the part preceding "ms" is also a word: Ada(ms) Nazis(ms) Si(ms) balsa(ms) boo(ms) char(ms) condo(ms) e(ms) far(ms) fir(ms) for(ms) ha(ms) hare(ms) he(ms) hi(ms) is(ms) la(ms) mini(ms) mode(ms) mu(ms) nor(ms) oh(ms) pal(ms) per(ms) pro(ms) real(ms) rear(ms) sea(ms) see(ms) ski(ms) spas(ms) tea(ms) tee(ms) thru(ms) to(ms) tote(ms) war(ms) ya(ms) and zoo(ms).

Re:Popfly?

[Oswald]

Props for having the stones to use a name like MSFTVet on /. but come on:

The team is a small band of folks with a passion for democratizing development, housed within Microsoft's Developer Division based in Redmond, Washington. Like most startup ventures, the team hustles for resources every day and is innovative, scrappy, and fun. Oh, and we also dream big.

That's just sad. Women, men, motorcycles, music, sports, dogs, horses, science fiction (back when it was worth a shit), Smalltalk, dancing...these are just a few of the things people can be passionate about. Democratizing development, whateverthefuckthatmeans, is not on the list. Smells like marketing to me.

White boys should not try to talk like they grew up in the hood, lesbians should not piss standing up, and corporations with US$50 thousand million in the bank should not try to act "scrappy". All of these acts display a combination of confusion, dishonesty, and poor taste. It's no sin to be bigger than God; just don't try to act like you're too cool to suffer the ill effects.

This is not a criticism of the people on the team because I can't possibly know anything about the people on the team (well, I know that Aaron Brethorst turned his last name into a verb, which is pretty creepy, but we'll let that slide). I'm criticizing Microsoft management for thinking they can pull this off. They're off to a great start, with 9 managers and 6 developers.

It doesn't matter if Popfly [isn't a popfly usually an out in baseball, btw?]is a cool app or not, because it will go away. If it's cool now, then it will be exploited by MS in some off-putting way as soon as it gets remotely popular, and if it's not cool then having a rich daddy won't help it.

On a positive note, the website makes pretty nice use of color.

Re:That'll make you cringe

[pasamio]

Now what I loved was all of the managers:
1x Group Program Manager
5x Program Manager (one of which is the token female)
1x Product Manager
1x Product Unit Manager
1x Engineering Manager
1x Test Developer
5x Developers

Or to reduce it to developers and managers: 5x Developers vs 10x Managers - I wonder who the three people missing are? No wonder Microsoft have issues shipping product, 1:2 dev to manager ratio is insane!