Microsoft is still not a domain registrar
Microsoft Azure is the cheapest source of .com domains of the big 3 hyperscalers (Amazon, Microsoft and Google), but they rely on a 3rd party which may be of concern to some enterprise customers.
In my previous post I discussed where to buy the cheapest .com domains, but what I didn't discuss is the enterprise-centric preference for a single hyperscaler vendor to provide E2E (end-to-end) supply chain security.
Microsoft partners with GoDaddy for domain registrar services for Microsoft's customers. Amazon and Google both have their own registrars. Microsoft.com itself is not hosted by GoDaddy and uses MarkMonitor instead.
Is GoDaddy as secure as Amazon or Google? I don't know.
What's the future for Microsoft and DNS?
My thought is Microsoft has missed the boat on buying GoDaddy while it was still cheap in the mid-2010s while it was run by ex-Microsoft exec Blake Irving.
Even with the drop in GoDaddy stock price in 2025, it's a very expensive acquisition for a <10% revenue growth company. It's more like for GoDaddy to approach Microsoft than the other way around. Microsoft needs SMBs (small to mid-size businesses) way more than GoDaddy does, but Microsoft doesn't care about SMBs anymore. Most SMBs today have been lost to Google already, based on consumer reputation for Gmail and search. Microsoft has doubled down on enterprise, where a single enterprise customer is probably worth 10K SMBs in revenue.
Microsoft could throw a billion dollars into building the core DNS capabilities itself, but at this time the C-level execs don't want to spend money on anything other than AI. I suppose GoDaddy can pitch Microsoft a sale in order for Microsoft to regain some ground in the SMB space, but the price would be expensive.
Cloudflare could help plug the DNS gap for Microsoft, but Microsoft turned its back on Cloudflare despite originally participating in a $110 million funding round for Cloudflare back in 2015, alongside Google, Baidu, and Fidelity. This was a pre-IPO investment intended to foster technical collaboration, but I guess someone at Microsoft forgot to think about DNS.
Post Cloudflare IPO in 2019, Microsoft has likely exited or significantly reduced that specific venture-era stake. I don't see Microsoft has a major shareholder. Instead I see massive institutional investors like Capital World Investors (11.7%), Vanguard (9.2%), and BlackRock (6.4%).
Would Microsoft buy Cloudflare? No. At a $65b+ valuation, Microsoft money goes to AI. Microsoft hasn't plugged this DNS registrar problem for a decade or longer now, so it's unlikely to ever get resolved.
So what is Microsoft doing with respect to DNS?
In 2023, Microsoft has started the ".microsoft" dotBrand strategy. This is a massive migration to consolidate its fragmented web presence (like office.com, live.com, and sharepoint.com) into the unified cloud.microsoft namespace.
This reduces the number of domains that IT admins have to deal with (in the future). There are also some relatively small performance benefits here for users accessing Microsoft services. Perhaps the biggest benefit is increased user recognition of the domain and potential reduction in phishing. e.g. accounts.microsoft is a more trustworthy domain than phishing attempts like accounts-microsoft.com.