Use of own domain name with Office 365 Home/Premium

Among my colleagues at work and friends, there are not so many who are using family domains. I asked some of them and they say they do not care and that is important only if you are a business. They see it more of the show-off, hobby, nerd, enthusiast thing. But lets exaggerate and say that 10% of all home users do. Now compare that to the amount of business customers. MS does not even bother.

Well I could understand this position if they would have to weight  "cost of development" <-> "estimated revenue".

But: They already have two seperate solutions for this in place (Outlook.com premium  /  O365 business plans).

So there is no reason to believe that there  would be a large cost impact to set this up as a feature in O365 home/personal.

Subsequently this smells like a political decision rather than a cost/return one.

They probably want their product portfolio stay clean and nicely distinguished.

Well, subsequently I want my money to be nicely distinguished and spent wisely, so: 

• as a private (family) user, I don't want to pay the extra for a SMB plan

Now weigthing the cost:

• [monthly cost for Domain & IMAP at a provider] + [monthly O365 home]

versus:

• [monthly cost for Domain & Mailbox + Office software] at a competing provider

versus: 

• [monthly Domain & IMAP] + [one-off Office 2016 license

...it seems to me that MS might be about to loose my subscription.

Too sad.

The customer is always right. As the post on this thread shows many home users would like to use their own domain name. I'm even happy to pay extra for it.

If Microsoft don't offer this they'll just loose business to competitors who do offer this, like Google.

According to MS, you are not ready to pay extra for it.

If you were, you would have purchased the Business plan.

Among my colleagues at work and friends, there are not so many who are using family domains. I asked some of them and they say they do not care and that is important only if you are a business. They see it more of the show-off, hobby, nerd, enthusiast thing. But lets exaggerate and say that 10% of all home users do. Now compare that to the amount of business customers. MS does not even bother.

The customer is always right. As the post on this thread shows many home users would like to use their own domain name. I'm even happy to pay extra for it.

If Microsoft don't offer this they'll just loose business to competitors who do offer this, like Google.

I think they did the homework and could see that there is a large number of up to 5 users small businesses (home businesses sort of) who (if the custom domain option were available) would have switched from Business to a cheaper Home plan, cannibalizing the more expensive plan.

May be true, but if you adress different markets, this can always happen.

You can limit this risk by limiting the license via TOS to "non-business". 

They already used to do this in the old "office home and student" editions! So it's really nothing new!

Ultimately the question is: do you get more out of the additional business by offering the feature or do you loose more by the cannibalisation?

I mean, honestly: 

the business model of the O365 home/personal is basically to rent out a pice of software that you could also buy for one-off.

The additional benefit from the subscription on top of the one-off purchase is limited (of course there will always be one person valuating it higher than the other, but over all it is rather limited).

Anyone can see that one-off buying is cheaper in the long run than the subscription.

On the other hand, 

if you would offer email tied into this subscription, you would have a real distinctive advantage for the subscription product. You would also tie the clients much closer to you as it would be much harder to move from such a subscription to a one-off purchase. 

But whatever, the decision seems to be made wether or not we like it (and I hate it).

I have waited for this feature for so long now that I am really frustrated to see the one chance they had slipping away.

(as outlook premium was not on my radar and available in my country, I wasn't aware of it until yesterday).

So for me this opens up the question again of whether to go back to one-off purchase instead of subscription.

If they don't intend to enrich their more expensive product with the most obvious benefit, then, well, I will go back to their cheaper alternative.

I can easily live with that.

Their problem.