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.