Microsoft is up to something. I’m not sure what, but I am really curious as to why Microsoft recently registered 26 domain names at once: all related to the word contosoyams. From my research so far, I have not been able to find any references anywhere to contosoyams, and can only determine that this is a fictitious word made up by someone at Microsoft.
@bhartzer we're moving into sweet potato farming. Figured it was obvious. 😉
— duane forrester (@DuaneForrester) October 4, 2013
The whole reason I bring this up is that Microsoft doesn’t normally register a lot of domain names all at once like this. And when they register both the .com and the .net, there’s a reason for it: to protect the brand name or the domain they’re registering. And in this case, they registered the .com, the .net, and domains that include numbers, as well.
Microsoft has purchased multiple domain names before, but when they did it there was a good reason for doing it.
Here is the list of domain names that they registered, all at once within the past 24 hours:
contosoyams.com
contosoyams.net
contosoyams1.com
contosoyams1.net
contosoyams10.com
contosoyams10.net
contosoyams11.com
contosoyams11.net
contosoyams12.com
contosoyams12.net
contosoyams2.com
contosoyams2.net
contosoyams3.com
contosoyams3.net
contosoyams4.com
contosoyams4.net
contosoyams5.com
contosoyams5.net
contosoyams6.com
contosoyams6.net
contosoyams7.com
contosoyams7.net
contosoyams8.com
contosoyams8.net
contosoyams9.com
contosoyams9.net
These domains could be used for several different purposes, such as for testing or training purposes. They could also be the internal names of servers or something related to that.
I cannot imagine that contosoyams has any branding potential. I checked Google Translate and Google says that it detected that the word was Spanish. But, I couldn’t find any reference to contosoyams anywhere in Google.com or even any of the Spanish Google sites.
Update
With some additional research, someone pointed out to me that Contoso is a fictional company that Microsoft owns, and they use Contoso often in their documentation. So, that part makes sense now. But is Contoso going to start selling yams?