Microsoft Office Live Small Business

» see smallbusiness.officelive.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i was a turkish engineering student through most of office live small business's life. honestly, i was not the small business it had in mind. the audience was a us dentist or a us florist who wanted a domain and an email address without learning what a mx record was. microsoft would register the domain for you, host the website, run the email, all at no cost beyond a domain renewal fee.

the service shipped in late 2007 alongside its sibling office live workspace. for whatever reason, microsoft made a bet that the right way to fight google apps for business was to give away the small-business tier and monetize add-ons on top. there were paid features (custom reports, expanded storage, paid email accounts above the free quota) but the floor was free. anyway, the only equivalent at the time was google apps standard edition, which had a free tier of its own.

the business case quietly evaporated. by 2011 microsoft had launched office 365 as a paid suite at six dollars per user per month for the business plan. the new product did more, but the free-forever promise was gone. on april 30 2012 microsoft started dismantling office live small business, by then a thirty-month-old free service holding millions of small-business domains.

the migration was rough. microsoft gave existing users a free six-month office 365 subscription as a sweetener but after that it was full price. many of the small businesses on olsb were free-tier-only customers who had built their entire web presence on microsoft's promise of zero monthly cost. for some reason the migration also broke godaddy and network-solutions domain transfers in the middle, and infoworld and the register were writing about angry customers all through may.

~ the case file ~

~ the deal ~

the deal was simple enough at signup. you typed in a domain you wanted, microsoft checked availability through its registrar partner, you paid the domain fee (around fifteen dollars per year), and microsoft did the rest. five free email accounts, a website builder with twenty-something templates, document sharing through the office live workspace sibling, all of it at smallbusiness.officelive.com. you did not need a credit card on file beyond the domain renewal. by 2009 microsoft was claiming three million small businesses had signed up.

the website builder was simple in the worst sense. the templates were the early-2000s pastel kind that even by 2009 looked dated. honestly, you could not write your own css. the editor was a wysiwyg drag-and-drop with a fixed library of widgets. if you wanted a real website you used wordpress or paid a freelancer on elance to do it. but for a plumber who needed a contact page and a map and an email address, it was enough.

~ the actual end ~

microsoft announced the shutdown around eight months out. the press cycle in 2011 framed it as a graceful migration to office 365, but the small businesses on olsb were not the businesses office 365 was priced for. the difference between zero dollars a month and thirty dollars a month for a five-person company is the difference between staying and leaving.

the april 30 2012 cutover happened on schedule. microsoft kept the domains pointing at the right places for a transition window and then handed the dns control back to the customer to do whatever they wanted with. by the end of summer 2012 most of the olsb websites were either dead, moved to godaddy, or rebuilt on weebly or wix. office 365 picked up a small fraction.

~ the next chapter ~

office 365 is now microsoft 365 and it is a real business at billions in arr. olsb does not show up in any of microsoft's heritage materials about that arr. it was the cheap front-door experiment microsoft ran before it figured out how to charge for the same surface. by then, the small-business tier was not a thing microsoft talked about giving away. the lesson microsoft seemed to take from olsb was that free was the wrong number.

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