Microsoft has recently bought sway.com for what we can only assume was a nice premium to the former owner as four letter domains do not come cheap these days. But, what is it for and why is Microsoft registering new domains that hint towards a content delivery network (CDN)? For those who are unaware, a CDN helps you deliver bandwidth-intensive content around the world, with Akamai being the leading brand in the market.
Without going too far down the rabbit hole of wild guesses and unfounded speculation, Microsoft did also register sway-CDN.com, sway-CDN.net, sway-INT.com and sway-INT.net, all of which appear to be CDN related. Microsoft already has a CDN in place and currently offers it to Azure customers so this could be purely a branding play.
Because of the accompanying CDN domains, Microsoft may be looking to position "Sway" as a marketing effort to promote its own CDN and attract developers to its platform. If the company could successfully campaign "Sway" to the enterprise users and show that its CDN is better than others, it could be a useful tactic in getting companies to either switch to Azure or sign up for Azure when they are ready to move to the cloud.
Other than the CDN idea, there isn"t much else to go on but Microsoft did trademark the term; the descriptions used on the mark are about as helpful as a canoe in the desert when trying to figure out what the domain will be used for.
If you head over to sway.com right now, you will be redirected to a Bing search page. We will keep digging to see if we can find more or, if you happen to know what it is, send us a tip here.
Source and Image Credit: Dot Weekly