To preserve their main domain from the filthiest blacklists? So they can move on to another shady domain for dirty tricks if this one goes under in reputation. Executive thinking..

but why wouldnt they use microsoft-telemetry.com instead?

Probably for the very few people that use regex on their DNS servers to block Microsoft

This is most definitely the case. I can't think of any other reason they'd do this.

Maybe it was a typo and fixing it would have required more bureaucracy than getting the domain.

Why would that be any less shady? I've gotten plenty of spam pointing to <legitservice-word>.com and similar.

Someone should def send up a pull to patch that on githup.com

Disclosure: Works for MS but not on anything related to the topic of discussion here. These are my personal opinions from experiences at multiple companies.

Any user-facing names obviously get reviewed by the whole departments that are dedicated to ensuring it fits with the brand, translates well into all languages, not offensive to anyone, etc.

For identifiers that are not expected to be user facing, they're likely to get code review, simple profanity filters, and certificate policy checks, plus whatever bikeshedding those particular dev+ops+networking teams want to have about it. For a service endpoint that's really only resolved in the guts of client code, I could easily imagine an individual dev just using an arbitrary name for the prototype, and then eventually finding that the service became useful and that it's just not worth updating all the existing clients for a cosmetic change mostly no one sees.

Also, you hear conversations like "so-and-so registered that name years ago for idea X, but that didn't really go anywhere, so we can just repurpose that since we know that it's both already working and unused".

So I wouldn't read any particular motivation into 'microsft.com'.

So, basically, laziness

So, basically, efficiency

I think the grandparent was being a bit tongue-in-cheek.