Microsoft Still Doesn’t Get Consumers (Premium)

Nothing says more about Microsoft’s inability to understand consumers than the pointless new features it’s adding to the new Edge on both desktop and mobile. In fact, this is proof that there are still corners of Microsoft that are still stuck in a now-distant past in which everything it did for individuals actually mattered.

Today, Microsoft, for the most part, gets it. The firm supports open standards and open source. It partners with every company and organization imaginable, with both friends and foes alike. And most important, it makes pragmatic decisions based on reality and not on out-of-date assumptions about a client dominance that ceased to be relevant many years ago. The new Microsoft plays to its strengths, which involve a core constituency in the enterprise, and productivity and cloud services.

Well. Not all of Microsoft.

As is the case anytime there’s a regime change, it takes a while to drain the swamp of all the bad ideas of the past. There are always some leftovers, some dead-enders, who pay lip service to the new while secretly desiring a return to the past. We see this in Microsoft’s enthusiast community too, of course. But those inside the firm who cling to these mistaken ideas are more dangerous. They’re like a cancer, attacking all the good parts from within.

We’re starting to see this in the new Microsoft Edge. On the desktop, the new browser is getting a pointless and redundant Collections feature that sits outside of Microsoft’s other note-taking solutions, like OneNote and Sticky Notes (and even Microsoft To-Do, depending on how you choose to organize things). And on mobile, it just introduced an equally pointless new Shopping experience, apparently because there’s a huge intersection of users who choose Microsoft’s web browser on mobile and immediately think of this firm went it comes to online commerce that I’m unaware of.

I know, some of you are probably thinking that these features are small and innocuous. That they don’t hurt the browser, or even get in the way of those who don’t want to use them. Sure, but that’s kind of the point: They are small and innocuous. They’re distractions. They’re pointless and arbitrary. And they show that there is a spark of life left in the bad ideas of the past, that there are still little parts of Microsoft holding on to this notion that it can make a difference in places where it simply cannot.

These features are bad ideas.

And not just because no one will ever use them, though they will surely be just as ignored as any of the pointless crap the firm added earlier to the original version of Edge. No, these are bad ideas because they betray a lack of understanding about everything else that is wonderful about the new Edge, from its industry-standard Chromium underpinnings to its de-Google-ization and anti-tracking functionality. And a lack of understanding about what a web browser is. About why the entire world has moved on to other browsers, mostly Chrome.

With the new Edge, the software giant again is cherry-picking arbitrary consumer experiences to add to its browser, instead of treating this functionality as it would in a truly open market, as optional extensions. It is trying to create little value-adds that differentiate Edge from its competitors, many of them also Chromium-based, instead of differentiating only where it really matters in web browsers, in privacy, anti-tracking, and online safety.

The reason it can’t only do that is two-fold. First, other web browsers—especially Brave, but also Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari—already offer superior protections in all of those areas. And second, as uncomfortable as this may be, Microsoft is monetizing its Edge users, or at least trying to, and that will always compromise the experience to some degree. Those who sign-in with a corporate AAD account are, by definition, paying customers, since there’s no such thing as a free Microsoft 365/Office 365 tier. And those who sign-in with a Microsoft account are simply using a browser in which all the Google functionality has been replaced by Microsoft functionality, with the goal of steering us to paid or ad-supported Microsoft services.

The reason we know this is true is that neither of the Edge features I cite—Collections and Shopping—would ever succeed if Microsoft released them as browser extensions or standalone services. They exist as features not because users want or need them, but because Microsoft is seeking new ways to monetize its existing customers. Are they being used to collect information about their online behavior?

Don’t get me wrong: There’s nothing particularly nefarious about this, in the same way that there’s nothing particularly nefarious about the data collection in Windows 10 that individuals can’t turn off. Microsoft isn’t a charity, and its corporate desires are logical and even somewhat defensible. But these particular features are just dumb and wrong-headed. They remind me of the types of things the firm used to add to Windows 10, which became cluttered over time with apps and features no one wanted or used. And how much extra crap is going to be in Edge by this time next year?

The problem for Microsoft, of course, is that the good work that it’s doing with the new Edge isn’t particularly unique. As noted, there are other web browsers, some also based on Chromium (like Brave and Opera), and some not (like Firefox and Safari), that also focus on privacy, anti-tracking, and online safety. They remove or never had Google’s integrations to begin with. They have rich extension support. And some of them—Brave, Opera, and Firefox, in particular—have no ties to a huge tech corporation with priorities that don’t distract them from always doing the right thing for their users. They are, by definition, more likely to stand up for their users than for other financial concerns.

Aside from this, we already know that Microsoft’s strategy of adding unique Edge-only features to its browser doesn’t work, because the classic version of Edge has low single-digit usage share despite being preinstalled on almost one billion PCs around the globe. So there is no reason to believe that another browser with the same name, but now available as a download for users of other platforms (Mac, Android, iOS, plus Windows 7 and 8.1), will perform any better.

What’s particularly curious about these features, however, is that they clearly target consumers and not business users. Given its core user base, one might instead imagine Microsoft building productivity features into its browser, like deep Office 365 and Microsoft 365 integration, instead. But if Microsoft doesn’t care which hardware platforms its users use, then why would it care which browser they use? Why even bother to differentiate with curious consumer features it at all? Why clutter up this clean vessel with nonsense that might be a barrier to corporate adoption?

If Microsoft were really serious about Edge, it would do what Brave is doing with its browser and block advertising in the name of privacy, security, and performance. It would take the Apple high road and explain that Edge was one way it is working to make the web better for its customers. That the payoff for using this Microsoft product as an individual is that you have the power of Microsoft at your back. But right now, the only real advantage that Microsoft Edge has over Brave is a nicer-looking icon.

And that is not how this should be going down.