The Power of Defaults Has Failed Us (Premium)

We’ve all heard about the so-called power of defaults, where making one option the default will increase the likelihood that people will use it. And we likewise know how this maxim is applied in personal technology, the most obvious example being platform makers like Apple, Google, and Microsoft using their own web browsers as the default.

But what Apple, Google, and Microsoft also understand, but do not publicize, is that the power of defaults is not absolute and that, in many cases, users are sophisticated enough to have their own opinions about what to use. Sometimes, the power of defaults is not so powerful.

This makes me wonder if the power of defaults isn’t yet another thing that seems to make sense but falls apart under scrutiny. We’re all vulnerable to this kind of thing, to assuming that widely accepted beliefs must have something meaningful behind them. But it doesn’t always pan out. For example, the notion that we need to take 10,000 steps a day to be healthy is so firmly ingrained in our subconsciousness, that Fitbit and other fitness trackers default to this value as a meaningful metric. But 10,000 steps isn’t just arbitrary, it’s completely made up, in the mid-1960s.

So perhaps the power of defaults is another classic “studies show” moment because, well, studies don’t show that at all. But it seems true, and it seems like something that must be the result of exhaustive testing. The canonical example here is the organ donor choice you get on a driver’s license, and the assumption is that when you make donating the default, more people will do so. Some studies seem to prove this. Others very much do not.

Regardless, this thinking is what led to the notion of default apps in personal computing platforms: if you make your own web browser the default choice on your platform, more people will use it. But Microsoft, Apple, and other platform makers have long known that this thinking is flawed, that users will in fact choose an alternative if that alternative is widely understood to be better. And so they have created various levels of friction over the years to influence and even force users to continue using the default. If the power of defaults worked, this wouldn’t be necessary.

Quality must play a role too. Internet Explorer (IE) was the most popular web browser in the world until Microsoft stopped updating it in meaningful ways and competitors like Mozilla Firefox and then Google Chrome showed a better way forward. By the time Microsoft subsequently re-found its web browser mojo, it was too late: later versions of IE were ignored regardless of whatever advantages they may have had because the world had moved on. And rebranding it as Microsoft Edge in Windows 10 didn’t help either. Neither did Microsoft’s move to rearchitect Edge to use Chromium underpinnings.

Microsoft’s more recent efforts to goose Edge usage are fascinating to me. On the one hand, it has added an endless stream of new features to the browser, bulking it up in unprecedented ways with functionality ranging from the superfluous to the truly useful. And on the other, it has taken a page from Apple’s playbook on mobile. That is, it has behaved in an anti-competitive and user-hostile manner.

One way Apple does this is by forcing its users and other browser makers to use its own web browser, Safari. That is, even if someone chooses, say, Google Chrome—and most do—what they’re really using is Safari with whatever subset of Chrome features that Apple allows on top.

This and other anticompetitive behavior must rankle Microsoft, a convicted monopoly abuser with a tainted history. After all, it was once held to a much higher standard than Apple—or Google or other modern abusers—despite controlling a much smaller market than to today’s Big Tech giants. Indeed, it was that scrutiny that led to the rise of Big Tech: a hobbled Microsoft couldn’t prevent these companies from surpassing it.

But this behavior also inspired Microsoft: with antitrust attention finally turning to the Apples and Googles of the world, Microsoft is now free to behave badly. And it has done so. The Chromium-based version of Edge tracks your movements online as egregiously as does Google Chrome, but that tracking benefits Microsoft’s advertising partners, not Google’s. And with Windows 11, Microsoft removed its granular default apps interface and then it did something even more sinister: it forces its customers to use Edge in certain circumstances, even when they’ve chosen another web browser as the default. If you access Search highlights, Start search, or a news story in Widgets, Edge will launch. It has expanded this behavior so that its Bing chatbot is artificially limited to working only with Edge. And it will expand this behavior again, soon, so that all links opened in Outlook or Teams will open in Edge.

There’s more, of course. Edge also pops up reminder notifications to switch back to it if you’re using another browser, and it pops up reminder notifications to Edge users to cajole them into allowing it to track them even more using dark pattern language that obfuscates its real intent. This browser’s behavior is so hostile it could logically be viewed as malware.

That this behavior is wrong is obvious, but besides the point of this conversation. Actions speak louder than words, and because Edge is not benefitting from the power of defaults, Microsoft must stack the deck and aggressively try to convince and silently force people to use its browser.

It is impossible to defend this behavior. It is also getting harder to square this behavior with the kinder, gentler Microsoft that we perceive today under Satya Nadella. I can no longer argue, as I have, that today’s Microsoft is in any way better than the bad old Microsoft of the antitrust era.

Think back to Microsoft’s antitrust problems in the United States in the late 1990s and the allegations that the software giant was abusing its monopoly in operating systems to illegally gain traction in a then-new market for web browsers while undermining Netscape, which was at the time the dominant player. Microsoft’s competitive strategy was multifold, and it included back-room business deals in which it illegally coerced the PC makers that needed Windows by trying to force them to ignore Netscape, and it retaliated against those that resisted; IBM, infamously, backed Netscape and then couldn’t get Windows 95 for its new PCs until months after its competitors.

Microsoft also rearchitected Windows to integrate its own IE web browser functionality so deeply into its dominant product that it would no longer be possible to tell where Windows began, and IE ended. And it did so specifically so that it could argue in court that the products were one and the same and thus inseparable, and that this integration was done to benefit its customers, not to harm Netscape. That was, of course, nonsense, and we should not forget that Microsoft was so alarmed that it might be surpassed by Netscape and the open web technologies that it literally made Windows less reliable and less secure to prevent that from happening.

Microsoft also gave IE away for free, while Netscape charged businesses for the browser and encouraged users to pay too. This is classic predatory behavior since Microsoft was so big that it could subsidize the cost of making IE with revenues generated by Windows, while tiny Netscape had no similar advantage.

Finally, Microsoft also did something that we seem to forget all these years later: it rapidly improved IE until it was a better web browser than what Netscape offered. Within a few years, IE usage surpassed Netscape usage. And by the time that happened, it was browser quality that had won the day: all of the anti-competitive behavior noted above had been dismantled by Microsoft’s legal troubles, and Netscape was free too. In the end, IE won because it was better.

Looking back on this now, one might argue that that was Microsoft’s plan all along: having failed to acquire Netscape, its initial solution to the web browser problem, the software giant understood that it would take at least a few years before it could offer a truly competitive web browser. And so it did what it could to blunt the success of Netscape while it raced to build a better browser. It wasn’t quite a stalling tactic, but it had the same effect in the end. (And it was still illegal.)

It doesn’t really matter. Dominant businesses will always do everything they can to maintain their dominance and extend their power as desired into new markets. That Microsoft was finally blocked from doing so by continued antitrust problems that extended into the early 2000s, in Europe and elsewhere, is a historic fact.

Today, the world is different. The web is huge, with several billion users, and is finally growing into the sophisticated app platform that Netscape envisioned in the mid-1990s and Microsoft feared. Apple and Google now dominate personal computing thanks to the rise of smartphones and mobile, leaving Microsoft as a big fish in the small pond of PC computing and forcing it to seek its fortunes elsewhere, which it has, in the cloud. And because of this dynamic shift, no one is looking at Microsoft’s abuses in the PC market anymore. What was once the most important thing in the world is now uninteresting, a sideshow.

It shouldn’t be this way. But it is. And it will only get worse.