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 And most important, it makes pragmatic decisions based on reality and not on out-of-date assumptions about a client dominance that ceased to be relevant many years ago.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...