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...