Bring Out Your Dead (Premium)

The reaction to the news this week that Microsoft is killing the ebook support in Edge and the Microsoft Store was fairly muted compared to previous retreats from consumer product and services. That makes some sense: Reading isn’t exactly a high-order activity on PC, and usage of this service was likely pretty low. Helping matters, Microsoft is also being generous to those who did—stupidly—buy and use its ebooks. Not only is it refunding all purchases, but it is even providing a $25 credit to those who actually annotated ebooks.

Put simply, Microsoft’s retreat from ebooks isn’t offensive. In fact, one might argue that just getting into ebooks—and doing so through a web browser—is the more offensive act. Pointless, even. Misguided. And nonsensical compared to other services which the software giant previously abandoned, like Groove Music Pass. Surely—surely—there is a much bigger market for music than there is for ebooks. Especially from a company whose customer base is largely relegated to PCs, not mobile devices.

Which begs the question. Microsoft killed music and ebooks. But it’s somehow decided to keep its music and TV shows service—imaginatively titled Movies & TV, the same exact name as the similar Google service—while not even bothering to offer it on mobile, ever. That alone should give anyone pause when it comes to purchasing videos from a company that shows zero interest in consumers. Though some will argue that Microsoft’s Movies & TV service continues because of Xbox One for some reason. Because in this fantasy world, so many people are using a loud and expensive video game console to watch rented movies.

I don’t see it. And I expect the Microsoft will bow to the inevitable there, too, and kill off Movies & TV at some point. Perhaps it will start by moving to rentals only.

I suspect the reason it hasn’t done so already is that it will be more expensive: Where very few customers ever purchased an ebook from Microsoft, let alone annotate it—seriously, can you even imagine doing that?—there must be a reasonable audience size for movie and TV show purchases. Where each can be quite expensive: A new movie is often $15 to $20.

Partially offsetting the cost of doing right by these customers, Microsoft can lean on its compatibility with Movies Anywhere. So some portion of each customer’s movie library will always work elsewhere—iTunes, Google Movies & TV, and more—as long as you’ve synced through Movies Anywhere. That won’t help for purchases made with studios that to do participate in Movies Anywhere, however. And it won’t help with TV shows either. So there’s your problem.

What else might Microsoft kill?

Cortana as an end user-facing service, certainly. The digital personal assistant that couldn’t isn’t even available worldwide, so many Microsoft customers would barely even notice. I can only assume that separating Cortana from Start Search in Windows 10 version 1903 was the first step towards making that happen.

Groove is still hanging on by a thread, as you can use it to manage and play back local music files. Honestly, it works well in the former capacity, but it’s a bit big for an audio player. I don’t have high hopes for this.

I wonder about true-blue Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps all the time. Store apps—which are now broadly defined as being “anything delivered through the Store”—will be with us forever. But UWP apps? I bet this platform slowly disappears as PWA and other Store apps take off.

Productivity-focused services like OneDrive, Office 365, OneNote, Outlook.com and the like are probably safe. That said, I wonder how it is that Microsoft has never offered Google One-like storage tiers on OneDrive. And it doesn’t seem like many of Microsoft’s new mobile apps have taken off in meaningful ways. Teams is the one glaring exception, but that has nothing to do with consumers.

Which is the point, really.

Microsoft has nothing to do with consumers. Nothing.

Even gamers are not technically “consumers.” Games are interactive, and the gaming community would not appreciate being lumped in with the Walmart set and people who mindlessly while away the hours at night watching Big Bang Theory and the 37 CSI shows that make up most of mainstream TV programming these days. Gamers are part of a premium crowd with specific requirements.

When I look back over the years, I see plenty of Microsoft efforts—some half-hearted, some not—at gaining traction with consumers. From Media Center to Zune to Groove to Windows Phone (which, remember, was consumer focused out of the gate because of Apple envy) to Microsoft Band and Microsoft Health, the only real commonality is here is defeat and then retreat. Microsoft held out longer than it should have in many cases. But the endgame, it was always inevitable.

And that sucks.

When I talk and write about Microsoft, I often bring up this notion of trust. In that I trust Microsoft broadly, and I think others should as well. But I do not trust Microsoft when it comes to truly consumer-focused products and services. There’s just too much history there. And I certainly do not trust Microsoft when it comes to content, like movies or ebooks.

In fact, I wrote about that specifically over two years ago … when Microsoft first announced its ebook efforts in Edge and the Store.

“Microsoft has a rich, multi-decade history of starting up content stores of various kinds and then winding them down unceremoniously without warning,” I wrote. “We’ve been burned many times, from music initiatives like Windows Media, Plays for Sure, and Zune to the Microsoft Reader e-book efforts that many now forget.”

I’m not particularly prophetic, but I was certainly right about the ebook stuff. And while this was the smallest cut of all, it was still one of a thousand cuts. And like many of you, the totality of all these defeats and retreats is just wearing on me. The only answer is to never trust Microsoft’s consumer-focused efforts. The firm means well, I’m sure, as much as any faceless corporation can mean well. And it pains me to write this. But our trust has been betrayed too often to think otherwise.

Bring out your dead!

Thanks to John McKinney for letting me use the title. 🙂