Ask Paul: May 12 (Premium)

Happy Friday! The sun is out, the temperatures are up, and the trains are running on schedule. Here's another great set of reader questions to kick off the weekend a bit early.
Video streaming services
leoaw asks:

I recall you mention that you have YouTube Music for your subscription music streaming. Are there specific video streaming services you use or do you start and start services depending on which shows/movies each service has?

Right now we're not being very smart about this, as we subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, and Disney+, and we get YouTube Premium as part of YouTube Music and Prime Video as part of Amazon Prime. Switching between services on a monthly basis or whatever makes lots of sense, especially in our case as we tend to binge watch shows, but we are still subsidizing these things for our adult but not quite independent children. It's a bit more complicated than that, as we watch one 30-minute show each day during the week at lunch and dinner and then watch Netflix-type shows at night, so I guess we'd usually have at least a few services kicking around. We could definitely save a lot of money each month, and I recommend that anyone and everyone look into doing that.
Microsoftification
JustMe asks:

A random thought regarding Edge - given what Edge has become and recent browser usage stats - how much worse would Edge usage be if Microsoft stopped forcing people to use it (i.e search results, widgets links, etc)?  Does Microsoft even look at usage stats this way?

Microsoft will never reveal this kind of innermost secret, but there is little doubt that Edge usage metrics are partially responsible for the current strategy, which is a combination of enticement (new features it hopes will sway users) and underhanded tactics and dark patterns that include forcing people to use Edge even when they chose another browser and constantly re-prompting them to use Edge.

I was thinking about this the other day when I clicked on a story in the Discover feed on my Pixel and it came up in what is clearly a web browser view. Is that using Chrome even though I made Brave the default on the phone? Probably. Apple does this too, of course, with Safari. So you might argue that all Microsoft is doing on Windows is what Apple and Google do on mobile, and those audiences are even bigger than what we see on Windows. So it's something they feel safe in getting away with.

Another random though - on the power of defaults, do you think there comes a point where the...Microsoftification...of a product (example, Chromium-based Edge that Microsoft....Microsofted) outweighs the power of defaults? Consider - if Microsoft had made Edge a Chrome-without-Google and left it there, you would have a competing browser that people might actually want to use and less motivation to move away from the bundled browser.

When this was what Edge appeared to be, a version of Chrome with all of the Google badness removed, I celebrated it, and I ...