Can We Trust Microsoft as a Content Provider? (Premium)

Today, you can buy music, movies and TV shows from the Windows Store, and Microsoft is adding e-books this year. But is Microsoft a trustworthy content provider?

This is perhaps a more complex question than is immediately obvious.

Consider the news this week that Microsoft is finally bringing e-books to Windows Store with the Windows 10 Creators Update. The feedback I've seen in the article comments and on Twitter falls into three main buckets:

Absolutely not. I would never trust Microsoft with any form of paid content
All for it. Finally! I've been waiting for Microsoft to do this
Pragmatic. Microsoft needs to do this because there are no high-quality content stores available for the Windows 10/Windows Store/UWP platform

Each of these opinions seems to make sense on the surface, given Microsoft's history and our collective experiences with the company's services. There are some fringe elements in each case too, the most obvious (and saddest) being those who perceive this as some kind of good news for phone. But overall, there's a nuanced conversation to be had.

The detractors perhaps have the strongest position.

After all, Microsoft has a rich, multi-decade history of starting up content stores of various kinds and then winding them down unceremoniously without warning. 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.

Too, Microsoft has never had a cohesive or consistent consumer strategy. The theory here, from what I can see, has always been that people need Microsoft products and services at work, typically through the PC, but increasingly from the cloud going forward, and that they will thus logically adopt that same technology, or at least the consumer-facing versions of it, at home.

But that hasn't really panned out in recent years as individuals have moved from PCs to more mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. And to a new generation of mobile apps and services from Google, Apple, and a host of companies that didn't even exist just a few years earlier. The world is changing, and we can credit Microsoft with changing along with it. But its inability to attract consumers to its wares has been hugely consistent over the years.

Looking purely at content, I've been advising readers to never purchase any movie or TV show content from the Windows Store simply because we cannot trust Microsoft to keep this store going or, as important, keep it competitive with what is available from others like Apple, Google, and Amazon. Too, that shift to mobile devices has limited the appeal of Windows Store content to PCs, which most people do not use to consume this kind of content. There is no inexpensive, mainstream, or simple way to watch Windows Store-purchased content in the living room or on the go. Practically speaking, that really limits the appeal of this store.

(Music is different because it...

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