I’m not sure on what I’m going to say, but this reeks cluelessness and desperation.

I feel like there’s a certain “pressure threshold” in marketing. If you apply less pressure than that, you might convince some people to try your product. But if you go past that threshold, even people who’d otherwise try will now avoid it.

I think that Microsoft is doing this because it simply doesn’t know how to market Edge. For some products (like Skype), Microsoft’s answer was simply to buy the company behind it and call it a day… but they can’t buy Chrome or Alphabet/Google.

For others (like Internet Explorer) it was generally enough to bundle it with Windows, prevent it from being removed, force it to operate only with its monopolies (like Windows) and then force the users directly a tiny bit, with that “users are like non-human animals, not like thinking people. You simply herd those things until they go where you want them to go” mindset.

Except that the situation changed. People still had the older Browser Wars in mind, and they remembered how Microsoft behaved back then (and the awful browser!), so they were extra careful to avoid what they saw as Internet Explorer 2: Electric Boogaloo. So Microsoft did what it did with IE, forcing the users… and it didn’t work. Then it started forcing the users hard and harder, but guess what - users are now avoiding Edge not due to IE, but because of the obnoxious marketing.

To complicate it further, Microsoft did try the “buy” approach. But since the engine is open source, it did the nearest that it could - it looked at the Chromium codebase, “bought” it for free, and built Edge around it. This means that, under the hood, Edge and Chrome are really similar, and that’s convenient for Google/Alphabet because this means that any improvement that Microsoft does over Edge could be ported back, even if proprietary.

And yet Microsoft wants to increase the marketshare of Edge. All that tasty, tasty data that you can vulture from the users, for personalised advertisement… it’s simply too big of a pot of gold to not care about it.