Microsoft has sparked alarm with an upcoming Outlook for Windows feature relating to links in emails—click on them, and they will open up a new tab in Microsoft’s Edge browser, even if your default browser is Google’s Chrome or Mozilla’s Firefox. The same feature will be coming to Microsoft Teams.
As system administrators have been repeatedly noting in a fiery Reddit thread (reported on by The Verge), this disrespecting of users’ browser choices is a real blast from the past.
Back in 2007—the year Apple released the first iPhone, though it was still very much a PC-first world—the Norwegian browser firm Opera complained to the EU antitrust authority about Microsoft bundling its internet Explorer browser with every copy of Windows. Microsoft had recently had an expensive run-in with the regulator over its bundling of Windows Media Player with Windows, so, in 2009, it settled the browser criticism by agreeing to give people a choice of browsers that they could set up as their default when firing up a new copy of Windows.
The Microsoft that kept getting nailed for anticompetitive practices was meant to be gone now—a relic of the combative Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer days. Satya Nadella’s Microsoft was supposed to be a cooler, calmer entity. But the company is increasingly giving off retro vibes.
The most obvious indicator of Microsoft’s new phase is its aggressive, arguably impetuous behavior in the A.I. space, where it’s become locked in a desperate race against Google that the latter company doesn’t seem to want to be part of, just yet. But there are also signs of Redmond returning to its old, anticompetitive ways.
British regulators are sniffing around both Microsoft and Amazon, worried that their terms for cloud customers are designed to discourage switching to other providers. The U.K.’s antitrust authority just nixed Microsoft’s $69 billion takeover of Activision-Blizzard because it thought Microsoft would use the deal to dominate the nascent cloud-gaming market. The European Commission is reportedly considering a fresh antitrust probe over Microsoft’s bundling of Teams with its Office suite (Slack complained) and is also looking into a separate complaint (from Amazon and others) about Microsoft’s terms for running its software on non-Microsoft clouds.
On its own, Microsoft’s move to shove Edge down the throats of Outlook and Teams users is annoying, but perhaps defensible if you consider that it enables a new “side-by-side experience” that lets users see the emails or chats that contained the opened link in an Edge sidebar. However, in the overall context, it’s another small blow to the notion that Microsoft is a different, friendlier beast these days.
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David Meyer
Data Sheet’s daily news section was written and curated by Andrea Guzman.
