This. It's always been wild to me how tone deaf Microsoft has always been. I always read these internal emails thinking how wildly out of touch with their own users they are.
MS has had one successful consumer product: the Xbox. That seems to have been given total autonomy. And they have still screwed up a few times (Xbox One launch) by falling into old patterns.
Apple was a user company under Jobs. Is still kind of is (they clearly don’t care about businesses), but not as much, and I’m getting a bit worried.
The Surface models with an ARM (can’t remember the name) were clearly more consumer aimed, but those flopped.
Really I meant more non-computer.
WebTV never set the world on fire (though it seems to have been more popular than most people realize). Zune was supposed to be pretty good, but initial marketing kind of killed it. And WMP wasn’t exactly loved software the way iTunes was. Remember when iTunes was great?
The Active Mates toys didn’t take off, though that’s not a surprise. Spot watches! And shoving Windows CE in the Dreamcast didn’t help.
I’m struggling to think of things MS has done outside of computers, peripherals, and the Xbox. There are probably tons, they’d try anything in the 90s.
What does Edge do? It shows you a unskippable, un-closable "how-to" (as if I've never used a browser), and a make-an-account-and-sync nag. It takes a minute to click though, what a turn off!
It hasn't popped up for me in a while, but it definitively happens sometimes.
Edge as a Chrome reskin is better than that at least. But then again, so was IE.