Right now MS is playing the browser game again. And it is beyond me why it thinks people want to use Bing for search.
Sometimes I have this impression that Microsoft has some collective amnesia where they think they’re in the 90s-00s again where they dominanted the market with their tactics. Quite curious why it hasn’t been sued yet by the DOJ.
Of course, their objective is not to create great software but to monopolize whole sectors and extract value = techno feudalism.
It's not about what people want, it's about the ads they can be shown.
A single corporation owns the proprietary OS running what must be upwards of 80% of the world's corporate and government workstations that is known to be laden with copious amounts of telemetry and privacy invading logging is probably quite an attractive partner to the various TLOs of the US government.
I read some fan-fic conspiracy theory that MS is actually a facade for an intelligence agency a couple of decades ago. Getting less and less certain about the weight of "theory" these days.
All US corporations are effectively compelled to collaborate with US authorities at any given time. There is some pretend/acting going on for the benefit of paying consumers (like Apple resisting unlocking phones for smalltime cops, while likely passing iCloud data to the big boys), but that's it.
I am also posting these remarks with a tongue in cheek. I am sure they (any) do liaise with government agencies when requested but not that they are primarily intel branches with a retail mask.