[slimsag]

As another said, the goal to increase revenue is per team. The Edge team must likely find proof for how they will drive revenue in the future.

Suddenly you've got a full browser engineering team trying to figure out how to monetize a browser - tough sell. So they can't come up with anything, that's fine because a product manager is the owner of this task anyway. They propose a myriad of different ways to monetize Edge in the future:

* A "Edge Pro" subscription $10/mo where you get ad-blocking and no tracking (we'll need to block third-parties from offering this)

* A built in way to pay people online, we take a cut. Hey maybe we finance big purchases and that's a unique selling point?

* Premium apps/websites, web page authors can give access only to users with an Edge subscription and in return they get a cut of the profits.

They discuss these options as a team, and decide which one is least likely to cause backlash and is least difficult to "try out" and they land on what we're seeing here.

[meesterdude]

This is a pretty good breakdown of how it likely came to be, but leaves out the satanic rituals and incantations that also (seemingly) play a big part in how microsoft makes decisions.

[scj]

"The peripheral drivers team needs to increase it's revenue."

[chocolatkey]

That team doesn't need to, device manufacturers already do that by only making drivers for Windows for certain devices, increasing lock-in

[noisy_boy]

"View this ad to continue using your mouse"

[adrr]

Sell the default search provider to bing for a few billion dollars. Same way Firefox makes money.

[cpeterso]

Mozilla can negotiate with multiple search engines. Imagine if the Edge team tried to make Google Edge’s default search engine!