[INTPnerd]

I don't understand why they even need their own web browser. Why not just ship Windows with Chrome. They could preset the settings to have bing as your home page. Or maybe that is illegal? What advantage to they gain by having their own browser? If there would be legal difficulties they could try to strike a deal with Firefox or Opera. On the same note I don't understand what Microsoft is trying to do recently. I mean eventually Windows is supposed to be free and everyone can get all the updates. .NET is becoming more open source. Visual Studio is becoming cross platform and this works on the free version. I like all these things, but I don't understand how they benefit Microsoft? The only explanation I have heard is that they are trying to "stay relevant", but what good is that relevance if they are giving Windows, .NET, and Visual Studio away for free? Am I missing something?

[kuschku]

Because then everyone would be using Chrome – Chrome already has a far too large market share right now.

If we want to have a free market of browsers, we also need multiple vendors that compete, otherwise the market will stall (see IE6)

[INTPnerd]

I was more asking how Microsoft benefits by pumping their own money and time into their own browser.

[mikhailt]

By producing their own browser, Microsoft can at least be assured that it works consistently under their own controls and can be used to power other features in the future for Windows. First feature is the Cortana integration in Edge. Good luck getting either Google or Firefox to agree for a deeper integration level.

You cannot integrate Cortana in Chrome like the way they did with Edge. Cortana is being used to collect information and provide better ads over time based on what customers are searching. It is the same market as Google is in and they're not going to do anything to lower their ads revenue and Microsoft is not going to pay them to bundle Chrome onto Windows, that's just not going to happen.

It is generally not a good idea to depend on a third party to provide the best browser (or any other types of tool) on your platform where they can control all of it and can deny whatever you want from them. Especially, when such parties are only doing it to drive business to their own solutions. Office vs Google Docs, Bing vs. Google, Cortana vs. Google Now, and so on.

Also, none of these things are being given away for free, they all have some costs for various groups. Companies who want to use VS professionally will pay tens of thousands of dollars per year for the support and maintenance from Microsoft, sometimes even more. Remember, a big part of MS revenues is from the enterprise market, not the regular consumer market.

Microsoft is not doing anything for free, that makes zero sense and would result into their entire management staff fired immediately. There are revenue models for each free solution from Microsoft, they're not in the market to produce free software, they're in it to make money for their shareholders.

[INTPnerd]

The only thing that makes sense to me is they are using these as a vessel to push people to use Bing and to buy Office, but now you can buy Office on more and more platforms and Bing is OS agnostic. I'm just not seeing a thought out plan here.

[noblethrasher]

At the very least, Microsoft wants/needs to have a seat at the web standards table, as well as influence at that table. While not a necessary condition, being a browser vendor is almost certainly a sufficient one.