SwiftKey, Edge, and several other Microsoft properties are actually under the auspices of Bing Ads now. A while ago, Microsoft made the wild move to shuffle a bunch of branches under the leadership of former Yandex CTO Mikhail Parakhin. Gradually, Mikhail began to make moves that caused a fair number of the original Edge team -- those who had come from IE, brought up Spartan, then brought up Edge-on-Chromium -- to leave in fits of rage over the anticonsumer path the browser team was being forced down. The engineers revolted and left when they couldn't fight anymore.
LinkedIn tells a lot about people moving from Edge to other places and even other companies afterwards. Some of the longest time zealots of the platform have turned their back on the tools they helped make because of it.
Fast forward about a year and we get The Fucking Bing Button. A top Bing search query for several weeks was "Remove the fucking bing button in edge" (or some variant thereof). Top results are all how to get rid of the Bing discover button: https://imgur.com/qZQ1NLn
I would not be surprised if there was backlash against it in the forums that Mikhail did not like. SwiftKey is a much smaller product space that does not have a high revenue, which means that he has every incentive to make it bleed every penny it can.
Most of the bad things I see coming from MS lately are like 90% Bing driven, and 10% writing everything for the web and not native.
eg. with Edge it's blatantly clear it's not made asking "how can it be the best tool for the user" but "how can we best use the user to drive Bing+GPT"
SwiftKey, Edge, and several other Microsoft properties are actually under the auspices of Bing Ads now. A while ago, Microsoft made the wild move to shuffle a bunch of branches under the leadership of former Yandex CTO Mikhail Parakhin. Gradually, Mikhail began to make moves that caused a fair number of the original Edge team -- those who had come from IE, brought up Spartan, then brought up Edge-on-Chromium -- to leave in fits of rage over the anticonsumer path the browser team was being forced down. The engineers revolted and left when they couldn't fight anymore.
LinkedIn tells a lot about people moving from Edge to other places and even other companies afterwards. Some of the longest time zealots of the platform have turned their back on the tools they helped make because of it.
Fast forward about a year and we get The Fucking Bing Button. A top Bing search query for several weeks was "Remove the fucking bing button in edge" (or some variant thereof). Top results are all how to get rid of the Bing discover button: https://imgur.com/qZQ1NLn
I would not be surprised if there was backlash against it in the forums that Mikhail did not like. SwiftKey is a much smaller product space that does not have a high revenue, which means that he has every incentive to make it bleed every penny it can.