While it’s becoming increasingly unheard of for a live presentation to go off without a hitch, Microsoft’s most recent blunder is a rather confusing and entertaining one. Taking to the stage to promote its Azure cloud service, the company representative had to stop the presentation part way through to download a rival browser, as Microsoft’s Edge just wouldn’t stop crashing.
When attempting to showcase the ease of migrating data using Microsoft’s Azure service, the company’s very own browser, Edge, just wouldn’t play ball. Stuck on a loading screen, the venue was met with an awkward silence and hushed whispers of Michael admitting that he forgot something.
Keeping the audience engaged in the presentation, Michael utters in a comical, yet exasperated tone, “I always love it when demos break.” Of course, the representative had to keep the presentation running and there was only one way he knew how. “So while we're talking here, I'm just going to install Chrome,” he says under a nervous chuckle before the audience breaks out into laughter and even applause.
The incident would, in fact, all be swept under the rug if Microsoft hadn’t gone and uploaded the footage of the mistake itself for all to see. And to Google’s YouTube, no less. The date on the video states that it was actually published last month, and yet has only gained public attention now due to the story exploding on Reddit.
To be fair to the representative, Michael did present some refreshing honesty, stating that “Edge on [those] machines is locked a little bit and there’s just some things that don’t work.” And to avoid getting in trouble with Microsoft bosses, he did make sure not to “help make Google better.”
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KitGuru Says: I had high hopes for edge, but Microsoft is still way behind with its browser in comparison to competitors. With Firefox Quantum around the corner, I can’t see it catching up any time soon. What browser do you use? What do you think of Microsoft having to download Chrome mid-presentation.
Edge is a fine casual browser but just that and nothing more. I do open it from time to time but I need the developer tools of firefox so…
Why would a Microsoft employee not use Internet Explorer if they need to run something Edge is blocking for security reasons?
Edge is perfectly fine. It’s not up there with Firefox, Chrome or Opera of course but is perfectly acceptable.
It’s a decent tablet browser. Firefox is terrible with the finger. It’s my browser of choose with a cursor though.
Because IE has not been updated for a long time so lacks support for some modern web standards that even Edge supports. Chances are that Azure website uses many of those standards since Azure is a very good and modern piece of server software.
That smart-ass is to blame for using InPrivate mode on Azure. It messes with the caching and functionality of the website.
I always find it fascinating that these super talented and intelligent people fail to use a browser properly…