There weren't defeated - the original Edge browser was popular on windows. The CEO just decided it was too much work. He did the same for Windows Phone. Maybe he will say Windows is also too much work in the future.

MS has become just another cloud company nowadays. Not much to differentiate them.

> it surely doesn't do anything to help the browser ecosystem.

I'm sure it doesn't do anywhere near as much as it would if Edge had its own browser engine or JavaScript engine, but surely it does something to have a competitor who has the resources to maintain a fork if they need to?

But Chrome, Chromium, and Edge are all Blink. IMO the GGP's fear of "Chrome dominance" is better expressed as "Blink dominance". I don't think anyone particularly liked Trident or EdgeHTML but at least they represented a more diverse rendering-engine-world.