I used to work at a company whose software had to interact with security cameras. In the security/surveillance industry, at least, the term 'edge devices' has l

I used to work at a company whose software had to interact with security cameras. In the security/surveillance industry, at least, the term 'edge devices' has long been used to describe IP cameras and other devices like motion sensors operating in the field, transmitting their data back to a central server. Interestingly, 'edge analytics' has been a thing in that industry for a relatively long time, too. This is used to refer to cameras that do things like motion detection, person counting, and other analytics in the camera instead of having to post-process the video streams at a central location to extract that data. So in this case at least, is looks like MS is just using terminology that was already widely used in IoT devices even before "Internet of Things" was even really a phrase that was used to describe these devices.