Kind of. They missed one step: raising mistrust on Chrome and Google. (Hell will freeze before they'll be able to raise trust on Internet Explorer Edge and Microsoft, so the only way to market themselves as more trustworthy is to make the other side look worse.)

And the technical merit should be meaningless; not something measurable as speed. Otherwise Google could simply pour a bit more dev hours into Chrome and say "done, now Chrome is faster", and make MS shoot its own foot.