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Users revolt as Microsoft bolts a short-term financing app onto Edge

Author: PaulHoule

Score: 36

Comments: 14

Date: 2021-11-30 18:37:42

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justin_oaks wrote at 2021-11-30 22:07:51:

Note that "Microsoft is not involved in providing the loan and does not collect a fee for connecting users to loan providers" DOES NOT mean that Microsoft does not collect a fee from Zip.

In fact, it's certain that some incentive (monetary or otherwise) is provided to Microsoft.

It might just be a flat fee per Edge installation, or an ongoing payment per year from Zip. Just because the conditions don't exactly match "a fee for connecting users to loan providers" doesn't make it OK to imply there's no money changing hands.

What scummy, evasive language. Sadly, it's the industry norm.

simonblack wrote at 2021-11-30 22:36:43:

Extremely old joke:

"Sir! Sir! The peasants are revolting!"

"Yes. I've always thought so."

aliswe wrote at 2021-11-30 23:23:18:

care to explain to an old mind?

muthdra wrote at 2021-11-30 23:28:39:

The first person uses "revolting" as a verb.

The second person interprets "revolting" as an adjective.

Epskampie wrote at 2021-11-30 19:03:38:

I understand the strong incentives for browser makers to try to monetize, but still it’s annoying. We don’t want pocket, we don’t want flock, we don’t want financing. Just let us use the web.

PaulHoule wrote at 2021-11-30 20:00:23:

+1 for "Pocket is thoroughly Pizzled" although I guess that's a -1 for Pocket itself.

_moof wrote at 2021-11-30 23:08:05:

Meet the new Microsoft, same as the old Microsoft.

londons_explore wrote at 2021-11-30 19:32:54:

I expect this from a tiny startup making a fork of Edge...

I don't expect this from the world's largest company who surely can look to bigger revenue sources.

PaulHoule wrote at 2021-11-30 20:01:51:

There was a blog post that got big traffic the other day about lame advertising in Apple products...

Microsoft takes the cake for advertising that's completely mindless. Advertising that drives good products to failure, like the 15 ways Windows tried to shove OneNote up your nostrils.

squarefoot wrote at 2021-11-30 20:39:15:

Advertising in products is very likely to spread like a pandemic in the future; I believe eventually every capable product will adopt it.

To understand the reason we should think like online advertisers: what product would you endorse, the one that can be used to promote products or the one that cannot? Therefore, it would be understandable that advertisers with strong ties with media sources would use their power to push more in favor of all products, either software or hardware, home appliances, etc. that can be used as business platforms in that context. So it's very possible that everyone in the field has to adapt to avoid being labeled in some circles as "the one we can't use to promote our products/services".

londons_explore wrote at 2021-11-30 22:11:42:

Having met a bunch of people responsible for ad budgets totalling $1B+/yr, this thinking seems almost the direct opposite of what they're after.

Everyone thinks only about the goods and services they're trying to promote, not the health of the advertising industry as a whole. Each platform wants to get more revenue, at the expense of other platforms if necessary. Each advertiser just wants to place ads on the platform that gives the best ROI.

PaulHoule wrote at 2021-11-30 22:56:04:

I think squarefoot is following me in pointing out the foolishness of Microsoft using successful products to promote lost causes and thus drag themselves down.

That is, Microsoft is getting $100 or so when you buy a computer and they really don't need to endanger that to get another 10 cents.

There's an even more pernicious pattern where Microsoft harms the thing they are trying to promote by promoting it.

For instance, the original "OneDrive" was tightly integrated into Microsoft Office making it the default place to save. Turned out if "OneDrive" was busted, which it often was, you couldn't save files in office AT ALL! If you have one experience like that you will NEVER use OneDrive again no matter what they say, something Microsoft should have thought about before they did it. Contrast that to DropBox, Box and numerous off-brand file sharing clients, none of which are so arrogant as to make it impossible to save files in a shared folder.

squarefoot wrote at 2021-11-30 23:08:50:

> Each advertiser just wants to place ads on the platform that gives the best ROI

Couldn't this be the reason why every hardware/software manufacturer might want (or even feel forced) to adapt and release only adware products?

AnimalMuppet wrote at 2021-11-30 22:53:21:

Did I miss something? Did Windows become so expensive that users need to have this option available to them, or what?

mrtweetyhack wrote at 2021-11-30 19:00:42:

what? 5 users?