Hacker News Reader

Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

The lack of consumer protections in the US is problematic.

When something is defined as a "monopoly" they can go in and do all kinds of pro-consumer stuff, but legally very few things are monopolies in the US (duopolies are more common). I wish stuff like this and iOS's ban on browser push notifications (because it competes with apps) was reviewed by a Federal consumer rights agency.

What is frustrating that Edge-Chrome is actually a pretty good browser, Microsoft don't need to be doing this petty stuff to make it popular, yet here we are. Feels like the engineers at Microsoft just want to make cool shit but the management are stuck in this 1990s toxic mindset that keeps the company's image in the toilet (see also the Hot Reload controversy with the Visual Studio VP).

View on HN

I would like to know what is happening inside MS and what is actually behind this move. From the outside looking in we can speculate all kinds of abusive behaviour, especially with Microsoft's past in mind. But there is so little information...

Say there was some QA team that found that some serious protected fallback mechanism was required to reduce support costs, that might be somewhat valid. But even then you'd expect to at least see some information appear about that, and that hasn't happened either. Heck, even security-wise they could come up with a story on how browser hijacking and protocol handler hijacking in windows is super bad and this was their only move (not true of course, plenty of other moves available) to mitigate it. But we get nothing, except broken behaviour and no real publication as to why. They can't throw it all on UX either, because if that's what they wanted they wouldn't be able to support an incompatible variety of PCs.

If it's anything like when I've tried to get them to do anything about a support case, I suspect no one gives a fuck about the customers any more unless they're big spenders. Everyone else is seen as a revenue drain.

To MSFT staff who I know hang around on here: prove me wrong by getting this turned around.

Not MSFT staff, but I work for one of the largest MSFT customers. Our questions get resolved pretty damn fast. Rarely about Windows though.

We have 10,000 seats so I’m not sure how much biomass you need to generate enough action potential for them to fix windows…

My experience with MS support is nothing like you describe. I'm in a very small company that uses Office 365. One of the principal reasons we continue using it is the excellent support we receive from MS. The support folks know their tools and stay on the line until they're sure the problem is solved. In a couple of cases, we've even received a follow-up call 48 hours later to make sure that we're still in good shape.

You can be an ISV partner and you just get the runaround constantly and shifted from one HCL contractor to another for months on end when you ask questions.

I suspect at some level of deliberation in MS, it’s as simple as wanting a predictable and controllable view portal to their content and site resources, rather than worrying about Google or whomever else “accidentally” and temporarily breaking something. I know there’s a lot of room to push on this - that MS themselves have myriad broken links and useless endpoints on the web so a browser is least of their worries. Nonetheless, the thinking may be about predictable user interface between the OS and the manufacturer’s online resources.

The only halfway valid technical reasons I could imagine for those microsoft-edge:// urls would be that they provide some special features that make only sense in a Windows installation - but none of the situations we have seen so far seem to use such a feature.

I could imagine special features being a good reason for such a protocol, but the special features themselves might not be a good thing to have (i.e. IE's ActiveX controls, that was 'special' too).

Say you have an OS with functionality that depends on a webpage, and you don't want a user to end up clicking on a thing and not getting anywhere because the custom browser they installed was broken, that would be a reason to have a built in or 'fallback' browser, even if you just end up using it to install another browser. But then you could also have some form of checking if the user didn't get what they wanted and have a 'try again in Edge'-button or something like that. Might not be the best UX, so that's another factor. Is the UX for the masses, the UX for administrators or the UX for power users more important.

I'm glad I'm not the person responsible for making those choices, but I'm curious about the processes and people that are on that path. Doubt MS will ever really publish that.

Regulations only help the current top stay that way by creating arbitrary barriers to enter competition and politicizes the whole thing, leading to lobby instead of research and development.

Microsoft is not a monopoly. Neither is Google, Facebook etc. They are dominant in their niches.

Use Linux, use firefox, use duckduckgo, use mastedon, use Rumble, odyssey, etc.

The only reason they stay dominant is because instead of dropping their usage, people complain, point fingers and still use them. Because at the end of the day its a feeling of entitlement instead of being proactive supporting the better alternatives. The free market will solve the issue so long we protect freedom in the market.

>Use Linux, use firefox, use duckduckgo, use mastedon, use Rumble, odyssey, etc.

What about the rest of the owl?

Many people/businesses can't just swap over to Linux on a whim. I can go through the rest of your examples one by one, and explain why many people/businesses don't have those as realistic options, if you'd like. But it seems excessive.

> Microsoft is not a monopoly. Neither is Google, Facebook etc. They are dominant in their niches.

This is why the more appropriate term is anti trust. Businesses don't need to be monopolies what matters is whether their position is dominant.

Before I spend time writing a rebuttal to this, I’d like to ask, are you genuinely interested in seeking a better understanding of this topic, or are you already convinced in your view and not interested?

This is a pretty silly argument. It’s not the consumers fault that a monopoly exists.

This is a weird view, albeit a common one among die hard free market lovers (I've even heard the "dominant in their niches" thing verbatim, although I doubt folks could expand on what that means).

The typical individual outside of our profession is not choosing a browser because of a feeling of entitlement. They have maybe 5 hours of free time in their day outside of work / commuting / kids / etc. I doubt they have any idea beyond "this browser works, is fast" or heck "it's installed" as a reason to choose their browser, especially if it's a mobile browser.

Free markets do not solve the issues of monopolies. You don't even have to look to history or the current market to understand that. Monopolies are an unfortunate natural tendency that the market heads towards when uninhibited, because they afford the maximum amount of profit. It also, at least until the monopoly hits a certain point, affords the max amount of efficiency and quality to the consumer.

Unfortunately, by the time the monopoly takes over, there remains no real "choice" left for the consumer to run to. At that point, the profit maximization takes over completely and quality begins to drop. After all, the incentive is just to be better than the "others" who remain, who likely have almost no resources (and moreover the monopoly probably introduces proprietary standards to make remaining alternatives worse).

At that point, we get stagnation, which I would argue the world has seen a good chunk of in recent years. Price fixing, collusion, all too common among the top (see the recent controversy with Google and Facebook working together). Why fight for the "free market" as you call it, when we can work together to rest comfortably?

> They are dominant in their niches.

This is the essence of anti-trust law (commonly refered to as anti-monopoly law), if a company is dominant in a market (or niche), they must refrain from certain anti-competitive practices which would help them to gain dominance in another market.

The law does not prohibit dominance in a market, nor does it prohibit gaining dominance in another market, and while some anti-competitive practices are generally prohibited, others are only prohibited in the context of a market dominant company gaining dominance in another market.

In general, pricing well below costs is prohibited as dumping, but these cases are tricky. When pricing well below cost is in a new market for the company and the old dominant market is subsidizing the costs, there's more room for scrutiny. Enforcement on dumping is light though, because of perceived customer gains when a subsidized product has no direct cost.

Ordinarily, bundling products is acceptable, but forcing a new market product to be purchased with a market dominant product is scrutinized.

Mergers and acquisitions are generally ok, but market dominant companies may need to show that competition remains after the merger.

It's been very clear for many many years that Microsoft's interests are quite opposite the consumer's interests.

I'd love to see consumer protections spring up on the topic, but it'd also be nice if people started considering something that's designed with them in mind, and stopped throwing money/data at such a user-hostile company.

I mean they are just mirroring apple with their forced browser engine on IOS...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com