I will never understand why they NEED to ruin this. It's baffling.
The issue is that once again Microsoft is abusing their monopoly power on the home PC market to make decisions that otherwise would be ignored. No one would download and install Edge and be force-fed ads for money lenders, except that Microsoft installs it by default and aggressively pushes windows users into it with frequent prompts and bogus security warnings.
It’s the bundling and abuse of their market power that is the issue, not their profit motive. In a well-regulated economy they would get fined and forced to change how they operate.
Where I live, house prices are climbing at about 10% a year. More, now that people can work from home. So you see articles in the paper where boomers say how terrible they feel that the young people won’t be able to afford a house because their house price has gone up $100,000 this year.
To the boomer I say, well, you don’t have to take the money. Nobody is forcing you to sell your house for $100k more this year than last. You’re free to sell it for less. Put your money where your mouth is!
Of course this is just a wry view, a letter to the newspaper. It’ll never actually happen. Because we’re all greedy.
So let me rephrase it like this: do you like paying too much?
Public companies are going to be priced on the open market based on their growth prospects relative to other companies. Their management chosen to maximize their growth prospects.
I think it is a fair point to say that "good" companies may choose to maintain the wind of customer satisfaction, goodwill and trust at their back by not doing predatory "bad" things.
But saying public corporations are not going to maximize returns is like saying mother bears are not going to protect their cubs. If that was possible within their nature, they wouldn't exist.
Even if you're Scrooge McDuck that sounds not worth it
Everything they do is aimed at gathering more data for more lucrative ads.
Google harms other companies as well that it can get under its thumb, but also harms its users.
In other words the only time I would have thought in the 90s how is MS going to harm me would be if I decided to start a company that would potentially compete with them, or would depend on standards they were likely to sabotage.
Today if I decide to use a google service I have to to wonder - how is google going to harm me?
Definitely not the case.
See: rigging the advertising market in cahoots with Facebook (Jedi Blue).
See: conspiring with other large tech companies to artificially limit salaries for tech workers.
See: leveraging its search monopoly to gain additional monopoly or near-monopoly positions (YouTube, Chrome, Android), as well as using it to harm competitors (eg Yelp and many others).
See: huge, repeat fines out of Europe for various abuses.
What we already know is that they're at least as evil as 1990s Microsoft. What we don't yet know, is likely to yet put them over the top. The Feds have hardly even looked under Google's corporate hood as they did with Microsoft in the 1990s. This is merely the second or third inning of discovery of all the evil shit Google has likely done over the past two decades. Google's founders simultaneously ran away as fast as they could to get out in front of what was coming, because they know where the bodies are buried.
"Well of course I know him — he's me" https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...
Suddenly you've got a full browser engineering team trying to figure out how to monetize a browser - tough sell. So they can't come up with anything, that's fine because a product manager is the owner of this task anyway. They propose a myriad of different ways to monetize Edge in the future:
* A "Edge Pro" subscription $10/mo where you get ad-blocking and no tracking (we'll need to block third-parties from offering this)
* A built in way to pay people online, we take a cut. Hey maybe we finance big purchases and that's a unique selling point?
* Premium apps/websites, web page authors can give access only to users with an Edge subscription and in return they get a cut of the profits.
They discuss these options as a team, and decide which one is least likely to cause backlash and is least difficult to "try out" and they land on what we're seeing here.
P.s.: I don't mean to defend BNPL, IMO it is shark loaning disguised behind late fees. I forgot the exact number but when I did the (ballpark) math for Afterpay you were capping at like 30% in late fees within 3/4 months.
Of all the MANGA* out there
FTFY
I'll stick with FAAMG.
Not being able to legally, without paying, test safari compatibility is crazy to me.