Users revolt as Microsoft bolts a short-term financing app onto Edge
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I don't expect this from the world's largest company who surely can look to bigger revenue sources.
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.
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".
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.
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.
Ha, but that’s the beauty of it. There are no alternatives (Expensive Apple products and Chromebooks aside). They are like the Comcast of operating systems and can keep squeezing every dime out of you. And they’ll get away with it, too.
Couldn't this be the reason why every hardware/software manufacturer might want (or even feel forced) to adapt and release only adware products?
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.
"Sir! Sir! The peasants are revolting!"
"Yes. I've always thought so."
The second person interprets "revolting" as an adjective.
They have no excuse for some monetisation scheme as sleazy as this.
Mozilla is a different story. They don't sit on billions in the bank nor have other products that are basically monopolies just raking it in. They're legitimately strapped for cash. But still they don't stoop this low.
PS: I'm pretty outspoken against these schemes because I seen how they take advantage of those who are bad with money and draw them into a debt spiral.