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Comment by zinekeller | Hacker News Reader

Of course, it's Taboola. Not shocking at all.

But why did Microsoft allowed Taboola in the first place despite Taboola's reputation? That's a question that I want to know the answer to.

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I ask myself the same question with regards to their Klarna partnership in Edge.

Are Microsoft really so hurt for cash they're willing to sacrifice their userbase for a few bucks? It seems crazy they'd stake their reputation like this, especially considering their corporate focus.

> same question with regards to their Klarna partnership

American here. What’s the beef with Klarna?

Horrendous rates, non-clear fees, everything packed in a nice UI that leads clueless folks right into a trap.

It's a scam scheme for financially illiterate people IMO. The fact that it's added into a default browser in a most popular OS in the world adds insult to the injury.

I’m generally sceptical of BNPL. Is Klarna worse than the category?

No, I think it’s in that bucket, personally I haven’t had a problem with them.

Wait, I've used Klarna (not via Edge) and I've never paid any interest rates or fees. You just select Klarna as payment method and then you have 45 days to settle the bill.

I've even been overdue on a bill (I forgot about it) and they just sent me an email asking to pay, still no fees.

Of course if I had continued to neglect the bill, fees might have started kicking in at some point, but that's no different from any other postpaid service.

I don't think you're right about Klarna. I mean sure, it enables people to spend outside their means, but it hardly seems predatory.

If I'm reading this right, the late payment fee is maximum of $7 for their 4 payment thing?

https://cdn.klarna.com/1.0/shared/content/legal/terms/0/en_u...

If you bounce a check or an ACH the fee seems to be $27 (but not more than you owe) for their 30 day plan: https://cdn.klarna.com/1.0/shared/content/legal/terms/0/en_u...

Their pay over time thing seems to be 0-29.99% which seems in line with credit cards?

I mean, sure, I guess making it easy for people who make bad financial choices isn't great... but it's also easy for people who are making good financial choices.

Are Microsoft really so hurt for cash they're willing to sacrifice their userbase for a few bucks?

Microsoft isn't, but somewhere within Microsoft there is probably team who's KPI for the year is "increase Edge ad revenue by $N million". This team is completely removed from the "make Edge a great browser" team.

> they're willing to sacrifice their userbase for a few bucks

Is there even a single corporation on earth that won't eventually do this? All it takes for this to happen is some executive or manager deciding they want a bonus. Shareholders demand perpetual growth and by god they're gonna deliver it.

I'd say it should be illegal to profitably harm people like this but everybody knows these people always get away with everything anyway. They already break existing laws and get a slap on the wrist at best.

A few years ago I got really into the daily challenges in Windows 10 solitaire. It had leaderboards and of course, advertisements. I generally browse with an ad blocker so I was shocked by what I saw inside the unfiltered Windows app.

About 95% of the ads were Taboola / Outbrain garbage designed to lead senior citizens into scams. Usually the ads are framed like they're stories from a news site. Secrets your doctor doesn't want you to know, (D or R) politicians just signed a bill that will let you save money refinancing your mortgage, your computer might have virus!!!!!1!

All these ads are there to prey on vulnerable people. I don't know how Microsoft, Taboola, Outbrain, etc. get away with it.

Blocking advertising should be on a cyber security checklist these days.

The fact that companies the size of Microsoft and Google refuse to properly sanitize their platforms is, just, gross behaviour begging for regulation.

It obviously costs them less in lobbying than it would to properly vet the ads they show.

Here's an example of Google advertising a scam: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-21/scammers-using-text-m...

I'm not going to comb through MSFT's financials, but I'm willing to bet it involves Taboola backing a dump truck full of cash up to Redmond.

Microsoft clearly cares about their brand, and cares _a lot_ about making MS Edge a success. They're evidently willing to spend about 10 billion dollars on it or so at least (given that their relentless pushing it is risking the EU slapping them down for this at the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars and the risk of that happening is at least 10%. They've done it before, and since then the EU has become more annoyed at such practices, especially from USA companies), that's some easy math.

So, either Taboola's dump truck had more than 10 billion dollars in it, or whomever made this call is an idiot, and the management above them is asleep at the wheel (seems like occam's answer here), or I'm missing something.

> Microsoft clearly cares about their brand

Is that really so obvious? Granted, I just use Windows and no other Microsoft products, but the way they are treating Windows, it does not seem to me that they actually care about their brand, they care about maximizing profits, since they have been introducing more and more ads into their OS.

I don't know. I get the feeling the no one at Microsoft cares about Microsoft. The Office team obviously cares deeply about Office, the Edge team about Edge, the XBox team about the Xbox, the Visual Studio team about Visual Studio and so on, but no one actually cares about Microsoft. No one is making decisions with a holistic view about what is good for the company as a whole.

The people who made this decision are only answerable to their team and hitting their targets. They don't care about the effects it has on other parts of the company, and don't have incentives to either.

Regulators should probably break up Microsoft into many individual companies.

> Microsoft clearly cares about their brand, and cares _a lot_ about making MS Edge a success

I think there's a decent number of people working on Edge that want it to be a success, but Microsoft's "put more ads in it department" clearly gets the final say on all decisions.

Microsoft cares about making edge a success... so it can monetise the users. Hence the ads.

Which is weird because Microsoft is usually distributing the money hats, not receiving them.

I hope that it is a big dump truck. Because I only use their OS because work makes me, and I used to work at Microsoft along with MSFT stock contributing mightily to our financial security. Now when I see this shit pop up on my screen, it just makes me sad. And furthers my resolve to not use their stuff, even if my wife does still work there.

Thing is, despite some particularly bad UI decisions of late, the base OS seems pretty solid these days. But then they slap this annoying UI on the top of it, and now with malware. It's like the company, as an individual, just can't help itself. Scorpions, frogs, and a river crossing, or summat.

As a current Microsoft employee, I agree the Edge content screens don’t fit well with our values. Given the tiny revenue generated it seems like a bad investment. Raising it as a values issue in the positive “I thought Microsoft would be better than this” way seems likely to have the most effect if enough people do it.

> Raising it as a values issue

This is about poor design and unethical decisions. MS can keep its values to itself.

> in the positive “I thought Microsoft would be better than this” way seems likely to have the most effect if enough people do it.

But how many is enough? And whom do I approach with this "positive" feedback so that the feedback is not routed to /dev/null? I'm pretty sure that MS receives a ton of feedback on this and similar topics and ignores it.

This is ridiculous. People hate how Edge is bloated nowadays and it’s a fact. You know it, we know it. But MS does nothing to fix that. Instead it pushes forward and adds new shit into the web browser.

* What's "Microsoft Rewards" in MS Edge? An award for those users who share the most amount of telemetry with MS?

* And a "Math solver" in a web browser?

* Games menu?

* FOUR unskippable screens to opt out of some useless features?

All this needs to be in a web browser?

Oh and I almost forgot. Please add support for Flash games into the web browser, add BonziBuddy and bring back my favourite AOL toolbar from IE. I'm missing all this (no).

MS's only job was to create a fast and clean Chromium-based web browser. It failed again.

MS has a lot of jobs, and it won’t ever be great at all of them at the same time. It does have some core values these days which are pretty strongly held (from my limited perspective at the fringe)

My suggestion is that when it fails at a job you care about, instead of dismissing the company as a whole you raise the gap between that particular bit of execution and the espoused values of the company.

That’s how I would raise it internally, because it respects the job people are doing while also suggesting a path for improvement.

One weird trick, security teams hate him.

Money ?

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