Comment by hooby | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hooby | Hacker News Reader

I lack the psychology knowledge to know for sure - but isn't it quite normal psychological behavior to go into full rejection-mode, if someone tries to push something down your throat too hard?

Nobody likes being manipulated - and if the manipulation attempts are too obvious and shameless - wouldn't people reject whatever is being pushed at them, just to assert their independence and self-determination?

Even if the product being pushed at them might otherwise be something they'd want to take a closer look at?

For me personally, Microsofts' behavior is definitely pushing me further away from trying or using Edge. Just hearing the word "Edge" creates negative emotions for me - simply because of many years of getting it inappropriately shoved into my face. The first thought that goes through my mind, when I see "Edge" or "Bing" mentioned anywhere in Windows is "Not again. F*k off. Just leave me in peace. Respect my decision to use the browser of MY choice."

As Microsoft is continuing to be so pushy, aren't more and more people going to end up being immediately annoyed just at the bare mention of Edge or Bing?

Probably yes for you and me, but I've observed how my parents (70+) interact with Google's search results, and for them there's no difference between an ad at the top and "real" search results.

I'm pretty sure they would consider this response as something which could be a feasible search result and would engage with it, albeit somewhat confused. They'd very likely discard it as a non-helpful response, but I'm not sure if they would know that Microsoft has injected this huge ad on purpose in order to glue them to Bing, so I don't see how they would go into full rejection-mode.

To them the internet is full of inexplicable annoyances that get in the way all the time, unless they stay in their walled garden, so they've accepted it. Even more so since they don't use an ad-blocker and therefore get bombarded with a lot of trash.

But would your parents switch to Edge/Bing on their own - or would they ask for your help, to do that for them?

Is that really the sort of audience that would actually switch to Edge, if whoever maintains their computer for them has setup a different browser as default?

What you are saying is that your parents would NOT detect this as a manipulation attempt. And my post above says that when people DO detect the attempt, the natural response would be to resist it.

But Microsoft is not exactly subtle in their attempts - and that means more people will be able to detect it, right?

>really the sort of audience that would actually switch to Edge

Someone whos default browser changed unknowingly upon system update?

Microsoft likes to play dirty. It is in their genes

It seemed like they were doing better when they were running leenucks servers in Azure. But you can't upload images on LinkedIn with firefox (at least on leenucks.) And there were some UI weirdness on GitHub, so yeah... Playing dirty is in their genome. And I was just getting to the point where I liked C#.

No, the internet heavily biases towards people who are on the spectrum for Oppositional Defiant Disorder because only the top 1% of people who are the most passionate about any topic ever post and ODD biases people into being passionate about things most people don't care about.

Thus, if you read internet comments, you get the impression that some significant fraction of the world has a massive chip on their shoulder and are willing to go to great lengths to defy authority whereas if you ever run analytics for a company, you realize that group of people are almost always a rounding error in terms of impact.

You will be surprised to know that ~4% of US workforce works in IT. 4.7% of European workers are in ICT.

Where in my comment did I mention anything about IT?

Well, most people would not accept the generous offer from the African prince, just because he wrote them an email.

And not everyone would buy everything some market crier advertises to them - or order anything that's hyped on some shopping channel.

And hopefully not too many would not fall for those scam calls, were the caller claims to be from Microsoft and to need their help (and password) to fix a Virus on their Computer.

And not everyone will just blindly agree to every single upsell that any company offers them.

Most people are kind of conditioned to be at least somewhat suspicious of anyone trying very hard to convince them of something.

I don't know if it's correct to call that a "disorder", kinda implying that this is the "abnormal" behavior - and also implying that agreeing and accepting all of the above is what a "normal" person (with no disorder) would do.

Keep thinking that way if you wish, but do not complain when your power users leave and your website turns to shit.

(related: not sure "impact" was the word you were searching for there)

Probably not everyone does so, but I certainly do. The more MS tries to reinstate MS-EdgeExplorer as a windows locked default, the greater lengths I go to, to ensure it is continously disabled and uninstalled. My experience so far is that this has to be repeated frequently, as some mechanism in Windows or Windows Update enthusiastically re-adds Edge often :-/.

> MS-EdgeExplorer

I propose the name: "Internet Edgeplorer" ;)

"There's no need to download a new web browser. Microsoft recommends Microsoft Edge."

Oh, ok, good.

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