Speaking as an ex-PM at MS, just about every individual contributor PM I've met at MS cares far more about reputational impact than making some little metric go up (even if it's a revenue metric).
I get that it's easy to use the PM discipline as a whipping boy because it's a PM's face that is associated with product changes, but I've rarely seen one at MS actively push for this kind of stuff. In the overwhelming case, they argue with their management structure for a while and get dragged kicking and screaming into a decision that they think is dumb, but they're told to own it anyways.
Typically the decisions of the boneheaded variety are made much higher up the org chart by higher-level middle management in the company who don't use the products they own and are (often) pretty thoroughly unaware of what their users actually care about. These decisions suck really bad too, because they overshadow countless other great decisions made by truly excellent people in similar positions.
Of course, it's entirely possible that everyone involved in something like this thinks it's awesome right up until it gets announced/released. I've just never actually seen that before.
I have issues with a LOT of stuff, but ads on the login screen, telemetry that can't be opted out of, privacy invasion, Cortana that is literally malware and the list can go on for days - which people did push for this? The janitors?
Excuse me, but your explanation is just a personal anecdote. Management approved on all this crap and bloatware, you can't realistically cop out that "ohnoes all the PMs at Microsoft I've ever known are more interested in the company's image etc and haven't been actively pushing for this stuff".
I mean, we SEE IT. How tf did all this stuff end up in the OS? Somebody stumbled and landed face first on a keyboard and this crap wrote itself?
Edit: how can upper management ask for this stuff from their underlings if they have no clue about what is happening or what the users want? I also apologise for the harsh tone, but I am so done with Microsoft products I can't help being upset.
And what's that person role? Someone I feel its not a VP of quality insurance who made that decision.
I think there’s not so much an incentive problem, but more of a “hiring the wrong people” problem. People that literally don’t give a crap about anything but their next bonus or raise.
Chances are that those managers will be able to deliver their features on time, meeting all KPIs & OKRs, while accumulating a stack of technical debt for future maintainers.
Isn’t that life in a nutshell?
I think last time Apple "pulled a Microsoft" was when Ive removed a bunch of really really useful stuff in MacBooks (e.g., the ports-gate). I can imagine some forces inside Apple went like "that's it, enough." I'm genuinely curious how management in Apple works and how it promotes ideas that are truly worth it.
I’ve never worked at Apple, but my understanding is that they have/had gatekeepers, from Jobs himself on down, to tell you your idea isn’t part of the vision and we’re not going to do it. And a lot of workers hate that!
On the other hand, is not as if every single other company doesn’t do it, which doesn’t excuse but does explain it.
Regarding the ports on macbooks, IMO it's just that Ive left and so everyone was allowed to design practical devices again, instead of admirable but impractical art pieces.
It's a major turn off.
The only other advertising system within iOS that I’m aware of is the App Store, both in recommendations and search, and of course, that Apple will advertise their own services for iCloud, Storage and so on.
Is Apple an advertising-based company? Not really. Are they marketing-driven? Absolutely. I think the difference is about user value and user impact.
Apple tends to go the Amazon route of trying to capture value from the interactions users might already do, though their iAds network from a decade ago did show an unsuccessful attempt to capture the in-app ad market.
But I can’t think of the last time I would have seen an “ad” in settings, though since App Clips appear in settings for up to 10 days once installed, I can see why some might think so.
I’m not sure whether that applies to the wallet but it definitely works for Siri.
Reminds me of that Better Call Saul episode where Jimmy makes a lavish TV ad to find members for a class action lawsuit, and finds a ton more people, but does it without getting the law firm's partners' approval, and they are angry with him because they care more about the law firm's reputation than the ROI for a particular case.
Edit: With that said, I'm not convinced this is the kind of the king that would actually hurt MS's reputation outside of geek circles.
That's why Google has been so successful with Stadia.
[0] I use Linux, but no, Proton is not fully there. Plenty of games either do not work or have enough glitches that make it unacceptable.
My personal preferences is owning a game library, because not always I play games, that require co-op or connection, but if the future is that you are opening browser and playing game from vast library of games on TV, for wich you pay subscription fee, then Stadia is on the right track. Actually, Stadia would be only one of many services and most probably that would be combined with Microsoft gaming. Looking in retrospect, most of the things are logical from what Microsoft was doing, but the question to me is always about if this is something I want as well. Looking on how automatic updates behaves on my Windows 10, it seems that 2022 is the year, I am abandoning Windows. And Stadia here is least thing I am worried about, because I don't.
Starlink's latency is probably barely OK for multiplayer games, but not for remote rendering.
GeForce Now and Stadia didn't have the games I wanted to play so I wasn't able to use them.
I guess you didn't live through the "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" era, which later became the "Nobody got fired for buying Microsoft" era that seems to be ending.
Teams is an abomination; something to be cast into the fires of Mount Doom. Slack is miles better for everyday communication.
(I did move the goalposts from "deployment size" to "quality").
Which reputation?
Maybe you have some data we don’t but that’s probably wrong.
Also I think Windows 10 is very good, so that « everyone » is wrong.
And before you say I “should have changed jobs“: not everyone is a developer who can easily job-hop like me, though.
If you're not aware, the latest Office also has LinkedIn integration. Pretty much what I'd class as an irrelevant feature. This is nothing new.
IMO Microsoft is actively working to make computing more horrible.
Like you, at first I thought some features were sleazy, like the coupon. But after using it a bit, I like it: whenever I'm going to buy something on Amazon or somewhere else, I having a big popup telling me it's cheaper on this alternative store OR that I forgot to clip a coupon on amazon is REALLY helpful! It's like shopping.google.com right inside your browser, on a push basis.
It's really hard to make a product that's satisfactory to everybody. You may hate the coupon feature - but I love it. I'm not a big fan of debt to finance consumption, BUT maybe there's a student out there who needs that to splurge on cheap hardware during blackfriday and make a profit by parting it out on ebay?
Also, a feature that's just "meh" can be safely ignored, like the various things Word can do: no, you don't have to display every toolbar if you don't use them.
If the feature is worse than "meh", say if it goes to far, Edge can become a source to made a free software browser, like Chrome became chromium for people who value their freedom and privacy.
And considering all the naughty changes Google has been adding (ex: to make it harder to do ad blocking), maybe that's for the better: I'd rather have Microsoft employees fix the codebase and backport features from upstream, than volunteers: this frees the volunteers so they can concentrate on the more important (and easy stuff), and leave the boring stuff to Microsoft.
Is it more complicated to have chrome -> chromium -> edge -> edgium -> something you will be able to use?
Yes.
But so what? As long as it works, I don't care much.
If you use gmail or outlook or just forward your emails there, I've got bad news for you :)
> And it’s not push, it’s pull because there is no way to store all data locally and keep it updated.
It's push in human terms because it comes to me automatically.
Pull is when I have to initiate action.
That's why you shouldn't use those either if you care about privacy. You should use fastmail, zoho or some other service where you are the customer, not the product.
You need to think at the system level, and with the time dimension added.
Let's see how it would go down if I followed your advice:
- I use coupons, like everyone else: I then save money
- I take a moral grand stand and refuse to use them: I waste money
- magically (meaning I don't think it'll ever happen), people are inspired by my moral grand stand and almost everybody stops using coupons: everybody saves money
- someone doesn't care about morals, and start using coupon again: they save money
- they post about this "one weird trick", other people decide to join in, they try and realize it helps them save money, I do the same, and we're back to square 1.
And from that point on, more people will be using coupons until almost everybody again uses coupons.
You can't win a fight against the shared preferences of everyone else in the world.
If you think you can, great! Then the best tool is to use politics to legally forbid coupons. If it's such a great idea, you'll certainly have no problem finding a wide popular support for that?
If it's not so popular, then what do you think gives you the right to impose your preferences on the majority?
It may seem better to take this grand stand, but to me, it's pointless: you are just wasting money to feel good, with no chance to do anything else in a larger picture, but feel special or more enlightened.
But if you like it, why not?
The problem is when sites like Amazon require accounts, there is not much to do to get around being tracked and having dynamic pricing come into play. At least with airlines you can VPN and use private browsing to try and avoid this practice.
Prime example of organizational failure...
Maybe it should be Nadella's job to keep on top of stuff like this.
I'm sure MS would love-- and is hoping-- to collect rents on purchases users might make anywhere, but this seems a very clumsy attempts. Possibly driven, as others have noted, by short-term incentives by product managers rather than anything more strategic.
Consumer apathy/inertia is MS's biggest benefit.
A severe indictment of society’s innumeracy.
I’m unclear on Zip’s business model so appreciate I could be missing something here.
Regardless of what the marketing says, nothing is ever “free”. Typically, these types of small time lending operations for retail purchases with no collateral depend on people without impulse control control and poor cash flow management buying things they should not and then collecting a slow drip of money from some portion of them who will not be able to pay it off for a long time.
Not that I think it should be illegal, but it is generally considered to be a bottom feeder business, one that the esteemed people who work at Microsoft might be above. But apparently, they are not, and hence it is on Hacker News as a controversy.
A quick internet search says that the average US credit card currently has an interest rate of 16%.
Paying off your credit card on the aforementioned schedule at that interest rate, assuming a monthly billing cycle that starts right before your purchase, you'll pay under $4 in interest if the purchase was under $487. If the purchase is over that, Zip is cheaper.
If your purchase comes in the middle of a billing cycle, the breakeven is $811.
(Both of those are assuming that you have nothing else on that card, so that the billing cycle in which you pay off the 4th payment will end with a 0 balance, and so there will be no interest for that cycle).
(Also I'm assuming you aren't using a rewards card. I'm using a card with 5% cash back on online purchases, making it quite a bit harder for Zip to beat the card).
(Checking the T&Cs shows that they do have a steep fee for any missed/late payments, in addition to whatever cut they're taking from the merchant. But it looks like here, the few weeks of credit really would be "free" to the customer provided payments are made on time. Not that I'd consider using them; my cashflow isn't so constrained that I need the service -- and if it was, I'd be more concerned about the risk of being late with a payment and getting stung for extra fees.)
>Regardless of what the marketing says, nothing is ever “free”
In a world of low-interest rates, plentiful venture capital, and penetration pricing, things are often better than free.
With schemes like these, all customers ultimately end up paying for this regardless if you use the service or not as merchants will have to add the costs to their prices.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/articles/introducing-...
> shoppers break their purchases into equal installment payments, often interest-free, which can allow shoppers to get their purchase upfront, instead of having to wait until it’s paid in full.
From the commenter JennaScout on the same page:
> Looks like you neglected to mention the $4 flat fee in the article?
>On a $35 purchase, that's 11% of the purchase cost spread over one month. Annualized, that's an astounding 250% APY. Even the most predatory credit cards top out at around 40% APY.
>All you've done is just baked predatory loans into your browser. Honestly, you should be ashamed.
Sure they do. Get a credit card with 0% interest on purchases and pay the balance before the interest free offer period expires. In many cases these cards to not charge any fee associated with the purchase.
I understand that the credit card company will still make a profit in many cases – even when they don't manage to collect any interest or fees. But the loan is free from the cardholder's point of view.
Edit: No interest, but a flat fee, so possibly not worth it.
The only one that works is the 2%+ credit card rewards, and that is because people who are not paying with credit cards that earn rewards subsidize those who do because merchants do not offer a lower price for the non rewards payment methods.
i keep trying to make things change (on my level) but it's hard, whenever you criticize them, you are seen as a useless "troll"
fanboism makes people blind!
I think you are hugely underestimating the audience for this kind of thing. This can be worth far far more than a few millions.
But yeah, of course for the rich HN audience this is an anti-feature. For the folks taking payday loans? Probably not!
Your argument is essentially "poor people will find these loans useful, but I know better than them", yikes.
I can see it happened with numerous service (at least in my country) that give users loan via an app, without usual paperworks. But many of said people are the one that have problem with their money management or lack financial literacy in the first place, and this add even more debt to theirs.
Giant corporation prey on ignorance of already struggling people. Ruthless, when you think about it.
The deeply out of touch comments here demonstrate that, even if this feature isn't appealing to HN users, it is appealing to a very wide range of people whom you are unlikely to see on HN.