Because Microsoft's raison-d'être is to extract as much money as possible from computer users. No matter how much they try to not be evil, no matter how many overtures they make to developers, it won't change the fact that Microsoft is basically just a hostile entity out there to extract as much money as possible from the computing scene.

Of course for-profit companies try to extract as much money as possible from their customers, that’s the reason they exist.

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.

I do not agree that maximizing profit is necessary. A company needs to take care of our customers and employees, and only make enough profit to keep doing so. More is just unethical.

I used to have similar thoughts until I got my MBA. We live in a capitalist economy. Investors consider where to invest by comparing an investment opportunity to a safe rate of return. They need some upside (greater returns) to offset the risk of less certain investments. Maximizing profits or at least ensuring hefty returns is important for a firm to continue to grow and receive investment dollars.

Maybe the need for continual growth and always angling for more investment dollars is a problem for society.

Of course it is, but we’re all greedy so nothing will ever change.

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.

There's no need for investors to get an ROI that's just over the inflation rate. Why would they want that? Because they want to get rich quick.

So let me rephrase it like this: do you like paying too much?

What are you trying to say?

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.

And to think they now own Github and NPM. The Borg is truly upon us.

And linked in and minecraft.

I imagine some MBA saw a way they could augment the payment card feature to extract money, and bringing that to their manager is a good permanent gain for them (since they most likely won’t have to answer to the PR team).

Because in the long run you make money best by providing customers valuable services and/or products. If you're screwing over your customers in any way, that is counterproductive to that goal.

Maybe that's true, but these kind of actions are Microsoft's MO. It's how they grew, it's what they'll forever do. I almost thought they had changed when they seemingly shifted to be friendlier when they were trying to attract developers to Azure and embracing Linux and OSS, but obviously not. MS just can't not be evil. Kind of like Oracle.

M$ "embracing" Linux was like The Wicked Witch Of The West embracing Dorothy considering how soon it followed their evil Linux patent racket and funding of SCO's baseless UNIX lawsuit. Beware The Borg, all you who are too young to remember M$'s glory days.

Haven't the past past 10 years been a complete refutation of this belief? Money made by hype, fraud, market power abuse or regulatory arbitrage dwarfs profits made by providing value, no longer how long the time horizon. Especially since it's clear that the US establishment's policy is not to prosecute and punish white-collar crime

It's a business

You just described every tech company.

Not every tech company is a for profit company.

It is a for profit company, the reason is always profit.

I'm honestly not sure how much profit a 2 trillion dollar company is supposed to generate from an interest free pay later browser bloatware feature

Even if you're Scrooge McDuck that sounds not worth it

As another said, the goal to increase revenue is per team. The Edge team must likely find proof for how they will drive revenue in the future.

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.

This is a pretty good breakdown of how it likely came to be, but leaves out the satanic rituals and incantations that also (seemingly) play a big part in how microsoft makes decisions.

"The peripheral drivers team needs to increase it's revenue."

That team doesn't need to, device manufacturers already do that by only making drivers for Windows for certain devices, increasing lock-in

"View this ad to continue using your mouse"

Sell the default search provider to bing for a few billion dollars. Same way Firefox makes money.

Mozilla can negotiate with multiple search engines. Imagine if the Edge team tried to make Google Edge’s default search engine!

The winning play for them is to make genuinely the best browser, gain market share, and then start their shenanigans. Like Google did

Today's Google is a saint compared to the nineties Microsoft.

I don't know about that - 90s MS was a scumbag to any other company it could get under it but it generally didn't harm its users (other than of course being uncompetitive and limiting options) because its users were a form of customer (just not the enterprise level customers which were most important)

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?

> Today's Google is a saint compared to the nineties Microsoft.

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.

> The Feds have hardly even looked under Google's corporate hood

"Well of course I know him ­— he's me" https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...

What shenanigans do you think Google is pulling? There's nothing equivalent in Chrome...

Extension manifest V3.

Care to explain why you think it's a bad thing? Seems like it's mostly deprecating old JS ways of doing things and introducing new JS features and a better security policy.

It's an underhanded way to limit blocking capabilities that they can sell as a benefit.

Most of Chrome’s shenanigans happen on the backend, like with Google in general.

Google is an advertising company. That's what they make their money from. And they are the biggest internet advertising company.

Everything they do is aimed at gathering more data for more lucrative ads.

I'd rather be connected to contextual ads than have my OS vendor try to keep my entire digital life hostage for a ransom.

> While the service is being promoted as ‘interest-free’, some were quick to point out that all transactions are subject to a “$4 flat fee”.

Of all the FAAMG out there, Microsoft arguably has the most diverse revenue streams, I don't see what's surprising with them going after another market (let alone payments). It's just another layer for monetization and doesn't prevent them pursuing their other business lines (it's arguably different teams anyway). Nothing's ever worth it if you take the approach of "It's already worth/earning 100x, adding 1x isn't worth the effort".

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 FAAMG out there

Of all the MANGA* out there

FTFY

Not the commenter above, but I don't really want to support Facebook's attempt to dodge bad press with a name change.

I'll stick with FAAMG.

I'm not too political/ideological about it, but Alphabet kept it's G in the acronym, Meta will keep it's F. I may revisit once they don't get >90% of their revenue from Google Services and Facebook + IG. But I do think if we're gonna be pedantic about Meta, we should be the same with Alphabet.

MAMAA

The Scrooge McDuck from the Ducktales remake (which I heartily recommend watching; it's a wonderfully funny cartoon for adults that pokes fun at plenty of adult things including silicon valley and mark zuckerberg) actually talks a bit about making money the smart way rather than being a penny-pincher. Which is a nice departure from the old persona.

There is zero proof that it will remain interest free forever; also their main goal here is to engage as much people as possible, so that each purchase click will generate profits indirectly through users profiling etc.

The goal is per team, Edge team must find new ways to generate profit, how much they make doesn't really matter, but the goal is to keep increasing this profit.

What profit did legacy Edge bring them? Considering all the development efforts, I'd believe it was more of a money sink than anything else.

What about WSL?

If you simply subtract some estimate of damage to their multi-billion dollar brand, it far outweighs any conceivable revenue from this creepy feature. It is not as if buy-now-pay-later is not already widely available on most merchant checkout pages. This will just be one option among many.

But their thinking is flawed. The reason is of course profit, but the result will not be profit.

The ultimate result is never profit. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to...

Chrome doesn't do this.

The previous edge (at least the latter versions) weren't that bad. I had about the same amount of issues with safari and the edgeHTML edge, but the big difference for me was that at least I could test edge legally on a non-windows machine while I cannot for safari. I also ran into some issues of corporate policies holding back updates, which seems like a "unique" "feature" of windows.

Not being able to legally, without paying, test safari compatibility is crazy to me.

They copied a browser which renders websites the same way as the browser they copied from. Value add, whether you like their choices or not, is arguably the only reason one would pick their browser over the browser they copied.

I do understand. Look at Firefox: they are barely hanging on.

Only because the Mozilla foundation spends their money doing all kinds of dumb things that no one wants.

That is not the "only" reason that Mozilla is struggling. There are vanishingly few companies their size who manage to remotely hold their own against Google for over a decade, let alone in a market segment that Google has invested on the order of billions of dollars in engineer time and advertising cost (some of it in the form of "free" advertising on the google.com homepage). That Mozilla has to contend with Google also being basically the only one willing to purchase search deals with them just makes it even more difficult.

Their password program was an example of this.

Data

As long as economics 101 is: "Hello capitalism!" ... What do you expect?