There was a blog post that got big traffic the other day about lame advertising in Apple products...
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.
Advertising in products is very likely to spread like a pandemic in the future; I believe eventually every capable product will adopt it.
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".
Having met a bunch of people responsible for ad budgets totalling $1B+/yr, this thinking seems almost the direct opposite of what they're after.
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.
I think squarefoot is following me in pointing out the foolishness of Microsoft using successful products to promote lost causes and thus drag themselves down.
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.
> 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.
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.
Note that "Microsoft is not involved in providing the loan and does not collect a fee for connecting users to loan providers" DOES NOT mean that Microsoft does not collect a fee from Zip.
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.
I understand the strong incentives for browser makers to try to monetize, but still it’s annoying. We don’t want pocket, we don’t want flock, we don’t want financing. Just let us use the web.
MS doesn't need to monetise though. Especially a browser they only half wrote. Their tie-ins with O365 and Bing should be enough to finance it.
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.
I don't expect this from the world's largest company who surely can look to bigger revenue sources.