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The company had over 100B in revenue last year. By adding this sleazy anti-feature, Microsoft is sacrificing its reputation and the quality of a high-profile pr

The company had over 100B in revenue last year. By adding this sleazy anti-feature, Microsoft is sacrificing its reputation and the quality of a high-profile product for probably a few million? That's a few thousandths of one percent of their total revenue. I don't understand it.

Mountain_Skies 5y ago
The product manager behind this cares about having numbers to show their manager and isn't concerned about the potential reputational impact it might have on the company as a whole. Their manager likewise will be happy to report in turn to their manager that they've increased revenue by a large amount. It's peanuts to the company but could be a large increase for that particular product which is what the managers get rewarded on.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  People use office because they need a feature or compatibility. Nobody chooses software based on reputation.
  - thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
    >> Nobody chooses software based on reputation. That's why Google has been so successful with Stadia.
    - jchw 5y ago
      Stadia isn’t even a good idea in the first place. Even if it is the best implementation of the idea, I still have no idea how it could ever make much sense. Other players in the space, like GeForce Now, don’t exactly look appealing either.
      - sangnoir 5y ago
        I know it's a niche market, but Stadia is really convenient when traveling. All you need to pack is a controller.
        throwaway2048 5y ago
        assuming you only travel to places with good internet and a nearby stadia server
      - 41b696ef1113 5y ago
        I think the value proposition is definitely there for a "rent a gaming pc" service. Cost/library/performance are thorny problems to solve, but if I were able to ditch my Windows PC[0] for a robust solution, I could consider it. Seemingly the only way I would possibly be able to utilize a current generation Nvidia equivalent card. [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.
        nitrogen 5y ago
        You would need a very large number of colocation setups to get latency low enough.
        Bobylonian 5y ago
        But looking on global picture and far in future with satellite internet - that is easily solvable, but technical issues on running those games in Stadia are least things that people are concerned about. 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.
        dehrmann 5y ago
        > satellite internet - that is easily solvable Starlink's latency is probably barely OK for multiplayer games, but not for remote rendering.
      - cobertos 5y ago
        Idk, I had a good time with shadow.tech? Mostly because I use Linux and wanted to play a game that doesn't port to Windows well (Roblox, due to anticheat not getting along with Wine). GeForce Now and Stadia didn't have the games I wanted to play so I wasn't able to use them.
      - foldr 5y ago
        What makes you say that? I find Stadia works really great for me as a gaming platform. I don't have any issues with lag and I like not having to have a noisy console in my living room. The only issue with it is the limited library, but that's not inherent to the basic idea.
    - marcodiego 5y ago
      Stadia is a service. Actually very few people have the luxury of being able to choose their software. When compatibility, previous knowledge or an specific feature is key, people simply can't choose.
    - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
      Bad example because none of the "cloud gaming" companies have been very successful
    - FormerBandmate 5y ago
      Stadia has no backwards compatibility, established user base, or ecosystem lock-in. Gmail and Android do, so despite having many of the same issues as Stadia, they’re incredibly popular
    - gman83 5y ago
      Stadia has been great for me. I just love it.
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    Nobody chooses software based on reputation. 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.
    - slac 5y ago
      It is now the "nobody got fired for buying a Gartner report" era.
  - FormerBandmate 5y ago
    Corporate clients definitely pick based on reputation. Why do you think Teams is bigger than Slack
    - unethical_ban 5y ago
      Teams is bigger than slack? Like, the executable? Teams is an abomination; something to be cast into the fires of Mount Doom. Slack is miles better for everyday communication.
      - breakfastduck 5y ago
        I agree its absolutely awful but Teams is far bigger than Slack, I'm not sure why you'd argue that.
        unethical_ban 5y ago
        My sample size of three large companies, two use Slack. Boom. (I did move the goalposts from "deployment size" to "quality").
    - ghostly_s 5y ago
      Because of Office license lock-in, not reputation.
    - ryantgtg 5y ago
      Don’t they “choose” Teams because it integrates with outlook/sharepoint/etc? That seems to be the case at my job. Basically, Teams replaced Skype.
    - behnamoh 5y ago
      Part of it is rational, because they see lots of chaos/noise in the market while having to make too many decisions. Following the "best practices" only saves them decision-making time. Might not be the "best" in practice, but at least they don't have to examine a gazillion options that are available.
    - 5y ago
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    I've been involved in a bunch of large Enterprise purchases and reputation definitely was a consideration. We typically interview other customers to find out their pros/cons and in one case travelled onsite to another customer to not only talk to them but go over their installation in person. (These were all done without a vendor representative present, and I can think of a few cases where it made the difference in deciding not to go with a vendor)
  - speed_spread 5y ago
    The commercial value of software is _nothing but reputation_. Would you buy software tools from a company about to go bankrupt? You pay for software with the idea that what you're not trusting your data and operations to a technological dead end. The problem here being that nobody is paying for software anymore in an ad-revenue model, meaning that companies have much less to lose doing that kind of shit.
- dheera 5y ago
  Also they only care about the numbers for the next 2 years before they jump to another job, not the long term future of the company.
- grishka 5y ago
  There's something deeply wrong with the incentive structure in many IT companies.
  - behnamoh 5y ago
    I wonder how Apple keeps its sh$t together. I know they have made some mistakes in recent years that hurt Apple's reputation, but overall it's been successful at maintaining a positive brand image and consistent product attributes. Sometimes this has been through backing down on wrong decisions they made before (e.g., look at the new Macbooks and all their ports.) 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.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - organsnyder 5y ago
      From my outside perspective, it seems like they must have an incentive structure that allows departments/products to forgo individual revenue if they're seen to be contributing to the wider company.
      - saddlerustle 5y ago
        And yet, they put ads in the iPhone settings app.
        grishka 5y ago
        It feels like they're really desperate to make their services ecosystem a thing, despite no one ever asking for it. But then services are the one area where it's possible to make shitloads of money out of thin air via recurring payments in a way that doesn't offend the users ("I'm using disk space on their servers and it needs to be paid for"). Locking people into these kinds of walled-garden services must also help somewhat with hardware sales. 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.
- SilasX 5y ago
  Yeah, but somebody in that chain up the line still cares about the reputation and has to weigh that against more local goals. 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.
  - sedawk 5y ago
    > 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. I kind of disagree with this, if enough geeks denounce it, this spreads like a wild fire. Geeks have the (un)fortunate role of recommending everything from a router to PC to TV to their friends and family and if disgruntled enough, they might steer them away from things they dislike, it is just human nature (and justifiably so too). If one non-techie thing I have learned at Microsoft very early on, is it the fact that never underestimate the _minority_ geek population who can have a disproportionately large impact on general populous with their opinions!
- phillipcarter 5y ago
  > The product manager behind this cares about having numbers to show their manager and isn't concerned about the potential reputational impact it might have on the company as a whole. 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.
  - shados 5y ago
    > Typically the decisions of the boneheaded variety are made much higher up the org chart by higher-level middle management And what's that person role? Someone I feel its not a VP of quality insurance who made that decision.
    - satyrnein 5y ago
      This sounds like typical "roadmap via bizdev" to me. Bizdev strikes a partnership (in this case, with the firm making the loans), and then it gets handed to the poor PM to push it through.
  - Cosmin_C 5y ago
    As somebody who has been using Microsoft stuff for years and paid through the nose for it, can you take a guess on why Microsoft is going this shitty path since Windows 8 came out? 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.
aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
I don't understand it either. I can't fathom how none of the people working on this had the conscience to pull the emergency brakes before it's shipped? How was this product idea validated? Where's the data-driven decision making everyone is preaching about? Prime example of organizational failure...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- pas 5y ago
  umm, it's not impossible that the data shows that it's "working great"
- meijer 5y ago
  Also, is there no oversight? Does nobody supervise the product managers? Maybe it should be Nadella's job to keep on top of stuff like this.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Not even conscience but foresight to see political or even regulatory issues with something that, if implemented the wrong way, could amount to predatory lending.
  - FDSGSG 5y ago
    That is a solved problem. There's nothing new here, 'Buy now, pay later' stuff has existed for ages.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      Sure, and some of it in the form of predatory lending financial instruments, some of which are regulated. And a company on the scale of MS entering into any new market will draw a lot of scrutiny. One in the business of lending money, even just through a tightly-integrated partnership, is going to draw even more. That's a lot to gamble on a browser initiative before Edge has the market share to throw its weight around. 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.
marcodiego 5y ago
> Microsoft is sacrificing its reputation and the quality of a high-profile product for probably a few million? Which reputation?
- parsimo2010 5y ago
  The reputation they have of being the makers of the most popular desktop operating system and most popular office productivity suite. You may not like them but most of the businesses in the world use their software. I can’t believe they think it’s worth it to harm their professional image in exchange for whatever pennies they will be making by sticking in a layaway feature into their browser.
  - colesantiago 5y ago
    Are you being forced to use it?
    - ratww 5y ago
      I’m not forced anymore because I work at a nice company, but in several jobs I had before: yes. I was forced to use a specific OS, and a specific browser. It is still extremely common in enterprise. And before you say I “should have changed jobs“: not everyone is a developer who can easily job-hop like me, though.
      - colesantiago 5y ago
        So you're being forced to 'By now pay later' by Microsoft?
    - parsimo2010 5y ago
      No, but the question was about Microsoft’s reputation. Whether I use the pay over time feature or not, Microsoft are hurting their reputation as a software maker and therefore their revenue from their paid products by signaling their willingness to insert irrelevant features into their software.
IAmGraydon 5y ago
While I generally agree with your sentiment, you are making a wild guess on how much revenue this brings/is projected to bring, and then you base your entire argument around it.
bladegash 5y ago
I’ve been generally happy with my switch to Edge, but am not a huge fan of this. However, I think you may be overestimating how much a non-technical person would dislike a feature like this. If anything, many would likely be happy to have layaway at their fingertips for all of their purchases.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > If anything, many would likely be happy to have layaway at their fingertips for all of their purchases. A severe indictment of society’s innumeracy.
  - quenix 5y ago
    How is that so?
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Nobody lends money for free: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/articles/introducing-buy-now-pay-later-in-microsoft-edge/td-p/2967030 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.
      - foldr 5y ago
        >Nobody lends money for free: 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.
isoprophlex 5y ago
Meanwhile nearly every corp on earth supplies their employees with windows laptops. So besides being shitty moneygrabbers, there's no way you can avoid them. IMO Microsoft is actively working to make computing more horrible.
- tentacleuno 5y ago
  Why can't you use your own laptop?
Shadonototra 5y ago
managers / product managers at microsoft are the ones responsible of ruining microsoft's reputation, they are rewarding bloat rather than innovation 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!
csdvrx 5y ago
Counterpoint: HUGE disclamer: I'm windows fangirl, and I really love the new Microsoft edge. I have it on my laptop, tablet and cellphone, and I even had it on Linux the last time I gave a chance to Linux. 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.
- BlueDingo 5y ago
  It's not "meh." I can't safely ignore that all my browsing and purchasing is being watched by a computer I supposedly own and control.
- goldenkey 5y ago
  We all pay more when coupons (cough cough affiliate codes) are automatically applied because increased marketing costs spur increased pricing. It's not surprising that you like the appearance of saving money, your experience isn't special. The verbosity of your uninformed defense of nefarious practices, well that is quite special :-)
zeruch 5y ago
"Microsoft is sacrificing its reputation" their rep has been a mixed bag (and I'm being kind, but I'm quite biased, having worked for SUN and VA Linux among other places) and they always seem to seek trashy new ways to squeeze a few million here and there, if users say nothing. Consumer apathy/inertia is MS's biggest benefit.
AshamedCaptain 5y ago
This is not new at all for them. There have been advertisements in Windows 10 for ridiculous games, and way back in Windows XP, Media Player would advertise the most ridiculous things including some paid online radio from South America (I guess it depended on the region -- today it just advertises Bing).
FDSGSG 5y ago
This comment reads super out of touch to me. 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!
- smegger001 5y ago
  don't assume everyone on her is rich. Not everyone on hacker news works in silicon valley but they are more likely to understand compound interest.
  - FDSGSG 5y ago
    Not everyone here is rich, but the demographics certainly skew in that direction. 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.
- f1refly 5y ago
  For the folks taking payday loans this is even worse. The whole feature is designed to make you spent more than you can afford, especially preying on the more desperate as opposed to the ones who could just afford the thing they where buying. Essentially this is just a micro-loan that gets prohibitively expensive when you miss a payment, which you are obviously more prone to when you have issues paying back regular loans already. Actually, it's exactly like a payday loan works and abusing the same people.
  - FDSGSG 5y ago
    I guess it's easy for you to sit in your ivory tower and tell poor people what kind of loans they should use to replace their broken refrigerator. Your argument is essentially "poor people will find these loans useful, but I know better than them", yikes.
    - 5y ago

Mountain_Skies 5y ago

The product manager behind this cares about having numbers to show their manager and isn't concerned about the potential reputational impact it might have on the company as a whole. Their manager likewise will be happy to report in turn to their manager that they've increased revenue by a large amount. It's peanuts to the company but could be a large increase for that particular product which is what the managers get rewarded on.

marcodiego 5y ago
People use office because they need a feature or compatibility. Nobody chooses software based on reputation.
- thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
  >> Nobody chooses software based on reputation. That's why Google has been so successful with Stadia.
  - jchw 5y ago
    Stadia isn’t even a good idea in the first place. Even if it is the best implementation of the idea, I still have no idea how it could ever make much sense. Other players in the space, like GeForce Now, don’t exactly look appealing either.
    - sangnoir 5y ago
      I know it's a niche market, but Stadia is really convenient when traveling. All you need to pack is a controller.
      - throwaway2048 5y ago
        assuming you only travel to places with good internet and a nearby stadia server
    - 41b696ef1113 5y ago
      I think the value proposition is definitely there for a "rent a gaming pc" service. Cost/library/performance are thorny problems to solve, but if I were able to ditch my Windows PC[0] for a robust solution, I could consider it. Seemingly the only way I would possibly be able to utilize a current generation Nvidia equivalent card. [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.
      - nitrogen 5y ago
        You would need a very large number of colocation setups to get latency low enough.
        Bobylonian 5y ago
        But looking on global picture and far in future with satellite internet - that is easily solvable, but technical issues on running those games in Stadia are least things that people are concerned about. 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.
        dehrmann 5y ago
        > satellite internet - that is easily solvable Starlink's latency is probably barely OK for multiplayer games, but not for remote rendering.
    - cobertos 5y ago
      Idk, I had a good time with shadow.tech? Mostly because I use Linux and wanted to play a game that doesn't port to Windows well (Roblox, due to anticheat not getting along with Wine). GeForce Now and Stadia didn't have the games I wanted to play so I wasn't able to use them.
    - foldr 5y ago
      What makes you say that? I find Stadia works really great for me as a gaming platform. I don't have any issues with lag and I like not having to have a noisy console in my living room. The only issue with it is the limited library, but that's not inherent to the basic idea.
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    Stadia is a service. Actually very few people have the luxury of being able to choose their software. When compatibility, previous knowledge or an specific feature is key, people simply can't choose.
  - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
    Bad example because none of the "cloud gaming" companies have been very successful
  - FormerBandmate 5y ago
    Stadia has no backwards compatibility, established user base, or ecosystem lock-in. Gmail and Android do, so despite having many of the same issues as Stadia, they’re incredibly popular
  - gman83 5y ago
    Stadia has been great for me. I just love it.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  Nobody chooses software based on reputation. 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.
  - slac 5y ago
    It is now the "nobody got fired for buying a Gartner report" era.
- FormerBandmate 5y ago
  Corporate clients definitely pick based on reputation. Why do you think Teams is bigger than Slack
  - unethical_ban 5y ago
    Teams is bigger than slack? Like, the executable? Teams is an abomination; something to be cast into the fires of Mount Doom. Slack is miles better for everyday communication.
    - breakfastduck 5y ago
      I agree its absolutely awful but Teams is far bigger than Slack, I'm not sure why you'd argue that.
      - unethical_ban 5y ago
        My sample size of three large companies, two use Slack. Boom. (I did move the goalposts from "deployment size" to "quality").
  - ghostly_s 5y ago
    Because of Office license lock-in, not reputation.
  - ryantgtg 5y ago
    Don’t they “choose” Teams because it integrates with outlook/sharepoint/etc? That seems to be the case at my job. Basically, Teams replaced Skype.
  - behnamoh 5y ago
    Part of it is rational, because they see lots of chaos/noise in the market while having to make too many decisions. Following the "best practices" only saves them decision-making time. Might not be the "best" in practice, but at least they don't have to examine a gazillion options that are available.
  - 5y ago
- ineedasername 5y ago
  I've been involved in a bunch of large Enterprise purchases and reputation definitely was a consideration. We typically interview other customers to find out their pros/cons and in one case travelled onsite to another customer to not only talk to them but go over their installation in person. (These were all done without a vendor representative present, and I can think of a few cases where it made the difference in deciding not to go with a vendor)
- speed_spread 5y ago
  The commercial value of software is _nothing but reputation_. Would you buy software tools from a company about to go bankrupt? You pay for software with the idea that what you're not trusting your data and operations to a technological dead end. The problem here being that nobody is paying for software anymore in an ad-revenue model, meaning that companies have much less to lose doing that kind of shit.
dheera 5y ago
Also they only care about the numbers for the next 2 years before they jump to another job, not the long term future of the company.
grishka 5y ago
There's something deeply wrong with the incentive structure in many IT companies.
- behnamoh 5y ago
  I wonder how Apple keeps its sh$t together. I know they have made some mistakes in recent years that hurt Apple's reputation, but overall it's been successful at maintaining a positive brand image and consistent product attributes. Sometimes this has been through backing down on wrong decisions they made before (e.g., look at the new Macbooks and all their ports.) 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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - organsnyder 5y ago
    From my outside perspective, it seems like they must have an incentive structure that allows departments/products to forgo individual revenue if they're seen to be contributing to the wider company.
    - saddlerustle 5y ago
      And yet, they put ads in the iPhone settings app.
      - grishka 5y ago
        It feels like they're really desperate to make their services ecosystem a thing, despite no one ever asking for it. But then services are the one area where it's possible to make shitloads of money out of thin air via recurring payments in a way that doesn't offend the users ("I'm using disk space on their servers and it needs to be paid for"). Locking people into these kinds of walled-garden services must also help somewhat with hardware sales. 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.
SilasX 5y ago
Yeah, but somebody in that chain up the line still cares about the reputation and has to weigh that against more local goals. 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.
- sedawk 5y ago
  > 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. I kind of disagree with this, if enough geeks denounce it, this spreads like a wild fire. Geeks have the (un)fortunate role of recommending everything from a router to PC to TV to their friends and family and if disgruntled enough, they might steer them away from things they dislike, it is just human nature (and justifiably so too). If one non-techie thing I have learned at Microsoft very early on, is it the fact that never underestimate the _minority_ geek population who can have a disproportionately large impact on general populous with their opinions!
phillipcarter 5y ago
> The product manager behind this cares about having numbers to show their manager and isn't concerned about the potential reputational impact it might have on the company as a whole. 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.
- shados 5y ago
  > Typically the decisions of the boneheaded variety are made much higher up the org chart by higher-level middle management And what's that person role? Someone I feel its not a VP of quality insurance who made that decision.
  - satyrnein 5y ago
    This sounds like typical "roadmap via bizdev" to me. Bizdev strikes a partnership (in this case, with the firm making the loans), and then it gets handed to the poor PM to push it through.
- Cosmin_C 5y ago
  As somebody who has been using Microsoft stuff for years and paid through the nose for it, can you take a guess on why Microsoft is going this shitty path since Windows 8 came out? 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.

aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago

I don't understand it either. I can't fathom how none of the people working on this had the conscience to pull the emergency brakes before it's shipped? How was this product idea validated? Where's the data-driven decision making everyone is preaching about? Prime example of organizational failure...

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pas 5y ago
umm, it's not impossible that the data shows that it's "working great"
meijer 5y ago
Also, is there no oversight? Does nobody supervise the product managers? Maybe it should be Nadella's job to keep on top of stuff like this.
ineedasername 5y ago
Not even conscience but foresight to see political or even regulatory issues with something that, if implemented the wrong way, could amount to predatory lending.
- FDSGSG 5y ago
  That is a solved problem. There's nothing new here, 'Buy now, pay later' stuff has existed for ages.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Sure, and some of it in the form of predatory lending financial instruments, some of which are regulated. And a company on the scale of MS entering into any new market will draw a lot of scrutiny. One in the business of lending money, even just through a tightly-integrated partnership, is going to draw even more. That's a lot to gamble on a browser initiative before Edge has the market share to throw its weight around. 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.

marcodiego 5y ago

> Microsoft is sacrificing its reputation and the quality of a high-profile product for probably a few million? Which reputation?

parsimo2010 5y ago
The reputation they have of being the makers of the most popular desktop operating system and most popular office productivity suite. You may not like them but most of the businesses in the world use their software. I can’t believe they think it’s worth it to harm their professional image in exchange for whatever pennies they will be making by sticking in a layaway feature into their browser.
- colesantiago 5y ago
  Are you being forced to use it?
  - ratww 5y ago
    I’m not forced anymore because I work at a nice company, but in several jobs I had before: yes. I was forced to use a specific OS, and a specific browser. It is still extremely common in enterprise. And before you say I “should have changed jobs“: not everyone is a developer who can easily job-hop like me, though.
    - colesantiago 5y ago
      So you're being forced to 'By now pay later' by Microsoft?
  - parsimo2010 5y ago
    No, but the question was about Microsoft’s reputation. Whether I use the pay over time feature or not, Microsoft are hurting their reputation as a software maker and therefore their revenue from their paid products by signaling their willingness to insert irrelevant features into their software.

IAmGraydon 5y ago

While I generally agree with your sentiment, you are making a wild guess on how much revenue this brings/is projected to bring, and then you base your entire argument around it.

bladegash 5y ago

I’ve been generally happy with my switch to Edge, but am not a huge fan of this. However, I think you may be overestimating how much a non-technical person would dislike a feature like this. If anything, many would likely be happy to have layaway at their fingertips for all of their purchases.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
> If anything, many would likely be happy to have layaway at their fingertips for all of their purchases. A severe indictment of society’s innumeracy.
- quenix 5y ago
  How is that so?
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Nobody lends money for free: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/articles/introducing-buy-now-pay-later-in-microsoft-edge/td-p/2967030 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.
    - foldr 5y ago
      >Nobody lends money for free: 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.

isoprophlex 5y ago

Meanwhile nearly every corp on earth supplies their employees with windows laptops. So besides being shitty moneygrabbers, there's no way you can avoid them. IMO Microsoft is actively working to make computing more horrible.

tentacleuno 5y ago
Why can't you use your own laptop?

Shadonototra 5y ago

managers / product managers at microsoft are the ones responsible of ruining microsoft's reputation, they are rewarding bloat rather than innovation 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!

csdvrx 5y ago

Counterpoint: HUGE disclamer: I'm windows fangirl, and I really love the new Microsoft edge. I have it on my laptop, tablet and cellphone, and I even had it on Linux the last time I gave a chance to Linux. 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.

BlueDingo 5y ago
It's not "meh." I can't safely ignore that all my browsing and purchasing is being watched by a computer I supposedly own and control.
goldenkey 5y ago
We all pay more when coupons (cough cough affiliate codes) are automatically applied because increased marketing costs spur increased pricing. It's not surprising that you like the appearance of saving money, your experience isn't special. The verbosity of your uninformed defense of nefarious practices, well that is quite special :-)

zeruch 5y ago

"Microsoft is sacrificing its reputation" their rep has been a mixed bag (and I'm being kind, but I'm quite biased, having worked for SUN and VA Linux among other places) and they always seem to seek trashy new ways to squeeze a few million here and there, if users say nothing. Consumer apathy/inertia is MS's biggest benefit.

AshamedCaptain 5y ago

This is not new at all for them. There have been advertisements in Windows 10 for ridiculous games, and way back in Windows XP, Media Player would advertise the most ridiculous things including some paid online radio from South America (I guess it depended on the region -- today it just advertises Bing).

FDSGSG 5y ago

This comment reads super out of touch to me. 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!

smegger001 5y ago
don't assume everyone on her is rich. Not everyone on hacker news works in silicon valley but they are more likely to understand compound interest.
- FDSGSG 5y ago
  Not everyone here is rich, but the demographics certainly skew in that direction. 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.
f1refly 5y ago
For the folks taking payday loans this is even worse. The whole feature is designed to make you spent more than you can afford, especially preying on the more desperate as opposed to the ones who could just afford the thing they where buying. Essentially this is just a micro-loan that gets prohibitively expensive when you miss a payment, which you are obviously more prone to when you have issues paying back regular loans already. Actually, it's exactly like a payday loan works and abusing the same people.
- FDSGSG 5y ago
  I guess it's easy for you to sit in your ivory tower and tell poor people what kind of loans they should use to replace their broken refrigerator. Your argument is essentially "poor people will find these loans useful, but I know better than them", yikes.
  - 5y ago