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.
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.
> 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.
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.
As an ex-PM, the idea that PMs are the ones making all the decisions absolutely does not resonate. Fundamentally, of course management in general (not specifically product management) is approving these things and carries the responsibility, but in my experience (not at Microsoft) the involvement of another firm is a clue this originated with a bizdev conversation. That sounds more likely to me than a PM saying "I really want to offer loans through Edge, let me see if I can find a partner to help execute this."
Current MSFT employee... I can say that PMs often wield a lot of power over decision making than most people in the org, esp the customer-facing decisions. And while it may not have been the PM in the lowest-rung of the chain, the parent comment perfectly applies to program managers in general, often in the middle management or higher up, both of which are often disconnected with real world, in spite of their claims to otherwise.
PMs at Microsoft have enormous veto power, they cite data (or lack thereof! ;-)), direct customer interaction, conducted user studies, etc. which the dev team is usually lacking in. Of course this is only an anecdotal observation over the last 2 decades or so.
Increase in $$$s in revenues is one of the best ways to get promoted, recognized and rewarded at Msft (and not only at MSFT, I suspect that's the case at most publicly traded companies, who only care to drive up the the bottom-line, no matter the means to achieve it, as long as it is (mostly) legal).
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.
I remember standing in an elevator with my manager on the way to sign a contract for a new bit of software. It would cost us 100k per year for this software. I asked my manager, “don’t we already have this product in-house, at least most of these features?” Their answer: “who cares? It’s not my money.”
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.
It has been established that most people are motivated by their personal short term gains, they have no real reason to care unless there's a positive incentive for them to worry about the long term consequences of their actions.
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.
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.
In a lot of places the “product design” is just the agglomeration of AB tests conceived by a large and widely distributed army of junior PMs. There is no one person responsible for the end to end experience, no top down vision, no one who’s ever going to say no on design or conceptual integrity grounds. At most an idea can get killed for having weak or negative experiment results.
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!
Also constant emails tellig you’re out of storage space trying to upsell iCloud storage space. Which, fair enough, is cheap but the emails are a bit spammish.
On the other hand, is not as if every single other company doesn’t do it, which doesn’t excuse but does explain it.
Out of iCloud Storage space or phone storage space? If it's iCloud Storage Space it would be ... weird if they didn't, since iCloud stops working (rightfully so) when you fill up the storage space.
They’ll get there in a few years. If you fire up some of their apps, like News, that have a premium Apple subscription component they try to gently upsell you. Expect that to become more aggressive as they taste more of that sweet sweet high margin service revenue.
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.
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.
Eh.. It's not that bad really. It's their own service and it's pretty unobtrusive. I'm not saying I like it at all, but it's a lot better than microsoft's ad notifications on windows. The windows notification immediately triggers a stress reflex in me now.
I cannot find any evidence of this. The only article I found even related to this was showing a feature where if you had the Siri suggestions widget then you might see an App Clip for a store nearby. It works like this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62559071/how-to-add-appc...
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.
Theres nagging to setup Apple Pay (which apple gets a cut of), and now they also push trials of Apple Music and Apple Arcade - https://postimg.cc/YM9xW5B4/
You were mostly right. I went as far as seeing a "Set up later in Wallet" button and tapped it. Now it's no longer showing an obnoxious red badge in settings. Thanks.
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.
> 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!
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I'd argue that Teams is bigger than Slack because Microsoft pulled a fast one, exploited their monopoly, and included it "for free" with the rest of their licenses, rather than getting people to sign up de novo. The fact that it's worse in every meaningful way than the competition, yet far wider used, highlights the whole problem quite neatly.
We have to use teams because teams is free. Despite it being terrible. There was also a push for us to switch from Miro to Microsoft whiteboard. Until a senior manager actually had to use whiteboard and they realised it was terrible.
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.
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.
They don't care about reputation. Nearly every Windows user hates Windows, everyone knows that Windows it's a bad operating system, still it is the operating system that everyone uses for the fact that comes installed on every computer that you purchase and most people doesn't even know than an alternative exists.
I don't hate Windows 10. Neither does my extended family, nor peer group - who all use Windows. We always disable the telemetry stuff though and it works just fantastic.
Most people don't even think about their operating system. HN is so far from the general public in terms of preference and mindshare and it is important to remember that.
They'll still be the most popular of both of those things. I think what the parent commenter is getting at is that Microsoft already had a reputation for being greedy and forcing unwanted features onto users. It would be more accurate to say this jeopardizes their ongoing
attempt to rehabilitate their image.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
For sure. I'm old enough that Microsoft's reputation is that of an exploitative, dirty-dealing, would-be monopolist. They appeared to get better after the DOJ and a number of competitors knocked them from their dominant position. But I've always suspected that was a change forced by circumstance, not some sort of deep inner improvement.
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.
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.
I urge everyone not to ignore to ignore or dismiss this viewpoint as I do not believe it is an outlier. Without going into the issues associated with 'cheaper' solutions ( that might easily end up not being so cheap once you check the fine print; return restrictions and so on ), privacy implications of MS monitoring your shopping patterns and veiled advertising resulting from MS selling user space to highest bidder, we need to be able to address those and indicate to regular users that there is a real potential for harm that could result from this ( and they will have no recourse when that harm happens ).
So Microsoft is tracking all your checkouts? Why would you want that? And it’s not push, it’s pull because there is no way to store all data locally and keep it updated.
> If you use gmail or outlook or just forward your emails there, I've got bad news for you :)
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.
> We all pay more when coupons (cough cough affiliate codes) are automatically applied. It's not surprising that you like the appearance of saving money, your experience isn't special.
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.
I personally don't worry about coupons, I worry about how sites can use data about me to dynamically adjust prices to "what I'll pay", instead of giving the same price to everybody. From my understanding sites like Amazon have even been caught doing these practices before. And we already know places like Airline companies do this.
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.
There are already solutions: use tor to do price discovery, or report prices or find communities centered around prices like reddit.com/r/buildapcsales
Oh for sure, I even use services like camelcamelcamel on Amazon to ensure I am getting a good price. It's unfortunate that we have to rely on third party services just to get more fair consumer standards.
There's a huge difference between doing some discovery and using a vendor's own coupon codes versus affiliate codes automatically applied by a browser addon masquerading as a virtuous aid. This distinction seems to be have been lost on you. When you use affiliate codes that didn't actually earn your conversion, you are screwing over the company while rewarding corruption.
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?
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.
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.
"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.
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).
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.
Don't know about Amazon since they are irrelevant in my country but Klarna has gotten a lot of heat for this here in Sweden. Maybe the American market does not care but there are markets where pay day loans will hurt your reputation a lot.
These are not pay day loans. It is unsecured debt the same as a credit card. For a more specific example, this to me is no different than a Department store (e.g., Macy’s, Target, Sears, etc.) asking if you want to sign up for their store card when checking out. This isn’t new, at least in the US. It is just taking place via a new medium (it’s really not, but it’s new for Microsoft at least).
layaway is just stupid. if you can afford to make a monthly payment and get it in six months you can save the money for six months and collect the interest. living pay check to pay check doesn't enter into it. if you cant afford it you can't afford it.
As I noted in an adjacent comment, there is a $4 flat fee, and it is reasonable to assume the lender has expenses to pay, such as payroll and profit seeking investors, so there must be a cost to using their financing.
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.
I was curious how it compared to a credit card, since if you wanted a 4 payment over 6 week plan you could simply use a credit card and make an immediate payment of 1/4th to your card, and then 3 more payments of that amount over the next 6 weeks.
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).
Interestingly, I just noticed a Zip Pay option here on a UK retailer's site, and in this case there doesn't appear to be any flat fee involved; the 4 payments add up to exactly the standard retail price of the product. I guess this probably varies depending on local credit-issuing regulations.
(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.)
> it is reasonable to assume the lender has expenses to pay, such as payroll and profit seeking investors, so there must be a cost to using their financing.
>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.
Sometimes, but I do not see how it is possible in this case. That type of thing is done temporarily to gain a monopoly via network effects and then establish pricing power. If you cannot achieve that, then it is giving away money.
As well as the $4 fee mentioned, Zip and co also charge the merchant - in my country, 30 cents per transaction and 4-6% commission. Late payment interest is probably just gravy.
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.
> 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.
Depends what the interest rate is. In my 25 adult years of living in the US, I have seen no “buy now, pay later” scheme for small purchases with no collateral that results in the costs for the financing being less than the gains from investing.
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.
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.
No, my argument is essentially "poor people who struggle with conventional loans will use this and get themselfes in even deeper trouble out of desperation". This is not going against the people that use such features, it's going against the most valuable conglomarate on earth that incorporated it into their webbrowser.
Agreed. Corporate know this can make money, and they do it. Managing your expenses is not their job,…which is, yeah, probably true. But there are things called social responsibility, too.
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.
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.
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.
