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