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Microsoft Cancels Bing Cashback Program
pjfontillas writes "Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Online Audience Business Group, recently announced, 'One of the principles we have here at Bing is to constantly experiment and learn. We do this to ensure we are keeping pace with new social and technology trends, and can continue to deliver great value for our customers and advertisers. As part of this "test-and-learn" mentality, we will be retiring the Bing cashback feature, which means that the last day you can earn cashback will be July 30, 2010.' From the look of the comments, Microsoft has at least 35 saddened users. eWeek does a follow-up attempting to explain the situation in more detail."
I signed up when I was going to buy a big LCD TV.
Got all the confirmation emails, or so I thought.
Signed onto Bing, "searched", bought the TV, never got the refund. Poked the seller to no avail. No way to poke Microsoft.
It was only about a $75 rebate. Still got a great price with free shipping, but I could have found that on Google too.
Actually, to pretend to use their search engine to buy things. The Bing advertisers would tell you - no matter how you arrived at the product - at checkout time that you could get Bing cashback if you put in the Bing code. So you had to go find the thing on Bing to get the code.
The basic dishonesty of this evolution didn't lend credibility to Bing with anybody involved.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Almost all their recent TV ads are as lame as hell. I'm watching and thinking, "What the hell are they talking about? Is this Random Night?". Then they mention the name of the product, such as Bing or Windows 7.
In one ad, there's a guy sitting in a college class, then suddenly he's naked, then he's a caveman at a business meeting, then a naked caveman. WTF city. I seriously expected them to say, "Windows 7 and Bing will together help you locate better LSD".
Please go back to Gates and Seinfeld wiggling their asses together. At least I know which end I'm looking at.
Table-ized A.I.
The funny thing is that people here think that Bing or Microsoft actually paid anything or "paid" users to use Bing. Ebay, Amazon and all other stores and sites have affiliate programs. Bing just gave some of that affiliate money back to users it referred to those stores via Bing. The most funny thing is that as a huge traffic source, Bing got excellent commission rates. A much higher than what they gave back with the cash back program.
But sure go on and continue the oh-so-funny joke about Bing "having to pay users to use their search engine".
I don't know what sites you looked at, but this was never the case for large sites like newegg, buy.com, overstock etc. However, the greatest deal was the 20% (later dropped to 8%) cash back on ebay get it now purchases. I saved a lot of money with that and could never figure out how they could afford it. Plus, even if I loved the cash back thing, I would only visit bing to go to ebay through it - google was still my search engine, so they didn't gain anything by paying me. In all canceling the program seems to me an inevitable (and late) decision.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Indeed. This program is solely responsible for me ever using ebay. They say it's discontinued due to poor adoption, or some such thing; I think adoption was quite rapid amongst people looking to save money and get the absolute best prices possible. The problem is, as an advertiser, those are the people you're least interested in.
I'm 35 years old, I've been fed up with Microsoft since about Windows XP SP2 although previously not much of a fan before that.
But at this point it's just like you guys are picking on the autistic kid.
We get it. Microsoft sucks. Give it back it's helmet.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but I'll leave Microsoft alone when it starts leaving me alone.
Microsoft may be autistic, but that's not why we pick on it. We pick on it because it's also crazy and occasionally a little scary. But mostly we pick on it because we all know it's the crazy, scary autistic kid, but nobody else seems to see the problem in that.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.