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Microsoft Wants To Pay You To Use Its Windows 10 Browser Edge (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report by The Guardian: Microsoft has a new browser. It launched with Windows 10 and it's called Edge. The company says it's faster, more battery efficient and all-round better than Chrome or Firefox. You can even draw on websites with a stylus. Trouble is, not very many people are using it. So now Microsoft's trying to bribe you to switch. The newly rebranded Microsoft Rewards -- formerly Bing Rewards, which paid people for using Bing as their search engine (another product Microsoft says is better than a Google product but that very few people actually use) -- will now pay you for using Edge, shopping at the Microsoft store, or using Bing. Users of Edge who sign up to Microsoft Rewards, which is currently US-only, are then awarded points simply for using the browser. Microsoft actively monitors whether you're using Edge for up to 30 hours a month. It tracks mouse movements and other signs that you're not trying to game the system, and you must also have Bing set as your default search engine. Points can then be traded in for vouchers or credit for places such as Starbucks, Skype, Amazon and ad-free Outlook.com -- remember, if you're not paying for something, you are the product.
What else is new? Every banner for every campaign I've ever seen, every special offer, every 100s spam mail I get from anyone, MS or otherwise, is always "US" only when you read the fine print.
Can we get a "US" news filter here so we can filter out the news that have offers only exlusive to US citizens? Please?
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
I use Bing because I find it to be as good as Google or better for searches (especially image/video searches) and maps.
The fact that they pay me to use it is a bonus.
They'd have to pay me a LOT more to use Edge, however. And make Edge available for Windows 7, because fuck Windows 10.
Depends on what you define as their "products."
Windows 10 is only "free" if you had a (recent) prior version of Windows. Sure there will be a few lost sales but the vast majority of people don't "upgrade" their OS until their PC breaks and the new version comes with their new PC.
And in turn they reduce their support costs significantly (they can justify EOLing Win7/8 much sooner if you've been given every incentive to upgrade already.) And of course they can leverage any new "features" in Win10 as an ad platform to generate third party compensation. They probably didn't expect quite as much backlash against Win10s intrusiveness but even with that, I'm guessing they're not hurting too much from the giveaway.
As for Bing and Edge. That's a much more direct and obvious bribe attempt. Microsoft can say whatever it wants, but Bing almost never returns more relevant results than Google. At least in my experience. Even when you're searching through MSDN and other Microsoft-owned sites where you think Bing would have a significant advantage.
Edge might be OK. From a technology standpoint it sounds pretty good (though that's mostly based on MS' own claims so salt required.) Problem is that they didn't bother with any sort of compatibility layer that I can tell, so it completely flips out on a large portion of websites. Occasionally it will even notice that its flipping out and suggest you retry with IE, but that brings up the question of why anyone would bother loading Edge if its just going to direct them to load IE half the time anyway -- may as well just start the one that works in the first place.