The main purpose of ads isn’t to sell you a specific product immediately, their real purpose is to expose you to their brand to make the brand more familiar (and therefore more trustworthy) to you.

For example, recently, I needed a new insurance. So of course I went to the websites of the 5 insurance companies that I knew from advertising and compared their offers. Then I went to a comparison portal, which again I knew from the ads. The best offer was from a brand I didn’t know so I went with the second one which was from a well known brand. I trusted the second offer more, simply because the brand felt more familiar to me.

Here’s another story: there is this big online clothing store. I always hated their ads, they were really annoying, and at that time I didn’t understand why anyone would buy clothes online. So guess where I went, 5 years later, after a disappointing offline shopping tour, in desparate need for new clothes?

No it wouldn’t. Corpos would just put in more effort to hide the damage. Climate change can’t be stopped by individual consumers because they have no means to verify whether a product they want to buy hurts the environment.

That’s not the usual evil corp BS they pull.

Yes it is. Why do you think they force you to pay for YT Music when all you want is an ad free experience? I tell you why: people will come to the realization that it is stupid to pay for two music streaming services at the same time, so they will cancel their Spotify subscription. This will make it extremely hard for other services to stay competitive. It’s no longer enough that their app is perhaps slightly better, or that they have the better algorithm, no one will be willing to pay the extra 11 € per month for just that. So eventually, these competing music streaming services will die (maybe with the exception of Apple Music and Amazon Music). Once YouTube has the monopoly on the music streaming market, they can raise the prices again. They are using one monopoly to build a second one. And a third one. And so on, until everything is owned by Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, or Microsoft and no one is able to compete with anything anymore. And the worst part is, that Google doesn’t even deserve any of YouTube’s success. YouTube’s success comes from its creators. All that Google ever did is to provide some servers and some bandwith, which arguably is expensive, but it’s not really an achievement. They didn’t even invent YouTube, they just bought it, made it big, and now abuse it to conquer more and more markets.

It might be reasonable, but the question still stands: why does Microsoft put so much effort into trying to convince people to use Edge? The purpose of Edge is to have a preinstalled browser so that you can start working right away and don’t need to rely on 3rd party software to do basic tasks. Great, I get that. Every OS has their own preinstalled browser. But what I don’t get is, why do they actively try to stop you from using a different browser? Why do they put in so much effort to stop you from installing Chrome? Why do they not put in the same effort when you try to install Notepad++ or Paint.Net? What’s so special about a browser, compared to other standard software? I can think of anti-consumer reasons, like harvesting and selling your data. And yes, Chrome isn’t any better in that regard, but at least you make the choice yourself.

Dude, nothing is more suspicious than when a developer of a supposedly free app nags you to use their app. Why do they even want you to use Edge so badly? You’re never going to pay any money for it, this screams “give us your data, we want to sell it”.

Sure, just throw money at the corpos, but please don’t act surprised when they suddenly double the premium fee, or when they start sneaking in ads for premium users. That’s the problem with corpo greed, it just never ends, and the moment you give in to it, you lose.