Well, that’s a bit naughty
A tale (actually two tales) of sleight-of-hand verging on duplicity, from our favourite mega-corporation. Microsoft.
Firstly, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Or the opening to a con. Your choice. This affects users of the Microsoft Edge browser – you know, the one that is installed automatically with Microsoft Windows, and spends a lot of time begging you not to switch to another browser. And it concerns ‘Bing‘ which is Microsoft’s massively less-popular alternative to Google. Obviously Microsoft have used their position as the authors of both to try an knit them together. So you have to be pretty alert to search with Google (other search engines are available), because Edge will constantly steer you towards Bing. Up until now, however, it’s been easy to spot. The Microsoft trick is now to format the Bing results page to look suspiciously similar to a Google results page. And more – it slides the page down to hide the ‘Results from Microsoft’ banner at the top. Now I’m absolutely, 100%, really, really sure this isn’t designed to dupe you, the user, into thinking you have Google results. But make up your own mind: there is a good article from The Verge that you can read.
Secondly, and more importantly, Microsoft is playing games with Microsoft365 (Office365) subscriptions. Particularly the ‘Basic’ pack. The ‘Family’ subscription which is/was £80 a year has mysteriously gone up in price to £110. I’m guessing they are hoping most subscribers will simply shrug & cough up. Don’t. What they have done is swapped around the names of the services. ‘Basic’ is now the next tier up (what was named ‘Premium’ and used to cost…. £110). Your current subscription would now be called ‘Family Classic’ – same package, same price. But cunningly hidden, and you can’t ‘downgrade(???)’ without a lot of effort. Back in the day there was a scam called ‘slamming’ when phone operators moved you onto a higher priced contract without discussing it with you. Sound familiar? And, to answer your next question: the difference between ‘Basic’ and ‘Family Classic’ is the inclusion of Microsoft CoPilot (yup, A.I.). To be honest, I’d pay extra to not have my life constantly interfered with by some automated cretin, but that’s me being a luddite. Anyway, there’s an amusing YouTube on this here.
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