The root of all evil: Incentives

During Paul’s rants about the nonsensical and unwanted features in Windows, Edge, etc., I’ve realized that this stuff must be due to the design of executive compensation and the incentives they are given based on certain metrics.

So any exec who can, for example, do something to gain a bump in monthly active users of some shopping feature will do that regardless of whether it is good long term for the Windows ecosystem.

This leaves an interesting journalistic challenge: Can anyone connect specific nonsense to specific incentives?

In fact, I’ll propose the following axiom: “Never attribute to incompetence that which can be explained by ill-conceived incentives.” 😛