People need to stop complaining about the ads and they need to start complaining about the existence of a Windows monetization team.
Kill that team now while the revenue is small and the shareholders won’t throw a giant hissy fit.
As long as that team exists, they’re going to be putting ads in shit. Cut the head off the snake.
Microsoft put themselves in this position when they started giving out Windows 10 for free. It was effective in bringing most of the market onto the new version, but it set an expectation which it now feels like they can't break, so they're also giving Windows 11 away. Now to offset that missing revenue, they have to do something to extract value from users.
I don't see how they could stop this without replacing it with something more exploitive.
Microsoft is the only company that charges for an operating system so frankly I don’t understand why they feel entitled to that income anyway
Google and Apple are definitely charging for that software development. In the case of Apple, it is being folded into hardware prices or used as a loss leader for pricy subscriptions / apps.
Google is also making a buck on subscriptions / apps, but instead of hardware, they’re also making money from licensing software to 3rd party Android manufacturers, and because Google gonna Google, they want that ad revenue.
And I would also argue that a lot of Linux distros make money from professional services and what not.
Most of the big boys aren’t doing the work for free
I've recently made the switch over to LinuxMint and I was shocked. Installing a popular Linux Distro is EASIER than installing Windows 10/11 at this point. Seriously. The Linux installer is super noob friendly, very quick and straight to the point, it doesn't need you to create an online account and you don't need be wary of accidentally giving any corporation the rights to steal your data.
And all the software I use (Steam, Discord, Spotify, Firefox, Thunderbird, ...) were all downloadable from the GUI Installer and worked right away OUT OF THE BOX. No fiddling in any Terminal was required.
Seriously, it's easier than installing Windows at this point.
Installing Linux has never been particularly difficult, not in the last 15 or even 20 years anyway. I've always found it easier and more straightforward than the contemporary Windows installation process.
The challenging part is wrapping your head around the Linux/Unix way of doing things when things can't be done through the GUI with just a few clicks.
I think about this sometimes. What stuff can't you do in a Linux GUI that an average person would be able to do in Windows? For the sake the simplicity, lets limit the GUI to Cinnamon, Plasma, or Gnome.
Obviously, there are obscure GUIs out there, but in the main ones, I think just about everything can be done without CLI.
I'd amend that to say I wouldn't count "regedit" or group policy muck to be "easy" by virtue of having "a gui". Those are areas where technically there's GUI that might be CLI-only under Linux, but hardly friendly enough to make a difference.
Regedit is about 10,000 times more complicated than Windows users think the Linux terminal is
The issue is that you have to install it. Most users don’t have a clue how to install windows either, but it came with their PC.
Omg I’m so mad about this
lol jk I use Linux
I'd be curious at the percentage of windows users actually using the store app.
As for the context of these ads, the store would kind of make more sense than within your settings landing page, start menu, search dialog, browser nagware, solitaire app etc.
If I remember correctly some (mainly Microsoft made apps) are store only and some system apps are updated through it so probably a large part of users use it
Anecdotally, I don't know anyone that uses it. In the years working IT since the Store came out, not a single coworker has asked me about it.
Logging into my customer's computers and I don't see any evidence that they use it either.
I'm so done with companies claiming my house for their ads.
It's my house i decide what makes it in as i pay the rent and i bought these devices, so fuck off.
Install any popular Linux distro. They are all so much better than any proprietary OS. And if you are running relatively common hardware, everything will just work.
When is ad an advertisement and not a recommendation?
Always? That's why it's called ad instead of recommendation
Then the question is: "When is a recommendation an ad?"
For which I'd say: When the person recommending it is gaining something from it
Is Microsoft so in debt that they need to sell ad space in every pixal of their products? What is going on.
Debt? This is capitalism, baby. Where every year's profits have to be bigger than last year's or else it counts as you failing, no matter how enormous the profits were last year.
The rate of profit is declining and the managers are looking for anything and everything to prop it back up. A German guy wrote about this like 150 years ago.
It's not enough for a company to have a lot of money, they have to have all the money.
Remember: under capitalism companies are legally obligated to pursue every last dollar they can possibly get, regardless of the damage it will do to the product, company, customer, or bystanders.
the 2nd most valuable company in the world? Hardly.
No they're just switching business models, from paying for an OS outright to OS as a service
Recommendations is just an euphemism marketing joke. Every serious journalist would call them what they are, ads.
I'm so happy that I will never have to deal with this on my home computers. At work we can at least disable it all via policies. But my god has Microsoft lost its way. What happened to making professional business products?
So anyway, welcome to computing 101, first you're going to create a new folder for your stuff. So let's do this, grab the mouse, and;
Right click->watch ad->New Folder
Mr Bob! The mouse bit me and now I can't stop the commercials!
This is not gonna stop until the consumer puts their money where there mouths are and stops using Windows until Microsoft back peddles. Money is all a company understands so that is where you need to hit them if you want them to listen. But as a group the consumer has a very weak constitution when it comes to having to do something that is good for them in the long term but causes them short term inconvenience. A lot of parallels to the modern corporate world in that.
Could it be that consumers are putting money where there mouths are and this is just Microsoft desperately trying to increase their margins since their business isn't growing anymore?
I mean the more people move away, the more likely it is Microsoft would milk the ones who can't.
i can't believe they wrote an entire article to whine about ads IN A STORE APP
As soon as they announced ads were gonna be in the start menu, i noped out of windows. I only use it for work which doesn't bother me because im not doing anything private on my work pc.
I switched to Fedora 40 with KDE and never looked back. My only real gripe is with making music. Getting the VSTs to work and setting up yabridge is kind of a headache that i still need to do 😮💨 aside from that, Linux has been my daily driver for quite a while now and im happy i switched even though im still learning.
I kind of expect ads in an app store, but I also don't use the ms app store.
The ads are in the app store. I don't really understand why that's a problem. Although I'm probably the only tool out there that actually likes Windows 11.
I would say a “recommendation” is an ad when an accountant is involved instead of (or in addition to) a curator. Even if it’s Microsoft recommending Microsoft’s products, department budgets probably track that internally (though I’m sure the official accounting is done in a way that shifts profits to a tax haven).
Yeah, basically as soon as money changes hands, a recommendation becomes an ad.
I have used Windows 10 for years and recently switched to Windows 11 and I don't think I've ever seen an ad in my day to day OS use. I don't do the registry edits or turn off the telemetry stuff, either. I don't know what I'm doing differently but I'm not seeing these ads that apparently infected Windows.
The home edition of windows has these ads baked in, but the pro/enterprise editions seem to be able to avoid this for now.
How many more of these will it take, until people start looking for alternatives
I think it is already happening gradually. SteamDeck has single handedly opened the eyes of so many already. M1 Macs did that for macOS as well.
Sounds like they’re reaching feature parity with Apple and Google. Both already do that so I’m not surprised. I never use Microsoft’s App Store so I’ll never see them.
That's unfortunate.
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