I’ve led the charge against Microsoft’s advertising efforts in Windows, noting back in 2012 that the software giant cheapened Windows 8 with ads. Despite my warnings about a slippery slope – Microsoft would only escalate its in-box advertising down the road, I cautioned – Windows 10, sadly, was even worse. And now the Creators Update is coming, bringing with it yet another escalation of in-product advertising. Most notably, and most disturbingly, in File Explorer.
iOS and Android do the same thing, where they pester you left and right with ads for nonsense like music services or cloud storage. It’s user-hostile and infuriating.
thank you microsoft
no really – thank you
this intensely arrogant and hostile behaviour will only increase people turning to open source
please do more of it .. why stop at the file explorer .. why not print ads in between pages when I print .. or pause the shutdown to show an ad … or extend the boot up sequence with a non-skippable ad … heck why not change the lock screen password to a challenge-responce which I can only get right if I’ve watched an ad properly …
and in your next update .. link it to my friends.. so I can’t print or access the internet more than 10 pages a day .. unless the people in my LinkedIn circle have also watched ads.. call it smartSocial or something .. you did recently buy LinkedIn didn’t you? .. yes…
Dear God, don’t give them ideas! Every one of those sounds plausible.
project_2501,
I don’t know if it was sarcastic, but it would pain me to endorse your strategy and “really thank” microsoft for this, haha. In reality if we all encourage microsoft to take it further, they will do it. If consumers accept this or even passively oppose it, then it will become a new norm across all devices and products. It would be regrettable for that to happen.
They’ve already got rid of me in the future. They obviously don’t want me using their OS any more, so when Windows 7 reaches end of life I have no choice but to move to another OS. Sad days indeed!
Here’s hoping ReactOS is usable by then!
Oh god not this again… Wake up, people who rely on MS software the most never move to open source… Never. And they never will. They will put up with absolutely anything, since most of the time their desktops are already ridden with advertisements from adware infections.
This is bullshit. I didn’t care about the other things it did – three or four easily removeable links in the start menu for apps that might interest me, for example – once you nuke them, they stay gone.
But, this bugged me. For one, I already have an Office3656 sub, so I have paid-for OneDrive storage (Though, it isn’t linked to my Windows account, since I get it via school). They’re advertising to a paying customer.
But, two, the only way to disable this is to disable ALL sync notifications, including warnings that your files may be out of date, or that you are running low on your available storage, or whatever – you know, actual useful messages.
It might be me but I don’t see adverts in my iPhone at all.
There again, my use case is probably very different to yours so YMMV applies
All I want to say is that what you see is not always replicated with others.
I am in the ‘grumpy old man’ phase of life and hate advertising in every form[1] so you would hear it from me if I saw any.
Well, actually I do see some adverts on iOS (iPad Mini) but those are inside a ‘spider’ solitaire app and they are for other titles from that source.
[1] I don’t want over 50’s life insurance, to check my credit score, make a PPI Claim, take out a funeral plan, I hate all adverts and even mentally make a point of NOT buying things which are advertised to me.
I’d even go as far as wanting to nuke all Add companies and ad slingers. IMHO, they are nothing but a scouge on society.
I don’t seen any adverts either. I did when I updated to the version that introduced Apple Music some time ago, but it was a one time thing upon first boot, and never came up again. No idea what Thom’s referring to here.
Do a search in the App Store and you’ll see what Thom’s talking about.
Oh, that. I assumed Thom referred to ads popping up while using an Apple stock app of some sort – like ads for more iCloud storage while you’re in the Photos or Notes app or something – not from within an application store.
Edited 2017-03-15 01:04 UTC
Well, the App Store kind of is a stock Apple app…
Every now and then I check if windows explorer and the start menu have caught up enough with TotalCommander in terms of features and ease of use to make me want to switch back.
Alas one step forward, two steps back.
Guess I’ll stick to using every part of the windows OS except its shell for a very long time…
There is no reason to expect Windows Explorer to catch up to alternative file managers or start menus. They are targeting a different market. That market has very different needs.
Thankfully Microsoft is mostly targeting applications that are easily replaced with better alternatives given our needs.
Not only does Windows have a back door that allows the CIA/NSA free and unrestricted access to your data but now Microsoft wants to push ads at its users too. Why does anyone still bother with Windows? Cut the cord! I did 15 years ago and have used Linux ever since. I haven’t missed anything on Windows and you won’t either once you discover that everything you need is available open source and ad free!
cmost,
I agree with the sentiment, however not everyone is fortunate enough to be gainfully employed with open source technology. I deploy linux when I can, but personally I’m not financially able to turn down work just because it requires windows. Those who can, great, but I think there are many in tech who are tethered to windows through our employers.
I’m implicitly blaming employers here but it’s not all their fault either, most native business apps, accounting software, etc is windows based…as much as it bugs me, that’s the way it is for a lot of specialized business software. There’s the potential to replace some of it with platform agnostic cloud services, so maybe that’s a way forward, but it comes with a lot of cons too. Sysadmins may find many of their roles being made redundant with the cloud services.
Good point, but this is where virtualization comes in.
I run everything I do in various VMs (running on a *nix host). This makes it easier to migrate functionality away from Windows as alternatives become available. (It also makes it easier to segregate different “function groups” from each other – e.g. Work vs. Personal vs. Hobby OS, etc.)
I will personally never run an MS OS on bare metal again.
Pro-Competition,
That’s not a bad idea.
The thing is, when I buy a laptop based on other criteria, it usually comes with windows and that’s the windows I use. Any idea if you’re legally allowed to install that version of windows in a VM without buying yet another windows license? I know they intend the license to be applied to windows running on that specific bare metal machine, and running it in a VM probably requires an activation hack even though it’s running on the same hardware.
I’m curious what you/others do? I could obviously buy a retail windows license without a problem, but I hate the idea of being double charged for windows to run it in a VM.
That’s a valid concern. Unfortunately, I haven’t kept up with these things in recent years. It used to be possible to call up tech support and switch the activation from one machine to another, but I don’t know if they allow that anymore or not.
It’s kind of complicated, but AFAIUI, it’s legal as long as you only run one instance of that VM and it only runs on that hardware.
In my case, I just dual-boot, but I also only use Windows for gaming and I don’t have the luxury of a having a GPU that virtualizes properly.
Give me Adobe Lightroom and graphics drivers on the same performance level as in Windows and I will move to Linux this instant.
Also, it would be nice if most software on Linux would work out of box without tinkering and not break randomly.
I gave up a few years ago and use Windows. Think of it as a calculated risk.
Why?
As I got older, I became less tolerant of screwing around with things. I just want things to work, with a minimum amount of downtime. I used a Mac for quite a while, but I can’t justify the premium for the hardware, and Apple’s really been ignoring OS X and the Mac for far too long.
If I spent less of my free time playing video games, I could probably put up with Mint or something, but things like Fallout 4 and The Witcher aren’t likely to run well on Linux.
I have to say that I’d rather Apple ignore Macs for a while than do this bullshit to MacOS. At this point, it would be nice if Microsoft would “ignore” Windows for a few years too.
I use Linux (Mint Cinnamon) as my main OS, and dual-boot with Windows 8.1.
As much as it hurts me to say, I need to dual boot simply because some software (Cubase 9 and VST’s like Omnisphere, Trilian, Stylus RMX, FM8, Absynth 5 and so on) will not run with low enough latency (if at all) under Linux. There are some very positive developments like Bitwig 2 for Linux, but there is still the problem with VST’s (although there are interesting developments going on). I do a lot more music production on Linux than I did in the past though.
And the second ones are indeed games. Although more and more games are ported to Linux (thank you Steam and GOG), the “big” titles I am interested in (upcoming Mass Effect Andromeda for instance) sadly do not (yet?) run under Linux.
As said, I use dual boot. But all my “real” work (apart from a sizable chunk of music production) is done on Linux. All my important data is stored on Ext4 partitions, so it’s not accessible from Windows. I only use a relatively small ntfs exchange partition (that is also network shared) to share data between the two OS.
It’s a setup that works very well, and every piece of software that is ported to Linux can be tested until I can safely remove it from Windows. Needless to say I do spend less and less time in Windows, but it’s not time to do totally without it (yet).
Jokel,
I haven’t had trouble mounting NTFS in linux and EXTFS in windows (I can’t remember which driver I use, windows e2fs or something).
I just wish they could share logical volume management. I’ve been using LVM in linux for years and it’s been wonderful to allocate & resize volumes as needed, but windows is stuck on a fixed parition.
There are some problems with Windows 8.1 in “vanilla” state when you try to read/write the partition Windows is installed on. This is because of the hybrid boot Windows 8.1 is using. You have to turn this off, but it will make booting Windows 8.1 significantly slower. I myself think that’s a sacrifice I will make happily, but others might differ in this opinion.
Making my (important) data partition ext4 (and thus unreadable for Windows 8.1 without special drivers) is fully on purpose.
Whatever Microsoft is pushing (and has pushed) on Windows 8.1 in the sense of telemetry and other spyware(ish) “patches”, will make no difference at all. The only thing they can “sense” is my game habits (big deal), and maybe some music files (although all the Cubase files have my name and date in-bedded, and the wave files are watermarked). All other stuff is done in Linux and thus out of reach for Windows.
I’ve used Linux more or less full time since 97 and yet I still keep a windows machine as there is absolutely nothing that can replace Cubase, FL Studio and the huge swathes of vst instruments and effects I need available for Linux.
Unless a government out there starts taxing Windows sales and then donating the proceeds to ReactOS, I don’t see this getting better anytime soon.
I use Linux and there’s nothing I can do in Windows (or Mac for that matter) that I can’t do with Linux. I even have a workaround for iMessage. No going back.
Advertising in file explorer? What a scumbag move. I can’t wait til the day when Microsoft has to atone for all of this disgusting behavior.
With all the spying electronic devices are doing, and all the ways & places advertising is rearing its ugly face, I’m starting to think the movie Idiocracy is actually a warning/documentary sent back from the future. Is there no limit to what people will tolerate?
No, Android APPS do the same thing. Android itself won’t unless it’s a vendor ROM that’s been modified to do so. This is part of the reason that there are so many people like myself who are willing to pay extra for a phone to get one that will run stock Android.