When is an ad an advertisement and not a recommendation? Microsoft clearly likes to use the term recommendation for what others may see as an advertisement.
There are recommendations in the Start menu, Settings app, Lock screen, File Explorer, Get Help app, and other areas of the operating system already. These are often not that useful. App recommendations in the Start menu are limited to Microsoft Store apps.
Now, Microsoft is testing recommendations in the Microsoft Store app. If you never use the app, you won’t be exposed to these. If you do, you may notice recommendations popping up when you try to use the built-in search.
First spotted by phantomofearth on X, two or three recommendations are shown whenever search is activated in the official Microsoft Store app.
Windows really is the worst OS. You pay 150$ for the license when you buy a laptop with it pre-installed and then on top of that, they spy on you and also show you ads.
Linux is free, does not spy on you and does not show any ads.
Omg I’m so mad about this
lol jk I use Linux
I use Linux at home and am disappointed with this news. I can’t help having to use Windows at work.
Most workplaces have those disabled through the group policy editor and the likes. I’ve never seen a single ad on my work laptop. Cortana, copilot and all that crap are also disabled by default.
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.
lol yep you probably are
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.
Especially considering the news on poor adoption rates for windows 11, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the case. It could also be an explanation as to why we are only seeing these ads added to w11 right now.
Isn’t something like half of Windows purchases from businesses though?
And I feel like the younger crowd isn’t even buying PCs. Just tablets and phones.
So, nothing will change, because businesses don’t care if Jerry from accounting has to look at a bud light advertisement as a recovering alcoholic.
And PCs might fade away like typewritters did.
But don’t worry. Printers will still exist wirelessly. They’ll still have a finicky driver that breaks if you even look at the printer, and it’ll still use ink that costs as much as a mortgage on a subscription model.
Because fuck trees!
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 have not dove into yabridge yet. What DAW did you go with?
After poking around I decided to go with Bitwig and skip trying to go with getting Ableton working with Proton or Wine. I’ve actually been enjoying some of their default VSTs as I practice my piano again, but I do miss my paid VSTs a lot.
Have been really looking around at the vsts that have native Linux support though. Was really glad to see of u-he’s VSTs worked natively.
I’m a huge fan of reaper. Nice clean daw for a good price imo. It being cross platform was a bonus. I started making music on Windows and the best part of switching to Linux was that reaper just works after figuring out how the hell to install it lol. Some Linux stuff im ok at but im still figuring things out.
And same here. I’m a self pianist like my grandfather was. I really like addictive keys for playing piano and was happy to see the standalone version works with bottles. But without yabridge setup, i haven’t been able to make much recently.
Ive been looking to find a replacement for addictive keys thats native to Linux or works well at least.
I will have to take a look at Reaper!
Its $60 for a personal/small bussines use and a great daw. Would recommend. But whatever daw works best for you is great too :)
Listen, bill gates just needs to buy more arable land. This, of course, is your capital to earn by being good and not using linux or Firefox to banish these innocent little ads.
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’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?
While I hate ads as much as the next person, I’m having trouble getting outraged by ads in an app store. “Recommendations” are kinda par for that course. Sure, it would be nice if those “recommendations” actually reflected stuff I was interested in and not just who paid Microsoft the most for ad placement. But, I also aggressively turn off telemetry (and actually don’t use Windows at home). So, it’s not like I expect useful recommendations anyway.
Is Microsoft so in debt that they need to sell ad space in every pixal of their products? What is going on.
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.
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 hell? This leads only to inflation.
Human sacrifices please the line. 💹
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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
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Dumb businesses majors who only know “growth”
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.
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
This is not true. Please stop repeating this lie which has become the excuse for companies to be even more evil
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i can’t believe they wrote an entire article to whine about ads IN A STORE APP
Gotta keep that rage up.
I’m surprised they didn’t put ads in the blank area of the taskbar.
Or on the entire desktop. Ad wallpapers when?
I already run Linux on my laptop. The one thing keeping me from getting rid of Windows on my big machine is Forza games. Motorsport does not seem to work at all with proton/wine (yet)
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<Linux User> That’s unfortunate.
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
It’s effectively bundled with Apple hardware (which also dramatically lowers their development costs; they don’t support anything they don’t ship and are perfectly willing to abandon hardware once it no longer supports the level of hardware features they feel the new OS version needs). I’m not sure it’s that different.
Android is free (maybe? Do phone manufacturers pay for Google play branding?), but they make their money by having the lions share of software going through their storefront. Microsoft is never going to do that with Windows.
You could say that about any product or service. “They don’t charge for a steering wheel on your car it’s bundled in.” But that’s not a useful or meaningful distinction.
The issue here is windows famously charged until very recently (and still sort of does) which distinguishes it from those that don’t charge.
But Windows is the product. Hardware is a small part of their revenue, and most of their install base is hardware that isn’t theirs.
MacOS is also part of Apple’s product, but they pretty much only sell higher margin premium hardware that both pays for and streamlines the OS development process.
Windows OS is not the product.
Yes, it absolutely is.
Back in the 90s Apple charge for OS upgrades. I saved my allowance money to get OS 8 and was super happy when I got OS X 10.2 for Christmas. Once they could reliably deliver upgrades over the Internet they stopped charging for it.
The story I always heard was that there were some weird accounting rules that were, if not codified legally, common practice at the time, that made the book keeping on free updates sketchier. But I don’t know about the validity of that.
I definitely don’t think “free” justifies any of Windows bullshit. I did pay for 10 (pro) for gaming several years back, but with the real emergence of proton the steam deck accelerated, I wouldn’t install windows on any of my systems for free now. They’re super hostile to users and are just assuming that inertia is good enough that they can get away with it.
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
There is nothing free in this life…
Linux is free.
Monetarily yes, but not free of time, in fact time it’s the most precious resource we have.
A one-off time ‘investment’ of switching to Linux will save you from all future cases of searching for how to wrestle with the latest Windows crapware. If you switch, you’ll be in time-debt for a few months, and after that you’ll be ahead - and you’ll stay ahead indefinitely. You’ll also have the piece of mind that you are not being spied on and monetised by your OS.
Personally I use Linux, and TBH as I value my free time it’s why I say it, if you need something that just works and don’t want to mess around looking for fixing trivial errors on the internet I would suggest using windows to 95% of people, I hate windows but I must admit if it’s about stability at exchange of looking ads with not tech ability definitely it’s the most recommended.
Linux it’s amazing but it’s not for everyone.
It’s like the eternal battle Apple VS Android, if you just want it to work and don’t want to mess around with trivial errors definitely Apple it’s the choice, you lose liberty and privacy but for most people it will work fine.(I use Android)
Your argument sounds OK, but is probably stuck a bunch of years in the past. I observe the opposite lately.
Like I want to do something trivial on windows, like move the fucking taskbar on the left side of the screen, I have spent time searching and it still does not work. At lest on Linux if something does not work you have a leg to work on and a community to help. Have you seen the windows forums when encountering an issue? It’s tragic.
I think this overstates the “you must futz with it” of both Android and the common Linux desktop. Broadly speaking, both are pretty much fine out of the box for most people and the stuff they are likely to want to do to Windows is similarly easy to do with a likely default desktop environment (I’d say KDE more likely than Gnome, since Gnome opts to try not let you do a lot of stuff and demands you have to do “weird stuff” for some customizations). You don’t have to play with “expert tiling-only window manager N” or go off the deep end tweaking to the Nth degree.
Same with Android, though with even less likelihood of anyone bothering to go “off script”. 99% of Android users never touch adb, never do an oem unlock, never boot an aftermarket OS load.
The fact that you can, does not imply you must.
It’s like the eternal battle Apple VS Android
My subjective opinion: Comparing Linux v Windows to iOS v Android is a terrible analogy. Both mobile OS work fine and have little differences.
I’d be happy to buy the OS too, but I want it to be a one-time payment and to quit with ads and all telemetry.
That’s so old fashioned grandpa. Just give them a straw and let them sip out of your bank account like everyone else. You sound like the kind of person that lives in a house with a yard.
Seriously though, subscription models seem here to stay and they’ve just made for an incredibly adversarial relationship between industry and consumer.
I hate the rent-seeking economy.
This, so much. Hell I’ll pay the old prices to never see an ad or pop up.
I remember being young and thinking an OEM copies price was brutal lol.
Microsoft put themselves in this position when they went against the open source movement.
It moves slowly but inexorably, and sooner or later Linux or another open source OS will take their spot on the desktop.
Are we speaking metaphorically or literally? sharpens blades
Yes
Ad injection will continue till public morale improves
