Microsoft now puts ads in Windows 10 File Explorer
extremetech.com
extremetech.com
It's not really the part of the PC market Apple was interested in ever.
I mean, on one hand you have Microsoft pushing really, really hard to be taken seriously as a vendor of premium, Apple-level products. Their Surface machines are slick and innovative. Windows 10 is more attractive to developers than any Windows in maybe 20 years. Azure has gone from a punchline to a solid, well-regarded competitor to AWS.
And then they sabotage all that with cheap, cheap, cheap decisions like forcing ads into the file browser. Ads! Right in the middle of a product they've been strenuously trying to position as high-end and premium and luxurious, they slap something straight out of the playbook of NetZero, the 1990s free ISP that was pitched at people too broke to afford AOL.
There was nothing premium about the NetZero experience, nothing high-end. It felt cheap because it was cheap. It was cheap crap aimed at people who couldn't afford anything better. And that's fine! But it's a long way from what Microsoft desperately wants people to think Windows 10 is. They're willing to pull the rug out from under all those years of engineering effort and marketing wizardry, just to squeeze a few more pennies into another product's quarterly revenue numbers. Talk about penny wise and pound foolish.
I guess there's still some truth in Steve Jobs' famous 1995 statement that "the only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJWWtV1w5fw)
You needed a licensed Windows 7 or 8 in order to upgrade; that one costs money too. You weren't able to get entirely free upgrade. It was more of exchange.
Again, not justifying the add- but I wouldn't be surprised if its because our accounts were at one time linked to home.
I told a colleague 18 months ago that I didn't want to move to Windows 10 because I didn't want advertising in my operating system. He insisted Microsoft would never do that, and I snorted at him.
Microsoft has been very clear and transparent about their goals with windows 10. It exists to push their other products. The app store is one of them, but of course onedrive and office365 are others. This isn't microsoft being suddenly enamored with ads, it's them closing the jaws of the trap.
There's at least four mainstream UX's to choose from and a few dozen small ones if you feel adventuresome. What desktops have you tried?
What programs is that? In my experience, unless you are using a bunch of specialized proprietary apps on Windows almost everything open source is on Linux and is better implemented.
I've have cases where due to a bug a setting that showed "tips" I disabled was accidentally ignored (it was fixed in the next build) and had the tooltip "why not try Edge?" pop after a year or so of using 10. I first I was raging with people in discord about Microsoft and Ads. But after a coffee I clamed down and I checked on line to see which option might of got flipped, found the flag and remembered I had set it long ago (and that's why I had never seen that tooltip before), checked the feedback tool and saw reports from others that the flag was being ignored for some reason and MS promptly fixed it.
Personally I enabled Fast Builds when Bash/WSL went live but I disabled them when an update conflicted with Overwatch so I'm no longer getting the Fast build. Just wondering if this person is having something similar where they disabled all the "suggestions" only to have one creep back in due to a bug?
Edit: Reading the comments seems like the person writing the article was the person who got the notice.
It's not a get out for MS. All these suggestions make it hard to suggest W10 to people as I have to give it with the caveat "as along as you turn off all the bullshit". It's a shame because with a little fine tuning W10 is a decent OS.
For crying out loud, make an ad-free, spy-free expensive edition if you're that strapped for money! Just do not make it $1000 Enterprise version.
Not affiliated with GPSoftware at all, just a happy long-time user.
The irony of me advertising it isn't lost on me, however.