There are Ads … And Then There are Ads (Premium)

When Microsoft first started putting advertisements in Windows back in 2012, I accurately called it a slippery slope. As I predicted, instances of advertising in Windows have only exploded since then. And Microsoft has repeatedly tried to slip even more insidious ads and other obstructions into pre-release Windows 10 builds in the Insider Preview only to have them back-off thanks to user outrage.

But when it comes to this kind of thing, there are ads … and then there are ads. I use this term broadly, and on purpose: It’s just too complicated to list out of the many strange transgressions in Windows 10. In the book Windows 10 Field Guide, for example, I refer to them generally as “annoyances” and I devote the opening section of the Personalization chapter to explaining how to remove them. For you Thurrott Premium members, I also briefly discussed this process (via “Remove crapware” and “Disable Windows 10 advertising and suggestions”) in This is How I Configure Windows 10 (Premium).

The good news with most Windows 10 advertising and other related annoyances is that you can mitigate it for the most part. Crapware, as noted, can be removed. And there are settings, which, granted are purposefully hidden all over the place—to help you disable much of the advertising throughout the system.

But many will argue that not everything I call an ad is, in fact, an ad. For example, many instances of this kind of thing are what Microsoft calls “suggestions,” and some people may even find these suggestions useful from time-to-time. For example, by default, the Start menu displays a list of 1-3 apps above the All Apps list in a section called, literally, Suggestions. For those hardy few actually interested in actively discovering new Store apps, that might literally be useful.

A far larger group of users probably never even sees these things, or doesn’t care when they do. A notification will pop-up asking if you knew whether you could link your PC to your phone, for example, an act that might be of use to you and will absolutely expand Microsoft’s access to you and your data throughout the day. Or they open the Start menu and don’t “see” that Suggest group, don’t care about it at all, because they’re there to get something done, not browse through a list of icons and text. I believe this to be the case for most people.

When Chris Capposela appeared on Windows Weekly in late December, Mary Jo and I asked him some tough questions. Among them was a question—really a set of questions—about the ads in Windows 10. Specifically, we asked him why there were ads in Windows 10 in the first place, since these things could not possibly be an effective way of generating revenue. But we also asked why the ads were so unsophisticated, since many users have complained about getting an upsell for Office 365 when they’re already a subscriber.

You can and should watch the episode to see how he responded to this question. But I took away something important from this: In his view as the Chief Marketing Officer for Microsoft, there is the possibility that overt advertising in Windows 10 may in fact end at some point. Conversely, he feels that Microsoft is fully within its rights to point its users towards related products and services where that makes sense.

I agree with that. With the caveat that Windows 10 should always include controls that let the user disable these nudges, which, again, Microsoft calls suggestions. Today, as noted, it does include these controls. So that’s fine.

The thing to understand here is that you a consumer or user is very different from me as a consumer advocate who is trying to look out for your collective best interests. That is, you may or may not be irked by the ads, suggestions, crapware, data collection, and other nonsense that happens in Windows 10. But I have to take a hardline stance on this. Because what Microsoft is looking for is an opening to do more. That’s why I called it a slippery slope. Once you open the door, it doesn’t close more. It just opens wider and wider. And again, that has happened.

Personally, I am irked by virtually all of these annoyances. And I do disable suggestions, remove crapware, and take other steps to mitigate them when I install Windows 10, as described in that earlier article. But I don’t do this in a vacuum. I know opinions vary. And that some people simply don’t care. That’s fine.

A reader emailed me this morning about an ad—and this is very clearly an ad, what the publishing business calls a “house ad”—that I’ve seen many times in the Microsoft News app. You will often see this ad when you open the app, which is annoying, but it’s always there now courtesy of a prominent red “Get Microsoft News” link in the navigation bar on the left. It’s an ad for … Microsoft News. On mobile.

There are things about this ad that I don’t like, most obviously that it takes over the app sometimes, forcing you to look at it and then manually navigate away. But it also falls under that category that Chris highlighted, where Microsoft is within its rights to point its users towards related products and services where that makes sense. And if someone is using Microsoft News on the PC, it does make sense that they may want to do so on mobile too.

The thing is, the ad is also persistent—it’s always in the News app now—and it’s dumb, which relates to that second half of our question on Windows Weekly; this ad has no understanding that you may have recently signed in to your Microsoft account in Microsoft News on mobile, so it will show you this ad whether you use the app on mobile or not.

Looked at broadly, I don’t find this particularly objectionable, I guess, but it’s a close call. Which is convenient, because in-app ads—which, by the way, were the very thing that triggered my original “slippery slope” article over 6 years ago—are an example of a type of ad or annoyance in Windows 10 that you cannot remove.

My role is to always fight for the people who use Windows 10, in this case, and I will always try to push Microsoft to do the right thing for its users. And this issue of ads and other annoyances in the operating system will always be a core part of that fight, it seems. We must remain vigilant.

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I don’t normally provide a “further reading” list per se, but I have written about this topic a lot. So here are some past articles that I think are particularly relevant to this discussion.

This is Why There Are Ads in Windows 10 (Premium)

What Led to this Mess (Premium)

Microsoft: If You Are Going to Put Ads in Windows 10, Be Smart About it (Premium, by Brad)

Microsoft Can’t Stop Punching Windows 10 in the Face (Premium)

Finally, Microsoft Takes a Step Back from the Windows 10 Cliff (Premium)