Ask Paul: January 27 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Let’s bid goodbye to January and usher in the weekend a bit early with another great set of reader questions.
Bing, Bung, Bonged
wright_is asks:

What is with Bing at the moment? Over the last few weeks (since just after Christmas, I think), a majority of blocked malware registered in the management console of our corporate anti-malware system seems to be coming from either Bing / the Edge home page directly, Bing search results or people clicking on articles on the Edge home page - mainly cached images or adverts. Is Microsoft suffering an attack and their malware detection isn't working properly?

I’ve not heard about anything like this, sorry. Is anyone else experiencing anything like this? (That said, given the low quality of the content delivered through the Edge home page, it wouldn’t surprise me if hackers have figured out a way to deliver malware through low-quality content sources. Still, it seems like this would be quickly found and acted on.)
Subscriptions are a symptom and a problem
Daishi asks:

I’m curious why, when you are so keen to remind us that you saw the slippery slope of ads in Windows coming, you apparently can’t see the obvious other one related to subscription fees. Sure they might follow your suggestions and offer customers the option to pay just to remove ads to start with, but it feels pretty obvious that that’s not where it would stop.

Well, that was literally the point of Ads and Subscriptions are the Future … of Windows (Premium), that Microsoft’s creeping monetization of Windows users is a multipronged strategy that doesn’t just involve in-product advertising, but also more and more subscription services (and sponsored app shortcuts and more).

Now I’m sure you are going to bring up the Chris Capossela comment about offering subscriptions being a tacit admission that they know they’re doing something wrong to say that Microsoft knows that it would be going to far to make people pay to keep Windows working.

Well, yes, that was in that article, but I tried to refute it by noting that ad-free Outlook, a key perk of a paid Microsoft 365 consumer subscription, does the same thing by letting customers pay to remove an annoyance. To me, giving customers a choice between ads and paying to not get ads is a common-sense solution. We see this in many places (Spotify, for example). It’s not perfect, but it’s better than no choice.

But he was saying that about your suggestion for ad removal, so if they cross the subscription Rubicon for removing ads why not expand it to include products activation, the ability to replace native features that feed into their ad business like the browser, advanced features and enterprise SKUs just becoming higher tiers of payment? All of these things seem like very realistic further steps they’d take while telling us it was to help generate the revenue to pay for Windows development, but for some reason I don’t understand yo...