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

While the tech blogosphere is finally waking up to the slippery slope of in-box advertising in Windows, I’m more curious now about the “why” than the “what”. Why would Microsoft cheapen such an important platform like this? And what does this say about Windows as a platform?

I first raised this alarm in 2012, when I noted that Microsoft was cheapening Windows 8 with advertising in in-box apps like News and Sports, and noted that this was just the tip of the iceberg. Critics disagreed, but they were wrong then and they’re even wronger now, with Microsoft escalating its use of advertising throughout Windows in subsequent releases of Windows: In 2016, I raised this issue again for Windows 10, and in recent weeks I’ve started documenting how you can remove the crazy distractions throughout Windows 10.

It’s interesting what puts people over the edge.

In an earlier Windows 10 version, Microsoft slipped a little-known feature called sync provider notifications into File Explorer, the Windows 10 shell. For many months, it has only reminded users to connect OneDrive to their PC, a message that could be interpreted as a tip or suggestion. Or, depending on your view, an ad.

See, here’s the thing. OneDrive is useful. It’s the type of thing many users don’t know about or use, and Microsoft mentioning it in this way in Windows isn’t all that objectionable. Though it would be a lot less so if they simply provided a UI option called “never show this again.”

But in recent weeks, that sync provider notification has switched over to a far less vague message, one that crosses the line from tip or suggestion into full-blown advertising. Microsoft isn’t just recommending that you use a free service that’s integrated with Windows. Now they’re recommending that its customers sign-up for a paid Office 365 service—which provides more OneDrive cloud storage—at a cost of $6.99 or more per month.

That’s an ad. Period. And this time, unlike in 2012, when Microsoft’s biggest partisan cheerleaders could at least make a thinly-veiled argument to the contrary, there is no denying this truth anymore.

And now everyone is on board, suddenly. Hi, everyone. I’ve been waiting.

“Microsoft is disgustingly sneaky,” one headline proclaims. “Windows 10 isn’t an operating system, it’s an advertising platform.” “Microsoft’s ads in Windows 10 are getting out of control,” a pro-Microsoft blog was forced to admit. And then we have to involve the shittier parts of the web, the clickbait headline writers: “Microsoft now puts ads in Windows 10 File Explorer, because of course.” From quality publications to the absolute dreck, everyone suddenly agrees that Microsoft has gone too far.

I’m glad everyone has finally hit the acceptance stage and some, of course—myself included—have moved on to fixing the problem by explaining in various tips, and in my case in my book Windows 10 Field Guide, how to turn off these intrusions.

But folks, I’m sorry. That’s not good enough.

For starters, the very nature of the slippery slope is that this will only continue getting worse. You can see the first signs of the next step in this terrible transition in the recent news that Windows 10 will soon support playable ads for apps, which are in-box ads that can mimic apps and be used with requiring the user to download them first. Too, I expect the advertising—sorry, what Microsoft calls “tips and suggestions”—that are littered all over Windows 10 will only get more annoying over time too. How will we all react when that OneDrive ad that turned into an Office 365 ad turns into a Box or Dropbox ad? Or—gulp—a fricking Candy Crush ad? You know it’s coming.

While you’re mulling over that one, I’m going to consider what is perhaps the most important question here.

Why is Microsoft doing this? Why would Microsoft cheapen such an important platform like this?

Normally, I’d argue that finding out the “why” in such cases is an exercise in futility, something amounting only to sheer speculation. But I think there is enough evidence here for us to at least arrive at an educated guess. An opinion that is at least backed by some reality.

I was first pushed in this direction by a close friend who had finally been laid off by Microsoft, after decades of service, in the past year. He wasn’t—still isn’t—bitter about the exit, and he’s retained a very level-headed attitude about what Microsoft is doing.

But Windows confuses him. He told me at the time that it was unclear why Microsoft would put so much money and resources into a product line that was clearly on the way out. And that if he were running that business, he would literally just manage the decline.

Tellingly, but probably also coincidentally, he told me an anecdote to explain his reasoning. The Windows 10 shell team, he told me, was overly-stuffed with personnel. And under Satya Nadella, they, like all other teams at Microsoft, needed to justify their existence and the expense of maintaining such a large team. And so the shell team was unnecessarily adding new features to Windows 10 at a time when that part of the product was/is just fine and so much else of it needed work.

Flash forward to 2017 and the result of that work can be seen very clearly. We have advertisements in File Explorer. Microsoft thought enough of this work, and the team that made it, to allow this work to continue, and to expand.

Curious.

So there’s a lot of unnecessary work happening in Windows for sure. But more obvious is the state of the PC industry responsible for the strength of Windows as a platform. As you may know, things aren’t going very well.

I’ve written a lot about the decline of the PC, but the short version goes like this: The PC market is shrinking year-over-year and has been for several years. It is much smaller than it used to be, and will never regain its former size and strength. To counter this change, PC makers are now focusing on small growth sub-markets—premium PCs and gaming rigs, for example—and Microsoft is tailoring Windows to meet those needs. But the end game here is inevitable: The PC market will simply continue to shrink because fewer and fewer people need these kinds of devices. And those trends will simply continue. The PC doesn’t disappear per se. It just becomes less important over time.

For Microsoft, you can see the impact of this shift in the downward fortunes of what used to be the Windows division. Even before Mr. Nadella formalized Microsoft’s “mobile first, cloud first” strategy, Windows dipped from being Microsoft’s biggest business to its second-biggest. And then to its third-biggest. Today, we don’t know where Windows falls because Microsoft hides that information inside of a nebulous More Personal Computing business.

And when was the last time we got a Windows 10 usage statistic from Microsoft? It was in September 2016, when Microsoft revealed that there were 400 million active Windows 10 users in the world. And as I write this, Android is about to overtake Windows as the most-used personal computing platform on earth. This shift is real, it’s happening, and it’s unstoppable.

Monetizing Windows used to be easy: Microsoft told licenses to PC makers, which resold them with new hardware to consumers. It sold subscription-based access to Windows to enterprises through volume licensing programs. And it sold a handful of copies to upgraders at retail or, more recently, electronically.

These days, things are a bit different. And Microsoft can’t rely on the volume of sales it experienced before.

Yes, PC makers still buy Windows licenses from Microsoft. But they buy fewer of them—like one-third fewer than the market at its height—and at lower per-license prices. Those prices are only going to continue to go down, too.

Enterprises still pay their volume licensing fees, and they continue to move very slowly into a more secure and reliable future because they’re too busy fixing problems. This market will be Windows’s last stand.

As for consumers, no one is upgrading to new Windows versions anymore, of course. Why would they? You don’t take a working PC and introduce uncertainty and pain. (And those PCs work for a really long time now. Combined with our shifting needs, few even need new PCs anymore, comparatively speaking.)

This is what we call a non-virtuous cycle, a self-fulfilling destiny, a future that is less, is smaller, than today. The business is in decline, as my friend noted last year.

But give Microsoft some credit, they’re trying. Their three biggest legacy software platforms—Windows Server, Office, and Windows—are each taking steps into the “mobile first, cloud first” world to varying degrees of success.

Moving Server to the cloud is the most obvious and will, I think, be the most lucrative for Microsoft in the long run. The future of Microsoft is the cloud, meaning that the future of Microsoft is Azure.

Office, too, has made a successful technical transition to the cloud thanks to Office 365. The user base is still somewhat small—about 100 million subscribers across consumers and businesses, compared to over 1 billion total Office customers—but everything is in place for that product line to sink or swim vs. Google G Suite and various other competitors.

And then there’s Windows.

Here, Microsoft has eschewed the subscription scheme that so many expected and has instead started by servicing this legacy platform as if it were a cloud service. The results have been disastrous, in my opinion, and we have a major new update coming soon that will test our collective intestinal fortitude yet again. I have high hopes, but realistic expectations.

Microsoft has also improved Windows 10’s ability to work on more mobile hardware—2-in-1 and convertible PCs, plus a coming generation of ARM-based devices—and has expanded the platform to smaller, lighter hardware platforms like IoT, Mobile, HoloLens, and Surface Hub, none of which would be called “volume products” by even their biggest fans. The promise here—that a single apps platform can work across all these hardware types—is very real, but it’s also very pointless.

My friend would manage the decline of this business. But Microsoft is pushing it like it’s the belle of the ball. And … Hm. Now there are ads in Windows 10.

Ads.

Even given Microsoft’s proud history of product bundling, this is alarming. Even given the presences of “sponsored” results in things like Google Search or Apple’s on-devices app store, this is alarming. The sheer number of times that Windows 10 prompts its users with some unnecessary “tip” or “suggestion” or—let’s just say it—advertisement is alarming.

What this really is, I think, is the real effort behind Windows 10, which is to find some way to squeeze as much out of this product line as is possible. Some of these efforts are direct—advertising can lead to product adoption and more ongoing revenues for the software giant—and some of it is indirect. Microsoft’s recent adoption of ARM is really about Intel, as I wrote, and about lowering chip prices. This impacts Windows very obviously: Lower component prices help PC makers lower their own costs and hopefully become profitable. In the old days, these prices were driven by volume and by competition. Today, Intel has a monopoly, and they’ve publicly stated that server/datacenter/cloud is more important to them than PCs. Oops.

There are all kinds of ways to compete. But as Microsoft diminishes Windows, cheapens it with ads, they are creating another kind of non-virtuous cycle. It’s one in which its customers grow increasingly frustrated by a never-ending series of issues in Windows—sneaky, forced upgrades; privacy issues; advertising and more—and it only ends one way. They leave the platform. In other words, Microsoft is by its efforts weakening Windows, not strengthening it.

There’s only so much we as a community can do to stop this. For example, I can write tips about turning off these terrible features, but what happens when the next version of Windows 10 disallows that? I can write editorials like this and come off as some gloomy grump, a non-team player screaming into the wind. But I know that the people who agree with all this will like that I’ve publicized it. And those who do not think I’m an asshole who churns up something like this from time to time because I didn’t sleep well last night.

Folks, I didn’t sleep well last night. But this issue with Windows 10 is the reason. And I am legitimately worried about the future. I have spent almost 20 years now writing primarily about Windows, and almost 25 years now writing primarily about Microsoft and its products. And I have to tell you, I find all of this very unsettling. Unnecessary. And overdue for change.

What really bothers me is that Windows 10, fundamentally, is excellent. It is absolutely the best version of Windows ever made, and vastly preferable to whatever platform—the Mac, of course, ChromeOS/Android hybrids, Linux-based PCs, or even the woeful iPad Pro—you care to mention. But we’re on this weird precipice now, and we’re wobbling. This could go south very quickly.

I hope that Microsoft does the right thing. I know the leadership there well enough to know that this can happen. But I also know that there are very real business interests that do not intersect with my personal preferences. And that it would very well go in a different direction.

There are ads in Windows 10. Let’s fix this.