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 ques...

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