Welcome to the Nanny State (Premium)

Remember when all we had to worry about was advertisements in apps? Oh, how young and naïve we were. Microsoft followed up that little Windows 8 innovation by dramatically increasing the scope of advertising in Windows, of course. But it also stole our privacy and added crapware in Windows 10, and it has moved on to endlessly nagging it to use its other products and services in Windows 11. So let's focus on that.

First, let's agree on some terms. Put simply, all of this is advertising. I know that's controversial in some circles and that some will argue that Microsoft's nudges are helpful, or whatever. But that's beside the point: what Microsoft is doing is using both carrot and stick to drive you into the one-way, dead-end street that is their broader ecosystem. You won't remember exactly how you got there, but now you can't leave.

The reason this is advertising is that it's not always the right choice for you, but is rather the right choice for Microsoft. That is, sure, you absolutely should make sure that all of the documents and other data files you're working with on your computer are synced to cloud storage so that they will survive a hardware failure. But that doesn't mean you have to---or want to---use Microsoft's OneDrive service for that work. In other words, Windows 11 isn't an open platform. Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive aren't given the option to interrupt your flow to advertise their services. Only Microsoft.

OneDrive is the poster child for Microsoft's in-house advertising and nudges in Windows 11. Indeed, it starts during the Out of Box Experience (OOBE), the wizard you step through when you first bring up a new PC. Depending on which Windows 11 product edition that came with the PC, you are either silently opted in to "backing up" your Desktop, Documents, and Pictures folders to OneDrive (Home edition) or are asked to do so (Pro edition).

Doing so, of course, will increase your use of OneDrive cloud storage, which will lead to further nags down the road to upgrade to some form of Microsoft 365 subscription service for additional storage. This is Microsoft's ulterior motive: it doesn't just want that one-time licensing fee for Windows 11. It wants you to pay it money every single month for the rest of your life.

If you have Windows 11 Pro and decline this offer, Microsoft will continuously nag you to reconsider, and it is either impossible or difficult to turn off this nagging. (I'm still researching that bit as it's accelerated in recent months.) (If you have Windows 11 Home, Gold help you. I would guess that almost no one using that system has any idea that this is even happening in the background and Microsoft will never again prompt you about it. That said, you can of course turn off OneDrive folder sync, or what it calls backup. If you know to look, and then where to look.)

It nags you in two ways.

First, it will put a blue "i" overlay on top of the OneDrive icon in the system tray on the Taskbar...