Microsoft is now promoting some of its products in the sign-out flyout menu that shows up when clicking the user icon in the Windows 11 start menu.
This new Windows 11 “feature” was discovered by Windows enthusiast Albacore, who shared several screenshots of advertisement notifications in the Accounts flyout.
The screenshots show that Microsoft promotes the OneDrive file hosting service and prods users to create or complete their Microsoft accounts.
Apple and Microsoft are actively ruining their operating systems just to squeeze a few more lousy coin out of their trapped users. What dreadful places to work they must be, with bean counters looking over every programmer’s shoulder to find ever more places to stuff in ads.
Microsoft and Apple can pretty much do whatever they want. And GNU/Linux market share on desktop won’t increase by 1%. In all honesty i don’t understand on why they haven’t went all in yet. Made their operating system a full scale ad for third party products. Like with the internet. Most of the content on internet nowadays is an ad. And it’s not like people have stop using the internet. People have accepted they are the product and don’t care about privacy anymore. Hence give them free Windows and ads. It’s not like they will complain or do anything about it. Likely they will be happy. To get free Windows.
people will give up a lot of things for convenience.
but i would disagree on people accepting ads. a lot of them would circumvent them, if they only knew how
This is about as close to a gentle reminder to setup free offsite backup as it could be. It’s not even a modal and placed in a spot that people are like ‘done with their task’ instead of just starting or in the middle of. I don’t think this is as outrageous as the author suggests.
This article is FUD, its simply offering the user to have an offsite backup. Considering how many times I’ve had to tell someone “I’m sorry but that drive is dead, it will cost you several hundred to a few thousand to recover those pictures of your family” it’s a frankly reasonable and decent thing MSFT is doing to make offsite backup simple and painless enough for a noob.
Trust me if you’ve ever had to console someone whose SSD died taking with it pictures of a dead family member and finding out how much it costs to hire a data recovery firm to work on an SSD? You’d be happy MSFT offers OneDrive.
It’s an ad for Microsoft products and services. Not directly related to Windows. You can be fine with that. As you can find such service useful. Still. It’s an ad. And not advertised as being such. Competition not being in the same position. For being able to be listed in such exact place. As OneDrive is advertised.
That’s just sad and annoying, in particular is you don’t want to use a dreaded MS account.
The hard to track metric is long term retention. The even harder to track is brand perception.
According to the article they are doing A/B testing to see whether the “feature” works. I am 90% sure, they will find it will work. Some people will get bonuses, and who knows they might even get promoted to a better position.
However, unless they are running very long studies on how people behave (will they buy another PC, or switch platforms) the experiment will only be self fulfilling (those who don’t like and don’t use the feature will jump ship, hence will not contribute to the “negative” feedback anymore). And of course collecting this data itself is pretty hard (will they partner with Best Buy and credit card companies to track spending year over year)?
Ads in the App Store and ads in the OS. Both suck but are two different things.
A wholly free OS that will be super popular will never happen. It is what it is.
People think that having all these options and and 50 different ways to do things and snaps and flatpaks this that and another.
It’s a mess. Most people just want something you pick up and it works and they know it. It’s why Windows still have the same menus from 30 years ago and apple is now just making toasters.