Earlier this year, Microsoft introduced a so-called “Account Manager” for Windows 11 that appears on the screen when you click your profile picture on the Start menu. Instead of just showing you buttons for logging out, locking your device or switching profiles, it displays Microsoft 365 ads. All the actually useful buttons are now hidden behind a three-dot submenu (apparently, my 43-inch display does not have enough space to accommodate them). Now, the “Account Manager” is coming to Windows 10 users.
↫ Taras Buria at Neowin
Yes, this is a really small ad int he grand scheme of things, but the mere concept of my operating system showing me all kinds of ads and upsells, as both Windows and macOS have been doing aggressively for years now, is so deeply offensive to me. It shows such utter disrespect to me as a user, and shows that Microsoft and Apple see me not as an end user, but as a ripe plum ready to be bled dry at every turn. It’s revolting.
As the latest release, Windows 11 has always been the most ad-ridden of the Windows releases still in use, but it seems Windows users can’t escape the onslaught either. I’m especially expecting ever more aggressive ads and upsells for Windows 11 to appear in Windows 10 now that the 2025 cutoff date for Windows 10 support is nearing, of course appearing at the most inopportune times – because everybody loves a giant fullscreen ad on your operating system when you’re trying to give a presentation or meet that tight deadline you forced yourself yo stress about by playing a bit too much League of Legends.
If you want an ad- and upsell-free operating system, your options are legion – there’s countless Linux distributions and the various BSDs to choose from.
I was recently forced to “upgrade” to windows 11 at work. I hate the damn thing so much. I hate having to go through the registry and group policies to remove the unwanted cloud garbage polluting the local OS. I hate that microsoft updates keep re-adding more garbage I don’t want. Microsoft knows damn well users want to disable this and that’s why they make it so difficult to remove: profits > user experience.
Windows 11 is enshitification at it’s finest. It’d be a much better OS without these anti-features. To think they’re actually paying software engineers to make windows worse like this, what a shame. By porting this crap to windows 10, they probably hope to remove some of the reasons users have been clutching windows 10: “Don’t make windows 11 better, just make windows 10 worse.” Brilliant.
/rant
It’d actually be an _extremely good_ OS without them, which is what makes it all the more frustrating. There’s finally decent package/software management, there’s a well thought out scheme for virtual desktops, fractional scaling works pretty well, WSL runs linux VMs at least as well as Linux can run windows VMs, there’s progress toward a unified look and feel for at least first-party applications, tiling assistant is about as good a window-snapping handler as you’ll find, etc. etc.
I think there’s quite a bit of a difference in how Apple handles this vs Windows, which this article brushes over.
Apple’s approach is advertising in the App Store mostly, as well as their other apps that sell services, such as News, Music and TV. The problem there isn’t the advertising itself, it’s the fact they have an unfair advantage bundling their apps and related frameworks on an operating system level.
Microsoft’s approach is more obnoxious because they don’t constrain advertisements inside their first party services apps, they actually have the audacity to cram ads in the middle of the operating system itself. You wouldn’t see Apple adding an ad to the dock!
This really speaks to Microsoft’s design language. Look at the mess that is Word, Teams or pretty much anything they release. It’s so inelegant, so driven by their enterprise background.
Then again why wouldn’t they, it’s not like anybody will do anything about it.
WAIT a minute!
As Microsoft is still pushing feature-updates for Win 10, does this mean that the 5 year “only security-updates” phase is still ahead of us?
Oh ffs, no there aren’t, not if you want win32/win64 compatibility, Wine compatibility is still very hit-and-miss, case in point:
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?iId=17&sClass=application
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?iId=31&sClass=application
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=13
These are very popular applications, so you’d expect the Wine bros would do whatever it takes to make them work, but nope.
Also, gotta love how they derisively call some apps “garbage” when their compatibility layer doesn’t implement 100% of even the published Win32/Win64 API calls. Perhaps it’s the compatibility layer that’s garbage and shouldn’t have left 0.x versioning before achieving 100% coverage of at least the published Win32/Win64 API calls.
The only real alternative is MacOS, because it has its own adequate app ecosystem, but it has its own issues mainly around pricing and unavailability of hi-end GPUs for the OS.
Now, people who are happy with just a browser and some FOSS Desktop Linux apps do exist and they are using ChromeOS, and you can go to Statcounter and see how that OS does, but most people have that one proprietary app they need to run.
There are sources out there one can easily find on the internet that deal with statistics, such as desktop usage by operating system! It seems that ChromeOS is losing ground, compared to GNU/Linux and at the same time GNU/Linux being at historical high, above 4%. So that doesn’t seem to back the claim end users can be satisfied with a web browser in kiosk mode. Here i must say that i never understood Google, on why such stupidity. Much more successful Android has apps, why on earth did they ever believe ChromeOS, desktop oriented, doesn’t need them. Anyway. As for MacOS being the only real alternative to Windows. I don’t feel that is true, in the end it’s a niche product and as such can’t really compete with Windows. In my opinion it’s still in between GNU/Linux and Windows and if the trend continues, around 1% market increase per year, then i feel that in a decade GNU/Linux won’t have only 14% market share, but higher. Why? It’s basically a general purpose solution, runs on all hardware, supports all architectures and programming languages, is much more user friendly out of the box, where things just work by design, its general availability helps too. All in all if the trend continues then IMHO GNU/Linux will have a substantial market share a decade from now, such market share that all software will have a native version available for GNU/Linux. That currently sometimes lacking being an economical and not a technical decision, with higher market share such dilemmas gone.
I don’t want or need Windows compatibility, and Linux has been serving me well for over two decades now. I just want to use my computer and run my programs. I can’t even do those basic things in Windows without the OS getting in the way. Linux works just fine.
Photoshop and Office? I’m sorry that you are stuck on 30 year old software!
There commercial OSes are no good for personal computing anymore. That mantle has been taken by open source. Your windows or macos machine isn’t your own secret garden to play in anymore. Where possible change to linux and forget about this mess of crass commercialism.
…but we have ExplorerPatcher: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/
Why nobody is petitioning to have back full retail PAID windows versions as in the 90’s or early 2000’s ? Because the only alternative to an ad-sustained model is the paid-in-full model. Despite what AI evangelists want us to believe, software does not write on its own, it needs teams of dedicated developers who, like any other worker, like to receive a salary at the end of each months. When “simple” software applications can cost up to 40~50 EUR, how can a whole OS be basically free ? And the windows license paid by HW manufacturers is surely pretty low: in a 350 EUR laptop how much can the software license weight ? I might be wrong, but i seem to remember that a full retail (non-upgrade) version of Windows 7 could cost as much as 250~300 EUR.
Windows Home edition is currently $140 in the US – I’m not sure what you are talking about.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/windows-11-home/dg7gmgf0krt0
I have installed countless VM’s and updated several PC’s and was never asked a license; you can’t do the same with windows 7, it always needs a license to be fully activated. And while you can update any PC from win7 to win10/11 you can’t update a PC running Vista to windows 7. To me, for all intent an purposes, Win10/11 is free.
enryfox,
Windows OEM computers are sold with OEM licenses in the firmware. When it comes to VM’s microsoft doesn’t have any solid way to differentiate them with serial numbers or anything.
Only the upgrade is free when you have an OEM license, Otherwise you’d be running it without a legal license. I don’t think microsoft are suing individual users as most of them the MS tax every time they buy a computer. But say a corporation were caught doing what you suggest installing win11 home edition without paying for licenses, I do think they would loose in court.
enryfox,
Of course we want to be paid. But historically when it comes to automation, the industry’s ability (or inability) to automate is more of a deciding factor than employee desire/need to get paid. :-/
We can agree that AI isn’t replacing devs, at least not yet, but for other jobs I
Putting aside the question of ads versus paid software and just looking at the economics of software development…
Companies that own software generally do not pay developers to rewrite the software with every release. Instead they keep reusing & resell the same software over and over and over again with small changes and feature enhancements. This is much cheaper than regularly rewriting the whole corpus of code. So while software maintenance is not necessarily cheap, it’s not like they are rewriting the OS from scratch. Changes from say windows 10 to windows 11 are generally on the surface.
Secondly, A small developer would likely have to charge more than a large developer to earn a similar profit even if the large developer’s software is more complex due to scales of economy. Software in particular is known to have enormous scales of economy with marginal costs approaching $0. Even high development costs, distributed across millions of customers, can bring costs per customer way down.
I’m getting snagged on the way the edit feature works. I hit “cancel” to revert a change, but then see another separate change I’d like to make, but then the canceled edit gets resurrected from the dead without my noticing, haha.
Anyway, I think other jobs are going to be in more trouble from AI displacement in the near term. Generative video is looking very impressive. Hollywood quality special effects may soon be replaced by AI. Although I know the unions tried to push contracts protecting their jobs, so it will be interesting to see how that actually plays out. It would an ironic twist if amateur films ended up having access to gray market AI that hollywood films aren’t allowed to use.
There’s a lot of very interesting work coming out already and it’s only in early development:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7qt8e1qBV0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anmuklFtu8U
I do not think that even Microsoft has the workforce required to rewrite from scratch an OS, it would take at least ten years and the debugging process would be super complex. Microsoft, like basically any other SW company, keeps improving they code base, but, unless you had access to the source code, you cannot say “Changes from say windows 10 to windows 11 are generally on the surface”: many internal components are updated or in same case rewritten with the specific goal of behaving exactly like before.
A component like the (unfortunately neglected) Linux subsystem for windows required many man-hours of MS finest developers but its generated revenue is, to my knowledge, close to zero. the same i think can be said for other components which took years to develop but had no visible change on the surface. Another simple example is a tool-chain update: in same case is a painless operation, but in other cases, when libraries or components are deprecated, it can take months of hard work to yield basically the same product as before.
We live in an era where it is a given that software is a free gift bundled with hardware purchase and hence there is this public perception that developing software is an activity requiring minimal budget, way less than developing hardware. Indeed that is not the case, every aspect of SW development is expensive (including automation, the manager’s one-cure-for-all) and companies need to find a way to fund SW development somehow. Microsoft does not sell hardware (or at least not seriously) and its cash cow are the subscription paid services like office 365.
enryfox,
I don’t remember saying anything that contradicts this. I agree.
I absolutely can and did say that 🙂
The surface level changes are apparent. Win 10 and 11 are very interchangeable for drivers and software. I won’t assert there are no changes at all, things like schedulers and new CPU features, etc, but my point was that the vast majority of win 11 was already done in win 10 (and so on). I’m a bit confused by your point here because your first point suggests that you would have agreed with me…no?
I guess it’s a semantic debate, but to me users being able to run linux software is a visible change.
Not so say those people don’t exist, but in reality windows is NOT free. There may not be a line item for it when you purchased it doesn’t mean you didn’t pay for it.
From the tone of your comments, it doesn’t seem like you appreciated my point about marginal costs, but I think it’s important. With software development in particular marginal unit costs are extremely low. In other words: It’s expensive to build and support software, developers aren’t free. But after you’ve sold enough copies to pay for this, additional copies sold are extremely profitable because they increase revenue without incurring additional development costs.
Of course they are. How else are they going to get the message out to its users that the OS will be killed off in a year and that they want their money?