I think Microsoft may be wildly underestimating the amount of goodwill this sort of thing costs them. Windows has been steadily losing ground to OS X, Linux, iOS and Android, and a big part of that is its reputation for being the platform stuffed with ads in places they don't belong. (Because of malware and OEM crapware, mostly). What happens if you're an OS X user considering switching back, and you look over someone's shoulder and see these ads? You conclude that Windows hasn't escaped its terrible past.
The thing that amazes me about decisions like this is how, well, chintzy they are. It's brand sabotage on a really deeply profound level.
I mean, on one hand you have Microsoft pushing really, really hard to be taken seriously as a vendor of premium, Apple-level products. Their Surface machines are slick and innovative. Windows 10 is more attractive to developers than any Windows in maybe 20 years. Azure has gone from a punchline to a solid, well-regarded competitor to AWS.
And then they sabotage all that with cheap, cheap, cheap decisions like forcing ads into the file browser. Ads! Right in the middle of a product they've been strenuously trying to position as high-end and premium and luxurious, they slap something straight out of the playbook of NetZero, the 1990s free ISP that was pitched at people too broke to afford AOL.
There was nothing premium about the NetZero experience, nothing high-end. It felt cheap because it was cheap. It was cheap crap aimed at people who couldn't afford anything better. And that's fine! But it's a long way from what Microsoft desperately wants people to think Windows 10 is. They're willing to pull the rug out from under all those years of engineering effort and marketing wizardry, just to squeeze a few more pennies into another product's quarterly revenue numbers. Talk about penny wise and pound foolish.
I guess there's still some truth in Steve Jobs' famous 1995 statement that "the only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJWWtV1w5fw)
I saw this exact ad for the first time this morning. I'm not one to be offended by ads but this one did irk me a little - I'm running 10 Pro which I paid $100 for, I shouldn't see ads in a paid product.
Just because it was free upgrade, it does not mean, that it was OS for free.
You needed a licensed Windows 7 or 8 in order to upgrade; that one costs money too. You weren't able to get entirely free upgrade. It was more of exchange.
I bought it through the Window's store after I bought one of the first Dell XPS 15 Windows 10 models. The only reason I needed pro was to enable HyperV to use with Vagrant.
>It’s odd that Microsoft has suddenly become so enamored with ads in Windows 10.
I told a colleague 18 months ago that I didn't want to move to Windows 10 because I didn't want advertising in my operating system. He insisted Microsoft would never do that, and I snorted at him.
Microsoft has been very clear and transparent about their goals with windows 10. It exists to push their other products. The app store is one of them, but of course onedrive and office365 are others. This isn't microsoft being suddenly enamored with ads, it's them closing the jaws of the trap.
It's not as much the look of the desktop as it is a bunch of little things about the OS. The command line stuff is nice but not useful unless I'm programming, I've found lots of stuff concerning configuration to be a little obtuse (knowing what's what in a configuration file takes some time), worrying about drivers isn't fun, and many common programs aren't on Linux and if they have an alternative it often isn't as good. Those are just a few reasons off the top of my head so don't take them as exhaustive or as authoritative but just a random opinion. I use Linux for programming and it's nice but for day to day use it suffers some problems for me (largely because of low adoption of the general desktop market I think).
> many common programs aren't on Linux and if they have an alternative it often isn't as good.
What programs is that? In my experience, unless you are using a bunch of specialized proprietary apps on Windows almost everything open source is on Linux and is better implemented.
I wonder if the person writing the article is using the Fast Insider Build of 10.
I've have cases where due to a bug a setting that showed "tips" I disabled was accidentally ignored (it was fixed in the next build) and had the tooltip "why not try Edge?" pop after a year or so of using 10. I first I was raging with people in discord about Microsoft and Ads. But after a coffee I clamed down and I checked on line to see which option might of got flipped, found the flag and remembered I had set it long ago (and that's why I had never seen that tooltip before), checked the feedback tool and saw reports from others that the flag was being ignored for some reason and MS promptly fixed it.
Personally I enabled Fast Builds when Bash/WSL went live but I disabled them when an update conflicted with Overwatch so I'm no longer getting the Fast build. Just wondering if this person is having something similar where they disabled all the "suggestions" only to have one creep back in due to a bug?
Edit: Reading the comments seems like the person writing the article was the person who got the notice.
It's not a get out for MS. All these suggestions make it hard to suggest W10 to people as I have to give it with the caveat "as along as you turn off all the bullshit". It's a shame because with a little fine tuning W10 is a decent OS.
