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Microsoft made a lot of changes in Windows 10 that helped it put the mistakes of Windows 8 in the rear view mirror. Not all of Microsoft's ideas are good, though. The company has shown a tendency to get a little too casual with how it promotes its services within Windows. You might even call these "ads." Microsoft would, of course, dispute that description. Some of these things that look very much like ads have started showing up in File Explorer. Specifically, Windows 10 has started nagging people to buy a subscription to OneDrive.
Microsoft's OneDrive cloud storage service is built into Windows 10 and tied to your Microsoft account. Everyone gets 5GB of space free, but you can pay to get as much as 1TB for a single user. That also includes an Office 365 subscription. Depending on your needs, that might be a good deal. That does not necessarily mean you want to be made aware of said deal while browsing your files.
The ad appears as a banner at the top of File Explorer, reminding you that OneDrive and Office 365 can be had for a mere $6.99 per month. You can take Microsoft up on the offer or dismiss it. It may just reappear at a later date, though. Some users reported seeing this a few months ago, but the incidence has ticked upward in the last week or so. This is not the first time Microsoft has crammed ads into the Windows UI — there are the lock screen ads disguised as backgrounds, notification ads for Edge, and a strange pop-up ad for Microsoft's personal shopping assistant in Chrome.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Sunday March 12 2017, @05:00AM (4 children)
MS has always leaned hard on users, experimented to see what people will swallow. Makes me sad seeing how much most people will swallow.
I thought IBM might get the jump on MS by having OS/2 a few years before Windows 95, but no, IBM screwed up even worse than MS and blew their opportunity. I thought the poor quality of Windows ME might provoke some into dumping MS. Nope. Windows 2000 saved them. Maybe the phone home misfeature they added in XP? Nope. How about the antitrust court case, would that finally get peoples' attention, get them to think about dumping MS? Nope. I hoped Vista might finally be disastrous enough to sink MS, with its extreme focus on protecting MAFIAA and their own intellectual property at the expense of reasonable performance, but no. MS fixed Vista enough to reduce the yells to grumbles.
By then, I understood that radical change to the interface, as they tried in Windows 8, wouldn't drive people away either, especially if they backpedaled soon enough, which they did.
The Office file format lock in and upgrade treadmill hasn't shaken people either. Nor have revelations such as the Halloween documents. So of course the messy, corruption riddled effort to ram OOXML through the standards bodies didn't even make a blip on most people's radar. How bad does MS have to get to finally run their customers off?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @10:11AM
Don't forget Apple not hammering them in courts for windows, even if MS had eventually won its platform would have been tainted, nobody would have invested in a system which might at one point become illegal.
Don't forget apple not selling its own OS to intel pcs when it was clearly superior. MS would have retaliated removing office but a VM with office would have been unstoppable.
MS got a lot of help, no wonder they think they can do whatever.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Nuke on Sunday March 12 2017, @10:28AM (1 child)
^^^^ This ^^^^
If I were doing a doctorate in psychology, I would make this phenomenon my thesis. It is the same mass behaviour as was portrayed so well in "1984" by George Orwell - no matter what Big Brother did to people, even torture, they still loved him.
Most people do not give or "need" a reason why they stick with Windows : they never even think about it, to them it is just a fact of life. They take any suggestion that they might use something else like a suggestion that they live on Mars - mostly without even any comment, just blankness.
The more technically minded Windows users (like the guys I work with) might show mild interest in the fact I use Linux, but only an outsiders' passing curiosity like if I said that I spent my holidays swimming in the Arctic. Forget evangelising, I only raise the subject of Linux if it comes up naturally, and if anything I tend to deter people by saying that while it is bullet-proof against malware, it's not much good for games and installing it would invalidate any hardware guarantee, and the PC World repair guys or Geek Squad won't touch it with a bargepole anyway. That clinches it for most people.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Sunday March 12 2017, @05:59PM
I've come to a place where I don't care what OS other people choose, as long as I can use linux or some other open-source OS. They can grumble and complain about how their computer breaks, spies on them, costs a fortune for upgrades every 4 months, etc. I chuckle, shake my head, say that that kind of thing never happens to me with linux, and continue on with my productive day.
If other people choose to be slaves, that's on them. Other people like me choose to be free. Freedom can at times be difficult and costly, but it is infinitely more worth having.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @06:49PM
The only thing that will kill M$ long term is if they fuck up the software stack (which they just might do under Nadella). The only thing keeping anyone on windows is the software, not the OS.