Apparently, I'm not the only person who's fed up with Microsoft's non-stop shilling.
From Knoxville's Daily Sun:
Windows 10 has been ramping up its “promoted apps,” or more commonly known as those pesky adverts, since May last year. Currently, the adverts are seen on the lock screen promoting game apps while some even disguise itself as tutorials/guides.
If you’re one that doesn’t want to change from Chrome, Microsoft hasn’t given up on you yet. Take a look at this screenshot obtained from Extreme Tech.
Windows is acquiring a new technique entirely. This time, there’s no way to disable it without affecting potentially useful updates for your cloud storage. Look at the image below to see how Microsoft is pushing the Office 365 now.
That is basically an advert built-in to file storage. To make things worse, the Reddit user had already paid for Office 365. You could always opt to turn “sync provider notification” off but this would jeopardize notification for your cloud storage.
Well, this just looks like Microsoft is selling out on Windows 10 users.
Not an especially well-written piece (sorry, Staff Reporter, unless you're a content-generating AI bot, in which case you don't have any feelings), but I'd say that "selling out" is pretty apt description of what Microsoft's been doing for the last couple of years.
I mean, I get it: Google has a better business plan for the 21st century, and Microsoft really want a piece of that action, in spite of being really late to the party. So, they're trying to leverage their one asset, the ubiquity of Windows, to force their way into the mobile OS market, and to have their own walled-garden storefront, and to have their own web search service, and to monetize everything they sell with advertising. I can see why they'd want to be Google.... and Apple, too, since they're also trying to force their way into the consumer electronics market, having already failed at that a few times now.
But Google didn't become Google by force. They became Google by building a better mouse-trap, by building a customer base who use their products because they prefer their products, and who haven't continually tried to change the relationship with those customers, practically overnight. Not that Google haven't mis-stepped, but they didn't double and triple down on those errors by forcing the issue still further: Google+ didn't become a thing, so Google stopped trying to be Facebook, and let it go.
Microsoft won't let it go. Nobody is using the Windows Store? No problem: they'll just push tiles for "promoted" apps directly to your desktop, to be "discovered" (and maybe accidentally installed/purchased) by users. Nobody is switching from Chrome to Edge, or from Google to Bing? No problem: they'll just push the ads that they would be serving via Edge/Bing directly to the OS itself, via the File Explorer. And why not? Windows 10 was built for this, specifically, in the same way that Windows 8 was built for this, specifically.
The answer is, "Because users won't stand for it, that's why not." I'm expecting Windows 10 to shed even more market share over this month. Look for their EU regulatory issues to not go away, either.