DARIEN GRAHAM-SMITH Are desktop adverts a clue to the future of Windows?
No-one appreciates the hard sell, but at least Microsoft isn’t taking its market for granted
Adverts have started to appear in recent builds of Windows 10, and it’s fair to say that users are not impressed. I’m not just talking about the unrequested links to Windows Store apps that pop up in your Start menu. The company’s latest wheeze is to place an advert for OneDrive in the top half of File Explorer windows. The response to this, on the forums I frequent, has been furious. It’s one thing to give a product away and make your money from advertising, but that’s never been the deal with Windows. Apart from anything else, the software is in no sense free: even the Windows 10 upgrade was only free if you’d bought a licence for a previous release.
To be fair, the ad itself isn’t too garish or obtrusive, and a second’s Googling will tell you how to get rid of it. I’m not even convinced that having adverts in Windows 10 is necessarily unreasonable. Microsoft apparently intends to keep updating and adding new features into the OS for ever more, at no extra charge – so adverts could simply be seen as a way of funding that ongoing development.
The peremptory way it’s been handled, however, looks like a red flag. Microsoft talks about new Windows features all the time; it could easily have given the world a heads-up about this controversial little notification, and shared its thinking about advertising on Windows. Instead, it simply dropped it onto users’ desktops. That’s not reassuring, and it raises questions about what happens next.
I’ve seen where such a path can lead, through my work with antivirus software. A decade or two ago, the free packages used to operate quite inconspicuously; perhaps they’d offer you the occasional invitation to upgrade to the paid-for package, but that wasn’t too hard to swallow when the software was otherwise free.
As the years have drawn on, however, publishers have sought to squeeze more and more marketing value from these offerings. Today, it’s the norm for free packages to pester you with commercial messages, both within the app and on your desktop. It’s even become accepted practice to promote features that aren’t included: only when you click to try out a promising-sounding function are you prompted to enter your credit card details to continue. What was once a fairly respectful transaction has become a straightforward deception.
That’s maddening in a security package; in an operating system it’s even harder to forgive. I’m not exactly worried about a future where the desktop is festooned with intrusive adverts, and where we’re prompted to pay additional fees to unlock this or that capability. If Microsoft did push things that far, I have every faith in the ingenuity of power users and tweakers to find ways of disabling the offending features.
Then again, who the hell wants to deal with such things? It’s a big distraction – and switching to a different platform isn’t always easy, especially if you’ve built a career on Windows. Microsoft knows that perfectly well – which makes these ads all the more exploitative.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. It’s not as if Microsoft has hitherto been an angel among technology companies; it’s faced numerous lawsuits in the past over userhostile behaviour.
One that particularly sticks with me concerned the coercive tricks it employed to try to get us all locked into Internet Explorer (a transgression that eventually inspired the much-derided “browser ballot”). That was 16 years ago, but something quite similar is going on right now in Windows 10. You can see that for yourself by simply searching Bing for “Google Chrome”: the very first thing that comes up is an advert for Microsoft Edge, detailing its supposed advantages. If you ignore this and install Chrome, Windows refuses to set it as your default browser. And if you try to make the change manually, guess what pops up? A little requester suggesting that you stick with Edge, and helpfully offering that as your default option.
Yet, this isn’t 2001. Even if I do use Edge on Windows 10, Microsoft loses me as soon as I switch to my MacBook, or my Chromebook. Indeed, as our apps and documents move into the cloud, Windows is no longer my default platform. I hop between systems with no more difficulty than a little clumsy typing as I switch between keyboards. That’s before we think about all the things I do on my smartphone, which are completely outside of Microsoft’s reach.
You have to assume Microsoft realises all of this – that it knows it can’t throw its weight around like it once did. So perhaps the advent of adverts in Windows 10 isn’t a sign of arrogance, but the opposite. Could it be that Microsoft’s looking for ways to exploit Windows for marketing because it’s realised that simply owning the platform is no longer much of an advantage? If Microsoft wants us to continue buying into its ecosystem, it can’t just shut out rivals: it’s going to jolly well have to fight for our custom. That means advertising, yes, but also knuckling down and improving the products themselves. In truth, despite some controversial design decisions, I think that’s largely what we’ve seen with Windows 10.
So perhaps we should be grateful that things are playing out this way. At the end of the day, I’d much rather be dealing with a Microsoft that’s fighting to stay relevant, than a complacent one that feels it can take users for granted. To put it another way, if the choice is between Windows 10 with the odd pop-up and an ad-free Windows 8, I know damn well which I’m choosing.
It’s one thing to give a product away and make your money from advertising, but that’s never been the deal with Windows