Microsoft is starting to enable ads inside the Start menu on Windows 11 for all users. After testing these briefly with Windows Insiders earlier this month, Microsoft has started to distribute update KB5036980 to Windows 11 users this week, which includes “recommendations” for apps from the Microsoft Store in the Start menu.
Luckily you can disable these ads, or “recommendations” as Microsoft calls them. If you’ve installed the latest KB5036980 update then head into Settings > Personalization > Start and turn off the toggle for “Show recommendations for tips, app promotions, and more.” While KB5036980 is optional right now, Microsoft will push this to all Windows 11 machines in the coming weeks.
Microsoft’s move to enable ads in the Windows 11 Start menu follows similar promotional spots in the Windows 10 lock screen and Start menu. Microsoft also started testing ads inside the File Explorer of Windows 11 last year before disabling the experiment and saying the test was “not intended to be published externally.” Hopefully that experiment remains very much an experiment.
When your business model revolves around indefinitely maintaining backwards compatibility with every weird bug and quirk your enterprise customers baked into their workflows back in 1983 while also trying to be on the cutting-edge and constantly overhauling your products, it’s hard to develop and maintain a modern operating system that isn’t a completely horrible shitshow.
Maybe they should branch Windows like in the old times of 9x and NT.
Keep a backwards compatible version for companies and create a new clean OS from scratch like Apple did with OS X.
Yeah, they do the compatibility mode thing for older apps, but it seems like a lot of work to maintain separate shims for each older version that still have compatibility problems when you could just refactor everything with a reasonable amount of legacy support, and push all the users of really old software to start using VM instances of their old OS’s. Surely these enormous financial institutions running bespoke financial apps using a custom COBOL interpreter that only works correctly in Windows 95, have the wherewithal to load up a VM.