Last weekend a windows insider user created quite a stir on Twitter when he posted that he saw an ad in Windows 11 File Explorer. This ad was promoting Microsoft Editor, a browser extension for checking grammatical errors and spelling.
This banner ad was craftily integrated into the UI of the windows client-side application. This means that one day you could be searching within your windows documents and could potentially see an ad, which is normally seen on browsers.
This “finding” caused a lot of anger and disgust online, as users of Microsoft saw it as an invasion of “privacy” if that is still a thing. It was also seen as greed, the whole idea of having a client-side experience is to be disconnected from the internet and the online arena. Being served ads while experiencing windows just seems a bit off.
Microsoft quickly spotted the news and released a little PR to clean up the mess. It’s still not enough as they stated that the banner ad was a test and wasn’t supposed to be public. They also deactivated the feature which was limited to early insider users built for windows 11.
This is not the first time that Microsoft has tinkered with such a move. They have done already in 2016 and 2017 with Windows 10 where they ran a series of ads inside file explorer for OneDrive.
The fact that they have been actively testing such a feature, means that they either have something up their sleeves for the future, or they were just testing things to see how the crowd will react given how immersed we are in advertising. Regardless, it’s still not a move that will be widely received, especially for hardcore users.
