I think people have a bit of a popular misconception about the Explorer advertising thing. What's happening is that MS is adding a banner to Explorer advertising paid OneDrive subscriptions.
I totally agree that it's massively inappropriate, but I do think that most people are imagining third-party advertising which is not what's happening - a lot of people might not consider the current situation to be an "ad" necessarily since it is pushing a subscription for OneDrive, a Microsoft product that you already have installed. It's more of an in-app purchase kind of offer.
If this is all it is, then it is not unprecedented. I remember that Windows 95 did something similar with MSN (which at that time was also a dialup service).
Yeah, I recently installed Windows 95 in a VM to run some old software and I was actually quite surprised at how hard it pushes MSN - the "connect to the internet" wizard it presents basically asks if you're on a LAN and, if you say no, tells you to call MSN to sign up.
As-is, I don't think it's a big deal. This is a slippery slope though. Look at what cable television has become. You pay for the product and they shove advertisements down your throat. Satellite radio is doing the same thing.
They don't necessarily make it easy to turn off all the weird ad-type-stuff, but they don't make it impossible either. A quick tour through settings on install can get rid of it all.
There is still one absolutely heinous crime though - your system comes preinstalled with Minecraft and Candy Crush (and a couple other bullshit softares), and if you uninstall them, Windows 10 will automatically reinstall them. You have to do esoteric shit in the registry editor to disable this. It infuriates me.
>There is still one absolutely heinous crime though - your system comes preinstalled with Minecraft and Candy Crush (and a couple other bullshit softares), and if you uninstall them, Windows 10 will automatically reinstall them.
That was fixed in Creators Update: it now remembers uninstalled default applications.
I recently did a fresh install of creators update on my laptop. Not only does it have crapware bundled that I had to uninstall, it has placeholders for apps from store which is literally advertisement. I also got edge ads when I was downloading other browser. I preemptively disabled all other "suggestions", but saying that windows 10 doesn't have ads is a blatant lie.
I formatted a few weeks ago. After installing Chrome and opening it, a popover appeared over the Edge icon in my toolbar explaining how much faster it is. I've also seen a few OneDrive ads.
