With the latest update, Microsoft made good on its promise or threat: it places advertisements in the well-known Start menu of the Windows 11 operating system. According to the document accompanying the new update, “some Microsoft Store apps will appear in the Recommended section of the Start menu.”
The cumulative update preview of the 2024-04 Cumulative Update Preview, i.e. the cumulative update with the version number KB5036980, has already reached all Windows 11 users, and the Start menu ads are also coming with it. Since it is only a preview for now, users can decide whether to install it or not. But this does not mean much, since as soon as the update becomes mandatory, Microsoft’s own advertisements will eventually arrive on these hidden but important parts of computers.
As the company emphasizes, the applications appearing in the advertisements come from a small, selected team of developers, and with the new marketing channel they only want to help users discover some great applications. True, they also revealed how to turn it off: Settings > Personalization > Start menu item, then you have to click on the “Show tips, app promotions and other recommendations” option.
The change comes shortly after Microsoft’s general manager of advertising and web services, Mikhail Parakhin he also publicly promised to “make the Start menu great again.” However, endowing it with ads probably wasn’t what Windows fans wanted. Especially after the company harassed Windows users with ads last year, encouraging them to sign up for Teams Essentials in the Get Help app originally used for support and troubleshooting. But in the past, there have also been examples of users encountering ads in File Explorer, which were quickly removed due to massively negative reviews. And of course, let’s not forget the ways to encourage people to switch to Bing…
