Ads in Windows

Advertisements in the operating system itself, what's next? Putting up billboards in people's homes?

Earlier in June, on Thursday the 12th, I saw an ad for WhatsApp in the Windows start menu on my work computer. It was a moment which has stuck with me as symbolic for all the issues in the digital age. My employer has paid dearly for hardware and software so that I can do my job as effectively as possible, and still Microsoft greedily inserts advertisements into its product. Worse still, for the version this happened on was not just the default ’Home’ version of Windows 11, but the premium ‘Pro’ version. In what other industry would this kind of behaviour be acceptable?

This post is partly a vehicle for me to express frustration with the absolute state of advertising in 2025, but also a wake up call for readers to realise that things could so easily be better. It was not that long ago that advertising at the operating system level was unthinkable; indeed for me it was precisely 18 days ago. It would not take much to go back to a time when Google Search reliably worked, when we were all blissfully unaware of Raid Shadow Legends and Manscaped, when sport stadiums had the same name for generations. It does not have to be this way. It was not always this way. But it is also a chance for me to whine more broadly about digitality.

Robert Solow joked in the 80’s that you could see the computer age everywhere but productivity statistics. The same is more or less true about software and digitalisation. It is everywhere but it has not made things better. As I explained in a previous post, a good example of how making thigs digital can backfire is job applications. Using supposedly neutral computers instead of supposedly biased humans results in a more arbitrary recruitment process as you cannot outsource judgement to machines; a generalisable conclusion. Computers and software constructs systems without the flexibility and integrity of human-led systems.

Digitalisation also opens up new and revolutionary new vectors for advertising. The reason why there are ads everywhere now, and that the cancer is spreading to operating systems, is that there is infinite space in the cloud. There are only so many billboards in a town, only so much space in a metro car to plaster, only so many minutes in an hour a tv-watcher will put up with. But you can expand a page down vertically as much as you want, or perhaps as much as you need to fit a few more ads. This ever-expanding torrent of ads was enabled by digitalisation, so add that to its list of drawbacks.

Because Microsoft is in the software business it is familiar with how the digital world works, and as it has only one competitor in the desktop operating system business it does not fear alienating its customer base with cheap and tacky ways to squeeze a few more cents out of its products. I’m not going to lie and say that I was shocked and appalled by seeing OS-level advertising, I’ve been writing critically about advertising on the blog for years. Well I was not shocked but certainly appalled, yet another nadir has been reached, and the descent has not slowed let alone stopped. We are a few short months away from your wifi-enabled fridge suggesting you recipes courtesy of Nestlé.

Not to go full Luddite here, but when we develop systems critical for society with the help of private, profit seeking firms rather than through some kind of government function then we invite the possibility of advertising creeping into routine social and community life unintentionally. Booking a doctors appointment or figuring out your closest polling station should be insulated from advertising, but as long as there are no areas which are designated as off limits the membrane through which we conduct our online lives will advertise at us. Commercial logic does not care about being proper and respectful of the private sphere, that has to be imposed from the outside, and until we as a society start treating a home PC or personal smart phone operating systems as an extension of the home in terms of privacy we will never be rid of intrusive ads. Much of modern life requires being online and interacting with the digital on a daily basis, so there are endless opportunities for companies to advertise at us. If we want any sanctity from corporate messaging anywhere we need to put pressure on legislators to do something about this.

If you liked this post you can read a previous post the Iran-Israel war here or the rest of my writings here. I also have a section for longer reads I call essays here, I particularly recommend my essay on Silicon Valley and AI called 'No Acoustic Guitars in Silicon Valley'. It'd mean a lot to me if you recommended the blog to a friend or coworker. Come back next Monday for a new post!

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I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.

Written by Karl Johansson

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Cover photo by Athena Sandrini from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson