The software vendor has for months been playing around with putting ads – or at least in the case of the Start Menu, notifications – about its services in the operating system as well as the Bing search engine, PCs, and other products.

Talk of such notifications in the Start Menu began circulating in November 2022. In March, with the KB5023778 preview build, Microsoft began sending them out to a few users, with the promise the practice would be more widely deployed in the following months.

[theregister.com...]

Since this stuff started with Win8 it has been around long enough the "boiling frog" principle might be at work. Perhaps it is time to go full ads to force everyone into the subscription mode (which will eventually force even more ads)?

Linix is looking mighty good to some out there. :)