Recommendations and App Promotions sound an awful lot like ads to me. Showing me things I didn't ask for that you wish to sell me....that's called advertising and I don't care what dumb name you call it, they're still ads. Show me only what I actually want to see - the stuff I explicitly choose to pin to my personalized Start menu.

And this feature was implemented into an OS you have to pay for. 💀💀💀

Microsoft: "We're sorry, this is all just a misunderstanding. We thought you were too stupid to notice."

So, Microsoft recognized and responded to all the complaints by removing the feature that people were objecting to.

Resulting headline: "Microsoft is trying to hide the evidence that they were thinking of doing that thing we hated! Hate them harder!"

Do people want companies to just ignore complaints completely because there's no way to satisfy anyone anyway?

Too late. I've already switched all four of my home PCs to Linux Mint.

wipes out evidence

I am certain it can be re-enabled with regedit

It’s the first move to making it normalized. It’s the “toes in the water” stage of advertising in your OS.

Why does this article use the term "real ads" every time instead of just "ads"? Is this just weird or does it have a technical meaning?

Microsoft is dead to me.

Maybe if after a disastrous enough reception of Windows 11 they might make a Windows 12 that actually cares about being more palatable to the users, like they did with Windows 7 following the disaster that was Vista.

But I think they'll most probably only move to meet us halfway like they did with Windows 10 following the other disaster that was 8. Where they replaced a major irritant with another and then slowly stacked more and more irritants with updates thereafter. They are too addicted to the revenue from data harvesting to give it up.

What's a "real" ad? They use that term multiple times and I can't imagine how it is different from a normal ad or if the adds that the start menu already had were somehow different from normal ads.

Better to just wipe out Windows entirely and be done with it.

They aren't ads. They are "App Promotions".

W11 is such a great example of how out-of-touch Microsoft's management and shareholders are. Its market share is tiny compared to W10 and is actively decreasing and they think pulling stunts like this is going to be beneficial in some way. Like even if you follow the usual routine of enshittification, they've missed the entire part where they expand their userbase first before making things worse.

MS needs a leadership shakeup so badly.