Why should Microsoft stop excessive advertising in its services?

Although Microsoft’s various services and products are highly popular among users, there is no doubt that excessive advertising in these products is one of their big and unavoidable problems. This issue is more visible in the four services of the American technology giant, which we will discuss in the following section.

1. Windows 11 start menu

The Windows 11 start menu is a section that users of this operating system enter at least once a day, but instead of your favorite applications and services, in this section you will find more software from your computer manufacturer and installation links for recommended applications such as Office, Prime Video, Tik Tok, You face Spotify and WhatsApp.

It is also not possible to synchronize applications with the Windows 11 start menu, and it seems that this issue follows Microsoft’s policy to display maximum advertisements in the mentioned section. In Windows 11 build 23435, Microsoft has also added a relatively large screen to the Start menu section that displays the benefits of signing in with a Microsoft account. This page is actually a big advertisement for Microsoft accounts, which is the company’s way of collecting user information.

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2. Bing

Microsoft has a special interest in promoting the Bing search engine. This issue is somewhat understandable considering the addition of the company’s proprietary artificial intelligence chatbot to the mentioned engine, but the display of Bing ads in places such as the Swiftkey keyboard in iOS is a bit annoying. Although you can remove the Bing icon from the mentioned keyboard, this icon is still displayed in other Apple products. Also, the way the Bing icon is placed on the keyboard is such that the possibility of accidentally touching it while typing is very high.

The Bing shortcut has also been added to the Edge browser, and placing its icon next to the browser menu icon has made this icon become more of a nuisance than a useful feature. Of course, you can remove the mentioned icon by disabling the Discover option from the settings section of the Edge browser.

3. Xbox dashboard

The dashboard of the Xbox Series X console is another area that is full of Microsoft ads. In this section, in addition to advertising new games, you will also see Game Pass service ads. These advertisements are located in the second row and under the latest applications and games section. Although you can customize the Xbox dashboard, it would have been better for Microsoft to show only your games by default.

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4. Edge browser

The Edge browser had fewer features than Chrome when it used HTML code, and this simplicity was considered one of its main strengths, but this is not the case with the new version of Edge. Now, with the increasing popularity of Edge, Microsoft has made the most of the opportunity and displayed as many ads as possible for its various products in this browser. For example, only in the sidebar of this browser, Bing, Office, and other ads can be seen.

Will there be changes coming?

Fortunately, there are ways such as the Windows Insider and Xbox Insider programs through which users can give feedback on Microsoft products to the company. If the number of these feedbacks is enough, we can hope that Microsoft will also reduce the amount of advertisements in its various products and services.