When a user clicks the user icon in the Windows 11 start menu, a sign-out flyout menu with Microsoft’s product promotions appears.
Albacore, a Windows fan, uploaded many images of the advertisement alerts in the Accounts flyout, where this new Windows 11 “feature” was first seen.
The pictures demonstrate how Microsoft urges users to register or finish their Microsoft accounts while promoting the OneDrive file hosting service.
Microsoft’s choice to include commercial messages in the start menu was met with criticism from those responding to this on social media.
Others remarked that this is a strange choice considering that “half of the Start Menu is for suggestions” anyhow, while another claimed that Windows 11 is “becoming worse with each and every update it gets.”
This suggests that either the firm is promoting such advertising to a certain group of consumers or that an A/B testing trial is being conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of such a “feature” on devices running Windows Insider versions.
Microsoft has already placed advertisements into the user interface of Windows or Microsoft Office applications.
Office 2021 subscribers were shown advertisements in August for Microsoft 365 Family subscriptions with discounts of more than $28 for a 3-month Family plan subscription.
Advertisements for various Microsoft products, including Microsoft Editor, began appearing for Windows Insiders in the File Explorer app in March, many months earlier.
When Redmond utilised File Explorer to display OneDrive advertisements in 2016, it was also laced with marketing messages.
In its menu bar two years ago, the Wordpad application for Windows 10 displayed advertisements for Microsoft’s free Office web apps.
Additionally, Microsoft’s Microsoft Edge web browser was shown to be promoted in the Windows 10 Start Menu when users looked for other browsers.
Sadly, several of these advertising tests also had unanticipated results: While testing Microsoft Teams advertising on Windows Insider build systems, Microsoft unintentionally damaged the Windows Start Menu and Taskbar.
Microsoft is experimenting with flyouts from the Start menu that contain messages encouraging users to join up for a Microsoft account or utilise OneDrive. With Windows 11 Build 25227, the promotional items appear to have first been available. Numerous people have voiced their complaints over the prompts.