Microsoft's big Windows 8 secret? It's actually about advertising.

They even put ads in Minesweeper. Minesweeper!<p>I used to pop open Minesweeper and play a game in 30 seconds. Now it takes 30 seconds to get through loading screens and all this "Xbox live integration" crap. I hate it. Who really wants "achievements"? I just want a fast loading game that I can throw on a USB stick.<p>For all the improvements they've made in the Desktop space, the direction they're heading with Metro is so awful for power users.

I really think this issue is overblown. Someone could literally use the Weather app for years without realizing there's an ad in it, for instance, because you have to scroll <i>way</i> over to the right to see it (past the daily forecast, the weekly forecast, the hourly forecast, national weather maps, and a historical weather chart). Since I typically care about the local weather over a short period, I <i>never</i> see the ads in the app.

It's actually about services. By having services like Xbox music, video, and live come bundled with the system they're trying to increase subscriptions and purchases. Ads no doubt will play a role but this article exaggerates it.

<i>Every day, we’re bombarded with advertising. Billboards. TV. Internet. Flyers. Cereal. Shoes. Advertising comes in every form and flavor, and it’s impossible to get away from.</i><p>This isn't true. I seldom see billboards (I live in the city, looking at the traffic is more than enough); I don't have a TV, I don't get flyers, don't eat cereal, and use adblock in my browser. It's very very rare for me to see ads outside of free apps for my android devices, and those generally go away once I buy the non-free versions.<p>I do not expect an OS I pay for to show me ads, and I'll reject any such OS as maliciously attacking my attention span.

&#62; Ten years ago Microsoft was in trouble for bundling Internet Explorer, but now bundling applications laden with advertising is okay?<p>How are those two even correlated?<p>Adding ads to your product is not breaking anti-trust laws.

I'm predicting Metro's primary home screen will switch over to M$ ads within 3 years to match the XBox.

All these changes from the traditional Windows DE to this new thing they have with Windows 8 prompts the inevitable question: What are they going to do for corporate and businesses? Are they going to try to push the same interface for the typical office working environment?

Yes if you've seen Xbox music app, its a big advert which is annoying.

Sci fi authors have, for decades now, envisioned a future with ubiquitous, pervasive advertising. That doesn't mean we shouldn't fight it, but we shouldn't really be surprised....

Ads in desktop software have seemed on their way for a long time, but the only high-profile bundled-with-the-OS example I can think of before this is Apple's Sherlock that came with Mac OS 8.5 and 9.<p>That was a bit of a special case, for similar reasons to the ones in Metro apps. Search engines had ads anyway, so ads in a program that gave you search results in a desktop app wasn't a huge leap. (There was still significant backlash, though.) And ads in mobile apps are fairly commonplace, MS has just gone a step further integrating them into their first-party ones. Which is a curious decision—how much revenue are we really talking about?<p>I also feel like there's an interesting parallel between Sherlock—a specialized program for getting results from the internet—and "apps" in the mobile sense. They're both ways to get around at-the-time-limited web user experiences. Desktop apps like Sherlock, though, did not last particularly long as the web itself got more usable.