Advertisements are displayed in the Windows 11 sign-out menu by Microsoft. When a user signs out of their account in Windows 11, the sign-out flyout menu that appears after clicking on the user icon in the start menu contains advertisements for various Microsoft goods.
This new “feature” of Windows 11 was found by the Windows enthusiast known as Albacore, who then published many screenshots of advertisement notifications that appeared in the Accounts flyout. The screenshots demonstrate that Microsoft encourages users to sign up for or finish setting up their Microsoft accounts as well as promoting the use of the OneDrive file hosting service.
People on social media had a negative reaction to Redmond’s choice to display advertising messages in the start menu, which was one of the reasons why Redmond made the decision. Others pointed out that this is an odd decision considering that “half of the Start Menu is for suggestions” anyway, despite the fact that Windows 11 is “growing worse with each and every update it gets.”
We have attempted to reproduce this issue on various Windows 11 machines, but we did not receive any advertisements as a result. This suggests that either the firm is doing an A/B testing trial to determine the efficacy of such a “feature” on devices that are running Windows Insider versions, or the company is pushing such advertisements to a select group of customers.
There are advertisements on the Start Menu, the File Explorer, and other places. There have been previous instances in which Redmond integrated advertisements into the user interface of Microsoft Office or other Windows applications.
Advertisements for Microsoft 365 Family subscriptions were shown to customers of Office 2021 during the month of August. These advertisements offered discounts of more than $28 for a three-month Family plan subscription. Windows Insiders began seeing advertisements for other Microsoft products (including Microsoft Editor) in the File Explorer application several months earlier, in March. In 2016, Redmond exploited File Explorer to display advertisements for OneDrive, which resulted in the browser being injected with promotional messages. In the menu bar of the Windows 10 Wordpad application, advertisements promoting Microsoft’s free Office web apps were displayed approximately two years ago.
Additionally, Microsoft was found to be advertising their Microsoft Edge web browser in the Windows 10 Start Menu when users searched for alternative browsers. This was discovered by users. Unfortunately, some of these tests of advertisements also had unforeseen repercussions. For example, Microsoft destroyed the Windows Start Menu and Taskbar by accident while testing advertisements for Microsoft Teams on PCs that were running Windows Insider versions.
