Microsoft Frantically Downplays Plan to Put Ads in Windows Email App

When Microsoft committed to developing Windows as a service, it declared that users could look forward to an unending stream of feature improvements and updates over time as the OS evolved. 

The company has kept that promise for most of the past three years each new major Windows update has introduced its own set of features and improvements. Recent developments, however, have pointed in a different direction.

Original image by Aggiornamenti Lumia

We’re starting to think the Big Idea Person presumably responsible for pitching and developing new Windows 10 features may actually hate Microsoft.

Microsoft’s next big idea is, or possibly was, ads. Specifically, embedding ads into the Windows 10 Mail application that comes free with the OS.

Now, in the time since this story started breaking, Microsoft has reversed course. It now claims that this was a simple A/B test that was never meant to be exposed to Windows Insiders. 


Claptrap. We know so, because Microsoft published an entire FAQ for people who saw ads in Windows Mail and wanted to know what the heck was going on. Microsoft has taken the FAQ offline, but fortunately Google cache still had a copy. 

We’ve also screenshotted the relevant text (Click on the image below to see a full-size version).