Microsoft is currently advertising some of its products in a pop-up exit menu that appears when a user clicks on the Windows 11 Start menu icon. This new Windows 11 “feature” was discovered by Windows enthusiast Albacore. shared A few screenshots of ad notifications in the “Accounts” dropdown.

Screenshots show that Microsoft is promoting its OneDrive file hosting service and asking users to create or complete their Microsoft account. Reactors on social media reacted negatively to Redmond’s decision to display advertising messages in the Start menu.

Some said Windows 11 “got worse with every update”, while others added that this was an odd choice given that “half the Start menu is already reserved for suggestions.”

BleepingComputer also tried to reproduce this on several Windows 11 systems, but we did not get any ads. This points to an A/B testing experiment trying to measure the success of such a “feature” on devices running Windows Insider builds, or the company’s serving of such ads to a limited number of customers.

File Explorer, Start menu, etc. Ads

Redmond has previously placed advertisements in the user interface of Microsoft Office programs or other Windows programs. In August, the company ran an ad for Microsoft 365 Family subscriptions, with more than $28 off a 3-month family plan subscription for Office 2021 customers.

A few months ago, in March, Windows Insiders started seeing ads for some Microsoft products (especially Microsoft Editor) in File Explorer. File Explorer also received publicity in 2016, when Redmond used it to run an ad for OneDrive.

Two years ago, Windows 10’s Wordpad showed ads promoting free Microsoft Office web apps in the menu bar. Microsoft was also caught advertising the Microsoft Edge web browser in the Windows 10 Start menu while users were searching for competing browsers.

Unfortunately, some of these ad tests also had unintended consequences: Microsoft accidentally broke the Windows Start menu and taskbar while testing Microsoft Teams ads on Windows Insider build systems. When contacting BleepingComputer earlier today, a Microsoft representative was not available for comment. Source