Microsoft is bringing ads to the Windows 10 Start menu, just like in Windows 11

If you have been sticking with Windows 10 in order to avoid some of the more irritating aspects of Windows 11, there's some bad news. Just as Microsoft has managed to find seemingly endless ways to lever advertising into Windows 11, even as the operating system is in its death throes the company is doing the same with Windows 10.

Windows 11's Start menu has been home to an increasing number of ads, sometimes in the form of blatant promotions of other Microsoft products and services, sometimes packaged as friendly app "recommendations". In the latest beta build of Windows 10, it is clear that Microsoft is planning to backport this particular annoyance to the older OS.

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In Windows 10 Beta build 19045.4842, Microsoft has introduced a number of changes to the Start menu such as relocating the account management button. This change may seem innocuous enough, but there is more. The relocating is accompanied by an attempt by Microsoft to promote its Microsoft 365 services -- just as it has been doing in Windows 11 for some time already.

Click the moved account management button, and the menu that appears has also been redesigned. Significantly, the menu displays information about the status of your Microsoft 365 subscription. If you don't have a subscription, this fact will be highlighted in what it is hard to describe as anything other than an ad.

The changes were spotted, as so many are, by Phantom of Earth who posted on X:

Quite why Microsoft felt the need to use the Windows 10 Start menu for self-promotion in this way is not clear. The number of new subscriptions that may result from the ads will hardly serve to outweigh the large numbers of Windows 10 hold-outs who will simply be pissed at the change.

Image credit: Monticelllo / Dreamstime.com