Ads in a paid Microsoft App

I have moved four businesses to free software and only gotten great feedback. I honestly have no idea why anyone would pay for a Microsoft product when Foss alternatives are better in every way.

Name them, I dare you.
- Two optical shops, a rehab clinic, and a grant funding service. No specifics on the internet.
- The 4 businesses or the free alternative to onedrive?
Is there anything that offers the same amount of storage as Onedrive? I pay about £80 a year and get 6 TB across 6 email addresses. One is mine and the others are for family.
To add to that, they all get the Office suite included too, which is 100% compatible with whatever random office files other normies send them.
- For that much storage, you'd be better to self host. The initial cost would probably be around 3 months of your current bill, and open office is free.
- 6 TB for $20? Man I haven't looked at hardware prices in a while.
And then you have my company that now shut down our nextcloud instance because "it is insecure" and moved all files to OneDrive.
- Ouch, the Nextcloud I'm usually stuck with only has an 8mb per second transfer rate which is annoying but at least we have it.
I've been gradually de-googling and de-microsofting, but it's a slow process. OneDrive was one of the only ways to get my files out of Google takeout because they're so huge. The direct downloads are rate limited, and have a high error rate, making it almost impossible to download massive Google takeout files before they expire.

Interleaved in the actual file listing too for maximum accidental clicking likelihood. Fuck you Microshaft

This isn't mildly infuriating, it's fucking enraging! Fuck the robber barons!

This is infuriating, but not mildly

Hahaha hahahahahahahaha, how dare they? Really, who do they think they are? Bought and paid for product, but you still get inline ads disguised as a file? Couldn't be more obvious how much they hate their customer and their time.

Spotify put a location targeted ad on a podcast I was listening to. Both beginning and end.
They're all cunts.

Paying for a product does not prevent enshitification

Amazing catch.

Normally I'm skeptical of this. If it's a popup saying "signup for Microsoft 365" or whatever, I don't consider that the same type of thing, and a lot of complaints about ads in Microsoft environments have been of this nature. Those don't necessarily have the implication of exposure to a 3rd party ad market and tracking and so on.

But this is a pretty clear smoking gun, regular old ad.

Microsoft has no shame about this kind of thing. They’ve been full steam ahead on the enshittification train for at least ten years now

I feel like some of the hate for Microsoft products is disproportionate, like people are looking for things to dislike and ignoring the weak aspects of rival products or equivalent FOSS software, but this really is indefensibly egregious and greedy.

Google's shitty practices with Google Photos was my last straw. I self host now with a cloud backup for a small fee.

Fuck all this. No one should charge this much for these kinds of services.

I guess I don't use photos enough, what did they do?
- Gmail, Drive, and Photos used to be three services that aggressively pushed you to put all your data into them, gave you 10gb each, and in the case of photos offered a nice featured viewer.
  Then, they decided to consolidate account storage. Now these services all share a pool of 10gb, and every high quality photo or heavy email from your 10 year old inbox is adding up.
  And then, having enshittified it, they start selling you Google backup.
  This isn't working
  Google One. Still not that popular...
  Okay now let's have constant nags across all three services, persistently, that warn you you are running out after like 60 or 70 percent full.
  I was done when I heard them almost get my girlfriend at the time, as well as my parents with this dark pattern bullshit. I backed up their data immediate and cleared their devices, setup syncthing and started working on hosting an alternative. I hadn't even learned about immich yet.
Same here, but I built an inexpensive home server. Immich is an amazing option
- Immich, obsidian, ollama, Plex...
  Barely scratching the surface but yea, I host everything.

Does this work? Do people click on it? Maybe by accident, but I can't imagine looking for pictures of my cat and thinking, "Thanks microsoft. I do need to wash my hands more".

Snug fit for an ad 🥰

Crap. Have to use this for work. Fucking criminals - sick of the enshitification.

I guess they figured if it works for Windows why not try it in other paid products?

One of these things is not like the others...

Is this the iOS app? My app looks nothing like that and I've never seen an ad on either account while using it.

It's Microsoft 365 on Android. I only saw this and one other ad so far.