Would You Use Ad-Supported Windows?

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet reported earlier this week that Microsoft was thinking of offering an Ad-Supported version of Windows. A blog post by John Carroll offers some reasons why Ad-Supported Windows makes sense. From the article: '4. More revenue through targeted marketing: The holy grail of marketing is to target an audience with the sort of ads that most appeal to them. Sending a bunch of male programmers advertisements for breast enlargement isn't terribly useful. Sending a bunch of male programmers advertisements for a four hour extended version of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan is useful.' Is there any situation where you can see yourself open to the possibility of using an Ad-Supported operating system?"

Re:OMG!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Kirk's son doesn't die until Search for Spock. Get it right.

Only if its free

[Anonymous Coward]

I would be willing to use it if there is no cost to me other than putting up with the occasional add. And it better be "occasional". A constant "toolbar" with seziure enducing "SHOOT THE MONKEY" banner ads would no doubt drive me insane. No cost savings is worth that.

Re:Free Windows?

[AKAImBatman]

Believe it or not, I remember once I saw there was an experiment in which a company (I do not remember if it was Dell) gave away free computers to the users which where add suported (this was more than 8 years ago).

It was FreePC.com, IIRC. They were a separate startup that thought they would make it big by offering a PC with a real resolution of 1024x768, but an effective resolution of 800x600. (The rest was ad space.) They also provided the dial up service. Many people (myself included) signed up for the offer. Unsurprisingly, the company went under long before most people (again, including myself) actually received their PCs.

BTW, they had a monthly charge if you didn't watch enough ads. I think the problem they had was that they couldn't line up enough advertisers to make a profit, and they couldn't charge the users for actually looking at their placeholders.

Re:Free Windows?

[Gabey]

I actually received one of these and gave it to my parents. They didn't seem to mind the ads although they didn't use it that often. After the company went under they ended up letting everyone keep the computers.

If I remember right, it was a compaq badged machine with horrible internals (these things couldn't have cost much to begin with) -- cyrix CPUs, onboard everything, etc. But hey, free computer and dialup access.

Partially ad-enabled already

[steve_l]

There already a fair few bits of advertising hook ins.

-the sign up to MSN/AOL stuff on an XP home system
-default search through MSN; pre XP SP2 that would even bring in popups
-the 'buy more music like this' hint when you browse a folder full of MP3s.
-the 'print your photos right now' option when you upload photos
-the 'get a digital ID' button on the Outlook security panel

So its there, its there, just no blatantly in your face.

Re:Hoth!

[Frangible]

Obesity = increased number of white adipose tissue cells. More WAT = more aromatase. Aromatase converts testosterone to its metabolite 17-beta-estradiol (estrogen). Thus obesity = more estrogen. Estrogen acts on breast tissue to stimulate growth. Testosterone and DHT normally counteract this but when they're getting turned into estrogen... In short, obesity can lead to gynecomastia, and is the most common factor associated with gynecomastia in males. Usually this goes away with weight loss for the most part though.

Re:Free Windows?

[corbettw]

What if it is fed to you from a central and unblockable IP?

Then add an entry to your routing table for that subnet, pointing to 127.0.0.1, with a daemon listening on the right port and responding with the equivalent of a blank page.

Not until it's cracked.

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything a hacker can make, a hacker can break. Until thus time, no I wouldn't use it.

Re:Not yet ad-supported

[nine-times]

I don't know if it's common practice anymore, but both IE and Netscape used to charge for bookmark placement. What do you think the browser wars were about? Why do you think they fought over the market for a product they were giving away?

AFAIK, they were fighting over the default homepage, search engines, bookmarks.