>What kind of sick people come up with this stuff?

Well, Microsoft in this case, and companies like it. They're out to maximize the profit they can extract from their users, so they will do so. People aren't leaving their products in large enough quantities for them to stop doing it.

Which makes this a good opportunity to re-evaluate whether you really need any of their products, or at least see if you can reduce your dependency on anti-user companies.

Don't forget the other side of it: we as programmers, designers, PMs, etc. have a lot more concentrated power than end users do. One of many good reasons to unionize is the ability to set professional standards.

Professional standards have a hard time against monetary incentives. We should work towards making dark patterns simply illegal and removing those incentives.

Edit: AND unionize AND vote for proper labor rights that make unions unnecessary. I just mean to say that it's better to remove the problem rather than trying to "battle" it with more force.

This.

For people in the software biz I think being allowed to make quality products is one of the most important aspects of our working conditions, particularly for our social standing in the long term.

Outlook.com isn’t even a good product if you ignore the ads. Their extremely strict anti spam policies make it very hard to deliver email to their customers.

Gmail has the same "problem". This is a concern for you, the person sending mail to these people, because the people you're trying to send mail to are probably going to complain to you about how they're unable to receive your messages.

I know this is just anecdotal, but IME gmail might send you to spam (and seems to at least sometimes learn not to do so for people you have exchanged mail with before) but MS will simply reject all mail from you if you are a small player without a long-standing deditacted /24 without any way for the recipient to get the mail.

> What kind of sick people come up with this stuff?

Probably a lot of the fine guys and gals on this forum, or people we would all work with. Lets be real here...

doesn't make them any less sick or vile.

This is unhelpful. Whether we like it or not, these are actions driven by incentives, not by some sort of sadism.

We simply need to change the incentives. Calling people names just has zero effect on the situation.

I'm not going to claim that it's right in this situation, but calling people names and social ostracism is a very effective way to modify the behaviors of people. In no small part because people dislike it and it modifies incentives.

> is a very effective way

Is it? I think this an overstatement.

Who's calling people names?

How do you propose to change the incentives? The incentives are money. Surely you have something more helpful than whatever you wanted to accomplish with your retort.

If I told you to your face that you were "sick and vile" for trying to do your job to the best of your ability - without a hint of play or irony - you would probably complain to HR. Name-calling doesn't have to entail the use of nouns.

> you would probably complain to HR

HR are sick and vile

Sadism for financial incentives, just another day of user abuse at Microsoft.

There is also a third choice, you can get Office 365 and remove ads completely. Companies cannot be expected to give away services for free, so if you're not directly sending them money, somebody else is sending them money for you to use it.

Paying for Office 365 does not remove ads. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/how-d...

So you linked to a random answers article (not a good sign) which in fact isn't even about the product being discussed (it's Word, not Outlook). In addition the ad they mentioned isn't an ad at all, it's a resume assistant feature offered as part of the linked in service and doesn't show up unless you open that feature.

I use office 365 and I've never seen an ad (and I would drop microsoft immediately if I did, they are on a very short leash already, although they don't show 3rd party ads their software bags and annoys the f* out of you and makes every effort to steal you data, even on a business subscription, but I digress)

The linked thread talks about a "home" version, and I have (I assume) a business version, though I dont remember seeing an option, that may be why

Windows itself is full of this. Microsoft is clearly not impressed by your thin ‘would drop immediately if I did’ threats.

I have never seen an ad in Windows. Where exactly do they appear?

In the Start Menu? Have you never seen the ads for Candy Crush?

No, never! And I'm not joking. What kind of Windows you folks have? Or it's maybe country dependent???

I just checked my copy of Word, and honestly that doesn't feel like an ad. Seems like a pretty cool feature for a lot of people, and your link shows how you can disable it through settings.

It's not asking for money nor does it save your personal information, it's just a Github CoPilot for resumes.

Less visually intrusive is exactly the point. The bastards want to trick you into thinking the ads are your emails.

Which choice results in ads being fully eliminated by ublock and pi-hole?

isn't this web based? in which case the obvious choice is ad blocker