This is where having a strong minded CEO comes into play. You literally have to have someone who can say "although this makes us less money, this is correct approach". In an organization whose entire purpose is to make money, very few people have the authority to make that call.
That's the wrong metric; you should look at the LTV. Guess what: pissing off users reduces your LTV significantly. If their users are too dumb or tasteless to care then they deserve each other.
It's simplicity itself to attribute the revenue growth, and very difficult to link ads to negative sentiment leading to abandonment.
No doubt they see Apple's relentless iCloud spamming as validation, but it's grating to get spam from an OS that you already paid for.
The next step for me here will be migrating clients off of Windows on their machines too.
For example the reason I keep using Linux on my machines is not because the OS works better for me -- it definitely does not. Things are crashing or doing stupid things and the entire ecosystem is completely disjoint and not integrated very well.
The reason I use Linux on my desktops is because I know I own the machine and it is doing my bidding (mostly, if we forget about the hardware part...) It is knowledge that if there is a problem there is a path to fix it -- it just depends on how much effort I am willing to expend.
Every time something like this ships out, guaranteed just about every CVP fields angry/annoyed/exasperated complaints about it.