If you use Microsoft 365, you may use the Office apps on your desktop devices that are part of the subscription package.
If you do, you may have noticed a new button in the title bar of any Office app that you launch on your device. It says “Upgrade your plan” and has a red dot attached to it to get your attention.
When you click on it, you get an option to upgrade to a new plan that costs more. Microsoft says that this upgrade gives customers “more AI usage and exclusive Copilot features”.
While you can close the window that opened, you may notice that the advertising button remains attached to the title bar. To make matters worse, Microsoft is not giving you any option to hide or remove it, let alone configure that something like it should never be shown again.
Someone at Microsoft must have thought that the upselling in the apps is a great way to increase revenue. The company has probably the numbers to back this up. While you anger some customers, you may get others to upgrade their plan and increase your bottom line in the process.
However, shoving an ad in the face of paying customers may not be the brightest of ideas, at least not this way. Microsoft has displayed ads in various products, including Windows, in the past years. All in an effort to push products, make additional sales or get users to upgrade.
It is probably one of the reasons why Windows has a less than stellar reputation at this point.
The strategy is always the same: add the ad in a location that gets lots of eyes, ignore the voice that questions the idea and also any user comment that is critical of the addition. Then, when things get too heated, remove it and claim that something like this will never happen again.
For anyone fed up with this, LibreOffice, a free and ad-free Office suite, may be a suitable replacement.