That's an interesting dividing line, and I think also needs to be compared against big companies setting opt-in/out defaults or the "Yes/Maybe later" patterns. What I find curious is that there's been the opportunity for spam for a lot longer, in a way the Win8 live tiles were an evolution of the widgets that first appeared in Vista, and they introduced active wallpaper along with IE4 (or was it Win98?) although that opportunity would have been much less effective as internet availability was much less.

> "Yes/Maybe later" patterns

I wish I could understand the managers that insist on these patterns.

Are they completely out of touch and don't know that people hate them? Are they aware that people hate them but don't care? Or perhaps they've drank their own Kool-Aid so much that they truly believe nobody would actually want to say "No" and think they just need more opportunities to say Yes?

I can totally see Internet availabilit correlating with the rise of unwanted stuff in the install. Believe it started with 3rd party games being part of the OS at first. I don't recall the yes/maybe later dialog "options" in win8 though, at least not in the beginning.

I actually really liked the win8 start menu change and the live tiles, even wrote some tiny homegrown apps with them. My logic was always "if I am opening the start menu, I will want to interact with that menu and only it until it's closed", so having it fullscreen made sense.