If I showed up at your place and painted some tactful ads on the walls, would you have an issue with it?

Or, if you bought a mattress and discovered that it hums some well-targeted, inoffensive jingle at 11pm every night, would that be fine?

Ads intruding deeper and deeper into your "personal" space are an issue even if they're executed well. Now, for free products, maybe that's fine. But you paid for that OS, and now it comes with ads on multiple surfaces.

> If I showed up at your place and painted some tactful ads on the walls, would you have an issue with it?

Yes, because I didn't call you to paint anything on my walls. But if I hired you to paint me something on my wall every month, and gave you total freedom, then no, I wouldn't mind an occasional tactful ad. In fact, I know some people who buy (or steal) ad posters they find beautiful and put them on their wall.

> Or, if you bought a mattress and discovered that it hums some well-targeted, inoffensive jingle at 11pm every night, would that be fine?

No, I don't want my mattress to hum, mattresses are not supposed to hum. But if I bought a picture frame and that picture frame came preloaded with a tasteful ad, then I would be fine, because picture frames are supposed to have pictures in it. I can always change it later.

That's what I wanted to point out. That ad is a picture that goes where pictures should go, and blends in. It is not like an ad banner that goes where content should be, a billboard that block my view of the landscape, or that humming that definitely shouldn't come out of a mattress.

> But you paid for that OS

That component, Bing Wallpaper is free, I think. And I believe you can have it on other OSes. Bundling ad-supported software and services in paid software is still a dubious practice, but in this particular case, I don't think it is that bad, as in, pretty much everything else is worse in Windows.