Advertising in Vista

Jonesie has asked about advertising in Vista... will Microsoft be covering your desktop with ads?

The short answer is no.  Not much has been publically discussed about this yet, so I cant give away many details, however, I can assure you that you will have no less control over what comes into your computing environment in Vista than what you have today. 

We are not building a spam engine (some might argue we already have one).  Did you know that we already have an advertising engine going?  If you take a look at www.msn.com you'll find that there are already ads on there.  If you look at the new Hotmail beta, you'll see ads in that too, and you'll notice them in Live Messenger (formerly MSN Messenger), but I dont expect you'll see seriously intrusive ads like Peter is concerned about.

Of course my knowledge in this area is not as complete as those in the product teams...