Microsoft patents the mother of all adware systems
It's such a tremendously bad idea that it's almost bound to succeed. Microsoft has filed another patent, this one for an "advertising framework" that uses "context data" from your hard drive to show you advertisements and …
Context & Ripple Effects
The adware-framework filing lands three days after Microsoft's patent application for a possible taskbar replacement, part of a burst of mid-2007 filings that treat the Windows shell itself as territory to be claimed. It also sits squarely inside a wider push into advertising: days earlier Microsoft added campaign-level negative keywords to adCenter, and it is reportedly weighing adding Ask Sponsored Listings to its Office Live adManager beta.
The reaction framing matters because it echoes Business Week's 2006 investigation of software that hijacks users' computers — the Ars headline treats drive-scanning ads as 'the mother of all adware,' reading the patent through that lens rather than as routine IP housekeeping.
First-order effects
- If the framework ships as filed, Windows itself becomes an ad delivery surface keyed to context data read from users' hard drives, making Microsoft's own OS the biggest test of where users draw the line on locally-scanned targeting.
Second-order effects
- Rivals selling desktop software — and search advertisers already buying through adCenter — face pressure to match OS-level targeting or lose the richest context signal in the market to whoever owns the platform.
Third-order effects
- A granted patent would establish that scanning a customer's own files for ad inventory is protectable IP, normalizing the operating system as an advertising channel and inviting privacy scrutiny of exactly the practice consumer-security vendors police elsewhere.
The trend: Platform vendors are converting user context — including data stored locally — into monetizable advertising inventory, with the OS owner holding the strongest claim.