> while long-term I and probably a million others are running for the exit, and doing our best to never use Windows, Azure, Outlook, Office etc again. So few companies out there seen to care about their long term reputation.

Sadly, the number of people who will actually run for the exit is much, much smaller. People on HN are completely unrepresentative of the general population. I'm pretty sure MS has people who do user retention as part of design research, it is standard in the industry before rolling out a feature to all users. Especially when switching costs are high, even people who hate ads get used to them after a very short time. Plus, everyone who can afford a Mac and doesn't mind being locked-in to the Apple ecosystem is already there.

Every mainstream platform is already inundated with ads. Social media is full of ads and sponsored posts. Most 'news' sites have gotten so bad that content is only 25-50% of the screen. E-commerce marketplaces from Amazon to Walmart are compromised and corrupted. People may run from one ad-saturated platform or site to another, but the norm is ads everywhere. If they're not running from that, would they notice or care about this?