Microsoft is running out of ideas. In its constant (and desperate) fight against Google, the company has opted for something that no one had seen coming. Because, as the specialists indicate, it is a maneuver that is closer to the techniques used to spread malware infections than to the advertising maneuvers that a company of its importance should use.
Edge’s market share is not advancing as fast as Microsoft would like. In reality, if it advances, it does so slowly. Failing that, Google Chrome remains the leader. The same goes for the battle between search systems. Bing is an alternative, but it doesn’t reach Google’s results, so the company has been carried away by an initiative that is being heavily criticized.
Pop-up notifications that nobody wants
After trying many other techniques, someone at Microsoft seems to have had the idea to launch pop-up notifications left and right without anyone asking for them. It is a movement that can be criticized, since although they are simple pop-ups, they are invasive and annoying. And, actually, they are not that simple. The difference with respect to other previously sent notifications is that the ones that have been recently registered are being issued at the operating system level.
In other words, these are not notifications that are within the Windows 10 or Windows 11 notification system, but rather they overlap with everything else so that they end up on the screen and we see them in a mandatory way. The problem is so severe that it has been discovered that Microsoft is using an executable file known as BGAupsell.exe for its issue. And if you do a Google search, it won’t take long to see that it’s not exactly a file that has many friends.
Should I worry?
The question that many users ask is if they are facing a case of malware. In principle, there shouldn’t be any kind of problem. It’s easy to exaggerate what happened, but Microsoft’s only intention would be to put those notifications they wanted you to see on your screen. Nothing more, you don’t have to give it many turns. Something different is that they are annoying, because undoubtedly, as we said before, it is not something that we would expect from the company.
A Microsoft spokesperson has spoken about it and said that the issuance of the notifications has not been intentional. Exactly they say that the behavior of the notification system as it has been carried out was not what should have occurred. Nor have they expanded to provide more information or to detail what the real objectives of using BGAupsell.exe were. What they have said is that they have stopped the process so that users do not encounter it again. That, for now, should help the situation cool down and stop talking about it in the coming days.
But just because notifications aren’t coming again doesn’t mean this hasn’t put Microsoft in a bad light. There is a level of desperation that is too marked when it comes to getting users to use their technology. These pop-up notifications had two different objectives, as it has been possible to read in the case of the users who have received them. One of them: getting a large number of people to leave Chrome and use Edge. And the other: that the web search engine of the users goes from being Google to Bing.
Both objectives are complicated and, in a certain way, it can even be understood that Microsoft is resorting to all kinds of ideas to achieve them. After all, no one can deny that they have the world’s most used operating system in their hands, so they are simply taking advantage of it. But maybe it’s too much.
