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When Leo Laporte called me in 2006 about co-hosting a podcast, he asked me how I envisioned the show. Simple, I said: As a conversation.

What I meant was that I wasn’t comfortable dictating from on high about how people should see the world. Instead, I saw the podcast, like my website, as more of a back-and-forth with readers/listeners. That I wasn’t an expert with all the answers, but rather someone whose real strength was communicating. And that I could learn as much from those readers and listeners as they could from me.

For much of the intervening years, that notion of conversation was a bit more theoretical than real. On the web, for example, I basically wrote into a void, picking the topics that mattered most to me. I had no assumptions about or understanding of whether they would resonate with any audience. And during my time at my previous gig, the SuperSite for Windows, which ran from 1998 through the end of 2014, my parent company would occasionally try to convince me to pay attention to which articles readers liked the best, and, you know, maybe write more of those.

I never really did that: I have my own feedback loops—email mostly, in the beginning, and now some combination of email, website feedback, and Twitter—and I feel now, as then, that these forms of feedback provide with the information I need to stay on track. Others at my current company don’t necessarily agree with that, and to their credit, they’ve undertaken several efforts to better understand what works and what doesn’t work, and to include me in whatever planning and strategizing results. This is a smaller company than my last, and it’s been more hands-on than I’m used to. But one of the big and positive changes that’s happened since moving to Thurrott.com is that we’re paying much more attention to the needs of readers, and are doing so explicitly. In effect, this company has helped me realized the promise I made.

The podcast—which has since grown over the years to podcasts­—followed a similar trajectory. From day one, I intended to have a listener Q & A as part of every episode—indeed, it’s still called out as an item in the show notes for every single episode today, over 8 years later—because, again, conversation. But the conversation has shifted, if you will: I worked to bring a new voice with a different perspective in Mary Jo Foley to the show, and it has worked out wonderfully. And so now the three of us—Leo, Mary Jo, and me—each have our own voice in the conversation. But we’re also informed by our respective feedback loops, and Leo does bring in comments and questions from the chat room during each show too.

In both cases, what we see is a change from a one-man show—or, in the case of Windows Weekly, a two-man show, I guess—to more of a team effort. And that’s something I had wanted for many years. As a writer, there are certainly advantages to being alone, and I do need specific time each day—a block of time I term deep work­­­—during which I can write relatively distraction-free. But the work-related times I really cherish, that are truly meaningful and will stay with me forever—are those times in which I’m just a part of something bigger. For example, work trips that are like reunions, both with the people I work with directly and with others who do similar work for other publications.

This applies to you, too. You, in this case, being a reader of this site. Or a listener of Windows Weekly, or First Ring Daily, or What the Tech. When I think about the moments that are the most valuable to me, it’s not necessarily those times where I was able to help someone solve a problem, or make a better decision, or whatever, though those are all certainly rewarding. It’s the times when a reader or listener suggested a good idea of their own, one that really made a big difference for me. That’s what the conversation idea was really about, all those years ago: It was always supposed to go both ways.

So, let me give you some recent examples. Some of these will be easily identifiable by many. Some will perhaps be subtler.

I’ve long been interested in the notion of minimalism, which takes many forms, and in decluttering, which is something that spans both the physical and digital worlds. I don’t believe that I’ve written about minimalism formally per se, but it is a topic that I slip in from time to time in other articles. Recently, I started scanning old photos, again, a task that was originally just about preserving memories, but has since taken on a new, as-important, emphasis in decluttering. Not only do I want to scan all my old photos. But I want to then destroy the paper originals since we’ve been carting many giant boxes of these photos around, for 20 years, as we move from house to house. I want to be more mobile than that. I want to downsize, be able to pick up and go more easily.

The issue, of course, is that I literally have about 30 years of paper-based photos, a metric ton of work that is both overwhelming and, to be honest, nearly impossible to compete. So, decluttering my entire photo collection was always more of a goal than something that was truly obtainable. Maybe I’d get as much of it done as possible. But I’d never really complete this work.

But a reader suggestion to try a high-speed photo scanner has led to a dramatic change of fortune: Scanning my photos this way works. I can burn through an entire photo album’s worth of photos in an hour and then spend some several minutes finishing the date/time tagging and uploading them to two online services. Suddenly, a workflow has occurred in which I spend time at night ripping photos out of albums and then time in the day scanning and uploading them. And the photo albums are actually disappearing. You can see the change from just a week’s time. I’m going to actually finish this.

OK, that one is obvious, especially if you’ve followed that particular story. But some other conversations have led to less obvious outcomes, or at least pointed to them.

As many of you know, I’ve been looking for an alternative to Google Inbox since the firm announced that it would kill Inbox last Fall, and I have until the end of March to make the switch. This event has triggered an examination of how I handle email, an examination that never would have happened otherwise. (If it ain’t broke, don’t screw with it.) And, I’ve found that I’m not necessarily handling email in the right/best/most efficient way. And things are going to change.

Right now, the details could still change. But my basic scheme is to delink the email accounts at the service level—where I was previously forwarding email from secondary accounts to a single primary account and letting that one account act on behalf of the others—and instead link them at the email app level. On mobile, I’ve chosen Outlook. On the desktop… maybe Windows Mail (which is getting better in Windows 10 19H1). And maybe a new entry, Postbox, a reader suggestion that looks great.

We’ll see. But the bigger confluence here, the bigger change agent, is that this move from Inbox to something else has ripple effects that touch on other topics—other conversations—that we’ve had here on Thurrott.com. And these are things that matter to me quite a bit too.

Consider, for example, Google Chrome. This is a controversial topic to some, and blindingly boring to others: Chrome is, after all, the world’s most popular browser because it is the world’s best browser, with better capabilities, performance, battery life, and compatibility than any other offering. But. Chrome is also a Google product, and it comes with Google account ties-in that some don’t like and with background tracking and advertising tie-ups that most should be suspicious of.

So, what does Chrome have to do with Inbox? One of the sticky things about Chrome, to me, is that I use it for PWAs and other web apps, and its ability to create standalone app shorts that I can pin to the Windows taskbar is a key feature (and one that is missing, or doesn’t work as well, in other browsers). I routinely create four web app shortcuts on the taskbar of every Windows PC I use—for Google Inbox, Outlook.com, Google Calendar, and Twitter—so there are essentially five entry points to Chrome (including the browser itself) there.

Chrome has other advantages—its passwords sync to Chrome on mobile and, on Android, to apps as well, which is hugely useful to me—but its ability to be the engine for web apps I use every day is the biggest deal. But if I replace Inbox with a non-web app, my reliance on Chrome declines. And more so than is immediately obvious. I also would be replacing Outlook.com with that same non-web app. And I could then replace Google Calendar with Windows Calendar (which, unlike Mail, is problem-free). And I could replace Twitter with the identical Store app version of Twitter.

Suddenly, my reliance on Chrome—my Chrome addiction, if you will—is minimized if not solved. And that means I would be freer to use other browsers, with fewer limitations. My only real requirement is a mobile version that syncs to the desktop version. So, Mozilla Firefox could work. Microsoft Edge could work (though I’d wait for the Chromium version). Brave could work in the future (it doesn’t currently offer seamless desktop/mobile sync). And so on.

This separation from Chrome and from Google is a topic that’s come up again and again on Thurrott.com. You see it in the Forum threads that readers write. And in the comments. And it’s the reason I started investigating whether it’s possible to live a Google-free existence on Android (it’s not).

Look, I’ve always taken a pragmatic approach to things: I choose the products and services that make the most sense for me, and I think you should too. If I have anything to offer, generally, to anyone else, it’s my advice to not simply choose products from a single company—an issue with many partisan tech blogs, for sure, but also with their readers—but to do the right thing for you. Sometimes those two goals intersect—what’s best for Apple, or whatever, is best for you too—but more often it’s best to be mobile, or portable. To have an out. To be able to change to something else if you need to, and when you want to.

And this all ties back, too, to some feedback I got in the wake of an Ask Paul question from a few weeks back when a reader asked about positive feedback—which is much less common than negative feedback, a tough reality of any personal interaction—and, more specifically, to whether we’d never considered some Patreon-type virtual tip jar or whatever. As always, I tried to answer that question honestly and transparently. But I was surprised when some—including a co-worker—contacted me, worried that there was something wrong.

I didn’t intend that to read as a cry for help, though I appreciate the notes of support I received since then. But this made me remember that the many benefits that I receive from this conversation we’re having are the interactions. There are specific things, like the recommendation for a high-speed photo scanner, which is transformative, or an email app, which could likewise make a positive difference. But there are also less tangible things related to being on the same page with a community of people who are simply trying to do the right things for themselves, their families, and their friends. Point being, I appreciate being appreciated. But I want you to know that you are appreciated, too.

This appreciation extends to negative feedback, too. I’m just a guy, I make mistakes, and I don’t have all the answers. I get a bit queasy when anyone mentions that I’m an expert of any kind, but I guess I’ll just say that I have been doing this for a long time, and I’ve seen a lot of things. And that experience certainly informs my outlook in ways that I don’t always see in younger, less experienced bloggers and writers.

Maybe it’s just the flood of memories that’s come from confronting the past while scanning all those photos. (And in another confluence, I’ll soon have a fun post about my old computer setups that would have been impossible otherwise.) But it has occurred to me recently, and not for the first time, that I’m lucky. And that the people I’ve surrounded myself with—at home, work, and virtually—and the interactions, the conversations, we have all play big parts in that.

So thanks. It’s always appreciated. And it’s been interesting to see a swirling cauldron of apparently separate topics intersect in unexpected ways.