Ask Paul: April 19 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Here’s another round of questions, this time surprisingly diverse, to kick off the weekend.

Outlook.com Premium admin console disappears

RichardFenoglio asks:

I recently noticed that the Outlook Premium website is no longer active, which is posing an issue managing my Outlook Premium subscription. I’m curious if Microsoft is planning to migrate that management somewhere else for those of us who are on the legacy/original Outlook Premium subscriptions with our own domains?

Interesting. I will probably need to ask Microsoft what’s up here, but the Outlook.com Premium support site notes that Microsoft “will continue to support current Outlook.com Premium customers with a custom domain. Just continue to renew your Outlook.com Premium subscription, and your domain renewal will be automatically included in your yearly subscription fee.” So that seems to answer the question, but there’s no information there or in the Outlook.com Premium FAQ about migrating domain management elsewhere.

Also, curious if you have heard any new rumors about the potential Microsoft 365 Consumer subscription?

No, there is no news about a consumer version of Microsoft 365, sorry.

Band on the Run

Eric_Rasmussen asks:

I’m several weeks behind on my Windows Weekly schedule so I’ve been catching up over the past several days. I’m currently watching “Band On The Run” and was intrigued by the discussion regarding Mary Jo’s experience with depth perception and the Hololens. I was talking with my wife about it, wondering how Mary Jo is able to interact with objects in the real world so naturally but not in the hologram world. It occurred to us that in the real world, our sense of touch combines with eyesight to complete the mental model of where things are in 3D space. I wonder if Microsoft could develop a haptic feedback glove that pairs with the Hololens and would allow people to “feel” holograms? I think this would solve Mary Jo’s issue of knowing where 3D objects are so that she could interact with them. Perhaps Microsoft already has something like that and I just haven’t heard of it yet? I’m curious what your thoughts are, as this is not something I’ve ever really thought about in the world of AR / VR.

So now I need to think about several-weeks-old Windows Weekly episodes?! 🙂 Fine!

But seriously. I was actually kind of confused by the issue Mary Jo had, and based on her experience this was a surprise to Microsoft as well. So it’s possibly if not likely that this issue won’t impact all that many people.

But your haptic glove thing is interesting to me because I literally asked Microsoft about this. And they confirmed that they are working on some solution that will, in fact, allow people to “feel” Holograms. That said, there’s a lot of mind trickery going on here as it is. And in my case, even though I couldn’t feel the holograms, the combination of the visuals and their reactions to my gestures did go a long ways towards fooling my brain into almost feeling them. Sort of a phantom limb-type effect, I guess.

Anyway. Yes, what you imagine—or something like it—is in the works.

Smart speakers vs. tablets

hrlngrv asks:

Earlier this week ZDNet had an article about smart speakers replacing tablets as the hot new device. Are tablets now going the way of mobile DVD players? If not, what’d make them more appealing to a wider user base? On a different tack, will smart speakers become the central controllers for home automation? If so, whither MSFT for home automation?

I assume the ZD report was based on the same study I wrote about here.

Canalys wondered aloud whether “one reason for the decline in tablets may be that smart speakers are taking over some of their functions in the home, such as controlling lights or playing music.” (Their predictions show smart speakers overtaking tablets in usage by 2021.) This makes sense: People will buy multiple speakers, and in many cases, they are much cheaper than tablets. But today’s larger phones are what really slowed tablet sales, not smart speakers.

But I don’t think tablets are going away. Instead, like PCs, I think we’re just seeing the extent of their reach as currently designed. A future for tablets in the form of PC replacements (iPad Pro, etc.) is still a possibility, though I wonder if the emerging market for folding phones will eat into that. Different people like different things. Some will embrace voice, some will not. Some will move between interfaces. I think tablets, like PCs, play a long-term role.

Microsoft has no direct impact in home automation today and I don’t see that changing.

My cats

wluck asks:

A non-tech question. You have not mentioned your cat in some time. Being a cat lover I enjoyed his appearance during your podcasts. A small update would be great.

LOL. Well.

We actually have two cats, Dasher and Dancer, who are sisters. The one that’s been on the podcast is Dasher, who is the smaller and more outgoing of the two. She’s not on the podcast because we finally added doors to my office, so I can lock her out and not be distracted.

The big thing with the cats, and this is something I normally share privately with Mary Jo, because she’s a cat owner now as well, has been the introduction of the dog. Which they were very much not fans of, understandably. But it’s been fascinating to watch their relationship grow and change over time. The dog loves the cats, but the cats don’t react well to the dog’s overly-active attempts at getting them to play with her because, well, they’re cats and are much smaller.

But over time, they have gotten a lot more comfortable with the dog. They all sleep on the same bed together a lot. And the bigger cat, Dancer, has interacted with the dog in fascinating ways. She has been caught rolling around on the rug with the dog. And most recently, we’ve seen her walk up to the dog, raise her back, and brush against the dog as she walks by, a clear sign of affection and acceptance.

One more recent story.

When my wife goes into the bathroom, one of the cats will always try to follow her in so she can drink from the sink. One time, the bigger cat (Dancer) was too late, so she was stuck outside the door, and she meowed, hoping that my wife would let her in. She didn’t, and I saw the dog, alert, watching the cat from the couch. After 10 seconds or so, she got up, walked over to the bathroom door, and scratched at it, clearly trying to help the cat get in the room. It worked, and the dog walked back to the couch, wagging her tail.

Our dog is a bit on the insane side—she’s a rescue and god knows what happened to her before we got her—but she is really empathetic. If I yell at something or somebody (or a cat), she will literally come over and put her head on my leg as if trying to calm me down. Seeing her do something similar for the cat was interesting. And nice.

Windows 10 version 1903 to the public

madthinus asks:

With Windows 10 1903 available to insiders and MSDN, should Microsoft make it available to the public in the form of a media creation tool with a warning to state that it is still not for general distribution yet? Clearly this is the final build, why not make it easier for insiders / power users to test drive it without going through the hassle of the insider program?

I was just thinking about this. And was thinking about writing up what would be a short-lived tip about how you might “clean install” Windows 10 version 1903 right now (before its public on the download site; basically, clean install Windows 10 1809, enroll in Insider Release Preview, reboot, install 1903, dis-enroll, reboot, done).

But… What Microsoft should really do is make all supported Windows 10 versions available from the download website and just make sure that the current version (1809 today) is the default download. And the others could be available via an advanced page or whatever. Similar to how the Insider ISO downloads have worked.

But that would be too simple and obvious, I guess.

Chromebooks deniers

Daishi asks:

On this week’s Windows Weekly you made the statement that “(Microsoft) still have no idea why Chromebooks are popular.”

I said that Microsoft fans continue to deny the success of Chromebooks and that they need to understand why they’re popular. You are apparently one of those people.

But Microsoft does understand this. That is why they made Windows RT and then S mode. It’s why they’ve improved their deployment tools for education. It’s why they’ve pushed PC makers to produce more low-cost PCs for the education market. And it’s why they’re now working on Lite OS or whatever it’s called this week, which is nothing more than Microsoft’s take on the Chromebook.

But NetMarketShare, who’s statistics you are happy to rely on in other situations, has them at 0.38% of Desktop/Laptop OS usage for Jan-Mar 2019 and the last firm number on sales I can find had them at around 2.5% of the total PC market in 2016 … These number seem to suggest they’re anything but popular.

I love a good accusation in the morning.

NetMarketShare measures usage, not sales. And they specifically measure usage on some range of public websites.

With regards to usage, Chromebook usage is artificially low because most Chromebooks are used in education, where they are used websites and services that are largely outside of NetMarketShare’s polling. That’s not to say that Chromebooks are 20 percent or whatever of total usage. But it’s higher than what you cite.

But the issue with Chromebooks, for Microsoft, is that they are a much higher percentage of sales in the education market today than they were previously. This started in the United States, but it has since spread to Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Chromebooks are now the top-selling education computing platform. Not Windows.

Chromebook sales have also impacted business, and that may be the next big growth area for the platform. In fact, there’s been at least one quarter so far in which business PC growth only occurred because of Chromebooks. Non-Chromebook business PC sales that quarter were down.

Chromebooks are big for PC makers, too: Every single major PC maker sells Chromebooks now. And just this past week alone, both HP and Acer announced new Chromebooks specifically for business. These companies and other PC makers live in a world of narrow margins, and they are risk-averse. They make these products because there is a market for them.

So, I’m wondering if you can provided citations for the data you are relying on for your belief in Chromebooks’ popularity. Not a future estimate (read ‘wild ass guess’) from a market analyst. Not a PR puff piece whose only source is an infographic from Google raving about their x% growth. Not supposition based on wondering why else Microsoft would be developing Windows S/Lite. Not an anecdote about your daughter and her friends using them everyday in their underfunded American school system. I mean independently sourced data on usage or sales from a reliable third party that shows Chromebooks are a real success. Because everything I can find points the other way.

I don’t appreciate the insinuation here that I am inflating the success of Chromebooks for … some reason. Microsoft sees Chromebooks as a direct threat to Windows because they are, and they are responding. All major PC makers are making Chromebooks and expanding their offerings because they’ve been successful products for them. Chromebooks are outselling Windows PCs in education. Etc. None of this is supposition, anecdotal, or “wild ass guesses.” These are all facts.

And I write about this a lot. And cite sources when I do.

Two years ago, ahead of the Microsoft education event at which Terry Myerson unveiled Windows 10 S, Surface Laptop, and a USB-based means of deploying Windows in education, I wrote that Microsoft cannot afford to lose the education market because a generation of kids is learning about personal computing on Google hardware with Google software and services, and those kids, as adults, will do what their parents and grandparents did, and demand access to the technology they understand as they enter the workforce. You can see the impact of this today in things like “Bring Your Own Device” and chat-based collaboration (Slack begets Teams, etc.)

So how is it going? As of January 2019, 155 million people use Microsoft Office 365 in education and 80 million use Google G Suite. 30 million students and educators use Chromebooks both inside and outside the classroom, according to Google (10 million of them were sold by Acer, by the way.) Microsoft says that 1 million new Windows PCs are being used by students at all levels every month, so my education guess—sorry, wild-ass speculation—is that there is some triple-digit number of Windows PCs in use in education overall. (I assume a guess that puts Windows in a positive light won’t receive the same level of scrutiny that you put into Chromebook denial.) That is, there are still more Windows PCs in education than Chromebooks. But Chromebooks outsell Windows PCs in education—87 percent of education PCs sold in the US in 2017 were Chromebooks—so that will change someday if the trend isn’t reversed.

I could go on, but denying the success of Chrome OS and Chromebooks is a mistake. Microsoft sees it and is responding. PC makers see it and are selling Chromebooks. Schools see it; they’re rolling out more Chromebooks than Windows PCs, especially in the US. Even businesses see it. You don’t see it? No offense, but who cares?

Look, my job is simple. It’s not to undercut Microsoft, or to sow Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt … for some reason. It’s to be clear-eyed about what’s happening and communicate that so that readers can make the best decisions for themselves. That’s it.