Ask Paul: October 18 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Here’s a new installment of Ask Paul covering Windows 10, Ignite, the Google event, xCloud, and much more.

Windows 10 version 1909 on ISO?

dmos01 asks:

Will 1809 release with an ISO, as normal?

I don’t see why not. That said, Microsoft is unpredictable and often behaves illogically. The good news is that getting from 1903 to 1909 is just a cumulative update away.

Windows 10 annoyances

madthinus asks:

What in Windows 10 annoys you the most?

My biggest annoyance, of course, is Windows as a Service (WaaS). Anyone, or any business, should be able to install a version of Windows 10 and then use it for 10 years without having to upgrade to a new version. WaaS is a lie: It is promoted as a way to keep us all safe, but I feel like its true purpose is to dramatically lessen Microsoft’s support requirements.

The second biggest problem, of course, is the “finish the job” issue: Microsoft is terrible at fit and finish and will leave things hanging for years instead of making the system consistent. Just look at how terrible and inconsistent both Dark mode and the implementation of Fluent still are.

The next three key areas I always cite are the bundled crapware (which can easily be removed), in-box advertising (which is inexcusable), and always-on data collection (which you should be able to disable). These are bad to innocuous, I guess, depending on how you feel about such things.

And there are smaller issues. Windows 10 has settings sync, but it’s only some settings and you never really know which ones, so you have to manually recreate your configuration when you bring a new PC up. (This is related to “finish the job.”) It’s not always configurable enough (I can’t center taskbar icons, for example). Stuff like that.

Microsoft Ignite

will asks:

With Ignite just around the corner, anything you will be looking for news on?

Two areas will be key for me: Windows 10 and developer. It looks like both will be amply represented, so I’m looking forward to the show.

Do they let you and Brad go to the Universal Studio’s party?

I assume this is the attendee party? If so, yes, but we’re not going. I assume it’s Thursday night, and we go home that morning.

Google’s hardware business

beckerrt asks:

Quick follow-up to your What Exactly is Google Selling post from Thursday – I’m staring to wonder what the endgame is for their Pixel line of smartphones. I’m not saying Google shouldn’t be making handsets, but I always see those phones as niche, as the phone that serious camera enthusiasts must have, or the phone to get if you want pure Android and timely updates. Exactly how big is this market? Here in the states, it’s an Apple and Samsung duopoly for the most part, and those cameras are more than enough for the everyday person. I don’t see many people switching. In the rest of the world, there’s Huawei too, which can also stand toe-to-toe with the Pixel lineup. I just don’t see a path forward. Do you ever see Google being a serious mainstream competitor to the Apples, Samsungs, and Huaweis?

No, I don’t.

But maybe it doesn’t have to be. There’s a lot going on there. Aside from that whole argument about competing with your partners (like Microsoft does with Surface), there are good reasons for Google to make its own hardware. They’re halo devices (or can be if they get ahead of the reliability issues). They show off Google’s platforms (or should). Etc.

More to the point, I was talking to a source at Microsoft at the recent hardware event about the Surface Duo, and asked about the real-world expectations about the device, etc. He basically asked, rhetorically, what if it were a small business but a profitable business? And … yeah. Google should be shooting for that as a minimum. It’s OK to have a small business as long as there are enthusiasts who love it and it actually makes sense as a business. (This applies to Surface, too.)

The issue I have, of course, is that Google seems to be pretty half-hearted about hardware. I feel like they should be all-in or not do it at all.

xCloud bandwidth

MartinusV2 asks:

I’m curious about xCloud. Where you able to calculate how much bandwidth a game session was?

No, but I will look at doing so for a future write-up.

Modern Windows developer frameworks

Daishi asks:

After your Winforms note pad project piece I’m wondering if you could give us a rundown of ‘Windows Development Frameworks for Beginners’ outlining what the differences are between the various options, what whether certain options are good or bad for certain project types etc.

This will be part of the Programming Windows series, but I chose Windows Forms (and Visual Basic) for the first project because it’s so easy to work with. WPF is more powerful, and it scales better on modern displays, but it’s also more complex. (WPF started out as Avalon in the original Longhorn SDK, but like WinForms, it’s .NET-based.) WinForms and WPF are compatible with all supported Windows versions. UWP is not “.NET-based,” meaning it’s not managed code, and it’s Windows 10-only.

I apologize if this is vague, I’m still digging into this stuff myself. But if you are just starting out with programming, WinForms will be the easiest. (And there is some display scaling functionality you can implement, which I’ll look into for the Notepad app.)

Dual-screen devices? Really?

wright_is asks:

Microsoft is marketing Windows 10 X as being designed for dual-screen setups… One question, what exactly does that mean? I’ve been running dual or more screen setups since 2002. I’ve never had any real problems with dual screen setups and Windows 10 with dual screen is a doddle, so the “dual screen” part of the story for X doesn’t make much sense, how is having 2×9″ screens more challenging than having 2xn” screens?

I’ve been struggling with this myself, and I don’t feel that there are any inherently different or unique features of such a display that are not already covered by functionality in Windows 10. This includes Snap, which works across displays, the ability of modern apps (like those made with UWP) to open two or more windows, and so on.

When we knew Windows 10X as Windows Lite, it was very much about a simpler user experience and about an architectural change in which Win32 apps could be put in containers and segregated from the system in a way that is more sophisticated than S mode. I still feel this is the more compelling and technically interesting thing about Windows 10X. And I don’t understand how they’re marketing it.

One likely possibility is that Microsoft wanted to test the new architecture on a limited range of devices so that any issues would impact a smaller audience.

Maybe we’ll learn more soon.

Microsoft or Google on privacy

yoshi asks:

Your “What Exactly is Google Selling” post got me thinking more about privacy again. I was curious your thoughts on privacy when it comes to say Gmail vs. Outlook.com – and their attached products such as Docs/Office. Would I have more privacy going with the MS suite of products vs. Google’s?

Generally speaking, yes, you will enjoy more privacy protections with any Microsoft product than you will with Google. Not be overly simplistic, but the reason is that Microsoft doesn’t sell your data to make money, for the most part: It sells you its software and services.

That said, the free versions of Microsoft services like Outlook.com or Bing or whatever do have ads, and they’re targeted by default (that can be disabled), so there is some kind of data gathering occurring. And some take exception to the telemetry data collected by Windows 10, which Microsoft says is anonymous and aimed at improving the product.

Overall, I don’t think that Microsoft is inherently morally superior to Google. It’s just that Microsoft is 25 years older than Google and came of age in a world in which companies sold software. Google’s more modern, and while you/we may dislike the business model, it’s just a reflection of the times. If Microsoft could sell ads as effectively and at the same scale as Google, I’m sure they would.

I’ve always gone back and forth with the two, and after years of use I’m so heavily invested in Google’s services that it makes it hard to leave.

Same for me.

As far as basic productivity services go, that’s Microsoft’s bread and butter. And services like Outlook.com or Office 365 or whatever are generally excellent and at least as good, if not better than, what Google offers. For email/calendar, I happen to use both.

But there are some Google services I can’t/won’t give up. I’m not going to use an inferior maps service, for example, because I’m worried about Google data collection. It’s all a trade-off.

A Microsoft Android?

chrishilton1 asks:

Is it possible, or technically feasible, that Microsoft could, following their decision to use the Chrome engine in Edge and develop their browser based on that technology, consider developing their own version of Android, a Mandroid if you will?

It’s technically possible, but it’s also highly unlikely. The issue with Android is that, unlike with Chrome/Edge, you need Google’s app store and core apps, and at that point, it’s just Android. Microsoft can’t rip out the Google stuff like they can on Chrome/Edge without losing what makes Android Android.

We’ll all be watching to see what Microsoft does with its fully licensed Android version and whether Panos Panay’s claims about them “co-engineering” it will lead to anything unique or interesting. But I don’t see them forking Android, doing their own app store, and going the Fire OS route. It’s just too much work for too little gain.