Ask Paul: December 27 (Premium)

Here in the weird interim between Christmas and New Year’s is an Ask Paul to end the week … and the year!

Whither OneNote 2016?

SherlockHolmes asks:

I have a question regarding how do you get the old Office OneNote as was part of the desktop Office suite. As I understand it, Microsoft have decided to Update that program again. But when I reinstall Office 365 Home, OneNote isnt part of the Office suite. Do you have an idea when this is going to change? I dont have installed the UWP version of OneNote. Thanks.

In early November, Microsoft revealed that it was bringing the desktop version of OneNote back from the dead. Previously, it had moved to the UWP version of OneNote as its primary client on desktop, it had never released a OneNote 2019 version alongside Office 2019, and it had stopped providing the old version, OneNote 2016, with Office 365 downloads.

But now everything is different: Microsoft is again supporting OneNote 2016 as its primary client on desktop, and it is starting to add new features to it again to bring it up to date with some of the unique functionality that previously appeared only in the UWP version of the app on desktop. This process will take a while, but I expect that OneNote desktop (they will have to drop the 2016 branding at some point) will be provided again with the Office 365 downloads.

As another reader noted in the comments, you can still download a standalone version of OneNote 2016 from various places, and this is the only way to get it for now. The most obvious choice is at OneNote.com.

Christmas

madthinus asks:

What was for Christmas lunch / Dinner. Any good family traditions. Got anything exciting under the tree?

Like a lot of people, we split the holidays with family, so this year we had Thanksgiving at our house (with 22 people, if I remember correctly) and we had our family Christmas event—two sisters and their families plus my stepmom are all local—on Christmas Eve at a sister’s house. We always do a Thanksgiving-type dinner for Christmas (turkey, stuffing, etc.), so we cooked that at home that day and brought it over to my sister’s place (and she had a bunch of other stuff as well). On Christmas Day, we had hot pot, a Chinese meal consisting of hot soup stock and various meats and vegetables, with just our immediate family.

My son gave me a Call of Duty-themed “Noob/Vet” photo (plus a more serious present) for Christmas, which you may find entertaining (see above). My wife bought us some concert tickets, which was a nice surprise. Nothing overtly tech-related, which was actually nice. 🙂 But I did buy my wife an annual subscription to Medium.com.

Star Wars

StevenLayton asks:

Did you get to watch Star Wars over the holiday? If so, did you enjoy it?

Not yet, sorry. 🙂 I was going to go on an off day when the holidays are over and the crowds have subsided. But I’ve been drowning in spoilers and feel like I can at least say this: As much as I appreciate the love and care that JJ Abrams has brought to the new Star Wars trilogy, I think it’s also fair to blame him for completely screwing it up. And it’s a shame, because it’s full of great new actors and some fun sequences. But overall, the whole thing is a mess.

In addition to the issues I raised earlier—where these new movies completely destroy the entire point of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, which is inexcusable—the bigger problem with the new trilogy is that it was never plotted out in any meaningful way. The first movie was just a rehash of the first Star Wars movies (A New Hope), which is whatever. But instead of specifying to Rian Johnson where he could and could not tread for the second movie, Abrams had literally zero ideas for where to go next. So Johnson just did whatever he wanted. A lot of it was great, honestly. But a lot it just destroyed some mysteries from the first film or quickly ended certain plot lines, it introduced and then killed a pointless new villain, and it left the overreaching story with nowhere to go. So the third movie is just a mess, plot-wise, because it has to do too much: Wrap up not just a trilogy but the entire Skywalker saga and address, fix, or ignore stupid problems from the second movie. Star Wars deserved better than this.

Look, I will watch and rewatch this movie multiple times, and I’ll read the novelization, which I wish was already out (and will add more information). And I’m sure there will be things to love and things to hate. But overall, I’m left like I was after The Hobbit movies: A weird combination of appreciation and loathing for the person (JJ Abrams with Star Wars and Peter Jackson with The Hobbit) who both deserves credit for doing it well in some ways and yet ultimately screwed up something I care about very much.

This kind of reminds of the prequel trilogy: The first one was just a rehash of the original Star Wars. The second one was better. And then the third one happens and you realize; this should have been the whole prequel trilogy. It should have all been about the Clone Wars. That would have been amazing. Instead, the Clone Wars happens in a quick 20-minute-ish sequence, leaving you wanting more of it. By that movie, Lucas had found a good vibe, and it’s dark, and right, and excellent. But ultimately, that trilogy is just bad storytelling. And so is the new one.

It’s a shame. Because, again, there are great new actors and some great sequences. The whole thing should have been better. It should have been a real story. Not something in which the constituent parts were cobbled together, one third at a time. What a missed opportunity.

And yes, that’s a lot of opinion for someone who hasn’t even seen the movie yet. 🙂

The death of traditional publishing

helix2301 asks:

Great 25 year magazines like the Linux Journal, Technet and others which have a magazine and a booming website are closing up my question is what is the difference with these companies vs something like thurrott.com do they fail from just being to big with not enough subscribers. For examples publications like wired, vice and popular mechanics have manager to survive. I guess my question as a consumer is why do these companies fail despite having huge subscriber numbers? Is it the example of kicking and screaming into the digital change? Just wondering your insight on this.

I was lucky enough to be hired by Duke Publishing, the publishers of Windows NT Magazine, in late 1999, and that hiring (and their acquisitions of my sites WinInformant.com and WinSuperSite.com) was part of their own understanding that publishing was changing. Windows NT Magazine (which was later renamed Windows 2000 Magazine, Windows & .NET Magazine, and then Windows IT Pro Magazine) was a very formal, old-school affair, and the articles I wrote for that print publication and for their email newsletters, required a laborious, resource-intensive, and expensive editing process in which everything I wrote was reviewed by at least three other people (split between editors, technical editors, and content experts). It was terrible. The publication also had a style guide that dictated that all personality be stripped out of everything, and that sentence be short and to the point, both in sharp contrast to my personal style of writing. We clashed a lot in the early days.

Ultimately, of course, that process became unsustainable. And as Duke Publishing was sold to a bigger company and then that company was sold to an even bigger conglomerate, the reality of our top-heavy nature became clear and the cost-cutting began. It was done poorly, by people with spreadsheets and no real idea of who did what and why their various relationships with Microsoft and other third-parties really matter. And then the whole thing fell apart. I have stories. But for now, let’s just say that I was well positioned because most of what I did was on the web already, and I was sort of the last man standing as our corporate overlords laid off everyone around me. When they did the final round of layoffs in late 2014, leaving me and possibly two or three other people, I quit.

What I sort of compare this to was Microsoft buying Nokia’s smartphone business: There was just too much overhead, and because Nokia and then Microsoft had to pay for all of its worldwide factories and other facilities, and for their upkeep and improvements, and for the salaries, healthcare, and pensions of its employees, every phone they made came with huge additional costs that ensured that that business could never be successful or profitable. Today, Nokia-branded phones are made by a third party and have no overhead at all. That business is no doubt tiny compared to Nokia, even near the end of Microsoft’s oversight. But it is also no doubt successful and profitable. That’s what the web had done to traditional publishing too.

Duke Publishing, like most other publishers and traditional publications, saw digital/web coming and they did embrace it. I don’t think most tried to push back, though I’m sure some did. But the economics of the web/digital/online make the old models financially unsustainable. You can see this everywhere, from local news broadcasts, which are generic, to newspapers, which for the most part no longer have reporters everywhere around the world. It’s just contracting, and the audience is changing from reading long thoughtful pieces to click-baity “you’ll never believe what this celebrity looks like now”-type slideshows.

It’s too bad. I think there is a place for good writing, still. (That Medium.com thing I mentioned above is one good example.)

Xbox Live Gold family

maddycom asks:

Xbox question…have three sons and three xbox ones also, two sons in college. I pay three different yearly gold live at different times of the year. I think Microsoft is leaving money on the table for I would more than willing pay to monthly, quarterly, or yearly to combine these much like Office 365. Any options or hope?

I don’t understand why there isn’t an Xbox Live Gold Family Pass or whatever, but with all the Game Pass subscriptions, I bet we’re going to see some major changes to how Microsoft monetizes Xbox happen this coming year. I bet something that addresses this need is part of that.

Windows 10 settings are failing

wright_is asks:

Windows 10 Settings is failing on some of our PCs (10%). We are logged in as either local administrator or domain administrator, but we can’t access the new Settings (as opposed to the classic control panel), we do not have sufficient rights to use the settings. Switching to the traditional control panel works fine, we have the rights to install/remove software, change the time etc. The big problem is, the administrators don’t have the rights to call Windows Update. And Windows Update is about the only thing that MS have actually removed from the traditional Control Panel. Why do Administrators not necessarily have administrator privileges in the modern Settings App in Windows 10 / Server 2016/2019? … It looks like the problem has been known by Microsoft for several years, but they haven’t reacted to the thread and they haven’t fixed the problem – other than making sure some of the workarounds no longer work.

I’m not sure I’ve ever even heard of this issue, but in researching it, it appears to be fairly common. And there is a lot of debate around the cause; some believe it is tied to the inability of UWP apps to run under a local admin account, which is interesting. But it’s not 100 percent clear what causes it, only that it does happen, and that creating a new user account usually (but not always) works for some reason. I assume you’ve been through the various workarounds and fix attempts that are everywhere online (reinstall/re-register the UWP apps, etc.).

So, I don’t know about a literal fix. But if the goal is only to run Windows Update, you can do that without the Settings app. The instructions here explain how you can do this from PowerShell. I gave it a shot and it seems to work fine…

The future of banking

christian.hvid asks:

In China, companies like WeChat and Alibaba have successfully moved into retail banking, and pose a real threat to the traditional banking industry. We see some of this in the West, but not to the extent you would expect given that the tech giants here have both the reach, financial strength and technical infrastructure to match almost any of the banks, and at almost no additional operating cost. When do you expect Amazon to make its great push and become the world’s largest consumer bank?

Interesting. A couple of stories come to mind…

When we moved to Pennsylvania, one of the first things we did was find a highly-rated local bank, because we had had such good experiences at our local bank in Dedham (as opposed to a big commercial bank like Citibank or whatever). But the experience was frustrating: My wife likes to use multiple accounts to manage our money, and this local bank had a smartphone app and online service that couldn’t handle more than two accounts per login, so she needed to have multiple accounts. Within a few days, she just gave up, and we researched online banks and have been using Ally every since. There are some pros and cons to online banks, I guess, but it’s worked out wonderfully.

Another aside: I worked in banking for several years, mostly as a commercial teller, and I witnessed what happened when the weird New England banking rules that protected local banks from national commercial banks were ended; all the local banks were bought, sold, and traded around, and now it’s all massive commercial banks or just the little local guys, just like everywhere else.

We’ve also all witnessed a related (bear with me) movement in craft beer, where great craft breweries have sprung up all around the country and have begun threatening the big breweries, which are themselves increasingly being consolidated with giant international conglomerates. So now a lot of the really successful craft breweries have been purchased by giant breweries, and the giant breweries are likewise introducing their own (fake) craft brands to better compete with the upstarts.

This should happen in banking, too. That is, in addition to the Allys of the world, the big banks have the infrastructure to offer online-only solutions or even buy or make new online-only brands. It doesn’t make sense to me that Amazon, or Facebook, or whatever would be the new banks. It makes sense to me that banks will be the new banks. But like the publishing issues noted above, the world doesn’t always work out the way I think it should. And it is possible that Big Tech, or some smaller, maybe new company(s) could take banking into a new era. But Big Tech will face massive pushback on this, plus antitrust concerns too.

I feel like Apple has taken concrete steps in this direction. They offer Apple Pay, of course, which has an Apple Cash option for sending and receiving money, and they now have their own credit card too. Why wouldn’t a debit option be next? Google has similar offerings.

But yes, Amazon would be a good option too. Imagine if Amazon let you spend your own money electronically at their store at some kind of a small discount (like, where $1 of your money stored with Amazon was worth $1.05 or whatever at their store). This isn’t very different from a house credit card with cashback. (And Amazon already has agreements with certain credit cards, too. For example, when I buy something at Amazon, I’m presented with the price but told that this could also be free because I have cashback rewards dollars on my Amex.)

Anyway. I’m not sure that the future of banking is texting apps as it maybe is in China. But …you never know.