Ask Paul: January 24 (Premium)

Happy Friday! After a contentious week of Sonos outrage, I’m looking forward to a calmer weekend. Let’s get it started.

Theoretical theoreticals

Anderb asks:

If it’s ok for Sonos to refuse to update your brand new Sonos speaker if it detects a ‘legacy’ Sonos speaker on your network, is it ok for Microsoft to refuse to update your Windows 10 machine if it detects a Windows 7 machine on your network?

Leaving aside the fact that Sonos has predictably quickly backtracked on its more egregious support polices, I never thought that it was OK to not update supported speakers just because there were on the same network as non-supported speakers. That was always dumb, and that was one of the many things that came up when Brad and I discussed this event on First Ring Daily this week.

But it is/was also a technical limitation of the Sonos ecosystem, one that Sonos is now going to fix. These speakers interoperate, and I assume the idea was that upgrading newer devices could break compatibility with the unsupported ones. And that having a fully-working set of speakers was the ultimate goal, and not limiting customers in some way.

Anyway, this is all academic. Thanks to the backlash, Sonos is doing the right thing.

Make the new Edge the default

Simard57 asks:

How do i make the new edge my default browser in Windows 10? Should i just wait for Microsoft to provide an update?

As a reader noted, you can do this manually in Settings > Apps > Default apps.  I would imagine that when the new Edge is automatically installed via Windows Update, that will happen automatically as well (assuming legacy Edge was the previous default).

Microsoft consumer vs. business

will asks:

A discussion on Thurott.com around the volume of people you see in an Apple Store vs a Microsoft Store got me thinking about the consumer side. I was curious how Microsoft compares device marketshare wise if there was a way to remove all of the business/corporate PCs and then compared Microsoft, Apple, and Google from a consumer level?

A few thoughts on this.

Microsoft absolutely knows how this breaks down but I’m sure it’s not in their best interest to communicate it. Back in the day—meaning I’m pretty sure this is no longer true—the running line was that two thirds of Microsoft’s users/revenues/whatever came from business and the remainder came from consumers.

IDC and/or Gartner occasionally provides this kind of a breakdown, I believe, but those are estimates and I’ve not seen one in a while. I’ll see if I can find something recent.

I talk and write a lot about engagement, and I think that’s an important part of this discussion. There may be x number of PCs out in the world, but how many of their owners are actively using them, or happy/excited/content to do so? How many are just sitting there for that rare use case? The size of the Windows user base vs. that of Android or iOS is an interesting number on one level. But if the users of those other platforms are more engaged—spending more time on the devices, spending more money—then that number is also rather pointless.

My guess is that if we knew the real number of actually engaged, active consumer users of Windows today, it would be relatively small compared to Android or iOS. But even without compressing it like that, Windows is still smaller than iOS, and it’s much smaller than Android.

PWAs

hrlngrv asks:

Is the Year of PWAs beginning to look like it’ll come AFTER the Year of Desktop Linux?

PWAs have not taken off as quickly as I expected, but I still feel very strongly that web apps are the future, in part because they work on both desktop and mobile and eliminate the need for developers to create, maintain, and support multiple codebases.

But web apps, more generally, are already very successful. And they’re the reason that platforms like the Mac and Linux are far more viable today to individuals than was the case years ago. And the biggest web apps I use every day (on Windows) aren’t even PWAs, and don’t really need to be. They still look and work like real apps.

.NET Core, C#, and the future

MartinusV2 asks:

After viewing this week episode of Windows Weekly, you were talking on how great .Net Core is and how good .Net Core 5 will be and how hard it is to get young people to use C#. I think one part of the problem is Microsoft not using for apps for Windows 10. One example is the source code of the Calc, it’s in C++ instead of C#. I thought it would have been a great place to use it and show what you can do with it.

This kind of thing has always been a blind spot for Microsoft. More generally, I’ve always argued that the UWP apps that Microsoft bundles with Windows 10 should be showcases for what’s possible with its platforms. Instead, most of them are terrible, and just highlight the problems or limitations with UWP. (There are exceptions, of course, and while Microsoft has given up on Groove as an ecosystem, I like the Windows 10 app quite a bit.)

Don’t you think that .Net Core 5 and WinUI 3+, should have been done much more sooner? And with some C# design changed make me feel it’s not C# anymore. That’s why I still use Delphi.

Yeah. It took Microsoft far too long to admit that its strategy to push developers to Store apps on both Windows 8.x and 10 was a mistake and to make those UWP-only technologies available on other frameworks. But at least they’re doing it now, finally.

I’m not sure what to say about the design of C# and how it’s changed over time, I just don’t know enough about that. I do know that Microsoft takes that very seriously, however. And that there are all kinds of related issues, from the different flavors of XAML across WPF, UWP, Xamarin and probably more to the lack of documentation for Visual Basic (which I find horrifying).

Yes, Microsoft could/should do more to reach younger developers, especially those in school or who wish to learn to program. But it’s likely that some combination of web apps and cross-platform frameworks like Flutter will ultimately make this whole conversation moot, I guess.

I will say that if I were 20-ish years old and was starting out today, I wouldn’t waste time on anything platform-specific. I would look at web technologies, period.

No Insider PWA app

Phil_Adcock asks:

Paul. I’m curious since you have followed Microsoft as a beat for so long. What do you make of Microsoft cancelling their Insiders PWA. How do you think this will play out for PWA’s on Windows in the future? Do you see a future with more PWA apps or do you think this will be another failed app approach by Microsoft?

I wouldn’t read too much into the Insider app failure. Not to be too cynical, but that strikes me as a limitation of the people working on it, not a limitation of PWAs. I mean, how complicated could an Insider app even be? They can’t do this in a web app?

Someone asked me about PWAs above, and that’s where I’m at: I think PWAs—or perhaps I should say web apps more generally—are the future of apps. For many, they’re what apps are right now.

Microsoft’s scattershot approach to PWAs and web apps hasn’t helped much. But they are making strides. Outlook.com and Outlook on the web are now PWAs. Teams is a web app and will be made into a PWA (and has to be about 1000x more complex than anything the Insider team needs). It stands to reason that the core online Office apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote) can and will be made into PWAs as well.

The problem for Microsoft, I think, is that they have too many egos to feed. I mentioned above, again, that the Windows 10 apps should be showcases. They’re not. But if they’re going to remake them, maybe they should think about each app being true to itself. An app like Calculator is fine as a UWP app, but Mail and Calendar should be web apps. Legacy apps like Notepad and Paint should remain exactly what they are, desktop apps. Ultimately, this is the strength of Windows, that all these different things run on it. The bundled apps should reflect that.

More broadly at Microsoft, though, everything new should be designed as web apps. I don’t understand doing otherwise, except in special cases (like games).

Mark’s documentary

jmeiii75 asks:

Hi Paul. I was just wondering if you had an update on the documentary featuring Mark and the rest of your family (Forgive me if I missed an earlier update).

Unbelievably, it still hasn’t ever been released. (If you’re unfamiliar, the company that makes the vaccine that would have prevented my son from becoming deaf filmed Mark and us for a promotional video about a year and a half ago.) This comes up from time to time, and my wife will ping them to find out what’s up. For example, the team that is making it sent us a Christmas card last month. I’ll definitely point to it whenever it does appear.

Windows needs multiple UXs

harmjr asks:

Why is it that Widows does not have multiple user interfaces like Android launchers? Having the ability to skin Windows 10 like it was Windows 7 or like Windows 8.1 or X would make life so much easier to adopt and get some users up and running faster.

Excellent question.

A couple of thoughts.

Microsoft has tried and failed to do this effectively in the past. When it released Windows XP in 2001, that Luna user interface was supposed to be easily skinned with different color schemes and looks, but because they implemented everything as fixed-sized bitmaps, it never worked out that way. And all we got were three built-in color schemes (two of which were kind of bizarre) and then, over several years, three (I think) additional color schemes (Media Center, Tablet, and Zune). That failure led to the basic color choices in Aero Glass and then in the flat Windows 8/10 UIs, which are bland but easy to implement.

I always wanted and expected Microsoft to differentiate the business and consumer versions of Windows with unique looks. But as the years went by, this seems like less of an imperative. I’m not that many people would even care anymore.

I know Stardock does something like this. Why not just buy Stardock and built that into Windows?

This kind of thing comes up a lot. And Stardock, in particular, has done many things Microsoft can’t or won’t, including Sets. (Which Stardock calls Groupy.) But the big reason is that Microsoft has a much larger and more diverse user base than does Stardock and the support needs would be horrific: Microsoft’s quality bar is just a lot higher. (That said, I look at how badly Dark mode is implemented in Windows 10 and wonder why the double standard.)

Anyway. I agree this is a need. I just wonder if the group of us who’d like it is too small to matter.

Get Windows 7 ESUs for free

evennotodd asks:

What’s your take on Windows 7 fan’s (illegal) way to get ESU updates on unsupported systems or non-business systems? I figure Microsoft will quash it in February when they release the first official ESU.

For those unfamiliar, someone has created a utility called BypassESU that bypasses the license checks required by Microsoft’s Extended Security Updates (ESU) for Windows 7, effectively providing the service to individuals for free. Apparently, this is possible because ESU eligibility is only checked when ESU is first installed.

As you (and the tool’s author) surmise, this could change as soon as Tuesday, February 11, when Microsoft issues its first ESU-based updates for Windows 7. And the most likely outcome is that Microsoft will effectively disable this capability by doing eligibility checks on an ongoing basis. So if the license isn’t there on the system, you won’t be able to get the updates.

I can’t imagine anyone who wants to use BypassESU is worried about it being illegal. But I’m a bit surprised that Microsoft hasn’t made ESU available to individuals. Honestly, spending $25, $50, or whatever it would cost per year would be acceptable to many who need or want to stick with Windows 7 for a few more years.