Ask Paul: September 10 (Premium)

Happy Friday! With the hottest summer in the history of summers finally winding down, here’s another great set of reader questions to kick off the weekend.

Mint vs. connectivity

harmjr asks:

Paul when using your Google Pixel 4a 5G (purchased from TMobile) with Mint Service. Have you ever noticed that the data will just drop. And If you shut off/on the data a couple of times it will eventually work? I have got my device back in spring and have noticed this several times. I am on Android 11 on my device.

Not that I’ve noticed, but I’ve certainly had some weird connectivity issues over the past several months, some of which I’ve observed with the Pixel 4a with 5G and, more recently, the Pixel 5a. My biggest issues are actually Bluetooth-related, but since that’s not what you’re asking about, and they could in fact be caused by my wife’s car, I’ll move on from that.

The one thing I did experience that may/may not be related to this happened when we flew home from Mexico City in August. I had been using a different phone via Google Fi while we were away (for the international connectivity, which Mint lacks), and I just checked the Pixel from time to time to make sure I hadn’t missed any calls or texts. But when we flew home, I used the Pixel in airplane mode to listen to music and an audiobook, and as we descended into Newark, I disabled Airplane Mode so that I could receive any emails or whatever I had missed during the flight.

As we landed and afterward, I waited and waited for the connectivity to resume while all around me, everyone else was busily accessing data, and making phone calls and texts. But my Pixel would not connect. I disabled/reenabled the data repeatedly. I even rebooted it, twice. And then I finally gave up and it didn’t connect until we were in the car driving home from the airport. I have no idea why, but I literally said to my wife, F this, I’m killing this account as soon as we get home because that is completely unacceptable.

And then I never did that, in part because it’s been perfect, connection-wise, since that moment. And when the Pixel 5a arrived, I popped in the SIM, made absolutely zero configuration changes—you’re really supposed to go through some rigamarole related to APN settings in Networking—and it’s always worked perfectly. So I’m not sure what to say.

Aside from that, I’ve had what I would call normal T-Mobile-related connectivity problems from time to time. There is a known dead spot between my house and the gym where streaming music or phone calls will cut out briefly, for example, and that’s been pretty consistent. And when we’ve driven to/from Charlotte for my daughter’s school stuff, there are of course areas where T-Mobile just doesn’t work well or at all. It seems to work well in and around this area, but obviously, your mileage will vary depending on your location.

OS minimalism

erichk asks:

Paul, one definition of a good operating system is one that “gets out your way” so you can just run your applications, to the extent that you barely know it’s there. What score would you give Windows in this regard, and if there’s room for improvement, what could be done, especially without losing important features?

I’m of two minds on the “gets out of the way” bit. That’s a rallying cry for Apple/Mac fans, and as a Windows user, I find macOS to be starker and less intuitive (maybe “easy to use,” really) than Windows, because it literally gets out of your way and gives you no indication whatsoever about what to do. But there is something to be said for familiarity, and once you’re used to a platform, whatever it is, you can pretty much run on muscle memory. And at that point, getting out of the way is a good thing.

One of the things I preach in the Windows 10 Field Guide, and this is being updated for the Windows 11 version, is that you can get rid of most of the superfluous pre-pinned taskbar items and save a bunch of on-screen real estate for the apps you actually use every day. But this assumes you know why you can get rid of them and how you can still access their functionality if you need it. This is all about keyboard shortcuts, in other words, and I wrote about that recently in Windows 11 Tip: Know Your Keyboard Shortcuts.

The point here is that Windows, by default, “gets in your way” because the functionality provided by those taskbar items—Search, Task View, Cortana, and more in Windows 10—relate to functionality of which most users are blissfully unaware. By putting those items front and center, users will be confronted by them and will perhaps start using features they didn’t even know about but might want.

That’s good. But what Windows doesn’t do is somehow explain that once you know about these features, those items are superfluous and just take up space. But I explain that in the book, and in that linked article above. It’s part of the process of going from whatever level user you are to one that is more proficient. More to the point, you can configure Windows to “get out of your way,” at least in this instance by following the advice about keyboard shortcuts. It’s only one example, but you get the idea.

Ideally, whatever platform you’re using will provide configuration options to remove whatever is superfluous to you so that you can be more efficient and, by virtue of a more minimalist interface with less clutter, better focus on the task at hand. This is why browser makers talk about minimizes the browser “chrome”—the UI on the edges of the app window—because users are there for the websites and web apps, not for all the UI. But this can only work when users are familiar with how browsers work, which of course we are now, over 20 years into the web era.

This is a more complex task for desktop operating systems, and it shouldn’t be surprising that some of the design changes Microsoft is making in Windows 11 very closely mirror what Google already did with Chrome OS. In both cases, the assumption is that most users are coming from some previous version of Windows, and by providing a simpler user interface—and in Chrome OS’s case, a simpler platform overall—that most users will be able to handle the UI changes and get work done. The problem is that many users, especially power users, and on both platforms, will find this minimalization to be off-putting and even inefficient. At least with Windows 11, all of that power is there, hiding somewhere. In Chrome OS, you often just run into dead-ends.

To actually answer your question, Windows 10 moved the needle back towards the desktop-centric UIs of Windows past specifically because users rejected the mobile app- and touch-first interfaces in Windows 8. With Windows 11, Microsoft is trying to bridge the divide between desktop and mobile by providing a UI that is simpler and more like the UIs found on smartphones and tablets while retaining the power of the PC and the basic interfaces; this is the paradox of “fresh and familiar.” It’s a hard middle ground to find, and I think we’re going to see the UI evolve a lot over the next few years. And if you’re as cynical as I am, it’s not hard to imagine it slowly just reverting to the same complexities we see today in Windows 10. (Complexities in this case meaning UI overload, multiple ways of doing things, and archaeological layers of UI and technologies from the past.)

Overall, I like the direction Microsoft is taking, UI-wise with Windows 11. But it’s unfinished, for now, and maybe not exactly where it needs to be. Like many who are familiar with Windows and have been using it for decades, some of the missing stuff is a bit hard to take, but I also acknowledge that making life easier for most people is more important than worrying about power users; we can figure it out.

Life without Brad

wunderbar asks:

Can you speak more to the plans for the site with Brad being gone? Will we see less content now that it’s essentially back down to a one man show? Will you be looking to bring someone else aboard to help? Or potentially a bit of a new direction?

From the perspective of readers, not much will change: Brad and I will still record First Ring Daily each day (though we’re taking off this week because Brad has been onboarding at Stardock), and Brad will still record his Sams Report show each Friday. Brad is always welcome to contribute articles to the site at any time, and I suspect he will as things come up. But I have always written most of the site content, even when there were other active contributors, and by a wide margin, and that’s not going to change, of course.

From my perspective, things are changing. Yes, we’re still doing FRD each day, and that’s a big deal for me because we can catch up every day. But Brad isn’t directly involved with the business anymore, and that’s also a big deal for me. Brad played a big role with the broader business that many Thurrott.com readers were probably unaware of, and on a more personal level, he was a sounding board for whatever complaints I had about things that weren’t going well at work. And he handled most of the customer service stuff via help@thurrott and so on. It’s hard to measure the importance of this kind of buffer to me, but it’s big. Like, psychologically big.

I probably wrote this at some point, but I always saw what I was doing with regards to news/opinion writing and websites and so on as a team thing, and yet I’ve also always found myself doing it alone most of the time. Granted, writing is a solitary act. But those times when I have had collaborators—Rafael and Martin on the books, for example, or Mehedi and Brad on the site, and more recently with Stephen—are a big deal for me, and some of the best times I’ve ever had professionally. One of the reasons Windows IT Pro worked so well for so long, for me, was the team camaraderie, and I’m still friends with many of those people. That’s the case at BWW, too, but Brad being gone leaves a big hole for me. We had regular daily interactions, and Brad was that rare person—like Raphael or Mary Jo—who I always wanted to hear from and would answer immediately; these are people who almost can’t bother me, if that makes sense. They’re important to me.

Anyway, we’re still sorting through how things will look moving forward. We collectively recognize the need for someone else to help with news, for example, since that will help me focus on weightier matters. But it all comes down to cost and compatibility. There aren’t many writers out there I would trust with this. (And for whatever it’s worth, one of the things I’ve been delighted by, though he isn’t writing news, of course, is the quality of Stephen’s work. He’s a great writer.)

It’s going to take some time. We’ve had a couple of consolidated meetings between Thurrott.com and Petri so far, and that will continue each week going forward. We have (too) many broken things that need to be fixed. And I’m sure I’ll be asked to do more, or to do some different things, and … we’ll see. But I feel like my big contribution is to basically do what I do, which I see as writing. I’m happy to do that for as long as I can.

Point the finger of blame

anoldamigauser asks:

Considering how especially bad Microsoft’s messaging about Windows 11 has been, do you think the issue is with Marketing (Chris Capossello), or is it more an issue with the Windows group (Panos Panay), or is it company wide? They are never very good at communication, but this has been a new level of bad.

So, with a company as big and complex as Microsoft, it’s kind of hard to point at one person and say, that’s him, that’s the bastard. Chris can’t just dictate what the Windows organization does, for example, and it’s not fair to say that all of Microsoft can’t communicate well. For example, Microsoft 365 communicates quite well, overall (at least the bits that are Office related). And I can’t blame Panos Panay either; these problems predate him.

Looking just at Windows, it’s just a series of ups and downs over time. I wrote before about how Terry Myerson was given the impossible task of aligning Windows and its legacy codebase with the broader cloud-based aims of the rest of the company, and more recently about how his compensation was tied to that effort’s success. The result was Windows as a Service, more ads in Windows, telemetry you can’t turn off, and a gross miscounting of Windows 10 virtual machine instances as active users, thus inflating the installed base and leading to that “one billion” debacle. But you know what? For all of that, Windows 10 was and is a huge improvement over Windows 8. So how do we judge that era? How do we judge what’s happened since? It’s hard.

What I will say is that Panos inherited some big messes, and while he’s cleaning some of them up, he’s also leaving some, most notably the Windows Insider Program, in place as before. And that is absolutely a mistake. The Windows 11 bit has yet to be written, but there’s obviously some good and some bad. Certainly, it’s something I’ll obsess over for a long time to come. But the worst miscommunications I deal with from Microsoft have come out of Windows for a long time now, and that bit, sadly, is continuing under Mr. Panay. So I guess that’s on him.

Given the fix for the problem with the ad crashing Windows 11 was to remove the registry key for the service providing the ad, do you think that Microsoft will rename the service so that it cannot be disabled going forward by the same step, or will we all be able to get rid of the ads in Windows 11 by axing this key?

I can only speculate, but I don’t see Microsoft allowing users to remove ads in Windows 11 by using a Registry key so, yes, I think the underlying system will change.

AdDuplex and Windows 11 usage

hrlngrv asks:

Why no AdDuplex articles recently? Follow-up: where do you believe AdDuplex will show Windows 11 usage by 30 June 2022?

I pretty much cover each AdDuplex report, but Alan Mendelevich sometimes takes months off, and that’s what happened in August. I assume we’ll get a new report at the end of September, but as of today, the last report from AdDuplex is from July.

It’s hard to predict where Windows 11 usage will go. Many believe that it won’t gain as quickly as did Windows 10, and that makes sense: Windows 8 was a dog, so the Windows 10 uptick was pretty quick, and then Windows 7 become unsupported for most, helping to sustain the growth. But Windows 11 has two issues: Its predecessor, Windows 10, works great, and it will be supported for five more years; and Windows 11 has strict hardware requirements that will artificially prevent much of the installed base from upgrading.

Windows 10 had 350 million users after one year. I assume Windows 11 will see less than that, but your guess is as good as mine.

(On a related note, two weeks ago, someone asked when I thought that Windows 11 would hit 50 percent of the installed base. This is just as unanswerable, but I looked at when Windows 10 hit this milestone and calculated that it must have happened at about January 1, 2019, so it took roughly 3.5 years.)

Consumers vs. businesses

jeroendegrebber asks:

Every now and then Microsoft shifts from “focus on productivity” to “catering to consumers”, examples of the latter are hardware like Zune, Band, etc. In your view, which group (consumers or office workers?) is being served best with Windows 11?

Honestly, it’s a pretty good mix. It’s hard not to see the consumer influences in Windows 11, since the UI is so clearly influenced by mobile platforms. But there are some solid features in there for business users, and for all the UI change, everything is right where you left it, too: the desktop, Start, taskbar, File Explorer, and other basic UIs are all present and accounted for.

But the big deal for both is less visual, I think: Because Windows 11 is delivered like a basic Windows 10 feature update, the upgrade should be relatively pain-free, and the servicing model is much improved. And as far as deployment and management goes, literally nothing has changed, so there’s no huge learning curve standing in the way. I guess I can see some businesses using the new UI as an excuse not to upgrade, citing training reasons. But this is the rare upgrade that should be seamless and semi-intuitive for most (given familiarity with Windows 10).

I guess the bigger issue is that Microsoft doesn’t really resonate with consumers. It doesn’t have any popular consumer services beyond Xbox today, and people see PCs either as work tools or as hybrid work/personal devices on which most of the latter interactions occur via non-Microsoft solutions (Netflix, Spotify, whatever). I don’t see that dynamic changing with Windows 11.

The Apple problem

wright_is asks:

With each new announcement about Windows 11, Microsoft Surface, M365. Android, Google in general, the iPhone, Apple’s behaviour etc. I feel more and more despondent about modern technology. Whilst I could understand moving away from old technology with Windows 11, if it was because of Spectre and Meltdown mitigation is built in or the TPM 2.0 brought something really fundamentally different in terms of security, I’d actually stand behind Microsoft on this. In fact, after the first announcement, I did actually defend them, saying it was unclear, but if this was really for security reasons, it was the right move. But the more I hear, the more it seems to be purely for marketing and OEM sales benefit and less about improved security and performance on the latest hardware.

So, I agree with this completely. Every time Microsoft communicates about the Windows 11 hardware requirements, it seems to move closer and closer to some rationale that I feel like I should be able to appreciate and defend. But as I noted in Analysis: Microsoft’s Windows 11 Performance Claims (Premium), the security argument starts to fall apart the deeper you look and the more Microsoft tries to explain; there doesn’t appear to be anything special about 8th-generation or newer Intel Core (or equivalent) chipsets, or TPM 2.0, or whatever, that explains or justifies these requirements. It just feels arbitrary, or, as you note, more to serve the needs of its PC market partners than to serve the userbase.

Likewise with Google and Android everything added seems to be more around gathering data and passing it onto the cloud for analysis, app store practices. Apple, I thought, might be worth switching back to an iPhone on privacy grounds, but they screwed up the message with the CSAM filtering on the device. The device should be sacrosanct. Again, app store practices. And the current Ashley Gjøvik case.

Again, I agree. Apple’s parentalism, as I call it, gets in the way of common sense. This is a company that knows better than the adults who buy its products, a company that knows better than the governments that regulate its very business. (Not unlocking a terrorist’s iPhone for law enforcement was, to me, a Richard Stallman-like act of punching oneself in the face over some ideal. Just insanely unjustifiable.) And Apple’s protectionist business practices, especially around its App Store, are beyond the pale as well.

And don’t get me started on data slupring Amazon & Facebook… The more I hear, the more I think Big Tech is fast asleep, racing headlong into a car crash. What is wrong with Big Tech at the moment has it become so big, that it is completely deaf and blind to everything going on underneath the clouds that obscure its view?

Put simply, yes.

I think of this as the Apple problem, because Apple is the biggest and best example of this kind of thinking, a company that behaves as if it’s above the law. But the real damage Apple has done is in the service of throwaway consumer baubles that need to be replaced frequently. If you think back to the original iPhone, for all of its undeniable technological brilliance, the most impressive thing about that device was that Apple was were able to convince people to spend an extravagant amount of money on a phone that couldn’t even last a day on battery. It’s the ultimate example of hand-waving marketing: pay no attention to the battery, you can listen to text messages in any order you want!

The good news, I guess, is that we’re in the middle of the most aggressive period of antitrust regulatory action we’ve ever seen on a global scale. And while some still argue about the inarguable—whether global warming is even real, for example—there seems to be a real consensus around the world that the power of Big Tech needs to be reined in. And it is happening. Slowly but surely.

Surface hardware

helix2301 asks:

I know we have a surface event coming up. Are you going to be covering surface hardware now that Brads gone? (I know you always did in past anyway but Brad used to get demo units)

This is based on Microsoft providing me with Surface review units. It’s been spotty in recent years, and I don’t see that improving. So probably not.

Are you still down on the surface hardware in the sense of its always behind?

Of course. It literally is always behind. (You know, it’s likely that me being too honest about that is contributing to me not getting review units.)

Why do you think so many enthusiasts love Surface is it just because its a Microsoft thing? I do like the surface buds I bought a pair 8-10 hours of battery life on full charge is impressive the surface over the ear phones were not great.

Some of it is enthusiast-based, for sure. I try to rise above that, but it’s hard sometimes. Surface is perhaps the best example of this. I don’t like Surface because it’s a Microsoft product line; in fact, I still don’t think Microsoft should be competing with its own partners. And there are certainly obvious complaints one can make about various Surface PCs, from the lack of Thunderbolt across the board to more specific things like a lack of ports or whatever. But there is something special about many Surface PCs. The Surface Laptop is clearly just a MacBook Air rip-off, and yet I love the damned thing. Surface Book’s detachable display is ridiculous, but again, I love it.

I’m not sure how to square all this other than to say that our preferences or enjoyment of products like this is some combination of logical and emotional. And that the best products should impact you positively in both areas. Objectively, logically, Surface makes zero sense as a brand. But subjectively, emotionally, there’s something about Surface, in general, that I’m quite attracted to.

Removing Your Phone

anoldamigauser asks:

Your Phone. Is there any way to uninstall or disable this app? It is hanging regularly on my computer causing other issues, and I do not use it since I have an iPhone.

It’s curious that an app you don’t use would cause reliability issues. But there’s no way to disable or uninstall Your Phone through the UI, so you’ll need to use PowerShell to get it done.

Run PowerShell as an administrator, and then use this cmdlet:

Get-AppxPackage *Microsoft.YourPhone* -AllUsers | Remove-AppxPackage