Ask Paul: March 11 (Premium)

Happy Friday! I’m still reeling from our trip, but here’s another great set of reader questions to kick off the weekend a bit early.

Space travel

bschnatt asks:

I know you’ve said you would never visit Mars, but would you consider a trip to the moon? Eventually, there’ll be a big moon city there (built by Hilton, no doubt). Personally, I’d love to see the original Apollo 11 landing site…

My issue with space travel isn’t the time, it’s the takeoff process. I assume I told the story about me riding the Stratosphere in Las Vegas and realizing that I could never be an astronaut. I get queasy when I walk out over glass in a building or whatever. If space travel involved an airplane-like experience, I could probably handle going to the moon, I guess. But not on a rocket.

Plus, if you want to see the moon, just go to Arizona. 🙂

Outlook on mobile

arjay asks:

Today, after trying to use it for several months, I removed the iOS Outlook app from my iPad and iPhone. It looks nothing like any other Outlook I have used, and is — in my opinion — poorly designed. Much of the management control for organizing email is either missing, or I’m not smart enough to find it.

It’s interesting that you had this experience because I did the same thing: I vaguely like the idea of using the Microsoft email solution, and I like that calendar is built-in, etc. But I just didn’t like it either. I use Gmail on mobile now. (Which is also a bit easier since the back-end service I’m using is Gmail and things happen more immediately.)

Is iOS Outlook supposed to be part of the One Outlook redesign? If so, they have a lot of work to do.

No, it’s not. But I hope/expect that Microsoft will fully rev the mobile client at some point to match. Unfortunately, it’s a completely different codebase.

Portable gaming

justme asks:

On the XBox front, I was somewhat surprised to hear that Valve may consider allowing Game Pass to work through Steam, particularly on Steam Deck. Given the potential success of the device and the success of the Switch, do you think MIcrosoft would ever release their own XBox hand-held focued on cloud and Game Pass (essentially, eliminating the middle man)?

No, I don’t believe so.

It’s pretty clear that Microsoft’s goals with Xbox revolved around moving the platform to services that work everywhere—and Phil Spencer has specifically said he wants Xbox Game Pass on Switch—and that, in doing so, it can eliminate its biggest, unrecoverable costs, which are hardware-related. Microsoft has only lost money on hardware, and moving Xbox to the cloud will fix that. So it makes more sense for Microsoft to put Xbox Game Pass on existing hardware and let other companies shoulder that burden.

A couple of related points.

A Steam Deck with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is pretty much that portable Xbox. It would provide access to both PC and, via streaming, console titles.

Microsoft doesn’t even make a VR headset for its consoles. And while hardware partners like HP and Samsung have made Windows Virtual Reality headsets for Windows, it always struck me as odd that those didn’t work on Xbox too. It will be interesting to see whether a future generation of that system works on both PCs and consoles.

Windows 11 search

justme also asks:

Regarding the changes to search in the latest Insider build – are they directly tied to widgets. What I mean is, if you uninstall widgets on WIndows 11, do you know if you still get this behaviour? If they are, and you uninstall widgets, will you break search? I realize that you can turn this off (for now) as Laurent reported, but it just seems to me that widgets and anything connected to them are meant to do one thing: drive BIng/Edge numbers.

I don’t believe this feature requires Widgets to be enabled to work, but it’s hard to tell right now because we can’t test it yet. Based on the description and the accompanying shots, it’s clear that search highlights is designed to look like Widgets (and/or literally uses the same web back-end), but that seems to be the only connection. You will be able to disable both features in the future, but you will do so in two different places.

This kind of thing is gross to me. But, again, as long as we can turn it off, and that’s the plan, I can live with it.

Clipchamp

madthinus asks:

You have been very quiet about the Clipchamp app and the new monetisation that it will bring to Windows.

Yeah. I had high hopes for this. Now I’m a bit worried about it.

I will likely do some kind of a “hands-on” write-up. But the issue is simply stated: for now, at least, Clipchamp is not really free, even if you pay for a Microsoft 365 account, as its free tier is useless with just 480p output. And it gets expensive fast: you can pay $9.99 per month for 720p output (and other features) or $19.99 for 1080p, which to me is the minimally acceptable quality bar. That is too expensive.

We did discuss this on First Ring Daily today, but in an ideal world, this will change so that all of Clipchamp’s features are included with Microsoft 365 Personal or Family. Or that, with such a subscription, that $9.99 per month would get you everything. Or that Microsoft might offer a Microsoft 365 Uber (whatever) tier that includes all Clipchamp features for a total cost of $149 per year (or whatever). But the current model makes this a non-starter. I’m not paying that much for something that Apple gives away for free with iMovie and that Microsoft used to give away for free with Windows Movie Maker.

This and the new Search experience just feel vulgar and pointless. Thoughts?

See above. Totally agree. But at least we can turn it off.

Advertising in Windows

spacecamel asks:

I am finding the advertising and addon pricing that Microsoft is doing to start to turn me off. What is even more depressing is that Google as an advertising company has less upsell and ads in ChromeOS than Windows does.

I don’t mean to pat myself on the back, but when the first ads appeared in Windows 8, I described this situation as a “slippery slope” because there’s no scaling back when you go that route; you only escalate the advertising. And that’s exactly what’s happened in the years since.

There is a solution to this problem, though many will dislike it just as much: let us pay to not see these invasive interruptions. And since many of us are already paying via Microsoft 365, the system is in place. I should get a clean Windows experience for my $99 per year. (In my opinion.)

As noted above, being able to disable these things is an OK first step. And we can disable “suggestions” and other annoying interruptions in Windows 10 and 11 today. And we will be able to disable search highlights. But again … slippery slope. It keeps getting worse. And as is the case with, say, Default Apps, sometimes Microsoft will go down a path and make things worse, not better, and not let you work around it. Because at the end of the day, the issue here is that it needs to monetize Windows somehow. And since no one is upgrading their PC every 2-4 years anymore, those customers are no longer paying them indirectly for Windows on a regular basis. That’s what this is all about.

Chris Capossela told us on Windows Weekly in December that Microsoft has no interest in charging people to make Windows less annoying because that’s an implicit admission that they’ve done things to make Windows annoying when in their minds they’re offering value. But I’d like them to get past the semantics and just make Windows less annoying. I’m willing to pay for that.

Many aren’t, of course. And that leaves one more option: moving to a rival platform like Mac, Chromebook, or Linux. That may or may not be a bad thing from Microsoft’s perspective, especially if you keep paying for Microsoft 365, which is a regular subscription fee. I hope they figure this out. I’m not sure they will.