Ask Paul: April 22 (Premium)

Happy Friday! In addition to the usual set of excellent reader questions, I have a couple of quick updates this week as well.

So let’s start with those.

A quick update

Back in 2018, my wife recorded what is essentially an ad for Pfizer, which sounds like a strange thing to do until you realize that our son was almost killed by bacterial meningitis when he was one year old, and their vaccine would have prevented that—and his resulting deafness—from happening. Anyway, the recording of this video came up at the time, but the finished product never surfaced, and I’ve been asked from time to time what happened to it. We just found out: Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, Pfizer was, of course, focused on other matters, but with that calming down now, they’ve finished the video, which is basically a 6-minute story in which my wife describes what happened to our son and how the company’s Prevnar vaccine would have prevented it. It’s not public yet, but we were allowed to preview it this week, and it brought a lot of ugly memories to the surface again, and a lot of tears. And while I will never be OK with what happened over 20 years ago, this kind of thing is now preventable and the vaccine is part of the normal course of vaccines that children receive in their early years. I’ll share a link to the video when it’s live.

Another quick update

Two weeks ago, I switched back to Google Fi from Mint Mobile because the latter offers no form of spam call or text protection whatsoever. This hadn’t been an issue for the previous two years because Android and/or Pixel do offer this protection, but once I switched to the iPhone—which offers no meaningful protection against spam calls and texts whatsoever—I started getting massive amounts of spam. (In one two-day period with the iPhone, I received 22 spam phone calls!) At the time I wrote that post, I was less than three days into using Google Fi again. But as of today, it’s been two weeks. And I can now report that I have not received a single spam call or text message in that period. Not one. I’m paying for it—Fi costs at least $10 per month more than Mint did—but it’s what I was hoping for.

Microsoft’s recent successes

matsan asks:

Following up on your walk down Windows memory lane – what would you consider Microsoft’s last/latest real success, both product- and platform-wise?

Microsoft’s latest major platform success is probably Azure. I know that doesn’t sound too recent—it launched over 13 years ago—but it also represented a major strategy shift for the company. And it now plays the role that Windows once played for Microsoft in the sense that it’s at the center of everything, from obvious offerings like Microsoft 365 to less obvious products like Xbox.

This will never impact Microsoft in a major way—but that actually makes it all the more special when you think about it—but I also look at .NET as a major recent success story. This is something that could have, maybe should have, slowly declined unnoticed. But by open-sourcing .NET and making a years-long effort to completely reinvent this platform, Microsoft has turned .NET into something that is both cross-platform and sustainable for the long term. I can’t believe they did it.

Finally, I will point to Teams as a huge success. This was a product Microsoft shouldn’t have made, as it could have simply purchased Slack. But it did make it, and then it evolved Teams far past the capabilities of Slack and turned it into a true cross-platform platform. Teams isn’t just successful, it’s now the model for future Microsoft platforms, like Loop. And it points the way to the future of office productivity generally, a world in which legacy solutions like Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint finally become passe.

12th-Gen Intel Core

will asks:

In listening to your discussion this week on Windows Weekly about the 12th Gen Intel chips I wanted to mention that I have seen similar results as you, and even worse battery life than the 11th Gen. We have a new X1 Carbon with a 12th Gen Intel processor, P series, and right now we are seeing around 4-5 hours on battery life. Part of me feels like this might be similar to the Skylake launch and it will take 6-8 months for things to improve. Hopefully.

I’m hoping to publish my first 12th-Gen Core-based laptop review today—if not, then this weekend—but I’m having trouble understanding the results I’m seeing for both performance and battery life. Part of me wonders if this isn’t related to Windows itself not fully understanding this new hybrid chipset type and reacting unpredictably. But whatever the reason, you may be onto something. This is something that will likely get better—e.g., be more consistent—over time.

Put simply, there are times when this particular laptop gets ungodly good battery life. And times when it’s laughably bad. And for the most part, performance is “normal,” meaning that I don’t notice anything. But there are times when it’s curiously bad. (I’m not sure how or if I’d ever notice better than usual performance for the most part; the one exception is its instant-on performance. This laptop explodes to life when I open the display lid. It’s unbelievable.)

I’m still struggling with how to communicate this. Maybe what I just wrote is all that needs to be said. I’m just not sure.

Microsoft learnings

will also asks:

Since you have been working on your Windows/Microsoft series and going back in time I wanted to see if you have seen any patterns from Microsoft repeated? I feel like from MS there was always a promise of great things coming tomorrow, but they never materialized. It was usually a change of messaging, product focus, or any number of other things. I believe you experienced this a few times with Microsoft saying one thing, then later implying or saying that was not correct because they changed direction yet again and did not finish what was started. Is this an endemic part of Microsoft?

I’ve been looking for themes this whole time, for sure. I’ve mentioned my sort-of conclusion to the series, We Fought the Web and the Web Won, a few times, but that’s a good example of something that came up again and again: Microsoft always understanding the threat/value of web technologies, almost just adopting it, and then ultimately deciding to go it’s own way and offering web-like capabilities in its own proprietary solutions instead. That one is like Groundhog Day. It happened again and again and again. (In the part I’m writing about now, it happened with WinJS, the JavaScript-based way to write to Windows 8’s WinRT APIs.)

There are other themes.

Apple envy (or even Steve Jobs envy) weighs heavily in this second half of the series (“the .NET years”) because they map to Jobs’ return to Apple and his incredible string of successes. Apple and Microsoft approached the market in two very different ways, where Microsoft was partner-based and Apple went it alone, and where Microsoft had always won through the early 2000s, Apple always won since then, at least with the client/devices. Microsoft’s attempts to copy Apple in this period are obvious and embarrassing, and they always failed. And Microsoft sacrificed what made it great in doing so because it fell into the trap of partnering and competing with its partners (in MP3 players, smartphones, and then PCs). Making the same mistake again and again is tragic and it was avoidable.

One other major theme is tied to my central premise for this series, which is that Windows, and the various updates, technologies, and changes that were made to this platform over time, were all reactions to what was going on in the world at the time. You can see this in the Apple envy examples, of course, and in other obvious ways. But this happened at every level within Microsoft and the Windows organization over time. Jim Allchin was open and transparent, so his replacement (Sinofsky) was secretive and duplicitous, and then his replacement (Myerson) was open and transparent, and his replacement (Panay) was secretive and duplicitous. It’s like a tennis match, watching it bounce back and forth.

I will say this. For all the complaining about the directions that Windows has taken over the years, we should at least give Microsoft some credit for trying. Even Sinofsky, who was terrible, took a big risk in not letting Windows just ride it out financially with minor upgrades and an inevitable decline. He made the wrong choices, for sure. But he made a big bet, and part of me respects that. (He bet so badly that he damaged Windows far worse than had he done nothing, which loses that respect. But … he tried. He was just the wrong person.) Myerson, likewise, was given a thankless and impossible task, and in succeeding to make Windows fit, sort of, in the cloud-focus world of Nadella’s Microsoft, he ended up making Windows less, if that makes sense, and that, too, has damaged the platform probably permanently. It’s certainly gotten even worse under Panay, and while our kneejerk reaction may be to blame him for that, it’s unclear that anyone could fix this now anyway.

Windows peaked in the pre-iPhone days of the mid-2000s, and through some combination of factors—the web, mobile, antitrust, and maybe even hubris—we had a perfect storm that combined to usher in a new era in personal computing, an era in which Windows still plays a role, but a diminished role. I wish things had turned out differently, in some ways, but this was inevitable. The fact that Windows is still around today, and is still important, is in some ways reassuring. It was beaten up so badly, but it still survived.

The problem with Microsoft more generally is that they often head out in some direction and then quietly back off, often without alerting anyone. There are a million examples of this, and while Google is infamous for behaving similarly, I don’t think Microsoft gets enough grief for it. I was talking to Mary Jo recently about Notion and Loop, and she kind of offhandedly said something like, well I hope Loop succeeds and we can switch to that. And I sort of agreed, but I was thinking later, why? Why even think like that? How many dead-ends do we go down before we just wake up and realize that maybe we’d just be better off not always hoping the next thing they do will finally work and make sense? Most of it doesn’t. I guess that’s more on us than Microsoft.

Qualcomm exclusivity

ivarh asks:

Do you have any information about when Microsofts exlusivity with Qualcomm ends? I have been running Windows 11 in a parallels vm on my apple silicon mac for 5 months or so now and it works great. I even discovered that I can get the installation activated by using the activation troubleshooting wizard and select “i changed my hw recently” for then to select one of the windows 10 pro licences in my MS account. This allows the win 11 install to activate.

Interesting that you should bring this up. I was just thinking about this.

According to Rich Woods, who I trust and who has excellent contacts in the ARM/mobile community, Microsoft’s exclusivity deal with Qualcomm on Windows on ARM will expire soon. (This is as of November 2021.)

But it may have already expired. Just this month, Microsoft announced that it has partnered with Ampere to use its ARM-based Altra chipsets in Azure-based virtual machines (VMs), which it said would offer up to 50 percent better price-performance than comparable x86-based VMs. And among the OS clients which customers can install in those VMs are … Windows 11 Professional and Enterprise. Which, to my understanding, only run on Snapdragon chipsets natively. (As you note, you can, of course, install Windows 11 virtually on M1-based Macs as well, and that may speak to the fact that Microsoft, as originally promised, has always intended WOA to run on multiple ARM chipsets and has perhaps thus architected it to do so from the beginning.)

That news was what put Microsoft’s exclusivity deal with Qualcomm back in my brain. I’m guessing that the low sales volume of WOA-based PCs has made it less likely that other ARM chipset makers will jump all over this opportunity when/if it’s possible. But didn’t Samsung—which does sell WOA laptops—express interest? Perhaps we’ll see something this year.

Or perhaps Qualcomm will finally get its act together and its upcoming Nuvia-based chipsets for PCs will finally be viable alternatives to Intel and AMD. Hope springs eternal.

One Outlook

lewk asks:

I was just curious on your thoughts if we’ll see the new Outlook client (project monarch) before, during or after Build? I was hoping we would have had a version to play with by now.

Me too. But all signs are pointing to an imminent release. I haven’t heard anything official, but I have to think that the first previews will ship at or around Build.

Teams deathmatch

SherlockHolmes asks:

So a strange thing happend the other day. I had a Teams business meeting the other day. I wanted to do that on my HP ZBook with Windows 11. The meeting link did not open with the Teams that comes with Windows 11. I had to do the meeting in Edge instead of the installed Windows app. Is this a bug or does Teams dont do that on Windows 11? Thanks.

This is frustrating, but there are currently two incompatible versions of the Teams client, one for businesses, and one for consumers. And it is the consumer version that ships with Windows 11. Which cannot be used to communicate with Teams for business customers. Because Microsoft.

The current solution, which is ridiculous, is to use both side-by-side. (Most people probably simply ignore the Teams client that ships with Windows 11; I always configure Windows 11 so that it doesn’t start at boot time.) Or to use the web client for business interactions, as you did.

But Microsoft will hopefully consolidate these clients at some point. The Teams version that is coming to the Microsoft Store will support both business and consumer accounts on Windows 10, for example, but not on Windows 11 (for some reason, probably related to the built-in consumer client).

Kids these days

helix2301 writes:

Paul my daughter is in computer class and they had me come in and speak about programming and some of the history of personal computers. Since my back ground is programming and next year programming is an elective. I was telling them all about Microsoft and Apple in 90s it was a fun day.

I told them about Microsoft investing 100 million into Apple in exchange for GUI lawsuit drop, office continuing to be on mac and internet explorer for mac. As well as the return of Steve Jobs to company. Plus that also help Microsoft not become a monopoly *cough*. Then I explained to her how Microsoft propped Novell up for years because of the same situation. How iPod really turned it around for Apple. Its funny because most of the kids are 13 and 14 there like and asked questions.

Why did Apple need Microsoft?

How was Microsoft dominate they are only on computers?

or my personal favorites

Why were computers not online?

How did you search without Google?

Why did you need Phone line to get on internet?

More of comment than a question for ASK PAUL but I thought you would get a kick out of it.

FYI I also got asked (what is long distance calling mean, what is dialup and why did you have to pay for calls by minute)

LOL, yep. I have had similar interactions with my kids. My son refuses to watch black and white movies and TV shows to this day. And I have thought about the many hours I spent using my Commodore Amiga in the pre-Internet days; I have no idea what I was doing since I couldn’t really be online. As a man of a certain age, I enjoy those meme-type things you see online like a photo of a pencil and a cassette tape, and how only some people will even know why they were in any way related. Or the video of a parent asking teenagers to try and use a rotary phone. Etc.

I once drove cross-country in 72 VW Super Beetle with a friend at 18 years old. We had three spare tires, $78 in cash plus some traveler’s checks, and a paper map of the country. I would never allow my kids to do something like that today. And I would never try it myself. I don’t even drive to the other side of the local highway without using Google Maps because it’s always more efficient to just use it.

Thinking about this, I guess the one tech-related constant in all this is that I still like tinkering with computers, especially on the software development side. My early interest in computers was all about writing code and making things, and I still do enjoy that today. I feel bad that this isn’t a thing for most kids today, sort of. Everything is so much easier, but their understanding of how things work is likewise less deep. I’m sure my parents thought the same with me, but with mechanical things.