Ask Paul: April 29 (Premium)

Well, this turned into a pretty dark week for Windows fans, but it’s Friday, and we’re going to get through it. Or at least past it.

But first…

Two quick updates

As was the case last week, I have two short updates unrelated to your questions this week.

First, we’re planning a second AMA for the second half of May. I’d like to do this sooner, but I have some scheduling conflicts, including my first-ever jury duty next week and then our long-delayed trip back to Mexico City the week after to finally close on the apartment. This one will feature Nick Tirrell, our web guy, who can answer your questions about the coming refresh of Thurrott.com now that the Petri refresh is pretty much complete. This is something I wish I could communicate myself, as I know you all have a lot of concerns about broken/missing functionality, but it’s a complicated topic and Nick is knee-deep in it and can/will do a much better job of explaining both what has to happen and answering your questions. Because this topic is so important, we’re going to open this one to everyone, but I wanted to give you all a heads-up first.

Second, and this one is all on me, really, I didn’t mean to drift off on Short Takes, but when I started doing Ask Paul on Fridays, the same day as Short Takes, it became impossible to do both. Ask Paul is usually very lengthy and I try to be thoughtful about it, but it’s also a very different tone than Short Takes, and doing both back-to-back is unfathomable. I thought about moving it to Monday originally, but now I do the Premium newsletter on Monday, which also requires a bit more work than a typical post and is likewise completely different from Short Takes. You get the idea, but I’m trying to balance my distaste for fixed schedules with my desire to not give up on Short Takes. So I will shoot for Tuesdays, I think. Hopefully that will start up again soon. (This will be on Petri, as before.)

Windows 11 and our sanity

Not surprisingly, there were a few related questions about the horrific Windows 11 Start menu video that I referenced yesterday. This is a big topic and maybe something that deserves its own post, but I’ll try to slog through this one. It’s still raw.

will asks:

I watched the “How we designed Windows…” video and I am honestly not sure what to think. On one hand I am ok with them giving a peak at the process, but on the other I do not feel this was a good way to build something. Apple seems to get design, not always, down. While they have issues with functions and limiting the use of something, they do get the design part down. Microsoft not so much. I always see Microsoft as Ford, in that we can build a box with wheels and that is what they stick with. I would love to hear your take on this?

This video has driven me to a very dark place.

It is an insult to anyone who cares about Windows. It provides a terrible insight into the lack of deep thought that went into a feature that never should have shipped in Windows in its current form, which makes that terribleness even worse. It is something I might have thought was a parody, something akin to the classic College Humor video “I designed Windows 7.” I feel like none of the designers in that video never even use Windows or understand the needs of its users.

So there’s that.

At a high level, taking a software product that is complicated and offers multiple ways of doing things and trying to make it simpler is hard. We should recognize that and appreciate the effort. It’s hard because you have to drop functionality to achieve the goal, and doing so will always alienate people. (The right-click issue with the Windows 11 Taskbar is now the canonical example of this kind of thing.)

Some people will just say, “I don’t see what the problem is. I like this new thing.” Or “I don’t even use the Start menu, so who cares?” Some will feel it deeply because they rely on a now-missing feature and their muscle memory is short-circuiting. Who is more important?

The thing is, the Start menu is literally everything that is wrong with Windows 11. Meaning, it’s much worse than what I just wrote. Like the Taskbar, the new Start menu isn’t the old Start menu with features removed. It’s this new thing, built from scratch. And it is not sophisticated. (Cue PTSD from Windows 8.) If you were to remove some number (or all) of the icons from the Pinned or Recommended section, the other section cannot resize automatically to reclaim the extra space: instead, there will be a hole there. That is … unbelievable. You can’t resize it, make it thinner or wider, or taller or shorter. Etc. It’s half-baked. It’s a prototype that somehow is shipping in a real version of Windows to real people.

And that’s just objective. That’s not my opinion, it’s a fact: this thing is not sophisticated. It should never have shipped as-is without any option to go back to the old thing. And that’s what I mean by the Start menu being everything that is wrong with Windows 11. Because that’s Windows 11. A product that was publicly tested for a few months before just shipping to the public on some arbitrary date. A date that didn’t make the holiday PC selling season, which makes me wonder what the rush was.

What is subjective is how we feel about it. As noted, some care and hate it. Some don’t care. Etc. My opinion is that the people responsible for this thing don’t care enough about their audience and/or don’t know what the F they’re doing.

On a related note, hrlngrv asks:

Given your article a few weeks ago about MSFT’s lack of urgency about the Windows 11 taskbar and this week’s ever so wonderful addition of Search Highlights, would it be fair to say MSFT cares far more about form than substance when it comes to Windows?

Yeah, I think there are many things going on here.

First, yes. Microsoft wants Windows to be prettier and simpler, and to fit better in what is now a mobile-focused world of personal computing. I totally get this. I even support it. It’s smart. But the rushed push to simplification, noted above, is alarming.

Second, we need to frame everything Microsoft is doing to its client software—Windows, Edge, etc.—in terms of the overall business. That is, why are they doing this, and in what way will doing this advantage Microsoft financially? I feel like Microsoft believes that making Windows 11 simpler/prettier quickly is a priority and that staying with the same stale UI they’ve had for almost 7 years now was problematic. Just guessing.

Third, this must all be based on some vector of feedback from … somewhere. There is telemetry that will show them that only 2 percent (or whatever) of people move the Taskbar, so that’s a no-brainer from a math perspective. This can justify a lot of decisions we may not agree with.

Fourth, it’s interesting you bring up Search Highlights. This is a great example of a feature I do not want, but I appreciate that I can at least turn it off. (I likewise do not appreciate that me making that change will not sync the change to every PC I sign into.) The problem with some of the changes in Windows 11 is that you can’t revert them. We can’t use the old Taskbar and Start menu, for example. And I worry that more and more changes will move in this direction, this one-way street.

More curmudgeonly, what portion of the Windows user base is demanding things like the, er, simplified taskbar or Search Highlights? Are Snap Groups the only functional (rather than aesthetic) innovation we can expect in Windows 11’s full life cycle?

It is getting harder to plumb for the useful stuff, for sure. There is more form than function, in other words. But there are useful changes, of course. I feel like my work on the Windows 11 book is mostly about fixing/reverting bad design decisions. It’s not how I want this to be.

Windows 12?

will asks:

On a related note, how long do you think it will be before we see Windows 12? Maybe in 1-2 years with bigger changes then?

Because Microsoft would never do anything as basic as providing customers with any kind of guidance on such a thing, we have to speculate. (Also, it’s reasonable to believe they don’t know yet either.) But this is further complicated by a few factors. Windows is on a rapid release cycle in which new versions (feature updates) will come out every year regardless of the branding. And Windows 11 is delivered as such an update, and because it is 90+ percent just Windows 10, that update/upgrade is technically simple and no more or less problematic than going from one version of Windows 10 to another. Plus, what would make Microsoft increment the number now? Windows 11 is a new version because of a new Start Menu, Taskbar, and rounded window corners. What’s next?

It’s hard to say. You could make a case for the Apple model, where we get a new version every year. You could make a case of the old model, where we get a new version every three years. You could make a case for the Windows 10 model, where Windows 12 would arrive in 5-6 years.

I don’t know. But I do feel like we need a clearly stated support lifecycle. It got really vague with Windows 10, which was supported “for the lifetime of your device.” But lifetime didn’t mean “for as long as it works.” Microsoft (sometimes arbitrarily) started declaring that some chipsets were no longer supported. There was no way to predict this happening. I’d much rather see: “x generation Intel/AMD/Qualcomm hardware is supported in whatever Windows version(s) is/are current for x number of years.” We will never see that clarity.

On a related note, hrlngrv asks:

A strong second: will Windows 12 arrive before Windows 10 reaches EOS, or will Windows 10 EOS become the first time since Windows 1 that there were only one version of Windows in support at the time?

This is an excellent question.

Microsoft’s stated goal with Windows 10 was to get the userbase all on the same version. By finally adding some hardware cutoffs and by retiring Windows 10, it may finally realize that dream with Windows 11. But we’re really stuck in the same weird cycle since Windows 11 is revved every year, and we will eventually see some hardware/chipsets fall out of support. It’s all so vague.

Still, that would be very interesting.

Junk

arjay asks:

This week I’ve had to hand-delete a couple of dozen junk (scam) emails from my outlook.com inbox. This has happened a few times before; I assume MSFT has to re-tune their filters somehow. I go through and report all of them. Most of this weeks are easily identified because they are offering me a $90 coupon or prize or rebate. But it seems to take quite a long time for that tuneup.

I realize this doesn’t help, but I experience this with Gmail as well. I report/block/mark as spam so much email I’m surprised I still get any. But it’s just getting worse all the time.

At the same time, however, they send me an email just about every day asking me if a sender is spamming me. 99% of the time it is an email or promotion list that I subscribe to, so the answer virtually always is that I intend to get that email. I’m sure I’ve had to answer the same question for the same source more than once; the response is (when I say I want it) that they will never filter that address. But then they ask again.

My biggest pet peeve is email newsletters that do not offer a way to unsubscribe. But my second biggest pet peeve is when I never subscribed, they do let me unsubscribe, and then one of the choices I get for unsubscribing is “I never signed up for this newsletter.” That should never happen, and it should never be a choice.

I wish there was a better way to handle this. Meaning that the infrastructure was there to just prevent it. I saw a headline on Medium, but didn’t read the post, that was “I delete my email account every three years.” And … that’s interesting. That is one way to get rid of spam. For a while.

But again. This should be better.

S mode

andrew b. asks:

So, the other day I purchased a Surface Go 3. The Pentium model, albeit the mid-tier 8/128 model. I am actually really enjoying it, although for me this mainly replaces a 2017 10″ Kindle Fire. My real work is done on a desktop, but I appreciate the flexibility of being able to run Windows apps if I need to.

I ran into a snag though: Amazon’s Kindle app is not in the store. This means I had to take my Go out of S mode. I am curious, is there a performance hit from taking it out of S mode? I’ve seen it explained that Microsoft’s performance claims are based on malware not being installable (seems laughable if you look at some of the apps available in the store) and limits to what the store apps can do, but is there anything more to it? Are there any additional processes or whatnot that get turned on when you switch out of S mode? Thanks.

When Microsoft started promoting Windows 10 S/S mode, it claimed that this would improve the performance, security, and whatever else in Windows, but it never provided any data to support those claims.

And if you look at the description of this for Windows 11, it’s hard not to quibble with it immediately. For example, “To increase security, it allows only apps from Microsoft Store, and requires Microsoft Edge for safe browsing.” It requires Microsoft Edge because it’s anti-competitive, and as I learned early on, Edge is no better or worse than Chrome or any other browser when it comes to tracking and privacy concerns. We’re just choosing a different overlord, and we will still need to install extensions to be truly protected. This is just marketing, in other words. (And it’s interesting that the word “performance” only appears once on that page with no supporting explanations.)

That said, I’ve always felt that Windows should always run in S mode but that users should be able to add exceptions. Like, I want to be in S mode, but I do want to use Chrome, or Brave, or Firefox. Or I need to install a driver utility for my printer or scanner. Or whatever. We’re adults. We appreciate what you’re trying to do here, but you need to let us punch a hole in it for particular things we need.

I’m not aware of any comparison of resource usage or whatever between S mode and normal Windows on the same PC using the same apps, etc. And generally speaking, I’d say this doesn’t matter much on most PCs. We have so much headroom these days with processing power, RAM, and storage. But The Surface Go line is an interesting example of where S mode might actually make sense. And it’s too bad you can’t simply be in S mode but make that one exception for that one app. It’s such a missed opportunity for Microsoft.

Surface

straker135 asks:

I have liked the Surface line of devices, first for the interesting developments that were brought in from time to time, hinge engineering heaven, and later for the quality of design. Since Microsoft got burned by trying to lead with what proved to be faulty Intel chips, and promising developments such as Surface Studio were never taken meaningfully further, Surface seems to me to have stagnated, apart from iterative, but hardly compelling, and certainly not industry leading improvements.

Paul do you see Microsoft doing anything really interesting with Surface in the future? Too many blind alleys Like Surface Duo and Neo for me to have much expectation. Microsoft seem to me to have lost interest and are barely going through the motions.

You know, Surface is a lot like Windows 11 in that I’m of two minds on it. I feel like Microsoft competing with its biggest partners (PC makers) was and is a mistake, but I also actually really like most Surface PCs. I have a hard time reconciling that.

But stepping past those issues, there are definitely some big problems with Surface. Microsoft is a tiny PC maker compared to the rest of the market, and it doesn’t get preferential pricing or availability on parts. It can’t offer the same customization capabilities as the big players, and now that it doesn’t have stores, it lost that Apple-like ability to have local places for people to shop and get support. It has a history of reliability issues. There is a weird focus on things that don’t matter to most customers, like hinges and new form factors, none of which have been successful. The whole product line is riding the one success they have had, the Surface Pro form factor, and that only speaks to a small portion of the market. Most people would be better off with a traditional laptop and don’t need a tablet with a pen.

The Duo/Neo stuff is just the latest rendition of this hubris, this belief that if they make it, it will just be successful. So what could be next? Is there some big change, some new form factor that will make Surface exciting again?

I doubt it. But I actually like the current lineup as it is for the most part, and I feel like Job One should be quality and style, and getting in front of the reliability issues. Surface Laptop, for example, is an absolute clone of the MacBook Air, but that’s perfect because there is a much bigger market of people who/need want Windows PCs and we need that kind of product. Just go for the mainstream. I’m surprised it’s not more successful.

Also, and this is nitpicky, but it’s time to drop 3:2 displays on non-tablets. 16:10 has established itself as the ideal aspect ratio for productivity-focused PCs. I know some will disagree. But this is another example of the whole world going in one direction. Except for Surface.

Edge VPN

wmurd118 asks:

Paul, what are your thoughts about the upcoming addition of a VPN to Edge? Is it just theater or a really useful tool?

If you haven’t seen it, Microsoft has begun testing a built-in VPN in Edge in the Dev channel. I love this idea. And I will probably write about this separately. But since you asked, here are a few thoughts.

First, this feature is still in early testing and there are many bits that are unclear. For example, Microsoft will provide 1 gigabyte of free data every month when you sign in to Microsoft Edge with your Microsoft Account. That seems like a fair trade, but it’s not clear what happens after 1 Gb. Will Microsoft let you pay for more data? If you have a Microsoft 365 account, could more data just be included with the subscription (to whatever point)? We don’t know.

Second, this makes me wonder about a VPN being built into Windows instead of Edge. And about being able to auto-enable a VPN for certain traffic. For example, I may not want a VPN on all the time, but I might want it applied to some streaming service when I’m traveling so I can access content I get at home. (There are many examples of this, most of which are about getting around stupid old-fashioned limits like watching Netflix content in another country or watching a baseball game on MLB.TV and being blacked out.)

But this is a great example of a truly useful new Edge feature. And I can’t remember the last time I said that.