Ask Paul: September 1 (Premium)

Happy, um, Thursday, and welcome to an earlier-in-the-week-than-usual edition of Ask Paul ahead of the Labor Day long weekend. Why? I’m traveling to the Finger Lakes region of New York state for the holiday weekend.

Ads and Windows

andrew asks:

Paul, is your goal of eliminating ads and general obnoxiousness reasonable while still using Windows? Between desktop notifications telling me to use programs I already use, a cute and handy weather indicator in the taskbar suddenly being replaced with calls for my attention to check out some new celebrity bikini photos or whatever (Breaking News!), search selling me things what aren’t the files I am searching for, etc. it seems as though Windows is one of the worst offenders. I gave up and switched my desktop machine to Zorin OS, and the digital silence is amazing. Short of switching OSes, I’d think you would be stuck playing whack-a-mole with various settings hidden as deep as possible to disable that stuff.

Obviously, I spend a lot of time thinking about this. But between writing the relevant parts of the Windows 11 Field Guide recently and what is suddenly a tsunami of laptop reviews that require me to keep reconfiguring Windows 11 from scratch, it’s been top of mind. And looking past my personal issues with Windows and telemetry, and how you can’t disable it (for the most part), I have been trying to think through what the real-world impact is of this behavior. Not just for me but in general.

And the issue you raise here is really multiple issues, each with its own threat assessment. That said, the overall impact, honestly, is usually quite minor, though that will depend on how you use Windows. Most people reading this site, for example, probably disable Widgets (well, hide the taskbar item) and know what they can do about “suggestions,” which appear as toast notifications and occasionally elsewhere in the UI. Most “normal” (non-technical) users probably don’t think about this stuff and regard the occasional interruption as part of the Windows experience.

But let me briefly consider each of these issues.

Widgets. I hide the icon, so there’s no harm, no foul, but I should at least point out that this interface has gotten a lot better and that there is a pretty simple wizard you can use to tailor it for your interests. (Open Widgets, click your profile image, choose “Manage interests” to go to the Microsoft Start website, and then scroll down to the bottom of the navigation bar on the left and choose “Tune your feed.”) Do I wish that I could literally disable this? (For example, Widgets still appears if you type WINKEY + W.) Sure. But it’s not offensive.

Default app nonsense. I’ve made a mini-career over the past year of complaining about how you can set Chrome or whatever browser as the default but you will still run Edge if you click on a story in Widgets, a web-based search result in Start search, or an item in Search highlights, and I will never stop complaining about that. It’s just wrong. But I don’t do any of those things, so they don’t impact me. And you can, at least, turn off Search highlights. (Settings > Privacy & security > More settings > “Show search highlights”.)

Suggestions. You can turn this off too. (Settings > System > Notifications > Additional settings > “Suggest ways to get the most out of Windows and finish setting up this device” and “Get tips and suggestions when using Windows”.

Notifications. I was literally just thinking about this one because what I usually do is see a Suggestions notification toast pop-up and then I turn off the two settings noted above. But realistically, I almost never want to see any notifications in Windows. This is one of those things that sounds like it makes sense, but these things are literally just interruptions and I can’t think of the last time I wanted or needed one. I’m looking into what it means to just disable them altogether. (Settings > System > Notifications > Notifications will do this.)

Search. As noted, you can turn off Search highlights. And there are other search settings you can configure (Settings > Privacy & security > Search permissions). And while none of them are “turn off Web search, you can at least disable personalized results from OneDrive and search history. But whatever. I use Start search for one thing and one thing only: to find secondary apps that are not pinned to my Taskbar. And it’s fine for that.

The sticking point for me is that you can’t disable telemetry entirely. I don’t get that. And I was discussing whether something like NextDNS could solve this problem with Rafael, and his answer was basically that he’d tried that and it wasn’t worth it because the results were unpredictable. But again, from a day-to-day perspective, this doesn’t really impact me.

What would impact me is not having the apps and services I rely on in Linux. OneDrive file system integration, for which I know there are solutions/workaround, but also native apps like Word, Photoshop, Premiere Elements, and so on. I like the idea of Linux, but it’s a workflow killer, and just too many things to replace. This is an issue for any alternative platform, including Chrome OS and the Mac. And it’s kind of a deal-breaker for me.

Ads and privacy

ianceicys asks:

Paul in relation to advertising in Windows there is a setting “Use Random Hardware Addresses.” Given all of the issues with invasive ad tracking, it seems like from a privacy perspective there are some folks in the Windows Engineering team that want to provide better tools for privacy and “less advertisement tracking”, taking an Apple-like approach, like icloud+ (apple relay/apple vpn).

Yes and no. Microsoft also has settings related to “advertising ID” which will uniquely fingerprint you for advertisers regardless of the random hardware address feature, which is related to network scanning. The awful thing is, they promote it as a benefit: by leaving this setting “on,” which it is by default, you will see personalized ads instead of random ads. Great. (All platforms have such a feature. On the iPhone, it’s called “Personalized Ads,” which you can find in Settings. As Apple notes, “turning off personalized ads will limit Apple’s ability to deliver relevant ads to you but will  not reduce the number of ads you receive.)

Any thoughts on if you see additional advertising safeguards being put in place in Windows by Microsoft, or do you think the siren call of advertising profits will just win out?

It’s already won out. Microsoft engages in what I call “privacy theater” in Windows, where it provides you with literally hundreds of privacy-related settings, 95 percent of which don’t do a thing, and 0 percent of which solve the real problem: you are being tracked by Windows, and Microsoft sells that data to advertisers.

How profitable do you think Privacy has been to Apple, compared to selling ads?

Well. 🙂

Apple is the most voracious company on earth when it comes to earning revenues and profits, and to date they’ve made a killing on selling hardware, and privacy has emerged as a key marketing point for them in recent years. But given its penchant for growth, and that big growth has to come from new markets/businesses, Apple will also soon emerge as one of the world’s biggest advertisers. I’m curious to see how it counters that with its privacy messaging.

Broken

AnOldAmigaUser asks:

Regarding advertising, you mentioned that it used to be possible to earn a reasonable amount from ads, but that has changed. Now, I know that Google and Meta are growing ad revenue. The advertisers themselves must be making money from the ads as they continue producing and placing them. So, it is a huge business that seems to be benefitting everyone but the content creators whose work bring the eyeballs. What has changed? Clearly something has. This doesn’t even touch on the problem of creepy surveillance, but it seems the entire business is broken.

Right. Exactly right.

This is the key issue with advertising: yes, it’s annoying, but what it really is about is learning more about you by violating your privacy and then monetizing that information. I know, because I always hear from these people, that some find it ironic or hypocritical or whatever that I am complaining about ads when my site is just as bad an offender in that regard as anything else on the web. I mean, duh. That’s the problem: my company can’t make a decent wage with reasonable ads, just like the rest of the web, and it’s because Facebook and Google, and soon Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft, have discovered that advertising is a cheap and easy way for them to make money, not the companies and people who actually create the content they’re leaching off of. The system is broken.

Look, we’ve all had that classic Google experience where we search for something and then see ads for that thing everywhere. Most have even suspected that their phones are listening to them because they will discuss a topic in public and then start seeing ads for that thing too. That’s a huge problem, for sure. But when that is not possible, the answer seems to be spamming users with ads and doing so everywhere. And because those ads are so ineffective and pay so poorly, it just escalates and we’re at the point now where ads can take up more space on a page than the actual content. Some spammers create sites just for that reason. (You’ve all gone down the “listical” sinkhole at least once, admit it.)

I don’t understand why the pushback on this isn’t bigger or more widespread, why governments and regulators aren’t putting a stop to it. But all I can do is what I can do, and given my role, I feel a responsibility to discuss this publicly. As I keep pointing out, I pay for a crazy amount of written, audio, and video content, and our site at least offers an option for people who don’t want ads and can afford to support the work we do. Most sites do not.

Speaking of which, I keep mentioning Spotify and how they are transparent about how much they make from paying and ad-supported customers, respectively, and how this could provide some insight into how ineffective ad-supported businesses really are. This isn’t even an extreme example, because Spotify has a captive audience and can’t (or at least doesn’t) spam customers with ads as one can on a website. But in its most recent earnings report, Spotify revealed that it earned about $2.49 billion in revenues from 188 million premium subscribers and about $358 million in revenues from 252 million ad-supported subscribers. So the math here is easy: Spotify earned an average of $13.24 per each paying customer but only $1.42 per each ad-supported customer in that quarter. That’s almost 10-to-1.

Switch bundles

harmjr asks:

So this one I know Paul is going to know the answer to this because its his favorite console. 🙂 Does anyone know if Nintendo will be releasing any new console bundles for the Switch before the holiday season. Have a nephew 5 yrs old who starting to like Minecraft.  Is this the best easiest way for him to get started in Minecraft?

Sorry, I don’t know anything about what’s happening with the Switch this holiday season beyond that I don’t expect a new version of the console (4K or whatever) anytime soon. But sure, I think Switch is a great choice for the age group and an excellent way to get started with Minecraft.

Delphi, free, and the future

ErichK asks:

Paul, Delphi lives!  Now I’m sure you’re aware of Embarcadero, but what I personally didn’t know is that you can download Delphi for free as long as it’s only for personal use.  I did that, and I’ve got to say, I was pretty impressed.  I don’t know… is there any reason why it couldn’t be used for professional software development, instead of Visual Studio?

Interesting. I either didn’t know or forgot that it was free for personal use.

There’s no reason one couldn’t use this for professional software development, but the issue with Delphi from the 1990s remains today: because it’s made by a third party, it will always lag behind whatever platform innovations that Microsoft is making. Granted, this was a bigger issue when Delphi was more of a mainstream concern, as was Windows.

But I was just thinking about this when watching the keynote (or another video) from the recent .NET Conf on MAUI. The presenter was explaining how Microsoft would always keep MAUI up to date, so that when Apple or Google released new controls, APIs, or whatever technologies in their respective mobile platforms that MAUI would be updated in kind. And … sure. I’m sure they’ll try. But there will be major advances here and there, and it will always be behind the native toolsets. It’s just a fact of life.

Personally, I feel like Delphi had its moment in the sun, and it was absolutely superior to whatever Microsoft was doing at the time: the Visual Component Library (VCL) was well-designed and truly object-oriented, and the underlying Object Pascal language was superior to C/C++, Java, and whatever else was happening. But things have changed a lot since then. Anders Hejlsberg, the mastermind behind Delphi/Object Pascal/VCL, came to Microsoft and created C# and .NET (and TypeScript). And these are by design more modern and superior to whatever Delphi is today. Even if you just stuck with Windows Forms or Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), I feel like you’d be in a much better place. And all that is available for free for personal use as well.

But I write this having spent a good chunk of the past week watching videos about the Amiga and rereading parts of the Amiga User Interface Style Guide and Amiga Hardware Reference Manual … to no end I can think of whatsoever. I get the nostalgia, in other words, and in the case of Delphi—unlike the Amiga—you could at least do something relevant and modern with it now. So there’s no reason not to.