Ask Paul: March 17 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Here’s another great set of reader questions to ponder as we kick off our last weekend in Mexico City (on this trip) a bit early.

Being Brave

Zeppelyn56 and JustMe ask:

Paul, like yourself I have switched to Brave as my main browser but the the only thing I’m not satisfied with is Brave search. Have you used it much and how are you finding the results displayed. The main results always seem to concentrate on discussion whereas all I want is an answer to my search query.

Right. I don’t use Brave Search because, like Bing, I find it to be inferior to Google Search. This is one of those areas where trying to move off Google for all the right reasons hurts more than helps—Google Maps and Google Photos, too—and so I just suck it up and use it.

The cost(s) of AI

will asks:

Does AI stand for Absolutely Indolent? 

🙂 I saw a quote from Microsoft that, sure, its work AI may make mistakes, but they’re fun mistakes. I’m paraphrasing.

Like you I watched the Microsoft Copilot announcement, and I agree it is a good name.

Yes. And let’s pause on that for a moment. Copilot is a good name, and while I have this weird nostalgia for the name Cortana, I feel like this is the right way forward. It’s something Microsoft can use everywhere and it will make sense to people.

However, what came to mind when I was watching this, and the Google one as well, is how lazy people might become (if they are willing to pay, question on that later) in doing their work?  CoPilot can create an email reply, draft a proposal based on X information, create a slide deck with X & Y information.  I get it, I even think it is a pretty impressive, but imagine getting emails and documents that are well outside of what someone would normally do.  Does this make us better if some program does the work for me? 

Some time ago in an Ask Paul I referenced an episode of Deadwood that I am positive I saw and have strong memories of, but when I went back to find it, it was nothing like I remembered. Anyway, in my version of this episode, there were telegram lines coming into town and the main character, standing on his deck, drinking coffee, asked what they were for. So his underling explained it, that this thing would let people communicate immediately. And he basically why on earth anyone would want that. After all, you need time to formulate an answer.

AI is the 21st-century version of that, the thing that will make us old-timers tell younger people that they have no idea how easy they have it. How we used to actually have to write entire Word documents, and muddle our way through figuring out how a presentation works. Or whatever.

And I share your cynicism on this matter. But in the vein of it being easier to give advice than to take it, think about it like this: we have wasted so much time in our lives figuring out tools and struggling to communicate using them, that we’ve lost sight of the fact that this isn’t our job, but these tools are just there to help us do that job. And while it does feel lazy to me too, helping people overcome things that are hard because they’re not what they usually do or whatever is ultimately a good thing.

Actually, here’s a more relevant story. That I’ve told a million times. About the TechEd pre-con session I hosted in the early days of cloud computing where some guy stood up and said, “let me get this straight: my final act as Exchange administrator is going to be transitioning my employer to the cloud?” And the answer was yes, but leaving aside the issues around this guy and his career, consider instead his company and what it’s there for. It’s not there to deliver email to its employees and to pay the costs of that infrastructure and its IT staff. It’s there to sell widgets, or whatever, and email is one tool that helps the business. Moving to the cloud was cost-effective and “easier,” or whatever. It was progress.

(I’m also reminded of how early car owners had to be their own mechanics and understand the inner workings of the vehicle to even use it. Today, actual mechanics can’t even fix modern cars because they’re basically just computers on wheels. I guess there are a lot of comparisons.)

My second question is the fact that this product from MS will have some cost.  We do not know what it is, or how it will be bundled, but what would you think would be a “hard pass” number vs a “yes, I will try it” one?

I wonder about the cost too. I don’t think it was coincidental that Google issued back-to-back announcements for Google Workspace this week, one that highlighted all the coming new AI features and one that revealed that the price of Google Workspace was going up. By some estimates, a quick Bing Chatbot interaction is 10 times as expensive as a standard search query. (It is notable to me that Duoling Max is an incredible $30 per month. What?) Whatever anyone thinks of Big Tech, they’re not charities. The money required to make this work is going to come from somewhere.

With Microsoft, and I guess with Microsoft 365 specifically, we can only guess. Price hikes are an obvious choice. As are premium versions of the service that open up the AI capabilities. If you think about how Microsoft Office standalone products work vs. the versions of the apps you get with Microsoft 365 subscriptions today, it’s not hard to imagine a third AI tier.

From the desktop to the cloud to AI

cnic asks:

I gotta ask. Where is Microsoft heading? They were the go to operating system for getting work done. Now there are advertisements in Edge, suggestions that just pop up. Crazy! And add insult to injury, all this week I’ve been getting email (I pay for office 365) from the Microsoft store advertising surfaced, X box, whatever.  Really! I just wanna get work done. That was what Windows used to be about.

I feel like that is still a big chunk of what Microsoft is. Some time back, I came up with a motto for my Twitter account (“Personal technology, with a focus on productivity, mostly Microsoft”) that mimics journalist Michael Pollan’s pithy quote about healthy eating (“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”) that neatly highlights my own focus. And while Microsoft is, of course, much more than just end-user productivity tools, you can sort of view most of what they do with a productivity lens. (Not so much Xbox, I guess.)

There was a shift away from the PC and to the cloud at Microsoft that started under Steve Ballmer and has accelerated under Satya Nadella. And my assumption to date was that this was how Nadella would be remembered. But now I feel like his legacy—for better or worse—will have more to do with AI. And I gotta say, for all the nonsense around AI, the one thing that rings true to me is that it will dramatically impact Microsoft’s productivity offers, especially Office and the other end-user products and services. And that’s very cool for me, given my focus. And it should help make you feel better about the company, though it will always be big and diversified and doing whatever else too.

But, yes, the advertising stuff is tough. Word advertised OneDrive to me this week, though I am already using OneDrive and I pay for it via Microsoft 365 Family and Business Basic. Word also just popped up a helpful suggestion that I might want to save the document I’m working on, as if I’d never seen the product before. I hit CTRL + S, which saved it. But the pop-up didn’t go away.

Both of these things are “bad.” Bad design. Bad whatever. And these are the types of things that make me insane and lead to posts like We Need to Talk About Microsoft Word (Premium). But there is a small part of me that would be OK with this nonsense if a) they could be turned off and b) if they were actually smart enough to not tell me about things I’m already using or paying for. (That said, Microsoft Teams has repeatedly interrupted work meetings to tell me that I could share an Excel document with a co-worker, which is ridiculous, so maybe not.)

The problem, I guess, is that selling us a tool (Office) once every several years and then getting out of our way so we can get work done isn’t a very lucrative business in a world in which everyone is paying subscription services for, well, everything. And engagement leads to us wanting or needing to pay for those services and on and on it goes. This is literally enshittification in action. It may be avoidable, though our one out is to vote for alternatives by switching. Those costs can be high, from a workflow/training perspective. But when things get bad enough, that’s the option.

Go Celtics!

sabertooth920 asks:

Do you think the Celtics have what it takes to win it all, this year?

I don’t follow the NBA or the Celtics as closely as I used to, but they’re in the top three in the league winning percentage-wise, and a return to the Finals isn’t out of the question.

Semi-related, my brother texted me about a Larry Bird story the other day. I responded with, “On a related note, we’re waiting for an Uber, and I look down at my screen and the guy is 2 minutes away. So I say out loud [what I always say when two minutes is involved]: ‘Two minutes. There are two minutes remaining in the game’.”

He gets this humor because we went to a lot of Celtics games, including the game when they won the championship in 2008. And that’s what they always say over the intercom at Celtics games. Some things are just stuck in your brain.

Offline content apps

MichaelMDiv asks:

So I tried to download a bunch of content to my laptop for a short trip. When I went to the Microsoft Store to get the apps for VUDU and Paramount+, I discovered they were PWAs and I couldn’t download any episodes or movies from them! Looking at the reviews, others are pretty unhappy about it too, but they are blaming the companies (VUDU and Paramount) for this. I could be wrong, but I think this Microsoft shooting themselves in the foot instead. They wanted developers to put apps in their store so badly that they lowered the bar on functionality and we got stuck with these “websites in a container” that aren’t near as good as regular apps. Maybe the functionality gap will close, but my experience is that if the app doesn’t launch with it, it is not likely to get it later. What are your thoughts? On the right track or not?

It’s hard to know what to blame here. Is there some incompatibility between the DRM these services are using and the web technologies used by their apps? If so, yeah, it’s the services’ fault for not using a technology that would let this work. Apps like Netflix (which I assume are basically UWP apps) would work fine, of course.

If it is the web technologies, yes, I do think the gap will close too. But I wouldn’t blame Microsoft either way: it’s up to the services to choose their tech stacks, and if offline usage matters to them, they would make the effort to do the right thing on Windows. Microsoft definitely has options that would work.

Curious about this, I brought up Netflix and Hulu in Chrome on a Chromebook. Neither offered any way to download videos to watch online. (YouTube, which doesn’t use DRM, I assume, does offer downloads.) So maybe this is a PWA/web app limitation still.

Why that app?

jrzoomer

Paul, what makes you use a separate app for screenshots besides the built in Snipping Tool? In the past I know you’ve used Techsoft Snagit, but you have also mentioned using ShareX and most recently Greenshot.

You have a better memory than I do, but I used SnagIt back in the day because my book publisher required it.

I use Greenshot now because I prefer it, and it does exactly what I want with simple keyboard shortcuts, and there’s no UI at all. If I were taking fewer screenshots, maybe I wouldn’t bother, but I often am taking dozens at a time for the Windows 11 book now. So I need the most efficient tool for this. And the Snipping Tool is definitely not that: I don’t want to start a “snip,” I want to tap one key, or maybe a two-key shortcut, and have it just happen, automatically and immediately, and the resulting shot saved exactly where I want it, not some system default.

Screen recording

jrzoomer asks:

Paul in your Hands-On Windows series what you use for desktop recording and editing the videos? Really enjoy it.

Thanks. I use OBS Studio, which is free. And while it’s a little bit complex to set up in some ways, it was one of a few choices that TWiT recommended and the output is terrific. I have to configure it to record only on one display, scale it to 1920 x 1080, and make sure I’m recording my mic (but not the desktop sounds) too.

The way we record the show is, I connect to the producer via Zoom and he records my audio and video. And I start the screen recording, which also records my microphone audio as a backup. I send him the file after we’re done, along with whatever other ancillary files I may have (usually screenshots) and he edits it together.

I don’t know that I will have a lot of other use cases for it, but if I do need screen recording for whatever reason, I will definitely use OBS, for the familiarity and quality. (And there are versions of Mac and Linux, though I’ve only tried the one for Windows.)

Sony vs. Microsoft

ChristopherCollins asks:

I am curious about your views on Microsoft/Activision. I feel like MS has done the right things and offered the proper deals. How does Sony have all this power over regulators in other countries? I mean, I know MS is no saint… But, they are just leveling the field in my opinion. Their argument has merit, why would they pull a game from anything they can sell it on? Big picture thinking, I guess.

I don’t know why any regulator would listen to Sony at this point. Its arguments are all false or made up, its concerns are nonsensical, and it is more guilty of the behavior that it says regulators should prevent Microsoft from engaging in than is Microsoft. This company basically just doesn’t want Microsoft to have Activision Blizzard. But there is no valid reason for any regulatory body to deny this acquisition, especially given the concessions Microsoft is ready and willing to make.

You can read more about my opinions on this matter in Good Defense Wins the Game (Premium).

Netscape time

JustMe asks:

Why does Microsoft require a registry hack to get rid of the Bing Chat icon instead of just letting you disable it via settings?  I understand turning it on via an update so the capability is discoverable, but not having a setting or Group Policy that disables/removes it seems short-sighted and just more UI clutter no one asked for.

This will be a setting in Edge version 113, which arrives in stable in May.

My opinion is that this is yet another example of Microsoft shipping a feature before it’s been tested in any meaningful way, and that feedback would have indicated that this needs to be optional. (Another great example: the Search “pill” that just appeared on the Windows 11 Taskbar in November/December that had never been tested via the Insider Program; it was just fixed/replaced with Moment 2.)

This is a strategy from the old Netscape playbook: ship it first, then fix it. And it’s fricking nonsense. You don’t screw around with this stuff in stable.

Whole house NextDNS

JustMe also asks:

I realize selling your home and moving may not have allowed you time to do it (not to mention all your other projects) – but did you ever put NextDNS on your router, and if not do you still intend to?

I never did at home and won’t now because we’re moving. But our Internet connection at the new place is getting installed the day after we come home from Mexico (and we’re getting a nice upgrade to 1.2 Gbps down for just $65 per month), and after I have our Eero Wi-Fi mesh system set up there, I’ll look at installing NextDNS on the router there.