Ask Paul: May 5 (Premium)

Well, it’s finally May, and the weather is finally warming after a terrible April, but don’t go outside until you’ve read through this mammoth installment of Ask Paul. There’s a lot going on this week.

PC upgrade

noelt1955 asks:

Hi Paul. I retired early last year and am currently using a (docked) Surface Pro 3 at home that has been great but has passed its use-by date. I no longer need a notebook computer and I want to toy with some amateur video editing for fun. I have a multiple monitor setup in my study and happily use Samsung Dex on my Galaxy Ultra s21 when away in our RV (thanks to Starlink). My budget is around US$1,500. I’m in Australia but have a wide choice available. Maybe I should switch to a Mac Mini, but I must admit to being more comfortable in the Microsoft world. What’s your advice?

If I’m reading this correctly, you have $1500, and need a device for video editing, but don’t want to buy a laptop? If that’s correct, then there is only one obvious choice: an iPad or iPad Pro with a Magic Keyboard or a third-party alternative. Why? Because iMovie, which you get for free on those platforms, is the very best and easiest video editing solution and iPads are fantastic. Was I doing this personally, I’d go for the biggest screen Apple makes, so a 12.9-inch iPad, which starts at $1099 U.S., and then the Apple Magic Keyboard, which is $349 U.S. That brings you in just under $1500, but you will need external storage or more internal storage for video, of course.

That said, if you handed me $1500 and said this was primarily for video editing, I would get a laptop. I prefer Windows, so I’d go with a premium HP or Lenovo laptop, with at least a 14-inch display. But if you like the iMovie idea, Apple will soon launch a 15-inch MacBook Air that should be right around that price point too.

Or, if you want to stick with Surface, the Surface Pro 9 is an obvious choice. Here, too, I would go with a laptop (Surface Laptop), in part for the bigger display, but everyone has their own preferences. And on that note, I suspect others will have different ideas about this. It may be useful to get a range of opinions on this.

Xbox eternal

jrzoomer asks:

Paul in light of a failed Activision deal, do you think Microsoft would be better off folding (or selling to an interested party, if possible) the Xbox division? It’s certainly not priority #1–earlier this year they did cut jobs at HoloLens, Xbox, and Surface.

I once believed that Microsoft should have spun off Xbox for all the obvious reasons, but with Microsoft’s shift to cloud computing, that thinking changed. And the one thing that Xbox benefits from—that HoloLens, Surface, and even Windows (mostly) do not—is that it can fit and grow within that world. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that cloud computing, and the resulting subscription services, are what makes Xbox make sense as a platform. Now that games are being delivered from the cloud, as opposed to on disc in retail stores, Microsoft’s expertise there is a strength. That’s particularly true of cloud streaming, and while this will never replace consoles (or whatever) else, it’s a nice piece of the diversification puzzle.

I think back to the the original Xbox strategy. Microsoft had no presence in the living room, and Gates thought that consoles could eventually compete and threaten their PC domination. So they got into TV with WebTV/MSN and consoles with Xbox. But that strategy failed, and I wonder if Microsoft, knowing what they know now, would have ever gone down this path to begin with. PC dominance would be eventually be threatened–not by consoles, but by the smartphone.

Obviously, things change, and while it’s fair to say that whatever strategy Gates and company had for video games in 2000/2001 is irrelevant today, one thing remains the same: gaming is huge. And while Microsoft lost in mobile, nothing other than time travel could have changed that, and there are still huge opportunities on the software and services (cloud) side there. And that includes gaming. My regret for Xbox isn’t that they stuck with consoles or whatever, it’s that they never attacked mobile gaming head-on. This is the one mistake that the current Xbox team made. And while they’re trying to address that with Activision Blizzard, they should still be working to bring as much Xbox intellectual property as possible (Halo, Gears, Forza, etc.) to mobile. In fact, you could argue that should be the primary focus.

I know there are people that love it. But history is filled with tech that doesn’t exist today that people loved. And nowadays, its hard to see how this division makes sense.

I think it does make sense. But you have to look past consoles to see why. Microsoft may be a perennial also-ran in consoles, but consoles are only one way to game. And they’re old-fashioned: you have to be in a specific room and only in your own home to use one. Cloud computing helps push Xbox past that limitation. And it provides other benefits, some of which I outline in Redfall Proves that Microsoft’s Xbox Strategy Works (Premium): if Xbox was just about consoles, it would be a one-trick pony and vulnerable. By diversifying, the business is healthier. It’s what Apple did to solve the iPhone “problem”: Services is now its second-biggest and fastest-growing business. This is exactly what Microsoft is trying to do with Xbox. (And you can even see this in their most recent earnings report: Xbox hardware sales fell 30 percent in the quarter, but Xbox content and services grew 3 percent, revenue from Xbox subscriptions reached nearly $1 billion in the quarter for the first time, and overall gaming revenues were only down 4 percent. If Xbox was just hardware, those numbers would be very different.)

And while we may not think of this as “Xbox,” there is no reason that Microsoft can’t do with Google said it would do with Stadia (but didn’t) after it canceled that consumer service, by making its Azure backend services available to game publishers and third-party services. Sony, for example, may still use Azure for its own Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Cloud Gaming competitors. So even if Xbox “loses” in the future, or is just one of several players, Microsoft can still win in gaming by leveraging its expertise and infrastructure and partnering with others. And that’s very much the Microsoft playbook.

Developers, developers, developers

TheJoeFin asks:

Do you have any read on if Microsoft is happy with how their new app strategy is going? (WinAppSDK & WinUI3 & MAUI)

Happy is a strong word. 🙂

Let me separate those out into two sides, the desktop—which is Windows App SDK (which includes WinUI 3 and is not .NET-based) and cross-platform, which is MAUI (and is based on .NET).

On the desktop, Microsoft made what I think was a fatal mistake when it transitioned to what became the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and then it made a second mistake by tying UWP functional updates and improvements to specific Windows 10 versions. It unraveled that mistake by creating WinUI 3 and the Windows App SDK, so now whatever developer features are available there can be used on any supported Windows version. That’s “smart,” but it’s also a belated change that maybe it should have seen was necessary before releasing Windows 10, but we can’t roll back the clock.

And I mean that broadly: after introducing Metro/universal Windows apps in Windows 8.x, Microsoft couldn’t have just reset everything and gone in a new direction as that would have screwed over the millions of developers who did adopt this technology, and so we’re kind of stuck with the bad decisions of the past. (Not that there weren’t some good ideas in UWP, obviously.) And maybe we should acknowledge that it doesn’t matter: new native Windows app development has been dead for a long time for all kinds of reasons, and UWP, like Windows 8, was an attempt to seize some of the success others were having in mobile. That all failed, and I think the strategy was wrong, but I understand it generally. I just disagree with the details.

MAUI comes out of a different place, but with a similar evolution. In this case, we have Miguel de Icaza championing cross-platform .NET from outside of Microsoft and his last pre-Microsoft company, Xamarin, creating a mobile cross-platform development environment called Xamarin.Forms that was a messy jumble of good and bad. Microsoft bought Xamarin, hired Miguel (who has since left), and advanced Xamarin.Forms, and then evolving that into MAUI, which now supports Windows and Mac (and Tizen) in addition to Android and iPhone/iPad. MAUI is similar to UWP in that it’s a mobile app framework (and that’s true on the desktop platforms too), but it’s different in that it’s based on .NET and not the Windows Runtime. That said, MAUI, like the Windows App SDK, supports WinUI 3 (on Windows only, of course). Raise your hand if you’re confused. Yep, me too.

MAUI solves some of the complexity of Xamarin.Forms, so in that sense it’s a win, just as the Windows App SDK is, sort of. But like the Windows App SDK, it’s based on a mess, and many of the issues of the past are still present. And it’s no one’s fault that cross-platform development is hard, especially if you really want an app to look and feel native and natural on all the target platforms. This is a struggle for any cross-platform solution.

So here we are. They solve some problems from the past. They provide other ways forward for Microsoft stack developers, and it’s fair to point out that high-level .NET and WinRT code is similar enough; the APIs work similarly, etc., you use the same language (C#), and so on. And developers in this space have some interesting web development options to consider, including Blazor (which also integrated with MAUI in interesting ways).

From Microsoft’s perspective, they’re probably done, and are doing, what they can. And I suppose one way to look at this is through the same lens that we view Microsoft more broadly (meet the users where they are), the same lens I just used on Xbox (meet gamers where they want to play). That is, Microsoft’s key advances here, arguably, are in making Windows as good a developer platform as they can. If you choose Windows, you can use tools like Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, you can target any number of platforms, and you can access any number of frameworks. The choice is, if anything, too daunting.

But if a developer chooses, say, Flutter or React Native for cross-platform development, we might see that as a loss of sorts, since they’re not using Microsoft frameworks. But if they do that work in Visual Studio Code or Visual Studio on Windows, we might see that as a win. What if they do so on a Mac? Or even Linux? It’s still sort of a win, right?

I’m trying to convince myself here, I guess.

What is the point of you, Miller?

wright_is asks:

As a user, what is the point of Windows, and to a certain extent MS applications, anymore? It is supposed to be an operating system. By definition, an operating system is something that lets you accomplish tasks using applications, without getting in the way … But, more and more, Windows is hindering actually doing things you want, with the tools you want. Want to open a document/link in the application you specified? (E.g. a link or a document in an email)? No chance, Windows will now open it in Edge, regardless of your preferences. Want to quickly start an application? Yes, just wait while we show these house-ads! Actually opened the app and want to get some work done? Let us put up some overlays pointing out features you already know about and stop you getting to your document! Microsoft aren’t the only culprits, but they are more egregious than most in the main OS.

These are the times that try men’s souls.

Obviously, I’m with you.

I was walking the other morning with my wife, and while I respect that too much of my day job stuff can be tedious, I need to unload sometimes, and I was curious if she had anything to offer on this topic. Which was this: I cover Microsoft. I’ve written about the company for almost 30 years, and through no design of my own, I moved into a news and analysis role early on and here we are. I can’t be a tail wagging the dog, I just report on what’s happening. But when what’s happening is negative, I often get pushback from people who believe me to be too negative myself, whereas I think I’m just reacting to what Microsoft did and their ire should be focused on them, not me. The way I think about it, when Microsoft does something right, I point that out. And when Microsoft does something wrong, I point that out. And if there is more bad than good, I can’t control that. But I also can’t ignore it.

What’s happening right now with the part of Microsoft I care about the most is objectively not good. It’s not the worst it’s ever been—that would be the U.S. antitrust days when every day in court was another revelation about how freaking terrible that company was—but it’s bad. And it seems to be escalating.

My rationalization 20+ years ago was that my job, as I saw it, was to serve those people who used Windows and other Microsoft products. That is, I’m not here for Microsoft. I’m here for their customers. And I look at it the same way today. How do we cope with what’s happening and, as importantly, what can or should we do as customers to make things right? Obviously, our options are somewhat limited. I use whatever tiny pulpit I have to the best effect I can. But we’re dealing with a soulless corporate colossus here. Individuals at Microsoft may or may not care about my opinions. But Microsoft certainly does not. I am clear-eyed about that.

For all the issues in Windows 11 today, I still prefer it. And I spend time, a lot of time, evaluating the alternatives.  I am just more productive in Windows. And while I could get work done on a Mac, with Linux, or (to a lesser degree) on a Chromebook, each has its own stumbling blocks for me, and each is painful enough that even considering such a switch is a non-starter. I will keep checking to see if that ever changes, but that’s where I’m at.

But this is a personal decision we all face. And when it’s time to upgrade, these negative experiences will inform whatever decision one makes. Enough bad experiences will surely lead to defections, and this is the specter I raised frequently, most recently in We’re All Beta Testers Now (Premium). And I have to say, I was a bit taken aback by some of the feedback. One person asked if I literally thought whether Microsoft’s “real goal is to get us all to get us to give up and go use some other platform” because “it really seems that antagonistic and user-hostile.” And I sort of pushed back with no, not literally. But … I don’t know. It does feel that way.

Another wondered aloud why they should even care that Microsoft was beta testing new features with mainstream users in what I think of as Windows 11 stable. This question confuses me. We are here specifically because we do care. But you need a certain amount of empathy is required to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. I don’t “care” that I’m being used as a guinea pig per se, as I’m technical enough to handle it. But I do think about my wife, my non-technical friends, or other “normal” people and, yeah, I find this tactic outrageous. Expressing that and literally providing an alternative to what I think is bad behavior isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s the only logical way to respond to this.

But I’m not jumping ship anytime soon, for two reasons. One, as noted above, I do prefer Windows to other computing platforms, and I do use and prefer a lot of Microsoft software and services, though I will always reserve the right to choose what’s best for me, as anyone should. And two, I feel a strong responsibility to help people work around this stuff. I write about personal technology generally, but I am very much focused on Microsoft and productivity, and this all hits right at the core of where I am. But everyone else needs to do what’s right for them. There are challenges to moving to new platforms, new apps, and new services. We all have to do what’s right for us.

It’s hard to sit here and watch what happens, document each outrageous step backward, and not feel that Microsoft is, deliberately or not, chipping away at the trust it has built up. And it will be hard if not impossible to win back that trust. Most people who leave will be gone for good. That’s why I described what they’re doing on today’s FRD as not just being bad, but bad business. It’s not smart, not for Microsoft, not for its customers, and not for Microsoft’s shareholders. I can’t explain why they are behaving this way.

App stores

wright_is also asks:

Apple & Google are especially bad when it comes to their app stores (and I just tried the MS Store in my browser – it is disabled by policy on my work PC – and they are actually better here, which surprises me, they missed a money earning opportunity). If you search for an app by name (E.g. “Microsoft Outlook”), Google and Apple will show you a totally different app that doesn’t match either word you are searching for, as the first option, E.g. Gmail, K9 etc. The 100% match is always at least the second item in the results … If I search for “mail client”, fine, give me a random list of mail clients. But if I give a 100% name match for the app I want, chances are, I want that app, not one of its competitors. Just about to go into a Teams meeting and need to install the app, enter “Microsoft Teams” into the Apple App Store and you get Zoom as the best match! Microsoft Teams is in second place…

Right. This doesn’t get enough press, and it’s a great example of enshittification, which is literally the process of taking something that was so great that you relied on it and then turning it into something that best serves its maker and not its users. (And it’s not just app stores. When I search on Amazon, the same thing, you see sponsored results first.) If this relationship was healthy, it would be a win-win, meaning that it would benefit you and the app store maker.

When I set up my last phone, I got the following:

• 1Password = LastPass
• Microsoft Teams = Zoom
• Microsoft Outlook = Gmail
• AppTec EMM = Microsoft InTune
• Microsoft ToDo = StepStone Jobs
• Microsoft OneNote = Daily Habits Tracker
• Google Authenticator = Authentikator-App, 2FA from Chamomile PTE Ltd. (Who?!?!?)
• PayPal = Klarna

Surely this is also dangerous, given the last 2 examples. If you are searching for a Google Authenticator and you are shown some no-name authenticator app, of unknown reputation, you could easily click on that by mistake. For financial applications, I’d want it to always be 100% the app I am looking for, not some other service or maybe even some malware app that slipped past the gatekeepers.

Yes. I’m sure Apple will tell you that a chunk of that 30 percent extra that customers spend on everything is going towards ensuring that such a thing never happens, but then Apple is also the privacy-first company that makes over $10 billion a year by putting Google Search, the most anti-privacy service on earth, on its devices as the default. So yeah.

This is part of the reason I’m not a fan of the stance that the U.S. government is taking on Big Tech. Yes, Big Tech needs to be regulated. But for crying out loud, how about going after the companies that are doing real consumer harm every day? Starting with the biggest offenders: the owners of the dominant app stores on mobile.

Our industry can be very frustrating.

(We hovered around the edge of this topic on FRD today as well, in comparing Google Search to AI. Granted, AI isn’t there yet, but if the point of this thing is to provide actual answers instead of just an endless scroll of blue links that users need to visit one at a time and vest for themselves, then maybe this is the revolution that we need. Nothing is that simple, but you get the idea.)

Performance and quality

madthinus asks:

Watching Digital Foundry videos, you can see a trend of several games that performs better on PlayStation 5 than Series X. Also, Series S l always end up a lesser experience. For all the hype of the worlds most powerful hardware in a console, the series X has not delivered. Is this an overhead issue in the software stack or is it developers prioritising Playstation 5 or is the Xbox tools just not that good in helping developers deliver at the same level as the “weaker” Playstation 5.

Consoles represent a unique challenge to video game makers because they have historically been a non-moving target and the only way to improve quality—better performance, better graphics, etc.—was to learn the ins and outs of each generation of device over time. Typically, what you’d find is that games made later in the lifecycle of a given console were of higher quality than those made at the beginning. This is true all the way back to the earliest consoles, like the Atari 2600.

The advantage of the PC is that users can improve matters on their own by upgrading hardware. (That’s also a negative, of course, but there’s no reason to debate the whole console vs. PC thing again.) So more recent console generations have seen midstream improvements where games would continue working across consoles in the same generation, but they might be better when played on newer, more powerful consoles in that generation. Xbox One had S and X variants, for example. The latest Xbox generation has Series S and X off the bat.

Sony does the same thing: there were multiple PS4 revs, including a Pro version of the console. But when it came to the current gen PS5, it has two versions, but there is no real technical difference beyond the availability or absence of an optical drive. We can debate which approach is “better.” In fact, let’s do that.

I initially felt that Microsoft’s approach made more sense because it formalized the notion of a tiered user experience that actually extends to the Xbox One as well, and created an expectation that there will be future tiers (i.e. new consoles) in this Xbox generation that have better specs than the Series X. Developers can move up from Xbox One and view the Series S and X as new tiers above the Xbox One, One S, and One X.

But hold on. Sony did something different, and while I’m not as well versed in the architectural differences on PlayStation, all I can say is that this tiered experience is coming: there will be a PS5 Pro or whatever that has better specs. But it is possible that a side effect of having just one PS5, so to speak, makes it a bit easier to deliver a single, high quality experience. And that by breaking up the platform as Microsoft did, developers find themselves often just targeting the least common denominator. That is, games are optimized for the Series S because they sort of have to be. That the Series S is so inexpensive and no doubt outsells the Series X doesn’t help in this regard. Why bother doing the work to make games a bit better on Series X if there are so few of them?

I guess the argument here is that maybe Microsoft should have shipped the Series S first and then maybe waited on the Series X until whatever year. And the evidence suggests that maybe that would have been better, though we should also acknowledge that the Series S would have faired poorly compared to the PS5 in benchmarks and reviews. And that maybe what Microsoft did was create a console that was roughly as good as the PS5 (the Series X) knowing that most people would see the Series S price and decide it was good enough. In this scenario, it’s a choice.

Put simply, I’m not sure. I see what both companies did, see the benefits of both approaches, and I can see what happened in the market. And what I’m sort of left with is that Sony’s inherent platform advantages related to exclusives especially is probably (but not definitely) why it’s still winning. On the other hand, this console generation is clearly not a disaster like the Xbox One was, and so there has been some improvement. And maybe that was informed by the experience of building the Xbox One S and X, both of which were nice improvements of their own.

In the end, I’m not sure that individual game “wins” are enough to get dedicated Xbox fans to switch sides (or vice versa), and most of these things are subtle, not blowouts. Plus, all the backward compatibility stuff, another piece of Phil Spencer genius that makes the Xbox more valuable as a platform, helps too. In the same way that I’ve evaluated the Mac, Linux, and ChromeOS and never felt the need to switch platforms, I’ve done the same with the PlayStation. I see it, I get it, and I don’t want it. Others may feel differently.

You’ve been Zuned

andrew b. asks:

What actually happened with the team that created the Zune store and software? I always thought that was Microsoft’s best UI work.

The Zune team, which was mostly designers, go figure, was housed in an aircraft hangar-sized facility on the Microsoft campus and I had never seen anything so big, or so many people, dedicated to a product that so few people used. I walked through that building like it was a Vegas attraction, constantly spinning my head in every direction, trying to take it all in. At the time, Zune was a going concern and still growing, and it still made absolutely no sense to me, and today it makes even less sense. It was a NeXT-like example of spending tons of money to make something unsuccessful look like it was the biggest thing in the world.

So what happened to it? It was scattered the winds. By the time Microsoft shipped the Zune HD to retail stores, that entire team had already been disbanded and I suspect that the vast majority of them couldn’t find other jobs at Microsoft because there just wasn’t that much demand for graphic artists. The key players moved onto Windows Phone, of course, but that was a relatively small group. A few ended up in Xbox because that’s where the music and video services went next.

Here’s what’s weird about this. When people think about Zune, they obviously think of the MP3 player hardware. The software, which was originally a skinned version of Windows Media Player. And the services, culminating in what was later called Grove Music Pass. But the vast majority of the people in the Zune organization were literally artists. That entire aircraft hangar-sized building was full of them. And you all forget or have no idea what they worked on because it was the stupidest, smallest part of the Zune empire: they were creating designs that you could etch onto the back of Zune hardware or use as background images in the software. Again, I’ve never seen such waste in my life. It was incredible.

But I liked the UI work too. That started in eHome, with Windows Media Center, and it continued into Windows Phone and then Metro in Windows 8. There are still elements of it, sort of, in today’s more modern Microsoft UI frameworks, like WinUI. Designs like that are sort of ephemeral, of an era, and one of the reasons that Windows 10 today looks antiquated to me is that the UI was clearly designed for the phone first. But it lives on there too. What feels modern today will look tired down the road. It’s just the way it goes with this stuff.

Building a PC

helix2301 asks:

I was wondering where you are with custom build computers? I know you have never wrote about or done one for the site but I still think there is a large market for hobbyist and enthusiast in this market. I know I build PC all the time for friends that want high performance machines and I know you have spoke about the premium PC market. I was just wondering where you land on this since there is a market for this kind of thing. I see many youtube channels and twitch channels dedicated to PC building.

Several years ago, my son and I did build a computer from scratch, and a few years ago, he brought it home from college and we took it completely apart, cleaned it up, and upgraded a few components, and he still uses it. I don’t think I ever wrote much about that, but I feel like most people don’t really need to do this sort of thing. It’s not a huge concern for me per se, though I am using an SFF mini-tower-type workstation-class PC these days and could upgrade it if needed.

And I am intrigued by what Framework is doing with laptops, and while modularity like that tackles a different part of the market than a gaming PC, it’s the same basic idea. Even something like the Intel NUC and similar tiny PCs, which can be upgraded, is in the same general area.