Ask Paul: July 14 (Premium)

Happy Friday and Hola from Mexico City! We’re heading out to the canals of Xochimilco with friends this afternoon, but let’s first kick off the weekend with another great set of reader questions. After last week’s explosion of writing—sorry about that—I tried to rein it in this week. Tried.

Exclusivity

sabertooth920 asks:

I guess only Nintendo and Sony are supposed to have exclusive games.  Fortunately, the judge seemingly saw through it.  What do you foresee in Microsoft’s post-Activision-purchase road map?  Do you think anything changed based on any of the concessions Microsoft had to make?

I feel like Microsoft went well beyond what is reasonable when it comes to concessions. And that these concessions show its willingness to rise above the normal competitive politics that occur in this industry. Should this deal go through, critics are going to carp every single time a Microsoft game studio releases an Xbox exclusive. But it’s important to remember two things. One, what you wrote, is that the disparity between the number of exclusives that Sony and Nintendo have compared to Microsoft is overwhelming and always will be. And two, that Microsoft is allowed to compete against these businesses just like Sony and Microsoft do. This should be a level playing field.

Were you in favor of trading for Porzingis?

Yes. This is the missing piece for the Celtics, which got this close to the championship two years in a row. I cannot believe Dallas gave this guy up.

You put the futile in FTC

red.radar asks:

Just saw that The FTC is going to appeal Judge Corley’s decision.  I am just flabbergasted.   I thought Judge Corley’s decision was rock solid and a thorough evisceration of every claim of the FTC.  I just can’t see how any regulator who values their career would throw their credibility away on such a prideful appeal.  What are your thoughts? 

So many thoughts. I will be brief.

The judge’s overall ruling is 100 percent correct. There are niggling issues that the FTC is seizing on. I wish it was more airtight.

I cannot believe the FTC is continuing this battle. That said, prolonging the case (delaying as a strategy) makes sense: after enough time, Microsoft and/or Activision Blizzard may finally say enough and move on.

There is a real risk here that this ridiculous rendition of the FTC will become seriously weakened by its ongoing losses taking on Big Tech and that this will embolden these rapacious companies to be even worse, knowing that the chance for punishment is small. A smart FTC would take on cases that make sense, not just every case, and lead by example. This would send a message to the industry regarding behavior. I just don’t understand or agree with the plan here (broadly, not just with Microsoft).

We need strong regulation of this crucial market and it’s not just the FTC that is screwing up here. We are basically offshoring Big Tech regulation to the EU, and that’s not just stupid, it’s wrong. This is not how you lead.

Related to this, JustMe asks:

One from the hypothetical back benches:  With the FTC appealing its case and the CMA not really changing its stance but allowing for Microsoft and Activision to alter their agreement for further consideration – what do you think happens if this does get dragged out to the point that Microsoft can no longer be bothered and abandons the merger entirely.  Microsoft would have won its case on merit and still effectively lost. 

All we can do here is speculate, of course. But I love to speculate. 🙂 So…

I think I mentioned on both Windows Weekly and First Ring Daily this week that delaying things has emerged as a potential strategy from both the FTC and the UK CDMA. And while I am very critical of their respective reasons for blocking this acquisition, I almost—not quite, but almost—admire this as a strategy. The longer they can delay Microsoft from consummating this deal, the more likely that they and Activision Blizzard just give up. The alternative is that they continue fighting, leading to more court experiences and more expenses for both. These governmental agencies aren’t charities, and they don’t have bottomless budgets. And both face serious opposition from within and without. The delay tactic is a good one.

How does such an outcome affect the tech industry?  How does it affect gaming, particularly on consoles?

Looking at this more broadly, and regardless of what I or anyone else thinks of the merit of this case, we are very much overdue on reigning in Big Tech and the awesome power they wield. Regulation is very much needed, and while there is a spectrum of possible remedies one can apply to any specific case of abuse, we’re behind on this. And a failure to step through these many cases, and achieve some level of positive change, becomes more onerous with every passing day.

For this case specifically, if Microsoft loses, while there will still be more acquisitions in the gaming space, they will be by nature smaller deals that will impact gamers and competitors in only minor ways. The nice things about the Microsoft/Activision Blizzard deal—assuming you can look past the “big getting bigger” bit, is that it would have improved Microsoft’s position overall, would have given Microsoft an overdue presence in mobile, would have made AB’s games available to more gamers on more devices, and would have given the entrenched dominant parties—Sony and Nintendo, mostly, but also perhaps Apple and Google over time—some much-needed competition. I’ve already argued my point here, but the net result would be more positive and healthier than the situation we have today.

More problematically, it cements Sony’s and Nintendo’s domination in consoles and does nothing to impact the mobile duopoly owned by Apple and Google. Xbox doesn’t improve generally, and Game Pass and Cloud Gaming don’t improve explicitly. Things just go on as they are. And I don’t like the way things are now, not as an Xbox guy, but as a gamer who believes that open and cross-platform is the future, or is, in other words, “better” and, I hope, inevitable. It’s a setback, basically.

Uptime

anderb asks:

What do you think about the EU making it a requirement for mobile phones sold in the region (by 2027) to have a user replaceable battery?

We can “credit” Apple for the move to non-replaceable batteries, which was just one of many things about the original iPhone that was incredible to me (in a bad way) when it was first released. You could say this of many things about the iPhone then, but it said a lot about how great that thing was overall that we put up with all the problems it introduced that were not an issue with existing smartphones. (Among them, call quality, network speed, battery life, and the removable battery you mention.)

This is an important issue on so many levels. And it really is all about Apple. It favors form over function, a traditional Apple design norm. It knew that batteries would fall short over time, leading to more frequent phone upgrades, its key business. It then made battery replacements expensive when forced to, and hard to obtain. And it fought each step of the way when forced to change its ways. Apple markets its environmental efforts, but the battery stuff is a gray area. And the entire industry followed them down this sealed battery path, because of course they did. Terrible.

Anyway, this is a good thing, and a necessary thing. Half of us walk around with portable chargers now. Carrying a thin battery was always better, and I cannot wait to do that again when needed.

C# and UHF

andrew b. asks:

Having found it for $3.99 at a Half Price Books, I have been working through Sams Teach Yourself Visual C# 2008 by James Foxall. Somewhat surprisingly, most of it (at least what I’ve worked through) carries through today without any real issue. Unsurprisingly, many of the bugs the author warns the reader they may encounter in Visual C# 2008 also carry over and are still present in Visual Studio 2022.

Microsoft has done a tremendous job with backward-compatible in C#, and that is by design. I’m not an expert in this area, but I feel like the changes in each version are usually additive and that existing language features usually carry forward.

Since that’s an observation and not a question, here’s a question: Why the hate for Winforms, Visual Basic, and anything else that makes development “easy”?

I assume you mean in general here, as I think these environments were (and are) amazing and that some of Microsoft’s most crucial mistakes in the developer space are tied to these technologies. Visual Basic can and should still be how people learn to code, but Microsoft quickly gave up on it when .NET launched. Windows Forms was essentially a cross-language version of Visual Basic, giving less experienced developers a way to learn a more sophisticated language (C#) in an environment they understood, something that is still important today (or would be, if they hadn’t ghosted VB). And when Microsoft released its most sophisticated development environment of all, WPF, it erred greatly by not leading by example and making its own in-house developers use it for new versions of Office apps and Windows user interfaces (and in other apps). Here, Microsoft did lead by example: it ignored WPF and so did third-party developers. This time period was crucial for native Windows app dev, and they totally dropped the ball, first because they were distracted by other big issues (Jim Allchin) and then because they were assholes trying to push their own stupid agendas (Steven Sinofksy, who hated .NET).

I could go on. This makes me crazy.

I’m a web developer, and yet with very little effort I was able to put together a useful winforms app that has a familiar Windows interface and is now used daily by others in my office to save literally hours of time. However, I know that Winforms gets about as much love from Microsoft and developers as Visual Basic. So, I’ve poked around with WPF and GTK but ran into a much steeper learning curve. I don’t get paid to develop desktop apps; I likely couldn’t have justified the time investment had Winforms not been available.

What gets lost here is that Windows Forms wasn’t just about moving between VB and C# at the language level. There was also a web version called Web Forms that allowed these same developers to move into this crucial huge market, and it worked just like Windows Forms. It’s long dead, obviously.

On one hand, I get that we all want everyone to learn the ins and outs and make things “the right way” with clean, beautiful code. On the other hand, offering a quick, “easy” way to make a minimum viable product (MVP) the way solutions like Winforms and VB do seem like a great way to get new developers on board. Foxall seems to recognize this. In the aforementioned book, he starts off by ditching the typical Hello World nonsense and has the reader make a basic, but fully functional, app.

Anyone wishing to learn software development today faces a much more daunting challenge today than was the case when BASIC and then Visual Basic were big concerns at Microsoft. And that is just on them. That same push for more sophisticated and elegant code was there at Microsoft, too, as it was still a company of engineers as this was happening. They just lost sight of this crucial market of people coming up in the world and then sticking with what they know if and when they become professionals. Looking at something like Javascript or Swift or whatever today, these are of whatever quality … for professional developers. They are hard on beginners.

Also, could you please rate the movie UHF on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being the best?

Is 0 a choice? 🙂 I cannot stand Weird Al Yankovic. He’s always just rubbed me the wrong way. So I assume he’s kind of polarizing. I know some (including a good friend) love the guy.

A who what now?

madthinus asks:

Paul, I am a little stunned about the news that Windows 11 23H2 is an enablement package. To me those have been super unreliable in the Windows 11 age. Some of the moment features never materialized (Right click to see task manger being the prime example.) Now we are going into the yearly refresh and it is just turn everything on from the last year’s moments?

I wasn’t sure how Microsoft was going to present this, and I gotta say, I was much more stunned by the fact that it finally issued a formal Windows updating whitepaper that actually describes what they’re doing in semi-clear form. This is the company that can’t or doesn’t communicate after all. But I was betting strongly heading into Windows 11 version 23H2 that this release would be Moment 4. So in the sense that each release builds on what came before, 23H2 is 22H2 + all previous Moments + all previous updates of whatever stripe + Moment 4. Moments come out once a quarter, so this made/makes sense to me.

When you think about it, actually basing 23H2 on a different source code branch would (or could) have instituted a new baseline for support and compatibility. So this is really good news: if your PC qualifies for 22H2, you’re getting 23H2, and if I understand this properly, you’ll get it right away with no silly tiered (or random) release schedule. We’ll see.

Some key questions: How do they now refresh the core OS: platform bits and Kernel, driver stack? Support for new processors. The Core team is still on a six monthly cycle last I checked. Are they swapping these bits now with patch Tuesdays? Canary builds just switched development branches. The removal of ARM32 UWP support, for example, when is that coming to stable, it just landed in Canary.

This is a pause on that, which, again, I think is good for customers. But Canary is a new release branch, and whether it’s Windows 12 or some future Windows 11 release, it’s fair to assume that the baseline may change at that point. We’ll see. The Insider stuff is still pretty opaque.

Or is this the clearest indication yet that 24H2 is Windows 12 and that Windows 11 is now marked for sunset. Stunned.

I believe that it is Windows 12. But as always, we can only speculate.

Home swaps

drjohnnyray asks:

Now that you have your apartment in Mexico City, do you plan on anymore house swaps in Europe?

There are a lot of open questions about us and the apartment and how we spend time moving forward. Our dog passed away last October, which was sad, of course, but it also triggered us to do something we’ve been meaning to do for a long time, and sell our overly big and expensive house. Which we did this past March. Now we live in an apartment in Pennsylvania, which has some obvious compromises or negatives compared to living in a house, but also some big upsides, especially around the cost of living. (There are many others.)

We would like to spend more time in Mexico, but we have two cats, and there are logistical problems around getting someone to care for them, especially for long periods of time. (For this trip, a niece is staying in our apartment for the three weeks we’re gone and taking care of the cats, but she’s home on college break and can’t do this during the school year.) So as was the case when we had a house, a dog, and two cats, we’re in sort of a holding pattern. We have ideas about what we’d like to do in the future. But there are blockers.

We would still like to do home swaps in Europe. But we can’t get ahead of ourselves here because, in the short term, this place was at first a big expense (now paid off), and there were expenses related to furnishing it, and time spent getting all our utilities sorted out so we can make sure the bills get paid, etc. Basically, the focus for us with regard to travel in the short term is the apartment, not Europe or anywhere else. We’ll still do other things, but smaller things. And then we’ll see.

But sure, we are open to a future where we are here in Mexico more often (some split with here and the U.S.) and can swap homes. There’s a version of this where we’re in PA, swap homes with someone in Europe, and they come to Mexico while we go to Europe from PA. But these are just ideas until things change. In the meantime, we talk about it. And we focus on Mexico City.

And not to drag this out, we also want to explore more of Mexico, using our apartment as a base. It’s a big, diverse country with lots of interesting places to explore. And hopefully, during this interim, short-term time, we can do some of that too.

NUC

jrzoomer asks:

Paul what are your thoughts about Intel and its closing of the NUC division?

As you likely know, and as I wrote in my news article about this topic, I was a huge fan of the NUC, and I owned three of these small form factor (SFF) PCs. I was just thinking, in the back of my mind, why I hadn’t since bought a newer model (the last one I owned was based on a 10th Gen Intel Core chipset). And while I can’t completely recall my various setups since then, I did make my move to a More Mobile setup in late 2021, and that may at least partially explain it: my last NUC was killed by lightning in August (I think) 2020.

Anyway, one might view the NUC’s status under Intel as being similar to that of Surface under Microsoft, in that a platform maker is technically competing with its own partners. But the NUC was never a serious retail concern, and Intel wasn’t selling them directly to customers with configurators and so on, and it never threatened PC makers. Plus, I’m not sure what Intel was even trying to prove here. It makes more money when customers buy high-end PCs with high-end Intel chips in them. Showing that one can have a great experience with a relatively low-end PC with laptop parts in it (in most cases, I know there were higher-end configurations and gaming NUCs) seems counterproductive in some ways.

So I guess I see the NUC as an almost enthusiast’s device. It was never going to be successful in a mainstream sense, and given that there are now many mini-PC alternatives, maybe there’s no need for it anymore. I think this is sad, personally, but it does make sense.

Framework for the future

dremy1011 asks:

Seeing if I can sneak in a last minute one.  Any thoughts on or plans to review the Framework laptop?  Fully upgradable sounds like a win!

Yes. I’ve been lazy here and should reach out to Framework and see if I can’t get a review unit to start. But just as with the smartphone battery question above and the industry’s growing acceptance that the sustainability and repairability of devices are crucial, it’s impossible not to view a fully upgradeable and fully modular PC like those sold by Framework as the future. This is one of those weird situations where Framework’s ultimate success—inspiring volume PC makers like Lenovo, HP, and Dell to follow in its footsteps—could easily result in its demise. But it will have achieved a great good, if so.

No promises, but I’ll try to get going on this before the end of the year. Like so many things, it’s overdue. But I very much see the importance of this product line.

Hard numbers, soft numbers

madpapist asks:

The number of active Windows users – approximating ~ 1 billion+ worldwide has been thrown around a lot.  Since Windows desktop seems to be ubiquitous  in the enterprise space, are there any statistics that reveal what percentage of Windows users are consumers?

No. We have to pick and choose between the various survey-driven estimates made by market researchers like IDC and Gartner, the sales numbers provided by PC makers (which often call out the consumer and business sales separately), the occasional utterances from Microsoft about the user base sporadic) and engagement (which are always soft numbers and therefore hard to compare to anything), and other data of varying quality.

There are different ways to evaluate this, too. Unit sales are market share and actual users, however you express this, are usage share, and these things don’t always line up. Upgrade cycles change over time, though both groups are holding onto older PCs for longer times now than ever before. And so on.

But given all this, given history and what we do know, the general consensus seems to be that consumers represent roughly one-third of the overall user-base and that businesses are the other two-thirds. Is this accurate plus or minus some percentage point? It’s hard to say. But that’s my best guess.