Ask Paul: July 21 (Premium)

Well, I wasn’t expecting another mammoth installment of Ask Paul, but here it is, with another terrific set of reader questions and a lot to read.

Invest in yourselves

jrzoomer asks:

Paul, with all your industry knowledge, do you invest in individual companies like MSFT, NVIDIA, GOOG etc? Do you have restrictions on owning individual companies?

I don’t invest in any companies in the tech industry, especially Microsoft, for ethical reasons: it is unethical to invest in a company when you earn a living writing about that company and might be influenced to bias your writing to manipulate that company’s stock price. It’s probably illegal, too, or should be. But it’s definitely unethical.

I don’t invest in any companies generally because we (my wife and I) are financially conservative and feel that doing so is a fool’s errand. Statistically, few people benefit from doing this and those that do are either lucky or were able to manipulate the stock price (insider trading or see above).

Or just generally how do you do your investing?

I think of what we do as investing in index funds, but since my wife handles our finances, I asked her for clarity (my brain is a set-it-and-forget-it kind of thing: I trust her, she does a great job at this kind of thing, I forget the details). And what we actually do—it’s all coming back to me—is invest in target date retirement funds, a mix of index funds and bonds based on a retirement date. That is, the further you are from retirement, the more aggressive the investment will be (more stocks, fewer bonds) and the closer to retirement you are, the more conservative you will be (more bonds, fewer stocks).

I have probably discussed this notion that, barring some horrible tragedy, I will never retire per se. I expect to write for my entire life, and at most, I could see myself perhaps writing less over time. And given this, and my wife’s correction of my notion of our retirement plans, I was curious what the date was in this target date retirement fund. She told me it was 2035, because we need a date, and that’s when I will be 69 years old, but that this was arbitrary because we set that to keep the mix shifted towards the aggressive (more stocks than bonds) for now.

My son, who turned 25 this year, just set up his own target date retirement fund, and his date is 2065, when he turns 67. It’s aggressive now, of course, because he’s so young.

As with the health matters I’ve started discussing again lately, I’m not a financial expert and I’m not giving anyone advice here. I am simply describing what it is my wife and I are doing. But as with health matters, I have some resources that help to explain how we arrived here if you are interested. (And as with the health stuff, I suspect this may trigger some further and perhaps contradictory resources from readers.)

The core resource is a book by JL Collins called The Simple Path to Wealth: Your Road Map to Financial Independence and a Rich, Free Life. He was one of two major influences for the so-called FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement, which I overall approve of, though I think the real goal here is FI (Financial Independence). The other is Vicki Robin, the co-author of Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence, which was updated in the wake of the FIRE movement.

I’ve done a lot of FIRE research over the years, from blogs to books and videos. But if you want to skip right to the point, Mr. Money Mustache has a classic blog post, The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement that sums up the philosophy nicely. It’s not about getting rich quickly. It’s about math.

Microsoft and Activision, sitting in a tree, m-e-r-g-i-n-g…

spacecamel asks:

What will Microsoft’s plan be for Activision’s games and Game Pass? Only old stuff or a day/date for everything?  Now that we are at the beginning of the end, do you have any guess when we will see some game on the service?

I’m writing a long Premium piece on what a combined Microsoft and Activision Blizzard (AB) might look like, and a part of that is how AB impacts the various pieces of the Xbox ecosystem. Here, we have to speculate: Microsoft has been very explicit about how some parts of the AB game library past, present, and future will be made available on rival platforms, but it has been much less specific on how it will impact Xbox. Or, more to the point, Xbox gamers.

So I will address this only generally. (Update: no I won’t.) And one of the goals of the AB acquisition is to bolster Xbox generally, to lift all ships.

This deal won’t change much for console gamers at first, as the same types of games that would appear on Xbox consoles will still do so, but it will prevent Sony from paying AB to keep games off of Xbox consoles, as it’s done with other publishers. Over time, however, we may see some games be Xbox ecosystem exclusive, however, and that means that Xbox console gamers could get games that PlayStation (PS) gamers will not. People freak out about this kind of thing—See! That’s why Microsoft shouldn’t be allowed to buy AB!—but that’s the video game industry. Sony does it. Nintendo does it. Microsoft does it to a minor degree, and maybe that will grow a bit. We’ll see. (And there’s a huge asterisk here because Microsoft needs Xbox consoles to disappear. More on that below.)

Likewise, this deal won’t change much for PC gamers who buy games outright. AB’s PC games are distributed however they are distributed, and that won’t change, and one of the nice things about the PC is that it doesn’t matter where you get a game—Steam, retail, whatever—it just works. But adding AB titles to PC Game Pass could influence some PC gamers to subscribe, and that will benefit Xbox and Microsoft, of course. (That said, Microsoft doesn’t care where you buy games either. A sale is a sale.)

On that note, AB will significantly improve the value proposition of all of the Game Pass subscriptions, and that’s true whether all or most AB titles are made available on day one. For example, I could see Microsoft keeping a new Call of Duty title off Game Pass on day one so that the franchise’s trend of big-bang billion-dollar releases doesn’t go downhill. But having the rest of the COD catalog on Game Pass would be huge. This is the very definition of why Game Pass exists, and the benefit it provides to gamers. I’m sure where they go in this regard. (And this will ignite a resurgence in older COD titles, which is excellent.)

Cloud gaming remains challenging. It’s nice that one can play Xbox console games on a mobile device, but the reality of bandwidth, lag, and latency means that some game types, especially fast-moving 3D shooters, but even more especially fast-moving 3D multiplayer shooters, are impossible or next to impossible. But AB has a vast catalog of diverse games, and surely some of them will work well when streamed. So, overall, this absolutely helps Xbox Cloud Gaming. But it being a perk of a single Game Pass subscription and not a standalone offering says it all. This is still a very small thing overall.

The availability of AB titles in Game Pass will impact existing Xbox gamers the most. But the addition of AB’s mobile games to Xbox is what will impact Xbox overall the most. Today, Xbox has just about no presence in mobile gaming. With AB, Xbox will finally have a meaningful presence in mobile. And these two things combined, I think, speak to the future of Xbox. It’s a 1-2 punch for growth.

That is, under Phil Spencer, Xbox has transformed itself from a (mostly) console-only business that relies on creating and selling hardware at a loss and trying to make money on software and services to one that is more diverse and less reliant on that money-losing hardware business. AB is an accelerator for this, a much more aggressive push into the software and services side of the business (and away from hardware). Fans don’t want to hear this, and Microsoft will claim otherwise (just as it does with standalone Office purchases vs. Microsoft 365 subscriptions), but the goal here has to be to eliminate the hardware business over time.

This neatly matches Microsoft’s overall business model under Satay Nadella: rather than pushing a Windows-first type strategy, it meets its customers where they are and focuses on what it does best, software and services. With Office/Microsoft 365, that meant in one famous example bringing the Office apps to Android and iOS/iPad. For Xbox, it means putting its games everywhere, from consoles made by Sony and Nintendo (both higher volume than Xbox, and by far) to PCs to mobile devices to smart TVs and more. It means mobile game stores (Game Pass Mobile for Android and iOS) after regulators open up those platforms. It means Apple Arcade-like stores and games that run natively on mobile. Literally games everywhere.

This is part of the reason the opposition to the Microsoft/AB deal was (and still is) so short-sighted. We are looking at a world in which Microsoft/Xbox, Microsoft’s console and cloud competitors, and gamers on PC, mobile, console, and anywhere else can all benefit. It’s literally a win-win(-win-win). There may be outliers (a certain title exclusive to Xbox consoles while that’s still a thing, etc.) that critics will highlight as “proof” of their fears realized. But overall, this is about making more games available to more people in more places. Period. And it makes sense.

OK, so that wasn’t very general. But that’s where my head’s at. I can’t wait to se what really happens.

Game Pass Family and Friends

accessjunky asks:

Do you think that the Xbox Game Pass Family and Friends subscription will come back in a slightly different form and at a different price point, perhaps to coincide with whatever the Activision Game Pass PR will be, or am I just being too optimistic and it’s dead and gone?

This has been stuck in the back of my brain since I saw this news. And I’ve been trying to figure it out, not why it bothers me so much (this is obvious) but rather what it means. What comes next?

Here, again, I have to speculate. And my educated guess is that this is tied to two things. First, the general current economic environment in which subscription service monthly prices are going up and, more specifically, we see Netflix having great success with its paid sharing initiative, where it charges subscribers for each additional user. And second, the reality is that the AB acquisition will dramatically improve the value proposition of Game Pass (see the previous question) and that, logically, Microsoft feels that it can charge for more as a result.

Microsoft already raised the price of some Game Pass subscriptions, of course. But my guess is that it’s trying to work out how to charge more to accommodate extra users on a subscription that is suddenly much more valuable. The details in some ways don’t matter, but there will have to be a general price hike (with Family and Friends in the mix) or a per-user or per-group add-on cost for additional users. (This suggests that the timing of this Xbox Game Pass Family and Friends thing isn’t coincidental: you don’t want these subscribers to think they’re just going to get all the AB games at no additional cost.)

I wonder if the Microsoft 365 consumer subscriptions offer any guide here: Microsoft currently has subscriptions for individuals (Personal) and literally arbitrary groups of up to 6 people (Family), and so perhaps will see standalone Game Pass subscriptions and Game Pass Family (or whatever) subscriptions. This makes sense to me, but here again, I’m curious what happens.

Thurrott + Discord

j5 asks:

Morning Paul! What are your thoughts on have an official Thurrott.com Discord channel for premium members?

Oh man.

It is always surprising to me—and I mean this in ways that are both delightful (like I laugh out loud happily) and almost scary (like it feels like you’re reading my mind)—when someone cuts through all the noise and hits right on an idea I’ve worked on for a long time and have been waiting to communicate. So you’re sort of short-circuiting something here with regard to some changes I’d like to make. And I will try to be general and brief, with the promise that there is more to come.

First, I don’t have plans for a Discord channel specifically. But I do have plans to dramatically improve the interactivity on the site and, related to this, to lower my reliance on third-party services that exist outside of Thurrott.com, like Twitter.

For example, today, when Microsoft, Apple, or Google hosts a live-streaming announcement event, I will often live-tweet it in a humorous way on Twitter. I enjoy doing this, and it seems like others enjoy it too. But Twitter is its own thing, it’s outside of my site and separate. Until recently, I could at least have my feed appear in the site’s sidebar, and that was OK but not ideal, but now, thanks to all the recent mess, I can’t even do that. And so I would like to do that on the site instead. Move it in-house, if you will.

The Twitter thing is sort of a one-way thing. Yes, people can respond. But I can’t cover an event live and reply to most comments in real time, so it’s not truly interactive. But I would also like to have some kind of persistent live chat capability (like Discord) that would just exist on the site. This would be there all the time, but it would also let schedule have live chats with readers at specific times, which I think would be fun. Here, too, an in-house solution would be better than something external, though I’m sure Discord and other services have ways to embed things so they can appear on the site, etc.

And of course, you can take this notion to the next logical level and imagine live video chats too.

I already have plans to do the first two of those three things, literally had a long conversation with the partner who will enable this. I can do both in a way that will not cost me any money (kind of ideal now that I’m paying the bills) where this functionality will appear to be native to, or at least part of, Thurrott.com, and not something out in the world somewhere else. (Like OpenWeb comments today.) But the third one will require a bit more work and time.

So, sometime in the next few months, as things settle down, I will get there. I have to get some backend dev work done (which does cost me money). And I have other updates related to the site, and some behind-the-scenes stuff (how comment moderation works, for example, customer service, and more) that I’ll be writing about soon. This is all part of that.

Digital hoarding

j5 also asks:

I came across this article this week in searching for tips on how to organize my digital life better. I was shocked by the low numbers of digital “stuff” the typical American has in the survey.

Dude, you are killing me. LOL. (See comment above about reading my mind.)

I’ve been online since the internet started and have had cellphones – smartphones since the markets inception. So I’ve a thousands of photos. And I’m a nerd so of course I bookmark sites I come across that I like. I’m still using RSS and always adding new sites I think are neat. I’m married with kids that still live in the house so I have tons of scanned files assocaited with this; financial, household, medical, and misc things.

Same.

Now one thing I am probably overboard with is keeping articles I come across or family and friends send to me. If I enjoyed reading it or think I might reference in the future (which does happen) I’ll categorize it and save it to GoodLinks. I don’t even want to say how many articles/Tweets/YouTube/Instagram links etc. I have saved there.

I do the same, but with Pocket. But here, as with email, I do a pretty good job of removing out-of-date items to keep the stack both short and relevant. This kind of daily/weekly/whatever busy work just has to be part of your normal workload, you have to work it in somewhere.

The file-based digital hoarding stuff, however, is hard. We will get to that…

I’m just curious if you’re a digital hoarder, according to the article, since you’ve been online from the start, you’re an avid reader, and the given nature of your work. Thanks!

I am.

First, I strongly recommend that anyone reading this peek at the article linked above. This is definitely an issue for most of us, I bet.

What’s interesting about this to me is that my own digital hoarding sort of (or mostly) sits outside of the parameters the author describes. That is, the average American apparently has lots of digital clutter in the form of email, unused or broken smartphone (that’s literal clutter, but there is a management overhead to this because of account information and data that might be on the devices), unread emails (which, to me, just falls under email), and bookmarks.

But then there is a broader list that includes other forms of clutter like cloud storage (i.e. files), external storage (also files), external hard drives (ditto), and more. And that is where I land most egregiously. In what I will call digital file clutter.

So.

I have literally already started writing about this but haven’t yet published anything in part because I’m away this month and don’t have access to my NAS. As I do so often, I will just say that there is more to come, but let’s step through some of this here because I am obsessed with this (and I think everyone should be, to some degree). This is important.

(This is also tied to an Ask Paul question from a few weeks ago when I was asked about scanning and photo metadata. Scanning photos and other items is a way to relieve physical clutter and increase digital clutter if you’re not careful.)

I have at various times described how I use cloud and network-based storage to backup and sync files (for lack of a better term). These files consist of what I’ll call work-related items (a huge collection of data going back at least 25 years), personal data, music, videos (huge, though most of it is not important), photos (also huge, but important), and probably more that I can’t think of right now. I have described my organization structure, and I have presented this as something logical that works for me, and have hopefully communicated that we all need to find something that works but that, most importantly, we must ensure that our most critical data is backed up in a geographically diverse way (across multiple cloud services and/or external/network storage) for redundancy. The most recent example of this discussion, I think, is in Don’t Be a Statistic (Premium) from this past March.

But here’s what I’ve never really admitted, at least explicitly. While I may appear to have my act together and be the most organized person you’ve ever run into, that’s only partially true. Yes, my photos and work-related archive are redundantly backed up across multiple services/devices. And yes, there is some data, like most of the videos and my offline music collection that are unimportant (I never used them or need them). But there is also a collection of hundreds of gigabytes of data that I have, in OneDrive and and/or on my NAS (some is only in one place), that spans all the file types noted above and spans the gamut of things that are not organized elsewhere where they belong (in my organizational system) or are simply redundant (duplicates) or just unnecessary; either way, they are taking up space.

Let me show you one example of what this looks like.

If you look at the top level of my OneDrive, you will see something clean and organized. There are the default OneDrive folders—Desktop, Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos (plus Personal Vault)—and one I added, Apps, for a few apps and, more recently, my Windows Package Manager bulk app install script, that I need on most PCs.

If you dive into Documents, it also appears to be organized at first, with Book, Code, eBooks, Future, Notebooks (for OneNote, now deprecated), Work, and Work archive folders. I’ve described how I work before (see above), but I use the Book folder and two subfolders in Work (To-do and a folder for the current month) every day, and so you can see them on the left in the navigation pane in File Explorer. This is a big part of my workflow.

But there is also an “__old” folder. And that’s where a big chunk of my digital clutter resides. This folder consumes 238 GB of storage space in OneDrive (!). And it is a mess. There are, for example, multiple folders in there named with some variation of “old” that all have their own files and subfolder messes. It goes on and on. And don’t get me started with the “__Scans” and “__To sort” folders in my OneDrive Pictures folder: those only take up 21.4 GB of space, but most of that is important and needs to be organized.

I am going to fix this.

In the same way that I tackled my entire paper-based photo collection using a high-speed photo printer back in 2019, this year I will tackle my digital clutter in OneDrive and on the NAS. And I will ruthlessly delete all of the chaff while organizing what I need/want to keep.

We need to be smart about this. The thing about digital clutter, of course, is that you don’t see it, it doesn’t take up space, and you rarely run into issues, in this case related to storage space. And there are real advantages to replacing physical clutter with digital clutter. For example, a huge bookshelf full of books may look impressive, but it’s big and heavy if you have to move them, the books are not accessible unless you’re in that one room, and, heck, it’s nice kindling for that future fire. But a Kindle collection of the same books takes up no physical space, is accessible from anywhere, and doesn’t need to be moved. And on that note, my wife and I have 868 Kindle books and 294 Audible audiobooks in our library. That is absolutely clutter, most of which we will never re-read. But it also doesn’t harm or cost me anything. Likewise, I have over 500 movies in my iTunes collection. Same deal. Was it dumb to spend all that money? I almost always buy movies when they’re in big sales, but sure. But also … whatever. It’s there, taking up no space in my life, so it’s not cluttering my brain.

The files I’m talking about are not like that. They are costing me something, as I pay for additional storage. And they are cluttering my brain, because some of it is important, it’s hanging over me, and I want all that where it belongs.

The stuff I’ve organized—work archive, photos, etc.—is likewise important. I am constantly referencing things I wrote in the past, and while the web is an OK archive, my original writing, notes, images, and so on are priceless to me. I have found so much in there, including private notes from Microsoft employees and executives that I never made public. They inform things like Windows Everywhere and whatever else. So to me, that’s not clutter, it’s an archive. There is wheat and then there is chaff.

I will get to the specifics in what will be a new series or, more likely, a continuation of my Digital Decluttering writing from the past. (Well, mostly: I wrote Digital Decluttering: Finishing the Job (Premium) back in May regarding my final push to digitize the remainder of my paper-based items, and that’s part of this too.)

But one idea I have is to find a PC that has enough on-board storage so that I can literally sync my entire OneDrive down to the local storage (or perhaps just the OneDrive Documents folder to start) so that I can triage, organize, and delete files as necessary locally (for performance reasons) and have those changes sync back to the cloud. Is this smart or efficient? It’s an idea. But I’m going to find out.

More on this when we get home in early August.

Oh, and stop reading my mind. 🙂

Kevin Mitnick

helix2301 asks:

What did you think about news of Kevin Mitnich dying at 59 definitely a legend in the security community. 2600, wired and all tech publications coving it. Died of same thing Steve Jobs and Alex Trebec died from. Woz and him were close friends. Free Kevin sticker was on my car in high school.

Nice.

When Mitnick was committing his first crimes, I was growing up playing the first home video games, owning some of the first home computers, and teaching myself to code. And by the time he was arrested, I had just started my career at the periphery of the personal technology industry: I was training to be a developer, but life happened, and I became a tech book writer and then a commentator/columnist/ whatever. And so his story was fascinating to me. He served a small fraction of his sentenced jail time (just several years, I think), and I distinctly remember that part of his early release was predicated on him never using a PC or any device that could communicate electronically. This is how legends are made: the courts were so scared of his powers, real or imagined, that he was treated like Magneto in the X-Men comics/movies. Hilarious.

But I was equally fascinated by his eventual rehabilitation. Many believed that his punishment was unjust or at least harsh (the “Free Kevin” thing you mention), and he sort of turned things around, I think, by providing what is basically white hat hacking services on behalf of clients to help prevent them from being hacked by people like, well, him. This, to me, is cleaner than, say, Bill Gates’ recent attempts to clean up his legacy by promoting his (admittedly solid) philanthropic works in the years after he wreaked havoc in personal technology for decades. That is, I don’t see Mitnick as that kind of horrible person. And I think that anyone who is interested in the technical side of personal technology can appreciate that his initial forays into hacking, at least, were driven by intellectual curiosity and the belief that there are no real victims when it comes to screwing around with big companies. Obviously, he did go down a darker path in time, but I don’t recall that what he did was about financial gain. I could be wrong there.

Whatever your stance on his hacking escapades, there are beloved industry figures like Steve Wozniak who performed similarly naïve acts early in their career, specifically phone phreaking, albeit mostly for entertainment value. But I do think that Mitnick is a similar personality and a generational equal.

That he died of pancreatic cancer like Jobs and Trebek is interesting but coincidental. Jobs is unique here in that he did literally nothing smart or logical to help himself over many years, which was dumb, while Mitnick and Trebek did the right thing and tried to get medical help early and often. I’m no expert, but I feel like pancreatic cancer is up there when it comes to mortality and bad outcomes. That’s a tough diagnosis.

Changes at Thurrott.com

will asks:

With the news of the behind-the-scenes changes happing at Thurrott.com I wanted to just take a minute and say a very big thank you for everything you do. I have only had the privilege of meeting you once, Orlando Ignite get together, before the world feel apart, but hope that time comes again soon. That said, I started following your postings years ago in the Windows 2000/XP Supersite days and have been following you since. I always looked forward to Fridays with your Friday Takes, I think that is what you called it.

Short Takes, but yes. Thank you.

Your articles, reviews, insights, opinions, and humor are all great. You really do work hard on what you publish, and it shows. It is not just a fluff piece to toe some company line. You are honest when something is good just as much as when it is bad, even if you are called a liar (when in fact you did not).

I am excited for this change and just as excited that we will continue to have your insights and occasional rants for years to come and will continue to support the site for hopefully many years to come. Even my wife enjoys listening to you when we have road trips and have WW going in the car. Most of what is discussed she does not follow, but she knows your voice and learns a thing or two about Windows or Microsoft along the way. All that to again say THANK YOU for what you do.

So, thank you. Really. The outpouring of support for this change has been nice, and I had hoped that most would see this for the positive move that it is. For most readers, nothing changes aside from the occasional newsletter pop-up, I guess, and I’ve been making sure that’s as non-disruptive as possible and will continue to adjust as necessary. For Premium members, I still need to figure out the land spot for Monday’s From the Editor’s Desk editorial, but it’s not going away. And for me, there is financial responsibility and risk, of course, but also this sense of controlling one’s destiny. And that the past four months or so have elapsed with no issues despite all the internal changes we only just now discussed is, I think, a good sign.

I had expected a lot of questions about the transition this week, and was sort of braced for it. I also expected, and maybe still expect, that as the feel-goods die down that complaints or at least customer service requests will increase in volume. I had wanted this transition to happen earlier, in toto, and be announced sooner. But again, maybe that four-month period was for the best. There is nothing shocking coming (aside from the newsletter, depending on your perspective, though I think the new offering is superior). I still work with Brad and Laurent. I still talk and strategize with George, and we will both cross-promote between the sites as before. I still love all my now-former co-workers. And so on. But most important, to me, I keep doing what I do. And I hope that’s important to all of you as well.

Anyway. I appreciate it. I’m not going to stop working.

Apple and AI

will also asks:

With the recent news/rumor that Apple is putting a lot of effort into AI, do you think that Microsoft for the first time in a while has been able to be out ahead of other companies on something that is actually sticking? It feels like Google and everyone else is playing catch up.

I woke up this morning to the New York Times headline that 7 A.I. Companies Agree to Safeguards After Pressure From the White House, which obviously caught my attention. And then I saw the sub-heading, “Amazon, Google, and Meta are among the companies that will announce the new commitments on Friday as they race to outdo each other with versions of artificial intelligence” and I completely lost my s#$t. I literally yelled out loud.

Then I turned to my wife and asked her, a normal non-technical person, if she could name the biggest companies in AI. She answered, “ChatGPT, Microsoft. Google, I guess.” To which I responded, “Exactly right. ChatGPT is actually made by a company called OpenAI, but they are definitely number one. And given how much PR Microsoft has put into its AI efforts, and all the products and services they have released, they are definitely number two.” But Amazon and Meta? Oh F you, New York Times. F you.

After getting through this miserable publication, I turned to the Washington Post. And a bit further down the front page, I saw the headline Top tech firms sign White House pledge to identify AI-generated images, which is OK, I guess, though this is about more than images. And the blurb, “Google, and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI agreed to the voluntary safety commitments.” Ah geez.

This isn’t about Google and ChatGPT. It’s about ChatGPT … and the other companies that are using or trying to duplicate its AI offerings. That’s Microsoft and Google in the top tier. And … that’s it. Amazon is nowhere with AI, and Meta? Please. But if you’re going to list all these companies, you either do so alphabetically—Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI—or by precedence. Not as “Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Chat GPT-maker OpenAI,” as the Post does in the body of that article.

Why do I mention my morning madness here?

Because I write about personal technology, and I would like to think that when these mainstream publications do the same, they do so with either an understanding of the real-world capabilities of these companies right now, or that they do so from a public awareness perspective that their own readers can relate to. And right now, OpenAI (ChatGPT) has so much mindshare and awareness that it’s off the charts. Indeed, ChatGPT has more monthly average users than Bing. But its popularity is also so great that it caused Google to stumble badly in its own AI announcements this year. Google, suddenly, is an underdog. And I mean that literally: I’m sure that Google’s AI prowess is formidable, but I’m also sure no one has seen that realized in products and services that anyone uses.

This is what disruption looks like. And I don’t like to see publications that can influence normal people to misrepresent what’s happening. Most people don’t know enough about technology to have their own opinions on these matters.

Sigh.

To your question. (It had to happen eventually.)

I wrote this in a comment somewhere recently, but there are two ways to view Apple when it comes to entering markets. It’s a copycat, meaning that it sees something popular (MP3 players, mini-tablets, big screen phones, whatever) and then just slaps an Apple logo on its own rendition of that, or, that it sees what’s popular but only enters those markets where it can create something that is better and differentiated. As I’m sure you know, few people are as critical of Apple as I am, but I’m in the latter camp. And I believe that Apple doing what it has done with MP3 players, smartphones, and other products and services that it did not invent but very much did improve on, represents both innovation and leadership. And that these two things—me being critical of Apple in some ways but complementary in others—are neither hypocritical nor mutually exclusive.

But there’s more: Apple also has a way of waiting, often for long periods of time, before it enters a new (to it) market. Longer than people believe should be the case. It’s as quiet now on folding phones and other devices as it was back in the day on bigger-screen iPhones. It’s late to the game in VR/XR, just as it was late to the game in smartwatches, two markets most people thought, or think, were pointless. And yet, Apple has a way of moving into markets on its own schedule and being successful no matter what anyone else thinks.

This is a roundabout way of saying that we should not discount Apple’s sudden and unexpected (and rumored) AI moves, despite the dull terribleness of Siri and the fact that its massive data centers are about storage and content delivery, not NPU/GPU-based AI processing. (That we know of.) When we talk about AI, the discussion must be centered on two truths: only a handful of companies have both the resources and special skills necessary to be successful in this market. And to date, the only two companies that made that criteria are Google and Microsoft. (OpenAI literally needs Microsoft’s Azure resources, Amazon has the resources but little in the way of AI skills beyond Alexa, and … Meta. Just laugh. What they have is stolen private data, so I guess the makings of an LLM dataset.)

But Apple? It has the resources, and there is some evidence of AI in there, especially via its on-again-off-again self-driving car efforts, but also via its rumored search engine. So we need to look past the first criteria and move on to the next: These companies also need a reason to get into AI. And for Apple, that reason is the same as it ever is. This company is built today on a mantra of going it alone, where it will begrudgingly partner only when needed and then work as quickly as possible to eliminate those partners. This is true for AI, but it’s doubly true because its 2007 partnership with Google on Search continues today unabated, and you have to think that it wants desperately to not rely on Google that way in the coming AI generation. Maybe partner at first (OpenAI, Microsoft), but definitely go it alone as the long-term plan. And market the hell out of the privacy and on-device stuff, as always.

We need to add Apple to the list, in other words.

Does [Microsoft] risk diluting the Copilot name by attaching it to everything now?

I was so happy with the Copilot brand because it’s apt—it frames Microsoft’s AI capabilities and their impact on individual productivity perfectly—and because Microsoft is known for getting branding wrong. It seems perfect to me. But that’s an interesting question. Microsoft did, after all, add the “Windows” brand to far too many products and services at the height of its dominance. (Windows Media Player for Mac is one of the uglier examples.) Could this be similar?

If you think back to Build 2023, I opined on Windows Weekly that the star of the AI show was Stevie Bathiche, who most think of the Robin to Panos Panay’s Batman, a sidekick who isn’t seen or heard from as often. And that’s because Bathiche, who appeared after a boring and meandering 30-minute segment with Panay, nailed it. He simply nailed it. Here we were on the second of two Build keynotes in as many days, bored to hell, and Bathiche, an actual expert, framed Microsoft AI efforts transparently and perfectly. And it woke us all up.

You can watch the presentation here. But he described Microsoft’s application of AI to its products and services as a sequence of three phases that would happen over time. In the first phase, AI will sit beside current (legacy) solutions as “copilots” that help existing applications. In the second, AI will be inside new solutions where AI is the center of the experience. And in the third phase, AI will be outside, meaning that AI agents will orchestrate across apps and tasks in a manner that might reduce our focus on apps today. (This is similar to how the Pictures hub in Windows Phone was about pictures no matter where they were from, rather than making you think about specific photo apps.)

We are in that first phase, and that is why we are seeing the Copilot brand appearing all over the place. But as AI evolves, and as Microsoft evolves the apps and services that it offers to customers, it believes that there will be a coming generation of AI-based apps, and these will not use the Copilot brand. So it’s likely that Copilot as a brand is temporary. I mean, everything is temporary. But this is a plan. With Windows as a brand, there was no plan, and they overused it past the point of logic.

We’ll see what happens. But I think Copilot works for what we have now.

Tech nostalgia

jmeiii75 asks:

A company called CreatorVC is set to release a documentary called First Person Shooter: The Definitive FPS Documentary on August 31. CreatorVC produces Kickstarter-style documentaries aimed at those most passionate fans of a given subject, with various packages, rewards, etc.

I am aware. But more on this below.

I was turned on to the work of this company by another podcast when CreatorVC was just gearing up to release In Search of Darkness: A Journey into Iconic ‘80s Horror. I knew that this was up my alley as I love ‘80s horror and, getting older, have been finding myself needing the warm blanket of nostalgia now and then. This doc was fantastic! It examines key films from each year of the decade, mixed with various other sub-topics and interviews with various stars and creators. It clocks in at over 4 hours and, once complete, I wanted more (again, passionate fans). Lucky for me, In Search of Darkness Part II and In Search of Darkness Part III followed about a year apart.

Of this, I was not aware. I am also a big fan of horror, especially 80’s horror, because this is when I came of age. Thank you for this!

The reason I talk so much about ISOD here is just to stress the level of quality that satisfied those of us so enthusiastic (and picky) about the subject. Another note: CreatorVC also released In Search of Tomorrow: The Definitive ‘80s Sci-Fi Documentary (with a Part II coming soon).

Also unaware. Again, thanks!

“First Person Shooter” focuses on the entire history of the FPS genre, with contributions from the usual suspects: John Carmack, John Romero, Tom Hall, etc. talking about all things Id (Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and more) and just about every FPS title you can think of. David Kushner, author of Masters of Doom, which I know you read and recommend, is also involved. And yes, like ISOD and ISOT, it clocks in at over 4 hours to allow us gorge on all the goodness. The trailer and info can be found at fpsdoc.com. I promise, I am in no way affiliated with this company or project. I just love what they do and I think you will too. The available packages tend to be a bit pricey, with the Digital copy being $49, but when you consider the length alone, not really all that crazy. They have made some steaming deals for other projects, with all 3 In Search of Darkness titles available on Shudder. So, if you are curious about the level of quality CreatorVC gives to the subject at hand, even if horror is not your thing, grab a free trial of Shudder (or AMC+, which includes Shudder) and watch a bit of ISOD. If they treat FPS with even a fraction of the quality given to all 3 parts (judging by the trailer alone, it looks like they did. Is the same overall vibe), we are in for a treat. Sorry for the length and if you have covered this before but I just needed to make sure you knew about this.

So, have you heard about this? Whoa, it is an “Ask Paul” after all.

As you know, I recently started a series called Tech Nostalgia. I did so somewhat reluctantly, in part because I wanted to approach it from a certain angle and I don’t want to promote piracy while still wanting to publicize how well (in most cases) you can experience games and computer systems from the past using software emulators.

But I went ahead with it and something weird happened. There was suddenly this weird coincidence of news—things happening literally right now—intersecting with what is, to me, a discussion about the past. The only published example so far is Tech Nostalgia: Interactive Classic Video Game Documentaries are Coming to Xbox, which is a news story but also part of a Premium article series, but there are others. And one of them is this documentary. (Another is this story about a retro gaming collection coming to Xbox Series X|S.)

My intent wasn’t to hide this from anyone, but this documentary looks like and reminds me of some of the classic tech documentaries I own and will be recommending as it makes sense. For example, the Atari documentaries Once Upon Atari ($5.99 on GOG) and Atari Game Over (free, YouTube) that I mentioned in Tech Nostalgia: VCS (Premium), or The Commodore Story – Changing the world 8-bits at a time ($7.99 on Amazon Prime), which I’m sure will come up in some future post.

In short, I am trying to note interesting references where possible, and this documentary will definitely come up as we get to the 1990s FPS era. As will that Romero book (Doom Guy: Life in First Person!), the classic Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner, and a lot more.

But to your point, yes, this probably warrants a news story of its own. Thanks!