Ask Paul: August 18 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Well, it’s another monster Ask Paul this week, thanks to a great set of reader questions. Let’s jump in.

Consultant mindset

TheJoeFin asks:

I was chatting with a friend about how consultants can frequently be toxic to a product by taking on tech debt then leave before they have to deal with it. He shared the famous Steve Jobs video where he calls out consultants. I posed the theory that employees of mega corps (like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.) frequently have a “consultant mindset.” I characterized this mindset by a lack of long-term ownership and focusing on doing new trendy buzzword things to pad a resume before quitting and taking a higher paying job.

So many thoughts.

The Steve Jobs and Apple examples of anything are classic on so many levels, but let me focus on two. One, that Apple, especially under Jobs, is in many ways unique, and as a result, there are no lessons to be learned there, no ways in which other companies can emulate what they do and be successful too; they are an exception. Except when they’re not, because two, Apple often gets it wrong and would have benefitted from a thoughtful feedback loop with customers and/or outside consultations. The hockey puck mouse on the first iMac, for example. Apple Maps. The butterfly keyboard. The secret performance-killing behavior in iOS that was allegedly just about saving our poor batteries. And so on.

Point being, Apple is like the bible and not just because there is a tablet: people will highlight the good stuff that makes their point but selectively ignore the contradictions. When you’re an Apple fan, Apple always gets it right. And the implicit follow-up to that is that, because Apple is always right, how it does things and makes decisions is always right. This leads us to the notion that Apple’s singular vision (or whatever) is so much better than whatever other companies do.

That’s bullshit. Microsoft, which could not be more different from Apple, is the second-largest company in the world. It’s doing something right, and it’s creating money in ways that Apple doesn’t even contemplate. There isn’t always a right and a wrong. Different approaches can both have value. (For example, Apple’s go-it-alone approach vs. Microsoft’s partner-based approach.)

Do you think Microsoft products suffer from this problem? If so, which ones are particularly afflicted?

All of Microsoft’s products suffer from this problem. But then, all of Microsoft’s products benefit from this way of doing things too. It’s a double-edged sword.

You may recall the hilarious College Humor video about Windows 7 that was a riff on Microsoft’s advertising of the day (and ironic given that the team that made Windows 7 could not have cared less about anyone’s feedback). It’s funny because it feels true: Microsoft would listen to every idea and just implement it all. And it feels right because where Apple (generally) provides one way to do things, Microsoft provides many. And this comes from a now quaint notion that Apple’s user base was small, non-diverse, and loyal, whereas Microsoft’s was huge and diverse. Today, of course, we can’t make that argument. And yet Apple retains a unique Apple-ness, good and bad. And Microsoft is Microsoft.

So what does it mean to be “Microsoft”? Look at Teams. I made the argument recently that Teams does not really compete with Slack because Teams is a huge, complex platform that targets enterprises and Slack is a small, targeted solution that targets startups and small businesses. And that while Teams started off as something simple, like Slack, it has grown—cancerously, one might argue—into this battleship bristling with functionality. That is what Microsoft does to products. Especially successful products, which is the other half of this story: say what you will about it, but Teams is incredibly successful.

Edge is another great example. Edge was supposed to be a lightweight web browser, something that would “get out of your way,” and remove all the Google terribleness from Chrome. But Edge is just Chrome with Microsoft tracking instead of Google tracking, plus what appears to be 1,000 additional features now because Edge, like Teams, has just grown and grown and grown. It no longer resembles the original product let alone the original vision and marketing. (That Edge has been unsuccessful is interesting, but Microsoft sees the importance of the web and it just can’t keep its hands off it.)

There are different terms for this kind of behavior, but I think of it as Microsoft being unable to say no to any customer need. (Hence the College Humor video.) Apple, generally, is unable to ignore any customer. Different approaches. And you can make either one look good—“we meet the customer where they are,” in Microsoft words, or that “Apple has a singular vision” nonsense in the other. But you can make either one look bad, too. Feature bloat is still bloat.

That we all have different needs and wants is obvious. But the ways in which companies address that reality can also be different, quite different. I’m not sure either one is “better.” But both are better than the other in some ways, or in some instances. But not in others.

This one is a debate for the ages, I guess. There are good consultants and bad consultants. There’s a related issue, probably not unique to Microsoft, where people inside the company—as opposed to outside consultants—will briefly touch a product, make a few changes, and then move on to the next thing, leaving that product in some unfinished state. All the in-box apps in Windows feel like that. (Don’t get me started on Paint.) Part of it is corporate culture. Part of it is the reality of the size of the company. It kind of goes on and on.

(In some vague way, this reminds me of professional sports. When I was a kid, successful sports teams would retain a core set of key players and rotate through some supporting cast. So the Larry Birds, Magic Johnsons, whoever, of the world typically stayed with one team. Today, superstars move from team to team seemingly at will, so there is no continuity. You may as well watch college sports, as you’re just rooting for a logo or a geography at this point. And so you might see the lack of product ownership at a company like that because there is literally no incentive for a core group of people, let alone any individual, to stick with the same product for their entire career. There are exceptions, I know, but that’s rare. And that’s why so much software, especially at Microsoft, is so screwed up. Is one theory.)

Game bloat

madthinus asks:

At 126 Gb Starfield is the latest massive game. Storage has emerged as one of the limitations of this generation, but also one of the few areas where the input cost on the manufacturing side has declined. You think we will see a price decrease or a storage increase?

I had never really considered this until I read this question, but I’m wondering now whether Microsoft was betting that cloud gaming would be bigger than it has become and that that thinking led to the relatively small storage sizes we see on the Xbox consoles. This has absolutely happened on smartphones: I know everyone is different, but 128 GB of storage is enough for me because so much of the content I’d otherwise store on the device—music, podcasts, videos, whatever—is streamed now. This is true on the PC, too, where I sync a relatively small amount of OneDrive data to each PC (about 3 GB right now). My PC storage needs are low too.

But video game consoles? Different story.

With Xbox (and I assume PS5), the games are huge. And they keep getting bigger. The 512 GB drive on the Series S is a joke but even the 1 TB of the Series X is insufficient. These should be 1 TB/2 TB, respectively, and Microsoft’s decision to require a custom storage “cartridge,” which was made by only one company until very recently, was obviously the wrong one. A standard M.2, even with specific speed/performance requirements, would have been so much better: cheaper, more choice, etc. This was a huge mistake.

Creating new versions of these consoles with more base storage is obvious, but they should move to M.2 SSD expansion too. And I suspect that’s a level of investment Microsoft doesn’t want to make in otherwise identical hardware. Perhaps there will be future mid-stream replacements with multiple improvements.

Given all this, the reality is that, yes, we need lower-cost storage upgrade choices. And more of them. I don’t know why this hasn’t improved more than it has.

Lifetime of the device, whatever that means

OldITPro2000 asks:

First, congrats on your positive health updates! It’s a model for all of us to follow.

Thanks. Obviously, nothing is perfect or linear or whatever, and there will be further challenges, but I know I’m doing the right thing for myself. And I hope others will at least try to get ahead of their own things, health or otherwise.

I have a Dell Precision workstation that I purchased back in May 2019. It has served me well in the past 4+ years. I’ve kept it on Windows 10 and as long as it was still alive in October 2025 when 10 goes out of support, I planned to upgrade it to Windows 11 (or 12 or whatever they decide to call it because you know they will arbitrarily change it at some point). Apparently that will now be impossible, or at least not “officially supported” as the Xeon E-2146G processor in it was removed from the list of Windows 11 supported processors a few weeks ago.

I understand all manufacturers put an expiration date on everything nowadays, including Intel. However, this processor WAS previously supported. It doesn’t appear this is tied to a particular Feature Update, which would make more sense, (i.e. “These processors are no longer supported in 21H2, these in 22H2, etc.”), so what would this have meant if I had already upgraded to Windows 11? Just “too bad”?

This is the weird gray area that has been an issue since the release of Windows 10, when Microsoft finally moved off its formal 10-year support lifecycle and claimed, vaguely, that the system would be supported “for the lifetime of the device” on which it was installed. It never explained what that meant, but we saw the first example of Microsoft, seemingly arbitrarily, dropping support for older Intel processors midstream when the Skylake generation of chips came out and Surface suffered from all those power management issues. We then learned that it did so in retaliation to Intel, which Microsoft felt should have fixed the underlying problems that caused its power management issues; Intel, correctly, noted that those fixes come from PC makers, not it, and no other PC makers had problems with those chipsets. Surface just had no idea what it was doing.

This was instructive, however, because it showed us that the “lifetime of the device” could be arbitrary and, worse, could change at any time midstream. And that despite marketing that Windows 10 (and now Windows 11) was in some way one version of a product, there were in fact biannual and then annual releases that were in fact each their own version, with their own short support lifecycles. And that since the 10-year support lifecycle was over, one could get stuck with suddenly unsupported hardware, as you have, and face an impending end-of-support date of just a year or 18 months. The whole thing reeks of a company, or team, just winging it, damn the customer consequences.

So. What can you do? Other than the nuclear option—installing Linux, buying a Mac, or whatever—you could ride out whatever supported time you have and see what happens. And I think you’ll find that it will be OK. Windows 11 works just fine on unsupported hardware, and there is little reason to believe that won’t continue. You may see watermarks on the desktop, and there are Registry changes that will fix that. You will have to download the Windows 11 ISO each time a new version comes out each year so you can upgrade, but when you do that, you will continue to get monthly updates, including new features, normally. And then, at some point, you will upgrade the hardware. But I think you will be OK in the interim.

I’m not sure what to call this. Support lifecycle theater? But you’re technical, you know what you’re doing, and you can work around it. I think it will be OK.

Related to this, JustMe also asks:

Apart from the natural lifecycle of an OS and the now-ubiquitous AI, from what is known currently is MIcrosoft doing anything specific in Windows 12 to attract enterprise customers, given the lack of enterprise uptake of 11?  Do you believe the lifecycle of Windows 10 will be extended as 7 was?

We don’t know much about Windows 12 yet and the Canary builds have certainly provided no clues. But my guess is that Windows 12 won’t have to do much to attract enterprise customers other than exist and be newer than Windows 11. And that’s because enterprises have largely ignored Windows 11 to date, and if our understanding of the timing is correct, Windows 12 will arrive at a good time in the corporate upgrade cycle, and many businesses will simply adopt it because it’s newer and will have the longest support lifecycle. Skipping versions is almost dogma for the enterprise, so it will be interesting to see what the mix of Windows 11 and 12 is in a few years.

There’s also the hardware requirement thing: with Windows 11, Microsoft for the first time arbitrarily supported a fairly limited range of hardware, and this should continue with Windows 12. This time, however, there will be new NPU AI capabilities that will supply a line in the sand, similar to the TPM 2.0 requirements in Windows 11. I’m curious to see how this all falls out.

Desktop publishing

jrzoomer asks:

Hi Paul, I love whenever you have an article involving PC nostalgia. However one large genre that the PC ushered in was the graphic design and desktop publishing revolution. The 80s and 90s especially were filled with glorious battles between Adobe, Apple, Aldus, Corel, Quark, and Microsoft with “wars” regarding fonts, file formats, and software programs used to create or manipulate graphics on a PC. Would love to hear your thoughts about this era, and your history of using any of the products in this genre over the years.

This will likely be part of that series, since it’s an important milestone. But I was a Commodore 64 user through the end of 1987—when our house burned down, taking my computer with it—and while I was fascinated by the GUIs that appeared first on the Mac, those things were always too expensive and out of reach. And so I used GEOS on the C64, and I did some early desktop publishing via geoPublish, and printed out things to my Okimate 20 color printer, which used thermal technology to transfer ink from the cartridge to paper. It streaked badly with graphics, but it always looked pretty amazing regardless. (I also had Print Shop, but I’m not sure that qualifies.)

That year, I had my first Mac experience at work, but I mostly stuck to MacPaint and MacWrite. And from there I moved on to the Apple II GS (with an ImageWriter printer), though I can’t recall any desktop publishing solutions I might have used, and then the Amiga 500 and 600, by which point I was more concerned about word processing. But from then on, it was all Windows and PC, and I did use Aldus Pagemaker for a time, though I never really had any literal need for this kind of thing. I got my first laser printer, an HP, in the mid-1990s, but by that point, I was writing books and it was mostly about Microsoft Word. I did dabble with Microsoft Publisher, and I thought for a while that that kind of app would be the future of web publishing, but that never really materialized.

To me, the advent of desktop publishing is the model for every personal technology that emerged in its wake, in that when things are new and different and exciting, we tend to abuse them and use them in ways that don’t actually make sense. And for desktop publishing, that example is the ransom note look of so many of the early documents that were created: it was new to have all these fonts and layouts and so we overused them.

The post-social media world

hastin asks:

Do you think with all the new regulations, Musk’s changes to Twitter/X, that we are entering a “post social media” world as some have said, and do you think it will have any greater effect on the Tech Industry as a whole?

I don’t think the genie can be put back in that bottle, but it’s fair to say that every tech advance brings both good and bad. And in this case, giving people, normal people, a free platform to publish their thoughts and photos and whatever is obviously good on one hand, and it gives them a seamless way to interact with people they’d never otherwise see regularly or even meet. But we know the bad side to that as well: an ever-insular filtering of news and information that leads to confirmation bias, conspiracy theories, misinformation, and worse.

There’s no clear answer to how we might fix this. At a personal level, many just block, hide, or unfriend relatives and friends who spew nonsense online, but that only “fixes” the problem for them individually. Do we hold social networks accountable for what people do on those networks? And if so, where does that end? I don’t know. This is something I wrestle with in my tiny microcosm of the world, in the comments and forums of this site, where I very much want people to feel free to disagree and debate things but also very much do not want people to attack others, spread misinformation, and so on. It’s so much worse on a global level.

I’ll be writing about my own issues with this, probably as part of a community guidelines post, but fixing social media is hard. Many people don’t believe facts, don’t trust science or experts of any kind, and fall for every stupid untruth imaginable. And it’s hard to scale back from that cliff as it becomes an almost religious-like faith issue. Fundamentally, we have a need for accurate information, as being informed is key to doing the right things, being a good citizen, and being tolerable as a human being. But we don’t always act in our best interests, either individually or from a community standpoint. This connectivity has amplified smart things but also stupid things. Maybe we should have seen this coming. I certainly didn’t.

The democratization of technology is too important to regulate out of existence, it is in many ways the point of technology. But things move so quickly now that we don’t see the problem until it’s too late, and the laws are always years if not decades behind. This is a tough one.

September 21

madthinus asks:

What are we seeing on the 21st of September?

And JustMe asks:

With Microsoft’s announcement of a special event on 21 September, Surface hardware seems almost destined to be on the agenda.  Apple has a similar event in early September, I believe – where I suspect you’ll hear about the IPhone 15.  Yet, the Rush fan in me wonders if there will be any Windows 12 announcements (Rush fans will know 2112) as well.  What sort of Windows-related news (if any) should we expect?

September 21 is a Surface hardware event. I expect to see new Surface Laptop, Surface Studio Laptop, Surface Pro, and possibly low-end Surface models at the very least. And I know everyone is waiting for some Windows 12 news, but based on the past, I don’t see that happening at this event. Instead, I think the big side conversation will be about AI, and that each of the new Surface PCs, no matter which chipset they use, will have NPU (“AI engine”) hardware. And that means we will need to see some examples of why this will matter. That will likely include Windows 11 23H2 features like Windows Copilot plus Microsoft 365 Copilot, but not Windows 12.

That’s my guess.

Edge for Business

JustMe also asks:

What, exactly, is Edge for Business?  What makes it different to Edge?  And…why is Microsoft doing anything like this?  Will Edge for Business be readily available for consumers should they decide to use it?

Edge for Business is just a mode that will work in the existing Edge browser. It’s only available if you sign in to Windows with what used to be called an AAD (Azure Active Directory, now Entra ID) account, or what Microsoft calls a “Work or School” account. So you won’t see this with a Microsoft account (or “no” account, as with a local account). But it should work just as things do today, where you can add multiple user profiles to Edge, and if one is a Work or School account, you get a separate Edge window, with a unique icon in the Taskbar, for that session, that is managed by the IT organization at your organization.

What Edge for Business is not is a standalone application. And it’s not cleaner, with fewer features or whatever. It’s just a slightly new way for businesses and educational institutions to separate the work/school-related stuff from the personal stuff in the browser, both visually and literally. Most of this exists today via profiles, so it’s just an updated version of what’s already in the browser. You, as the user, will be able to configure which sites open in which mode (Edge or Edge for Business), as can your IT.

There’s a bit more about Edge for Business here. When this ships, I’ll update the Windows 11 Field Guide to accommodate the change.

Uninstalling in-box apps

JustMe also asks:

New builds- I understand the new Canary build will allow users to uninstall more of the in-box apps.  While this is welcomed news to users like me, is there a driver behind the move?  Do you think this is something may have gleaned from telemetry that some apps are either not being used or force-uninstalled with powershell or DISM?

I’m glad that Microsoft is letting users uninstall more and more in-box apps over time, though doing so doesn’t exactly save much disk space, and most would be better off just ignoring them. That said, you can in fact uninstall almost all of these apps already using PowerShell, as you note. And maybe this is just a maturity thing, where that capability, known only to power users and IT, is just spreading into the mainstream UI. I’m really not sure why they’re doing this, honestly.

Coincidentally, I did have an occasion to uninstall an in-box app recently. As you may have seen, Cortana is no longer supported in Windows 11, which is fine as I never used it anyway. But on the Lenovo Slim Pro 9i (16″ Intel) that I’m currently reviewing, I ran into a weird issue where some keyboard shortcut—I literally never figured it out—would launch Cortana again and again as I typed. (I know WINKEY + C does/did this, but that wasn’t it.) The issue there, aside from having to close a blank Cortana window repeatedly, is that when you run Cortana, even by mistake, it puts Cortana in the auto-run at boot time, and even when you close it, it stays in memory. So I went nuclear and uninstalled the app with PowerShell, since you can’t do that from the UI. Problem solved.

Activision Blizzard, hanging in the balance

JustMe also asks:

CMA – given we still dont have a ‘final’ ruling from the CMA in the UK, what happens if the CMA come out and say no, we still arent approving this?  Does Microsoft simply pull anything Activision from the UK?  What does that potentially do to Starfield?

I don’t see a version of this where the CMA does not approve this deal. Instead, to reuse this term, I see this as “regulatory theater,” where this agency must appear that it is doing due diligence, considering the new “evidence,” and making the right decision for the UK’s consumers and businesses. This requires it to wait some number of weeks, writing a very lengthy announcement in which it explains that its original decision was indeed correct given the situation at the time, but that things have changed, and that now this deal makes sense. I’m honestly surprised this hasn’t happened already. But they threw some dates around. Surely by the end of the month.

But in some imaginary future in which the CMA somehow still says no, the more likely outcome is that Microsoft simply consummates the deal anyway, as it was going to do originally—this, along with the FTC defeats in court, is what triggered the CMA rethink—and then let the UK figure it out. Would it be better or worse for that market to not have access to Activision Blizzard’s games? That would make the CMA and the UK both look terrible.

I don’t think Starfield is impacted either way though.

Speaking of Starfield…not the type of game I would expect to normally be in your wheelhouse, but are you intending to play it at all?  With such a massive size of download, its strikes me as not something most people would casually try.

No, I have no interest in Starfield personally. That’s not really my kind of thing. But in keeping with what I wrote in Redfall Proves that Microsoft’s Xbox Strategy Works (Premium), those with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate can stream it first to see how it is, and those with any version of Game Pass can at least try it (after downloading) without paying for it outright. And there will be so many reviews available right at launch, so anyone interested should be able to make an educated decision and not get bitten if it’s not as great as promised.

I will say, if Starfield is somehow a bomb, that might a be PR disaster that Microsoft would have a hard time getting past.

Cloud streaming winners and losers

MartinusV2 asks:

Read last week on Windows Central this article called “PlayStation won the console war, will xBox let them win the cloud gaming too?” I do not know if you read this article and if you did, what is your take on it? Seems to me, since Microsoft is focusing so much on AI that the server resources for cloud gaming is suffering. That is what the article seems to suggest that in the near-term Sony is working slowly but steadily on their cloud gaming offering.

While it would be somewhat ironic if Sony were somehow able to offer a “better” cloud streaming service than Xbox, whatever that means—better game selection, I guess, resolution, graphics quality, or lag and latency, maybe—the reality is that both companies will need to figure out the financial reality of such a service. I agree that Microsoft’s focus on AI could be a distraction from the gamer’s perspective. And that Sony should not be counted out.

That said, if the scrutiny over Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard acquisition taught us anything, and I think it taught us a lot, it’s that cloud gaming just doesn’t make any sense as a standalone business and likely won’t, for a long time if ever. And given this, Sony’s service will be a perk of another subscription (PS Plus, I guess), and a premium version of it, just as is the case with Microsoft. And so it’s a feature, not a standalone offering.

There is also the big possibility that Sony will rely on Microsoft Azure, partially if not completely, for this service. And in this scenario, Microsoft still “wins” since it will be paid for the cloud resources by Sony. (Sony could also go with Amazon or Google, of course, but the two companies revealed a few years ago that they were partnering on this.)

Issues with Intel’s hybrid Core chipsets

MartinusV2 also asks:

Someone did a test between a previous generation of Intel CPU (before the hybrids) against the new hybrid’s ones. From what the article seems to show is Windows 11 is much snappier/fluid with the old Intel CPUs than the new ones. Is it Microsoft fault not supporting adequately the new hybrid CPU? I know you had issues with the new Intel chips at one time. Did you notice some performances issues as well?

I don’t know whose fault it is, but yes, I have noticed performance issues with 12th and 13th Gen Intel Core chipsets, and was the first and perhaps the only person to have pointed out this issue with USB-C and Thunderbolt docks, in particular. To my knowledge, this has never been addressed. I have much better—meaning reliable performance—results with 11th and 10th Gen Intel Core chipsets. This will become a problem over time as the chipsets advance and new capabilities, like NPU/AI arrive.

My guess is that this is mostly Intel’s fault, and that its switch to a hybrid architecture (with Performance and Efficient cores) starting with the 12th Gen chipsets has perhaps not surprisingly triggered some issues. I’m mostly just concerned now that this wasn’t already fixed in the 13th Gen chips. It’s something I’ll keep watching, but it’s already gone on longer than I expected. (I figured there would be firmware updates for the 12th Gen PCs that fixed this.)

That said, Microsoft might be able to fix this too, I suppose. In a perfect world, these companies would team up to find the issues and fix them. But it seems like neither wants to even acknowledge them at all. Perhaps they are simply waiting to solve it.