Ask Paul: September 22 (Premium)

As we stumble to the conclusion of this incredibly busy and historic week, let’s wind down with some great reader questions.

Roadmap

ianceicys asks:

With the Xbox Roadmap leak given how far (multiple-years) into the future Microsoft plans and roadmaps stretch, and given the today’s launch of the iPhone 15, how do you think about the reality that many of the decisions that are made regarding these products and services were made YEARS ago and that today these companies are working on features and capabilities that we won’t see for 36-48 months from now?

I am fascinated by this. And regardless of the specific details of what we learned from the Xbox leak, on some level just knowing that they are working on the future that far in advance is somehow heartening. Externally, Microsoft just talks, but internally, in this case, we can see some of the machinations that will lead to future announcements and products. This is very interesting.

I would like to think that products I care even more about, like Windows, have this level of strategy happening. And though I really don’t believe that, the fact that something like AI can come in and mix the whole thing up, triggering a new strategy and thus a new longer-term vision is pretty exciting as well. “We were going to this, but now we’re going to do that.” And what they were going to do before was a whole lot of nothing.

Ultimately, the point behind my Programming Windows series, which became Windows Everywhere, was to look at why Windows changed when it did. In some cases, it was literally because some visionary correctly predicted the future inside of Microsoft and the firm moved to make it happen, but much more often it was Microsoft reacting to outside trends. Windows 8 is a great example of the latter case. But AI is a bit of both, with Microsoft deciding to take a leadership position and explicitly seizing this moment at what might very well be the right time. That’s exciting. Windows, a product that much of Microsoft ignored for a long time, is suddenly on the front burner again. Not by itself, obviously. But there.

Apple is interesting on many levels, of course, but one of its core competencies, even though some see this as a negative, is its measured approach to adopting new technologies and evolving its products. This is on the one hand “late to market,” but it’s also its own form of leadership assuming they’re making good choices because being first to market doesn’t always work out. We’re tech enthusiasts, so this is contrary to what we want, but it’s probably best for most users.

Also, they kind of telegraph things. And here, I don’t always agree. When you see something like the dynamic island on the iPhone Pro one year, you know it’s coming to the non-Pro models the next (which just happened). That does make sense because this kind of advance (or whatever) should trickle down to less expensive products over time, as we see everywhere (PCs, etc.). But I don’t like that one year’s new iOS features will be next year’s new iPadOS features: These platforms are basically the same and should be advanced in lock-step, I think. But whatever. Apple is obviously doing something right, and it may be possible in ways to predict a few years down the road just based on a few hints in new premium products.

Plus, you have to think they have a very detailed roadmap and that it’s unusual for them to be blindsided by some innovation elsewhere. Folding displays, for example. That technology needs to work before they can put it out to the masses. And/or make sense to their overall strategy, which right now is very much about customers having multiple devices, not one device that replaces two.

Moving it closer to home, the thing I’m most fascinated by in the Xbox leak is the very real possibility that the next Xbox console could be based on Arm and not x64. And while that may not happen, the fact that one year ago Microsoft expected Arm silicon to be good enough for a flagship console in 2028 is amazing because that silicon today, on the PC, is anemic. So they know something. They have relationships with all the silicon vendors, know much of their roadmaps, and are making bets based on that information. It’s all very, very interesting.

Chris Hoffman

j5 asks:

This is a total non-tech question. But man, how tall is Chris? You’re a big guy but Chris looks like he’s a full head taller than you. I saw the pictures from the live event yesterday on my iPhone/Safari. Ya’ll should make a podcast called Tall Tech Guys lol. I’d love to listen to two industry vets give cantankerous takes on tech.

🙂

I was delighted when I learned that Chris would be manning the Windows Intelligence newsletter because I had followed him for so long at How-To Geek, liked his writing, and saw in that a similar worldview. And I was likewise delighted to finally meet him in person the night before the Microsoft event in New York. And, yes, surprised by how tall he was.

He’s 6-foot-4. I had to ask.

Blue blockers

j5 asks:

Blue lens glasses, I’ve been meaning to look into this since I’m always in front of a computer screen for work and personal usage. Do you have any thoughts on this? And how monitors, tablets, and smartphones can adjust the screen color/temperature at night to help you sleep. Do you use this feature? Curious if you knew/heard anything about this from an industry point of view.

I’ve never tried the glasses, but many PC displays now have blue light-blocking capabilities built-in, some in sophisticated ways that don’t require the screen to have an orangish tint. And because of my eyes, I’ve long been worried about this kind of thing, and am particularly happy with the rise of dark mode across all device types. I do use automated “night light” (or whatever) features everywhere I can as well.

But … I just saw a story that blue light-blocking glasses might not be beneficial. As with so many health-related topics these days, there are studies that “prove” pretty much everything, so the jury is probably still out on this. But I can say that anything that reduces glare and brightness certainly feels better to my eyes. I’m not sure where you’re at with age, eye health, and so on, but I think it’s important to do what you can proactively. And as I do enable all those display features everywhere, I guess that’s my baseline advice. And these things certainly don’t hurt.

An outlook on the new Outlook

SherlockHolmes asks:

I was using the new Outlook for the last few days now. Its all in all fine but doesnt match the classic Outlook desktop app. Why does Microsoft think it will get away with the replacement with the new Outlook app? Specially in companies and Enterprises?

I was surprised to discover yesterday that an old friend of mine from Microsoft was at the event and was further surprised to learn that he was now working on Outlook. And so I asked him about this. Most pointedly how they could ship it now when it was so feature-incomplete. It doesn’t even support offline usage, for example.

His answer was interesting. First, he correctly pointed out that the new Outlook isn’t replacing desktop Outlook now, it’s replacing Mail and Calendar in Windows 11, and these apps are unsophisticated, used by most non-technical users, and no longer under active development. And these people aren’t typically reading, let alone writing, emails when they’re offline. And whatever, that feature will come, of course. (He didn’t say this, but I wonder if the Windows 11 update schedule had something to do with its sudden release. The new Outlook can be seen as another bullet point in the list of new features in 23H2.) And … those users who wish to stick with Mail and Calendar can do so through the end of 2024. This is reasonable.

As for business customers, he drew an interesting distinction between what he called the “Win32 app” and the new Outlook. I suspect that many people think of the new Outlook as a “desktop app,” which to me is the same as Win32, but he did not, and he believes that this new codebase was long overdue. Here, too, there will be functional regressions, and because of the nature of the Outlook desktop user base, some will be problematic and will never be fixed.

In any event, right now the new Outlook is an option for businesses and others who use the Outlook desktop app, so you can choose which to use. If I remember correctly, the big issue in that category is add-ins. But this is just seen as problematic from a security perspective, and can’t be supported forever, and so that is the dividing line. That said, I suspect that corporate users will be able to stick with classic Outlook a lot longer than consumers can with Mail and Calendar.

He was very gung-ho about the new Outlook. And, I know, he would be, I guess. But I know this guy very well and he is quite honest about things, so this kind of surprised me.

Here’s my guess. Microsoft went into the Teams era knowing that some older users, especially, would stick with Outlook for collaboration, and that it would need to keep supporting both as much as possible. But it has seen more success with Teams than expected, and I think that might have inspired this new Outlook. There are just so many users who don’t have very specific email needs and/or don’t care about classic Outlook at all. And because the way we’ve worked has changed so much, the age-old classic Outlook needs are getting less important. That audience is getting older and younger works couldn’t care less.

I suspect that Microsoft will continue updating the new Outlook to address both audiences. And that by the time it’s required for businesses, it will be where it needs to be.

Flying without a copilot

SherlockHolmes asks:

Did Microsoft say anything about the new Copilot that it can be deactivated? Honestly I don’t see many companies that want to play around during workhours with ChatGPT.

I don’t believe the intent is for users to play around with AI but rather to take advantage of it to be more efficient or productive. And this is a careful balancing act, as it is marketing AI as something positive that will help you do your job better, not something that will cause you to lose your job. But AI will do both: In giving you abilities that are today beyond your experience or capabilities, AI is indeed eliminating the jobs of others who are. That’s the nature of this.

Anyway. It depends on the Copilot, but the current view is good, in that it’s all optional.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is a paid add-on service, so no worries there: If you paid for it, you will get it. Windows Copilot is free, and it will be enabled by default soon. But you can disable it, yes. (And IT can disable it with policies.) Bing Chat is a feature of Bing, of course, so it’s easily ignored.

Amazon, hardware, and services

jrzoomer asks:

Amazon also had their event this week. Do you think hardware is still a huge opportunity for them? I’m not sure how Ring, Alexa, and FireTV/Fire tablets are doing in the market, but Amazon as a platform seems to have a huge opportunity ahead of it if they can get this right.

I’m a bit behind on my Amazon analysis, but then it was of course the craziest and busiest week in memory. That said, I did watch the Amazon event live (the company invites me to do so remotely each year), and I was quite taken with the fact that it is doing what I feel Google should do by taking new generative AI capabilities and adding them to its digital assistant. (And not just creating new products and services.) This is smart, for Amazon, developers that target this ecosystem, and for its customers.

The relative success of each Amazon hardware product family is hard to understand because there are multiple factors involved. Amazon is usually in the top 2 or 3 in tablets by market share, for example, but it’s not clear how profitable that business is directly. Or whether it matters: One could argue that using hardware as a loss-leader is a sound strategy because the goal is to put the services that do make money—the Prime subscription in general, advertising, additional services, whatever—in front of as many people as possible. And there’s also an argument that the Alexa ecosystem cannot succeed unless there are attractive devices that people want, sort of how the iPhone’s success led to Apple’s services business. You have to reach users somehow.

From the outside, I have a few general observations about Amazon hardware. One is that it tends to be cheap in every way imaginable, by actual street price and quality. Two, that there is so much of it. Every year, this event results in a flood of hardware revisions and new products; they are like the anti-Google in this way. And Amazon is a sort of Wal-Mart of personal technology in that it has the reach to bring these cheap products to a huge market of people in a very value-oriented way that speaks to the average consumer and not just the elites. Amazon is middle America. And middle America is big.

Any success should be a win-win. And in this case, any successful product needs to make sense to customers and to Amazon as a business. There have been reports about both Amazon and Google investing/losing billions building out their respective smart home ecosystems, but Amazon, unlike Google, continues to invest, and it continues to release more and more new products. This is not a dumb company, and while most of the business is very low margin, including this stuff, it’s clearly succeeding on some level and sees the long-term view as more important than short-term worries.

For people like me—and I bet for you and most other readers—Amazon just seems to lowball it a bit too much. The highest-end Echo smart speaker is not as good as the lowest-end Sonos speaker, for example, just like the highest-end Kindle Fire tablet is not as good as the cheapest iPad. This is the nature of this business, and I will not take part in it, though I of course consider various Amazon products as they appear or are updated, and I do use several Amazon services, mostly via Prime. (Yes, I own Eero Wi-Fi equipment, which is owned by Amazon but is also more premium than most Amazon products.) Amazon Essentials, to me, is the essence of Amazon. They do what’s essential, but rarely do anything more.

And … that speaks to a big audience. Just not me, usually.

Intel rising

jrzoomer asks:

The Intel Innovation conference was this week where Intel announced their new processor lineup based on the Intel 4 (7nm) process Meteor Lake coming in December amongst other things. Being that Intel it is so important in this ecosystem, do you think they can finally overcome their multi-year manufacturing delays and loss of marketshare to AMD (and increased competition overall from NVIDIA in datacenter)?

I do think they can. The question is whether they will and, if so, do so in time.

According to my internal Magic 8-Ball, the future is still hazy. Intel’s shift to a hybrid core architecture hasn’t been completely successful in my opinion, and Meteor Lake really accelerates that change in almost insane ways. So we’ll see how that goes. (And that’s in addition to the NPU/AI stuff, which will also become mainstream in this generation.)

But moving to a 7-nm process right as Apple announced the first 3-nm chipset shows you the delta between Intel and TSMC, which manufactures the Apple chips and is Intel’s real target here. As is Samsung’s 4-nm processes. So forward progress, for sure. But there is still a way to go.

And thanks for mentioning NVIDIA, I don’t mention or think about this enough. In many ways, getting sophisticated NPUs into the datacenter is as important as modernizing the manufacturing process on traditional processors and SoCs, maybe more so. For Intel to survive and perhaps win, it needs to succeed in that market too. And perhaps this is all part of the plan: combine its Arm-like hybrid architecture chipsets with on-die AI capabilities while meeting the performance, efficiency, and power management needs of its core markets. Right now, Intel is coasting in the PC space, but the datacenter/cloud market is problematic.

Surface, simplified

madthinus asks:

With the news of Panos leaving and Microsoft scaling Surface efforts and products  back, the real question is why do they bother going forward?. Has Surface run its course? Tied to this, Microsoft mouse and keyboards has been excellent for years, they consolidated that to Surface earlier in the year in what I felt like was a land grab from Panos, is that also now just abandoned?

Right. I wonder about all this as well. So let’s step through this.

On the Surface PC lineup, I feel like there is a real danger that Microsoft is in the same place with this product line as it was with Windows phone in 2015, meaning that it is, in fact, quietly winding this business down right now but is saying otherwise publicly and promising new hardware. But the other possibility is that Microsoft wants Surface to succeed and believes that it let the product line get a little too expansive. After all, it’s a small business and doesn’t get the volume discounts of the big PC makers, and it may make sense to move forward with a smaller set of more successful products.

Were this up to me, I would stick with Surface Pro, Surface Laptop, and Surface Studio Laptop, and I would kill the rest of the PCs. This would require a level of quality and reliability that befits this premium part of the market, and given history, it’s not clear that Microsoft is capable of that. But selling low-margin PCs with the word “Go” in their name is not the future. This is one place where emulating Apple would actually make sense. There is no MacBook Go.

In keeping with my initial prediction, I do believe that if this smaller Surface lineup doesn’t deliver, Microsoft will kill the brand. At least in the PC space. I could see Surface Hub continuing forward. Though Microsoft Hub has a nice ring to it, too. Microsoft 365 Hub? Hm.

This brings us to your point about Microsoft hardware and them stupidly moving to the Surface brand. A move that looks even stupider now. This was a mistake then and it’s a mistake now. So I’d just pretend it never happened and stick with the Microsoft brand for this stuff going forward, and maybe consolidate all that down to fewer products too.

I will never understand that decision.

Xbox, expanding

madthinus asks:

I like Phil [Spencer] and I generally think he is great, but this has been bothering me since the leaks started. What is clear to me at least from the leaks is that they failed to excite gamers for this generation. They had the early reveal and I still love that video. The specs were on par with PS5 and they seemed to have felt that was enough. They failed to deliver on the one thing they where panned on for the Xbox One reveal, games. They did not have a truly next generation title to showcase the Series X. They arrived on the market with old title upgrades and not a single truly next gen title. Sony had Rachet and Clank and Miles Morales on day one. Two PS5 exclusives. Microsoft had a muddy looking Halo game they did not ship. This is a rather large misstep. Their first big title is Starfield, three years in and Xcloud, their big bet and it is ate a lot of Series X chips for no gain at the expense of sales volumes to Sony. Is this strategy working? And the one they laid out for 2030, is that just delusional? Here comes another one chip to do Xbox, data center work loads and devices? I feel less confident in Phil and Xbox.

These are all solid points. I also love Phil Spencer and what he brought to Xbox, and I agree that not shipping some AAA exclusives with the new consoles was a huge mistake. And subsequent gaffs, like Halo Infinite and Redfall, just amplify the issue. To his credit, Spencer has pretty much acknowledged all that publicly. And he was central to Microsoft’s game studio buying spree, the big whale being Activision Blizzard, and this shows he has also been acting to correct the problem.

But I have also pointed out the lack of any mobile strategy beyond streaming, which was thwarted by Apple and never made sense anyway. This to me is his biggest misstep, and while Activision Blizzard will help, Xbox should have done much more by now. And all of this does fall on Spencer’s shoulders, of course.

I’m not ready to give up on him, though. And since Activision Blizzard finally looks like it’s going to happen, that could redeem a lot of this. It’s a huge win, and it puts Xbox in a better place respective to the competition.