Ask Paul: November 3 (Premium)

Happy Friday! We’ve survived Día de Muertos here in Mexico City, so I can take a crack at some great reader questions and kick off the weekend.

Laptop keyboards

Markld asks:

Recently it became apparent that I cannot type well on my laptop vs my cheapie desktop keyboard. This also applies to no matter what laptop I have recently came across. I tried lots of laptops at Microcenter and I was ‘all thumbs’. My typing is OK on a desktop keyboard, I am slow to moderate in speed, but without too many mistakes, I can hit the symbol/# keys pretty well without looking. I found out the hard way that my laptop is no fun when I have to type on it. I had to use it for 2 days while I was upgrading and backing up my home office equipment. Its either the travel, or the feel, or the spacing that I am having so much trouble with. Not sure how to describe it, but you have any suggestions, besides just not use my laptop for typing?

I have a lot of issues in this area myself, between being a fast but messy/error-prone typist, switching between a desktop setup and a laptop each day, and in reviewing different laptops, as each has a slightly different key layout and typing feel. The worst of it is when I switch from laptop to laptop during the day, as my muscle memory can’t kick in with regard to the layout in particular, so I kind of fumble-key my way around a lot and rely on auto-correct when typing.

Related to this, I switched to an ergonomic keyboard and mouse decades ago when I started feeling the first pangs of what I assume would have turned into carpal tunnel syndrome on the backs of my hands. I use a Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic keyboard and mouse now, and this setup is so important to me that I brought an extra set to Mexico City (which I’m using as I type this) and have a new, in-box extra at home should the one I’m using come up lame for whatever reason. This has saved my writing career in many ways—I have never experienced that hand pain issue, not even once, since then—so it’s obviously important. But it also exacerbates the issues in moving between a desktop setup and a laptop because the desktop keyboard is so different. I wish there were semi-ergonomic keyboard options for laptops, but there aren’t (and it’s not clear there could be).

So.

With the underlying theme that I feel very strongly about ergonomic keyboards and will now have to ignore those feelings, the best thing you can do is not switch between PCs if possible: The more time you spend with one keyboard—the laptop keyboard—the more familiar it will become and the fewer errors you’ll experience. But since that is likely impossible, the next best thing is to limit the differences between the two keyboards you use. The problem with laptop keyboards is that they have an additional Fn (function) key in the lower right, which can misplace the Ctrl and Alt keys. And in some cases (cough, Lenovo), the Ctrl key is misplaced regardless. On the PC side, you could look at a smaller keyboard that’s more like a laptop keyboard, with no numeric keypad, etc.

Everyone is different, too, which makes this difficult. I think that HP has the best keyboards in the industry, assuming you stick with their premium products (Spectre on the consumer end, EliteBook, Dragonfly, and ZBook on the commercial side), followed by Surface. Many cite Lenovo/ThinkPad, but to my hands, they gave up the title years ago. I prefer tight, punchy keystrokes with minimal key travel. You will likely be very different. But anything you can do to minimize the differences between the keyboards you use should help.

Or not.  It’s possible none of this will matter, sorry. I’ve been using a modern smartphone since the day the first iPhone came out, and to this day I cannot type on a phone screen accurately at all. It would be funny if it wasn’t so problematic, and if I literally didn’t have almost more experience with this than most people in the world. I often rely on my voice for phone typing.

The Apple Way

ThemainJP asks:

I believe I read in one of your recent articles that you were going to explore using Safari on iOS (I assume with a content blocker like AdGuard).

Yes. I’ve been using Safari for at least the past month as my browser on the iPhone. There’s a healthy market for extensions to that browser, which is pretty impressive (and, I think, unique on mobile).

Have you tested iCloud Private Relay at all?  It seems like an excellent privacy tool.

Yes, in the sense that I enabled this feature when I set up the iPhone 15 Pro Max, and have it configured to transmit a general location only. I can’t say that I notice anything per se, it’s kind of like NextDNS in that it’s there, but it doesn’t ever report anything or seem to cause any issues. But yeah, there’s no reason not to turn it on: I pay for iCloud+ storage for device backup, and it’s part of the subscription. (There are other security/privacy features on the iPhone I don’t use, like Hide My Email, not because they’re not valuable but because I just don’t live an Apple-centric life.)

Spotlight on (Desktop) Spotlight

DuguaySarah84 asks:

Desktop Spotlight was broken before 22H3, and it still is … Upgrading to 23H2 doesn’t fix Spotlight.

It’s not clear what you mean by broken, but I assume you mean that it’s not changing the wallpaper on a daily schedule? The problem with this feature—well, one problem—is that it’s just a toggle for your background settings. You can just enable/use it or use a different type of background; there are no customization options in Settings. So that makes it hard to test: If there was a way to auto-cycle the wallpaper more quickly (not just manually choose one via its desktop button), it would be easier to troubleshoot.

It’s also hard to find help with this because there are two Windows spotlights, if you will, the one on the lock screen and the one on the desktop. And they are enabled separately and don’t seem to sync up, which I assume many would like. (There’s an option to add, Microsoft.) But when you Google this problem, all the results are for the lock screen version, most likely because it’s been around a lot longer.

I realize “use something different” doesn’t answer the question, but I suspect there are better alternatives for Bing wallpapers, though I don’t use such a thing myself.

To be sure though, what is broken here for you?

My rant is, why doesn’t even Microsoft understand this broken, unruly monster they have created?

That is a beautiful definition of my career these days. 🙂

Time change

leoaw asks:

If I recall correctly, you had Mexico trips during both the spring and now the fall time changes. For this trip, going back home you’re back to just an hour difference, instead of 2 hours. Was the timing on this trip intentional to ease back into daylight standard time?

It’s the opposite, sadly.

Starting this past year, Mexico no longer observes Daylight Savings Time, which means that they don’t change the clocks twice a year as most of the United States does. The impact on us is negative: From March through November, the time change is two hours, not one, which was ideal. Here’s a single example of why that’s a problem: I record First Ring Daily with Brad each weekday morning at 9 am ET, and making the transition to 8 am here in Mexico was no problem as we’re up well before then anyway. But making the transition to 7 am, which is what it’s been since March, is impossible: 7 am is my target wake-up time and I am not getting up at 6 am every day for the podcast, sorry. (Plus, I like to have an hour each morning to read, drink a cup of coffee, and ease into the day.) Brad has been nice enough to accommodate this change on all three of our trips to Mexico this year—in March, July, and now October/early November—but it’s not great.

Our next trip here is in February, so we’ll be back to the ideal one-hour time change for that. But it benefits more than the podcast, obviously, it makes travel so much easier too. Two hours is OK. But one hour is excellent.

SyncThing

tommygeusens asks:

I think I posted it on one of your OneDrive posts that I’d be interested on your take on SyncThing. Will you try it out in the future?

Most likely, this is one of many things I kind of put aside for a later date, one that in this case is tied to some future NAS purchase. I don’t see using SyncThing in place of OneDrive/Google Drive sync, as the central point there is the main “version of the truth” up in the cloud. But my current workflow with my out-of-date NAS isn’t great—it’s all manual work—and automating it somehow is of interest. I just have a ways to go before I take that step: I’ve made only minimal progress on my current decluttering activities, and I have more waiting for me when we move later this month. The new NAS will come after that.

Who’s the boss?

madthinus asks:

I was wondering if we have now more clarity as to who is in charge of Windows? There was a lot of people mentioned in the wake of Panos exiting, but who is actually making the calls now on development and features and direction.

This is such a great question, not only because I really want to know the answer but because Microsoft’s announcement about this topic is also the perfect example of miscommunication. At first blush, it seemed like Panay’s duties were being spread between three or more people, which almost makes him seem super-human. But this was perhaps a reorg that was overdue, and something Panay fought. (We have to speculate.) And perhaps it better represents what a modern Windows leadership team looks like. But let’s reexamine the original announcement, which came via an email from Rajesh Jha, who sits above all of this, organizationally, in the Microsoft leadership ranks:

“Build silicon, systems, and devices that span Windows, client, and cloud for an AI world. This team will be led by Pavan Davuluri, who will report directly to me.”

This is the top of the new Windows organization, which is not “Windows” anymore but rather a team that builds software (“systems”) and hardware (“silicon,” meaning chipsets, and “devices,” meaning PCs and maybe other devices). It’s led by Pavan Davuluri, who appeared at Build 2023 and the recent Qualcomm Snapdragon event. Davuluri reports directly to Jha, and he (Davuluri) is the person who runs “Windows” (which, again, is more than Windows).

“Brett Ostrum, Nino Storniolo, Linda Averett, Ken Pan, Ralf Groene, Aidan Marcuss, Carlos Picoto, Stevie Bathiche, Robin Seiler, Ruben Caballero, and Anuj Gosalia will move to report to Pavan with their teams intact.”

I haven’t looked up all these people, but this is pretty much what we’d call the leadership part of what used to be the Surface team. So these people will report directly to Davuluri, just as they had previously reported directly to Panay. The change, as I see it, and perhaps we could view Panay’s Windows responsibilities as the first step in this direction, is that now this single organization develops what I’d call Windows, chipsets, and PCs in tandem, rather than having separate teams doing each (with some crossover).

“Windows planning and release management will continue to be in this team.”

Davuluri’s team, which includes people from across Windows, chipsets, and PCs (and not just Windows) will continue to manage and release new versions of Windows and whatever updates. Yet another indication that Davuluri is the man in charge.

But there’s more.

“Build experiences that blend web, services, and Windows for an AI world. To this end, Shilpa Ranganathan, Jeff Johnson, and Ali Akgun will directly report to Mikhail Parakhin and form a new Windows and Web Experiences Team, moving with their teams intact.”

Parakin will lead a “new” Windows and Web Experiences Team that specifically addresses the integration of AI capabilities that run across both the web and Windows. This says “Microsoft Copilot” to me, the underlying AI strata that powers Bing Chat, Bing Image Creator, the integration of those features in Microsoft Edge, and Copilot in Windows 11. What this announcement doesn’t say is who Parakin reports to: It’s either Rajesh Jha (that’s my guess) or Davuluri, and the reason I think it’s Jha is that these capabilities start/exist outside of Windows and include products and services that don’t fall under the Windows (or Windows, chipsets, and PCs) organization. I could be wrong (and I guess it doesn’t matter).

“Yusuf Mehdi will take on the responsibility of leading the Windows and Surface businesses with our OEM and Retail partners.”

Many read this and immediately connected the dots incorrectly, believing that Mehdi was somehow in charge of Windows because of the “leading the Windows and Surface businesses” bit: That seems to suggest that he replaced Panay. He did not. Mehdi has been in what I’d call a marketing role for most of his career, a career that spans a bizarre number of Microsoft products and services over the years. When I first met him in 1998, he was on the NT team (I asked him a question about Dave Cutler, go figure). But he moved between various roles at MSN/Windows Live, Xbox, and Bing over the years (and probably more), and he is perhaps most familiar today because he was the guy who led the presentation at the first Bing Chat even this past February.

So what’s he really doing? He’s the hardware liaison between Microsoft and its PC maker and retailer partners. For PC makers, that means keeping up with what Microsoft is doing in Windows and with chipsets. And for retailers, it means keeping up with what Microsoft is doing in Windows and Surface. He’s still in marketing, basically.

And he still is (in marketing). But he’s left that role already.

When Microsoft announced a reorg of its Xbox and marketing divisions—a week ago, it seems like longer—it provided much more clarity on Mehdi’s role, including a new title and a change in who he reports to directly. (I assume he previously reported to Davuluri, given the description.) Now, we know that Mehdi has been promoted to Executive Vice President, Consumer Chief Marketing Officer (the marketing role thus confirmed). And he reports directly to Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft’s new Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, replacing Chris Capossela. Mehdi has been elevated to the Senior Leadership Team (SLT), which honestly doesn’t make sense to me. And he will “champion [Microsoft’s] end-user experiences and build on his work launching several of our AI-powered services to lead Microsoft Copilot product marketing. He will also continue to lead our Search, Ad, & News, and Devices & Creativity Customer Solution Areas (CSAs).”

Wait, what? This means that Mehdi is no longer the liaison with PC makers and Surface, and that he held that job for about a month. He’s kind of back in the cloud with AI, as he was most recently in Bing. The Xbox/marketing reorg does not address who if anyone replaces Mehdi in the Windows/chips/PCs organization.

Back to the original reorg memo. There is one more thing.

“Charles Simonyi, Terri Chudzik, and Erin Kolb will join the E+D management teams, and Ralf Groene and Mike Davidson will work together on the best alignment on design teams.”

This one is full of Microsoft insider Easter Eggs.

First, Charles Simonyi is still at Microsoft? What the what? For those who don’t know him, Simonyi is in the top five most influential people who ever worked at Microsoft, alongside Dave Cutler, Bill Gates, and just a few others. I wrote about him in 2017 when he returned to Microsoft, but the high points are that he worked at Xerox Parc and co-created the Xerox Alto, one of the first PCs, and Bravo, the first WYSIWYG word processors. He then joined Microsoft and created Multiplan and what became Microsoft Word. He invented “Hungarian Notation,” a way for variables, constants, and other objects in software code to self-document their type, a coding practice that is still common today. And he pushed Microsoft into object-oriented programming (OOP) in the late 1980s.

Then there’s Ralf Groene, a key member of the Surface team and a curious omission from the team under Davuluri that’s comprised of ex-Surface members. (I suspect he had moved into some other group previously, and was working with Surface on whatever.)

And that “E + D” thing references Experiences + Devices, which is the team I suspect Groene and the others were on previously. E+D is/was a group at Microsoft Research that is working further back from release on “1st party hardware” (i.e. Surface) and “Microsoft 365 Software as a Service Platform.” Or was: That “alignment” bit suggests this team might be finding a new home soon. Probably under that Windows/chipsets/PC group.

So there you go.

To answer your question, Pavan Davuluri runs Windows now. 🙂

Will the “Mac style” status bar survive the Panos exit? 

Do you mean the Taskbar? If so I would look at this more broadly: Does the general Windows 11 user experience survive Panay’s exit? And the answer (guess) to that is yes: This user experience predated Panay and was originally designed for Windows 10X, a lightweight Windows version for fanless devices and ultra-thin PCs. And it’s now had three years of updates to address functional regressions and issues, and is pretty much where Microsoft needs it to be. I don’t see another major UX shift happening so quickly, nothing like the shift from Windows 10 to 11. In fact, if you think about it, Windows 10 was really just another refinement of Windows 8.x from a UX perspective. I suspect the Windows 12 UX will be similar to Windows 11. (And will make for an easier transition for customers.)

Windows 11 23H2 rollout what it is, I could not get the update, until I clicked the box for previews for it to appear, yet another change in behavior from before. Previously it would have shown as an optional update, that you could install. Microsoft declaring, they are releasing things when they make it hidden previews or CFR’s is really starting to get old and I want a name to blame!

You may have seen the insanity I documented in Notes From the Field: The Week That 23H2 Happened (Premium), in which I explain how 23H2 is somehow both released in stable and yet is still a preview. It’s … crazy. But as I note in that article, this week’s weirdnesses will fade in time: Users will get 23H2—by which I mean “all of 23H2”—relatively quickly, and within a month or so, this nonsense will be behind us. Of course, by that point, we’ll have new nonsense in the form of future updates to discuss and agonize over. It never ends.

NASA+

christianwilson asks:

NASA+ is launching on November 8th. It is part of a revamp of NASA’s online presence and streaming services. There is no subscription required and no ads. Do you have any interest in it?

Of course. Space travel is one of the most inspiring human endeavors. I’ve literally teared up while considering the achievements in this, um, space, like the Space Shuttle just landing on an airstrip normally like an airplane. It’s amazing. This is the type of thing I could imagine just leaving on all the time on a screen in the background.

Excited?

jrzoomer asks:

Paul are you excited for the upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite?

I wouldn’t say excited. I am hopeful but also mindful of the mistakes of the past. I wrote about my feelings on this in Windows on Arm’s Last Stand? (Premium), which maybe should have been called Qualcomm’s Last Stand? (Premium). They have a lot to prove and a lot of previous claims and promises to outlive. So we’ll see. I do think that Windows on Arm (WOA) will survive and that AMD, NVIDIA, and possibly Samsung and others competing in this space will be the shot in the (ahem) arm that this market—and, really, the broader PC market—needs. WOA is such an also-ran today, but it can still transition into our mainstream PC platform, a shift that would rival the 32-bit era of the 80386 and the x64 era (thanks, AMD and Dave Cutler!) that we still live in today.

Hopeful but cautious is pretty much my stance on almost everything these days, I guess.

Bill Gates

sabertooth920 asks:

With Bill still having his fingers involved with Microsoft, how much blame and credit does he deserve for the various things that have been released “off his watch” such as Surface, Cortana and Azure?

Bill Gates is a complicated topic.

I was appalled by the marketing campaign that accompanied his Netflix documentary, as it whitewashed the terribleness he orchestrated while at Microsoft to make his current philanthropic efforts seem more laudable. But in the wake of that documentary, I was vindicated as he ongoing terrible behavior resulted in his divorce from Melinda and his final ouster from a Microsoft that everyone had assumed he no longer had a role in. But that was not the case: He was brought in as an “advisor” to Satya Nadella when he became CEO, and Gates had a much more active, hands-on role at Microsoft in recent years than most know. But he was a kind of Grima Wormtongue, a “power behind the throne” with outsized but secret influence. Those inside the company I’ve talked to have routinely described his meddling as “toxic” and “unwelcome.”

Put more simply, we have to give Gates credit for almost singlehandedly creating the PC industry as we still know it today; there is no one who played a bigger, more central, or longer-lasting role than Gates. We also have to give him credit for his stance on his ill-deserved wealth and his philanthropy over the past few decades. But we cannot forget the toxic culture that Gates created at Microsoft and the companies, jobs, and people he destroyed along the way. Our industry’s growth and evolution were stymied by his actions and it’s impossible to know how much could have happened had he been stopped; but we have a clue: Look at the rise of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and others in the decade in which regulators finally put a stop to his/Microsoft’s belligerent market abuses. This is also his legacy.

As to your question, Gates is finally out at Microsoft. (Well, allegedly.) But he had to have been involved in all those products you mentioned—Surface, Cortana, and Azure. Meaning that he was briefed and explicitly approved of the direction Microsoft went in each case or was at least outvoted by the board or SLT if he disagreed. Depending on the timing, this was relatively public or incredibly secret.

But here’s one example most people have probably heard about: Microsoft was about to buy Slack for $8 billion in early 2016 so that it could eliminate a hot new competitor that had created a new market for chat-based collaboration that was threatening Outlook and SharePoint. But it was Gates who stepped in and said no: He explained to Nadella and the SLT that Microsoft already had all the assets it needed to compete with and then destroy Slack. The resulting product, Teams, is Microsoft’s most successful new offering in decades and is so popular that Slack sued Microsoft for antitrust violations.

Microsoft today would probably be a curiously different place had it acquired Slack. But we’ll never know.

Microsoft and Linux

JustMe asks:

A speculative question for you.  In one of those random surfing moments we all have, found an article over at Windows Central which pointed to a Microsoft website that detailed how to install Linux.  The article discusses how to install Linux using WSL (understandable), the cloud, a VM, and on bare metal.

Yep. I saw the original article about this on The Register.

Do you have any insight or speculation as to why Microsoft would have a site detailing how to install Linux?  Is there something potentially forthcoming in the consumer space (apart from WSL) that mightbe Linux-related?

No, nothing like that.

This isn’t the 1990s or early 2000s anymore. Linux isn’t a cancer, it’s not going to replace Windows on the PC desktop, and Microsoft has fully embraced open-source software (OSS) across the board. It’s a new era.

And it’s been like this for a while. Windows Azure started off as the proprietary next evolution of Windows Server, which was itself the next evolution of Windows on the client, and it was very much “Windows Server in the cloud.” Today, that product is Microsoft Azure and it’s evolved into infrastructure, and of the key workloads that customers run on top of it, Linux is even more popular than Windows (Server). This makes sense for the cloud as Linux is comparatively lightweight and lends itself well to cloud-based jobs like web servers, online services, and so on.

On the client, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) exists to entice developers to stick with Windows and because doing so can lead to more usage of Microsoft services: It came about because some large percentage of developers would dual-boot between Windows or Linux, or maintain separate PCs. And with the world evolving as it has, developers have turned more and more to cross-platform and/or open source on the client and to OSS and lightweight web dev in the cloud. Visual Studio Code came up out of this reality. So the hope is that the combination of VS Code, WSL, and Linux in Azure will address a need and push the revenue-generating services in Azure that make the most money for Microsoft.

That’s all this is. It’s not a guide to switching to Linux, and headlines stating that “Now Microsoft is teaching us how to install Linux” are delirious clickbait. The goal is just to keep people in the Microsoft ecosystem, especially Azure. That’s where the money is. Each step into Azure, whether it’s via a Linux VM in the cloud, various services hosted in Azure, or whatever, is all recurring monthly profits and revenues. By comparison, someone buying a Windows PC and doing whatever with it is just a tiny one-time benefit.

TWiT and live streaming

helix2301 asks:

Paul, what do you think of twit moving live streaming to club members only? I think Club Twit is worth the money.

I do too, and while I’m compromised here, as I record a podcast that’s only in Club TWiT and I get paid to do so, I think there’s a lot of value there.

The move away from live streaming is a tough one. In an ideal world, TWiT would have both paid and free, ad-supported versions of its service/individual podcasts, similar to how Spotify operates, and it would be able to afford the infrastructure costs that are part of doing business. This shift was triggered by a horrible ad revenue slide that’s impacted us all—ad revenues here on Thurrott.com are down an incredible 40 percent year-over-year, for example—so I very much understand and feel the pain. It’s too bad, but you have to survive as a business. So hopefully they can build up the subscriber base and grow again.

Store woes

Helix2301 also asks:

Any update on the Windows store? I developed apps for there and lately, Microsoft has not announced anything relating to the store like usage numbers or anything. Is the store doing good or not? Any update on this front would be great.

Microsoft actively pushed the Windows Store (now Microsoft Store) in the early days, obviously, but now it only comes up when there is some major shift, like the addition of different app types, or bad news, like when it killed the business and education stores. But here’s how much this has changed in two years: At Build 2022, Microsoft discussed Store momentum for perhaps the last time. At Build 2023, it touted an AI hub in the Store, yawn, because now that is all anyone there cares about.

I don’t believe that the Microsoft Store is all that compelling to users because of the usual engagement issue. But my guess on momentum is that Microsoft’s AI shift triggered an about-face everywhere at Microsoft, and that for the Store in particular, it will be about AI features coming to apps in the Store. And that this will be the next big marketing push for developers: Add AI, and deploy it in the Store. That’s where any “momentum” will occur (or not).

Tied to this, what’s Microsoft’s strategy for helping developers easily/quickly add AI capabilities to existing apps? Is there one? I feel like Build 2023 was very vague on this topic and that developers will need to wade through a series of third-party offerings in the short term to find something that meets their specific needs. But it’s early days, and this stuff is still quite immature and (I’m imagining) difficult and/or expensive to work with.

How to set up your web browser correctly

lightbody asks:

Paul has written a great article about how to “setup Edge properly” – is it possible for a similar article for Chrome & Firefox?  🙂

Well, that’s really a chapter in the Windows 11 Field Guide, and it wasn’t part of my original table of contents. It came about in the writing of the other Microsoft Edge chapters, and because I would so often reset PCs to get a clean startup image (as I discussed yesterday in Notes From the Field: The Week That 23H2 Happened (Premium)). In doing so, I discovered that Microsoft pushes you into configuring Edge in ways that disadvantage you so that it can push you to its own advertising-backed online services, a malicious tactic. And so I started collecting this list of ways in which you could undermine that and configure Edge, when possible, in a way that was best for you, not Microsoft. So it became it’s own chapter, and then it grew in size.

(I’m happy to report that I have found no new bad behavior in Edge in 23H2/current Edge versions, though I haven’t fully explored the impact of the Bing Chat and Image Creator features yet. I will get to revising the Edge chapters in the next few weeks, I bet.)

Anyway. That chapter/article is mostly Edge-specific content, obviously, but the basics are the same for any web browser not named Brave and the specifics regarding extensions are literally the same: You need to protect yourself with privacy extensions, often from the browser you’re using, and those extensions work the same magic in Chrome and (to a lesser degree, because it’s not as necessary) Firefox. I recommend and use a combination of Privacy Badger and Adblock Plus in all non-Brave browsers for tracking protection. But Ghostery and uBlock Origin are good choices too.

Oddly, I have been planning to publish an article called “How I Configure and Use Brave” for a long time now (I started it back in May) because people misunderstand this browser, complain about silly things (toolbar buttons that are disabled with one click and services that aren’t even enabled by default), and probably don’t appreciate the beauty and superiority of its decentralized settings sync functionality. I’ll do this eventually.

But an article about “correctly” configuring Chrome and/or Firefox is perhaps interesting. I do use Chrome still as a secondary browser, mostly because it’s easier to use secondary accounts like Gmail in a different browser. But I don’t use Firefox all that often, other than to test new versions and see what’s changed. I’m just not sure what I can offer there. I will think on this.

Amazon + Microsoft 365

ianceicys asks:

What do you think about the 550,000 Microsoft 365 licenses purchased by Amazon?

I’m not sure why I didn’t write this up for starters. Brad and I did discuss a while back on First Ring Daily. But I do have a few thoughts.

First, this is pragmatic. Microsoft 365 doesn’t really have a direct competitor in this space, and the size of this purchase is enormous: 1.5 million seats across various tiers/SKUs at a value of $1 billion over five years. I am as small a business as you can be, and I can tell you that Google Workspace’s handling of tiers/SKUs is horrible compared to that of Microsoft 365 (and will come up soon in an editorial involving a little run-in I just had with Slack).

Second, Amazon has been (had been?) working on an in-house competitor to Microsoft 365 and this clearly suggests that those efforts are so immature—or so incompatible with a business as big and diverse as Amazon’s—that it can’t even use its own products and services internally. That’s interesting on many levels, but as Google has found out with Workspace, it’s not enough to just show up. Enterprises have very specific needs and Microsoft has been meeting them for decades.

Third, and this is my naïve desire for companies like this to just work together, Microsoft and Amazon came up in the same geographical area and share many similarities (and, yes, many differences, especially culturally). I think it’s healthy for this industry, and for the Seattle/Puget Sound area, that these companies would partner like this. Maybe it leads to other partnerships. And an end to a silly rivalry as there is room for both.

Anyway. This is nothing but good news. For both companies.