Ask Paul: January 19 (Premium)

Happy Friday! We live in interesting times, for better or worse, and you can see that in this week’s terrific set of reader questions. I will do my best.

Numbers

AnOldAmigaUser asks:

With this week’s revelations regarding tracking being done by Microsoft and Meta were sort of stunning. The problem was obvious, but I do not think the scale of the problem was as obvious.

Right. I equated this to having a baby: You know it’s going to be difficult, but it’s only when it really happens that you understand that knowing that in no way prepared you for reality.

What I found interesting was that it was Microsoft that posted the “772” message itself because of those rules. The Meta numbers were the result of analysis by Consumer Reports. I find it hard to believe that Google, Apple, Meta, TikTok, etc. are going to provide the same information without a lot of kicking and screaming the the legal sense. So I guess Microsoft has that going for it…they were first to step up. Do you think that we will be getting more numbers in the near future from those companies considered Gatekeepers by the EU?

Yes. What I’ve learned since then is that the 772 disclosure did not come “from” Microsoft per se, but is rather a live number and that EU users will see that sort of pop-up in front of apps and websites all over the place. So this wasn’t Microsoft self-reporting per se.

Do you attribute the vast discrepancy in the numbers between Microsoft and Meta is due to Microsoft being late to the game, or does it have more to do with Meta’s footprint in mobile and their APIs?

Generally speaking, I attribute it to Meta having a bigger and more successful ad business. Which makes sense when you think about it, since this is the only way the company makes money. And yes, being on mobile helps as they track users when they use other apps too.

Any chance this will cause enough outrage here that lawmakers would act to reign in the issue? Never mind, nothing can make lawmakers here act.

We have to be realistic, but never say never. Enough outrage will move the needle. The problem is, we get outraged over the wrong things.

Pontificate? I live to pontificate

lindhartsen asks:

Hey Paul, may lean into a bit of pontificating for this question but curious what purpose Bing may serve for Microsoft moving forward. The attempt to attach the brand to the burgeoning excitement around AI appears to have fallen flat based on recent news reports.

We didn’t write this up, but if you didn’t see it elsewhere, Bing’s overall usage share as measured by StatCounter went from 3.03 percent in December 2022 to 3.37 percent in December 2023. (Google’s share fell from 92.58 percent to 91.62 percent in the same time frame, a difference of almost 1 percentage point.) That’s a gain of 0.34 percentage points, which is what I’d call “flat,” and it corroborates the August report that resulted in my article Cute, But Not a Game Changer (Premium): Despite several billion dollars of investment and months and months of promotion, the AI additions to Bing did not help Microsoft’s service in the slightest. Bing fares much better on desktop (10.53 percent usage) but much worse on mobile (0.54 percent share), if you’re curious about that divide.

As Microsoft shifts to Copilot being their primary brand around all of their AI efforts does Bing become an invisible brand inside the company, serving as their web crawler akin to how SharePoint serves as the basis for so many things but is disguised from the user, consumer or business?

That’s interesting. What you’re describing is similar to the final plan Microsoft had for Cortana before finally putting that service out to pasture because Cortana, like Bing, was a poisoned brand that didn’t resonate with customers as part of a non-virtuous cycle. (Poor usage leads to fewer resources which leads to even poorer usage…) I think that removing Bing from the marketing to emphasize Copilot instead is both brilliant and correct—though as I noted this past week, I have fears that Microsoft could poison the Copilot brand as well by releasing too little too soon at too high a price—but I hadn’t really considered what happens to Bing in the wake of this shift.

So let’s consider that.

Put simply, I don’t see Bing going away as a brand or as a standalone search engine, but only that latter bit is important. As weird as this seems, Microsoft needs Bing now because AI needs data, and lots of it. I can draw a parallel here to Xbox, which was an unnecessary money loser that didn’t fit into the broader company and was something that Microsoft should have spun off, but then because both necessary and strategic when Microsoft shifted its central strategy to the cloud. In this case, Bing was an unnecessary money loser that didn’t fit into the broader company and was something that Microsoft should have spun off or just killed. But thanks to this shift to AI, this also-ran is suddenly a key piece to its current focus, AI.

What’s weird here is that the AI push wasn’t from the bottom up, meaning from niche, vertical use cases to broader, more general usage, it was the reverse. But what we’re discovering is that AI “hallucinates” when given too much data because—surprise, surprise—most of the information online is contradictory. And that AI is at its best, at least today, when it has finite data sources to work with, and it does its best work in certain use cases, like summarizing. Had this progressed more naturally—AI features first added where they make the most sense, like in Word and Excel—and built over time, we might be having a very different conversation now.

There’s also that whole consumer/commercial divide. Microsoft has certain advantages over Amazon and Google when it comes to partnering with OpenAI and delivering AI functionality to end users. But one of the key advantages is that Microsoft had been working on the Microsoft Graph for commercial customers for years, this extensive platform that sucks in data from all the silos in a business—email, calendars, meetings, OneDrive and SharePoint data stores, LinkedIn-style data about employees, their skills, and what they’re working on, and so on—and was starting to expose insights related to that collection to those businesses. The problem is that its first efforts, like Delve, were seen as creepy surveillance tools (Bob, we see you didn’t spend enough time in Teams last month, etc.) and were mostly rejected. But AI can do here what we thought it would do for the broader Internet (and still might) because, as big as it is, it’s still finite. It can make sense of the data in ways that benefit workers, managers, IT staff, security teams, and more. AI makes sense of the Microsoft Graph, basically.

We don’t have a Microsoft Graph for consumers. But consumers do have email, calendars, contacts, and to-do’s in Outlook.com, documents, photos, and other files in OneDrive, usage tracking in Windows and Edge, and other data silos that are finite and easily handled by AI. This explains the enshittification of Windows 11, Edge, OneDrive, and the new Outlook. But we also have Bing, which brings in that data from the Internet. And while Bing may be lackluster compared to Google—or not, some people prefer it, of course—the hope here is that as AI matures, its public data consumption and filtering will get better.

And here’s a weird one for you: Is it possible that Bing’s second-rate nature makes it better for AI than Google, literally because it’s so much smaller as a data source? It’s an interesting concept, but I suspect that Bing’s second-rate nature (as I see it) is actually problematic because we can’t trust it as much. Who knows?

The good news for Bing, I guess, is that the business is almost certainly intertwined with AI now from a structural perspective. So it’s unlikely we’ll see cuts there and more likely that the investments continue because it could pan out in time. Microsoft knows more than we do about the real state of AI now and where it’s likely to go, so we’re just guessing here. But that was sort of the point, right?

Will enshittification trigger content consumption changes?

helix2301 asks:

Paul I know your doing an entire digital declutter series.

This is mostly unrelated to the question below, but I finally finished consolidating my photo collections into a single 450 GB collection. There’s more work to do, but this was a big milestone for me, and it lets me now turn my focus to other projects, related and otherwise.

Recently I set up Plex server to host my local music which a lot of it still not on Spotify because they are indie artists and to host dvd that are not available online I use cloud for most things this is just easier option for me to get my music on the go if I wanted it I’m also backing up to cloud so I don’t loose this stuff.

This is smart and pragmatic.

I’ve probably told this story before, but I keep my “legacy” music, movies, and TV show collections on my NAS in part because I could see a time in which we’re either offline a lot—driving around the country in an RV was one idea, briefly—or simply want to reduce our monthly bills from subscription services—and have so much content that we could go a year or more before we needed anything new. Add in the content we have paid for, like our embarrassing big Apple-based purchased movie collection, and we probably have several years of paid-for content just sitting out there.

Which we’ve never used. But, again, never say never. One thing I’m working toward is putting a NAS here in the states and replicating it in Mexico City so that the two are always in sync. So there’s an alternate future out there in which we could need (or at least want) that content.

I guess my question is I know this is small sub set of people but I am starting to see people bring there data back in house so they don’t have another subscription. I know that sounds nuts and any times not good idea because of no redundancy but I’m seeing it more and more people think they can save subscription by just copying data to local hard drive

So, a few things here.

It’s not nuts. Not at all.

It’s also not an overreaction. I discussed this with my wife recently, noting that some people are reacting to subscription service price hikes the wrong way, imagining they’ll go analog or back to physical media in some weird retro/nostalgic backlash. That’s not happening, not at scale. But what you’re describing is different. It’s digital, for starters, and so it retains some of the key advantages of the shift from analog/physical media to digital/online services, like availability, small physical space, and portability. (People who love to read still debate the merits of the Kindle for some reason, but the ability to store your entire collection in the cloud and have hundreds or thousands of titles with you on a device that has weeks of battery life is irrefutable, in my mind.)

The question here is whether this is part of a broader movement that expands over time and in some ways cuts into the “share” (for lack of a better term) now enjoyed by subscription services. I don’t think so, honestly. But more on that in a second…

I’m wondering if this is making come back because of cost of subscriptions rising also why do you think the base price for storage has not gone up.

There is no doubt that the backlash against subscription services price hikes will result in change. The question is where/how this change will occur.

I think the biggest change is the most natural one: There will be consolidation, meaning fewer services. Part of the problem with video services, in particular, is that we don’t just have top-tier must-have services like YouTube and Netflix and second-tier services like Hulu, Apple+, Max, and the like. We also have third-tier (tertiary) services, things like Paramount+ and Peacock. (And then even quartary or niche services like Shudder, which will always be around because they’re small enough to be successful at that size.) I see those third-tier services, especially, going away (or consolidating through partnerships and so on) for starters. There are just too many of them.

For consumers, especially those who are price-conscious, there are of course solutions, like the idea my wife and I have floated but not implemented: You can just subscribe to one service each month (in the case of video services) and then move on, binging on what’s new with each service as you go. Netflix in January, Hulu in February, etc. The portability (not the right term?) of these services makes this easy. (And there are also less costly new ad-based subscription tiers for those who can stand that.)

What you’re describing is complementary. If you have videos in your Plex server, that can broaden the choices on music night. If you love music and have enough local music, you may not need Spotify, and perhaps you could buy (or, cough, otherwise acquire) music as needed to grow that collection. I don’t see that as the mainstream. But I do see it growing, and for technical people like this audience, it’s a compelling idea. We all do things that are right for us but wouldn’t recommend to less technical people like our parents or certain other family members and friends. This kind of falls into that category.

I’m definitely buying a new NAS this year, and assuming I have the positive experience I believe I’m going to have, I will get a second one for Mexico and see where that takes things. But whatever happens, I do see this kind of hybrid use case—a mix of owned and subscribed content—in my future.

Everything is a compromise

Christian-Gaeng asks:

I have a question about your relationship with Google and how you use their products. I know you’re against Chrome, but you use Gmail. Hence my question, how do you explain or justify which Google products are safe for you and which are “evil”.

I don’t view Google as “evil.” I view Google the same way I view any Big Tech company or other gigantic corporation, as an entity that exists solely to make money by any means necessary, and that it will betray its customers as needed and allowed by law to make that happen. This is one of those “don’t hate the player, hate the game”-type things, where the investor-driven requirement to always grow leads companies onto dark paths that don’t seem related, over time, to the original vision. It’s how we get nonsensical products like Peanut Butter Cup cereal. And in the Big Tech space, it’s what leads to enshittification.

Me and many in the Microsoft ecosystem had fallen into a sense of complacency, I think, in the wake of Microsoft’s antitrust troubles as the company seemed to take the moral high ground and, under Satya Nadella, presented a kinder, gentler face to the world. But a creeping increase in product enshittification and then some earth-shattering events in the past year—the AI explosion, the Activision Blizzard acquisition, especially—served as a reminder that this company, literally tied with Apple as the biggest company in the world with a market cap of $2.94 trillion as I write this, is no better than those we have looked down on, companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and others. It is, in some ways, even worse.

Many people, technical and non-technical alike, gravitate to particular ecosystems. There are Apple people who buy anything the company makes and then proselytize the benefits of the walled garden while ignoring all the bad things the company does. And there are Google people who know the company is tracking them at every step and is responsible for every creepy invasive ad they see that’s for a product they were just discussing on the couch, and yet still use Gmail, Google Maps, and their other products and services. And we can mock those people, I guess. But really, this is just human nature. We all compromise, every single day.

My goal as a consumer and a human being is to make the right decisions for myself and my loved ones. And as a writer in the tech sphere, my goal is to take my experiences and knowledge and try to help others do the same. The problem is that there are precious few decisions that don’t have negative ramifications. There’s no black and white, just many shades of gray. Nuance.

So this is just the “bite your nose to spite your face” argument. There are people on this site who will never even consider, let alone use, an Apple product. People who despise Google so much that they can’t even fathom using one of their services. And so on. In my view, this is too extreme. And even when I was just getting started 25 or 30 years ago, and was focusing solely on Microsoft, I felt that it was important to see what was happening with the company’s competitors. After all, you can’t claim that something is the best if you don’t know what else is out there. (It’s so American to think like that: Those who believe that America today is somehow the “best” country in the world are among the most likely to have never traveled internationally, while those who travel a lot see there are pros and cons to every place. Nothing is perfect.)

In the end, this isn’t about Google vs. Microsoft vs. Apple, it’s just about doing what’s best for you. For some, it’s just the path of least resistance. For others, there’s experimentation and agonizing decisions.

But you asked about Google.

In my tech guy perspective, there is a part of me that doesn’t respect this company because it’s really just an advertising giant—over 70 percent of its revenues, about $60 billion—came from advertising in the most recent quarter—masquerading as a tech giant. Right?

No, not really. Google came up out of pure computer science, and it makes several essential online services—Gmail, Calendar, Photos, Maps, and YouTube, among others—that might not exist otherwise. It offers a compelling hardware ecosystem to rival Apple’s, preventing a hardware monoculture and monopoly. Google, like everything else, is nuanced.

So we have to decide for ourselves and adapt as we learn more. Do the tracking/privacy/advertising parts of Google outweigh the benefits of its products and services? Are there individual cases where they do or do not? That’s up to each of us.

I have increased my use of Google products and services, but not because of some plan or strategy. I’ve just had bad experiences with other products and services and have found that Google’s, in some cases, make more sense to me. But not in all cases. For example, I’m not leaving Windows for Chromebook or Android (or for the Mac or Linux), though I will continue to experiment and use those things to some degree. That said, I see the natural knee-jerk reaction every time I make any ecosystem change. “What’s next? You’re leaving Windows, I bet.”

No. But I will do for myself what I recommend to others. Educate myself, decide accordingly, and be mentally strong enough to move again later if things change and there’s a better choice. This is where the portability thing comes into play: Ideally, the world is this lovey-dovey open-source, standards-based place where switching email providers, word processors, cloud providers, phones, or whatever else is instant, seamless, and cost-free. But that’s not the world, so all we can do is make these changes as easy as possible.

For example, I’ve been obsessing about password managers lately, and I’m still not happy with the state of that. But the good news is that passwords are portable. If I wanted to switch to 1Password or whatever’s built into Chrome (or whatever) today, I could make that happen in under an hour. So that’s in the back of my mind. That transition, at least, is simple.

Switching from, say, Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 would not be simple. There’s a business infrastructure sitting under there that makes doing so prohibitively expensive and time-consuming, and the resulting value, if any, is unclear. So that’s less portable. At least the thing I’m using works. But there is a nagging worry there.

Nothing is perfect. Especially when it comes to Big Tech.

Artifact

fraXis asks:

I started using Artifact on iOS after I saw your recommendation about it a few weeks ago. I have been enjoying it. However, I have received a notification that it will shut down soon. Have you found a replacement for it?

Artifact was a late addition to My Favorite New Apps of 2023 (Premium). It’s a news feed/reader app made by the original cofounders of Instagram and it solves a problem I’ve had for many years, which is that these times of apps—Google News, Apple News, MSN News (back in the day), whatever—all suck. Like suck hard. The sheer amount of non-tech-related crap I still see in Google News every day is beyond comprehension. There’s no excuse for this, and filtering news to be on-topic is about as far from a hard computer science problem as you can get.

Artifact is the cure for this disease, and I love it. I read it after looking at my Google News-based tech feed every morning, and the differences are stark. Artifact is on-point where Google News seems insane and off the rails. It’s exactly what I want.

And, yes, it is going away. The company has been unable to figure out a viable business model, and it will stop publishing at the end of February. I am devastated: You have no idea how much time I’ve spent trying to find this exact app. It’s perfect.

So, I will keep reading Artifact until I cannot. My hope is that some other entity will acquire Artifact and just keep it going. But I am, of course, hunting for a replacement.

There is no replacement. Let’s be honest here. If there was, I’d already be using that. But I keep trying. The closest I’ve gotten so far, and to be clear, this isn’t great, is an old chestnut, Flipboard. I resuscitated my old account, cleaned up my preferences, and have been trying. For now, I read Google News, Artifact, and then Flipboard each morning, in that order. And Flipboard is better than Google News (low bar) and not anywhere as good as Artifact. The question is whether I can make it better over time through care and feeding of preferences. Honestly, I doubt it.

But I will chime in if I find something that makes more sense. My worry is that this thing does not exist.