Ask Paul: October 25 (Premium)

Happy Friday! And Happy Call of Duty day if you’re celebrating. Let’s kick of the last weekend of October with some terrific reader questions.

My wife is also my accountant

dremy1011 asks:

In what might be the most random question this week, I’ve started to re-evaluate how I handle my household budget. I’m wondering how your budget is maintained (special software, Excel spreadsheet)? I’ve been using a software application but the yearly fee has recently increased, I’m also always curious how others manage this. If it’s a spreadsheet, how do you have this setup and how do you monitor it on a daily/monthly basis?

I am embarrassingly disconnected from this on a daily or weekly basis because my wife handles our finances. She’s better at it, but like anything related to this small business we now have, it would be horribly distracting and problematic for me to spend time on it. But we do of course discuss these things regularly and as things come up. And while we don’t have a formal monthly meeting per se, she would like that, and we do less formally put aside time every few months to go over things.

So I asked her to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. We had been using Mint for a long time but its parent company, Intuit, shut the service down and recommended that customers switch over to something called Credit Karma, which was lackluster and not really the same thing. My wife hated it, so she researched other services and experimented with a few.

She eventually settled on Quicken Simplifi, which I see is also recommended by The Wirecutter (though that was three years ago, and I don’t see anything more recent; this year-old NYT article is the closest I could find). Concurrent to this, we started using QuickBooks for the business because George’s accountant uses/used it, but our company isn’t really complicated enough to warrant this. (And this is likely beside the point.)

Anyway, Simplifi seems to work well. IIt does all the expected things where you enter all your account information, and it provides net worth, monthly income, and expenses data, and you can set budgets for different categories and so on.

Skimming the Surface

helix2301 asks:

Where do you land on Surface not Arm? Surface Laptop Studio has not been refreshed in a while they don’t make headphones or earbuds anymore. I was all in on the Surface brand and now it seems to be not fading away I know you say never trust a consumer product to Microsoft but Surface was so good and in Microsoft wheel house.

Surface is complicated.

On the one hand, I always felt very strong–and still do–that Microsoft competing head to head with its biggest partners, companies that contribute billions of dollars of revenues every quarter was and still is a big mistake. And Microsoft expanded Surface beyond all reason over the years, and haphazardly, getting into non-Premium models that I feel tarnished the brand, too many models, a host of peripherals, and most stupidly, killing the Microsoft hardware brand and putting the remains of that in Surface.

On the other, Surface was also the result of years of frustration in which Microsoft had tried in vain to get PC makers to embrace the then-modern innovations (or at least changes) it was delivering in Windows with each release. This was always a problem to some degree, but you can probably point to the race-to-the-bottom mentality of the netbook craze as the nadir and the breaking point; PC makers undermined their own already-tight business models and in some ways never recovered. So you might see Surface as a sort of “Gen 3” attempt to “fix” the PC market and perhaps show these companies how it could/should be done. (Gen 1 being PC maker-specific attempts to improve the experience, like the Velocity partnership with Lenovo, and Gen 2 being the Signature PC program.) But Surface started out small–two models, one x86, on Arm, and using a niche form factor, and even as it expanded, it never sold well, and Microsoft had various reliability issues, and then closed its stores, cutting off the natural distribution point. And it just never took off.

It’s unclear what Microsoft accomplished. Every major PC maker started selling Chromebooks because of Surface, and they still do. Surface arguably formalized the tablet as a PC form factor with Surface Pro, and nailed that with Surface Pro 3, but that was its one and only notable accomplishment/contribution to the market. And after all the shifting strategies, none successful, I am somewhat surprised Microsoft still keeps Surface around, given how aggressive Satya Nadella is when it comes to businesses inside the company making sense financially. So there’s some internal piece I’m just not privy to. But when he forced Surface (and Windows) to cut back last year, Panos Panay bailed, and the product lineup at least makes a bit more sense right now. Meaning, there are fewer models, all premium, and they do at least offer that clean experience (beyond the crap going on in Windows that is inexcusable).

But the cuts could and maybe should go deeper. To me, Microsoft pushing forward with Surface Pro and Surface Laptop, both in x64 and Arm variants, makes tons of sense. The other products–Surface Studio, Surface Laptop Studio, and Surface Laptop Go–maybe not so much. But these are all woefully out of date. And so we’re well past decision time on each. If I were betting, they all disappear. (Oddly, there are even more older models in the business side of Surface, but those too are mostly out of date and likely on the way out; businesses expect longer support timeframes, etc., and perhaps that explains it.)

The thing is, I really like Surface despite my worries about the impact it had on PC makers and that relationship. We’ve not anything about endemic reliability issues in several years. And my experience with the Surface Laptop 7, which is Arm-based, is exemplary. This is my favorite PC right now and has been since I got it.

One might make the argument that Microsoft should keep Surface around just so its executives and employs can appear publicly with a Microsoft logo on the PCs at events. Or that in its reduced current capacity it is less of a financial black hole. Or maybe it’s just the business end, that it has some number of corporate contracts and killing it would cost more than keeping it going. I’m not sure. But I like the handful of devices they have, and don’t think they need to expand into any more product categories. Surface Pro, for example, can now have lower-end models with a Snapdragon X Plus 8-core processor, for example, tied to a lower-end keyboard cover, and that handles the low-end of the premium market nicely. As does a similar 13-inch Surface Laptop. The trick is not getting Apple envy again. This is enough. It doesn’t need an all-in-one, a mini PC, etc.

Lipstick on an Xbox pig

helix2301 asks:

I have an Xbox XS from original launch what is difference between old XS vs the new one is there any way to compare hardware specs?

I’m surprised that Microsoft hasn’t promoted its refreshed Xbox consoles more. The Series X got a lot more attention, and there were some surprises tied to the chipset manufacturing processes and a thermal redesign when it launched. But the Series S doesn’t appear to be changed all that much, with the same design and the same internals for the most part. There is a new storage tier (1 TB), slightly faster Wi-Fi (6E vs. 6) and Bluetooth (5.2 vs. 5.1), and some other minor changes. But nothing that should trigger an upgrade, it’s the same console. Microsoft doesn’t offer a head-to-head comparison new-to-old that I’m aware of, but I assume we’ll see some reviewers tear it apart and see if there’s anything notable. My guess is no.

Unsupported upgrades to 24H2

spacecamel asks:

For 24H2, is there a way to upgrade from 23H2 on an unsupported computer that does not involve reinstalling windows? I have a remote laptop that I use as a server but do not see it much. I am wondering if there is a way to upgrade it remotely using RDP and a VPN. For 23H2, there was a specific update from Microsoft you would download but I do not see one for this update.

There are two hurdles to get over there. The unsupported hardware bit, of course. And that 24H2 is not available as an enablement package, it’s a so-called “full OS swap,” so there’s no KB cumulative update to download as with the last two versions. (Come to think of it, I guess there are three hurdles, actually, as Microsoft doesn’t offer Feature Updates to unsupported PCs via Windows Update.)

That said, in updating the Windows 11 Field Guide for 24H2 this past month, I did perform in-place upgrades on unsupported PCs using the familiar “Server” workaround, and that does still work. So you should be able to download the standard Windows 11 24H2 ISO from Microsoft and do that. Alternatively, you could create Windows 11 24H2 installation media using Rufus and run Setup from that USB flash drive and upgrade that way too.

If either of these doesn’t work, please let me know. Microsoft is definitely tightening the vise on this type of thing, but in my experience, these methods both work with 24H2.

F1 you, Mexico City

Brumfondl asks:

If I recall correctly, for the second year in a row you are in Mexico at your apartment at the same time as the Formula 1 Grand Prix hits Mexico City. I am guessing you have little interest in the race, but does it have any impact on you over the weekend?

This is true, though I only became aware of it last night when a friend mention to us that she was going to the event (today or tomorrow, I can’t recall). It doesn’t impact the city broadly because it occurs to the east of the “downtown” Centro area of Mexico City, and well east of where we are. I suspect Centro will be especially busy this weekend because of Formula 1, but we try to avoid that area on weekends anyway. So, no, this most likely will have zero impact on us. It didn’t last year, for sure.

Music night

christianwilson asks:

I know you have mentioned the non-portability of playlists from one music service to another is a barrier to switching services if you ever wanted to. I can understand why that would be a problem, though it got me curious about how you use a music service. Do you spend a lot of time building your own playlists?

Yes.

In September, we went to Rochester to visit our son Mark, and he was asking about Apple Music–like his sister, he’s an iPhone user that has been using Spotify this whole time–because he’s deaf, and it offers a new Music Haptics feature he was curious about. At the time, I was on the edge of pushing forward with whatever Apple One subscription for the family, as the kids are both part of that, and if I could get them off Spotify, it would make sense financially. I got that going so he could try it, but I warned him about the playlist export/import issues I’ve experienced. And I recommended that he try the app/service I’d had the most success with, called SongShift. It’s only available as an iOS app.

Anyway, we were driving from Rochester to Niagara Falls, so he had some time to kill, and he tried SongShift and was surprised how well it worked, given my issues. But he doesn’t listen to music they way I do, of course. He’s younger, and while he probably adds music to playlists or his library or whatever regularly, it’s all modern music that’s on all the services. And so his playlists transferred over successfully enough, with just a minimum of manual corrections. So he’s good to go.

For me, the experience is a bit different though, again, SongShift has worked the best. The issues are probably many, but I am a big fan of live music, and one of the nice things about YouTube Music, which is what I’ve been using for several years now, is that there are kinds of live songs and concerts on YouTube (the video service) that you can add to playlists and access as audio-only in YouTube Music. And not just live music, but videos of whatever kind that work the same way. And those tracks do not translate to other services. So I can download them and then upload into a new service (easy enough with Apple Music but less so with Spotify), as I did with Rock Sugar’s songs and some others. Or I can simply search for and choose alternatives using the SongShift import wizard. Both are a bit ponderous and time-consuming, and I have many dozens of playlists.

I make many playlists. Some are most band-based (my favorites songs from whatever groups), some are themed, I guess, series of sets of 2 or 3 songs from the same group, or 2 or 3 songs that are similar in whatever ways, and so. I have been making annual playlists that sort of represent what my wife and I listen to on weekend music nights since we moved to Pennsylvania. I have a Mexico City playlist that is music we’ve discovered here. And so on. I guess this is one of those “your mileage may vary” things.

I use YouTube Music and while I have created a few playlists I usually pick from the curated playlists when I’m looking for some variety. Do you spend any time digging through those playlists or the community playlists YouTube Music offers?

I do, and this is one area where Apple Music is actually really good. (I like YouTube Music’s new music area better, by contrast.) But when I really care about a group, I want specific songs on there, and they’re not always the top hit songs that most people know. So I usually prefer to do my own thing. That said, when I find a new (to me) artist that I think I like, those service-created playlists are very useful. I have listened to a few of those to pull out songs I like so we can have them in whatever playlists of our own.

Music is very personal, I guess. A couple of weeks back, I was Shazam-ing a song I heard while sitting at a favorite local bar here and a friend of ours who works there must have noticed that, and he asked me what type of music I like. This was surprisingly difficult to answer. That changes over time. I’m happy to still be finding new music I like today, whether it’s new music from artists I’ve followed for years or decades, music that is new to me, or just literally new music, and I feel like a lot of people my age don’t do that. Our experiences in Mexico City have opened up a new world of Hispanic pop and rock (most in the “new to us” category, I guess), and that’s been great. But I also listen to instrumental music, and other things that don’t tie into a single, easily explainable genre or whatever. It’s all over the place.

Alternative computing lifestyles

AnOldAmigaUser asks:

I have been looking at alternatives to Windows 11, it just leaves me cold. As someone who likes and uses pen and touch, this rules out MacOS, so Linux seems a likely candidate. It comes down to applications though, and two that I depend on are Excel and OneNote. For the most part, I can get by with the online versions, Excel a little less so, but mostly. The problem is that Microsoft has yet to create PWAs of the Office apps and to embrace offline work with the online applications. Is there any chance they might support this in the future, or is the lack of support for this just another form of enshittification to keep users on Windows? To be fair, Google does not offer PWAs of its Workspace apps either.

This is something I think about a lot, of course, and I touch on this occasionally because I’m always testing alternatives to the platforms, software, and services I use regularly. This past year has been fascinating (to me) in that I’ve made more switches than ever before, and I’m not quite sure how to explain that. Some of it is enshittification-based, of course, like what’s happening with OneDrive in Windows 11. But that’s not always the case. Sometimes, it’s just that I’ve come across something better that really clicks. Notion is perhaps the best example of that.

Windows is a special case for all the obvious reasons. As with the Surface discussion above, there are all kinds of mitigating factors there, pros and cons, that kind of guide my overall feelings about it. It’s fair to say that Mac hardware since the shift to Apple Silicon is objectively “better” than anything we see on the PC side, with all the obvious exceptions for gamers and perhaps other sub-audiences. And while I’ve always been fascinated by macOS/Mac OS X, and have owned one or more Macs straight through from 2001 until today, macOS has always left me cold. I very much prefer Windows.

Linux is inherently interesting. And some of the same changes that benefit macOS, like more and more viable web apps, can help with that transition. Microsoft not offering full PWA versions of its Office apps on the web feels purposeful to me, and I would be quite happy, personally, using Word for the Web if they just did that. But maybe that’s the last death grip on the desktop market: If Office just worked everywhere, it might diminish Windows to the point of no return. It’s hard to say.

We all have our own needs and preferences. And there are just basic requirements: If you pay for some kind of cloud storage and rely on local sync with the file system, Linux requires you to get creative, accept some limitations, and use a third-party app because none of the major platform makers (Apple, Google, or Microsoft) support Linux with that. That’s a major blocker for me and, I think, for many. From there, it’s all about apps and workflow, and that’s personal. For some, the shift will be easy, even desirable. For others, you that wall and just can’t do it. That I have enough issues with macOS suggests Linux will be difficult too. So I try to adjust to these platforms, change how I do things from app, services, and workflow perspectives. And so far, nothing has stuck. I still prefer Windows.

That can change. Anything can change. Just trying these things is healthy, and if all you learn is that you’re happy where you are, that’s fantastic. But the issue hovering the background here, at least for me, is all those unwanted behaviors Microsoft imposes in Windows 11. It’s getting better in Europe, but that won’t help me here in the US. So I look for workarounds. Some are good, some not so much. The battle continues.

Anyway. I’m with you. And I will keep trying. Each time there’s a new release of whatever browser, whatever apps, whatever platforms, I take a look. Someday, maybe, there will be more changes. But today is not that day.

The enshittification of conspiracy theories

AnOldAmigaUser asks:

Do you see a link between the growth of the surveillance economy and the growth of enshittification? I know that coincidence is not causation, but I cannot help but feel that we were treated better when we were customers and not product.

I appreciate you bringing up the causation bit on two levels: Many mistake coincidence and causation, and most aren’t self-aware enough to even doubt themselves in the first place. This notion of “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product” straddles this line–I don’t pay for Notion, which kind of throws an obvious wrench into the machinery of that argument–but it’s fair enough. That is, it’s objectively true enough of the time to be broadly true.

Enshittification is worse, though. Enshittification is also at its worst when the product in question is something you pay for. There are light versions of this (a newspaper putting up ads even though you pay for it), hidden versions of this (Google or whatever secretly tracking you and selling your activities to advertisers), and overt versions of this. The real in-your-face stuff. And then all the related issues, like subscription services vs. paid/owned products and escalating monthly prices.

You’re almost literally referencing this entire spectrum, which is interesting. And while the surveillance economy might seem conspiracy theory-adjacent, there’s a direct link between surveillance (tracking) and enshittification (advertisers knowing far too much about you). Google and Meta–and Microsoft and Apple, too–have built rich businesses on this exact activity. But Google and Meta, notably, are literally based on this activity. Those businesses are the surveillance economy.

There is some nuance. In the old days, we would buy a product like Office and put it on one or two PCs. We would use it for some number of years. And then we would upgrade to a new version at some point (or not). This was a simple relationship. Microsoft, a for-profit company, obviously would like to maximize the revenues it makes from you. But it found itself in a weird place where that thing it made several years ago works a bit too well today, and you’re not upgrading. There are advances in connectivity. And Microsoft 365 happens. It has the same Office apps, and more, including cloud storage. And it’s a subscription. You may or may not like that. But for many, it’s a no-brainer. Even over several years, it’s either less expensive than Office was, or it’s enough of a value to make sense. And so you pay monthly or annually. This is better for Microsoft. It’s better for you, too, hopefully. The day it isn’t is when you notice enshittification. For me, Microsoft 365 is on the line. For others, it may be over the line. These things are subjective, and they evolve.

Broadly, we are drowning in subscriptions. They are easy to get, they offer some value. And then there are too many of them. The prices go up, a lot. The value goes down. One day, you realize there are more of them than you even realize. And there are all the awful things tied to tracking and ads that so many people don’t even understand. But there is a weird, almost nostalgic thing that kicks in where you sort of wish it was like it was 10 or 20 years ago. When Microsoft didn’t update Windows twice every month, you just used Office, and you weren’t spending maybe hundreds of dollars each month on … something. Many somethings. This is completely normal. The trick is finding a solution.

And I don’t know what that is, exactly. It’s some combination of evaluating what you’re paying for and saying no to at least some of it. It’s about testing and evaluating, and finding what makes sense for you. Some of it will end in defeat, or at least compromise. For example, most of us, almost all of us, use some Google services or whatever knowing what’s happening in the background, but unwilling to give up the services regardless. This, too, is personal.

I feel like it’s only going to get worse, sadly. But also that maybe, with enough pushback, or even governmental regulation, things could get better instead. This was sort of what I wrote about yesterday, that Big Tech won’t change for the better unless it’s forced to. It will just keep getting worse.

So yeah. I do see that relationship between the surveillance economy and enshittification. I’m not sure of the cause/effect there, but maybe it doesn’t matter. It’s happening. They’re tied together, in many cases one and the same. Living in a cabin in the woods with no Internet isn’t the answer. So we have to find our own place to land.

But your question is also the answer, broadly. In a good relationship, you are treated well. If you’re not being treated properly by the products and services you use, you gotta move on when you can. Life is too short for toxicity.

I wish there were ways to be more specific here. But this is one of the central issues of this age, for sure.

Breaking up

phytio asks:

Hi Paul, I’ve got a question about the break up threat that Google is facing. If it does happen, how do you think it will affect the various services Google (Alphabet) offers once they’re no longer financed by Google Search? Will it undermine them or free them to innovate? If something like Android is undermined what can you imagine replacing it as the second phone ecosystem?

We don’t yet know what’s going to happen with Google, of course, and the appeals process could drag on for years unless it can reach a settlement with the Justice Department and states. But we have history to fall back on (U.S. v. Microsoft) and the proposal the DOJ submitted to the court.

Broadly speaking, Google was found guilty of illegally maintaining its monopoly in two separate markets, general search services and general search text advertising. Which I think we can just call “search” for simplicity’s sake. And as the DOJ proposal notes, “Plaintiffs have a duty to seek—and the Court has the authority to impose—an order that not only addresses the harms that already exist as a result of Google’s illegal conduct, but also prevents and restrains recurrence of the same offense of illegal monopoly maintenance going forward.” In other words, the remedy here must address the crime and ensure that it doesn’t continue. (Actually, the DOJ has an even more concise description of the remedy, which must “eradicate existing evils and prevent future violations. Perfect.)

Among other things, the DOJ proposes:

• Ending Google’s control of Search distribution via secret deals with Apple, browser makers and others
• Ensuring Google cannot control Search distribution in the future by prohibiting it from engaging in those types of deals
• Behavioral or structural remedies that would prevent Google from using Chrome, Play, and Android to advantage Search (and, going forward, AI)
• Choice-based remedies by which Google would be forced to overcome inertia/habit by requiring it to present choice screens throughout its product UIs so that users could make explicit decisions about the services they use
• Requiring Google to make its illegally obtained trove of Google Search indexes, data, feeds, and models–including those used in AI–to third party competitors

The “structural” bit is where the breakup discussion comes from: In the most extreme example of a structural remedy, Google could be forced to spin off or otherwise separate parts of its business. This could happen in any number of ways. But to my mind, you have this dominant product, Search, that is monetized solely through advertising and secret distribution deals (Apple, etc.), and so you “cut off the head of the snake,” so to speak. Which could mean literally separating Search and advertising by spinning off one of the two. But this could also take a different form in which the court forces Google to open each in ways that give competitors equal footing.

Both are pretty radical. But so is Google’s dominance and abuses of these markets.

To your question, 74 percent of Google’s revenues in the most recently reported quarter came from advertising, with most of that from Google Search (and some from YouTube). Since YouTube never came up in the proposal filing, I will assume that we’re only talking about Search advertising here. And on that note, Google earned $48.5 billion on advertising in that quarter, of the $74 billion total. So let’s call it 66 percent of all revenues.

If that business disappeared, Google would be smaller that it is now. With two caveats, the first of which suggests it won’t be as small as some think.

First, that’s just on paper. It’s not like Google Search would operate in some vacuum as a non-profit freebie for one and all. The company could still monetize it. And that would still come through ads. They would just be third-party ads. And you have to think that advertisers would trip over themselves to get that business. There would just be more reasonable ad-sharing revenue.

In the opposite direction, we know that some amount of that comes from exclusivity deals with Apple and others. This is harder to compute, but Google couldn’t get that back. If Google is really paying Apple $20+ billion per year for exclusivity, it’s earning some amount that makes sense on the ads. I’m not sure where that it is, but if it’s worth 1 to 4 times that amount, it could account for $5 billion or more per quarter. So perhaps–this is all guessing–we’re looking at a total drop of $10 billion or more in that quarter. Diminished, for sure. But not dropping off the face of the earth.

And Google is diversified. It earned $15-ish billion from YouTube and Network ads. $9.3 billion from subscriptions, platforms, and devices. $10.3 billion from Google Cloud (with a $1 billion in operating profit for the first time, too). And it lost $2.3 billion on so-called Alphabet-level activities. There’s still a big, big company in there.

This is all spinning wheels at this point. Anything could happen. But I don’t see a doomsday scenario in there for anything except for Google’s ability to abuse its market power. It’s far more likely that Google’s eventual punishment, so to speak, will be lighter than it deserves. I don’t see Search or Android being undermined. If anything, related legal issues with the Play Store will likely result in a better Android for everyone. Android and Play Store revenues are in that $9.3 billion revenue bucket, and even if that were halved, and it won’t be–most will stick with the built-in Store, obviously–it’s still just a small part of the overall company.

Obviously, this is fascinating to think about. But the final outcome will likely not be all that dramatic. They rarely are.