Ask Paul: January 17 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Welcome to the end of a needlessly contentious week. We have AI, we have misinformation, we have it all.

By the way, we’re flying to Mexico tomorrow (Saturday) and plan to be there roughly three months, though we don’t yet have a return date. I can’t imagine we’ll extend this one, though, as we have at least two major commitments in May. So we’ll see what happens.

And before getting to this week’s questions, I want to highlight that wrote a quick follow-up to my 2025 is the Year of Competing AI Business Models (Premium) editorial called, Well, That Was Quite the Week that may be worth reading. It’s related to some of the questions this week, for sure.

On that note.

? YAOR (Yet another Office rebranding)?

digiguy asks:

Hi Paul, I read Windows Central top story Microsoft’s dumbest rebrand in its near 50 year history just got even dumber and it really gives me Windows 8 vibes … They are rebranding Office to Copilot and using the power of Office massive adoption to shove the Copilot brand and AI into everyone’s throat, including businesses. I wonder if this will again backfire and impact Office use or even if Microsoft will have to go back like they did with Windows 10 after 8.

Three things.

First, I will not link to that nonsese.

Second, thanks for making me read this. ? I was studiously avoiding this post because the author has extreme views I routinely disagree with. Also, his focus, such as it is, is on gaming not Windows, Microsoft 365, or AI. So his opinions are no more informed than anyone else’s. Reading this, maybe less so.

Third, that’s not what’s happening. No surprise there. See points one and two.

Microsoft is not rebranding Office to Copilot.

Microsoft is renaming the Microsoft 365 app to Microsoft 365 Copilot. It was previously called the Office app. But it was renamed when Microsoft sort-of rebranded Office to Microsoft 365. (The Office brand still exists and thanks to its commonality, it will likely never go away. Indeed, the app was previously labeled as “Microsoft 365 (Office).”)

All Microsoft did was a rename an app. Cue the freak-out. And it’s an app that I suspect most customers don’t even notice, let alone use. The impetus behind this change is tied to the odd news we received in late 2024, when Microsoft informed its commercial Microsoft 365 customers of the coming changes. It really has to do with separating paid commercial AI access, which can use company data, from the consumer Copilot offering, which is world-facing. So it’s about data governance or, more simply, data protection. Not so much about a brand.

I can’t stand to see stupidity like this get any attention. It’s a waste of our time and energy. It’s not true. And it does not matter in the slightest.

Whatever happens, marketing decisions at Microsoft seem crazy, sounds as if Lenovo renamed their Thinkpad brand to some Lenovo Business or whatever… Pure suicide.

Dell: Hold my beer.

HP: Hold my beer first.

Do you think Office is strong enough to not be impacted by this? Even if Office is not impacted, I think Microsoft is tapping into its brand capital a lot, with people sticking to it because they have to (e.g. because the alternatives, like MacOS or Linux, are worse, if you are not a fan of those OSs, and alternatives to Office are not always an option, like for instance I need pen support in Word) but hating the company more and more.

This doesn’t impact the Office or Microsoft 365 brands.

The bigger event this past week was that Google and Microsoft finally did the right thing–the thing I was asking for in I Will Not Pay for AI (Premium) last August: Just make AI features, which are just features, available in that thing I’m already paying for. That thing being their respective productivity subscriptions, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. The strategies are slightly different, but the net change is the same. More importantly, the value is there in both cases. Microsoft 365 Family, as I point out in that previously linked article, is still very much a no-brainer.

To be clear, Microsoft 365 Family is not being renamed to Microsoft 365 Copilot Family.

The more I think about this, the more upset I get about the abject lack of responsibility this person has. That post’s author misunderstands branding and naming. Misunderstands suites and subscription services. Misunderstands the differences between Copilot in Windows 11, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. Misunderstands what Microsoft is really doing. And then miscommunicates all that to the public. Which, as a writer, is the greatest sin you can commit: Misinform readers in the guise of educating them.

Shame on him. I am dumber for having read that. We all are.

? It’s all about the ecosystems

dremy1011 asks:

Before the holiday you had mentioned a switch back to iOS along with acquiring an Apple Watch. I was wondering what prompted that change and how it’s been working for you.

I have been writing something that will address this more fully, had, in fact meant to publish that as part of my year-end recap stories. I don’t want to step on that too much, but the broad strokes are obvious enough. And I’ve written about this in various ways over the past year as things evolved. For example, in Problems Persist in the Pixel Ecosystem (Premium) from last February and Look What You Made Me Do (Premium) from last summer.

There’s a lot to this, but it’s most about ecosystems and the products and services we choose between. I’m trying not to go too far down the rabbit hole here, but we have whatever choices, and some choices come with what I think of as collateral effects. Any buying decision–say, for a phone–is a matrix of micro-decisions, each weighted differently by any individual, and leading to some choice. But it’s more than the components of the device, in this case. There’s also the surrounding ecosystems with whatever value and, complicating things even further, whatever other products and services we’re using and how those things coexist or don’t.

My head is already spinning, so let’s go to your specific question and apply the above to it.

I am currently using an iPhone with an Apple Watch. There is a synergy there, obviously. Equally obvious, I can’t use a Pixel Watch with the iPhone.

But I also like the Pixel and oftentimes use that instead of an iPhone. It has a synergy with Pixel Watch, of course. And it cannot work with Apple Watch, obviously

I could use a third-party alternative. A Fitbit of whatever kind. A Garmin device, maybe. Whatever, there are many choices, including some weird options that sell through Amazon, are inexpensive, and are inexplicably highly rated in some cases. But even in this space, the options are all over the place, and that matrix of decisions, which varies by individual, comes into play. Some may care about the health monitoring, or even specific health monitoring features, for example.

Looking just at a watch, I have my own list of micro-preferences. This is all in that coming article, but I don’t like large things on my wrist, and yet I have an Apple Watch and a Pixel Watch, and both are large. I like devices that have multi-day battery life, like a Fitbit, and both have to be charged every day. So the choice seems to be narrowed. They’re not. The integrations into the broader ecosystems both belong to are worth me learning more about them and understanding them. So I’m putting in the time. There’s more, but, again, just high-leveling this for now.

The important bit, in a way, is the perspective. These watches are not in any way the most important part of their respective ecosystems. That’s probably obvious and/or true for most people. But I might also argue that the phones aren’t the most important part of their respective ecosystems, either. And that, I think, will give many people pause. We tend to think of the phone as the center of these ecosystems. But I’m backing myself into a space where I’m coming to believe that’s not the case. That making a decision about a phone and then proceeding from there–buying additional devices in that ecosystem, subscribing to additional services in that ecosystem–is misguided these days, where maybe it made sense in the past. I am starting to believe (understand?) that it is the ecosystem that is important here. Not the devices. And not any individual service. The ecosystem, if you will, is at the center of the ecosystem.

That sounds dumb. I know. But bear with me. Or just reword it to, it’s the ecosystems that matter the most.

But ecosystems are big and complex. They change all the time. The value proposition changes, for example, with price hikes or functional regressions, such as Amazon putting ads in Prime Video. Each change brings a micro-decision, a reassessment. Is the value still there? Do I need to make a change? Am I good? This came up with what I’ll call office productivity services, and just this week, as I wrote in Well, That Was Quite the Week. In that case, Microsoft 365 Family remains, to me, a no-brainer.

So, yes. I have been using an iPhone and an Apple Watch. I will at some point use a Pixel and a Pixel Watch, I bet. But overall, for me, I feel like the Apple ecosystem better meets my needs as a consumer. And while I can’t think of many ways in which I’d choose Apple for work–I still prefer Windows PCs to Macs, etc.–I use Apple more and more on the consumer side, for entertainment, reading, and other consumption activities. Not exclusively, I mostly play games on a PC, for example. But more than ever before. And it’s not because the iPad is better than any Android tablet, though it is, objectively. And it’s not because Apple Music is better than Spotify or YouTube Music (it is not). It’s because of the broader ecosystem, which is vast, high quality, and valuable to me as an individual.

This is a personal choice. Others will make a series of different micro-decisions and land somewhere else. You can mix and match ecosystems, and I do that all the time. You can go all-in on one ecosystem, though that still makes me vaguely queasy from a lock-in perspective. But whatever. We’re all different.

Here’s one example of how complicated this can get.

I have a lot of Sonos speakers. I didn’t wake up one day and decide to spend a lot of money. I eased into it because these things are expensive, and I was curious. My first Sonos speaker was good enough that I bought a second one for a stereo pair. And that was it for a while. We added one more so I could listen to podcasts and audiobooks while shaving/showering. But I stuck with dumb speakers and Google Chromecast Audio for “whole house audio.” Because money.

Then Google killed that product. Me being me, I tried several different things. But in a bit of coincidental timing, Brad was selling a pair of Sonos Play:5 speakers and asked if I wanted to buy them. Yes, this would solve what was then our sunroom problem. They sound amazing. Are so good that we added a Sub at great cost. ($500 or $600, I can’t recall.) Now they sound even more amazing.

Part of the appeal of Sonos was that speakers could be controlled by the music app I used, which at the time was Google Play Music. But that app became YouTube Music and that feature disappeared. We know now that the two companies had a falling out because Google stole Sonos functionality for its smart speaker products. But this reset my system of micro-considerations, took away a positive. I had to use the Sonos app for music, plus podcasts and audiobooks. And the Sonos app was terrible.

We forget this because the new app is somehow even worse. But this was years ago. The Sonos app has always sucked.

I experiment all the time. I try Spotify again and again and don’t like. Apple Music is interesting for all the obvious ecosystem reasons, and we do use Apple TV. But the one thing it doesn’t have, I miss. YouTube Music lets you add videos into music playlists and play them as music. I can also access music playlists in the YouTube app (on Apple TV in my case, but anywhere) and they will play as music videos there. All the songs, not just the ones that were videos I had added. This is nice. My wife and I listen to music each week. And now that we’ve downsized, we listen in the room where the TV is. And that means we have videos if we want that. We often do. Another micro-consideration.

When I use an iPhone, I can control Sonos with Apple’s AirPlay feature. That means any audio app can play through Sonos. And that’s huge. I can use the apps I know and like, and not the Sonos app. This is weighted very heavily in my personal list of micro-decisions. It’s a big deal. I cannot do this on a Pixel. And so in this yin and yang between the two phones, which is really about the two ecosystems, this is a plus in the Apple column. A star, really, it’s heavily weighted.

That Sonos fell off a cliff this past year is a concern, another micro-decision to reconsider. Last year, I bought some Apple HomePod speakers and then bought some more, and part of that was issues with specific Sonos equipment, but part of it was an “it just works” thing because they integrate nicely with Apple TV. Which, again, we use. But Apple speakers are a solid lock-in problem too. It’s concerning.

I’m probably missing some of the history there, but that’s sort of the point. It’s complicated and it changes all the time. Right now, I have no plans to ever buy another Sonos product again. I have whatever Apple equipment. I think a lot about what’s next, but I also don’t have to make any changes now. Or want to. What I have now works fine. But things change. Something will happen. Some product announcement, whatever change. And maybe I change with that. You can’t tell the future. You can only be open to doing what’s best for you.

And that’s just music. And not just music, but music in the home. There is so much more to it. So much more.

So, yes. I’m using an iPhone and an Apple Watch right now. 🙂

More soon. Or eventually.

? Not-so-personal

wright_is asks:

Ein bisschen Mau diese Woche! Not many questions, yet.

No worries, I somehow managed to turn a handful of questions into several thousand words of answers. A gift and a curse, I guess. 🙂

Anyway, what is with Big Tech simply changing existing functionality without thinking?

Looking ahead at where I assume you’re going with this, this is all about enshittification. Or, more specifically, in this case it’s about a small set of companies–Apple, Google, and Microsoft, the jury is still out on Amazon–pursuing AI so aggressively that they are compromising their products and services and, more to your point, the customer experience, in what feels like a madcap race to own the future. Google and Microsoft are perhaps more guilty of this than Apple. But Microsoft, above all. I know that I focus on Microsoft, so maybe I’m not as unbiased as possible, but Apple and even Google seem saner than Microsoft right now when it comes to AI. Microsoft is just chaos right now.

I work for a company that has to follow certain regulations, but we also use Microsoft products, among others. One is, we aren’t allowed to use public AI software or cloud AI software, unless it has been vetted and approved. Everything was going fine, we were blocking external AIs, like Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT etc. using our firewall and our AV software. And nobody had a Copilot license assigned to their M365 account, so no Copilot was appearing.

And, now, the Microsoft 365 app, for viewing and editing Office documents on mobile devices suddenly gets rereleased as Microsoft 365 Copilot, with no way to disable the Copilot part of the app, as far as I can see.

Things are moving so quickly right now that this is all very confusing. I knew I was doing this when I wrote these posts, but in the editorial from earlier this week and in today’s follow-up post, I commingled Google’s commercial product changes with Microsoft’s consumer product changes, at least in the latter. But that’s just timing. These things happened back to back. And there are parallels.

The more relevant news for you came out Ignite in November, when Microsoft quickly revealed during the keynote that it was renaming the Microsoft 365 app in Windows to Microsoft 365 Copilot. This is tied to the news I wrote about a month later, regarding the Copilot key on laptop keyboards and Microsoft’s communications about these changes to its commercial customers. In an inside baseball sense, this change was not communicated to us in the press ahead of Ignite, was not buried in the mountain of information we received. This may be tied to the speed at which AI happens, but I think it was deliberate too. Microsoft had to make this change because it could not prevent the “normal” Copilot client in Windows from commingling private corporate data with public information. So it needed two apps. This would happen quickly. Etc. And here we are. (Remember that the initial concern was that the “new” Copilot app wouldn’t work with Entra ID accounts. This is by design, of course, and now we know why. It feels almost quaint now, just another month later.)

From your perspective as someone responsible for implementing corporate policy, these changes will likely result in you needing to do so largely at the Windows level. In the original post about the Copilot key and app renaming changes, Microsoft says that “enterprise users should go to Windows client policies, such as Group Policy or configuration service provider (CSP) policies, to update the target of the key to the Microsoft 365 app so employees can access Copilot within the Microsoft 365 app.” It also points to two resources:

• Updated Windows and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat experience, which was just updated again this week
• The specific policy you can use to configure what the Copilot key does

But what you need, more broadly, is a set of policies for controlling access to specific features and functionality (unless you just want to block the app). This is not an area I focus on, but my understanding is that these policies are coming, but I think they are still in development. Consider this area of Microsoft Learn regarding Windows AI policies. Still in preview.

Then we have the announcement that Paint, Notepad and all of Office will get AI or Copilot bits added to them, with Paint and Notepad probably with no way to remove it. How are companies supposed to stick to industry regulations, when Big Tech keeps making it nearly impossible to use their products, but stick within the regulations they have to follow?

Microsoft isn’t ignorant of regional laws and regulations, so this is deeply concerning. We tend to think of enshittification on a personal level–Netflix is terrible, etc.–but it’s difficult not to wonder how far Microsoft will push things in the name of this AI race. There are regulatory concerns there, but also just basic commercial customer relationship concerns. That is, will Microsoft deploy its AI functionality to places where doing so is against customer policy or even illegal to some degree? It appears so. But it will then address all that after the fact by eventually providing policies so that companies can control this access according to the law and/or their specific business needs. In short, I think what you’re seeing is that businesses are getting caught up in this vortex just like consumers are. This makes the insanity I see at Microsoft doubly concerning. This takes the “ship it, then fix it” mentality to an extreme.

?‍? The big picture

brisonharvey asks:

With Microsoft 365’s announcement of their new Copilot business model, it raises questions about the future development of their apps beyond AI tools. Will the Office team continue to enhance the user experience or focus primarily on integrating more AI features into the apps? While both goals aren’t mutually exclusive, there is concern that the latter might take precedence. Personally, I am considering switching back from Google Docs (despite my work environment being Google-centric) because the potential of using Copilot to simplify tasks like managing large spreadsheets and creating PowerPoints more efficiently is appealing. The new model makes this option more attractive, as paying an extra $20 a month was not feasible. In this regard, their new approach seems like a win if they aim to attract more users.

I agree.

When we talk about “AI PCs” or Copilot+ PCs, we often make the point that these unique capabilities, such as they are, are only temporarily limited to a certain class of PC. And that, over time, they will come to all PCs, either because all PCs have the required hardware, or just because things change. Like the multimedia PCs of the 1990s, which required Intel chips with MMX extensions, specific hardware components like a sound card, and so on, these brands just go away. Media Center, Tablet PC, we sort of forget about this stuff.

I think the AI features we’re seeing now in Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace are making this same transition. They started as expensive add-ons. They’re being integrated into the core products. And in Google’s case, the add-ons are going away entirely. This is important because these features are just features, the types of things Microsoft would have added to the existing 365 SKUs in the past. So it’s kind of shifting back the way it should be, in the sense that we’re paying for the productivity offerings as before. Some of the benefits use AI, some do not.

I don’t see AI overtaking or nullifying other essential work that might occur in these offerings, but I do see AI enhancing them, just as other new features do. These products are pretty mature, after all, it’s not like they’re lacking basic or obvious features. One of the biggest impacts AI will have in personal technology will be in enhancing the productivity experience. On this week’s Windows Weekly, I discussed using GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio, and the productivity gains are off the charts positive. I’ll write about that here, soon, but I suspect individuals will seem similar gains with what was otherwise unfamiliar or daunting office productivity apps and individual features, thanks to AI. It will put them over the top for individuals that might otherwise have been intimidated or unable to work effectively in certain areas.

From a business model perspective, this maps to the underlying value Office always had. It was just a bundle of apps at first, but you could save money if you were going to buy two or more anyway. It was then integrated over time, with lots of common and cross-app functionality. It was integrated with online services, with similar benefits. It grew into the no-brainer it is now with Microsoft 365. And AI is making it better overall. A better value for those who pay for it, and even more of a no-brainer. This is a good thing.