Ask Paul: February 14 ? (Premium)

Happy Friday, and Happy Valentine’s Day. You guys never let me down with the questions, and that’s always appreciated. I will do my best to rise to the occasion.

? Message in a bottleneck

jrzoomer asks:

Paul do you primarily check your email through a web browser, or do you use a desktop application like Microsoft Outlook?

I use a web browser on the desktop (and mobile apps on phones and tablets). And because my primary identity, paul @ thurrott.com, is tied to Google Workspace, that interface is Gmail. Which, honestly, seems to have worked out just fine: It seems like Microsoft’s email services constantly forget how to filter spam and experience other issues. But Gmail, which not perfect, has been rock solid for so long, I don’t even think about it anymore. It just works.

To be fair, I think I could use any of the modern Outlooks (Outlook.com, Outlook on the web, the new Outlook, etc.) effectively. And I do use Outlook mobile on my smartphones now, in part because it does a better job with text scaling than Gmail (the app) does. That is, I can scale the app independently of the system. I do like that.

Everyone’s needs and expectations are different. But a big part of mine is consolidating several accounts into a single interface. So I am forwarding email from my secondary accounts to Gmail, and I have configured Gmail so that it can send email on behalf of those accounts as needed. I works really well, and this is another part of that experience I just don’t think about anymore. I set it up like this several years ago, re-tested whether this system worked best for me a few years later, and then stopped worrying about it.

I saw your Hands on Windows 124 on the new Outlook, and I’ve tried it (and I want to like it!), but I have a Gmail account and I still find it much easier to just go to gmail.com (also I do occasionally use Gemini to summarize email newsletters). Anything I’m missing?

No, I don’t think so. You should use whatever makes sense to you. I actually do like the new Outlook and it would certainly meet my needs. But I’m so used to accessing email in its own (pinned) tab in my desktop web browser (and, similarly, calendar) that using a standalone app for that feels cumbersome. But if I were going to use the new Outlook, I would at least configure my Microsoft account in there as well, even though it’s “empty”–the email is forwarded to Gmail, I don’t use the calendar, and so on–because there would be ads in the app otherwise.

I covered the new Outlook in Hands-On Windows because it is a part of Windows 11 and has replaced the legacy Mail and Calendar (and People) apps in the OS. And I have seen bizarre resistance to this app, and to change and/progress more generally, from the community. (Lacking a better term.) There’s nothing wrong with the new Outlook, at least from a user experience perspective, it’s modern and powerful.

But yeah. You should use what makes sense to you.

? Trainspotting

AnOldAmigaUser asks:

Watched North by Northwest the other night and it got me thinking about train travel. Knowing you are a train fan, are you thinking of taking a long distance train trip one of these days? I have heard good things about the Copper Canyon trip in Mexico.

I have spent my entire life thinking about taking a long-distance train trip. But I never have. I’ve never even taken an overnight train.

There are too many variants of this to discuss effectively. But I’ve always wanted to take a cross-continental train trip across southern Canada, with those dining and observation cars that have glass roofs. I’ve considered taking a series of trains across at least part of the U.S. in whatever directions, mostly through the Midwest, but there are also interesting west coast lines. I’ve of course long researched what it would look like to get an annual pass and just train my way through Europe. And now that we’re in Mexico, there is a new Tren Maya (Maya Train) that loops around the Yucatán peninsula. It was literally just completed, and this is something my wife and I discuss and will eventually experience.

There are a lot of shorter distance train experiences I am interested, like narrow gauge, steam-powered systems in places like Colorado, and Pennsylvania is, of course, a center of sorts of this kind of thing, with lots of large and small train museums. We’ve done some of this, and have been on a few trains there, but not as much as I’d expected. It’s something we do with friends who visit from Boston, so that will likely expand over time.

Anyway. Yes. Someday.

? Brad’s secretary

Omegaman asks:

Any chance you can convince Brad to change the opening sound effects on the the First Ring Daily? Next to nails scraping a chalk board, the sounds of a dentist’s drill everyday makes me want to dig my ear drums out with a spoon. Anyway, I appreciate the consideration.

Sorry, we’ve recorded over 1700 episodes of First Ring Daily, and I guess this is just something I’ve stopped thinking about. But we do have to update the intro and outro graphics, and that’s overdue. Perhaps there is a broader refresh to be done.

I will mention it.

?️ Making sense of AI assistants

These two questions are related, I think.

jchampeau asks:

Other than saying “AI” 473 times, what do you think we’ll hear from Amazon at their event later this month?

This month’s Amazon event is about what’s called “conversational Alexa,” though that’s probably not the name Amazon will use publicly going forward. Regardless of the name, a new version of its Alexa digital personal assistant, or “voice assistant,” that has generative AI capabilities. This what Apple is slowly doing to evolve Siri, and Google is likewise in the middle of a transition from Google Assistant to Gemini.

Amazon has spoken publicly about the difficulty of this shift, but most of what we know comes from outside reports. (One year ago, for example, there was a report that Amazon was working on a paid AI version of Alexa.) So I assume this event will include what Amazon is ready to release now/soon, what it plans to add over time (similar to Apple), how this will change/improve existing Alexa-compatible devices, and, perhaps, one or more new devices that are unique in whatever ways and maybe wouldn’t have been possible without these improvements.

For whatever it’s worth, I suspect that Amazon, like Apple, will be conservative in rolling out AI functionality in Alexa because much of its user base are older and/or less technical people who may be less capable of understanding the hallucinations this service could cause and are thus more at risk. Even Google, which has been aggressive in many ways, has taken a more conservative approach to certain AI features, including generative AI creation related to people. And then there’s Microsoft.

To which, gregsedwards asks:

Hey Paul, I’m wondering if you’ve tried using the new Copilot Daily which is available from the consumer Copilot app and delivers AI-powered daily news headlines narrated by Copilot. I found it to be a welcome addition, informative, and a perfectly timed for walking my dogs each day. I know there’s a lot of mixed feelings regarding Microsoft’s execution of Copilot, so I just wanted to get your take on uses like this.

Tied to the most recent Copilot makeover, which brought the so-called “native” app version of this thing to Windows, Microsoft dramatically changed the user experience for what I’ll call the consumer version of Copilot, meaning the app on Windows, mobile, and the web. This app is now consistent across these platforms, with a sort of minimalist, tan-colored chat interface by default. But when you click on the Copilot icon, you get this … other new interface. It has the Copilot Daily feature you mention, and a series of what I think of as “getting started” content blocks to show individuals some of the ways they can use Copilot. This is smart, and Copilot has had some version of that from the beginning, it’s just in a nicer design now.

This user experience speaks to an ongoing effort, and not just at Microsoft, to figure out what makes sense to its customers. That is, it’s not entirely clear what the expectations are. Copilot is an AI companion that should be seen as the modern replacement for Cortana, similar to work we see at Amazon, Apple, and Google (and at AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic that didn’t previously offer digital personal assistants). But we’re still not clear on the experience. We’re in a “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” era. One might argue that Microsoft never figured this out with Cortana, though there were some good ideas in there.

Copilot Daily reminds me of three things, immediately, and you’re never going to believe what number three is.

Sorry. But they are the Alexa news feature that will read you the top stories each morning, the eerie-good Google NotebookLM feature that summarizes textual content into an audio recording of two AI-based virtual hosts, and, wait for, Parade magazine.

That last one either requires explanation or is immediately obvious, depending on where and when you grew up.

Parade magazine was a small newspaper-style magazine that was delivered as an insert in the Sunday edition of several hundred newspapers in the U.S. each week for about 80 years. (I had to look this up, but Wikipedia says that Parade had a readership of over 54 million and a circulation of over 30 million copies each week at its peak, and it was the most-widely read magazine in the U.S. ever.) We subscribed to the Boston Globe, and the Sunday edition was humongous through at least the 1990s, and I would separate out all the parts into piles of paper I would read or not read. And Parade was always in the to-read pile.

I really enjoyed Parade growing up–mostly for the Ask Marilyn column, but sometimes for whatever cover interview–but it was notable for having a curiously approachable and non-confrontational style. It was in some ways the print version of those “In the News” and “Schoolhouse Rock” (“Conjunction junction, what’s your function?” and so on) bits we’d see between cartoons on Saturday morning, a way to makes news enjoyable, opening it up to a wider audience. It wasn’t controversial. It was the type of content that could get by any censor. Rated G, or whatever.

The Copilot “getting started” content, and Copilot Daily, is like that. It’s … curiously good spirited and non-aggressive. I also find the content sources notable, because Microsoft absolutely doesn’t shoot for this level of quality in, say, the news feeds it provides in Widgets in Windows or MSN on the web. If those sources are the bottom of the barrel, and they mostly are, the news sources it uses in Copilot Daily are one step up. Not the best of the best, but … better. For example, today’s stories were from USA Today, Food & Wine, Good Housekeeping, People, and Reuters. That’s about as middle of the road as you can get.

Copilot Daily has an AI-generated newsreader, and you can choose the voice, each of which is quite good. I don’t consume news this way, so I’ve only listened to it to understand the experience. But as with Alexa news, I could see some preferring this presentation. It’s a little short.

But the question here isn’t so much the technology, or the news sources, or whatever. It’s whether this spaghetti sticks to the wall. That is, is this what customers want? I don’t know. I don’t think Microsoft (or any of those other companies) know either.

The voice vs. reading thing is interesting. I do like the idea of audio content, and there are tools to read webpages, saved article (as in Pocket), and so on, and I do take advantage of that sometimes. I guess my issue is that I tend to be selective. When I read a newspaper, I don’t read the whole thing from top to bottom, I select the stories I care about. This Copilot Daily thing is more like a radio show or podcast in that it’s easiest to just put it on and go. It does offer a skip feature, of course. But again, it’s a little short. I also have worries about the sources and quality, based on previous experience, and hope it doesn’t go more downmarket.

We’re in a slice of time, too. And these things will keep changing.

On February 26, we’ll find out what Amazon’s latest approach is for this type of thing, plus whatever else conversational Alexa will do. Apple is rumored to be working on a “HomePad,” which is basically a HomePod-based smart display, and you can expect a Siri feature like this. They’re all doing something like this. If it works, they’ll keep doing it. I don’t know. This is a clash of business models, user expectations, and costs, and I feel like the bigger end game here is as simple as that service my son asked about when he was very young and didn’t know Google existed. “They should make a thing where you ask it any question and it gives you the answer.” Right. They should. And if they can make money doing that, they will. In the meantime, we get stuff like this.

? The greatest misdirect in Microsoft history

christianwilson asks:

Quick one. How well do you think the Courier would have done in the market given the state of the industry at that time?

Courier wasn’t real, so this is a classic what-if.

But it would have failed, and badly.

Courier has almost turned into fan fiction at this point. There were no prototypes, working or otherwise. It was just an idea. An idea that came out of the wrong part of Microsoft–whatever the Xbox group was called at the time–and there were no plans, synergistically or not–to make this thing make sense in the broader context of Microsoft’s platform offerings. It wasn’t based on Windows, or anything, because it wasn’t real. There were unique ideas, which are easy to come up with in isolation but would have been impossible to implement with the technology of the day. It would have been a one-off with no broad support inside or outside of Microsoft, but, again, it doesn’t matter because it was never close to being real.

I’ve recommended Steven Sinofsky’s book, Hardcore Software, many times, and to this I will do so again. His story about Courier falls into the same category as his stories about NetDocs–that came up twice, historically–which is that each was a side-show at the time, at best, and he was part of both stories, if unfairly. In the case of Courier, Microsoft was working on Windows 8, Apple was rumored to be announcing a tablet at that time, and one of the people who came up with the Courier concept–this person is not identified, but I wonder if it was J Allard–leaked it to the press, claimed that Sinofsky had “killed” it, as he had NetDocs, in an effort to undermine Apple’s iPad and make it seem like Microsoft had been secretly innovating in touch-based tablets internally.

This was all untrue. Sinofsky was vaguely aware of Courier, but he didn’t kill it. The issue was that Sinofsky’s Windows team was, at the time, working on what would become Surface, a tablet-based PC, and Windows 8, which would be optimized for touch-first interfaces and tablet form factors. Windows 8 and Surface were Microsoft’s formal plans to address the then growing mobile threat (which was a combination of tablet/phone form factors, multitouch, and mobile apps and mobile app stores). But it was also iterative. Windows 8 was to be the first step, followed by a technical link-up with phones for a future release and other advances. Courier, to its designer(s), was more forward-leaning and innovative. And he/they were not happy that no one was interested in it as a product internally. So he/they leaked it.

Sinofsky says that the Courier leak undermined Microsoft’s relationship with PC makers, who were then struggling to adapt to the shift to mobile and were all considering making phones and/or tablets. This is why Steve Ballmer showed off a Windows 7-based HP Slate tablet at CES 2010, to calm down what was then Microsoft’s biggest partner. But HP was so pissed by this leak and its implications that it purchased Palm for $1.2 billion with the aim of using webOS for tablets. This is similar to the reaction most PC makers had a few years later when Microsoft unveiled Surface: They all licensed Chrome OS.

“Courier became a shorthand or meme for incompetent management at Microsoft,” Sinofsky wrote. “[But] for so many reasons, it was readily apparent even if it materialized as a real PC, Courier would have been as doomed as all the Tablet PC products before it, and even more so because of the dual-screen approach.”

I would say, even more so because of the lack of platform behind it: Tablet PC was a first-class effort at the OS level that was pushed heavily at partners and customers for years, and it went nowhere. A new product, with none of those technologies, no app support, and no partners with go-to-market strategies, was always going to fail. Which was obvious, and why it never went past the prototype/concept phase. Its designers may as well have been designing a prop for Star Trek. It’s easy to seem perfect when it’s not even real.

The false hopes around Courier, even today, are a little strange to me, but we see similar wistfulness in products that did ship and fail, like Windows Phone, Zune, and Media Center. Sinofsky addresses that too.

“People still hope to bring Courier back and many still see it as symbolic of the company’s tendency to stifle innovative projects,” he continued. “Courier routinely shows up on lists of innovative projects killed by management. There’s some irony given Microsoft’s penchant for continuing to pursue products long after they have failed to achieve critical mass, well beyond the requisite three versions.”

If you think about the success the iPad has achieved–I believe it’s been held back by Apple, but whatever–the key success, perhaps, was the apps, and getting developers excited by a new form factor with unique capabilities. Microsoft was not success at this with Windows, mind you, there was very little in the way of unique Tablet PC apps or whatever. And it absolutely failed doing this with a new platform, in Windows Phone. Courier would have faired even more poorly.

?️ Game boy

hastin asks:

According to CNET, PC gaming now accounts for more sales than console gaming. If this market trend continues, this could be lucrative to help MS compete with Sony and Nintendo.

I feel like PC gaming and console revenues have been within shouting distance of each other for a while now, and I have found other sources claiming that consoles still generate more revenues overall than PCs. (I wrote about this at one point, but I can’t find it now, and this is becoming more and more of a problem, but let me try to stay focused here.) But whatever. Both market segments are reasonably big–though both are much smaller than mobile gaming–and with Microsoft evolving Xbox as a platform, this is key, I think, to the future.

That is, I think PC and console gaming will overlap so much that differentiating between them will become difficult. This is especially true with Xbox because of Microsoft’s history with PCs and Windows. The current and previous generation Xbox consoles are hybrid x64 Windows PC designs, already, and based on a Hyper-V architecture created by NT lead Dave Cutler. Aside from the obvious, Microsoft has dropped many hints about where it will take Xbox going forward, and more specifically what future Xbox–and/or Windows PC gaming devices–will be.

I think they might be merging at the Xbox level. That Microsoft could bring Xbox (console) game compatibility to Windows as the next step in the Backward Compatibility story. That it could bring an Xbox “shell” to Windows for use on portable gaming devices that will bridge the console/PC gap. That the next Xbox consoles will be Arm-based and portable, similar to the Switch. And that they will utilize technologies like AutoSR and Prism emulation to enable previous and previous-generation console games–and x64 Windows games–to run normally (to the user, with graphics scaling and so on).

I keep coming back to this notion that Xbox is sort of treading water right now, waiting for some hardware innovation to occur that we’re not privy to. I think it’s tied to Arm and some coming generation of Qualcomm and/or AMD/Nvidia/whatever advances. And that Phil Spencer and the rest are dying to just reveal it to the world, but are worried that they will even further undermine the current products. There are rumors that Xbox wants to bring rival games stores–Epic, Steam, whatever–to Xbox. That makes more sense if the underlying platform is just Windows.

It feels like PC gaming, and what Microsoft offers for it – kinda feels stuck. We’ve had what feels like the same Game Bar UX since Windows 10, and the Xbox app can’t hold a candle to Steam. Windows has always been a “platform to run games” but could be a “gaming platform”.

Well, Xbox and Steam are two different things today. That might change.

On console, Xbox is a walled garden, and the promise is a simple experience where you power on, launch a game, and play. On PC, Xbox is one of several choices, but the nice thing about Windows is that it’s not exclusive. PC gamers don’t have to choose between Epic, GOG, Steam, Xbox, and whatever else. They can use all of them. And do. That’s the nature of the PC, and while there are downsides to this–see “the success of iPad,” above–there are also upsides. And making Xbox and PC essentially the same, from a platform level, could make sense. Running Xbox games on Windows would be amazing. But so, too, would be running Windows games on Xbox, especially if that includes all those other game stores.

What do you see in the future of PC gaming on Windows?

I switched back to PC gaming over the past couple of years, after playing exclusively on Xbox since the Xbox 360 arrived in 2005. I had good reasons for sticking with Xbox for so long–the simplicity, basically, and what I’ll call “good enough” graphics quality and performance compared to PCs, and with none of the complexity. But the PC has improved a lot in recent years for gamers. And today, it more closely aligns with how I do things. It’s not stuck to a single screen in a single room in my home, it’s something I could do anywhere. With Intel Meteor Lake and newer processors, and at least one generation earlier on AMD, and now moving forward, you can game effectively (1080p+, 30 FPS+) on any mainstream laptop, even with modern AAA games. That is revolutionary.

But when you add in the efficiency and battery life gains we see on Arm, and to a lesser degree on Lunar Lake/Zen 5, plus the software gains in Windows (AutoSR, etc.), you can see where this is going. And because people are different, there will be game-centric products–handheld gaming devices that are Xbox and/or Windows–and then there will be more traditional PCs that can also play games. I think these will essentially all be the same thing–i.e. be “Windows” and run the same games/game stores–and that the key difference will be the shell (Xbox or Windows) and the form factors.

Yes, some of this is speculation. But it’s also an educated guess, since Spencer and others have actually talked about this stuff to some degree, and repeatedly. I think we’re going to hear what’s next, hardware-wise, this year. And that what it is will be portable, Arm-based, and some fusion of the Xbox and Windows platforms. An Xbox console that is more upgradeable, more PC-like in that regard, is an interesting idea. Perhaps upgradeable graphics, RAM, and/or storage (and more industry-standard in the latter case). But the central thing to me is that consoles are unprofitable for Microsoft, and whatever it shifts to next will take that into account. This all sort of tracks with that notion.

I can’t wait to learn more. It’s killing me.