Ask Paul: October 3 ⭐

Happy Friday! I’m still getting back up to speed after a month of travel, and I will never really catch up. Not helping matters, this was a surprisingly momentous week. And so it’s not surprising that we’re all struggling with some of the same issues. I feel like this is just the beginning, but you have to start somewhere.

? Where I stand on AI

jrzoomer asks:

Paul I remember reading back to your article I Will not pay for AI last year, was curious to know has your stance changed? Do you subscribe to any of the Google Gemini AI plans or Chat GPT Plus etc today?

One of my favorite series of movies is The Trip, which is basically two British actor/comedians, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, driving around Europe, doing imitations, cracking jokes, and riffing off each other. In one scene in the second in the series, Brydon asks the other, “Where do you stand on Michael Bublé?” And Coogan answers, “His windpipe?”

Which is how I feel about where I stand on AI, I guess.

I wrote about this a bit in Microsoft 365 Puts Copilot Inside the Apps⭐, but the problem I’ve had with Copilot—by which I mean Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Pro—is that these things are overly expensive add-ons to existing subscriptions and the functionality they offer is collectively the type of thing Microsoft historically provided “for free” as part of the subscription. This may seem like a vague distinction, but to me this is an important point about the value of something you pay for. I will pay for “productivity” in the form of Microsoft 365 because I value the online storage, the desktop apps, and whatever else. But those Copilot features are just features of each app, like spell checking or whatever.

But that’s Microsoft 365, or Office, or whatever you want to call it. I do pay for something called LanguageTool, which is similar to Grammarly, meaning that it is a standalone spelling and grammar-checking service that’s maybe better described as a writing aid. LanguageTool and Grammarly both use AI, I’m sure (the latter explicitly), so I’m a hypocrite of a kind. But I pay for that because I don’t use Word to write, I use a Markdown editor that has a very basic spell checker and not much else. So I view LanguageTool as a productivity solution that I see value in and pay for, and in that way it’s like Microsoft 365, not Copilot.

To your question, I have Google AI Pro for one year as part of owning (really borrowing, this year) a Pixel 10 series phone. I got Perplexity Pro for free for one year by signing up for it through the Galaxy Store (as opposed to the Play Store) when someone tipped me off that this worked. And I have Microsoft 365 Family, and as the account holder, I have access to whatever Copilot features that has.

Here’s the thing. I don’t use these things, almost ever. I use Microsoft Designer for some site images, but I think that would just be free regardless of my subscription. I use GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio, but the free version. I keep meaning to use AI more, so to speak, but my workflow is so ingrained now, I just never really bother. I’m not against it. I am against paying for it. I don’t mind getting it for free. As an individual, as a consumer, I just don’t understand paying for AI. But things are nuanced, too. At some point everything will have AI in it. My graphics app. My writing app. Etc.

But here’s the other thing. In whatever role I think I play in this world, I do need to stay up on this stuff. Fortunately, I can do so mostly by not paying for anything, because most AIs have whatever limits for free usage and it’s enough.

Also curious do you run any LLMs locally, and do you see any use case for this?

I experiment with this from time to time, mostly in Visual Studio Code. And I feel like I will be adding local AI-based writing help in my .NETpad app at some point, similar to Notepad, and so I’ve been following that. I wrote about any early experiment with this in Hands-On: Coding to the Windows Copilot Runtime (Premium).

On-device models, what I think of as small language models (SMLs), are getting more sophisticated all the time, as are LLMs in the cloud. There’s an emerging view that hybrid AI, in which you use on-device AI primarily and it hands off to the cloud when needed, is the way forward. And I feel we get there. But right now, these on-device SLMs are a lot less sophisticated than what’s in the cloud. And so you can have a basic chatbot-like experience with some SLM running off the PC’s NPU and it’s like using ChatGPT or whatever. But it’s more basic. Text is getting there the fastest, and you can see that in Notepad on a Copilot+ PC. And image generation is further behind. And other generative AI. But it’s coming. Someday. Just not today.

? Blink and you’ll miss it

HTurner asks:

You asked during October 1, Windows Weekly “To let you know if we got Windows 11 25H2” and my specifications says I have it.

Edition Windows 11 Pro
Version 25H2
Installed on ‎10/‎2/‎2024 OS build 26200.6584
Experience Windows Feature Experience Pack 1000.26100.234.0

But do I really?????? ??‍♀️

Yes. 🙂

I’m still trying to wrap my head around how much this has changed. But Windows is not unique among personal computing platforms in that we’re well past the big bang new version releases that were newsworthy in a mainstream way. Android, iOS, and whatever else all have the same issues. And the companies that make these platforms all have their way of dealing with that. Android, to me, is similar to Windows, especially this year, where there was a major version upgrade with little in the way of blockbuster new features but then quarterly releases that add more interesting features coming down the road.

Thinking about Windows 11 and the system we have now, I can’t say that I disagree or even dislike what’s happening. It’s just … different. But if you think back to January 2015 and the event at which Terry Myerson announced that Windows 10 would be a free upgrade, he discussed Windows as a Service for the first time, and his goal that everyone using Windows would be on the same version. The rationale being that this would make it easier to service the system.

We were never going to get the entire Windows user base on the same version. But the way Microsoft updates Windows 11 today suggests that this goal is actually doable now, effectively speaking. Windows 11 version 24H2 was a major release, with big changes at the foundational/core level. 25H2 is a minor release, with no big changes. And these things are both getting updated identically. They are identical except for one digit in the version number. And as we move forward to whatever comes next, this model helps Microsoft achieve this future where, OK, technically there are different versions, but they’re not really different. And we’re all on the same thing basically.

You know, until Windows 12 lands.

? Slippery slope

spacecamel asks:

With Office raising the price in a way and now GamePass also increasing its price, do you think we will see a new round of price increases for the rest of Microsoft products?

Looking at Microsoft from a consumer perspective, the entire consumer portfolio is in the More Personal Computing business unit, which is Windows, Xbox, Surface, and Bing/MSN (which is mostly about ad-sponsored content). And you could dive one level deeper and find things like Microsoft Edge, Copilot, the paid OneDrive stuff, Game Pass and consoles, and whatever else.

We live in an era of escalating prices on everything, hardware, software, and services. We live in an era of subscription creep, too. And these things all require hard decisions for consumers. We’re getting squeezed. It’s not necessarily Microsoft’s fault. But it’s happening.

So I guess what I see is more frequent price increases. That happened literally this year with the first-ever instance of Microsoft raising Xbox console prices twice. The price increases of AAA games have escalated, with $79.99 happening in less than half the time it took to go from $59.99 to $69.99. Etc.

Going through the list. Windows pricing will never impact us as consumers. Xbox hardware is more expensive and it will get even more expensive. Xbox Game Pass subscriptions will get more expensive and/or offer less value in different ways. Microsoft 365 didn’t so much get a price increase as it did a new SKU with a new upsell/potential value, though I feel like we need something that gives Copilot capabilities to everyone on a subscription, not just the account holder. Across the board, this is about paying more and about having more we can pay for.

With the possible exception of the 50 percent price hike on Game Pass Ultimate (which is actually an even greater price increase), I don’t resent any of this per se. Microsoft is in its own ginormous way a victim of certain situations outside of its control, too. But I do resent the way it communicates these changes, the way it pretends this is all about making our lives better, and the general enshittification that’s happening here. The good news is that we do live in a golden age (to use that term again) of choice for all these things, and we have many solid alternatives, including those from Little Tech companies not out to wring every cent out of our bloodless bodies.

As I wrote at the end of Playing Xbox is Getting a Lot More Expensive. Now What?⭐, the issue in some ways is just that these unwanted changes are being thrust on us, and that’s forcing our hand as consumers. We have choices. But we also have to make choices. And I think many of us simply want these things to stop changing for the worse so frequently.

?️ We’re just islands in the game stream

helix2301 asks:

Quick question this week xcloud, gforce now, Amazon Luna? Do you think stadia was too early? Why do you think it failed?

Stadia was the best of the streaming services at that time thanks to an innovative solution to the lag/latency issues that dog any cloud gaming service: The Stadia controller connected directly to the online service and not to the device you were playing on, sort of eliminating the middleman. My understanding is that Luna works similarly, and when Google killed Stadia, Luna shifted into its place, so to speak. At the time, I called on Microsoft to use this system for Xbox Cloud Gaming.

Stadia failed for many reasons, I’m sure, but this the videogame market is tough, and it had trouble securing not just exclusives but reasonably new high-profile games that customers would want. Xbox, for all its troubles, does have this decades-long catalog it can fall back on. Stadia was starting fresh.

Amazon is a different kind of company and it’s likely that the focus for Luna is different too, but if you look at that service now you can kind of see the problem. It has Fortnite, some Fallout games, Madden, Rainbow Six, and whatever. There’s nothing unique per se. It’s missing a lot. It’s just … there. It’s an option. I can’t see a lot of gamers just settling on Luna.

I’m overdue in looking at game streaming, and since Microsoft is upping the quality on Game Pass Ultimate-based Cloud Gaming, I should look at that while I still have it. I will do so, but in the sense that recommending earbuds is tough because everyone’s ears are different, cloud streaming is beholden to all kinds of factors tied to your connection, and we are all going to have different experiences.

We’ll see.

Game pass ultimate price rose 50% with then adding blizzard activision, ea, ubisoft and more i still think value there for price. Your thoughts?

Most of my thoughts on this are in Playing Xbox is Getting a Lot More Expensive. Now What?⭐, but there’s always more, and one of the things I didn’t maybe discuss enough is the other two Game Pass tiers, Game Pass Essential (which replaces Core) and Game Pass Premium (which replaces Standard), and how I still see these offerings, which cost $9.99 and $14.99 per month, as reasonably good values with one major caveat: Removing the three-month and 12-month payment options that provided substantial discounts in an obvious pain point.

Adding Activision Blizzard titles to whichever Game Pass subscriptions is definitely a plus. But which games you get matters. And how old they are. And the Xbox Wire blog post announcing these changes does include the list of games that’s included with each tier. (They are, thankfully, each a superset of the other, if that makes sense.) So you can kind of go through that and decide accordingly. But I see a lot of old games in there. And that may be what one is looking for.

Maybe it’s time to start buying up 3- and 12-month Xbox gift cards of whatever type while they’re still around.

(Also, it appears that the PC-only plan, PC Game Pass, is still around and costs $16.49 per month. Interesting.)

? How do we even sleep at night?

williamg asks:

I’m not sure exactly how to phrase or ask this exactly. Hopefully the point comes across. I’m trying to figure it out for myself. With the big tech companies that do awful things and behave terribly, how do you decide which ones you will still buy products or services from? In the September 26 Ask Paul, someone asks if you would buy the Meta glasses. Your response included, “I will never pay Meta/Facebook for anything. They have taken enough from me—and from my country—as it is.” Based on your comments about Apple on this site, including the review of the Apple in China book, and in the Windows Weekly podcast that elucidate your issues with Apple, why are you still okay buying and using Apple products?

The struggle is real.

I mean that. There are no good answers here.

When our government transitioned into the nightmare hellscape it is now, a few readers from outside the U.S. emailed me to tell me they were cancelling their Thurrott Premium subscription because they could not support a company based in my country. When I write about Spotify, someone will comment that they cannot support that company because its CEO invested in a military drone company or whatever. People ask me how I can use Twitter/X since its owned by a man who promotes hate speech and spreads misinformation. Etc.

My response to these things is that there is no example of a Big Tech company that isn’t run by horrible human beings. And if that is literally the bar, then you can’t use any Big Tech product, whether it’s Apple, Google, Microsoft, or whatever else. Internally, I appreciate making a moral stand on whatever topic, but I also see the futility of me, say, not paying for Spotify because I disagree with the CEO because I know I’m not sending a message of any kind, he will never find out or care.

Apple. God.

Because of what I do for a living, I probably have a better understanding of Apple as a company than most. And I do see the hypocritical nature of this company more clearly than any of its fans, so I feel like I’m approaching Apple from a good place in the sense that I’m coming down the middle and not at some extreme. Anyone who thinks *my take on Apple is somehow extreme is simply exposing how extreme they are. The center only looks extreme by those the furthest from it.

But I was shocked by some of the revelations in Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company. Thanks to 25+ years of dealing with antitrust and Big Tech, I understand these issues deeply. But with Apple and China today, I’m where I was with Microsoft and antitrust in the mid-1999s. Only this time, what I need to understand are even bigger issues about treason and what it means to give an enemy of my country all the technology and know—how it needs to defeat us.

This isn’t an excuse, but Apple is only notable because of its size. You go after the biggest first. All other U.S.-based Big Tech firms and other tech-based companies (including things like Uber, Tesla, and others that are out on the periphery) have done and are doing the same thing. But Apple was first. Apple has done it the most. Apple has done it to a scale that is unprecedented and unequaled. They’re the innovator here, the biggest and worst when it comes to caving to China.

Watching the leaders of these Big Tech companies literally taking a knee to our crybaby in chief and rolling over to whatever childish demands he makes isn’t just disheartening. It’s a wake-up call to how terrible these companies and their leaders really are. You can see the degree to which they will give up everything they tell us they stand for, and instantly. It’s pathetic. But I hope those people who blindly love these companies see this. People need to wake the F up.

But what can you do? What can I do?

If I followed my moral principles at the expense of everything else, I couldn’t work, couldn’t earn a living, couldn’t be true to what I am in other ways. I don’t like our government, but it doesn’t mean I don’t love my country. I don’t like Elon Musk, but I also get most of my social media traffic from Twitter/X and giving up that would be professional suicide. Which I am tempted by sometimes, but let me stay on topic here.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft are platform makers. Each matters in its own way. And so this sets them apart from companies like Meta, in some ways. But not in others. In the sense that I need to use some computing devices to get work done but also for whatever consumption purposes, I do use social media. I need it to some degree. The other day, one of our cats passed away and our daughter, who has been taking care of them for over a year now, had to deal with this on her own. It’s one of those horrible things that you know is going to happen, the cats are quite old, but it can’t really prepare you for it actually happening. And so my son FaceTimed with her at the vet when Kelly said goodbye to a cat that both had grown up with. And her and my wife’s posts about this event on Facebook then reminded me of why this service still matters. It was a fascinating outpouring of kind thoughts and love from people throughout our collective lives, people from across the globe who don’t know each other. Those connections are special.

Meaning, sometimes a flower grows out of shit. But you have to draw the line somewhere.

And when it comes to Meta, this is a company that started off as a theft by a person with zero moral standing. It bought companies it could not compete with and then enshittified its offerings over time. It is also committing what I see as treason in its dealings with China. And so, as with X/Twitter, I will continue using these services, which are Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, because I have to. There is a personal and/or professional rationale for each.

What I will not do is fund Meta’s attempt to leverage its dominance in social media to force its way into a new market, a new market that happens to be platform-based and would achieve two aims for this most terrible of companies: It would help them get out from under the control Apple and Google exert over it because they’re needed to distribute Meta’s apps and ads. And it would give them control of a potentially lucrative future platform that I know they do not have the capability or inclination to manage properly. I do not trust this company. I want less Meta, not more.

Apple is tough because it gets a lot of things right. It’s one of only two choices in mobile, and the other choice is just as terrible. These are the cards we were dealt. So we can try to fix the problems, most effectively with antitrust. My voice isn’t enough. My dollars don’t matter. But our governments can fix this. And it’s happening. Not perfectly, not universally. There will be setbacks. But there are wins, too.

I don’t have a pithy, concise way to say this. But we all have to make decisions based on our own needs. We have to do what’s right for us, and how far one is willing to go will vary. I can’t live in a cabin in the woods and ignore progress, I don’t have that luxury. But this year, I’ve been working towards a future I didn’t plan that minimizes Big Tech where possible. When it makes sense. Ideally, without compromise or at least reasonable compromise.

This is very much like the Xbox issue discussed above, of course it. This was thrust on us. No one wanted this world. But this is what we’ve got. And there are no good answers.

Sorry :/