Ask Paul: April 24 ⭐️

Happy Friday! It’s an interesting week of existential crisises here in the Microsoft community. But we’ve been here before, so let’s settle in and see what the future holds.

⛵️ That ship sailed and then it burned down as it went over the horizon

NickTech asks:

Theoretical question: do you think Microsoft could have a successful mobile devices strategy if they tried making Android-based phones, but with their own apps and features baked in to customize it, like a Windows 10 Mobile style launcher and advanced integration with M365 and OneDrive?

I don’t see a version of that ever making sense anymore, and I’m not sure it would have ever made sense. The world has settled on the two mobile platforms as they are, and though one (Android) is sort of open, it’s still controlled by one of Microsoft’s biggest competitors. Microsoft’s enterprise customers know and understand both mobile platforms from a device management perspective, and there’s no real value-add for it to deliver to those customers that would make them consider dropping their existing devices/strategies.

And this isn’t a big enough opportunity for Microsoft to even try; we used to talk about “billion dollar businesses” and how Microsoft would ignore anything smaller than that, but that was many years ago. Today, the bar is much higher, Microsoft as an organization is focused elsewhere (AI, cloud), and this just doesn’t fit in.

There was a point several years ago when I thought we’d see a Surface Pro equivalent running Android, a Microsoft 365 device, so to speak. But Surface was always a failure and there was likely little stomach to take that risk. It was never going to work, really. But what if it did, and all Microsoft did was shift part of the customer base from Windows to Android, which is owned by a rival? We lived through a silly era where some claimed that an (Intel-based) MacBook was somehow the best PC for running Windows, now imagine that happening with a Surface PC being the best way to run Android.

It makes sense for Microsoft to put its software and services on other mobile platforms, even when it made its own, it needs to meet its customers where they are. It makes sense for Microsoft to continue improving Windows given its importance to its biggest customers. But it doesn’t make sense for Microsoft to make its own hardware anywhere. That’s true for PCs, Surface is a disaster. It’s true for Xbox, ditto (with hardware). And it would be true on mobile. There’s just no call for it, no real interest and, for Microsoft, no opportunity for growth.

The open question here is whether Microsoft might have ever established its own mobile platform as a third option or, even more out there, assumed the role that Android now has in this market. It’s impossible to know, of course, but I feel like either or both were possible. But that was many years ago, and there are all kinds of variables, and the Microsoft of whatever era couldn’t have and wouldn’t have ever made the decisions that might have let those things happen. It was different, the world was different, and no one could have predicted how things would change.

“Sam Altman’s Next High-Wire Act: Getting OpenAI to Make More Money”

I think you mean “to make money”

📆 My outlook includes never using Outlook

Akis asks:

Contants management in Windows. Could it be any worse? Right now I am using the horrible Outlook 365′ contanct management and refuse to accept there can’t be any better option.

There is, but it’s not anywhere near Microsoft or Windows. I don’t even know what contact management in Windows means, sort of, at this point. I do all that through Google and on mobile, and it works great all the time everywhere. This is one of those moving on moments, I guess.

I apologize I don’t have more to say here. I don’t manage contacts with Microsoft at all, and I wouldn’t go anywhere near anything named Outlook.

“5 Tall Tasks for Apple’s New C.E.O.”

You did not just make a height joke

🪟 Microsoft is not the center of the universe

helix2301 asks:

I just wanted to ask how you pick and choose stories. I know, like Windows Central and Neo Win are fairly Microsoft-centric. I know you say your site is a consumer tech site.

We cover personal technology. I have a long history in the Microsoft space, and with Windows specifically. So I still have that leaning, I guess. And that reputation.

I feel sometimes like the Microsoft-centric sites have stories that are a bit of a stretch, or like who cares. This week, the story of clipchamp being discontinued on iOS or Copiliot Keyboards come to Japan. You don’t get those kinds of fluff stories here.

I’m not sure if this is a “strategy” or whatever, or maybe a worldview, but one of the things I fell into very early on was curation. I started the WinInfo email newsletter in the late 1990s with a tagline that included “no fluff” specifically because I knew I didn’t want to just randomly cover everything (cough, Neowin, the worst). I wanted to focus on what’s important, what someone in this space really needed to know. Critical thinking is part of this. It’s in short supply out there and getting worse all the time.

Is this why you are Windows plus consumer tech?

When I got started in this career, Windows was personal technology almost literally. So Microsoft was the center of this universe, so to speak, except that it was almost all of it too. It extended that dominance into every market imaginable and then the antitrust cases happened and it took its eye off the ball. Companies like Amazon and Google came along, Apple had a resurgence and then an incredible run (all, interestingly, outside the PC space). And then we got the hundreds or even thousands of smaller companies and a more heterogeneous world overall.

I wrote about this years ago, but if you look at just computers today, Microsoft is still dominant, not quite like it was 30 years ago, but still by far the biggest player. Chromebooks, Macs, and Linux together account for less than 15 percent of the market. But personal computing is not just computers now. There are smartphones, billions of them, and tablets, mostly iPads, and they’re not just bigger overall, they’re edging further and further into computer use cases. Most people don’t use computers as much as maybe you or I do, they use these other devices. This is where customers are, it’s where developers focus, it’s where all the excitement is. You don’t get products like AirPods and Apple Watches that sync only to computers or whatever. These are all part of the mobile ecosystem (even though they can sometimes work with Macs or whatever, that’s not the big focus).

Even when Microsoft was dominant, I was interested in alternatives. I was looking at Linux on floppies in the mid-1990s. I was fascinated by open source Office alternatives. I lusted after NeXTStep and seeing Steve Jobs bring that system to Apple for Mac OS X was thrilling. And so on, but whatever: I felt very strongly and still do that you can’t make a claim like “Windows is the best platform” if you know nothing about the alternatives. And so if I did or do make such a claim, it’s based on trying everything else too. It’s an attempt to be educated.

But I started doing this in the 1990s. It was all Microsoft. I was not so much a fan of Microsoft or Windows as I was trying to be pragmatic about just helping people with technology, and that’s where it all was. But as the world changed, my Microsoft-centric work could be a liability, if only by perception. Although I was trying alternatives and writing about that, I was the Microsoft guy. What could I know about this other stuff? WinInfo (Windows Information) and the SuperSite for Windows, which was originally just a one-off for what should have been called Windows NT 5.0, were limiting. You can bring up old versions of the SuperSite and see that I wrote about Apple, or whatever, and had a section called Alt.Windows. But as the world moved on, or forward, or whatever life does, it just felt limiting.

So when I started Thurrott.com I very specifically wanted a name/brand that was not Microsoft or Windows-centric, but I wanted the focus to be what it always was, really, which is personal technology. Which today is not really about Microsoft. I still use and prefer Windows, of course. I still find it more interesting than not just rival platforms but also mobile. And I still prefer the Xbox ecosystem for games. But I also use mobile devices like everyone else and whatever services, consumer or otherwise. Not because Microsoft isn’t there anymore, but because these other things make sense.

And I just want to play the same basic role, which is helping other people with this stuff. One way I can help is to ignore the stupid and be clear-eyed about what’s really happening. Look at the headlines about Intel’s earnings this week, look at what I wrote, and then compare them both to reality. I want to be on the right side of history. Meaning, facts not history rewriting (a huge problem in the Apple community) and opinions that are hopefully educated. I will never contort what I write to make some company or product look good. I just tell the truth. And admit when I get that wrong. This isn’t rocket science, but then I look at my news feeds every morning and it’s depressing. Few seem to have this conviction.

For whatever it’s worth, my world view doesn’t always work. I’m not a self promotor and my ignoring of ridiculous stories can be problematic. People assume I didn’t see that story, perhaps, so they’re helping me out by telling me about it. Or I will get on Windows Weekly and Leo will ask me about one of these things because someone mentioned it in the Discord chat, and then I have to deal with. It’s usually some form of, I didn’t write about that because it’s not real/not relevant, or whatever. But then I wonder, maybe I do need to somehow deal with these things. People might assume I’m out to lunch, or worse, that an omission is like a lie. I don’t have a way to make that whole; there’s no obvious answer. But I don’t want to waste my time. And I very much don’t want to waste others’ time either.

“Microsoft to offer voluntary retirement buyouts to about 7% of the US workforce”

Flush twice, it’s a long way to Redmond

💥 Bullet points on a slide

madthinus asks:

With both Windows and Xbox having an introspective moment and suddenly feeling more open to user voice and feedback, do you think this is lip service in the short term or actual pushback from customers and data from third parties indicating that inertia has met resistance and the business is heading towards a failure/ inflection point.

This is two things. One, real change will come to both platforms and it will be mostly positive. Two, neither is fundamentally changing in any meaningful way, despite all the happy noises. So what this is really about, in both cases, is silencing the loudest but smallest part of the respective user bases. It’s about being able to point to a bullet point on a slide to show that you’ve addressed a concern.

There’s a term for this, and I need to look this up. But in his book Hardcore Software, Steven Sinofsky describes this process, how Microsoft, in his case, would sometimes just implement whatever feature just so customers would stop complaining, even when the feature would be used by almost no one. They could just point at a slide and say, yeah, we have that. Shut them up.

Xbox consoles and Windows licenses are not growth markets. They’re sizable markets, especially Windows. They’re big enough to not ignore. But they’re also different. Xbox is a community or fanbase, or whatever, that feels slighted because the consoles that few would ever use anyway aren’t the center of the gaming universe. So making happy noises for them will keep the disgruntled ones quiet while the overall strategy moves forward almost completely unchanged. Windows is a real market, a big market, but the only real concern there is the enterprise. And Windows has gotten bad enough, quality-wise, that that audience is complaining now. So they have to address the complaints. But as I’ve pointed out, they are not reversing most of the objectively enshittified aspects of Windows at all. And they are not stopping with adding AI all over Windows, they’re removing a couple of offensive Copilot icons. Yay?

The good news is that both platforms will improve, and that does benefit users. But this is mostly marketing. They are not changing the big bucket issues with either platform because those issues are by design and part of the strategy in both cases. Xbox only makes sense as a business that publishes games across platforms. Sorry.

Long term, Xbox consoles and Windows PCs are not the future. Short term, shut up the critics and do what you can to prevent decline. But the decline is inevitable.

“Microsoft launches Agent Mode for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint”

Anthropic: Hold my beer

📕 Mi libro es su libro

train_wreck asks:

How’s the Eternal Spring book project going? Congrats on official finish if it hasn’t been said already. Ever thought about doing versions for other cities in México?

We’ve moved onto the second (2026) edition, and one of the significant changes that I’m working on now is adding a Further afield section that will (lightly) cover places outside Mexico City. So there are day trips, and then bus/airplane trips that might be a few days or a long weekend, or whatever. But guide books are never finished, there are always new places, places that disappear, and whatever other changes. So just keeping what we have up-to-date is challenging.

Expanding beyond Mexico City would be a nightmare, an impossibility for the two of us. So it will just be a chapter, and that will expand with the rest of the book as we do more travel around the country. But I don’t see any of that turning into standalone books. We just don’t have the time or inclination. Our focus is Mexico City.

“Here’s How the iPhone Ultra Compares to Other Apple Devices”

For starters, it doesn’t exist yet

👓 Privacy is a basic human right or something

OldITPro2000 asks:

I often see other sites and newsletters tout that “50% of the Fortune 100 reads this” or “15 major tech CEOs read us daily” or whatever. Obviously I don’t expect you to name names, but I was curious if the Thurrott Premium audience is mainly just us tech enthusiast lunatics or if the audience contains anyone recognizable per se.

It’s impossible for me to fully express how uninterested I am in the business side of this business. But the short version is that I want to wake up every day and work, which to me means writing and researching. And the business side is a distraction that I find unappealing. This actually came to a head during our current trip to Mexico, and without getting into the details, I basically went to my wife and said, you’re going to have to show up here or I will run this thing into the ground. I just don’t care. I care about what I write about. I do not care about the business.

Given that, when I say to you that I have no idea who reads what we write, then you might understandably think that’s impossible. But I have never once looked over the email addresses or names of readers, or whatever, to try and understand whether there were whatever companies or people represented. This was something George and BWW would do, for sure, we had annual reader surveys and so forth, people who did marketing and understood these things. I do not care. I am not interested in this at all.

So I don’t know. I have always written about things I care about with the assumption that anyone who reads it likewise cares about that thing, and that this community, big, small or otherwise, is made up of like-minded individuals with open eyes and working brains. And I could be screaming into an abyss for all I know, other than the obvious feedback I get every day. I am not trying to write for an audience that “matters,” except that of course you matter, you all matter, and the reason you matter is that you care enough to be here and have this conversation. And that’s something I care about.

But … whatever executives at Microsoft or elsewhere? I don’t know. I feel weird even writing all this, but that’s where my head’s at.

“The base model $599 Mac mini is now completely out of stock”

I can literally get it with free same-day delivery from Amazon right now

📲 It already does so much, but I think it could do more

OldITPro2000 asks:

I’d like to know your thoughts on why using a smartphone as a full fledged computer never seemed to catch on. Nowadays it’s not a technical barrier as we have similar chips in laptops and smartphones these days but outside of gee whiz demos and niche interest I don’t see anyone hooking up a keyboard/monitor/mouse to a modern smartphone on a regular basis. I’d bet this would be a good solution for a lot of people; use the phone as normal 90% of the time but when you need a full setup the other 10% of the time just dock and go.

I feel like it gets there.

I have been trying to make what I’ll call “non-computer devices,” what we would today just call mobile devices, work for basically forever. I was part of the initial Windows CE beta (“Pegasus”) and the initial wave of those devices were called Handheld PCs, they were clamshell, laptop-like devices that were too big for a pocket but much smaller than any computer of the era. And I thought some version of that, perhaps with color, which came eventually, and a full-sized keyboard could make sense. Jerry Pournelle did too, and he used such a thing for many years, back when laptops weren’t all that portable and had terrible battery life. But the experience never got there.

Handheld PCs and Windows CE morphed into PDAs and Windows Mobile in time and then into smartphones. But that took years. I tried every imaginable PDA over that period, I think I owned almost every non-Palm PalmOS device ever made, or close to it, and many Windows Mobile-based PDAs, of course. If you think back to my “right tool for the job” thing, that came about from me using a PalmOS-based PDA mounted on a foldable keyboard on the tray table of a plane. There was a bump, the PDA disconnected a bit from the keyboard, and I lost whatever article I was writing because it froze up and I had to reset it. This was the early 2000s.

This came up above, but as the world shifted from using computers for everything to using mobile devices for most things, there have been various attempts to make tablets and smartphones work more like computers. Samsung has DeX and now Android has Desktop mode, and we will get Android-based laptops this year. Apple finally took major steps forward with iPadOS 26 last year. And now we have folding phones that at least add some screen real estate, but also make that use case more possible for more people. Apple will likely ship an iPhone Fold this year that can run two iPhone apps side-by-side, but it’s impossible not to wonder why this thing won’t just run iPadOS and have the bigger screen experience be an iPad with all those other use case possibilities.

Regardless, if you want to–and if you have good enough eyes—you can connect a Bluetooth keyboard to an iPhone or Android device and use it like a tiny computer to some degree. You could emulate my PDA plane experience from 20-ish years ago and it would work significantly better than it did then. We’re on the cusp of any phone being able to replace a PC for many people.

I can only guess why this isn’t more popular already.

One reason may be the separation of work/personal life. Obviously, people get work emails and do whatever work activities on phones. But PCs are pretty much only for work for most these days, the place where you turn when you have to work. And I bet many find it irritating when work intrudes on them when they’re out with their phone. I do. I’m not sure my phone has ever made a sound that made me happy. You know it’s going to be irritating.

Another is obviously just technology-related, that this stuff isn’t the low-hanging fruit, and the makers of these platforms don’t turn to computer-like use cases until they have to, so it always lags behind. An iPad with a keyboard solves many problems for some audiences, but it’s still never going to be the full PC/Mac experience. A phone with a keyboard is even more limited. The screen is much smaller, the OS isn’t optimized for that etc.

And then there’s what I think of as the Apple problem. Apple wants to sell you multiple devices, not one device that can do everything. This is why iPadOS was just a miracle and an outlier; they don’t usually do that kind of thing. (And the MacBook Neo might be seen as an implicit admission that they went too far.) When I wrote the Right Tool for the Job bit, it wasn’t a lack of trying on the part of device or platform makers, it was the reality. Today … we could get there. On the Apple side, they limit capabilities to sell more devices, and they kind of set the tone for the industry. Dex is an outlier in Android, but maybe Android having a Desktop mode will put it over the finish line. We’ll see.

Anyway, I’ve always thought that docking a smartphone and getting a big screen, full-sized keyboard, and mouse and turning that into a computer made sense. I still do. That Microsoft delivered on this with Windows Phone and Continuum is yet another chapter in a book I should write about missed opportunities. But I think it will happen. I think we get there.

“Apple has ‘six major new product categories’ coming”

Number five is shocking