Ask Paul: June 29 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Here’s another round of Q & A to start off the summer.

Is there room for a third?

KingNerdTheThird asks:

In my opinion, not enough is made of how there are effectively two phone makers who control industry trends. Do you see it as problematic that there is not more competition in the phone space?

I don’t, for two reasons.

Apple and Samsung seem to keep each other in check, with each trying to leapfrog the other with each new generation of devices. And, perhaps more important, we have such great choice now in phones. And with the market maturing, those great choices extend to much less expensive devices as well. This actually makes the phone market “better,” I think, at least for consumers.

But it’s hard not to think about Stephen Elop’s open question about whether the market could support three ecosystems, with Nokia at the time adopting Windows Phone. History has shown that it cannot, and the smartphone market has followed down the same two major players path that the PC market did, with one dominant product and one secondary product. (The processor market was similar as well, at least until mobile disrupted things.)

This is a generalization of sorts; in the US, the iPhone is about 50 percent of the market. And worldwide, Apple still makes the most profits. Or, most of the profits, to put it more succinctly.

Ecosystems are not the same as phone makers, I know. But this profit thing factors into the overall health question you’re asking. And it seems today that the companies that are doing best are the very biggest and, conversely, the very smallest. And I think that’s because the low or non-existent profit margins in the Android space hurts those companies (LG, HTC, Motorola, etc.) that stuck in the middle the most.

Anyway … The fear with consolidating markets is that consumer choice will suffer. That hasn’t happened in the smartphone market. At least not yet.

ThinkPad X1 Tablet review?

simont asks:

Any chance you can get a Lenovo X1 Tablet 3rd Gen to review?

Yes, I could do that. The thing is, I’m backlogged on Lenovo hardware reviews right now, and when I look at what’s available, a Windows tablet doesn’t seem all that necessary, broadly speaking. So far, I’ve declined to review that.

That said, I’m open to suggestions. If there is enough call for this, I would consider reviewing it.

Is Microsoft squeezing out third-party developers?

Darekmeridian asks:

Sort of asked you about this on Twitter. It seems like over the last few years Windows features have grown so much that it has to be taking a toll on 3rd party software developers. For example personally I have dropped things like Dropbox & BackBlaze, Eset Antivirus & Malware Bytes, Ashampoo Snap, Nero Burning ROM, Process Lasso, Adobe Acrobat, Daemon Tools, TeraCopy, Display Fusion, these are just a few I remember off-hand that have become outdated or replaced by built in OS features. So do you think Microsoft is putting the squeeze on one of it’s biggest assets, 3rd party devs? And, is 3rd party client development itself is becoming pointless?

I was just a bit too dismissive of this on Twitter. 🙂 Sorry, let me expand on that answer.

Apple is more infamous for this kind of thing, and I’ve found their aggressive way of copying third-party functionality and putting it into OS X/macOS to be quite troubling in the past. It can have a chilling effect on app developers.

But despite its terrible past, Microsoft has a richer history of buying software companies than it does of copying their products. That’s especially true in recent years, with mobile apps and services. It also forms partnerships, including with some of the companies you mention above, like Adobe and Dropbox.

With regards to Windows specifically, the rationale behind my simplistic “no” answer is that there’s almost literally no new software development occurring on Windows today anyway. And I feel like antivirus, disk tools, and cloud integration should be part of the OS. Third parties can compete on functionality. Antivirus vendors, for example, have built more complete suites of services that some consumers find useful.

Looked at from another angle, one of the issues with product bundling in the past was that it was illegal because Microsoft was a monopolist. That’s no longer true today: Consumers have much more choice even in the traditional PC market. Consider the much broader “personal computing” space and PCs don’t even rate. So Microsoft adding stuff to Windows isn’t going to cause any ripples, at least not legally.

More to the point, I can’t think of any truly gross and recent examples of Microsoft copying third-party software and just putting it in Windows. One might cite Stardock Groupy, but I’m pretty sure that happened because they had heard Microsoft was doing something like that in Windows. Either way, Microsoft did not “copy” Groupy.

Mobile gaming

Daekar asks:

You seemed to be intrigued by the mobile gaming experience you had lately, and I have to say I have been totally shocked at A) the graphical fidelity of my Nintendo Switch, B) how much utility I find in the portability (laze around in bed with my wife, my cat, a cup of tea, AND video games? Yes please!), and C) how well mainstream titles like Skyrim or Doom translate to this format. From your perspective, are there any lessons that the Xbox division can take from strong traditional gaming experiences on mobile platforms? Is this an inspiration to change, an existential threat, a call-to-action? Or just more irrelevant noise in an increasingly-diverse gaming landscape?

There are two big pieces here.

First, the quality of gameplay really matters and is more important than graphical fidelity. This is why Fornite is “better” than PUBG. And it’s why Nintendo has always played a big role: They just “get” this at a level that exceeds Sony and Microsoft (and Sega, in the past). Tied to this is the notion that the perceived limits of mobile devices (form factor, not processing power) sort of forces developers to think differently. And this can result in better games with new experiences that would never have happened otherwise on more traditional game consoles and PCs.

Second, gaming is succeeding on mobile for the same reason that everything else is succeeding on mobile, too: It’s everywhere. You can pull out your phone in line at a supermarket checkout and do whatever you want, including gaming. The size of this market is quite attractive to developers, as it should be.

Could I see myself switching to mobile gaming? On an iPad or another tablet, I’d want a game controller. The Switch already has that. But … yeah. I could see this happening. Plus, it plays into that whole “future of Microsoft in gaming” thing, where the hardware matters less. That’s the Nintendo approach, basically. It’s smart.

Is Call of Duty on the Switch? 🙂

Will ARM-based PCs succeed?

jimchamplin asks:

Re: the future of ARM-based PCs, do you think that ARM-based desktops are destined to be a thing? I’d love to see a decently-spec’d machine running a future ARM chip that’s about the size of a pack of cards. Not like the limited Atom-powered hardware that’s available today, but something that can actually offer a bit of flexibility.

We’ve got ones like the Compute Stick and the Kangaroo now but they’re always so limited on storage and RAM. With an ARM SoC, couldn’t we have a lower-power system that has more premium options? Larger, faster SSDs? More RAM? I think it would be pretty nice!

I believe that the rumored Snapdragon 1000—which Qualcomm did not tell me about, at least not specifically—is aimed at desktop-class PCs. And I know they are very serious about this market, though I sometimes wonder why. Regardless, Qualcomm is shaping up to be the best thing that’s happened to the PC market since AMD shook up Intel with x64. (Which, I know, it called AMD64.)

That said, it’s still a pretty small market, especially if you’re talking about desktop PCs, as opposed to laptops and tablets. I think Qualcomm will have the bigger impact in the portable space. And that portable PCs are, and will be, the volume part of the market.

What do I choose to review?

Daishi asks:

I’m curious what your criteria are for deciding what you review?

I ask because your rave review of the Matebook X seemed to give the impression that it was somehow a unique combination of performance, portability and price, when it seems like all of the major OEMs except Dell have been making largely the same kind of machines for quite a while. So it seems like it being “the single-best portable PC I’ve ever tested” may just be down to you not having tested any of the dozen or so similar things in the market (though you did at least do a first impressions piece of the Envy 13, just didn’t publish a final review).

Hardware reviews are a combination of me reaching out to hardware makers and hardware makers reaching out to me. Choosing “what” to review isn’t really a science, but I’ve declined more reviews than I’ve accepted, overall. I’ve also been met with silence on more than one occasion when I’ve reached out to companies for review units (Google and Samsung being the two most painful; Samsung’s PR is terrible).

Reviews are just opinions. But my comments about the MateBook X Pro are easily defended. Sometimes a product just hits a magic matrix of rightness. And sometimes it just falls short in a key area. This was the former.

For laptops generally, I’m taking a stand on 3:2. We were led down the wrong road to 16:9 years ago and now the industry is stuck there. So I will ding every 16:9 laptop on that point.

Sets, Sets, Sets, what’s so great about Sets?

jwpear asks:

Shoot, missed it by this much (3 mins)!

I will allow it. 🙂

Wanted to ask: What’s so great about Sets? How does it make Windows users more productive?

The thing I liked about Sets wasn’t so much that I’d ever use it myself but rather that it was a core productivity feature, and the type of thing I feel like Microsoft should have been focusing on in Windows 10. Instead of the nonsense that they had been focusing on.

Strategically, I think Sets is/was tied to the notion that the future of Windows is a simpler system that is largely web- and mobile-based. And bringing tabs to apps helps them look and act more like a web browser. In fact, the way Sets was implemented was basically—or maybe literally—by bringing tabs, as done by Edge, to other apps. So you could view this as Microsoft making Windows itself more Edge-like. Which might help to make Edge feel more comfortable to users. (A reader posted something to this effect in our forums a while back.)

Personally, I think that tabs the most sense in apps that are document-based. Things like web browsers and traditional Office applications (Word, Excel, etc.) are good places for tabs. File Explorer? Not really. Not for me, anyway. But its availability in the OS doesn’t “hurt” me, of course. Or anyone else that might not use this feature. It’s at least easily discoverable, unlike, say, Timeline.