Ask Paul: January 25 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Here’s the final “Ask Paul” for January. As always, thanks for the thoughtful questions.

Surface Go knock-offs

harmjr asks:

Anyone else yet making a Surface Go knock off yet? 10″ screen with pen. If yes can you point me in their direction.

I’m not sure what you’re looking for exactly. Surface Go certainly isn’t the first small-screen tablet, though to be fair, most of them probably target education. Is this just about “Surface Go but cheaper”? Or “Surface Go but with better performance and battery life?”

Daishi notes in the comments that Lenovo makes an Ideapad D330, and that firm does have three tablet PCs in the 10-12-inch screen size range. I don’t see anything as inexpensive as Surface Go though.

Anyone looking for a 10-inch tablet needs to get an iPad. Anyone looking for a real Windows PC/tablet PC will find tons of options at 11-inches and up.

Micropayments

Polycrastinator asks:

Less a question and more a request for comment, but I saw this article in Wired and wondered what you made of it, especially as someone who’s suffering from having to live with ad money? I’ve been wondering for a while why there’s no great micropayment solution on the internet, and this reinforced that question in my mind.

The article notes that the inventors of the World Wide Web designed the system specifically to handle digital payments so that content creators could get paid. But instead, the companies that took advantage of the web went with an ad-driven system that has, in recent years, imploded. This is a regular topic here on Thurrott.com because we have a paid Thurrott Premium membership, which, again, we feel is more honest and transparent than trying to fleece readers in other ways.

My two immediate thoughts about micropayments are that they are common in places where the PC revolution never happened and the population started using phones/smartphones as their first computing devices, and that there is at least one browser maker—Brave—which is trying to bring a system like this to the web.

Brave won’t be successful, at least in that regard. Which I know because the planet, collectively, has an aversion to paying for content because 99 percent of the web is basically free and has been for decades. But I appreciate that effort.

As for micropayments more generally, it’s starting to happen. My wife and I send money to our son in college via a service called Zelle, for example. And even products like Square, which let individuals and very small businesses accept credit card payments have really democratized things and contribute to this movement. These types of things were ponderous or impossible just a few years ago.

I guess the issue for the web is that we have a primary gatekeeper in Google that still earns the vast majority of its revenues from ads. That company has little incentive to make a micropayment system on the web successful. But perhaps it could at least support existing systems as it does now with credit cards. Any step in that direction would be a positive.

Patreon

kzrystof asks:

Have you ever considered using Patreon (or something like it) for Thurrott.com, either for the podcast or the premium article? Would it be a viable option for those who are not willing to be a premium member?

Yeah. It’s probably worth considering. I don’t recall why we don’t have this, perhaps because it might de-value Thurrott Premium. I’ll ask.

For me personally, the issue is that I would never benefit from this financially. If Thurrott Premium somehow doubled its membership ranks overnight, for example, I wouldn’t make more money. And that would be true if we added Patreon. I make a salary, and that salary is lower today than it was when I was at Penton. Part of the reason we moved to Pennsylvania was to help make that up via a lower cost of living, but that hasn’t materialized as much as we expected either. So, I view this kind of effort—more money for my employer, not more money for me—as perhaps less exciting than you might imagine. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen, of course, assuming it makes sense.

Positive feedback

kzrystof also asks:

I have heard you on different podcasts (What the tech, FRD…) talking about how people can be vocal when they are not happy with the site or something. But do you guys get positive feedback on the work you are doing?

He provided some positive feedback, which you can see in the original forum thread. And a few other readers commented similarly. Thanks for that. (I cut it here only for space reasons.)

One thing I can fall back on from my earlier pseudo-career in banking is that feedback is always overwhelmingly negative. People who are happy with the way things are don’t typically tell you that, they just go about with their lives. But people who have a bad experience are usually pretty quick to let you know. So I do at least view negative feedback in that light, and I do, of course, take it seriously. We all do: Tim, for example, gets some feedback, mostly negative, through [email protected].

Some of the comments about this question regarded the recent episode with a person from Europe complaining that I wouldn’t ship Microsoft’s giveaway hardware outside of the United States. It’s a bit more complex than that: He attacked me personally, publicly, and we obviously can’t allow our own website to be used for that kind of thing. He also canceled his Thurrott Premium membership to punish me and the company. I deleted the thread for that first reason. But I did notice that a number of readers came to my defense, and I do appreciate that quite a bit.

This is kind of hard to explain, but this particular episode hit at a very sensitive spot for me. I’m generally pretty resilient when it comes to complaints or put-downs, or whatever. But this was just the perfect storm of not getting me personally and just not understanding the various pressures that I’m under. It’s not really necessary to spell out what happened in that one case again, but the central reason it was tough on me is that I was trying to do something nice. And I feel like I got kicked in the face for it.

To answer your actual question, sure. We do sometimes get feedback of a positive nature. But it is few and far between. Usually via email, or maybe on Twitter. And to be clear, that’s absolutely fine. Again, I/we understand the dynamic here. Negative feedback is always going to be more common. Much more.

So. Thank you and the other commenters for your positive feedback here. I’m especially happy to see that Brad and Mehedi were called out as well. One thing that’s been great for me at Thurrott.com is that I work closely with these guys, and others, who I like and respect quite a bit. And it’s more of a team vibe than was the case at the SuperSite, which was a one-man show. (Though I certainly had good friends there, too, of course, and there was a broader “us against them” thing with the team in Colorado that worked mostly on Windows IT Pro, the former Windows NT Magazine.)

We’d like to expand Thurrott.com to include other contributors, and while this is perhaps a conversation for another day, we’re looking for people that would make sense for Thurrott Premium specifically as well. It’s a hard thing, because I am, for better or worse, obviously closely associated with this all, given that my name is on the site. But we all feel that for this to grow, it needs to literally grow. This is something I’ll be asking Premium members about at some point for sure.

Again, thanks.

Microsoft Store, expanded

Lewk asks:

I found it quite interesting how you spoke on Windows Weekly about how Microsoft had a perfect opportunity to add Windows Phone apps to the Desktop with Windows 8 back in 2012. While that opportunity has absolutely sailed, do you think it behooves Microsoft to support more Application frameworks on it’s operating systems going forward? The ability to run containerised Android or iOS apps, Chrome apps and Linux apps on Windows 10, appearing to the user as though they were native. With the ability for the developers of those apps to submit them to the Microsoft Store to run on Windows 10/Windows 10 Lite etc?

Yes I do.

The definition of what constitutes a Store app hasn’t just expanded since 2015, it’s exploded. And today it already includes what are essentially containerized apps, of the desktop and web variety. Microsoft was originally working on a way to run Android apps in Windows 10, but Terry Myerson killed that project—and scattered those working on it to other parts of the company—when this effort proved too successful. The feeling at the time was that the UWP apps platform would never take off if users could effortless access the far more voluminous Android app library.

I don’t have any knowledge of Microsoft’s plans with regards to this kind of thing, but I could see the selection of contained app platforms expand for sure. And when you think about Microsoft trying to simplify Windows and eventually obsolete true desktop apps—and to make a Chromebook-like system—this makes even more sense. Just getting Android apps on Windows would be a huge win for the platform and its users.

Photo scanner

spacecamel asks:

Can you please do a review of the photo scanner you discussed on the FRD podcast on Thursday? I have the same project and the troubles you are going through are the same ones I found. I really hope this scanner is good.

I do too. 🙂 This scanner could turn what was originally a daunting—and, let’s face it, impossible—task into something I might actually accomplish. If it works as well as I hope, that is.

I’m not sure about a formal review, but I will absolutely be writing more about this scanner, and soon. I can’t wait to get it.

The scanner I did order is a refurbished Epson FastFoto FF-640 High-Speed Photo Scanning System with Auto Photo Feeder; it costs $440 on Amazon and supports 600 dpi scanning. A newer version, which provides 1200 dpi support, costs $600. (Those are affiliate links. Unlike with Patreon, that would technically benefit me personally.)

Android performance rot

millerkl61 asks:

Do you think Android rot has gotten better, worse, stayed the same? Do you think it will improve in meaningful ways in the future? And now that Apple is expanding its services outside its own ecosystem, could that introduce “UX rot” or risk compromising the Apple experience/image on other platforms? Does that even matter? Thanks!

I don’t think that Android performance rot has changed at all. And I base that mostly on the fact that phone makers are starting to include features of their own to combat. For example, the next version of Samsung’s UI for Android will include interfaces for auto-rebooting the device once a week, specifically for performance reasons. I suspect that Google’s Fuchsia effort is partially designed to finally fix this issue, too.

Regarding Apple, I coincidentally just installed Apple Music on an Android phone and was struck by how weird it looked, with bright pink/red UI elements and non-standard UI widgets. This isn’t smart: Microsoft did this kind of thing on the Mac years ago, and the users of that platform were rightfully not happy with all the Windows branding and non-standard (for Mac) user interfaces.

There is a right way to do this, and it’s not duplicating the iOS experience. If you look at something like Flutter, which is a developer tool, it provides native (OK, native-ish) UI elements on both Android (Material) and iOS (Cupertino) so that the apps developed with this toolset look right on both platforms. If Apple is serious about making its apps and services available everywhere, it will need to figure that out. It can keep whatever branding elements it wants, of course. But if these apps aren’t native, they’ll just turn off the userbase.

Apple doesn’t even get this right on its own platforms, by the way. The iOS apps that are in macOS today feature no native Mac-like UI elements or navigation, and they just look and feel different from other apps. They need to clean that up too.

Waving goodbye to the next wave

helix2301 asks:

You said in recent podcast that Microsoft has missed every wave since PC market. AI, wearables, mobile. While the xbox was the exception to the rule with gaming. My question is the growth Microsoft is seeing in Bing do you consider that a loss? Do you consider that an enterprise or personal product? With Hotmail, I know Microsoft bought that back in the day, and now it’s Outlook.com. Was that every a profitable purchase for Microsoft?

I’m not sure what to make of Bing, and that’s even truer given what just happened to Cortana. As a back-end search capability, Bing makes sense. As a standalone search engine, it makes a bit less sense. It’s not quite Cortana bad, but still bad: Under 8 percent usage share worldwide on desktop, compared to 74 percent for Google and almost 13 percent for Baidu. (Bing used to be at about 14 percent.) And it’s less than 1 percent on mobile.

That said, I don’t see Microsoft killing Bing. It’s a very visible product, and it powers other search engines and should see some success as a back-end service, just like Cortana.

Given the timing of the Hotmail acquisition, there’s no doubt that this has worked out for Microsoft. It has consistently ranked among the top email/calendar/contacts solutions for consumers and it has impacted the design of Microsoft’s enterprise alternatives as well. Outlook is a good brand overall. (Bing is just weird, even today. It never really became “normal,” like say “Pentium” did over time. I’m not sure why.)

PowerApps development

skborders asks:

Paul, This may not be in your wheelhouse, but do you know of any resources for learning how to develop PowerApps within the Office/Dynamics 365 products?

I had to look this up, so I probably won’t surprise you with anything here. But Lynda.com already offers a Learning PowerApps course, which I didn’t expect. And Microsoft has a nice (albeit year-old) resource for learning PowerApps as well. I would be surprised if this year’s Build and Ignite conferences didn’t bring further resources.