Ask Paul: August 30 (Premium)

Happy Friday! I’m out of the office this afternoon, so I wanted to get this done as early as possible. It’s a big one.

Quick follow-up

Last week, there was a question about Microsoft Authenticator on Android. Microsoft has since added cloud backup and restore of accounts to the beta version of the app on Android, so it should be available to everyone soon. —Paul

Surface updates

sjmoshier asks:

What is the one item or enhancement you wish to see implemented within the Surface line of hardware if there are updated versions of Surface Laptop, Pro, & Book announced during the 10/2 MS event?

In the afternoons, I’ll often go upstairs and work from a laptop for an hour or so while lying on the bed. This has been how I’ve written much of the Programming Windows series: It requires a lot of research, which is done on the web, in Kindle books (which I access through Kindle Cloud Reader), or in actual paper books, of which I’ve bought a ton over the past several weeks. In doing so, I was using Surface Book 2 one day and noticed the battery was about to die. I didn’t have a Surface charger by the bed, but I did have a Dell USB-C charger, since I had previously used a Dell laptop there. And I was able to use that charger to charge the Surface, since the Book 2 has a USB-C port.

This got me thinking: Just adding USB-C to its products is a major improvement, even if Microsoft sticks with its proprietary Surface connector. The problem, of course, is that Microsoft hasn’t been consistent about this support: Surface Laptop 2, as an obvious example, lacks a USB-C port. That’s just bad design on Microsoft’s part.

I’ve long complained about how slowly Surface embraces modern technologies, most notably Thunderbolt 3. But in retrospect, just adding USB-C to all of its current devices would have answered most of the need. But as we barrel towards 2020, and with the understanding that whatever devices Microsoft does release will be in-market for about two years, not adding USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 support to all its new PCs would be a huge mistake. And so the one thing I would like to see added—need to see added—remains the same: USB-C/Thunderbolt 3.

In my opinion, this should be the default and only way to power the new Surface PCs, and Microsoft should release a new Thunderbolt 3 Dock that would service all of them. But I could see the firm still including the old connector for backward compatibility purposes, and that would be fine too. As long as it’s not the only option.

This is so overdue.

Razors and blades

sabertooth920 asks:

From a business perspective, if the XBox consoles are money losers, and with all the game studios Microsoft has acquired, why not discontinue the console and simply pump out quality games that can be played everywhere? I don’t see the point of exclusive games, if the console is losing money, anyway. What am I missing?

Microsoft knew it would lose money on Xbox hardware, but it always expected to make that up over time with software and services, and, over time, by cost-reducing each Xbox model.

That never happened, though the reasons varied by console generation. The original Xbox was a pure hit, which was always expected: It was Microsoft’s first console, they used PC parts to save money and ease their development, and it sold in relatively low volume anyway. Xbox 360 was supposed to reverse that trend, but it was a reliability disaster, and the RROD issue forever destroyed any chance of that console making money. Microsoft cost-reduced it twice to lower the impact, but it was a loss.

Xbox One has perhaps been the biggest disappointment. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the console, no rampant reliability issues. But it launched too expensively, required customers to buy into a Kinect peripheral they did not want, and its online requirements (later tuned down) were perhaps a bit too forward-leaning. Whatever the reason, this console has performed terribly, and Microsoft has cost reduced it, and added a more powerful version, to try and ease the pain as much as possible.

The flower in the pile of shit that is Xbox One is that this defeat triggered a rethinking of Microsoft’s Xbox strategy. Today, Xbox is the most gamer-centric gaming platform there is. But the only reason Xbox still exists inside Microsoft is timing: The future of the platform neatly coincides with Microsoft’s broader move to the cloud. It is somewhat interesting that this failure of a business has a brighter future, at least inside Microsoft, than does Windows, the product that got Microsoft to where it is in the first place.

To your point: Microsoft very much wants to exit the console business and it will do so, probably a lot more aggressively than their stating today. But it can’t just kill the money-losing part of the business if it wants to transition its customers to the new services, which are/will be hardware agnostic, and maintain a sense of continuity for those who are observing from the outside and might be swayed to switch in the future. If Microsoft suddenly announced, for example, that they were done with consoles because the cloud future was so great, many future potential customers would wonder about its dedication to the business and might choose otherwise as a result.

It’s a good thing this cloud business is finally starting to make sense. Otherwise, I bet Xbox One would have triggered Microsoft to kill this business or at least sell/spin it off.

Software that requires Windows 7 or older

hrlngrv asks:

I know there’s software which can run in Windows XP but not Windows 7 (the XP Powertoy Calculator being one example, its capacity for user-defined functions and graphing making it one of the best SMALL ad hoc math tools I’ve used). Is there much software which can run in Windows 7 but not Windows 10 which would cause enterprises and larger SMBs problems when Windows 7 reaches EOS in January? I understand IT departments have many reasons not to relish upgrading lots of PCs, but is lack of backwards compatibility one of those reasons for Windows 7 to Windows 10?

I can only speak anecdotally to this, but the answer is yes. I’ve seen this myself while testing older software packages for that Programming Windows series. And in recent weeks, especially, I’ve heard from several people who are starting to freak out about the coming Windows 7 EOL because they have older software—not written for Windows 7, but well before that—that will not run in Windows 10.

I wrote about a few possible options in The Windows 10 Waffle (Premium), but as with any other software transition, there are many who will simply be left out. And I’m not sure what their options are beyond continuing running Windows 7 and hoping for the best.

Cord cutting update

jmeiii75 asks:

I was just wondering if you could give us an update on your cord cutting (or lack thereof) status. My wife and I have been cord cutters for almost 3 years. Aside from Netflix. Prime, and Hulu (the last of which is paid for with Microsoft Rewards), we had been using PS Vue as our OTT service. We turn HBO Now, Starz, Showtime, and CBS All Access on and off as content dictates (Disney + is of obvious interest as well). We recently switched from Vue to Sling TV in order to save a bit of money and to explore a different service. We also toyed with the idea of an antenna for locals, but are using an app called Locast for this purpose (for now…Locast is now being sued by all 4 of the major networks. Essentially, they appear to be the 2019 version of Aereo). I remember you writing that this would be an area that you would dip in and out of. Anything new?

Not so much new, but after using and really enjoying HBO NOW between say April and July—to watch the end of Game of Thrones and Veep and to rewatch some older shows, especially Deadwood—we’ll be canceling that this week and maybe switching YouTube TV back on so we can watch football through January. Between now and then, Disney+ will come online, and we’ll get that too. (I’ll test but almost certainly not keep AppleTV+ as well.)

We’ve not missed traditional TV at all. And we may not need to pay for YouTube TV to watch football, I’m still looking into that.

I routinely hear from people on Twitter and via email who complain that cord cutting is just as expensive as cable and that, given that, it’s not worth switching. But the beauty of this approach isn’t so much the price, though I do find it less expensive overall. It’s the ability to move in and out of services at will. The HBO NOW thing is a good example, and we ended up keeping it longer than expected because we really used it. But now that that’s over, we can just walk away.

Office: Mobile vs. desktop

AnOldAmigaUser asks:

Do you have any information on what is going on with Office development in general, and specifically for the Mobile apps for Windows? … I went to the Store to look for the mobile office apps, and they were not there. As others have pointed out, you are redirected to the web to install the full versions for Office 365, so it seems that Office is no longer in the Store.

It just got me thinking that this is rather Chromebook-ish and was wondering if this move could be related to LiteOS, or if the mobile versions for Windows tablets was just such a niche version that they tossed them, and this is a first step towards a PWA.

I was just thinking about this, and about whether this is tied to the whole LiteOS thing. This is also tied to that Programming Windows series because, these days, everything in my mind is tied to that. Let me see if I can make sense of all that.

With the failure of UWP and Microsoft deemphasizing the Store (so that any apps which had been packaged for the Store can, or soon will be able to, be distributed normally on the web, you have to wonder about the point of a new platform (LiteOS) and the devices (Andromeda, now dead, or Centaurus). Will it be purely web-based like Chrome OS, and if so, where are all the PWA apps? Will it be Store-based, which seems kind of off given what’s happening with UWP/Store? Is there some new software platform coming (to replace UWP)? Etc.

When Microsoft killed UWP, readers asked me whether this meant that the built-in Windows 10 apps, like OneNote and Mail, would be rewritten as Win32 apps. This was the final trigger for Programming Windows as I had been thinking about this topic and knew that straight-up Win32 hasn’t been the answer for over 20 years. Whatever comes next, if something comes next, it will be “a thing on a thing,” an API or framework that is modern and sits on top of Win32.

The thing is, that may not happen. Microsoft has resuscitated both Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), both of which are .NET-based UI frameworks from the early to mid-2000s. Modern applications can be written in either, and both are arguably more powerful than UWP, especially since Microsoft has been porting all unique UWP functionality back to these frameworks.

Think about yesterday’s new tablet UI announcement for Windows 10: It’s just the normal Windows desktop with a more touch-friendly File Explorer. Maybe the future of Windows 10 is less mobile and more Windows. Maybe those future platforms and devices, should they ever ship, will likely still be PCs for all intents and purposes. Maybe Microsoft has finally conceded that Windows is Windows and there’s no next thing. No next API or framework. This is it.

Getting to Office, the Office Mobile apps were briefly the future, but I think that the death of Windows Mobile put a stop to that. There’s no point in working on less-capable versions of apps that will run on the same platform as the full-featured desktop apps. And there’s always the Office web apps, too. I think it’s fair to say that both will evolve going forward and that there will be no major architectural changes. And that the web version will never supplant the desktop versions.

I was talking to a source at Microsoft recently who told me that the company, overall, just wants to simplify the client to eliminate complexity, cost, and support needs. If users choose iPad or Chromebook over Windows, fine. The important point is that they’re using the services. On Windows, this will continue to be the existing apps—the desktop apps. Elsewhere, it will be web and mobile apps.

Microsoft could make just a few changes to the web Office apps—like offline support—to make them completely viable for many users. I’m surprised they’ve not done so.

Teams

wright_is asks:

Why has Microsoft decided to ignore the installation manifest for Office 365 this month? We don’t use Teams, and have it disabled in the Admin Center, yet since the last update, every time the PC is rebooted, Teams is re-installed and asks the user to log on. There doesn’t seem to be a way to stop this behaviour in Microsoft 365. In the end we blacklisted the Teams executable in our AV software.

I assume this was a mistake. I’ve heard from several people who booted into Windows 10 and found Teams running, including one who is on Office 365 Home, which is particularly strange. This can’t be purposeful.

I’m reminded that “why” questions are hard to answer. 🙂

The known unknowns

wright_is also asks:

Why do the “modern” Settings app often say that you don’t have the correct privileges to deinstall an application (as opposed to a UWP app) or change the network settings? Usually I have to then click through to the old Control Panel equivalent and I can deinstall or change setting from there with no problems – this is whether the user is an administrator or not.

I have not had this issue, to my memory. Do you see this same issue if you try to uninstall directly from Start?

Likewise, any news on when activating VPN connections from the taskbar in Windows 10 1903 will work reliably? We have a range of laptops and most of the Lenovos work properly, but Dells, for example, refuse to let the VPN be started from the taskbar, you have to go into the old Control Panel and right click on the VPN connection and start it from there.

Sorry, I haven’t seen this issue either. Granted, my VPN experiences are limited largely to ExpressVPN or similar when I’m traveling internationally, and it always works fine from the Networking connectoid.

Maybe/hopefully someone else here can help, sorry.

AirPlay on Roku

jt5 asks:

Have you heard any updates on Airplay support coming to Roku?

No, and now that you mention it, it has been a while, hasn’t it? There were rumors, corroborated by multiple sources, that Apple and Roku were working on bringing AirPlay 2 support to Roku’s devices back in March.

Here’s the thing: Roku always announces new versions of its set-top boxes in the fall, and it makes sense that this support would be part of that announcement. So that is the most likely timing: Roku announced its 2018 lineup on September 24, 2018, and its 2017 lineup on October 2, 2017, so I bet it will be somewhere around that time frame.

The question, of course, is whether this capability comes to older devices. I’m guessing yes, but that it will only be the more powerful streamers from the last year or two.

Programming Windows

wbhite asks:

Paul, I’m really enjoying the Programming Windows series. On the various screenshots you embed in those articles, I presume that they come from VMs that you’ve set up. For old Windows, Netscape Navigator, etc… did you just happen to still have those old install disks laying around? I’m curious how you were able to build those VMs; I’d love to go back in time and mess with Windows 95 for a while.

Yes, I’ve been using VirtualBox to run older Windows OSes in virtual machines. I do have a lot of old installers, including my original Windows 95 and Office 95 disks, but there is an incredible collection of older OSes, development environments, and applications available at WinWorld. This has been an invaluable resource.