Ask Paul: November 15 (Premium)

Happy Friday! We’re on the eve of another Black Friday holiday shopping event, so let’s get the weekend off to a good start.

HP + Xerox?

drjohnnyray asks:

Whats your opinion of the proposed Xerox HP acquisition or Merger? Good or bad or HPs PC business?

I was surprised by this news, and I’m still not sure how to process it, mostly because I don’t understand Xerox’s business today (copiers?).

But it seems to be based mostly on HP’s printing business, and that makes me a bit worried about the fate of its PC business, which is excellent from a product quality perspective but problematic from a business perspective. PCs are an incredibly low-margin business, so I could see the long-term impact here being negative. But perhaps it will be more of a merger, where Xerox and HP’s printer business are essentially combined and the PC business remains untouched. I hope so.

Lots of questions

JustMe asks:

Recently got a new laptop and am going through the initial setup after power on. I have a few questions:

1) My new laptop came with 1809 Home installed, and as soon as I turned the laptop on, Cortana started chirping. While I silenced her quite quickly, I thought that was going away…?

It is going away in Windows 10 Pro, but it isn’t retroactive to older Windows 10 versions. But I’m not sure if that’s true for consumers, or if it’s only for businesses.

2) Is there ever *any* hope of Microsoft allowing consumers a “minimal install”? While my new kit is an HP Envy and therefore has a bit more crapware than normal, as ever, it always seems like there is more and more of it

No.

Sorry, that sounds cavalier, I know.  But the answer is no.

If you mean it from a crapware perspective, there are great arguments to be made about the long-term impact on PC sales due to poor experiences. But PC makers live a short-term experience, and have shown very little interest in abandoning the only part of the business that makes them any profits at all.

If you mean it from a Windows 10 feature perspective, Windows is already a legacy business and letting consumers arbitrarily not install OS components would make the remaining value proposition for application developers disappear overnight. They need to rely on Windows 10 being all there.

3) Why on earth can I not uninstall Your Phone? What about this app is deemed essential? (I was able to get rid of it – though I do wonder if the next feature update will bring it back.)

I would have to speculate, but you can remove any Store app in Windows 10 using PowerShell scripts and the like, as I suspect you discovered. My guess is that Your Phone is seen as a key part of that all-in Windows 10 approach because it relates to phone connectivity, which, if successful, would make Windows 10 more value to users.

4) Does a new Windows install automatically setup a new Outlook.com account for you? I was surprised going through Settings to see an email account set up for me as I hadnt done anything related to email with the device. When I investigated, it opened a browser to Outlook.com seemingly logged in with my MSA – or is that just a part of your microsoft account these days?

It’s always been part of your Microsoft account. It’s not created by Windows or when you first sign-in to Windows.

Google + Fitbit

cwfinn asks:

Do you see the acquisition of FitBit ($2.1 billion!!!) by Google as a net win or loss for users of the FitBit ecosystem?

It’s not clear yet what they intend to do with it.

Keeping the Fitbit fitness wearables as-is makes sense. But how does this impact Wear OS and Fitbit’s smartwatch platform? Do they get combined? Does one replace the other?

As Google’s Vic Gundrota once noted when Nokia adopted Windows Phone, “two turkeys don’t make an eagle.” That could be the case here: Wear OS and Fitbit’s smartwatch platform haven’t exactly made any inroads on Apple Watch. And I don’t see how combining them (or consolidating one out of the business) changes anything.

Windows 10 Home on Surface

chrishilton1 asks:

Hi Paul, I got a new Surface Laptop 3 this week, turned it on, connected to Wi-Fi, and the went to input my Office 365 credentials to log in. Needless to say, it would not accept a work or school account. This is because Microsoft is shipping it with Windows 10 Home. I wanted to deploy these to staff out of the box in the near future, but I can’t see a way round having to log on with my Hotmail account, upgrade to Windows 10 Edu, then reset the thing and start again (which worked). It doesn’t make sense why MS is shipping it’s flagship products with such a cut down version of Windows, that will not work in the enterprise out of the box, any thoughts?

Microsoft started shipping Windows 10 Home on Surface PCs sold to consumers last year. It obviously ships Windows 10 Pro on machines sold to businesses.

But looking at Windows 10 Home as “cut down” is not really fair: It’s just targeted at consumers. As you note, there is an educational version of Windows 10, or you could upgrade to Windows 10 Pro. If you are going to deploy machines to staff, why on earth are you buying consumer devices?

No simplified ribbon in sight

Lewk asks:

I was wondering if you’ve heard anything recently from Microsoft about the roll-out of the new Simplified Ribbon UI? In the article you wrote announcing the new UI back in June of last year, you warned us of a tortured roll-out with no clear schedule. But I sincerely didn’t think we’d be sitting here a year and a half later with zero news about it. I’ve really looked forward to this update, as it’s much friendlier to use on the web. But I’d love to have it in the desktop app too.

No, and I’m waiting for this as well. I will ask about this.

The Mandalorian

helix2301 asks:

What are your thoughts on the new Mandalorian series on Disney+?

I welcome any new Star Wars content and was eagerly awaiting this show. I’ve only seen the one episode so far, but I’m really unimpressed: It’s slow-moving, with stiff dialog, a main character who never takes off his helmet, which is ridiculous, and an unclear point. As a long-time Star Wars uber-fan, I got all the (often heavy-handed) references, or least I think I did, which I bet most won’t. But I just don’t like it yet. We’ll see if it improves.

Non-Google search

jmeiii75 asks:

Last week, you wrote that you have been trying to stick with default browsers when using various mobile devices. This question may seem very obvious, but what about search engines? Is it always Google for you? I think it’s fair to say that, in terms of search results, Google is the clear winner. However, this may come at a cost, depending on how you feel about Google and privacy. I don’t know why I do this to myself, but once switched to the new Edge (desktop and mobile) a few months back, I made the decision to keep the default search engine set to Bing (Yes, I actually did this on purpose). This has been painful at times and, in some cases, if I don’t get a satisfactory answer, I end up actually navigating to Google.com and trying my search there. The difference is laughable at times, but I still don’t switch my default to Google. It’s almost as if I am condescendingly saying “Come on Bing. You can do it.” Just to be clear, I am not anti-Google per se and, before the new Edge, I had been using Chrome and Google as defaults for as long as I can remember. This is just some kind of experiment to see how many times I have to go back to Google. I guess I just don;t want to be dependent on anything. What are you thoughts on this and have you tried something similar?

Yeah, I have tried. And I just can’t stand Bing, overall. I always go right back to Google when it comes up. Seeing Bing is what reminds me that I want Google Search.

Google Search is like Google Maps: I’m not going to punish myself by not using it. What I found with using the default browser on mobile was that it didn’t matter. But search does matter. (To me.)

From paper to digital photos

harmjr asks:

How is your physical to digital photos going?

I finished that several months ago. I have a few folders of mostly unsortable photos to still figure out, but the big stuff is all done. This was almost certainly the best thing that happened this year, from a personal tech perspective.

Do you share your collections with your extended family and so whats your choice of sharing.

Not yet, but I will do that. I have local copies of all the scanned photos, and some of the family I want to share with aren’t particularly sophisticated from a tech perspective, so I will likely just distribute it on USB hard drives.

Any new devices you mentioned having -I think- google device in the kitchen?

We use a Google Assistant-based Lenovo Smart Display in our kitchen that displays photos from an automatically-updated Google Photos album of family and friends. It’s excellent, and I highly recommend it. When I see a photo I want to share, I can say “Hey Google, share this photo,” and it kicks off a wizard so I can send the new photo to someone. It’s just great.

Any new recommendations?

Getting over the bulk photo scan was the key for me: Previously, I just didn’t expect to ever scan in all those photos. But now that it’s done, I’m thinking about maybe tackling my parents’ photos in the future. I’m currently loaning the scanner to a friend so he can do the same.

But nothing new on scanning, storing, or sharing, no. I still use/rely on both Google Photos and OneDrive.