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...