Ask Paul: January 8 (Premium)

Happy Friday, and welcome to the first Ask Paul of 2021. Let’s get the weekend, and the new year, off to an early start with some great reader questions.
Quick resume
whgb asks:

It seems that the best feature from either of the new consoles is the Xbox Series X/S's Quick Resume feature. It's especially good for people like me with young children with little time to game, who have to drop it at a moment's notice.

Agreed. This might literally be the marquee feature of the new consoles.

Do you know or can you speculate if it might be coming to PC at some point? Or Xbox Cloud Gaming? The latter is a great concept, but it takes such a long time to load up and get into a game at this point. You'd have to think that they'd work on startup loading times at some point this year, perhaps replacing the Xbox One S blades that currently run it and take a long time to load.

Microsoft has never said that it would do so, but I could see this feature coming to both. On the PC, it would of course require some specific hardware capabilities with regards to SSD speed, etc. And in the cloud, yes, it would require upgrading to Xbox Series X blades, which I think is safe to assume to be inevitable.
Insider program status
eeisner asks:

What's going on with the Insider Program these days? It seemed like (for better or for worse) under Aul and Sarkar the Insider Program was both very visible and made out to be a much bigger deal, and now these days... pretty quiet.

Yep.

I wonder about this a lot, but I think it’s also fair to say that the program dropped the engineering focus after Gabel Aul left and became more marketing-focused, which is understandable but still disappointing for some people (certainly for me). What this means, practically speaking, is that the Insider Program is divorced from engineering---i.e. the team(s) that are actually building Windows---and so they’ve become a middleman between engineering and Insiders. And it’s long suffered from poor communication, as I’ve complained many times.

But this past year or so has been particularly tough. The Insider program was essentially leaderless from October 2019, when Ms. Sarkar left, until March 2020, when Panos Panay appointed Amanda Langowski as the new lead for the Windows Insider Program. And since then ... what? Nothing. She gets a bit of a pass for two reasons: The pandemic and the fact that Panay took control of Windows just a month earlier, in February, and no doubt needed time to formulate a way forward. And to be fair, she did say that she’d be less active/visible than her predecessor.

But still. It’s been almost a year, and I can’t think of a single substantive action or communication from Ms. Langowski, let alone the housekeeping that the Insider program has needed for years. She has literally written only two blog posts since taking over, and the most recent one is from June 2020. As with the wider Windows team, I think we’re overdue for an u...