Ask Paul: May 14 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Because I’m traveling yet again today, I had to get this done a bit early, but we still have a great set of reader questions to tackle.

Chromebook tablets

hrlngrv asks:

Have you used or have any plans to review Chrome OS tablets like HP’s Chromebook x2? Maybe not as an alternative to iPads, but how they stack up against Android tablets.

No, but I’m open to trying one, of course. In the meantime, there are two related items that might be of interest.

First, I’ve been trying to catch up on my hardware reviews and the next devices in line for review (chronologically) are both Chromebooks. And not just Chromebooks, but Chromebook convertibles, meaning that they can be used like (large/heavy) tablets. They are the HP Elite c1030 Chromebook Enterprise and the Lenovo ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook Enterprise. I’ve been thinking about the right way to write these up, and instead of doing a normal and separate review of each, I will probably do a single write-up (maybe “A tale of two premium Chromebooks” or whatever) with an eye towards the next item…

Which is that I’m getting geared up to write a new “Living with…” series based around web apps. This one will be different from previous “Living with…” series in that it will probably be called “Living on the web” and will be structured differently. Here’s a cut and paste from the beginning of the first post:

“Rather than dropping (almost) everything to more accurately experience what it’s like to use a different platform, I’ll be examining many different aspects of the web app experience from a variety of angles over a longer period of time. And this won’t require me to “switch” from my normal ways of doing things normally, which has its appeal.”

In other words, it will likely be a longer series of shorter articles that examine specific things related to web apps and making the transition from native apps to web apps. Using touch- and pen-based web platforms like Chrome OS will definitely be part of this. I hope to get this going soon.

(Also, I’ll probably have another PC review before I do that Chromebook write-up.)

Military tech

j5 asks:

This might seems like a strange question. But have you ever covered military tech? I remember coming across some articles awhile back when Samsung was experimenting with bendable screens. And maybe I came across them in just Googling bendable screens but I read about some experimental military suits with screens like that in the forearms, sensors that could detect wounds and inject pain killers, GPS tracking to see where all the soldiers are on the battlefield, stuff like that. And there’s those creepy but really cool DARPA dog type robots that we have now. Just curious what you think about military tech or if it comes across your screen in doing your work.

No, nothing directly. Obviously, there are the odd moments where Microsoft or some other company is in the news for military reasons (like the recent HoloLens news or the JEDI drama). The closest I get to military technology is when I play Call of Duty. 🙂

Reading habits

helix2301 asks:

I know you have written about it before but I was wondering your morning reading routine I know you read a lot on iPad. Could you give a little insight into your reading habits while you have your coffee. What sites you read, what apps you read on etc. Wondering what your reading habits look like during the day your always talking about new books with Leo just wondering where this time fits in to your day and what you read.

I’ve been a life-long reader and I recall resorting to reading all sides of a cereal box as a kid if there wasn’t anything more substantial nearby. But I quickly graduated to reading the newspaper as a kid, initially because I was interested in the comics. And then I discovered there was a lot more there than that.

Flash forward, say, 40-ish years, and I do all my reading on an iPad, as you know. Today, as with normal (pre-COVID) times, that’s most of what I do with an iPad, though when I travel alone, I typically use one for movies and other videos too. But mostly it’s reading. And you can see that by the app icons I put in the dock, which are all reading-related and arranged, from right-to-left, in the order I read them, generally: The New York Times (which I read less and less of over time, but I still start here and read the front page and Most Popular sections at least), Google News (For You and Technology), Google (Discovery feed), Pocket, Medium, Amazon, Kindle, and Microsoft Edge.

My morning always includes the NY Times, Google News, and the Google Discovery feed. And then, depending on the time (we walk the dog by 8:15 at the latest) and my mood, I’ll look at Pocket, Medium, and/or Kindle. For the past four or five days, I’ve turned to Kindle first because I’ve been rereading “2010: Odyssey Two” by Arthur C. Clarke. I always liked this story, both the book and the movie. And I’m delighted how well this book has stood up over time. It’s nice to have something to look forward to reading again.

I also read at other times, of course, and always before I go to bed, even if I’m really tired. And I often fall asleep while doing so, which is dumb, but it’s kind of a life-long habit.

Can we get an update on Andrew?

I’m waiting on Andrew like everyone else. He’s been horrifically busy getting his primary job up and running post-COVID and says he has some ideas for moving the podcast forward. But it’s on him.

What if…

bschnatt asks:

I’m always curious how history plays out, and what might have been. I know forecasting is really hard, but how do you think things would have played out if Microsoft *hadn’t* killed:

The Band. (Wow, I just had a ’70’s rock movie flashback – “Aww, man, you’re killing the band?!”) I really liked mine. That is, until it crumbled on me – definitely not the best built device. Would Microsoft be the market leader in health tracking instead of Apple if they had kept this?

Of all the products you mention, this is the one, curiously, that I have the most trouble with. Microsoft was well ahead of the market (Fitbit, of course, but also Apple Watch) with its multi-sensor approach and the promise of Band, that it would be able to use its knowledge of your workday (through Outlook integration) and your health and fitness trends over time could help it better help its users. “You’re about to start a meeting and your heart rate always goes up during this time, so let’s try some breathing exercises or meditation,” or whatever, is a promise made and never kept. Maybe they just realized it was impossible. Maybe they belatedly realized what Fitbit had already discovered, that it’s really easy to make unreliable hardware that will lead to problems. I don’t know. I feel like they could have stuck this one out.

Windows Phone. Do you think this would have been a positive or negative move? Microsoft is fairly close to migrating to Project Maui. Do you think we would have been at a better place development-wise if they hadn’t killed Windows Phone, or do you think Maui will be the better move in the long run?

Windows phone became unsustainable as both a platform and a business, so I don’t begrudge Microsoft this one. Though as one of the world’s first Windows phone enthusiasts—I wrote the first-ever Windows phone book and later gave away a Windows phone book to fans—I obviously understand the hard feelings. This is the Band problem all over again: Great ideas, but big promises missed. And while everyone has their own theories about the one thing that killed Windows phone, there’s no such thing. This platform died from a thousand cuts, none more important than the others. This was natural selection, basically.

Windows Media Center: I *loved* that user interface and I was not happy to see Microsoft kill it. Considering the utility and popularity of Plex (of which I’m a huge adherent), I think Microsoft made a mistake with this one. They could have been Plex!

When I first saw Media Center, then called Freestyle, at CES 2002, I was blown away. And as with Windows phone, I quickly because a Media Center enthusiast and spent the next several years using various PCs in my living room along with all the IR blasting nonsense that it required. What I remember is a discussion with the folks who worked on this, and the debate they had at the time was whether to go the Xbox route, with a standalone device, or whether to tap into Microsoft’s vast experience with PCs and make a software-based solution. They chose the latter, and while that probably made sense on some level, it was clearly the wrong decision. Most Media Center PCs were just big tower PCs and they were ungainly in the living room. (This later changed, but the market had moved on.) We all understand that PCs are big and complex and we’re today debating about Windows 10X. This was even more true in 2002-2003. No one wants a PC in the living room.

Oddly, this situation is repeating itself on a minor level today with Xbox and PlayStation consoles used as media devices. There are much smaller, power-efficient, and silent devices for this purpose now—Apple TV, Google TV, Roku, Fire TV, etc.—that make much more sense.

But the other way to look at this is that Microsoft’s strengths are in productivity/commercial computing and not with consumers. Media Center is from an era in which it didn’t yet understand that it had lost consumers forever. Today, that’s more obvious.

Extra credit: What do you think would happen if Microsoft gave away Windows, and if they did, would it be better to keep in closed-source, or make it open-source?

Like a lot of Windows fans, I’ve often wondered about this, mostly because it’s hard to believe sometimes that Microsoft puts any effort at all into improving this product. But while it generates what I’ll call $8 billion to $12 billion in revenues per quarter, this will never happen. Microsoft will keep Windows limping along.

But let’s pretend. I feel like the Windows codebase is too messy and perhaps even legally problematic to open source. And that a better approach, as technically impossible as it may be, would be for Microsoft to transition to Linux on the desktop and figure out some way in which Windows apps can run reliably and with great performance on that open-source platform. The issue, when you think about it, isn’t so much Windows, it’s the Windows apps. And if those apps are accessible elsewhere, via virtualization, remote access, or natively, maybe we can solve all the legacy issues we now deal with by getting rid of the OS. And making a Linux that looks just like it.

What I just wrote is nonsense, of course, in the sense that it will never happen and because the technical hurdles are too high to bother trying. But I feel like Window, sadly, is the problem. And that the only way to get people off of a legacy codebase is to let those apps run elsewhere, on more modern platforms. The only other approach is what I wrote last week: Keep Windows as-is but lock it down over time, first with prompts and then via something more sophisticated like containers.