Ask Paul: August 13 (Premium)

Greetings from Mexico City. Let’s kick off the weekend---and Mexico’s quincentennial---with some great reader questions.
Windows 365, phones, and the future
Brothernod asks:

Any chance that Windows 365 would work on a docked Windows Phone?

I suppose it’s technically possible since there is/was a Microsoft Remote Desktop app for the platform. And if that’s still installed … maybe. I don’t have any way to test that out. Would it work with Continuum, etc.? Again, I don’t know. But we’ve seen some interesting “mods” (for lack of a better term) on Windows phones in recent years. Obviously, you’re better off going a support route on mobile in 2021, and Windows 365 does work on iPhone and Android.

If this were available 5 years ago might it have saved Windows Phone in the corporate space?

A few readers chimed in on this one, for understandable reasons. And while there’s no need to beat this one to death---we get it, Windows phone is dead---there is an alternate history in which Microsoft continued forward with that platform, accepted some minimal level of success, and made it the preferred/best/whatever mobile platform for Microsoft 365. Obviously, that never happened, but it is interesting to wonder how some of the innovations (again, for lack of a better word) that Microsoft has come out with in the intervening years might have impacted Windows phone had it still been around.

As someone who worked part time in the office and part time at home, the idea of having my cell phone be my laptop was always very appealing.

I’ve always been fascinated by this as well, and always imagined some world in which you’d bring some smartphone with you out in the world and dock it in various places---a work docking station, the back of an airline seat, etc.---to access your work and personal information and content. But the reality of this configuration, be it Windows phone and Continuum, Samsung, DeX, or whatever, has never lived up to the promise, at least so far.

What has been successful, I think, is storing your data in cloud services like OneDrive and then accessing it from multiple devices. I often start working on an article on my desktop PC and then go upstairs, lie down on the bed, and finish it on a laptop. Or, on this trip, I started an article on a laptop on a plane and finished it from an Airbnb, on a different laptop, in a different place. This kind of thing relies on relatively cheap and pervasive access to both hardware and an Internet connection, but for much of the world, that’s where we are.

If you can get over whatever platform preferences you have---I happen to prefer Windows for PCs, Android for phones, and iPads for tablets---that data is available anywhere. And in many ways, that’s more important than a particular hardware platform being successful. For example, if Android somehow drops off the face of the earth, or if I just decide I prefer iPhones better for some reason, all my...