Ask Paul: August 27 (Premium)

It’s the last week of August, so let’s kick off the weekend, and the end of the month, a bit early with some great reader questions.

Language barriers

erichk asks:

Paul, I’m curious, when you travel internationally, how do you handle the language barriers? Nowadays we have better tools for that kind of thing, but that wasn’t always the case. I know when I finally visited Europe with my parents in 2008, I was fortunate that a lot of people spoke English. Is this true in your case as well?

The availability of language tools like Google Translate, and language learning apps like Duolingo (which I can no longer recommend) and Busuu (which is superior) does help. But there are different levels of language understanding, and while my wife and I are not bilingual or even proficient in some second language, we have both spent many years studying languages—mostly French and Spanish—specifically because we’ve long intended to spend time in countries in which English is not the primary language (and have done so).

Many travel experts advise that visitors learn some key phrases in the language used in the country they’re visiting: Words like “bonjour” and so on. But this is insufficient, even if you’re visiting a major city like Paris or Mexico City where most people do speak some English: It’s not enough to just toss out some easy words when you enter a restaurant or business, you need to make an effort. It’s not on the people there to speak your language, it’s on you to speak theirs. It is astonishing to me how many times someone in another country has apologized to me that they don’t speak English well, when in fact they do, and I always tell them not to do this. The responsibility is ours.

My wife and I are very comfortable with what I call “restaurant Spanish” (or “restaurant French”), meaning that we can pretty much look at a menu written in those languages and not need much help and­­­—and this is the important bit—be able to handle the types of conversations one might have in such a place. For example, when a waiter walks up to your table for the first time, he’s almost certainly going to say hello and ask if we are ready to order drinks or similar; he’s not going to ask if it’s raining outside or what the exchange rate is right now. Context is important.

This bit comes from a conversation my wife had with our son Mark, who is deaf and wears a cochlear implant. When he was young, he was nervous about talking to adults because he was worried about the range of questions they might ask. But as my wife told him, accurately, adults are only going to ask a few questions of a kid: How are you? How are you doing in school? That kind of thing. And that’s exactly what happened.

Our travels often take us outside of comfortable, English-speaking areas, and that’s by design. We routinely have the following conversation no matter where we travel:

Me (in the local language): “Hello. Do you speak English?”

Person: “No.” (Or, more politely, “Only a little bit.”)

Me: “OK.” (And then proceed to muddle through it in the local language as much as possible.)

This requires you to know some of the language, of course. But we do, at least with French and Spanish, and I see these incidents as a challenge and a chance to use what we’ve learned and perhaps learn some more.

In our most recent trip, we didn’t fall too far outside the English comfort zone for the most part. San Miguel de Allende is an expat haven, so English was common. And English is common in the center of Mexico City. But there were instances in which our Spanish studies paid off. Guanajuato, for example, is a vacation destination for Mexicans, not Americans, and it’s mostly Spanish there. We did great because most of our interactions were restaurant-based. And in Mexico City, we got into a conversation with the Uber driver who took us to the canals at Xochimilco, a 40-45 minute drive from our Airbnb, which was kind of interesting.

The driver only spoke Spanish, no English. And I could tell that what he was asking was whether we needed help finding a boat at Xochimilco (we did not) and whether we needed him to pick us up when we were done. I wanted to make sure we got it right. So I pulled out my phone and we did a Star Trek-like thing where we spoke in our own languages to Google Translate and muddled through it. Turns out I was mostly right: He was actually offering to sit there for the two hours we’d be on the boat and then drive us back. The cost would be the same price as the drive there, the difference being that he would get all of the money in cash for the return trip and not just some tiny percentage as he would through Uber.

We immediately agreed because this was fair and because the amount of money for this two-hour wait plus the return drive was so small: Our trip there cost a bit over 400 pesos, so about $21 US. And we gave him 500 pesos, or about $25, for the wait and the return. Both sides were happy about the value received, though as I wrote in this past week’s Premium newsletter, the poverty in Mexico is stunning and it bothers me that this made sense to him financially. What can I say, it’s a different world.

Basically, this all boils down to that acceptable level of challenge thing I often write about when it comes to travel. We’re comfortable to some degree with French and Spanish because we’ve studied both and visited countries that speak those languages many times, and our proficiency has gone up over time. A visit to an Asian country like Japan or China would be more problematic, for sure.

The future of Windows 11

hrlngrv asks:

Since Windows 98 appeared, there have always been at least 2 versions of at least 32-bit, long filename-supporting Windows in support at the same time. Even given the Longhorn fiasco, Windows ME and 2K were both in support most of the period between XP and Vista general availability (ME missed just the last few months of that period). Will there really be only Windows 11 in support as of late October 2025, will Windows 12 also be available by Windows 10 EOS, or will MSFT be compelled to extend Windows 10 support like they were forced to extend XP support?

This is one of the great unknowns as Microsoft has never really explained its plans to update/upgrade Windows 11 over time. It did the same thing with Windows 10, too. So we can only use the past as our guide and guess.

On that note, we know that Microsoft will update Windows 11 with new product versions via feature packs every year, and my guess is that each will get a 2xH2 version that matches the accompanying Windows 10 2H upgrade each year. Microsoft will stop supporting Windows 10 in five years, but whether it will offer paid additional support, as it did for Windows 7, will depend on how much of its enterprise customer base is still on Windows 10. That is certainly an option.

If you look out to five years from now, there are a few possibilities with regards to Windows 11 and newer/different Windows products. Microsoft could simply keep upgrading Windows 11 as it did with Windows 10. It could introduce Windows 12 in 2-3 years to match the support lifecycle it announced previously, and then Windows 13 2-3 years after that. It could revive Windows 10X for simpler PC-like devices, and that could be that second Windows OS.

But the most likely outcome, whatever it is, is one we can’t really predict right now because things change. For example, had the pandemic not happened and PC sales had continued flatlining or falling, and had Microsoft figured out a way to make the Win32 container in Win32 actually work, is almost certain that this year would have been about yet another set of boring Windows 10 updates and the far more interesting new UX that would debut in Windows 10X on exciting new not-quite-PC devices.

What will the world look like in 2-3 or 5 years? Will there be more COVID variants and more uncertainty? Will PC sales continuing falling despite Windows 11, leading Microsoft to ignore Windows again? I’m not Nostradamus, but these things are both possible. As are so many other things.

With regards to Windows 11 specifically, I don’t think even Microsoft knows exactly what it’s going to do. A lot of this feels more like them playing it as it comes than them being secretive but knowing exactly what they’re going to do. I think things will evolve reactionarily, as they have for the past 5-6 years with Windows 10.

Related: when do you believe Windows 11 will reach 50% usage?

Hm. When did Windows 10 hit 50 percent? I’ll call it as roughly January 1, 2019: If you accept that there were/are 1.5 billion PCs, Microsoft revealed that there were 700 million active Windows 10 users in September 2018 and then 800 million active users in March 2019, and that’s sort of the halfway point between those dates. So that took about 3.5 years.

It’s unclear if Windows 11 will follow the same basic upgrade path, but I think a combination of factors will play a role, and I’m not sure of the hard numbers here: The number of incompatible (with Windows 11) corporate PCs out in the world vs. the number of businesses that will simply milk Windows 10 for the next five years, and so on.

But we could also look at the rates at which individual Windows 10 versions rose in usage, I guess. I tried to find an example of a Windows 10 version with 50 percent usage share, but the most recent one I found was version 1903, which hit 48.2 percent share in May 2020, almost one year after it was first released. So Windows 11 could theoretically get to 50 percent pretty quickly.

There are so many conflicting factors at work here. The upgrade is easier than ever. But a larger portion of the user base is incompatible than ever before too. It’s not clear.

Edgebook

kdjones74 asks:

Paul – If you could get a Chromebook, but with Edge instead of Chrome, a 14in 1080p display, light weight & no fan, with a couple of workdays worth of battery life, from a major PC maker, for $250 would you be interested? Because I bought one – on sale at Best Buy a couple of weeks ago – the Samsung Galaxy Book Go. I put Windows 11 beta on it and it works great. Edge is snappy and so is Firefox (ARM64 version) and it’s a great machine for my use case (browsing while watching TV on the couch, personal traveling).

Based on years of experience with Chromebooks, probably not, and certainly not as a primary computer. But once Android app compatibility is available in Windows 11, the differences between Windows on Arm and Chrome OS will certainly tilt more in Windows’ favor. And Windows on Arm is creeping towards being a viable alternative regardless.

To be fair, it’s not my only computer. I have a laptop from my employer and a desktop I built (gaming/dev/work backup), but I found I didn’t want to do personal stuff on a work laptop and I didn’t want to give up the flexibility of a desktop. What I wanted was a light weight, low cost, laptop which I’ll use for browsing / watching videos 99% of the time. I wonder how these ARM based Windows machines would sell if they didn’t have the name “Windows” attached to them? Edgebook anyone?

Yeah, I wonder the same and worry that the Windows on Arm brand has been tarnished by years of bad compatibility, poor performance, and high prices, at least for new machines. The 7cx-based stuff doesn’t help much in the perception department because we need better performance and lower prices. But like many, I hope that the coming generation of new Qualcomm chipsets, not expected until next year, will make this happen.

Digital art

Anoldamigauser asks:

As someone who studied art when younger, is there something about the experience of using a pen on a computer or tablet that makes you feel they are not the right tool for you to draw or paint or simply take notes? Do you still dabble in drawing or painting with real media?

No, and that’s really the key here. Not that drawing and taking notes with a digital pen is (or isn’t) similar or superior to doing so on paper, but that I gave up drawing and writing by hand long before Tablet PCs and the iPad ever existed. And that doing either is painful to me now.

I used to have spectacular handwriting. But over the years, as the need to write decreased, and my use of computer keyboards increased, I’ve lost that. In fact, writing is physically painful to me: I can’t get through writing a check without feeling my wrist seize up. And I can type much, much faster than I could ever handwrite, regardless of the quality, etc.

And while art was always something I was good at—drawing more so than painting—but it was also something forced on me by my parents, and something I realized would never amount to a career. And so I gave up on it and never think about it anymore. I don’t have any desire to scribble or draw or whatever in any medium. I’m just not interested.

I can tell using things like Surface Pen or Apple Pencil that these firms have reached some incredible level of sophistication that should meet the needs of many people who have note-taking or art-related needs. But I also know they’re just not for me in any capacity.

Stadia

christianwilson asks:

Google has been more open about their cloud gaming services (Stadia) being used as a white label service for other publishers. The idea being that a publisher, say EA, could roll out an EA Play streaming service that is powered by Google in the background. Customers could, in theory, subscribe to EA Play to stream games, dealing directly with EA, while Google is the silent partner running in the background. Do you think Google’s focus has always been more about the infrastructure with their real customers being developers/publishers?

No, but only because there have been so many insider accounts of what went wrong there in the wake of this past year’s changes, and it’s very clear that Google wanted Stadia to be a first-class game streaming service and the market leader. But it’s still quite viable as-is—it’s a lot further along than Amazon Luna, for example—and I think Stadia could still play a role in this market.

More importantly, when Stadia is looked at in this light, do you see a brighter future for Google’s cloud gaming aspirations?

Yes. There are only a handful of companies with the infrastructure to be both first-party services and backends for third-party services, and it is not coincidental that all three—Amazon, Google, and Microsoft—are actively working both angles. The question is whether all three will be doing both years from now and, if so, which end of the business will be more successful. For example, if Sony does use Azure as the back-end for its future game streaming service, that could potentially be more successful than Xbox Cloud Gaming. And if so, great, Microsoft wins either way. Google could absolutely have a future like that as well.