Ask Paul: March 11 (Premium)

Happy Friday! I’m still reeling from our trip, but here’s another great set of reader questions to kick off the weekend a bit early.
Space travel
bschnatt asks:

I know you've said you would never visit Mars, but would you consider a trip to the moon? Eventually, there'll be a big moon city there (built by Hilton, no doubt). Personally, I'd love to see the original Apollo 11 landing site...

My issue with space travel isn’t the time, it’s the takeoff process. I assume I told the story about me riding the Stratosphere in Las Vegas and realizing that I could never be an astronaut. I get queasy when I walk out over glass in a building or whatever. If space travel involved an airplane-like experience, I could probably handle going to the moon, I guess. But not on a rocket.

Plus, if you want to see the moon, just go to Arizona. :)
Outlook on mobile
arjay asks:

Today, after trying to use it for several months, I removed the iOS Outlook app from my iPad and iPhone. It looks nothing like any other Outlook I have used, and is — in my opinion — poorly designed. Much of the management control for organizing email is either missing, or I’m not smart enough to find it.

It’s interesting that you had this experience because I did the same thing: I vaguely like the idea of using the Microsoft email solution, and I like that calendar is built-in, etc. But I just didn’t like it either. I use Gmail on mobile now. (Which is also a bit easier since the back-end service I’m using is Gmail and things happen more immediately.)

Is iOS Outlook supposed to be part of the One Outlook redesign? If so, they have a lot of work to do.

No, it’s not. But I hope/expect that Microsoft will fully rev the mobile client at some point to match. Unfortunately, it’s a completely different codebase.
Portable gaming
justme asks:

On the XBox front, I was somewhat surprised to hear that Valve may consider allowing Game Pass to work through Steam, particularly on Steam Deck. Given the potential success of the device and the success of the Switch, do you think MIcrosoft would ever release their own XBox hand-held focued on cloud and Game Pass (essentially, eliminating the middle man)?

No, I don’t believe so.

It’s pretty clear that Microsoft’s goals with Xbox revolved around moving the platform to services that work everywhere---and Phil Spencer has specifically said he wants Xbox Game Pass on Switch---and that, in doing so, it can eliminate its biggest, unrecoverable costs, which are hardware-related. Microsoft has only lost money on hardware, and moving Xbox to the cloud will fix that. So it makes more sense for Microsoft to put Xbox Game Pass on existing hardware and let other companies shoulder that burden.

A couple of related points.

A Steam Deck with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is pretty much that portable Xbox. It would provide access to both PC and, via streaming, console titles.

Microsoft doesn’t even make a ...

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