Ask Paul: March 25 (Premium)

Happy Friday, and happy Spring! Let’s wrap up a curiously busy week with yet another great set of reader questions.
Steam deck
christianwilson asks:

Steam Deck is one product by a single company but the idea of a portable PC designed for games is compelling. Do you think there's potential for the Switch/Steam Deck design to become a new PC form factor?

Unless Valve is protecting the design, I don’t see any reason why Dell, HP, Lenovo, or any other PC maker couldn’t make PCs like the Steam Deck. The question, I guess, is whether this form factor represents a big enough potential market. PC gaming is huge, obviously. But this is still new and it’s unclear whether it will resonate with a wide audience. Part of the problem is the interaction model: most PC gamers use a keyboard and mouse today, and it’s easy enough to add an Xbox or PS controller to a PC if you prefer that.

I could see Dell and others producing a Windows 11-based mobile PC similar in design to the Steam Deck. It could function like any other computer when docked to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse but instead of being productivity focused like a laptop, it would be PC gaming focused when on the go.

For sure. But again, the question here is just whether that makes sense. Traditional form factors like laptops and Tablet PCs have large, established audiences. And they serve people interested in portable PC gaming, too.
Traditional Office vs. the future
spacecamel asks:

I know you talked about it a little on Windows Weekly but why doesn't Microsoft make the paid online version of Office with the same features as the various applications? This is essentially what they are doing with Outlook and would apply them to stop having to update the various different applications on different platforms (i.e. Windows and Mac).

There were periods of time when it seemed like Microsoft was going to, in turn, move Office from its native codebases to the web and then to mobile ... and then didn’t. And I think the issue they ran into in each case was the same: the complexity of those codebases and the incredible challenge of duplicating every single feature in apps like Word or Excel to these more lightweight platforms. (I don’t know what this looks like today, but as Bill Gates noted as long ago as 2005, Word 2003 had 35 toolbars and over 1,500 commands. And 19 task panes, which he didn’t mention.)

That said, I could see Microsoft making the web-based versions of Office the standard over time, but that’s sort of hollow given how little these apps are updated. They don’t even support basic PWA functionality, like offline support. But the point of an effort like that would have to be to move Office to a single codebase that would work everywhere. It seems worth it to me.

And Microsoft has done things like this in the past. It moved the Windows codebase from 9x/DOS and it completely rewrote .NET to make it open source. Maybe after this “One Outlook” t...

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