Ask Paul: April 1 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Here’s a great set of thought-provoking and April Fools-free questions from readers to get the weekend off to an early start.
Hardcore software
mattbg asks:

Have you been following Steven Sinofsky's "Hardcore Software" series? What do you think about it? It seems like an important and comprehensive look at how Microsoft worked in the past, and there are occasionally side discussions in the comments area from ex-MSFT employees. I have been finding it difficult to keep up with the content - it has a bit more detail than I need in some areas - but find it very interesting regardless.

Not yet. I would like to record my version of this history before I look at the history rewriting that I know he is engaging in: he will be the hero in his version of this story. But he’s not the hero, and I will check out his latest overly long missives when I’m done.

I’m not surprised you’re having a hard time getting through it. At least you can walk away. Imagine if you were working for this guy and he sent you 5,000-word emails every night.
Intent
Sykeward asks:

Hey, thanks for all you do first of all, I've loved reading your material since Windows 98 Secrets. My questions are about enthusiasm for technology. There's obviously going to be cooling when new technologies and device types move from exciting and new to ubiquitous, everyday things; laptops and smartphones are pretty same-y these days. But lately it seems that when talking about what's new in Windows, for example, it's all things we DON'T want, like built-in advertising and intentionally hard-to-use UI's.

I didn’t actually write Windows 98 Secrets, by the way, that was Brian Livingston. Though I did work with him on the first edition of Windows Vista Secrets, and was, of course writing about Windows from about 1994 on.

Regarding the shift in how we discuss Windows these days, I know that complaining about superfluous features we don’t want was always part of the discussion. But as personal computing has moved past Windows, and with Microsoft focusing more on the cloud for the past decade, it’s perhaps understandable that Windows just doesn’t play the same role it used to, and so there are no interesting advances to be had either. And of course most people who use Windows simply want it to keep doing what it does, and they aren’t super-interested in whiz-bang new features or whatever. And from Microsoft’s perspective, Windows is still a cash cow, and upsetting that would be as dumb as ignoring it. And so they have been trying to make Windows make sense in this new subscription model, ad-driven world. And here we are, with ads for subscriptions and other unwanted nonsense in Windows.

More broadly, the tech stories of the day all seem to be things like worker abuses and bad developer relations, usurious app store fees, misinformation "engagement", and advertiser spying/tracking. The recent news that Facebook hired a GOP marketing firm to fe...

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