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 feed fake stories about TikTok “viral trends” to local stations which were then reported everywhere, for the sole purpose of making TikTok look bad ahead of their testimony to congress, is something straight out of a Black Mirror episode. My wife and I kept our kids from school one day because of the fake “school shooting challenge” TikTok news stories which seem to have been part of this – we knew it was probably fake, but we couldn’t live with ourselves if something happened, especially since the restrooms at said school have been damaged by previous TikTok “challenges.”

Yeah, when the companies that matter the most to people are superficial, this is what happens. It’s style over substance. We’re all much more concerned about the next iPhone, the next hot meme, and whatever some stupid celebrity did or said to think about substantive issues. In personal tech, in particular, there are weighty conversations to be had about market power abuse and so on, but many seem uninterested in any of that, and many that are interested seem to blindly just accept whatever Big Tech gives them. Look, it’s an iPhone 14 rumor!

I think back to the era when I was reading your Windows 98 book and the joy I felt about technology, and then reflect on how I now feel so drained by an industry I once lived for. In your opinion, have things in the industry really taken a dim turn, or is it my COVID fatigue talking? How do you maintain your sanity these days?

Well, I rant a lot. You gotta get it out. 🙂

Honestly, there is always this push/pull thing with technology. I’m still hopeful for the future that technology does still promise, but I’m also depressed by how the world has changed and gotten smaller-minded. The things I care most about, like Windows, just aren’t a focus anymore, not for Microsoft or for the people that use it. I understand that, but it’s hard.

I wrote the other day about the manufactured desire to make the smartphone industry more exciting, about how misguided I believe this thinking to be. But Windows and PCs are an even more mature business, and so it’s unclear that any company could do anything to make this as exciting as it was when PCs were the center of personal computing. And what is at the center now—phones, the web, social media—is just not as interesting to me. Some of it more than others. The parallels between the smartphone industry and the PC industry before it are still interesting. But TikTok and Facebook? I’d like to wake up and find out that these companies have disappeared from the earth.

PS, I’ll buy you a beer if you ever come to Portland OR – you seem exactly the kind of misanthrope I’d click with 😉

LOL. I hope that can happen.

Surface and custom silicon

christophercollins asks:

I’ve often wondered why Microsoft doesn’t make an AMD based Surface Laptop using the XBox Series X APU. It’s obviously very capable. I know heat could be an issue, but even if they downclocked the GPU cores, it could still be a great 1440P gaming laptop.Any thoughts or ideas on this? It seems Microsoft could literally make the killer gaming laptop, with full XBox compatibility.

I’d never really considered Microsoft using the chipset from the Xbox in a PC, but confronted by this idea, I’ll just throw out my initial reactions. There are two.

First, it’s highly likely that the Xbox chipsets were designed specifically for the console architecture, which I assume is still Hyper-V-based, and the unique workloads of that hardware, which involved giving a much higher priority to the currently-running game/app than is the case in Windows. And that the platform is generally highly-tuned for the needs of this system, and is very stripped-down compared to Windows. In short, it’s likely that the processors in the Xbox are great for Xbox but maybe would need some tuning/changes to make sense in a Windows PC.

Second, and tied to that, Microsoft has in fact partnered with AMD—as it has with Intel and Qualcomm—for custom silicon for Surface PCs. So far what we’ve seen is mildly evolved versions of existing chipsets, but given what Apple’s accomplished with the M1x-series of chipsets, you have to think that Microsoft and those hardware partners are setting their sights a bit higher. And so maybe we will see even more customized silicon.

This is more necessary on the Qualcomm side, of course, but maybe that’s a great comparison, as the ARM-based Snapdragon processors we see in WOA PCs these days are quite different from what we got in the first few generations. I suspect the Xbox chipset would require a similar amount of work to make sense on Windows. And it seems like the advances we’re seeing on the PC side now—like Intel’s 12th-Gen core chipsets and their hybrid architectures—are a good indication of where the industry is going.

Microsoft should be announcing Surface Laptop 5 anytime now. It will be interesting to see if the AMD variants are using off-the-shelf parts or something more customized. And while I don’t see Microsoft ever making a portable Xbox now, given its cloud push, a gaming-class Surface PC seems like a reasonable choice. Surface is mostly in the premium space as it is, and gaming PCs are a big chunk of that market. Would a hybrid Intel/AMD chipset tied to modern a GPU of some kind make sense in such a product? I think it would.

Business model buffoonery

VMax asks:

I have a few clients who use Office 365 for their email hosting, but prefer perpetual/one-off licenses for desktop apps. There seems to be no way to associate an Office Home+Business key with an Office 365-hosted address (leaving aside the annoyance of having to associate a key with an email address at all). Only “personal” Microsoft accounts are accepted, and you can’t create a new personal account with the same address as an existing “work or school” account anymore.

Interesting. I used to be a bit dismissive of anyone who chose a perpetual Office product over a Microsoft 365 subscription for all the obvious reasons, but I sort of get it in certain circumstances. There is definitely a backlash against one key Microsoft 365 advantage—the ongoing functional additions—when you consider that most people don’t use all of the features in any of those apps to begin with, so why would they need new features.

These clients are basically running afoul of the divide between the perpetual past and the subscription future, but I assume you can make a financial case for moving to Microsoft 365 fully on a per-employee basis. That is, how many years would an employee need to use the same perpetual Office product on just that single PC before it was actually less expensive than just subscribing? At a high level, it’s probably not that long, but the other benefits of the subscription need to be factored in, including the real-time collaboration stuff, the OneDrive storage (which is also more secure/reliable for important company data), and so on. It seems like Microsoft has tilted the argument enough in favor of the subscription that most would simply give in on that.

(And part of that tilting is making the perpetual/subscription divide harder to get around, of course. I think that’s what they’re seeing here.)

The only viable solution appears to be creating a random Outlook.com or GMail account for every Office license, the sole purpose of which is to let Office be installed. I really hope I’m missing something, but if not, do you think this a reasonable situation?

It’s hard to understand the costs here without knowing how many employees are involved, what level of M365 subscription each would need, and what version(s) of perpetual Office they’re currently using. Could some of them just use the web apps? (For example.) But with regards to what you’re doing, I think the answer is simply that these clients should really look at the costs involved and consider subscriptions. And if they are dead set against that, then they’ll have to put up with this kind of workaround. Unfortunately, this is the conversation you have to have with them.

I get that pushing the subscription option is what Microsoft wants now, but if they’re that keen on subscriptions, just don’t sell the perpetual versions, rather than making them annoying to install and require extra pointless hoops be jumped through!

It’s pretty clear Microsoft does not want to sell perpetual Office versions, and that they do so only because of the demand. They’ve done everything they can to make these products less enticing. And every time they announce a new version, I think, surely, this is the last one. But they keep pumping them out, and making them less interesting, because they have to.

Windows 11 R2

madthinus asks:

With the Windows event next week and the news this week that there is no build to test, I assume the build next week will be really the first look at what will ship as Windows 11 22H2. Once again they are shipping features without any time to incorporate community feedback. It is clear that this is the Panos way. The only question then is, will we see the solid follow-up like Windows 7 was to Windows Vista or are we once again on a path out of sync with reality?

The Windows 7 comparison is probably a good one, though it’s worth pointing out that the big difference between Windows Vista and Windows 11 1.0 is that Windows Vista didn’t arrive with numerous functional regressions. (Unless you consider performance on existing hardware a functional regression. I guess it was.) Regardless, what Microsoft needs to do with Windows 11 v2 is two-fold: fix as many of those regressions as possible and add enough useful new features to make this release interesting to those who didn’t/don’t want to upgrade.

Based on my experience with this Windows group, they will not succeed at either of those goals, and they will undershoot both. Meaning that there will be some regression fixes, but not enough, and there will be a lot of small new features, but few if any will be truly interesting. Worse, the biggest problem with Windows 11 is that it doesn’t well serve Microsoft’s most important customers, which are businesses. Most of the improvements when compared to Windows 10 are just eye-candy or superfluous, and they don’t outweigh the missing stuff. (Not all of them: the new Snap features are truly useful, for example.)

I am very interested to see what Microsoft announces next week. I expect there to be some feature surprises. I’m unhappy enough with how this is going to be worried that most of those will be pointless. But hope springs eternal. I would love to be wrong about this.

TPM

vernonlvincent asks:

Artificial requirements for Windows 11 aside, is there actual real value for a typical customer in having a PC that supports with TPM 2.0? Anecdotally, I feel like my PC is more stable with it running, but I have nothing to base that on other than my subjective perception. Are there any statistics that can show the reliability of a PC that has TPM 2.0, versus one where it doesn’t? And is there a good case to be made, independent of Win 11, that PC users really should have machines running TPM.

TPM in general, yes, is necessary: among other things, a TPM helps protect your PC in offline moments, when attacks can circumvent a non-running OS. But TPM 2.0 vs., say, TPM 1.2? I’m not an expert in this area, but I don’t see any particular advantage to TPM 2.0. According to Microsoft, TPM 2.0 “supports newer cryptographic algorithms. TPM 1.2 only supports the SHA-1 algorithm which is being deprecated.”

And Microsoft has required TPM 2.0 to be implemented and enabled in Windows PCs since July 2016, so that includes Windows 10 as well. That Windows 11 arrived almost exactly five years after that requirement is interesting and not coincidental: Windows 10 support ends on October 14, 2025, which is just under 10 years from that date, 10 years being the historic support lifecycle for major Windows versions. (We can reasonably expect Microsoft to offer further paid support to businesses as well.)

Anyway. TPM doesn’t hurt anything and it plays a big role in protecting a PC from electronic attacks. Microsoft’s TPM 2.0 requirements in Windows 11 seem onerous, but they’re not. The bigger issue is the CPU requirements, which are truly arbitrary. For example, the Intel CPU requirements basically specify 8th-Gen or newer Core CPUs (there are some exceptions), and Intel launched those in late 2019, which is just over two years ago. Had Microsoft made the minimum CPU requirements match the TPM 2.0 requirements in Windows 10 PCs, we probably wouldn’t be stressing over much because that would include Intel chipsets that debuted in late 2015 or 2016. (4th-Gen? 5th? I’m not sure.)

Windows vs. the world

anoldamigauser asks:

Do you think that the problems we are all commenting on with Windows…advertisements, default apps, changes to settings back to Microsoft defaults with feature updates, and the like are a result of diminished corporate memory of the anti-trust era? It just seems that they are moving inexorably back towards the old habits of embrace and extend; pushing a little harder with each thing that doesn’t cause an outright revolt.

I think they’re playing a game of chicken here and that their argument will simply be that Windows isn’t dominant anymore in a world in which most people use Android and iPhones/iPads, not Windows PCs. And while I’m not a fan of their behavior, there are two mitigating factors: we do have alternatives, including Macs, Chromebooks, Linux PCs, and even mobile platforms, and there are bigger antitrust targets now in Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook, each of which harms a far bigger audience, and in more egregious ways, than does Microsoft.

What will it take to drive you to a different platform?

This is something I’ve been thinking about since I moved to Windows, honestly. And for all the experimentation with other platforms, I’ve always come back to Windows because it works the way I want and is more familiar (which makes me more efficient). And because the other platforms all have their own issues too. This “the grass is always greener” thing has come up a few times just in the past week, but it’s real: when you move from Windows to another platform, you are just trading familiar problems for new problems. And if one of these platforms was perfect or even objectively better, we’d all be using it.

I like Windows enough that the issues and behaviors you mention do bother me a lot. So far, they don’t bother me enough to jump ship, and I keep hoping that Microsoft will just give me and others the option to pay them to not deal with tracking, ads, and crapware, or maybe just give us that if we’re already paying for Microsoft 365. This is a very common business model now—consider Spotify, which has paid and ad-supported tiers—and there is no reason Microsoft couldn’t do this as well. Except, of course, that they won’t.

But who knows? Maybe Windows is like our recent Mexico adventures where one day I will turn a corner and suddenly go in a completely different and unexpected direction. For that to happen, some rival platform will need to change in big ways. Or perhaps Windows will need to get even worse. But for now, I very much prefer Windows. Despite its issues.

I will say this. Enough people are asking me about Windows alternatives now that it’s clear there is deep unrest in what I’ll call the enthusiast community for lack of a better term. I hope Microsoft takes that seriously: this is where the rot starts, and if they lose their most enthusiastic backers, it’s over. I don’t mean that as a threat, of course, just as a commonsense observation. Microsoft has not done well by enthusiasts for years.