Ask Paul: April 22 (Premium)

Happy Friday! In addition to the usual set of excellent reader questions, I have a couple of quick updates this week as well.

So let’s start with those.
A quick update
Back in 2018, my wife recorded what is essentially an ad for Pfizer, which sounds like a strange thing to do until you realize that our son was almost killed by bacterial meningitis when he was one year old, and their vaccine would have prevented that---and his resulting deafness---from happening. Anyway, the recording of this video came up at the time, but the finished product never surfaced, and I’ve been asked from time to time what happened to it. We just found out: Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, Pfizer was, of course, focused on other matters, but with that calming down now, they’ve finished the video, which is basically a 6-minute story in which my wife describes what happened to our son and how the company’s Prevnar vaccine would have prevented it. It’s not public yet, but we were allowed to preview it this week, and it brought a lot of ugly memories to the surface again, and a lot of tears. And while I will never be OK with what happened over 20 years ago, this kind of thing is now preventable and the vaccine is part of the normal course of vaccines that children receive in their early years. I’ll share a link to the video when it’s live.
Another quick update
Two weeks ago, I switched back to Google Fi from Mint Mobile because the latter offers no form of spam call or text protection whatsoever. This hadn’t been an issue for the previous two years because Android and/or Pixel do offer this protection, but once I switched to the iPhone---which offers no meaningful protection against spam calls and texts whatsoever---I started getting massive amounts of spam. (In one two-day period with the iPhone, I received 22 spam phone calls!) At the time I wrote that post, I was less than three days into using Google Fi again. But as of today, it’s been two weeks. And I can now report that I have not received a single spam call or text message in that period. Not one. I’m paying for it---Fi costs at least $10 per month more than Mint did---but it’s what I was hoping for.
Microsoft’s recent successes
matsan asks:

Following up on your walk down Windows memory lane - what would you consider Microsoft’s last/latest real success, both product- and platform-wise?

Microsoft’s latest major platform success is probably Azure. I know that doesn’t sound too recent---it launched over 13 years ago---but it also represented a major strategy shift for the company. And it now plays the role that Windows once played for Microsoft in the sense that it’s at the center of everything, from obvious offerings like Microsoft 365 to less obvious products like Xbox.

This will never impact Microsoft in a major way---but that actually makes it all the more special when you think about it---but I also look at .NET as a major recent success story. This is som...