Ask Paul: May 20 (Premium)

Happy Friday (or Feliz Viernes, I guess) from Mexico City. Our flight home was canceled, so we stayed here a few days extra. But that doesn’t mean we can’t tackle some questions this week…

AMA

navarac writes:

Not a question, but a thanks to you and Nick for the AMA today (Thursday).

Thank you. I hope everyone had a chance to watch, but if not, you can watch the replay here, and dftf left a very detailed summary of what we discussed.

Store in a store

cwfinn asks:

Does Microsoft and/or Amazon have any plans to expand their pathetic selection from the Amazon AppStore? With very few exceptions, they are silly childish games. Since I use a Kindle Fire, I can see the “real” Amazon AppStore which is WAY more complete. 🙁 Clearly, the “trial” must be finished!

Technically, it’s still a preview, but, yeah, it’s reasonable to wonder why the app selection and quality haven’t improved—or changed at all, from what I can tell—since the initial release. Looking at this again today, I can identify less than 15 useful apps and a lot of crappy, B-quality games. So, no meaningful changes.

This was arguably the number one selling point of Windows 11 at the announcement last summer. This needs to be better.

Microsoft v. Apple

hrlngrv asks:

This is asking you to be a psychoanalyst for a corporation.

I feel uniquely qualified to do this. 🙂

More seriously, I do believe that corporations have personalities and that those are shaped by the personalities of their leaders. Apple under Steve Jobs is a great example (though that was just one personality). And I think of the Windows org at Microsoft like this: each generation takes on the personality of its leadership.

Is MSFT fundamentally shaken by Apple having a larger market capitalization? If so, what would you rate as the most unfortunate consequence of that? I’ve expressed the cynical opinion that MSFT does what it does for money, but is MSFT also motivated by a desperate and somewhat pathetic yearning for relevance (I hate that term, but it seems aptest) in the Age of the Ascendant Smartphone?

I think there was a collective moment of dread as Apple’s market cap rose and then surpassed that of Microsoft. But that happened several years ago. And I think that time has made this a bit easier. Apple was the first company to surpass a $1 trillion market cap, and the first to reach $2 trillion and then $3 trillion too. I feel like Satya Nadella, and thus Microsoft, understands that Apple is a very different company, and that its success is based on a business, hardware sales, in which Microsoft is not successful. Likewise, Microsoft’s current and future is based on cloud services, and while Apple has a successful services business, that is tied to their handsets and isn’t the same thing.

Apple isn’t as different from Microsoft as, say, Saudi Aramco (which, oddly, is worth more than Apple as I write this), and the two companies obviously have a shared history. But they are very different today. And they are both incredibly successful. Today, Apple is worth $2.2 trillion, and Microsoft is worth $1.9 trillion, Microsoft did briefly surpass Apple’s market cap a while back. I think most are OK with the way things are.

Digital photo frame

rambone05 asks:

Hi Paul! Welcome back!

I’m actually still stuck in Mexico City: United canceled our flights home, so we extended the trip through Saturday so we could get more stuff for the apartment. That worked out nicely, actually: we got our refrigerator and washer yesterday, otherwise that would have waited until at least June. But thank you.

Which digital photo frame are you currently using and what’s your setup? Google photos album, Amazon? Any recommendation for devices that are currently out there?

We currently use a 10-inch Lenovo Smart Display that is powered by Google in our kitchen at home. We like it a lot, but we mostly just use it for photo slideshows via Google Photos. There are a few minor things I’d change if possible, but don’t see any way to do that. For example, when we lean in to see a photo better, which we do a lot, the display wants to exit the photo slideshow because it thinks we want something else. It must have some kind of presence detection, but I can’t turn that off. I also would just mute the microphone since we never talk to it, but when you do, there’s an annoying icon on the screen. Again, nothing serious.

I’ve been watching to see when Google updates its Next Hub Max, and I may consider that whenever it happens. I could see having a bigger display for sure. But I’ll stick with something Google-powered regardless because our photos are there, and I created an album for use in the smart display (and with Google TV) that features family, friends, and pets. It’s a regular source of conversation.

That said, I suspect an Echo Show whatever paired with a photo collection in Amazon Photos would work well too. I’ve just never tried that.

Captchas

anoldamigauser asks:

What is up with the Captchas? Damn they are annoying.

Yep, I agree. We had to enable them yesterday because of an ongoing site stability issue that seems to ebb and flow for reasons I don’t fully understand. But we had an AMA yesterday about the coming site refresh that will fix this issue. The captcha thing should be disabled today regardless.

Start me up

anoldamigauser asks:

Now to the question…after Microsoft released “How we made Start”, did you discuss it at all with your son? Just wondering, since he is a UI/UX guy and his take on it would probably be interesting. Personally, I think the Windows 11 interface would be fine on a Chromebook competitor, but makes everything about working with Windows one or two clicks more difficult.

No, but I have had interesting UX conversations with him, and that’s kind of an odd growth moment for the relationship since I’ve spent my entire adult life complaining about UX issues everywhere—not just in tech products, but in the world at gas pumps, ATMs, whatever—and now his brain is wired that way as well. This was many months ago, but were we out one time getting something to eat and he remarked that something was “bad UX” literally as I was thinking the same thing, so I just burst out laughing. I was like, “your life is going to be hell now. Almost everything is bad UX.”

With regards to Windows 11 specifically, excuse me for projecting, but I think we’re coming from the same place. This thing was designed to vaguely resemble the past but to be much simpler and maybe they’re onto something when they decide to leave behind the people like us who are maybe a little too married to every little feature or whatever that’s now gone or one or two steps further away. I’m just guessing, but they must have telemetry data that shows how many people do things and how often, and the missing/less efficient features in Windows 11 probably reflect low over usage.

I don’t like this on at least two levels, but I guess I’ll fall back on something I recently re-saw myself arguing in the wake of Windows 8, which was that people who are experienced (or power users or whatever) are smart enough to figure it out. The problem with Window 8 was that it screwed over mainstream users, too, whereas maybe Windows 11 does not. I’ve asked my wife what she thinks of Windows 11, for example, and she doesn’t understand the question. She hasn’t noticed a difference or had any issues.

To your Chromebook comment, maybe that was literally the point: find the most minimalistic UI that addresses the mainstream need. I feel like Google did a reasonable job for that audience. Maybe the Windows audience isn’t all that different.

But I’m just rationalizing here. I don’t like it, and I don’t think they made the right compromises.

Desktop widgets

justme asks:

I understand its in an Insider build, but do you know if there is any way to turn off the “new” desktop search box on the desktop? For me, its a workflow issue as I tend to use my desktop as a workspace and I find this addition to be … well, annoying. I also dislike that the searchbox will search Bing and force you to use Edge – thereby completely disrespecting my choice of browser and search engine. <sarcasm> But hey, I suspect telemetry is telling Microsoft that forcing people through Bing and Edge is driving up Bing and Edge numbers so they are obviously doing something right. </sarcasm>

Yeah, this is one of those “of course they are” moments. I suspect there will be a long-running game of people figuring out new ways to block all the Edge/Bing/MSN usage until Microsoft prevents that and we just keep repeating the loop.

With regards to this new desktop-based search—seriously, we’re going to call it a “gadget,” right?—it’s not enabled by default. And if/when it is, I assume the instructions for enabling it will work in reverse to disable it. More to the point, I further assume there will be a group policy for this and that those who wish to batch disable Windows 11 features they hate can write scripts to do all that on the first boot.

The yin and yang of Windows 11

justme also asks:

More broadly – and, in fairness, probably a question no one but Microsoft can answer – why is Microsoft so focused on things that no one seems to have been asking for and seemingly ignoring a large list of things people ARE asking for?

I am literally obsessing over this right now.

Between that Programming Windows series, where I’ve been confronting the past anew, and my collecting all of the new features in Windows 11 22H2 for a future post, I’ve been really struck by how Microsoft responds or ignores feedback over time (with Windows specifically). There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, but of course there is, and we just don’t understand it yet.

But just guessing, I feel like Windows 11 falls into the same internal imperative as did Windows 10, which makes sense since Windows 11 is just a Windows 10 feature update. Which is, this thing needs to make sense in the broader context of Microsoft, which today is a cloud computing giant, not a “software giant,” as I often call it. And that means it has to make sense in a services-first world. With Windows 10, Microsoft put Windows on a services-like servicing (meaning updating) schedule for better or worse. And with Windows 11, I feel like the big push is really about making this complex desktop system as simple and/or similar to mobile platforms as possible. That it can only make sense in the future if it’s as easy to use as iOS/iPadOS, Chrome OS, or Android. Even Apple has arguably taken steps in this direction with macOS, though I’m not as well versed in that.

Whatever the underlying rationale, it’s clear that some decision maker(s) have decided that bringing the pain to experienced/power users is an acceptable tradeoff. And in many ways, this is eerily similar (to me at least) to what they did with Windows 8. (Though, as noted above, Windows 8 also screwed over inexperienced/mainstream users.)

The more I am exposed to Windows 11, the more annoyed I get by the oversimplification of the UI, the fact that it seems to take way more clicks to do anything than it did in Windows 10, and the fact that all your searches/data are belong to Bing and Edge.

Exactly. Me too.

Mexican technology

spacecamel asks:

Do you have any technology observations from Mexico City? I would assume they use fewer Iphones and need what they have longer.

Generally speaking, there are a lot more Android handsets here than iPhones, yes. One of our Uber drivers yesterday actually had an iPhone, and I pointed it out to my wife, and we agreed that was the first we’d seen with an Uber driver. But on the Metro or out on the streets, it’s pretty much all Android.

The people here are almost addicted to WhatsApp, and you pretty much have to use this app to do anything here. We’ve WhatsApped with the people moving our furniture, and I know people who live here do so with doctors and everyone else. It’s more popular than phone calls or texting.

Mexico City, like a lot of large urban areas, has public Wi-Fi, but it’s garbage, at least when/where we’ve tried it. I remember when Paris got public Wi-Fi in 2008 (I think), but I’m not sure if it’s better anywhere else.

And we did see one amazing technology demo just this morning, oddly. We knew that Mexico is slowly replacing its paper-based bills with new versions, and that the MX$20 had come out first. The owner of a restaurant showed us a new MX$50 bill he had just received, and he brought up a government or bank AR app that lets you prove that it’s real because the money has holograms built in and they animate on your phone via the app. The previous-generation bills have basic hologram images, but the new bills are nuts. On the MX$50 bill, there is a holographic animation of boaters paddling up a canal in Xochimilco, and it is amazing. This makes our money in the U.S. look like it’s from the 1950s by comparison. I’ll try to make a video on a future trip.