Ask Paul: October 28 (Premium)

Hola from Mexico City and Happy Friday! Here’s another great set of reader questions to get the weekend started a little early.

Mary Jo

OldITPro2000 asks:

I was sad to see that this was the last week that Mary Jo will be a regular on Windows Weekly. I’ve been reading both you and Mary Jo for as long as I can remember, back to when you had the Internet Nexus and she had the Microsoft Watch blog.

Yep. It’s been a long time. Leo and I started Windows Weekly in late 2006, so about 16 years ago, and Mary Jo joined … maybe four years later? Whatever the exact time frame, it’s been a long time.

I vaguely remember the rivalry between you both, so I was glad to see it fade away and you become colleagues and friends. I thought she would be a great addition to Windows Weekly years ago and she certainly was. Like you said, the combination of the two of you plus Leo just worked and reminded me of the crew from The Grand Tour or Inside the NBA where the sum is greater than the parts. Too bad you can’t get the same amount of money they all do.

Yep.

I was at a Microsoft event at the Seattle Convention Center in the early 2000s—so, almost certainly a WinHEC—and Todd Bishop, who was then working for the Seattle PI, asked if we could have lunch so he could pick my brain about some things related to Microsoft. Todd is one of the nicest people in the world, and one of the questions he asked me—which is totally innocuous—was which other Microsoft-focused reporters and bloggers I followed. I kind of stammered for a second and then finally had to admit, “I don’t follow any of them.” It was kind of a weird personal thing, I just wanted everything I did to be original and I didn’t want to spend my life rewriting things others had covered first. But it made me feel weird, and I decided I’d start following others and, as importantly, reach out to some of them personally as well. Specifically, some people I considered to be rivals.

Long story short, of the few people I did reach out to, only Mary Jo proved to be an incredible human being. I said this on the show, but most people disappoint me and it usually gets worse over time. She is a rare exception to that, and the more I’ve gotten to know her, the more I respect and love her. I don’t know what this looks like on the outside, but we have an amazing relationship. We have traveled together for work, we’ve traveled together (often with my wife) for fun, and I just enjoy her as a person. She’s a true friend and confidant.

I might have missed it on the show, but did you mention who might be the new co-host? I know you said you were going to fly solo with Leo for a bit and see what happens, but I thought I heard Leo drop a name (besides the said in jest suggestion of Sinofsky, which quite frankly would be epic if just for one episode…the equivalent of the Jobs-Gates D5 interview scaled down to our circle of Microsoft folks).

There’s no new cohost. The problem with trying to “replace” Mary Jo is that you can’t. That kind of chemistry is impossible to fake, for starters, and this two-plus-hour show is difficult enough to get through every week without having to worry about another personality I don’t know well or trust. (I am wasted afterward. I don’t know how Leo does this all day long every day.) More importantly, Mary Jo and I had a real partnership. We didn’t just show up every week and babble, we worked on the show notes together and we collaborated throughout the week. We still will, to some degree. We’re both in the same world from a work perspective. But I’ve never done that with anyone else, not really. I have other collaborations around the book with Rafael, for example, though I do all the writing. Or with Brad both during and after his time at BWW. But you can’t just pick up with someone new to pretend it’s the same. It won’t be the same.

If it were only up to me, I would just do it myself. But I understand and respect that TWiT will probably want to try out different people with an eye towards there one day being another co-host. We’ll see what happens.

helix2301 adds:

I know a lot of people are upset about Mary Jo leaving and I am as well but I remember listening to the show before Mary Jo just you and Leo back in the day.

This is a true testament to the people like you who help built Twit but unlike a lot of other shows on the network Windows Weekly, Security Now, and The Tech guy have gone through a decade or more of the same hosts unlike This Week In Google, All About Android, Floss Weekly and MacBreak Weekly which poor Leo has been shuffling hosts around on for months. Not his fault I don’t include TWIT because every week they always had a different panel that was part of the show since the start.

To be clear, Mary Jo is leaving. TWiT (and Leo and I) very much wanted her to stay. But she has a new job now and part of that involves her participating in their podcasts and webcasts.

As I’ve often said of blogs and podcasts (and now, I guess, YouTube channels), anyone can start one. The trick is to keep going. And that’s where most things fall apart. I told Leo the same thing in 2006 that I told my boss at BWW in late 2014 when we first met: I can’t guarantee readers/listeners/viewers or numbers. All I can guarantee is that I will show up every single day/week and do the job. And that is what I’ve done, whether it’s writing—since the early 1990s—or podcasting (since 2006). Just show up and get it done. Mary Jo did the same thing throughout her career, most recently with ZDNet and she did so with Windows Weekly as well. I can’t speak to other TWiT shows or hosts, but I suspect the shuffling was often because of the hosts needing to move on for whatever reason. Not always, I guess. But probably.

MSA merge

ommoran asks:

My perennial question that I haven’t asked in a while:  will Microsoft EVER permit the merging of two MSAs?  Because … reasons… I created an MSA when I got my Xbox 360 that was / is different than the MSA I use for everything else.  I would love to push the two together.

There’s been no news on that front in years, sorry. I can only speculate that, knowing Microsoft, this will one day suddenly just happen with no fanfare. It’s absolutely a need.

Apple and ads

spacecamel asks:

Do you think Apple’s new push into Ads in their app store is going to hurt their image?  They have been able to say their privacy was best, but Ads hurt that image.  Plus, you are paying a premium for their phones, hoping for an ad-free experience.  I can see people saying Android is cheaper and gets the same ads.  You can also say that Microsoft started down this path and can see the dark places it is taking them.  It makes me wonder where Apple will go with this next.

I have been wondering the same thing. There are many sides to this discussion.

First, more ads are perhaps inevitable given Apple’s push into services, and that that business has suddenly slowed dramatically. Ads are the obvious way to boost those numbers, and Apple has a huge and very compliant user base.

Also, we know that targeted advertising—that is, ads that use a so-called “advertising ID” like we see in Windows and mobile platforms—is no more effective than truly anonymous ads that know nothing about the user because the platform isn’t tracking them behind the scenes and selling their usage activity to advertisers. So Apple could stick to its privacy pledges and still do a gangbuster job selling ads. No doubt about it.

Except for point three, which you raised: what does this do to Apple’s image? Will the user base just take the weak argument that everybody is doing it? Or will it more realistically react violently because they are already paying Apple a premium for hardware to the only company on earth with huge hardware margins, and for services too?

What’s weird to me is that Apple, of all companies, went out the door with the worst-imaginable set of ads: they were all gambling-related. That is crazy considering the high-end brands that would pay big to be associated with Apple and to be put in front of its well-heeled user base. It’s … impossible. But they did it. Apple will learn from that mistake, I guess, and probably already has, but it was a weird misstep.

But again, I am curious how Apple weathers this. They need this revenue to maintain growth, which is sadly critical to its financial future. But its user base expects—and should demand—a high-end, premium experience. And I think that includes not just privacy protections with no tracking, but no ads. Not “better” ads or fewer ads. No ads. (This was one bit of my move to iPhone, not the biggest consideration, but certainly one of them.)

But we’re going to find out soon what the user base does when this is no longer the case.

Widows 11?

AliMaggs asks:

On the whole, I like Windows 11. I like the design, the simplification, and the improvements around multitasking (with Snap Layouts and the monitor docking/undocking experience).

Agreed. 100 percent.

But I just can’t get behind the direction the in-box apps are heading in.

I’m listening.

I received the new Photos app yesterday. And, as nice as it looks, the feature regression is terrible. You can no longer search for an object/tag/place (sunset, dog, London). The People integration has disappeared, so you can’t search for friends or family members by name. You can’t even add photos to a OneDrive Album anymore (they’ve replaced “Albums” with a folder-based structure according to the support notes, meaning we’re going back to the very manual way we used to organize photos in the early 2000s). If you go beyond the first level of the app, everything opens in the browser. 

Reading this, I opened Photos and saw that it was the old version. So I took several screenshots of the UI, went to the Store, looked for updates, and installed the new version. Then I took a look at that and again took a few screenshots.

Two quick observations.

When Windows 10 came out, I made the argument that the in-box apps (as Microsoft calls them) should be shining examples of what’s possible on the platform. But the issue, of course, is that most of the built-in apps have serious functional problems and they’re really just mobile apps, so of course they do. The one exception to this, interestingly, was Xbox Music, which became Groove and has since been updated to the new Media Player. Each version of this app features what is now a common UWP/App SDK UI paradigm, where there is a collapsible/expandable navigation bar on the left and a bigger content area on the right. And I can see that the new Photos app adopts this, which I think is smart. (And more consistent.)

The missing features you cite sound eerily reminiscent to what happened more broadly with Windows 11, where the UI was simplified, which is good, but now there are features you expect and can’t use. Which is bad. Perhaps some or all will be added over time.

The good news, sort of, is that you can still use the old Photos app if you want: there is a “Get Photos Legacy” button in the settings page for the new Photos app.

We’re in a situation with the Photos app where the Android and iOS versions (Photos in their OneDrive app) are vastly superior. This would have been a good moment for Microsoft to catch-up with the vastly superior Google Photos (and even Amazon Photos) and prove that they care about consumer services, but we get this instead. Microsoft announces a few features around photos and memories every few years, and then it doesn’t go anywhere. But this isn’t even that. This new app doesn’t even do the basics.

Completely agree. There’s no real integration here, either: when you click on a Memory in the app, it doesn’t load in the app, it opens a web browser tab. That’s incredibly lazy.

I can only theorize that Microsoft wanted to get this out there as quickly as possible so that people would use Clipchamp instead of Photos for video editing. And assume/hope they will add features aggressively, especially regressions.

And it feels like they’re doing the same with other apps too. The “new” OneNote is terrible with touch/pen on my Surface Pro where it should shine. Clipchamp, as good as it is, still runs into issues not being a native app. And have you opened up the News app (which was once a beautiful and functional app in Windows 8 days)? It is literally a wrapper for the Microsoft Start website. And their Mail and Calendar app is heading down the same route with Project Monarch.

Yep. Photos is sort of that as well. It almost appears to just be a front-end to your OneDrive photos.

From the perspective of someone just using Windows, this seems odd. But if you’re familiar with how bifurcated Windows app development has come, and agree that no developer in their right mind would ever create a major new app only for Windows, making these apps either pure web apps (Clipchamp) or frontends to websites and web services is probably a viable and understandable approach. When you think about it, it’s sort of what I was asking of the in-box apps back when Windows 10 first shipped, except that this time they’re web-based, which makes sense in this era, but offer poorer user experiences, which is problematic.

These apps should be first-class, native apps and a shining example of the platform’s capabilities. And it’s hard to look at what Apple is doing with their apps and cloud services (which have seen some huge improvements) and not be a little envious. Microsoft should be killing it here with their apps and cloud integrations, and they just aren’t.

So, I agree, of course. But Apple is sort of a unique case in that its business model relies on native apps being important and so the company artificially undermines the web, and ignores standards and new open technologies. Microsoft is agnostic about this, and maybe this shift shows them embracing the web model. The problem is, in embracing that model, they’re also embracing the part of that model that includes “ship fast, fix later.” They did this with Windows 11, and it looks like they’re doing it with apps.

Suppose it’s true that “normal” people don’t care about the OS (like us enthusiasts), and it’s all about the apps and experiences. What does this say about Microsoft that their in-box apps on iOS and Android (OneDrive/Photos, OneNote, Microsoft Start, Outlook) are better native apps than what’s available on Windows 11?

Again, I’m with you. Taking the devil’s advocate approach, I guess I’ll just argue that Apple and Google are very much trying to lock users into their platforms and making their in-house apps as good as possible makes sense. Microsoft, meanwhile, is really just trying to retain users and the engagement we see in Windows is not with built-in apps per se—though I bet Notepad and Paint have many millions of active users—but rather with things like Office and Teams. Which are being updated all the time and are high-quality. (We can always nitpick there, but they are.) In other words, the lock-in that Microsoft cares about is Microsoft 365.

That’s my theory. I’m not 100 percent OK with it, of course. And I agree completely with your complaints (and very accurate observations).

What the Microsoft

wright_is asks:

What the heck is Microsoft playing at? My Lenovo is starting to play up and insists on installing a USB Ethernet driver every other day, which stops Ethernet, Thunderbolt Ethernet, USB-C Ethernet and Wi-Fi working, so needs to be deinstalled immediately.

Windows used to have major issues with Windows Update and PC maker support apps fighting over which version of particular drivers were the most recent, with each installing their own version only to be overwritten by the other, again and again and again. This has been largely fixed, but I have had oddly similar experiences recently on both Lenovo and Dell PCs where I check both places for updates and then some set of driver updates gets stuck in Windows Update and won’t install, and the issue survives reboots. You can clear out Windows Update temporary files, etc. but I wasn’t trying to make this my career, it should just work. Anyway, maybe that’s related.

We have MacBook sitting around, so I set that up,as a backup…

Everything went fine, it joined the domain, I managed to log on with my domain account, installed the Remote Desktop App, so far, so good. Then I installed Office… what the actual? Outlook for Mac cannot be set up with a Microsoft Exchange email address. It is greyed out and says “coming soon”. As MICROSOFT Outlook is the primary business tool for a large number of companies and those companies tend to use MICROSOFT Exchange, what exactly is Microsoft thinking? I can set it up with a Yahoo! Account, an iCloud account, an Gmail account, Outlook.com, but an actual Microsoft business account? No chance!

One wonders if this isn’t related to the “ship fast, fix later” conversation above. It’s reasonable to expect a company as big and sophisticated as Microsoft to support its own services in a v1 release.

And it’s perhaps somewhat related to something that came up on Windows Weekly recently: why can’t Microsoft time functional updates so that they hit all platforms at the same time (assuming said feature will be on each platform)? Word for the web just got Dark mode support? And Word for the web has a transcription feature that Word for desktop lacks? Come on. The new Outlook client doesn’t even support multiple email accounts. It doesn’t get any more basic than that.

I can’t explain it. All I can do is complain and shake my head in disbelief.

ChromeOS vs. Android

andrew b. asks:

Will Google kill ChromeOS?

That’s a great question. And not just for the obvious reason, that Google has suddenly found the Android tablet religion again: thanks to the tanking economy, CEO Sundar Pichai is aggressively closing down projects—Pixelbook, Stadia—that don’t make sense. Maybe it doesn’t make sense to have two large-screen computing platforms.

The thing is, all of the large screen improvements that Google made to Android in versions 12L and 13, and to its in-house apps, all apply equally well to ChromeOS. So that work is progressing on a separate track and it benefits both (and split-screen and folding screen devices too).

From a sales perspective, Android tablets do outsell Chromebooks overall, but there are lots of caveats there. Most Android tablets are a mix of low-end, small display devices and are largely used for consumption. If you were to compare sales of Android tablets that have large displays and are at least sometimes used with a keyboard for productivity work to Chromebooks, the latter would come out on top by a wide margin.

It’s always dangerous for a platform maker to pit two products against each other in the public—Microsoft has done this many times—but my guess is that they see how successful iPad is and realize that ChromeOS tablets or 2-in-1s will never be competitive even with sophisticated Android app support, and that maybe some mix of Android tablets and Chromebooks can be. And that if Android improves enough, maybe ChromeOS won’t be necessary anymore.

The one thing that would put Android over the top in my mind is Google bringing a full desktop version of Chrome to that platform. That—and, to a lesser degree, Linux compatibility—is what really differentiates ChromeOS from Android on large-screen devices. Well, that and the low-cost productivity angle: Chromebooks make sense for a lot of schools, especially, but also for individuals and very small businesses.

Without knowing what Google has planned, I’d vote to keep ChromeOS around. But if Android really does have an iPad Pro-like future, that might change things.