Ask Paul: November 11 (Premium)

Happy 11/11, happy Friday, and happy Veteran’s Day! Let’s kick off the weekend a bit early with a great set of reader questions.

Calculated

agilefrog asks:

Tone deaf email. I received an email from Microsoft this week that started “Microsoft is committed to improving your Microsoft 365 subscription,” but then ploughed on to detail how they were ceasing support for personal email addresses, and rolling outlook data into your one drive allowance. [Laurent wrote about these changes here. —Paul] Neither of which is an improvement! Do you know if there is a major overhaul of 365 in the works that this could be pre-work for? Otherwise it feels like a tone-deaf step at a time when most consumers are trying to drive greater value from their subscriptions, rather than less. I get that personal email integration is likely a niche feature, but I’d bet that a sizeable number of sole-traders/small businesses rely on this.

We’re seeing this all over. Apple, for example, just raised the prices of many of its online services and it’s the most profitable company on earth.

My suspicion is that this is tied to what Microsoft is doing on the commercial side of Microsoft 365, where services that were free during the pandemic are now moving into paid add-ons or subscriptions (like Teams Premium). In other words, the free ride is over. I don’t think we’re going to see a major revamp of Microsoft 365, though. It’s more likely that Microsoft will simply wait until after the holidays to raise prices on Microsoft 365 Personal and Family (much as I expect it to do across the Xbox subscriptions).

The good news on the custom domain front is that you have a year to set that up if you haven’t already, and when the feature disappears in November 2023, your custom domain will continue working. (I’ve had the same custom domain on my primary Microsoft account, a Hotmail address that is literally 20 years old, for years, and it still works fine. In fact, I sign into Windows 10/11 PCs with it.)

But those who wish to use a custom domain going forward are going to have some choices to make. Unless something changes, your only option from Microsoft will be to switch to a Microsoft 365 commercial account, and while that may be acceptable for an individual, it won’t be for a family: the lowest-cost option, Microsoft 365 Business Basic, is only $6 per month per user ($72 per year) and it supports custom domains (and 1 TB of OneDrive), but it doesn’t include access to the desktop Office apps. If you need those apps, you’re looking at Microsoft 365 Business Standard, which is $12.50 per month ($150 per year) per user. That’s 50 percent more than Microsoft 365 Family, and that account supports 6 users.

With regards to the email attachment storage now coming out of your OneDrive storage, that probably won’t be an issue for most: the Outlook.com email attachment limit is pretty small anyway, and I suspect most people won’t notice much of a hit. If there is a web interface for viewing just the attachments on the way, I’d probably just delete them all anyway.

But maybe enough customers will complain and Microsoft will step back from this cliff. It’s done so in the past: this is the second time it’s killed custom domains for Microsoft accounts.

The hype is real

ErichK asks:

Hi Paul.  As per usual with my questions to you, we’re going back in time again.  This time, I want to ask you, do you think it was a good or bad thing that Microsoft generated so much hype for Windows 95 that even people that didn’t even know what was going on were lining up to buy the product?  I’m all for drumming up excitement, but it should be based on merit and a genuine solution to a tech problem, not “’cause everyone else is doing it.”

Windows 95 really was an inflection point, not just for Windows and the PC industry, but for the Internet itself. Before Windows 95, users had to download Internet starter kits with TCP/IP networking stacks to get online, and that was beyond most people’s skills. And the release of Windows 95 coincided with an explosion of high-speed Internet connections, first via cable, in the United States. So it was kind of a perfect storm moment. I’d also argue that Windows 95 was when Windows didn’t just match the Mac but surpassed it, not just from a UI perspective but technically as well. Granted, it looks archaic today, but this was the shift to 32-bit applications as well.

The problem with a launch of that magnitude is that it could never be repeated. Windows XP suffered by launching the month after 9/11, but even if that hadn’t happened, the launch still wouldn’t have been as big. Though to be fair to XP, it had the same technical (full 32-bit) and UX advantages over past systems as did Windows 95, and it was the first mainstream release of what used to be Windows NT, for both consumers and businesses. We are in many ways still living in that world now.

Anyway, it’s hard to remember how important Windows 95 really was. It made the Internet accessible to normal people, and while Microsoft didn’t invent any of the technologies or products that made that possible, it did the best job of capitalizing on it. Indeed, it was so successful that it landed in two major antitrust trials just a few years later.

The best COD is a streaming COD

spacecamel asks:

Have you considered streaming your COD matches on Twitch?  I would love to hear what setup you got working as I am thinking about does this as a hobby.  This might be a good excuse to “work” and play some COD.

Hm. I can’t say that I ever seriously entertained this, but I have certainly considered it. The issue for me is that most of my game playing isn’t so much “timed,” meaning I don’t set aside an hour or two on specific times and days, but rather jump in and out during the day for the most part. If I’m busy with things, I don’t play at all, but even on a day like yesterday when I finally finished two dreadful Edge chapters for the book, both on the site and with the eBook, I took a break in the middle and played a few rounds to clear my head.

Temporarily, my gameplay is sort of an unknown. Because of the unfinished nature of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, there’s no way to check my overall K/D (kill/death) ratio, and because I’m stuck playing non-hardcore Team Deathmatch, my K/D is much lower than it should be (and could even be negative). This will change soon when Season 01 comes out, I can’t wait. But the issue, for now, is that every game is a spin of the wheel: I can dominate as I do in Black Ops 4 in one game—highest or second-highest score in the game, whether on the winning or losing team—and then go 9 and 16 (or whatever) in the next one. It’s very irregular.

All that said, I’ll look into it. I’m not sure what goes into streaming via Twitch, but I assume on a console this must just be built-in with no additional hardware required. I’ll find out.

NASty

erich82 asks:

What are you using for local storage and backups currently?  Did you go with a NAS again, or decide on something else? 

I’ve stuck with my existing (and now unsupported) WD NAS for the time being. The thing is, I don’t really “use” it all that much on a daily basis. It has local backups of my entire work archive and photo collection, plus my old music collection and some other things, but I mostly use cloud storage (OneDrive and Google Photos) these days. That said, I like having something local for obvious reasons, and I do backup my phone photo libraries to the NAS when I reset or decommission them. But I’ve had to disconnect it from the Internet for security reasons. And I’d like something that I could access remotely if need be.

I might have gone in a different direction if Amazon hadn’t killed its Drive service this past year. We pay for Prime, obviously, so I considered backing it all up to Amazon as a third location. But now it’s only good for photos, which is fine. But not for the archives I have.

The two things I have considered are another consumer/prosumer-grade NAS or even a network- (or possibly USB-) attached external drive. But whatever I get, it has to have two physical drives for redundancy purposes. I look into this from time to time, and I will see whether anything enticing is on sale during Black Friday. But short term, the current NAS still works at least.