Ask Paul: May 12 (Premium)

Happy Friday! The sun is out, the temperatures are up, and the trains are running on schedule. Here’s another great set of reader questions to kick off the weekend a bit early.

Video streaming services

leoaw asks:

I recall you mention that you have YouTube Music for your subscription music streaming. Are there specific video streaming services you use or do you start and start services depending on which shows/movies each service has?

Right now we’re not being very smart about this, as we subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, and Disney+, and we get YouTube Premium as part of YouTube Music and Prime Video as part of Amazon Prime. Switching between services on a monthly basis or whatever makes lots of sense, especially in our case as we tend to binge watch shows, but we are still subsidizing these things for our adult but not quite independent children. It’s a bit more complicated than that, as we watch one 30-minute show each day during the week at lunch and dinner and then watch Netflix-type shows at night, so I guess we’d usually have at least a few services kicking around. We could definitely save a lot of money each month, and I recommend that anyone and everyone look into doing that.

Microsoftification

JustMe asks:

A random thought regarding Edge – given what Edge has become and recent browser usage stats – how much worse would Edge usage be if Microsoft stopped forcing people to use it (i.e search results, widgets links, etc)?  Does Microsoft even look at usage stats this way?

Microsoft will never reveal this kind of innermost secret, but there is little doubt that Edge usage metrics are partially responsible for the current strategy, which is a combination of enticement (new features it hopes will sway users) and underhanded tactics and dark patterns that include forcing people to use Edge even when they chose another browser and constantly re-prompting them to use Edge.

I was thinking about this the other day when I clicked on a story in the Discover feed on my Pixel and it came up in what is clearly a web browser view. Is that using Chrome even though I made Brave the default on the phone? Probably. Apple does this too, of course, with Safari. So you might argue that all Microsoft is doing on Windows is what Apple and Google do on mobile, and those audiences are even bigger than what we see on Windows. So it’s something they feel safe in getting away with.

Another random though – on the power of defaults, do you think there comes a point where the…Microsoftification…of a product (example, Chromium-based Edge that Microsoft….Microsofted) outweighs the power of defaults? Consider – if Microsoft had made Edge a Chrome-without-Google and left it there, you would have a competing browser that people might actually want to use and less motivation to move away from the bundled browser.

When this was what Edge appeared to be, a version of Chrome with all of the Google badness removed, I celebrated it, and I felt that there was some huge audience out there, including most critically Microsoft’s business customers, that would want exactly that thing. What we don’t know is how well that really worked. But the evidence suggests not well enough: Edge usage has never surged in any meaningful way in the wake of the switch to Chromium. That doesn’t mean it was the wrong decision, as there are huge advantages to using that ecosystem. And it’s not like the old Edge was doing well. But where Apple and Google have large web browser user bases on their own platforms, Microsoft does not. And that harms all the work it’s doing in the cloud, in advertising, and now in AI. Which is why, I think, they have be more aggressive.

But because of what Microsoft has foisted on its users, they run away from Edge and Microsoft has to resort to brute force tactics to get people to use it.  Similarly, with Windows 11, it is the default OS on most consumer machines these days, yet at least in part due to the Microsoftification (telemetry, ads, nuisance pop-ups) of the OS, a part of their user base is downgrading to Windows 10.  In the same vein, Windows 11 isnt an ‘easy yes’ upgrade assuming an existing machine meets hardware requirements either, especially with the rumored Windows 12 around the corner.

Yes to all that. The big question here is how or if these things impact normal (non-technical) people. Businesses will do as they will. And we know that most individuals just choose Chrome and don’t think further about web browsers. But what about Windows 11? I have two anecdotal instances in which people I know well, my wife and my brother in law, both separately asked me about some Windows 11 upgrade prompt and then later went ahead and did it. And in both cases, I later asked them how it went. And neither had anything to say. They barely noticed the change at all.

Windows 11 at least benefits from something Edge does not, which is that it will simply come on new PCs and most people will just use it. And whether businesses stick with Windows 10 or not doesn’t matter to Microsoft all that much, since their most valuable customers are paying monthly per-PC licensing fees and can install whatever supported Windows version they want with no difference in the price they pay. And this buys Windows 11 some time: it may have shipped incomplete, but it is being updated regularly now, and it’s getting to the point where it’s in pretty good shape. By the time Windows 10 hits end of life, I don’t think most people will care. (Businesses are another story.)

The notion that the needs of the few (us) and the needs of the many (mainstream users) are different is not new. But I at least try to be empathetic to what those needs are and to judge what Microsoft is doing in that light. That is, sure, there are things that impact me personally. But there are things you or I can workaround where I think it’s still important to try and understand how (or if) they will impact average users. My worry is that with the constant change happening now, and the terribleness you mention, that there will be more and more instances where these people are impacted negatively. I feel like that should be avoided at all costs. Microsoft has different ideas, I guess.

PC quality

JustMe also asks:

After a (relatively) recent laptop purchase, I noticed an unusual behavior – when the machine was hybernating or in sleep mode, the keyboard would flash random patterns.  I thought the machine might have an electrical fault and was close to sending it back when, after some research, I discovered that this is an expected behavior due to some undocumented software (bloatware) that came with the machine.  Eventually found the setting and turned it off, but that leads me to wonder – given you review tons of laptops for a living, what is the worst thing you’ve seen a machine you’re reviewing do due to bloatware?  While most manufacturers install some non-required software, is there one manufacturer that stands out as the ‘worst offender’ in this regard?

Ah boy. 🙂

Well, I tend to avoid the truly terrible products, though there are of course nasty surprises. One of the long-time issues in the PC space is crapware, of course, and this early form of enshittification came out of the fact that PCs are a low margin business in which the hardware makers haven’t been particularly successful in monetizing their users beyond the initial purchase. So bundling crapware is an easy way to bump up the per-PC profits a bit.

But the goal is some annual or monthly revenue stream, just as it is for Microsoft. And the classic example here is tied to that first issue, where the most common form of crapware you see on new PCs is McAfee. And there you see PC makers not just getting an upfront per-PC payment, but also a bit of the action when customers subscribe and re-up in subsequent years.

Microsoft tried to wean PC makers off of crapware with the Signature PC series, but with Windows no longer generating upgrade revenues, they’ve had to go in the same direction, and so they killed Signature and started putting crapware directly in Windows. The whole industry has the same problem.

The “solution” is to make more money per PC. And that’s why premium PCs—which include not just business-class PCs but also prosumer and gaming models—are so important. PC makers make more profit per PC on these devices, and so does Microsoft, since they usually come with Windows Pro. Best of all, most premium PCs come with little to no crapware, depending on the PC maker and product line. If you read my reviews, you know I always look out for that.

Most of my PC reviews are for HP and Lenovo models, but I also review PCs from Acer, Dell, and occasionally from other companies like ASUS, Razer, Samsung, and others. And I can’t really say that any of them are particularly bad, except for Samsung, which bundles an astonishing amount of crapware on its premium PCs, breaking the rule noted above. (It does this on its smartphones, too.) Indeed, I removed all the crapware on the most recent Samsung PC I reviewed, reset it using a clean Windows 10 ISO, and most of it came back over time. Yikes.

But there have been some notable offenders in recent months too: the Lenovo Yoga 9i 14, for example, came with a lot of crapware, but it also kept popping up notifications for monthly subscription services of all kinds. It’s a beautiful premium PC, and Lenovo is usually very good about this kind of thing. That one really stands out. The upselling was out of control.

Wowey

Daishi asks:

As something of a follow up from TheJoeFin‘s question from last week: Having invested, presumably, reasonably significant money and man power into the development of Maui I was expecting that at some point they would start doing things to help encourage its use by developers. But, while there is a basic level course in Microsoft Learn, there are currently no certifications for it or any kind of local app development with .Net.

Interesting. I’m not aware of what they might be doing with certifications, but I would guess that it’s related to MAUI being fairly new and arguably still rough around the edges, and that they’re waiting for another major release (presumably this November with .NET 8) to get it to where it needs to be.

I’m just guessing, though. Looking at Microsoft Learn, there’s obviously a lot of documentation and some training paths that look decent. But noting for certifications.

Do you think there’s any chance that they’ll announce new certifications for Maui at Build or do you think the modern Cloud first, last and only version of Microsoft will just continue to treat on device app development as the red headed stepchild of the .Net family?

I can’t say too much about Build because I just agreed to view some materials early, but I feel safe saying that while AI will be a big and obvious focus, there will be some good client content. There have been some tough Build conferences in the last from a Windows/client dev perspective, but I think this will be a good show.

Handheld gaming

jrzoomer asks:

Paul, what are your thoughts on a possible future regarding Windows gaming handhelds? Asus worked with Microsoft on a portable gaming device that competes with the Steamdeck, the Verge has an article on it.

Laurent wrote about it as well, by the way.

I think this is very interesting, and while I understand why Steam went with Linux for the Steam Deck and am sure that Linux gaming has improved a lot in recent years, Windows is still the better choice for gaming overall. The trick is fitting even remotely gaming-class hardware in a portable form factor with decent battery life.

But whatever. Gaming is so diverse with such a great variety of form factors. And just in the portable gaming space, you could argue that this is a terrific Xbox Game Pass Ultimate machine, with downloadable PC games and streaming Xbox titles via Xbox Cloud Gaming. I’m not sure how big the market is, obviously, no one is, and many might choose to go with a smartphone, iPad, or Nintendo Switch for whatever reasons. But the key here, I think, is that it’s a PC.

I’ve never really gotten into mobile gaming per se, though I have finished some games on phones and iPad. But I’ve always wanted an Xbox portable gaming machine, and now that our libraries are so much more available digitally, that’s even more true. But with a Game Pass subscription, this kind of thing also makes sense, and I’ve been playing games on PC for the past few months and it’s not horribly different from using a console, especially if you use a controller. (And many laptops are decent secondary gaming PCs too.) The timing seems right for this type of device.

Visual Basic and .NET woes

JaviAl asks:

In .NET I am moving from Visual Basic to C# due to lack of Visual Basic support in ASP.NET Core … I much prefer Visual Basic, it’s clearer, more readable, and everything looks neater and more logical. Much easier to debug or read code, even other people’s … Back in 2015 or so, Microsoft promised us full support for Visual Basic in .NET Core. Initially it was going to arrive in version 3.0 of NET Core. But it didn’t come … they also announced that they would not continue to develop or improve Visual Basic as they have done up to now keeping it on par with C#. They would just keep it as it is with security updates, support for new versions of .NET Core, and little else. They continue to break everything they have promised.

Sorry to cut down your original commentary, but anyone interested in this topic should definitely check out his questions in the original forum thread.

This beloved language has been an afterthought at Microsoft since the transition to .NET in 2002, in part because Microsoft was embarrassed by its success and by still being so closely tied to Basic, which many professional developers mistakenly believed was an unsophisticated toy language. I’ve always thought this was a huge mistake, that Visual Basic did for software development exactly what Microsoft was doing with technology elsewhere by making it accessible to the masses. And VB was a wonderful tool that could be used to create truly sophisticated applications.

Anyone who tried to transition to .NET and Visual Basic.NET at that time surely noticed that Microsoft’s documentation quickly moved from being equal between C# and VB to being heavily weighted to being C# only. And that basically forced developers to learn C#: even those that stuck with VB had to know C# so they could understand the documentation. What made this semi-acceptable was that VB and C# were updated in tandem for many years and shared the same basic feature sets.

But as you note, this changed over time. In 2017, Microsoft announced that it would no longer keep VB up-to-date with all the new features coming to C#. Instead, it would “focus innovation on the core scenarios and domains where VB is popular.” In 2020, it got even worse: then, Microsoft announced that it would no longer add new features to VB. This was timed to the transition of .NET Core to .NET 5 (where the open-source version of .NET became just .NET. We’re currently on .NET 7, with annual releases, so .NET 8 is due in November.

So I guess the short version is that VB has gotten the short end of the stick since the transition to .NET, and with .NET having transitioned to open-source, it’s been left behind as a supported legacy product that won’t be updated with new features. (I do sort of wonder whether Microsoft can’t take a community approach to updates here as they have with Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation, but that would require Microsoft to open-source VB, which would require a lot of work, and perhaps be impossible for cost/licensing reasons. I don’t know.)

In other words, developers who wish to target modern .NET workloads pretty much have to use C#. I don’t see this as bad per se, but I still feel that VB could play an important role in attracting amateur developers and learners, and that Microsoft is missing an opportunity there. VB knowledge is a good starting point for anyone who wishes to move forward to C#.

Another thing I don’t understand is how Microsoft is handling .NET Core compared to the .NET Framework.

I suspect many aren’t familiar with what’s happened to .NET. To cut to the chase on this one, there are basically two .NETs now. There is the modern .NET, which is open-source and cross-platform, and then there is the legacy .NET, which is proprietary and Windows-only. The modern .NET, as noted above, is at version 7.0 right now. And the legacy .NET, which is most closely associated with the .NET Framework, was just upgraded to version 4.8.1. And Microsoft just announced that it is bringing .NET Framework 4.8.1 to Windows Update on all supported versions of Windows. (Meaning Windows 10 21H2 (LTSC), Windows 10 22H2, and all versions of Windows 11.)

Confusingly, there are new features in .NET Framework 4.8.1, the most notable being native Arm64 support. But this is really about legacy support: there are all kinds of codebases running on the legacy .NET stack and much of it can’t or will never be updated to modern .NET. But legacy .NET shipped with Windows, and so its support lifecycle was supposed to be tied to the lifecycle of the Windows version in which it was included. But that hasn’t happened: Microsoft is letting developers bring forward their codebases by upgrading from whatever .NET Framework version (probably 4.7.x in most/many cases) if they want to. But these codebases don’t need to be updated, and those apps will just continue working normally. I suppose the day may come when that is no longer the case. But there is no announced end-of-support date for .NET Framework 4.6.2 or newer. Support for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, which dates back to 2008 (!), won’t end until 2029.

The move to modern .NET complicates a lot of things, support among them. Modern .NET has its own support lifecycle, where every other year we see an LTS (long-term servicing) release with 3 years of support, and in intervening years we see an STS (short-term servicing) release with 18 months of support. That is, in open-sourcing .NET and taking it cross-platform, Microsoft has decoupled .NET support from whatever Windows version. On Windows, it’s just supported on whatever versions of Windows are currently supported (within the confines of the LTS/STS schedule). The transition from UWP to Windows App SDK resulted in a similar decoupling.

I guess the theory here is that legacy codebases should be left alone to run where they can and that PCs and servers will age out at some point and provide another way to reach that endpoint. Meanwhile, newer, actively developed codebases will be on modern .NET and whatever version of .NET they’re using should be kept up to date. Presumably part of the transition to this era of .NET was about ensuring that those upgrades are at least semi-seamless, and Microsoft does of course have a .NET Upgrade Assistant dedicated to this process.

Speed dating

helix2301 asks:

You talked to Brad on FRD about not wanting to use the Apple watch anymore. What made you make that decision did I miss an article?

When I moved back to the Google Pixel, I needed to figure out what to do for fitness tracking. I tested a Google Pixel Watch, but I will stick with my old Fitbit Charge 5 until at least this fall and then evaluate what’s available then.

I know you always talk about parrells have you every tried vmware fusion?

I have, but not for some time. I’ve been on Parallels for the past several versions/years.

Will you be experimenting with rust as all now that its being built into windows kernal?

I wrote a bit about Rust back in January before I had heard about the Linux and Windows kernel work. But Rust is mostly about low-level systems and driver code, and that’s not really where I’m at. I know there is work happening on Rust-based front-end frameworks, and if any of that starts to make sense, I will definitely take a look.

Why do you think handheld gaming has hung around despite the smartphone market?

I think gaming is unique in that it can be enjoyed in so many different ways. Mobile will always be the biggest use case now, but for people who really care about gaming, a dedicated device—or a powerful PC—still makes sense. I can say more vaguely that one of the nice side effects of the mobile revolution, for me, is that I can now separate my work and consumption (reading, video watching) activities between a laptop and an iPad, respectively. You could apply this thinking to game playing too.

I work for a large consulting firm that specializes in Microsoft. When someone says something about new feature in Windows and/or anything like that the joke at office is always like I’ll believe it when its on Thurrott. We have gotten burned in the past with sites reporting wrong info so that a testament to you the trust your readers have.

Well, thank you. I can’t promise that we’ll always get it right, but we will always try and will fix it when we get it wrong. Trust is an important thing.