Ask Paul: August 4 (Premium)

Happy Friday! I’m back home, finally, and somewhat rested, and so here’s another mammoth installment of Ask Paul to kick off the weekend a bit early.

Windows alternatives

andrew b. asks:

You’ve mentioned before that Surface was a bit of a slap in the face to PC builders since it was Microsoft competing against them. Additionally, it seems as though Windows and Microsoft are constantly getting into trouble in Europe regarding privacy, and I’ve read stories of random European governments making a push for Linux on their systems.

Can you see a future in which PC builders like Dell start making their own Linux distribution and pushing that? Intel has Clear Linux, but I haven’t heard of them doing much with it.

No, because doing so would require a big, ongoing investment and the margins in the PC business are already laser thin.

What we’ve seen in the PC space to date is sort of predictable, retroactively, given this: they went with Linux on netbooks for cost reasons, triggering Microsoft to make Windows XP Starter Edition. Literally every major PC maker on earth introduced Chromebooks in the wake of Microsoft Surface. And some PC makers, like Dell and Lenovo/ThinkPad, do offer and support Linux on select models, as if feeling out customer demand should that ever take off.

The more likely outcome there, should Linux ever prove popular enough to make it a more mainstream offering, is for PC makers to treat Linux distribution makers as they do Microsoft by letting them do the heavy lifting and then just explicitly supporting the OS versions with hardware compatibility through drivers and, over time, with software utility solutions. But the nice thing there, should this happen, is that there will be competition. Where Windows only comes from one company, Linux distribution makers will trip over themselves to get pack-in deals from any major PC maker. And so they will do most of the work, I bet, and happily.

Ultimately, the PC model works (maybe barely) only because the hardware makers don’t have to invest too much in the software. But maybe Samsung (in smartphones and tablets) provides a model for the future should things change. That said, if you’ve ever seen a Samsung PC, you know they come with a metric ton of crap software. It may be better for everyone to leave the software to the community.

Why leak?

oasis21 asks:

Hey Paul, first and foremost, congrats on owning this site ?. Maybe a little late, but better late than never, I guess. Also, I’m looking forward to your writings about the behind the scenes of this site.

Thank you! It’s been a stressful and busy year, but my wife and I feel like we can make this work, and it’s been going well so far.

One thing I’ve not really discussed on this topic yet is that this change makes the site what many people thought it was, meaning a literal online representation of me. But what it was, before, was the product of a company, a small company, sure, but a company, which often had broader goals or aims that were not my own. (Not that I opposed anything, per se, but rather that many things happened that had nothing to do with me.) And we could get distracted, from my point of view, by focusing elsewhere (which was absolutely needed).

But now, Thurrott.com is me now, and I am Thurrott.com. If you or anyone else do anything that helps Thurrott.com, and I’m literally not asking anyone to do anything, it does at least benefit me now. This direct connection is important to me, and it’s not just about money per se, but because the site is what people maybe always thought it was, me. So its success will depend on me making it worthwhile to others. Which is daunting but fair.

I’ll probably have a discussion at some point about the financials of the site. I’m not sure how specific I can get, but it may be interesting to understand the scope of the costs and how this thing makes money. It was literally something I didn’t understand (and sort of didn’t care about) until about five months ago. And now I’m drowning in it.

Anyway. You didn’t ask for that, sorry. I have a lot on my mind these days, and this was something I wanted to express somewhere.

What incentives Microsoft employees to leak things to you or other tech journalist? They risk getting fired, sued. For example, we have seen leaked build of windows with a legal disclaimer on the wallpaper and also employees do sign contracts.

Leaking has been a thing since the creation of this industry and it’s obviously a big deal in all kinds of businesses. If you’re into cars, for example, you’ve seen the spy photos of camouflaged vehicles, and reports detailing the specs.

But the reasons are simple enough.

Sometimes it’s just simple excitement about something coming down the pike, and an employee recognizes that you, as a journalist or blogger, share that excitement, have s a history of being pro-Microsoft, in this case, or at least fair, and feels that you will share their happiness of what’s happening and will then share that excitement with others. And that in doing so, they can see how the community (hopefully) gets excited as well.

Sometimes, it’s because the leaker is upset about what’s happening in the company, either because the product in question is taking too long to come to market, the leadership is too secretive and they’re bursting to talk about it, or perhaps the product might be in danger of getting killed, and they want to prove to leadership that there is excitement or demand for it.

There are probably more. I know some other blogs are a bit more cheerleading in their coverage of Microsoft, but in my case, I think (and hope) that I have over a long period of time exhibited honesty, enthusiasm, and clarity for Windows, in particular, and that what I care about most is its users. And that, depending on the leadership at the time, that the employees and decision-makers working on that thing at least respect where I come from and/or appreciate it to some degree. We can disagree, etc. but my heart is in the right place (I hope). And maybe that makes a connection from time to time.

I know this is a little sensitive topic because you as a journalist would want to protect your sources, but do you have any interesting stories or opinions to share on this? For example, has there been a time when Microsoft asked you to reveal the source?

Yes. There was one time I can think of, and it was a huge Surface 2-era leak that coincidentally is what brought Brad and I together through Mary Jo. We connected, compared the information we had received, and it corroborated the other, and we wrote what we wrote at the time, me at the SuperSite for Windows and Brad at Neowin. In the wake of this, Microsoft PR contacted me to see if I could come to the Microsoft Store in Boston and meet with Panos Panay, who ran Surface at the time (and still does, along with Windows). I hadn’t ever met him—I skipped out on the original Surface launch in LA because of the short amount of time we learned about it before the event and because no one would give me any details at all—so I was sure what to expect.

And my first meeting with Panos was about as weird as it could be. Rather than just sit out in the Store and talk, I was led into this dark room out back, and the door closed behind me. He was standing there with his gold chains, bracelets, and rings, sort of an unusual character compared to the Microsoft executives I had known, and he demanded that I tell him who had leaked that information to me. I actually laughed because I assumed he was joking and knew I’d never tell him. But he didn’t laugh, and it quickly dawned on me that he was serious. And so I finally told him that revealing a source was out of the question. He told me that this would never happen again, and he was clearly upset about it. And he was right: we obviously get various Surface leaks now and again, but nothing like the motherlode that I had gotten, even without Brad. They very clearly locked things down.

But I have many stories. I have been given leaks from the people who run Windows, not Panos, but his three predecessors, for sure, and, yes, that includes Sinofsky. And I have gotten leaks from every manner of Microsoft employee, up and down the chain, over many years. Just yesterday, I was told of Windows team members who are now being “destroyed morale-wise internally,” and I’m trying to find out why. One of my best friends at Microsoft, and a real confidant, became Satya Nadella’s speech writer up until that guy because CEO. There’s a lot there.

I think I’ve told the story about the time Terry Myerson wanted to meet with me at CES in whatever year, and not knowing what it was about, I was curious that he confirmed rumors about a Windows 10 Cloud edition and then spilled the beans and specifically asked for my feedback. I told him the name was terrible, and he told me that he agreed, and that they were looking for a better (and less misleading) name; it eventually became Windows 10 S. And I told him that the ability to upgrade to full Windows 10, at cost, was a bait and switch, and I compared it to my recent arrival at my (terrible) hotel in Las Vegas, in which the final cost of the stay was literally double what I had been quoted because of all the hidden fees and whatever. He leaned back so far in his chair that I thought he was going to fall over, stared at the ceiling, and literally cried out, “FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKK!!!” Which was weird, because I didn’t feel like this was particularly insightful. But Microsoft made that upgrade free for a year, officially, but they really made it free forever quietly. Because bait and switch.

There was also the time I was given a leak about Android app compatibility in Windows 10, wrote about it, and was summoned to meet Terry right before Build started this year. I went into a completely empty restaurant, found him alone in the back, and was told that he needed to practice his keynote speech, and that I was going to watch and give feedback. Like some meeting with the mafia. So I did, and when the Android bit came up—it was just a small part of that whole “bridges” thing at the time—he looked at me and said, tell me if this what you thought it was. And … it wasn’t, not really. But that was because the employee who leaked it was doing what I described above, he was disappointed that the Android thing they did release was not the full solution they had come up with. At the time, Microsoft had figured out a way to run Android apps, all Android apps, directly in Windows. But doing so undercut UWP and the bridges bit, because Microsoft wanted developers to bring their code for apps to Windows, not their apps. (That group was eventually disbanded.)

It kind of goes on and on.

But from the perspective of leakers, things have gotten riskier. There are many more controls in place to prevent this from happening, or to catch those that do leak. There are major examples of different, contradictory leaks, and the story behind those is that Microsoft (or Apple, or other companies) were specifically trying to figure out which employee(s) were leaking and so fed them different information. It’s not worth losing a job over this. But then I have some examples from the past year of now former employees who spilled the beans after the fact. They don’t have the same job security concerns, of course, but being laid off, and unfairly in each case that I’m thinking of, perhaps feel a little more open to revelations.

Healthy

73rian asks:

First, thank you so much for sharing your interest in Gary Taubes’ books and your personal struggles to maintain a healthy weight. Like you and so many others, I’ve struggled with it too and a recent A1C blood test indicated I’m now pre-diabetic. The experiences you’ve shared over the years has prompted me to research the topic and be more proactive.

Thank you for telling me this.

I’m going to write on this topic in Monday’s column, and while I know that the volume of information I’m providing here is probably a bit much for some, there is one simple reason why I can’t help myself. And it’s what you just wrote: I hope to inspire people to advocate for themselves, especially when it comes to health, for all the obvious reasons why this is so important. I may or may not have some answers, but you’re doing all I can ask, which is to do the research and be proactive because our healthcare system will not fix you. It will treat the problems after they occur.

Currently I use a Garmin watch to track my activity. It includes continuous heart rate variability monitoring which Garmin labels as “stress.” For me, my “stress” levels (which is the inverse of heart rate variability) are very high throughout the day and sometimes at night when compared to other people. I’ve also noticed the my “stress” level goes up after eating and stays high for an extended time, especially after high-carb or sugary meals. It’s my understanding that low heart rate variability is associated with an activated sympathetic nervous system and possibly insulin resistance. It appears my sympathetic nervous system is overly active and I’m trying to understand if that is a contributor to or a resulting symptom of being pre-diabetic. My research indicates there is a link but the nature isn’t clear to me.

What you’re seeing is possibly related to what’s called metabolic syndrome, in that all of these things are, as we both suspect, interrelated, and that fixing the underlying problem—which appears to be basically blood glucose levels—will fix or at least improve everything else: blood pressure/hypertension, cholesterol, glucose variability (spiking), and so on. This is why the latest Taubes book is so valuable: he addresses this directly and notes that everyone is different, and so one’s susceptibility to carbs varies, and that it’s important to know what you can tolerate. It is very clear to me that I am in a no-carb zone personally on that spectrum (which my wife defines as 0 to 100 net carbs per day). Others are luckier (more carb-tolerant).

My question for you is any of this familiar to you from your own research? Have you tried a fitness tracker which has heart rate variability monitoring? I’m considering trying a continuous glucose monitor like you and seeing for myself if there’s a correlation. It would be helpful to know if there is because heart rate variability monitoring can be done for free after you purchase the hardware.

I’ve been using Fitbit, with a several-month interlude with Apple Watch, and I can’t say that I’ve directly monitored heart rate variability. (Though I feel like this is a thing with Fitbit Premium and/or Apple Watch.) On Fitbit, my key metrics are resting heart rate, exercise, and sleep (which is always inaccurate), but there is a stress management bit that I’ve not tried, sorry. Resting heart rate is basically a daily average, so not what you want, and there’s an irregular rhythm notification that I’ve fortunately not experienced.

Honestly, the closest I’ve seen this is the glucose stuff in Veri, which includes average glucose, glucose variability, glucose oscillation (the intensity of spikes and dips), and morning fasting glucose (each daily, but the first one in a running graph over time too). I bet these things are all tied together, but perhaps you could ask a doctor and see about getting a continuous glucose monitor. It has really helped me see what foods impact me most, and as I’ve adjusted to not eating those foods, it’s shown me what a difference that can make to those metrics. And I think you will see a correlation. There is absolutely no reason not to at least try it.

On Monday, I will tell the story of the first happy and positive doctor’s visit I’ve ever had in my life, at least that I can recall. 6 weeks-ish with a changed diet and glucose monitoring has already made a huge difference. Surely an effort over this short a time period is worth it to anyone. (I can tell it is to you.)

Model railroading

andrew b. asks:

Let’s say you have decided to take up model railroading. What time period, location and railroad do you model?

When I was under 7 (based on where I lived), I received a model train set for Christmas one year and obviously loved it. It was barebones at the time—just train and track on the floor—with a transformer that would smell like electricity when I used it too much. Over time, we did put it only plywood and added some light dress-up to the set, with some building and those fun fake trees that look like moss. But I never did improve it to a fully realistic thing. I use to pour over the model railroad magazines at the library, hoping I could have something more professional.

Today, I don’t have the space or inclination to do anything like that, but if I did, I would probably have a combination of eras over different areas in a large but interconnected set. So there would be steam-based trains from the late 1800s, super-modern high-speed trains, and a few in-between. I was always in love with trolleys like the ones we used to have on the Green line of the MBTA in Boston, but also the classic designs you still see in Lisbon and San Francisco. Perhaps a funicular going up a steep incline. Cable cars, even.

It’s kind of hard to pick. I mean, all trains are excellent.

Future Surface speculation

helix2301 asks:

I was listening to you on FRD after the earnings report and Surface said they were going to focus on high-margin devices. Doesn’t Microsoft have a deal still with NFL?

Microsoft does have a deal with the NFL, but then HoloLens has a deal with the U.S. Army, and that doesn’t seem like it’s going to save that business. For all the face time and marketing, it’s not clear that exposing Surface to the public via the NFL has paid off. And not to be mean about it, but it’s hard not to imagine players, coaches, and announcers not being happier with iPads anyway.

How is Surface not profitable? They have deals with GameStop I see surface stuff in there all the time. I just don’t understand why this is not working for Microsoft. Is it marketing? Is it branding?

I think it’s related to the cost of business.

This came up in passing above, but the PC market has always been a low-margin business, and established PC makers have had to resort to crapware bundling and advertising added-pay services to make a profit, especially on non-premium devices. Microsoft entered this market without fully understanding the economics, honestly (or, really, anything), and so that’s been a learning curve because “knowing” something is not the same as doing it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had conversations with people I know at PC makers who just laugh at each thing Surface goes through because these issues were resolved for them so long ago for them.

Also, Microsoft sells so few PCs that it doesn’t benefit from the scale that established PC makers get. Lenovo, HP, Dell, and others pay lower costs for components because they buy so much more than does Microsoft, and they get first and preferential treatment when supplies are low. Microsoft tried to end-run around this system one time, with the Skylake-based Surface PCs that triggered Surfacegate, and my guess is that they paid a lot upfront for that, only to have it backfire. For the most part, they’ve been on previous-generation chips ever since, or at least late in each cycle.

This is the delta between claiming a leadership role, as Surface has done repeatedly, and not actually providing that leadership role. Microsoft can’t afford to lead. It’s a non-virtuous cycle.

Tied to this, OldITPro2000 asks:

For someone who doesn’t want to encounter analysis paralysis with all of the choices from Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. and just wants a MacBook that’s not a Mac, a Surface makes a lot of sense. Like you, I want Surface to succeed but the financials show it doesn’t make sense as a business. Since Surface was always supposed to be a “premium reference brand,” my belief was Microsoft would take advantage of that positioning and introduce more Surface products with Arm processors. I can’t imagine them transitioning over completely to Arm but the only device available with Arm right now is the Pro 9.

This was clearly a goal, and my understanding is that Microsoft did not expect Qualcomm’s PC chipsets to ramp up so slowly and so poorly. But there’s another double-edged sword in this conversation: the software had to be there, too, and while we can now claim that Microsoft has literally done everything it could have to get this platform to where it needs to be, that effort took several years. And I will argue here that it is only now, in 2023, that the software half of this equation finally makes sense. (And that includes the caveat about software drivers, which will never be interoperable with x86.) So this leaves Qualcomm as the final blocker. And Qualcomm has its first big NUVIA-based chipsets coming soon, probably to be announced this December. So we may literally be on the cusp of this platform making sense.

At this point I was expecting at least one of the laptop models (like the Laptop Go) to be offered in an Arm variant. Any idea why Microsoft hasn’t taken advantage of this? We always see those rumor articles about Microsoft hiring in the custom silicon space but beyond what they are doing in Azure that has yet to translate into actual products people can hold.

It’s the hardware. And whatever anyone thinks about the quality of Surface hardware, releasing more Arm-based designs now will only hurt for all the obvious performance (and lingering compatibility) reasons. Something that looks like Windows but is not completely Windows has never succeeded. So they can’t take this step now. You have to think they want to.

And who knows? If Qualcomm hits that home run, we may see non-Surface Pro models offered in both Intel/AMD and Qualcomm variants in the future, and then go Qualcomm-only (if Intel/AMD don’t get their acts together). We can dream. But it is possible.

One music service to rule them all

helix2301 also asks:

I was listening to MacBreak Weekly the other day and they were talking about Spotify earnings which were stellar. How Spotify is number 1 in music service by far and Apple is running slow as number 2 which is starting to possibly become number 3 thanks to Amazon. Is this an example of power defaults not working? Even with AppleOne, this is a market where Apple actually losing ground.

Spotify has been in the market since 2006, but Apple Music only debuted in 2015. So it had a nearly decade-long head start and had it not been so successful, it’s unclear if Apple would have even offered a competitor. But Apple has done everything it can—including using some potentially illegal business practices like subsidizing its service with its successful hardware products to lower prices beyond what Spotify is capable of—to make up the lost ground. And Apple Music is quite successful, honestly. It’s just that Spotify is a monster, in part because users seem to love it. This is the right kind of “sticky,” if that makes sense: it’s not artificial, it’s real.

That said, it is notable that Apple has not revealed the number of Apple Music subscribers in over four years. Like Microsoft, it is sticking to vaguer success milestones and commingling subscriber numbers across Apple One.

Regarding the power of defaults, that’s perhaps less impactful because of the nature of music and the music market. That is, it’s so easy to switch that people can choose the best product, and there’s no Apple Music integration with other successful Apple products to drive usage. (They tried and failed to do this with HomePod, which remains a niche product.) Plus, there are excellent examples of products that are so good, they defy the power of defaults, Google Chrome being the most obvious. It appears that Spotify plays the same role in music.

(For whatever it’s worth, I’ve never personally understood the appeal of Spotify, and that’s even more true now with the recent UI changes.)

Usage share vs. quality of usage

helix2301 also asks:

I notice many people are on console or phone has there ever been or is there even a way to see stats like gaming on console vs PC vs Mobile Handheld? To me, phones are not a great metric because I don’t really consider my wife playing Candycrush on her phone a “Gamer”. If you kinda get what I am asking. But I know with Xbox Cloud gaming I guess you could be a gamer on the phone.

This kills me. I had an excellent resource for this exact information, and I referenced it recently and intended to hold onto it but lost it. So I will keep looking, but here is an off-the-top of my head (and perhaps unreliable) paraphrase of the high-level market overview: Mobile gaming is over 50 percent of all gaming by revenue, with PC sales overtaking console gaming slightly this year for the first time; so PC gaming revenue was something like 28 percent of the total and console was most of the remainder (21 percent-ish). There is a tiny slice for web gaming that was single-digit.

But to your point, I bet mobile gaming is an even bigger percentage of the total if you look at usage. And that’s where most of the free (and I am not paying to play) mobile gaming lands. More to the point, many of those people are not, as you state, gamers. They are whittling away their free time here and there. It’s a slightly more interactive form of entertainment than reading or watching a video. I hear that. But it’s still part of the market, and if you want to draw a distinction between hard-core gamers and casual gamers, you can, but if they spend money (even indirectly via ads), they’re important to the industry.

Anyway, Xbox Cloud Gaming does not appeal to that casual mobile gamer. It requires an expensive paid subscription and will appeal to gamers who are so hard-core that they want to play the same console-quality games at any time and on any device. Your wife or other normal people have never heard of this and would not pay for it.

And to be fair, there are terrific and involved mobile games and thus “hard-core” mobile gamers, too. They play Call of Duty Mobile and other similarly advanced and sophisticated native mobile games. Not sure about the numbers, but there was a point where COD Mobile revenues outstripped the PC and console versions. That almost says everything about the possibilities.

A Google mulligan?

helix2301 also asks:

My last question is do you think Google will try another stadia? It was such great tech or do you think this is another Google Buzz / Google+ where they just give up after trying too many times?

No, and while I still have lingering opinions that Stadia could have succeeded, it definitely succumbed that most Google of product strategies, which is to throw it out in the world, never improve it in any material way (game exclusives, licensing deals, whatever), and then let it die. But I feel like the “evidence” (I’d call it “information”) that Microsoft and its partners and competitors provided during that recent FTC hearing tells of another reality: these things just don’t make sense at scale as standalone businesses. That could change over time, but Microsoft doesn’t offer a standalone Xbox Cloud Gaming subscription for one reason and one reason only: it’s not viable. And that was true for Stadia too, I bet. I wish it were otherwise.

(You know, Futurama was just resurrected again, with the original cast and for the umpteenth time. I guess anything is possible.)