Ask Paul: September 1 (Premium)

Happy Friday! And, yep, it’s really September already. So let’s kick off the long Labor Day weekend with a great set of reader questions.

ChatGPT and non-exclusivity

helix2301 asks:

First of all just want to say love all the site updates great to get some of the behind-the-scenes stuff really great and enjoy it.

Thanks. I meant to be more consistent with those posts—maybe once a week until I had hit all the obvious topics—but I got derailed by my digital decluttering work. But this is very important to me, not just because it’s in keeping with my transparency preferences, but because the feedback I get is invaluable. It’s very rewarding.

My question is what is Microsoft doing with ChatGPT it is the same thing they tried with Cortana putting it everywhere and they failed and lost to Google and Amazon. Why are they doing it again with a product they don’t own? I know it’s because they don’t want to miss the next wave but they have kind of been there and done that and they failed. I don’t get the point of it.

You aren’t the only one wondering this: Microsoft has invested an incredible amount of money in OpenAI directly—a reported $13 billion so far—but it has likewise invested untold tens of billions more each quarter in products and services that build off OpenAI. The potential here is obvious, with Microsoft clearly betting the future of the company on AI. But the risks are huge, in part because Microsoft doesn’t get exclusive access to OpenAI’s technologies. The company can—and has—licensed it to others as well. Why is that?

For starters, OpenAI is a privately owned company that isn’t for sale, and it has no plans to ever go public. It was formed as a non-profit, but it announced in 2019 that it was creating a “capped profit” company, a “hybrid of a for-profit and nonprofit,” so that it could raise the investments it needed to grow its AI technologies without giving up ownership or control. This confusing and unusual arrangement let OpenAI grow rapidly by attracting outside investors, with Microsoft being the big fish in that pond, but it also protected the company from being swallowed up because its investors can never make more than 100 times the money they put into OpenAI. And these investors can’t get a seat on OpenAI’s board, further limiting their ability to control the company and its strategic direction.

In short, Microsoft did what it could do to help OpenAI grow its technologies as rapidly as possible and to have at least some influence over the company. Microsoft Azure is OpenAI’s exclusive cloud partner, for example—everything the company does runs on Azure—and the software giant ensured that would continue to be the case by extending this partnership this past January. “Azure will remain the exclusive cloud provider for all OpenAI workloads across our research, API, and products,” OpenAI said at the time.

The word independent is important here. OpenAI is independent as a company, and though it collaborates with Microsoft’s AI teams, it independently researches and develops its AI technologies. For its part, Microsoft said at the time that both firms could “independently commercialize the resulting advanced AI technologies.” What it didn’t say, of course, was that independently commercializing these things means that OpenAI can sell or license all of the technologies that Microsoft gets to any other companies too. And it has done so.

Microsoft would clearly prefer to acquire OpenAI, though that would be impossible now because of regulatory concerns. And it would likewise prefer to have an ownership stake in the company or, I’m sure, some form of control. But the deal as structured has enabled OpenAI to grow dramatically, and Microsoft’s bet has paid off in the sense that OpenAI is quite successful today and will likely continue growing in both power and capability. While this is happening, Microsoft is adapting OpenAI technologies into its own products and services, and building out its AI infrastructure so that it can further benefit over the long term via Azure (hosting AI workloads for OpenAI and others)

To your point, I don’t see Microsoft succeeding on the consumer side with Bing chat or other AI initiatives. But it should succeed handily in the commercial space as it does now, but at even bigger scale. The move to cloud computing has already paid off for Microsoft big-time, but AI will likely be an even bigger growth driver. It’s just all going to happen on the back-end, through Azure, or via business solutions that are part of Microsoft 365.

Skype in limbo

helix2301 also asks:

My other question is Skype I see Microsoft still adding features and improvements to Skype will they ever say if it’s a profitable business? Are they maybe using Skype to test features before teams? I still see people using Skype in the world not sure what the play is with it.

Here again, you are not alone. Skype has been on the back burner since Teams took off with businesses, but the brand has failed to gain any traction with consumers. Sadly, when the pandemic hit, Microsoft was in full-on Teams mode, and so Skype was basically ignored at a time in which much of the planet needed seamless remote communications capabilities, something Skype has always done quite well. And so while Teams use skyrocketed with businesses, Skype usage fell as individuals swarmed to Zoom instead. (Microsoft boasts that Teams has over 300 million users. It’s hard to find a current number for Skype, but it appears to be just 36 million.)

Microsoft has never explicitly said that it would kill the Skype brand, though many have assumed as much. But as you noticed, Skype is actually updated with new features regularly. It was one of the first ways to access Bing chat outside of a browser, for example, and Microsoft just celebrated Skype’s 20th anniversary, not that many noticed. Like Windows, it just seems to be an afterthought these days.

I made my feelings about this clear back in December in Microsoft, Just Bring Back Skype (Premium). Though it’s been mishandled in recent years, Skype is still a great product and a great brand. And I feel like it, not Teams, should carry forward as Microsoft’s solution for consumers. But as is so often the case with Microsoft, there’s no way to know whether it is profitable. I’m not even sure which one of Microsoft’s three business units runs Skype.

Xbox Series X still runs on Windows 10?

spacecamel asks:

I checked my Xbox Series X info yesterday, and it says the OS version is 10.0.22621.  I take this to mean that it is still running Windows 10.  While I know there is very little difference between Windows 11 and 10, I find it odd that they have not updated it to say it is running the latest version of Windows.  Any ideas when they will update it?

Microsoft’s Xbox consoles have always utilized an OS that was based on whatever version of Windows was current at that time, but that doesn’t mean that they “run Windows” per se, or are ever updated to new product versions alongside Windows. That said, the Xbox One was rearchitected (with NT designer Dave Cutler’s help, no less) to a new architecture based on Hyper-V the hypervisor virtualization platform that was originally created for Windows Server. And part of that effort was to ensure that the Xbox OS could run “modern” apps (now called UWP apps) as part of the whole “One Windows” initiative.

This Hyper-V architecture means that the host OS is a thin and light parent partition, “close to the metal,” based on NT controls access to the hardware and launches the OSes in its two child partitions, each of which are virtual environments without direct access to the hardware. On Windows and Windows Server, these child partitions are VMs with their own (guest) operating system, and there can be any number of them. But on Xbox, the first partition, called Exclusive, runs Xbox OS for games and probably gets most system resources, while the second partition, called Shared, runs a scaled-down version of Windows, for cross-compatible apps. (Their names hint at their relative importance, I think.)

Microsoft talked about this a bit when Xbox One was the going concern, but there has been no new information about this that I’m aware of since Xbox Series X|S debuted. (Microsoft Learn has an overview of the Hyper-V architecture for Windows/Windows Server if you want to know about that.)

Anyway, Xbox One was based on Windows 8 (go figure, I had forgotten that I was actually the first to report that), and Xbox Series X|S is based on Windows 10. These are appliances, really, fixed platforms at the lowest level, so they will see incremental updates each month, but there’s no reason to “upgrade” to Windows 11, such as it is, since most of that platform’s advantages are either UI-related that don’t apply to Xbox or low-level changes that are PC-specific in nature. (The reverse is not true, I guess, as Windows sometimes gets features that originated on the consoles, like DirectStorage.) Even when Windows 10 goes out of support, this won’t have to change, because Microsoft controls the platform and there are no support worries.

While it’s not impossible that Microsoft might “upgrade” the underpinnings of any (or all) of the three OSes used by Xbox, it’s unlikely, and I don’t believe that’s ever happened. And if you’re familiar with Hyper-V, you know that very little effort has gone into this product on the PC/Server side (while cloud-hosted VMs have gotten all the attention), and so it’s very unlikely there are any architectural advantages to Windows 11 that might benefit the host OS or the apps partition. The most important thing here is the Xbox OS in the Exclusive partition, and that’s all custom to Xbox.

But Microsoft has, of course, changed the UI of its front-end, the Dashboard, many, many times, and that was often done to get it to align, where it made sense, with whatever was happening with Windows UIs at the time. For example, the Xbox 360 “blade” UI was swapped out for a panoramic UI that mimicked how Windows 8 panoramic apps looked and worked (and that was, of course, based on Windows Phone 7 panoramic experiences). That will almost certainly continue.

(Of course, this is Microsoft, so there will be a headline, “Microsoft upgrades Xbox to Windows 11,” next week.

Notable

j5 asks:

Paul, what do you use to take personal notes? I know you use Notion for Thurrott.com related notes and collaboration. I think you used to use OneNote before it maybe?

Yes, I used OneNote from the moment the first beta appeared—I commented at the time how weird it was that Microsoft was making an app that seemed custom-designed for me—until early 2022, when I switched to Notion. (That said, I did use Evernote for a while, albeit just for personal things.) The issues with OneNote were (and still are) many, and the simplicity of what was originally called OneNote for Windows 10 temporarily delayed me moving off it. But the big thing was that real-time collaboration—I worked on Windows Weekly notes with Mary Jo at the time and it was a constant source of problems, so much so that we would simply ping each other on Skype to let the other know when we were or were not in there working on it. Good riddance.

But what about your personal thing? Do you keep notes for ideas, to-do lists, wish lists for books, tech, etc.?

I moved to Notion, first for Windows Weekly, but then for everything else, and I use it extensively (and every day). I have three shared pages (these are called notebooks at this level in OneNote) now, for Windows Weekly, Eternal Spring (the YouTube channel I share with my wife, for show notes and whatnot), and Thurrott.com (also shared with my wife, for to-do’s and various business-related things). And then I have many pages for work- and personal-related things, like meeting notes, health-related things (mostly for the weights I use at the gym, but also for manual food and glucose monitoring), and so on.

This is a reminder that I’ve been meaning to write something about Loop, which has been on a slow-boil development path that is starting to get frustrating. I had been using Loop on my phone at the gym for a few months at least—I just copied that bit over from Notion—with the expectation that I’d be moving to Loop at some point. (This has come up a few times in Ask Paul, for example on June 2 this past year.) But I have had nothing but problems with this one page in the mobile app, with lots of pop-up warnings in red and sync issues. And then it was doing this for the past week.

So we’ll see. I still think I will make the change, but only if they get it right.

I’ve been using Apple Notes exclusively for the past few years. Before that, I used Standard Notes when I was on Windows and Android. I like Apple Notes but it’s a hot mess! Sometimes I just want to wipe it clean and start fresh. But I’d lose my mind if all my personal notes were gone. I didn’t realize until recently that Apple Notes doesn’t have a real time backup “CMD + Z” macOS “Ctrl +Z” Windows. I accidentally deleted some things I had put in a note and there’s no way to get it back once you start typing new information in the note. So this has me on the hunt for a new personal note app. I’m just curious about what you use for your personal notes. Thanks!

I’m not super-familiar with the Apple stuff, but my goals, notes or otherwise, have always centered on simplicity and availability. One of the issues I had with OneNote is that it got so busy with all these features I never needed (hence my attraction to OneNote for Windows 10 at first), or like a typical Office app in other words. But Notion is clean and minimalistic. And on the availability front, it needs to be everywhere I might want to be. And Notion is on all Windows, Mac, web, and mobile.

It’s also worth mentioning that I don’t pay for Notion, though I would if I had to. But the free version has never been limiting to me, and I share the Windows Weekly notes with several people at TWiT with no issues.

Microsoft 365 price hikes

harmjr asks:

Do you think the Microsoft Office Family Subscription is going to go up this year? I feel it will soon.

Yes. I’m not sure when it will happen, but this is inevitable. We live in age of price hikes, it seems, and no service is immune. I am sort of wondering if Microsoft will discuss new Copilot AI capabilities in the consumer versions of Microsoft 365 next month, as they have never done so yet, and what that might look like, and how that could be the excuse for a price hike too.

And I am thinking about buying several years worth and stacking them. Are they still allowing stacking?

Yes, they are. I do this all the time, and I recommend it anytime you see a sale price on a Microsoft 365 Family code online. In fact, I am paid up through May 28, 2025. And will add to that whenever the price is right.

Pixelated

harmjr asks:

Not sure if anyone has asked about it in some time but how do you feel today about the Pixel Fold? I am thinking of grabbing a Pixel 7a during Black Friday as it may be fire sale pricing.

I was surprised by how much I liked the Pixel Fold, but I will be upgrading to a Pixel 8 Pro (and probably an iPhone 15 Max or whatever they call it) in the coming months and then see where things stand. The Pixel Fold is pretty much there, but I would like to see more apps tailored for the screen and maybe a Pixel Pro-level camera system in a future update if possible.

Semi-related, I will consider a Pixel Watch 2 this fall as well, as I was likewise surprised by how good the first one was (aside from battery life, which was also an issue with the Apple Watch).

The Pixel 7a is a solid handset, but as Google moves forward with new Tensor chipsets, I would just see if they solve the issues with the first two generations, which boil down to heat and performance, and the resulting impacts on battery life and charging times. Don’t get me wrong, they’re fine overall, but the Tensor just doesn’t seem optimized for a lot of the day-to-day stuff that, say, Samsung users take for granted. I’m curious if the Tensor G3 in the Pixel 8s fix any of that. But either way, the Pixel 7a is a great little phone. Just be aware of the (minor) issues.

File management

MartinusV2 asks:

About that release of the next fiasco of File Manager, did you compare with Files app from the store which one is better? I like Files but I feel it’s still slower than the current File Manager. When I need to do a lot of files moving/copying, I use that old Total Commander file manager. Like your Directory Opus, it’s ugly and looks old, but the software only takes 10-15mb of ram compared to the 100mb of File Manager and Files. And it does things faster than File Manager.

I didn’t look at Files this time, though I have in the past, partially out of my belief that a file manager needs to be a Win32 app and as close to the metal as possible (look at that phrase coming up twice today) for performance reasons. And so I researched file manager applications and tested two of them, the other one being XYplorer. Ultimately, I went with Directory Opus for a variety of reasons, but its dual-pane view was ideal for the comparisons and cross-folder copying I was doing—when I was working in File Explorer, I was literally using Snap to have two windows side-by-side full-screen—and it has some incredible capabilities, especially Find, where the left pane becomes a sort of filtered/virtual view that was just ideal for what I was doing.

(I will soon publish yet another post in that digital decluttering series because I have literally finished the archiving process, a feat I did not think was possible just a month ago. Tools like Directory Opus and WinDirStat were key to this success, and great examples of technology helping instead of hindering, which is what I often experience. More on that soon.)

And talking about slow Win11 software, have you noticed that moving from Performance to Processes from Task Manager takes some time to show? Was a lot faster with the old Task Manager.

The File Explorer issues I raised are sort of the tip of the iceberg with this stuff—I had a related rant on Windows Weekly the other day in which I described this mess as a “clown car of stupidity”—but there is a rolling snowball of issues here that is interrelated. And, go figure, your mentioning of that Files app plays into this as well.

If you think back to Windows 8 and the dawn of the modern app era, there was a push by Microsoft to put what are essentially mobile apps on top of the Windows desktop platform. There are advantages inherent in this idea that we shouldn’t ignore, even just on desktop—simpler UIs, better power management and thus battery life, and so on—but it’s very clear that Microsoft completely screwed up this platform from the get-go, as those apps were too simplistic, making it impossible to create command-dense solutions like Microsoft Word or Excel. Which, you’ll recall, they tried. Indeed, the message for a year or more was that the UWP versions of Office would replace the desktop versions in time. The only one that got anywhere close to this—another callback—was OneNote for Windows 10. But the Office team gave up on this very quickly because, well, it was impossible. Metro/modern/UWP/whatever just wasn’t sophisticated enough.

When that dream died, Microsoft moved to make UWP make more sense on the desktop by offering hybrid capabilities between mobile and desktop, and by migrating its underline tech to the desktop. First with XAML Islands, which is the disaster you see in File Explorer today in Windows 11 22H2. This version of File Explorer is a hybrid desktop app with XAML Island-based user interfaces (toolbar and navigation bar, so they could use WinUI 2), but XAML Islands, like UWP, was so limited that the File Explorer team had to modify it extensively for their needs.

But Microsoft created the Windows App SDK, which is essentially UWP for desktop, but decoupled from specific Windows versions (which is a great idea). And so the File Explorer team is moving to that: the File Explorer that will almost certainly appear in 23H2 (it’s in the Beta channel now) replaces the XAML Island UIs with Windows App SDK/WinUI 3 UIs. And it is even worse than the previous version because it is slower and more unreliable. (And in another strike to this entire tech stack and its legacy, they once again had to heavily modify it for their needs. So much for that.) Hence my rants lately: in 23H2, File Explorer is just as slow as ever, and now it’s unreliable too and crashes all the time.

Yes, I know it’s a pre-release thing. (And, yes, the recent Beta build includes File Explorer reliability fixes, because of course it does.) But it is unclear to me why Microsoft can’t architect the Win32 underpinnings of this app to work as well (meaning “as fast”) as third-party file managers like Directory Opus. No lie, I’m seeing something on the order of a 10x performance improvement over the network or from disk to disk. This is inexcusable.

Likewise, it’s unclear to me why Microsoft can’t figure out this hybrid (post-Windows 8/UWP) app future, where the front-end is pretty (I really do like the look of WinUI 3) but actually works well too. The new File Explorer will be prettier than ever, I guess. But it should work well too. (And enough with the feature bloat and continuous changes. Every Windows 11 version has come with a new File Explorer for some reason.)

I do not understand with all the CPU power we have already, that software is getting slower and slower.

Yep. I think I talk around how this happened above, but I don’t see why they can’t fix it or why these newest types of apps simply aren’t better overall (prettier, simpler, more reliable, and more performant). Microsoft is focusing on the wrong things, I think. Form over function used to be Apple’s thing.

(To be clear, my File Explorer performance issues during the digital decluttering stuff occurred on both stable 22H2 and 23H2/Beta channel. The 23H2 File Explorer was just less reliable, meaning it would hang and crash constantly, making it unusable.)

OneDrive is double-dipping, Edge is meandering

AnOldAmigaUser asks:

So today, I got a message from Microsoft regarding photo storage in OneDrive that contained this snippet…

Microsoft is committed to improving your Microsoft 365 experience, and we want to let you know about an upcoming change to the OneDrive photos storage infrastructure. Soon, data from photos saved in your Gallery and in your albums will each count separately against your total Microsoft storage quota.

It was always my thought that an album in OneDrive was simply a file with pointers to the actual photos, or a filter applied to categories. My understanding is that OneDrive storage is built on SharePoint, and this (filters on a category) is certainly how SharePoint would handle it. The new policy, however, would indicate that they are copying the photos. Whisky-Tango-Foxtrot…are they actually that stupid or is this just a way to grab a bit more cash from people? If it is the former, that might explain why photos in an album cannot be arranged by name or date taken, but that is just another example of stupid.

So many thoughts. 🙂

But first, this issue. Which I had to look up: I was unaware of anything called Gallery in OneDrive (because of the way I use this service, more on that below). But if you navigate to the Photos view in OneDrive on the web or in the mobile app, you’ll see it. (It’s in the Windows 11 Photos app under “Memories” too, actually.) And it is not coincidental that the File Explorer in Windows 11 23H3 (yet another callback!) features a top-level Gallery view in its navigation pane. According to Microsoft, Gallery is customizable and lets you “browse your memories,” which is a feature that OneDrive (like Google Photos, etc.) has offered for years. This is where you get notifications about photos from the past and so. (The type of thing I disable immediately.)

Basically, Gallery displays “For you” and “All photos” sections, and in the first of those, I see tiles for “On this day,” “A recent trip,” “August moments,” and the like. I didn’t create any of these, they’re from Microsoft. I also don’t see a way to delete any of these, or disable this feature beyond hiding “For you” in My files, which I did do while researching this. (It still appears in Photos.) So what on earth is Microsoft even talking about here?

Well, you can share a memory from OneDrive, though it appears that’s possible only from the mobile app. (And not in the Photos app in Windows? Weird.) Elsewhere, you can share photos, of course, and make and share albums, which I guess are just manually curated virtual folders. And according to that email, anything in galleries—which Microsoft makes—and/or in albums—which you make—will count against your OneDrive storage allotment. And if that’s true, and my assumptions about these things are true (that they are pointers, not duplicates of photo files), then this is nonsense. Microsoft is basically telling you not to use albums.

Maybe that is the point. But maybe someone understands this better than I do.

My own use of OneDrive for photos is archival in nature. I don’t use the Photos view, I go in through My files, where you see the top-level folders in OneDrive (Desktop, Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos, plus Personal Vault and any custom folders you created). And so the Pictures folder, for me, is just Camera roll and the folders I created and manage: Favorites, Photo collection, and Home movies. This is my entire interaction with OneDrive photos. (Some of the shots in this article show some of that folder structure.)

But my frustrations with OneDrive are many. You can’t configure it to always display folders in one way as you can in File Explorer in Windows: I would use List view always sorted alphabetically, for example, but OneDrive seems to veer drunkenly from folder to folder, each with its own way displaying things. This is not a good interface for browsing, so I ignore it. (It is a good interface for searching, but that’s more true of documents than images. If I want to find pictures from Paris or whatever, Google Photos is faster and more complete.)

Put simply, OneDrive is not the best solution for photo browsing or management. If you have the storage space, as you would with Microsoft 365, it’s not a horrible place for backing up phone photos. But I’d put those photos in at least one other place, and other services, like Google Photos, are much better.

On another note, regarding the platform-ization of Edge, do you think Microsoft might still be looking at the idea of a lightweight, browser-based OS to compete with Chromebooks…a Windows 12X so to speak? They are simply not competitive in the education market, even though Microsoft 365 (the web bits) works just fine on a Chromebook.

It does seem so, though they have never explicitly admitted to that. I still believe this is an ongoing effort somewhere in Microsoft, and that the elusive future lightweight client is still a goal.

Where in the world is Code Sandiego?

ianceicys asks:

Do you ever think about where in the world the code/apps you run every day are developed in? Examples: Stardock code is developed in Michigan. Microsoft Word code is developed in ho chi minh city, Vietnam. Windows Assembler code / C based code is developed in Nairobi, Kenya. Spotify code is developed in Stockholm, Sweden. HBO Max (Warner Bros. Discovery) code is developed in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Honestly, no, not explicitly. And I wasn’t aware of most of those examples, which is interesting. But I do know about the history of Spotify, and I know that multinational companies like Microsoft have developers all over the world, and that the post-pandemic hybrid work reality means that many of these people are probably now working from home. And you could stretch that to see the impetus for things like Windows 365 and Dev Box, as they help solve some of the security and maintainability issues inherent in that way of doing things. (When I visited Berlin with my family in 2018, we met with the local team at Microsoft—formerly Wunderlist—and they were at that time working on all kinds of interesting projects.)