Ask Paul: September 15 (Premium)

Whew! Happy Friday, and welcome to another mammoth and curiously personal installment of Ask Paul to kick off the weekend a bit early. This, again, is one of the biggest yet.

Ahsoka

helix2301 asks:

Did you watch Ahsoka yet? Did you like it?

I’m only partway through Ahsoka, mostly because of time issues: I watch most TV/movie content with my wife, and she would not be interested in this, and I don’t do much cardio at the gym anymore. But I will say, I do like it quite a bit. My favorite Star Wars show so far is still Obi-Wan Kenobi, because it really captures the feel of the movies, and of course the return of Hayden Christensen was amazing. (He’s underrated. I really like the guy.) The two previous shows—The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett in particular—have this weird, constricted (and identical) feel that just feels like what they are, mostly filmed in some relatively small green screen studio. But Ohsoka might be my second favorite Star Wars show, we’ll see. It’s definitely up there so far.

And speaking of embarrassing, I haven’t finished Andor either. I started that, too, and that one is quite unique among the series. I bet it lands near the top whenever I can get to that as well.

Phone Link and iPhone

helix2301 asks:

When is phone connect for iPhone coming to windows I had it on a dell then it got discontinued because Microsoft bought the tech but it still not in Windows. I bought dell for this feature and now its gone. Dell Connect was great feature for iPhone users

I thought you meant iPhone support in Phone Link at first: That’s been available since April, though it is very limited compared to Android. But right, Dell Mobile Connect: That was a neat solution for integrating an iPhone with a PC, but it was only available via Dell computers. And then Intel purchased the company that made Mobile Connect in 2021, forcing Dell to discontinue it. Intel re-released it as Unison in late 2022, but it’s sadly only made available via “select PCs” from Dell, HP, Lenovo, and others running 13th Gen Core processors. Only one of which, the Lenovo Yoga 9i, I’ve reviewed, and I’m sorry to say I barely noticed it (and was using a Pixel at the time anyway.) I can’t explain why Intel doesn’t just release this app publicly. (Like Phone Link and other similar apps, it requires an app on the iPhone as well.)

Latency and cloud gaming

SherlockHolmes asks:

Hi Paul, I was playing Baldurs Gate 3 for the past few days on an old gaming PC over Nvidia Geforce Now. I was using a Powerline Adapter on a 100 MBps line with a latency from 5 to 10 ms. So it actually works pretty well. Why do you think cloud gaming isnt or wouldnt be a thing for Microsoft and other cloud gaming services?

For a variety of reasons, but to be clear, I don’t mean that it won’t work at all, or generally. I mean that it won’t work for many people—for bandwidth and latency reasons—and for many types of games, especially first-person shooters, which require hair-trigger reaction times, and especially for multiplayer.

The most success I saw with this type of thing was Doom Eternal on Stadia, which is a first-person shooter, but single-player, but there was still plenty of that “sliding on ice” latency lag effect. And Stadia benefitted, I think, by having the controller directly connected to the service via Wi-Fi, whereas Xbox Cloud Gaming does not do that. So many will rely on a Bluetooth controller connection, which adds another layer of issues. (Wired is always best in this case.)

Cloud streaming will be fine for some types of games and in some scenarios; the more casual the better, and the lower the lag/latency the better. But it will always be an issue with modern, first-person multiplayer games. I don’t think that will ever work, there are just too many variables.

Xbox hardware value

madthinus asks:

Xbox value proposition looks a bit muddy. You have now $299, $349 and $499. The PS5 is $399 and $499. Is it fair to say that for the $50 more, the PlayStation 5 digital version is a better buy at this point of time in the generation? Storage and size of games this generation has ballooned. Is the Series S great value still? For the record, I own a Series S, and I love it, but the storage has bit me a bit.

A couple of thoughts.

I don’t think most potential PlayStation or Xbox buyers are even making this comparison, where they compare the specs, games, and prices of the respective consoles. Instead, I think most are in either ecosystem and are considering which PlayStation 5 or Xbox model to get.

But some people are, of course, making that comparison. There are multi-console owners, and people who game in multiple ways, across PC/Mac, console, and/or mobile. And there must be switchers of some degree, though I will always argue that the real value proposition of Xbox is tied to its respect for legacy and backward compatibility. (And it’s not technically lock-in like we see with Apple; one of Microsoft’s overreaching goals for this platform is to make as many games as possible available in as many places as possible. Perhaps in some alternative future, PS gamers could subscribe to an Xbox Game Pass and enjoy those games on the console they prefer.)

But the cost is an interesting thing, and Xbox does benefit in some way just by being cheaper. And the base model Series S, which I also use, is a terrific console that significantly undercuts the base PS5 (by $100): It’s literally two-thirds the price. For whatever audience is out there who wants a console but is unsure of which way to go, that will make a difference. Of course, the base Nintendo Switch is only $199, or $100 less than that Series S. I suspect it benefits greatly from this fact. (And from other unique Switch advantages, like its portability and kid-friendliness.)

But that’s not the only cost factor. One could argue, correctly, that with games getting bigger and bigger, the base Series S’s 512 GB of storage is inadequate. But it’s still cheaper, and many people will simply rationalize that they can upgrade the storage later if they can’t deal with the built-in limit. And though that future upgrade will make the total cost more than just going with the 1 TB Series S version, whatever. Mortgaging the future—I jokingly refer to this as “Future Paul” and will often say, “F#$% that guy”—is kind of a human condition. But then so too is intending to buy the cheapest one and getting an upgrade at purchase time. By then, you’re not considering the PS5 anyway. You’re in on Xbox.

Those who value technical superiority over cost can compare a Switch to a Series S and/or Xbox Series X|S to either PS5 and do the math on that. But those people aren’t considering a Series S (or Switch anyway). They are comparing Xbox Series X to PS5. And this is why I think Microsoft is wrong to not upgrade the X right now. That’s where I would make the change: Introduce a true “PS5 killer” (really a truly competitive Series X) that guarantees 4K/60 fps as a minimum.

But again, Phil Spencer knows this market and the cost/benefit of such a thing much better than I do. And we all agree that the future of Xbox is about the services, not the console hardware. So maybe it doesn’t matter as much as I still sort of think it does.

Larry Bird and other stories

rambone05 asks:

Hi Paul!  Never heard the Larry Bird story. Would you mind sharing the story?

I was positive that I was going to be able to link to some article in which I describe this, but the closest I could find was From the Editor’s Desk for Monday: We Don’t Need Another Hero (Premium), where I only reference it. (Maybe it’s in an older newsletter editorial that hasn’t yet been added to the site.) So sure, I will tell it here. And add a few other related stories that may be of interest.

First, the background of all this is that I went to the K.C. Jones Basketball Camp for three or four years in the late 1970s and 1980s. I researched this and couldn’t find anything concrete about the camp, and I have fewer photos from these camps than I had hoped, but the first camp I went to was in Lake Placid, New York, whereas the remainder were at Norwich University in New York. And K.C. Jones, for those who don’t know, was a star basketball player for the Boston Celtics for over a decade from the late 1950s to the late 1960s, where he helped the team win 8 championships. But I knew K.C. as the assistant and then head coach of the Boston Celtics, and it was in the former capacity that he served when I attended his basketball camp.

This is all I found on that history: “During his early years as the assistant coach for Boston, Jones managed an annual international summer basketball camp teaching foundational principles and good sportsmanship to all ages, genders, races, and creeds throughout the years; his five children having the privilege to participate.”

One of the obvious key benefits of the K.C. Jones Basketball Camp was that players from the team would appear, and it was always a mix of stars and what we called “scrubs,” the role and bench players that pad out any team. For example, Rick Robey, who was pretty much a backup center for the Celtics, came many times, while the stars would only come once or maybe a few times each.

The first time I went to the camp was in August 1980, which was the summer after Larry Bird’s first year with the Celtics. He was literally one of, if not the very best, players in the NBA already, and he had helped the team set an NBA record for the best-ever season-over-season turnaround, having won just 29 games in 1978-79 and then 61 games in 1979-80. The team got within one game of the championship, but lost to Philly in 7 games, and they won the NBA Finals the next season (and needed 7 games to get by Philly that year).

Anyway. It was in this world of great promise for my favorite team that Larry Bird and Nate “Tiny” Archibald, the team’s star guard, came to the camp. And I was ready, with a little Polaroid camera (with those cube-shaped detachable and disposable flashes), to take pictures of my new hero. And when he arrived and started shooting around at an outdoor court, we all swarmed to watch the legend in action. Most maintained a respectable distance, but I positioned myself on the three-point line, along with however many kids could fit, so we were as close as you could be.

One of Bird’s shots bounced high off the rim and came toward me. And when he ran backward to catch up with it, he ended up tripping over me, which was mortifying enough; all I could think of was an injury, and even at 13 years old, I understood the possibility of a season-ending injury. But as it turns out, Larry Bird was kind of a rough guy. He would go on to be semi-infamous for triggering physical altercations on the court, with rivals both real and below his skill level, and he even got into some bar fights. But I didn’t know this then. And so I was surprised when he swore at me, just for being in the way, I guess. And prolifically.

I mean, I was a child. This was confusing and unwelcome. And I felt like everyone there was suddenly looking at me. And even though I hadn’t done anything wrong—I was one of many kids on the three-point line—I naturally blamed myself for this. And after a few moments of shame, I got up and walked back to the dorms. Bird never even apologized. I was an insect to him.

This was obviously my first experience with that very common phenomenon of “never meet your heroes,” which, with much more life experience, I later turned into one of my theories of life, which is that people who are a little too good at something are often horrible at almost everything else. In this case, Larry Bird was a basketball savant, of course, but he wasn’t a great person. And we have lots of examples of that in our industry, Steve Jobs being the prime example. This was the point of that We Don’t Need Another Hero editorial: we idolize people who are both terrible and lucky to be in their positions of power. And we need to get past that. (We won’t. People are particularly fascinated by celebrities for some reason.)

Thinking about this, I wanted to quickly (OK, non-quickly) tell a few other stories from the K.C. Jones Basketball Camp, because my years there were transformational and a big moment of maturity. When I arrived that first year, I was a child. And by the last year—there was an age limit, which I now refer to as being “Menudo’d out”—I led my team to the camp championship with my best friend, and we literally ran the rack from beginning to end. It was incredible.

The first story involves K.C. Jones himself. It is one of my great joys in life that I can claim to have played basketball with this legend, as he would join us at night on the courts for pickup games. Jones was a sweetheart of a man and a natural teacher, and of course he had a deep love for the game, and for the kids he came to his camp. And this experience is hard to put into words. It was a big part of the transformational thing I mentioned above. He was calm, kind, and friendly, everything Bird was not. What a great guy.

The second involves two topics that are core to my life, deafness and racism. Deafness because of my son—who contracted bacterial meningitis as a one-year-old, lost his hearing completely, and now has cochlear implants, with which he has done wonderfully—and racism in part because of when and where I grew up, and that this something I had to figure out on my own. If you think about the often-personal topics that I discuss in From the Editor’s Desk—first in the Premium Newsletter and then later on the site—you should know that I have long intended to write an editorial that I will call Racism. Which I have put off for all the obvious touchy reasons but often imagined might be the last one I write if I know that the series will end for whatever reason.

This story will be part of that editorial that’s only in my brain, but the short setup is that I was born in Boston, and lived in Boston during a horrible decade of racial strife that included a desegregation-based busing crisis in which my father was involved as a police officer, until the age of 7. Which is when we moved to Dedham, just outside Boston. And while my parents were not overt racists, they were a product of their time and were certainly what many white people in that area were like at the time. Our move from Boston to Dedham was very much about them wanting to get further away from the mess, but the implication was that we could move further from Boston in the future if needed too.

So that was part of the world I grew up in. Not my fault, obviously, but also nothing mature from my parents about dealing with things that are different (and a key component of my own parenting, which was part of the reason we felt the need to expose our kids to Europe, among other things).

Anyway, the reason I went to the camp in the first place was that my uncle, who played basketball through college, arranged it so that his son and a few cousins, including me, could go, and he coached there. He was a teacher of the deaf in Boston at a time when that sort of thing was unusual, and kind of spread out. And he had also arranged to have some of his students from Canada come to the camp separately. And when they arrived, they were not what I expected.

For starters, they were black. They were also French Canadian, meaning that they spoke with an accent that I very much did not associate with black people. Furthermore, they were nice. Like, really nice. We got along famously, and this ended up being another part of that transformational thing, where I went into this with certain immature expectations, learned something—something important—and then emerged on the other side as a better and more mature person. I don’t know how long this may have taken otherwise.

Without beating the topic to death, I feel very strongly that diversity is key to the human experience, but it’s especially important to be exposed to it. As people, we perhaps naturally fear the unknown and the different. And the only way to break through that is through immersion. Experience is the death of ignorance.

Stepping off the soapbox, my third and final camp story involves M.L. Carr, one of those Celtics role players; he played for the team for six years, through 1985, and is sadly most well-known among fans of that era for his towel-waving celebrations during the 1983-84 championship run. But he came to K.C. Jones basketball, and so I got to know him a bit—like Jones, he was a fantastic guy—and later in life I played in a men’s basketball league with my uncle, dad, and cousins with (diminutive) football star Doug Flutie, and we had to turn down M.L. Carr when he asked to join the league because he would have run us off the court, even then.

Here’s how we knew that to be true. The first time Carr appeared at camp, we were in Norwich by then, we were all gathered in the biggest indoor gym, which had one long court end-to-end and then two crosswise courts next to each other side by side. We were all sitting on the floor and Carr was telling stories and jokes, and he asked us to select the fastest kid in camp. After a lot of deliberation, one kid was selected, and he came up to Carr. Who told us al that they would race the entire length of the gym and then back again to see who was faster. But there was a catch: the camper would run normally, but Carr would dribble two basketballs, one with each hand.

How fast was M.L. Carr? Well, he finished the race, and never once lost track of a ball, before the kid turned from the halfway point after touching the far wall. It wasn’t even close. I have never witnessed speed of this kind. (Though, Doug Flutie while tiny, was actually pretty quick too.) It was really impressive.

And that was camp.

Success breeds success

ggolcher asks:

In your digital decluttering articles, your editor’s note about your book, and in other articles, you’ve discussed setting goals for yourself that you expected to take months or years, and then having completed them in record time.

Yes. To be fair, the reverse also happens. But these things are notable because they succeeded in ways I didn’t expect, and so I’ve started thinking about why that is, and what one can do to harness that positivity and also identify the blockers to success and try and eliminate those.

Tied to the stories above, on a personal level, I sometimes feel like the butt of a Bill Burr joke, in which my wife, in this case, is a fully realized person while I am continually a work-in-progress. But I think acknowledging that we are all, in fact, a work-in-progress is important, as is trying to improve and evolve.

I noticed a pattern lately of these types of accomplishments for you, and it’s got me wondering: what do you think is the cause for this? Do you think it may be tied to your usage of Adderall, or do you think some other reason(s) may be at play here?

The Adderall thing came up recently with regard to weight loss, too, and, sure, it’s something I think about. But no, I don’t credit Adderall for any of that per se. That said, it’s worth discussing what’s happening with Adderall. And what I do attribute those successes to.

When I wrote From the Editor’s Desk: Mental Health Will Drive You, Well, You Know (Premium), it was sort of a mini-version of that Racism article I haven’t written in the sense that I procrastinated for reasons that I assume or hope are understandable. I am about as transparent as I think anyone can be, but there are sensitive topics. And I can be outspoken about certain topics, especially those that have fallen under the “politically correct” umbrella over the years, and are now further amplified by our current oversensitivity to … everything. It’s a frustrating combination: I want to be open and honest, I feel like I have a positive or at least logical message, and yet I know that these things might be so sensitive to some that my even discussing these things would be what we now call triggering. A term I cannot stand. And yet … must also acknowledge and respect. That’s how this works.

Anyway. I did finally write it. But because I waited a bit, I inadvertently left out a key part of the story, which a reader mentioned in a comment. And what he wrote was actually a key reason I resisted getting that help, and why I procrastinated for so long.

“I wanted to just remind you that part of the reason you are a driven, successful writer is because of your ability to hyperfocus on what you are interested in and come up with hundreds of ideas about how you can engage with it,” he wrote. “If you were a mere mortal, you might just be a normal writer. This is not just a ‘disability’. It’s a superpower as well. It makes some things harder, but you would find a lot of other things harder without it.”

So, getting past the perhaps undue praise there, this was one of my key concerns, that I am good at this thing I do, and if this drug changes me, makes me better in some ways, what if it changes me in this regard, too, and I become “less” as a writer? This scared me deeply. (Tied to this, there’s also a relationship angle I didn’t mention in that article, which is that I have this wife who loves me, so much that she wants me to get help, but also apparently isn’t super-happy with me in some ways as well. I have not changed as a person over the years, and this is the Paul she fell in love with. Why did she need me to change? You can see how this can snowball quickly.)

But what that commenter said is true. And it’s what my therapist and then my doctor told me. Adderall doesn’t strip you of what makes you, you. It’s not like the lobotomy scene at the end of the first Planet of the Apes movie. It will instead leave you the same or, if you’re lucky, amplify your strengths as part of one of its key benefits, which is to help you improve focus.

Adderall also has side effects, one of which is a loss of hunger. This is something my daughter experiences, and for her, it’s ongoing, and she has to be careful to eat more than she wants to as she’s very thin anyway. In my case, I lost a ton of weight in July, which is when I started on Adderall. And so when I wrote about that, someone asked whether the Adderall played a role.

I responded with a no. The rationale being that I had lost weight similarly when I went on a keto diet in early 2017, and that while I did indeed experience a loss of hunger early on, that effect went away before the end of the month. I was already eating only twice a day, and we snacked very infrequently in July at night, and even less frequently since.

Today, my thinking is a bit more nuanced. I do think the Adderall helped, as I had trouble finishing meals early in that month, which was a first for me. And since writing that, I switched up the dosage, and now take more in the morning instead of some in the morning and some at noon, and I have been successfully doing lengthier intermittent fasts on Tuesdays and Thursdays since then. And maybe the Adderall is helping with that. It’s hard to say: I have been doing an intermittent fast of roughly 14-16 hours every day for many months now. So moving to a longer fast of 19 to 23 hours twice a week—where I eat dinner on one day and don’t eat again until dinner the next day—is perhaps just the next natural step, and something I’ve been training my body for.

Long story short, there are too many variables. It could be one thing. It could be the other. It could be both. And … it doesn’t matter to me. Because I just want this to work, and it is. And if Adderall is helping, great. All the more reason to stick with it. (Though the anti-hunger effect did subside previously.)

To your point, it’s important to know two things.

One, that I have experienced what I think of as a writer’s “frenzy/fugue state”—what many would call “being in the zone”—many, many times in my life, and most well before I had even heard of Adderall. I wrote about that recently in the horribly-named From the Editor’s Desk: Just One Piece of the Success Puzzle (Premium), and used two recent examples, one pre-Adderall and one since I started taking it (the decluttering stuff). Tied to this, I remember talking to George around the time that I was writing the second half of the Programming Windows series (two years ago?) and telling him that it was exploding out of me almost magically and that I felt like I was, at that time, writing more than I ever had in my life. (I’ve since felt this way at different times, too.)

The second is just schedule-related. Like many people, I do my best work in the morning. I had long ago come up with this notion of “deep work,” and have tried to schedule my days such that the “important” things that I write fall into that part of the day when possible. This can’t always happen: things happen when they happen, whether it’s circumstance or inspiration. But I like to go to the gym 4-5 times per week, and I can’t bear to go after lunch, so this can cut into my key writing time.

But the reality is that I work all day, and into the night, and on weekends, and I do this because I like it, and it’s satisfying, and I still have a lot I need to get out. And now that I’ve doubled up on the Adderall in the morning—good for focus—and am not taking anything mid-day (take it after that, and you could be up all night), I can say that I’ve noticed no difference at all. My days “feel” the same to me, if that makes sense. (Dosage is hard. I hate changing things up so much.)

More specifically, much of the digital decluttering work I’ve done—and the writing about it that you’ve seen—has occurred in the afternoons and at night. And this is because of my schedule: I would not take time out of “deep work” to scan things, or shuffle files around on my NAS or whatever. I do that kind of thing in the afternoon, or at night, and if something more important comes up, I drop it to do that other thing, whether it’s a breaking news item or whatever other writing.

Given that, I feel like Adderall is not “the” reason for whatever successes. But as with weight loss/appetite suppression, I can’t rule out that it hasn’t helped. And that puts me in the same position: There’s no way to know for sure—too many variables—but it doesn’t matter either because I will ride this wave regardless and strike when the iron is hot. That was the point of Just One Piece of the Success Puzzle, that one should “let success take you along with it, get caught up in it. There are always more wins to be had.” Success breeds success. And in the case of this digital decluttering stuff, it’s let me expand this work into new areas. To be fair, there have been some relatively minor roadblocks I’ll write about soon. But it’s going great, and that’s very exciting.

Getting past form over function

hastin asks:

Microsoft seems to be developing features to modernize and improve Windows 11 Inbox Apps – Paint, Snipping Tool, Photos, etc. While these are welcome improvements, they feel a decade late. Why did this take so long? Why now?

“Why” questions are difficult to answer, especially when we have no insight into the thinking (or lack thereof) in the Windows team, such as it is today. But we can speculate. And base that on history, much of which is well-understood.

At a high level, Windows 11 emerged as an exercise in “lipstick on a pig,” a new version of Windows 10 with a simpler and prettier user interface. This was always superficial, of course, as you lose functionality when you simplify an existing product, and Windows still has the same issue as ever with its multiple user interfaces from different eras poking through from time to time. I love Windows, but it’s a mess. And Windows 11 is just another layer on that mess.

Heading into its second anniversary, Windows 11 has been updated numerous times since its first release, and it’s fair to point out that many of its most important updates were driven by feedback submitted by users who were frustrated by the feature regressions triggered by the product’s simpler UI. Microsoft moved slowly to address these concerns at first, but I feel like we’re mostly in a good place now.

And that equilibrium has perhaps allowed the team to start addressing new needs and issues in a way that Windows had ignored for a while. The in-box apps you mention have long been a central concern, but they’ve been neglected for a long time too. I know this is controversial in some circles, but replacing the candy-ass Mail app with a real version of Outlook is both the right move and a neat callback to the days of Outlook Express and Windows Live Mail. Apps like Notepad and Paint are so core to the experience that modernizing them, while also controversial, is also smart, at least when it’s done right. The in-box apps should be useful and modern examples of what’s possible when developers actually do the right thing, and they should inspire other developers to do the same with their apps. For too long, they’ve been jokes.

So it may be as simple as the team finally having the time to do this. It could also be related to Microsoft’s shifting strategy for creating modern desktop applications. We will no doubt see some combination of apps built on the Windows App SDK (like the new File Explorer that debuts in 23H2) and/or whatever WinUI 3 front-end, and apps built on web technologies like Clipchamp, which is terrific, and Teams. Shifting codebases is difficult and takes time. (And it contributes to that situation in which multiple UIs from different eras are used side by side.) But it looks like we’re finally making some progress again.

Whatever the reason, this is a positive trend. And I hope it continues, though the current AI push has me worried about a new generation of superfluous apps, UIs, and features. Next week’s special event will be a crucial indicator of what we can expect during 23H2’s lifetime and beyond.

The Xbox of tomorrow

christianwilson asks:

I was thinking about Microsoft trying to extend Game Pass to more platforms (mobile) and what options they have outside of Xbox Cloud Gaming. I realized Netflix already figured this out. I seek out mobile games on the iPhone regularly and have noticed a growing number of games that require a Netflix subscription to play.

Yep. I would love to see some data on Netflix game usage and how the overall experience rates. I feel like the natural endgame here, should this initiative be successful, is that Netflix will spin off the games from its core video app, much as Meta once did with Facebook and Messenger, because what it’s currently doing is eerily similar to that classic antitrust bundling thing. That said, we have podcasts (and now audiobooks) in music apps now. Maybe mobile apps are just getting more complex and more multi-functon.

Obviously, I’m not suggesting Microsoft squeeze Starfield, Halo Infinite, Forza Horizon, etc. into mobile native releases. I was thinking more like building a library of third party or indie mobile titles they strike deals with. Eventually, yes, they would publish their own mobile titles in this fashion.

I could see this going either way, or both ways. This means that mobile gaming is already the number one gaming sub-market and there is room for all kinds of PC/console ports to mobile, including stripped-down versions, full feature-complete ports, streaming, and more. And that maybe that will be decided on a game-by-game basis.

Anyone who cares about this should watch (or rewatch) Apple’s iPhone Pro gaming announcements from this past week, as that is one intriguing future for mobile gaming (in which mobile hardware is so good that game makers can simply bring full-fidelity PC/console titles to mobile). I bet we see a lot more of that in the future, and if Microsoft can get past Apple’s horrible business practices, in particular, many of its in-house studio titles would be a great fit for native mobile ports. (Streaming, and via a web browser, is just not enough.)

It’s not the same strategy as offering cloud gaming via a native app but it does extend Game Pass to mobile in a logical way. Is Microsoft looking at doing something like this? Does it make sense for their Game Pass business?

Phil Spencer has explicitly stated his desire to have an Xbox game store on mobile. In keeping with the multiple ways in which one might bring games to mobile, I could absolutely see a future in which there is an Xbox Game Pass for iPhone and Android (and/or both, just Mobile) and that it could include both downloaded native games and streamed titles. This will require some help from regulators, I think. And for Microsoft to do the work: I love Phil Spencer, but unless there is a secret internal initiative I don’t know about, Xbox has not done anything meaningful to bring their successful game IP to mobile, especially natively. There is no excuse for this.

And to your point, it’s not the same strategy, but that’s what Xbox is now: it’s everything, it’s meeting the customer where they are. It’s about choice. It’s about separating the brand from one device, the console, and expanding the availability of games wherever possible.

If Xbox is successful in the future, it will be because of mobile, not the console or the PC.