Ask Paul: December 22 (Premium)

Happy Holidays! And welcome to a mammoth, pre-Christmas edition of Ask Paul with some terrific reader questions. I’ve done my best.

Ghost of Windows past

hastin asks:

I’m going to propose three “A Windows Carole” questions:

Ghost of Windows Past: What defining thing do you think the Windows platform did to get it at the point and mindset it has today?

The Windows we use today is a direct result/descendant of Windows 8, with which the Windows team of the day understood that modernizing the platform by adopting the best of mobile was the correct way forward but then completely botched the implementation. But this was the release in which Windows proper was first ported to Arm (derivatives like Windows CE were by nature subsets, not “real” Windows), and this was the beginning of the shift to focus on efficiency rather than raw performance, which had long ceased being an issue.

The mistakes of Windows 8, of course, are many. Microsoft could/should have adopted the Windows Phone app platform and store rather than basically redoing that work, but Steven Sinofsky’s hatred of .NET and the team’s arrogance toward what they viewed as the “B team” working on Phone were the primary drivers for not doing so. And to be fair to this group, Windows Phone was rushed out the door, and it ended up changing the software platform three times after the initial Silverlight-based release. But had Windows adopted Silverlight right then, we would be in a better place today, and the “One Windows” push that belatedly started later with Windows 10 might just have established itself as a third viable mobile platform. It’s painful to even think about how dumb this team’s decisions were, and how they set back Windows, possibly forever.

The Phone-based Myerson team that came in afterwards made some great decisions, like returning the focus to the desktop and the PC used by the existing 1+ billion user base. But they tried to evolve the Windows 8 app platform, with UWP and One Windows (singular app platform across phones, tablets, PCs, Xbox, HoloLens, Surface Hub, etc.), and lost years of time trying to build bridges that developers could use to bring other codebases to Windows. All of this work failed, and then it lost even more years unrolling it while pretending they weren’t doing so. And the net results, the Windows App SDK, is only there so developers can move their apps forward to newer technologies like WinUI 3. No sane developer would ever create a new Windows-only app with this library.

And here we are: Modern new Windows apps are no longer Windows-only, they are cross-platform (or at least could be) and built with web technologies or frameworks like Flutter and .NET MAUI that target multiple platforms.

Ghost of Windows Present: Do you feel that Windows is on the “right track”, right now?

Hm.

For the most part, I don’t feel that Windows is on any track, really. And what Microsoft is doing with Windows these days feels largely like audience retention rather than being about making the underlying platform better/more modern.

But there are two three caveats to that. The work that was done to improve Windows on Arm is impressive and is now just waiting for the hardware to catch up, and they could well happen next year, finally. And because of that work, Intel and AMD have transitioned their traditional x86-based hardware platforms to more efficient Arm-like architectures. And thanks to Microsoft’s AI push, which may or may not help further Windows on the client, they are also finally adding sophisticated NPUs and (maybe even more important) better integrated GPUs, all of which are better, more efficient, and (potentially) more performant thanks to that Arm-inspired architecture shift. So by some combination of factors, Windows as a platform actually is improving right now in meaningful ways. We’ll need a year or two to see whether it matters. But this is forward movement.

So what’s my problem? When we look at the improvements—or at least updates—that Microsoft has made to Windows 11 since its initial release, they largely fall into three buckets: Fixing regressions they caused by simplifying the top-level Windows 11 UI, adding superfluous new features, and pushing AI, some of which is absolutely useful. (That said, the poster child, Copilot in Windows 11, is currently a waste of time.) File Explorer is one typical example, where the team focuses on nonsense UI changes no one needs and introduced many bugs and performance issues as a result. The insane push to force users to use OneDrive more is another. It’s just sad.

And when we look at the changes that we know are coming soon to Windows 11, most obviously the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) compliance stuff that would finally make this system better for everyone, we see that they’re only coming to those in EMEA. These should be made available to everyone. And I will heavily promote workarounds and utilities that make that happen. This shouldn’t be necessary.

Anyway. There’s good and bad. As with all things, it’s nuanced.

Ghost of Windows Future: What’s one thing you would like to see done by or in Windows by the end of 2024?

Hardware shifts are hard, and they usually take a long time. But I would like to be sitting here a year from now content in the knowledge that Windows on Arm is now a viable alternative to x86, and that a mainstream consumer could buy a WOA-based PC and never even notice it. I would like to see more hardware makers offer Arm chipsets for PCs because a more competitive set of offerings will only make the platform better. And I hope that Intel and AMD’s work on these new chipset architectures will result in meaningful advances that trigger a PC upgrade cycle.

For that to happen, of course, we need a killer app for AI on the PC. And I don’t think there is one. Instead, I think AI will simply improve our productivity across the board, and while this is absolutely a big deal and an advance, it may not be enough to trigger than upgrade cycle. The good news, I guess, is that the AI capabilities, hardware and software, will only improve in time. And PC upgraders will have that experience that, say, iPhone upgraders have: Year-over-year may not be a big deal, but waiting several year will provide a terrific upgrade.

2024 is the year of Windows on Arm. Maybe

will asks:

Windows ARMageddon.  In 2024 several device makers look to be releasing laptops with the new Snapdragon processors.  In the past it was only a small number of devices and now it looks like there will be some from all the major brands, do you think we might start to see Windows on ARM become more mainstream for general purpose computing in 2024?  Is there anything from an OS side that would be a limitation, or has it mainly been a hardware issue?

I touched on Windows on Arm in the previous question, but I do feel like we’re about to hit a make-or-break inflection point for this platform in 2024 after years of steady software progress and little positive news on the hardware front. The success of WOA in 2024 will depend on two factors: How well Snapdragon X Elite-based PCs perform in the real world, and how broadly PC makers adopt this platform in their PCs.

Of course, Intel and AMD could ruin this party by delivering the same advantages as Arm with their evolving hybrid architectures, and if those PCs can at least approach the battery longevity of Arm-based PCs while providing the 100 percent software/driver compatibility that PC users demand, better/similar performance in the same market categories (primary Ultrabooks), and that much broader range of PC form factor support (gaming PCs, workstations, etc.), then it could be game over. I’ve told this story before, but Terry Myerson was very explicit that it did not matter which platform won, he just wanted Windows PCs to become more efficient, a tactic Intel, especially, ignored. And he was right: In our technical little world, we can get hung up on chipset architectures, but mainstream PC users just want it all: Long battery life, great performance, and compatibility. They couldn’t care less which chips are inside the PC as long as that all happens.

But there is also that wild card, where AMD, Nvidia, and perhaps Samsung introduce their own Arm-based PC chipsets. It’s possible any of these companies could outperform the chipsets that Qualcomm makes in whatever ways, and that they might even target different markets and form factors right away. So it’s possible that the future of Windows and PCs is basically a hybrid/multi-platform market, where some Arm architecture might well win out on efficient mobile PCs, but hybrid x64 designs win out on beefier PCs. Once the compatibility issues are mostly gone, it might not matter. Diversity for the win.

Maybe. It’s so hard to predict, and we’ve been disappointed so many times on the Arm front. And it may not be 2024: Perhaps we have to push back this imagined future another year or more.

Why is Microsoft screwing with File Explorer?

lindhartsen asks:

Curious if you have a broader take on what value Microsoft is trying to find in their tinkering with File Explorer and where they’re trying to take it. This fusion of their new UI onto classic Windows views seems to come with performance penalties many of us are running into, and they seem to have difficulties improving it. Meanwhile, they’ve added the Gallery view, Home, and various other features that seems to promote, or simply work best, if you’re subscribed to and have your files stores with Microsoft 365.

Obviously, the priorities at Microsoft have shifted. And while this isn’t new, the best engineers, developers, program managers, executives, and other employees have long since moved onto more high profile, career-advancing teams elsewhere in the company. Combine that with the reality that Windows is no longer the central concern, and it’s not hard to understand that we’re working with a vastly reduced talent pool with little in the way of direction or strategy. They just can’t take on the big architectural projects that any power user would agree are necessary. In File Explorer’s case, this means improving performance (not just of the app generally, but especially with file copy speeds across local disks and the network, and concurrency) and reliability. I keep saying this, but in my photo consolidation work, I am forced to crash and restart Explorer.exe multiple times every day, often more than once per hour, because the reliability issues are so serious.

But to your question, today’s File Explorer team is trying to add new surface-level features to the app that will drive more revenue. And all those features you mention can help drive OneDrive usage, which will require subscriptions for storage or Microsoft 365, leading to more revenue per user. That’s all this is. The problem is, the “architecture” of this app is a mess because it’s been carried forward for years and years, and like much of Windows, it’s an archeological dig with different strata of technologies all cobbled together. It’s a mess.

In the first version of Windows 11, Microsoft introduced a brand new Start menu and Taskbar, literally: There was no reused code from previous versions. (That said, some of that code was still sitting in the system, enabling third party tools that could duplicate legacy functionality.) This explains the functional regressions, and Microsoft slowly added back some missing features (like Task Manager from the Taskbar right-click menu) as the complaints rolled in.

Also in that first version of Windows 11, Microsoft updated File Explorer with a user interface built on XAML Islands, which we now know to be an interim solution for using some (then) modern Windows technologies like WinUI 2 in classic desktop apps. XAML Islands was always a kludge, and while Microsoft will never promote this, the File Explorer team had to heavily modify it to get it to do what it wanted in that app. And so they plotted to move forward to the more modern Windows App SDK. And that’s what you see in the File Explorer in 23H2: A hybrid desktop app in which the address bar, command bar, and navigation pane have been rewritten in the Windows App SDK (and the rest is the hodgepodge it’s long been).

The File Explorer team is excited about this change because they can now add more updates to File Explorer more easily than before. But there’s a dirty little secret to this work: As with XAML Islands, the File Explorer team again found that this newer solution didn’t work properly for their needs, and so they are using a proprietary/secret modified version of the Windows App SDK that will never ship publicly. And as with the Start and Taskbar changes in Windows 11, these new UIs have introduced functional regressions because it’s literally new code. The big one being that we can no longer drag and drop files onto the File Explorer address bar. (Which used to be pretty cool, because each of the folder entries in the file path “breadcrumb” bar were individual drop targets.) My guess is that they will add back that feature in a future release, just like the shell team added back that Taskbar access to Task Manager. But we’ll see.

But the issues all remain. The performance and reliability is terrible, and I don’t believe this team has the deep architectural knowledge or acumen to fix them. So we will likely see regular and vague claims of File Explorer performance/reliability improvements in coming Insider and stable builds. But my guess, based on history, is that they will never truly be addressed. And they can rationalize it away by claiming, perhaps correctly, that most users don’t “use” File Explorer directly, they simply access their files through apps or search. And maybe they do, I have no idea.

I sense a disturbance in the Force

christianwilson asks:

We have both found ourselves inching toward using more Google products and services this year. I found your experiments and discoveries with Google Drive, Pixel Tablet, Pixel 8, etc. to be beneficial and I was wondering if there will be more Google coverage going forward, particularly productivity focused articles around Google Docs, Sheets, or other products in the Workspace suite.

This is a big topic. And we should acknowledge upfront that nothing is perfect, and that the Google/Pixel ecosystem obviously has shortcomings of its own (the grass is always greener).

But my goal in this regard has always been the same, which is that I want to use the best tools for my needs, and I want you all to do the same. The Google stuff is likely exciting to some who have had similar experience and confusing and even antagonistic to those firmly in the Microsoft camp and/or those who closely associate me and my work with Windows and Microsoft. This type of thing has always been an issue—I’ve been writing about Apple and Linux since the 1990s, for example, and when I wrote a lot about the first iPhone in 2007, some suggested, sarcastically, that I should rename my site to “The SuperSite for iPhone”—but it’s worse these days. The world is so on edge, sees everything in stark black and white terms, and isn’t interested in nuance or compromise, let alone objective facts. So there is a side-struggle to this conversation.

I’m perhaps prouder than I should be of that Michael Pollan-style tagline I came up with for the site—“Personal technology, with a focus on productivity, mostly Microsoft”—despite the fact that Pollan is an uneducated idiot. But I like it because it combines my past—Windows/Microsoft—with my present, which I see as more a general focus on personal computing, especially for productivity. I do most of my work on PCs, and I’ve been clear that I still very much prefer Windows to the Mac and Chrome OS. This isn’t pandering to whatever audience. It’s just the truth.

But it’s also true that Microsoft has worked explicitly to make Windows more hostile to its users. And so as an individual who uses Windows, and as a person who documents Windows for others, I have had to try to work around these issues more and more in recent years. When you’re slapped in the face enough, you start looking around. It’s only natural.

And I am in a unique place in that, alone among the people who focus on Windows and Microsoft, I have spent my entire carrier constantly trying alternatives at every level. Not just Windows, but office productivity and other apps, web browsers, services, whatever. And all this stuff combines into whatever it is I am. And whatever it is I use.

To your question, I am not sure that I can specifically claim that, yes, I will up my coverage of the productivity capabilities in whatever Google Workspace apps and services. But I will keep looking at that, to be sure. Tied to this, I have very specific requirements related to writing, which I also don’t see other addressing, in that everything I write has to be compatible with the place that that writing will be published. By which I mean, the articles I write for this site must import into WordPress cleanly and effortlessly, and the content I write for the book must be written with a tool that can generate the clean Markdown variant that Leanpub uses. These realities constrain me somewhat.

What I can promise is that, yes, I will keep experimenting with Google and other solutions across the board. I will soon publish a “new apps of 2023” article, and in working on it, I confirmed that this was a year of massive change in the tools I use, and that might continue. But I will always use the best tools for the job, and will continue to reevaluate those tools and be open to change.

I recently published an article, The Escalating Complexity of the Microsoft Ecosystem (Premium), that expressed my frustrations with both Microsoft 365 broadly and Word explicitly, but these are not new concerns: I’ve long tried to replace Word, in particular, with something simpler. And I’m a power user of this app, I can only imagine how it makes normal people feel. You could see this as just a criticism of Microsoft and whatever strategy, and I get that. But I hope that readers also view as constructive, meaning that I’d love to see Microsoft actually address my concerns. And as a reminder that there might be better alternatives out there that we should consider, and that we should all be open to that. Google Docs, perhaps. A Markdown editor, maybe. I keep looking.

I can also promise that I will continue to use and write about certain Google products, especially on the hardware side. And that I think that Google offering an alternative to Apple’s ecosystem is both important and necessary, and that I will be comparing them to see where they succeed and fail at that. The productivity front is interesting and is a direct Microsoft comparison. And I think it’s fair to say that my Google Drive successes have opened a door. I will keep experimenting as possible. You never know.

Right now, I feel very good about moving off of Apple in devices and will keep that going. Again, this doesn’t mean I ignore Apple. But I more personally align with what Google is doing in this market, with the understanding that, yes, Google is also terrible in some ways. But part of that 2023 story is a shift to more Google solutions. It’s real.

Sorry if this is all over the place. I will keep writing about Google. 🙂 I need some time to figure out where I’m at with the productivity solutions.

Related to this, gregsedwards asks:

By and large, I love my Outlook.com account and the app/web UI it provides…except for one thing… I’ve really started investing in the Google hardware ecosystem over the past few years. I’m now daily driving a Pixel 7 (which I love). I have a Pixel Watch. I have a bunch of Nest Home Hubs and Google TVs all over my home. And none of these really integrate with Outlook mail or (especially) calendar. At all. That’s not necessarily a big surprise…I mean, if you want your photos to show up on those devices, you use Google Photos. But unlike something like photos, which can be synchronized across multiple services fairly easily, you really kind of have to pick one calendar service and just stick with it. I absentmindedly added an upcoming personal appointment to my Google Calendar recently (instead of my Outlook.com calendar), and I was blown away. Without any finagling, it just showed up on my phone, watch, and hubs…everywhere. The Assistant added it to my upcoming daily reminders. I know it sounds corny, but it just works.

And yet, I really do like my Outlook-based solution. Call it nostalgia or a sunk cost fallacy or just good old-fashioned Stockholm syndrome, but I would prefer to just keep using that. At the risk of answering my own question here, what to you recommend? Should I just give up the ghost and start using Google Calendar (what’s next…Mail, Drive)? Or is there some amazing service/configuration I can use to intelligently synchronize events between services, so that I can keep using my beloved Outlook.com but reap all the benefits of visibility across my Google devices? Thanks in advance and happy holidays!

I’ve maintained my original Hotmail and Gmail accounts since the beginning, and while I can’t keep track of the confusing history here, it’s a coincidence of timing that my [email protected] email address, which obviously makes sense as my central online identity, happened to be tied to what’s now a Google Workspace account when I came to BWW Media in late 2014 and started Thurrott.com. And so for the past several years, I’ve mostly used this Thurrott.com account for my online activities and, in doing so, have become quite familiar with Gmail and Google Calendar. And so in my own subjective way, I prefer them to the Microsoft offerings in Outlook.com or Outlook on the web (because, yes, I also maintain a Microsoft 365 commercial account for testing purposes).

But whatever, that’s just me. If you prefer Outlook.com, there’s no reason not to stick with that for email and the like. You just need to come up with a multi-account strategy that makes sense for you. Obviously, you should (and do) have a standalone Gmail account for the Google stuff, just as one would have an Apple ID if they use any Apple products and services (as I do, too).

I wrote “just” there like this was easy, sorry. I have certainly struggled to make sense of my many online accounts over the years. And as a “set it and forget it” kind of guy, I occasionally go back and examine how I’ve configured things to see whether it still makes the most sense, because I literally forget. But there are multiple pieces here. Email, calendar, and related, and whether it makes sense to consolidate it all through a central account (which I do through Thurrott.com/Google Workspace). Account security, which means adding as many accounts to an Authenticator app of some kind and using passkeys where possible. A password manager—I use and recommend Bitwarden—that also provides secure storage of other important data like credit cards and so on. Online storage for documents and photos, personal and professional. And probably more.

I spent a lot of time on this stuff, and I have written about it here and there through articles and series like the current digital decluttering series. But maybe this is a topic I need to address more explicitly. Not because I have all the answers (I don’t) or because what I do is the only/best way to do things (it’s not). But because opening this up as a conversation will lead to good ideas from others too.

I have too many articles and series planned and underway. But let me think on this. I think something related to personal online identity management is a terrific idea and an important and necessary topic.

But for now, don’t stress over this. Instead, consider documenting what you have and where, which accounts you use for what, and see where things overlap and don’t. In keeping with my comments earlier in this post, be sure you’re choosing the best tool for each job. And if you’re aren’t, think about how you might change or consolidate. (I use Notion for this kind of thing, but that’s another subjective choice. Use whatever you prefer.)

Also related to this, AnOldAmigaUser asks:

With the continuing enshittification of the Microsoft/Windows ecosystem, there seems to be a lot of frustration in the enthusiast community. You have stated that you are moving more and more towards the Google ecosystem yourself. My question is, do you think this winter of our discontent is caused because Microsoft is becoming more and more like Google, in its tracking, data collection, and ads whereas Google has always just done it, but it is not in your face because the ads show up on other sites (other than search)?

Hm.

That’s interesting. You are hitting on a central truth here in that, yes, Microsoft has looked at the financial successes that Google has enjoyed thanks to tracking customers and selling their personal information to advertisers, and it wants some of that market for itself. And while it’s easy to be outraged by that, it’s a proven high margin business model that honestly makes more sense to Microsoft than its other major wannabe business model, which is trying to copy Apple’s success with hardware. That is, Microsoft could succeed in advertising, but it will never succeed selling hardware of any kind to consumers.

I try to educate readers, whether on the site or in the book, about how Microsoft tracks users of Windows 11 and forces them down paths that put them in front of their content and advertising services online, and how they can work around that where possible. And two of the big contributions I’ve made, I think, are in the privacy and Edge configuration chapters in the Windows 11 Field Guide. But I also acknowledge the realities of people just not caring about this stuff and using products like Chrome despite it being a vector for tracking and advertising. And so the discussion shifts a bit to things like compromising (understanding what you give up to get the benefits of free services from Google or elsewhere) and what you can do to protect yourself, perhaps with browser plug-ins or services like NextDNS.

I do this not from a position of authority, but rather with the idea that we’re all just trying to figure this stuff out. I’m not a security or networking expert. Just a concerned citizen trying to be educated enough to help myself.

And on that note, I’m not personally super-concerned with the privacy implications of, say, the mandatory telemetry data collection in Windows 11. I do wish that you could choose to turn it off. But I probably wouldn’t bother even if could. I find the forced Edge (and OneDrive) usage far more malicious. And that has certainly led me down certain paths.

Microsoft is literally putting ads in its products, and cannot seem to understand, even when I am logged in with the MSA associated with my Microsoft 365 Family subscription, that I have already purchased the thing they are advertising.

Yes. This is infuriating.

And there are levels of infuriating: Seeing ads when you pay for a product is unacceptable. (This is what led me to use NextDNS on my mobile devices.) Seeing ads for a product or service you pay for, from the company that provides them, is so stupid it boggles the mind. And not having a way to turn off those ads in those paid products is what puts me over the edge. I do not need to be reminded, every single time that I create a Word document on my non-backed up Desktop, that I should back that thing up. F you, Microsoft. I configured this app explicitly. Respect my choice.

Google on the other hand seems to have become less aggressive about pushing its products…YouTube still regularly inquires if I would like to try premium, but seems to have given up on pushing Chrome. Yet every action on the site is tracked and associated with an identifier (MAC address?) since I do not have a Google account.

I think the difference here is a matter of timing. Microsoft is a much older company, and it came up in a world of traditional software that was sold in boxes in retail stores. But from the beginning, it also saw the genius of a business model in which what they sold was not physical. It started with PC makers licensing MS-DOS and then Windows, and how they would buy in bulk upfront so they could use those licenses on PCs they sold later. It continued into volume licensing for businesses in the 1990s, which led to the subscription-based models we see everywhere today. And while there are many benefits to this model, the big one, for Microsoft, is reliable, ongoing, monthly revenue, which is vastly preferable to the old model of big-bang Windows and Office upgrades every few years interspersed with relatively lean years. This shift explains Office 365/Microsoft, the cloud, the new Xbox strategy, and now AI. It’s like a lightbulb for a moth.

But Google came up in the web age and it sees everything as services that can be exposed to customers on websites and now mobile apps. It’s been the most successful selling ads, and there’s always been an implicit understanding between it and users that the free services it offered came at a price, of sorts. And users, as noted, seem to be A-OK with that arrangement. But Google has also envied the regular monthly subscription fees that Microsoft gets from businesses. And that explains Google Workspace. And now things like YouTube Premium.

Second question is do you think that Google’s move to FLoC/Privacy Sandbox may push you in yet another direction? or is that just in Chrome?

Privacy Sandbox is just privacy theater, a way to pretend that it is doing something positive for users when in fact this is about shoring up its advertising empire by continuing to use Chrome and Android as tracking vectors to advantage its advertising customers while specifically harming those extensions that work to thwart that behavior. I have seen some quotes from extension makers who believe that they can still offer reliable anti-tracking capabilities, so we’ll see. But all of the major Chromium-based browser makers except for Microsoft have said that they will not utilize Privacy Sandbox in their apps. As always, using anything but Chrome is the best first step one can take.

Reminiscing

gg1 asks:

With the end of the year coming, many sites are doing recaps of 2023. Any thoughts on doing a recap for this site?

Yeah. I have my annual apps, podcasts, books/audiobooks posts underway, and I will have a “most popular articles of 2023”-type post soon too. I have a hard time keeping to a schedule for those “Behind Thurrott.com” posts, but I will try to escalate that as well. I do have several started or waiting to be written.

And in line with that, what are the biggest pleasant and unpleasant surprises in tech for you in 2023? And, what are you most looking forward to in 2024?

Richard probably said this best, on Windows Weekly, but 2024 will be the year of implementing AI, where 2023 was all about the promotion and hype. And I mean this broadly, because it impacts everything we do across hardware and software. Our world will look quite different in December 2024, I think.

The biggest drama of 2023, to me, was the Activision Blizzard acquisition. (Sorry, Sam Altman.) In the same vein as renaming my site to “The SuperSite for iPhone,” more than one person suggested renaming Windows Weekly to “Activision Blizzard Weekly,” but that’s just as silly: You don’t ignore the biggest news story for the year, you embrace it. And now we can look forward to how this company and its many assets are integrated into Xbox and how this impacts Game Pass especially. I’m looking forward to that.

Both of those stories—AI and Activision Blizzard—speak to another wonderful surprise from 2023, in that it was the year that Microsoft woke up from its years-long silence, flexed its muscles, and fought serious challenges to its market power successfully. This was long overdue, and something I never thought I’d see from Satya Nadella. I always look for balance, and the Microsoft we have today may be the perfect middle ground between the abusive Microsoft of the 1990s and the somnolent Microsoft of the past 10 years: Aggressive, smart, and right.

You know, except for that crap it’s doing to Windows.

You’ve been SKUd

helix2301 asks:

Ok so I understand that on Netflix $6.99 plan I get commercials and limited content library but there is unwritten restriction that the Verge and few other sites point out. Netflix basics does not support chrome cast and Apple TV devices. I get ads n content restrictions but restricting devices unless you upgraded kind of jerk move its artificial restrictions put in place.

Aside from the general issues that escalated this past year with regards to higher subscription service costs and the introduction of more and more ad-supported tiers, differentiating individual tiers is more art than science. And it can feel arbitrary. We’ve long seen this in the functional differences between Windows Home and Pro, for example, though we should remember that things were much worse before that, as Windows Vista and 7 both had multiple product edition (SKUs) tiers that really confused people and seemed like a money grab.

Which it is: These are companies, after all. But ideally, this relationship benefits both parties, so you see the value of what you’re paying for, and you pay more for an upgrade because of its advantages. This, too, is a common retail strategy: You go to the car dealership for the low-priced car in the ad but walk away having spent more to get more, and hopefully you feel good about it.

It’s hard to keep track of all the plans that Netflix and other services now offer, and how they’ve changed just this year. Netflix does note that not all supported devices are supported by all of its plans, and it’s reasonable to expect the lowest-cost plan to have limitations. I think the bigger issue would be if a feature that was previously available was suddenly taken away, which certainly does happen too. But being clear about the actual limitation is obviously important. It appears they may have made both mistakes with this plan: It’s no longer offered to new subscribers, and its plans and pricing page does not mention this limitation explicitly. And the pricing delta between Standard with ads ($6.99 per month) and Standard ($15.49 per month) is huge. That doesn’t make sense to me. Beyond the obvious: Netflix is trying to get users on this plan to upgrade so it can get rid of the offering for good.

I recently downgraded my Netflix subscription from Premium to Standard because of the cost hikes, and I’ve not noticed any issues with regards to video quality. Fortunately, my kids no longer rely on my account, as I’d double my monthly cost if they used it too. But I guess all you can do here is consider the pros and cons of what you’re missing and determine if using a Chromecast and/or Apple TV is required. If so, it looks like you need to pay for that privilege. Or give Netflix the boot.

Sorry.

Crypto

jrzoomer asks:

Paul you’ve been around the industry for many years, do (or did) you own any cryptocurrency? If not, do you think you might get into it? And overall what do you think of crypto?

No, never.

I consider cryptocurrency to be a borderline if not outright scan given the get-rich-quick marketing, the difficulty in accessing/transferring funds, lack of regulatory oversight, and so on. There’s a world in which cryptocurrency can be made legitimate, of course. But I don’t think we’re there.

Happy holidays, and thanks for all the fish!

SherlockHolmes asks:

Lier Paul and team, thank you for your great work in 2023. It was always fun to read the site and interact with the community. Please keep it up next year. Happy Holidays to Paul, Laurent, Russell and everyone else.

Thank you sir. To you as well, and to everyone reading. It’s been an interesting and eventful year. I hope 2024 is even better.

–Paul