Ask Paul: March 29 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Welcome to the last Ask Paul for March. It’s another great set of reader questions, but I also have a question for you!

So let’s start with that.

Some questions for you

I was going to post this last week, but that installment of Ask Paul went super-long, so I didn’t want it to get lost in the mix. But now that I’m home for a few months, I wanted to start expanding on some of the ideas we’ve discussed vaguely in the past and see what the interest is.

For example, I write a series of What I Use posts because this kind of thing is very interesting (and to me as well; I’m always interested in what other people use and do in the course of working with technology. This can be for work/productivity or personal/entertainment. So I’m curious what you all think about a series like What You Use (or whatever) in which individual readers either provide that type of list/post. Or, something topic-based where multiple-readers could contribute individual product/solutions (like What Web Browsers You Use or whatever). I would of course edit these (or, in the latter case, write these) for you.

Also, I recently did a series of tips videos with Chris Hoffman, who writes the Windows Intelligence newsletter. I’d love to have readers contribute individual tips like that, either via video or text, and I could create a short screen capture video as needed, like with those videos. That could be fun.

And I’d like to figure out some form of more direct interaction. This could be 1:1 videos in which individual readers and I discuss whatever topic, but also perhaps group video meet-ups.

Whatever form(s) this takes, it’s something I (and before it was me, we) have wanted to do for some time. George and I used to talk about integrating the forums feed into the main/news feed, for example, but couldn’t figure out a way to make that make sense. But I think making Thurrott.com more interactive could be fun for all of us. And starting with, or keeping it exclusive to, Thurrott Premium makes plenty of sense.

So, please, if you don’t mind, let me know what you think of any of that. And if you have other ideas, I’m listening.

Thanks!

Paul

App store fees

vernonlvincent asks:

Regarding the Apple antitrust suit – a substantial number of people, including technology reporters, compare what Apple does with its 30% fee and app store policies with similar behavior on the console side. That seems like a false equivalence to me as the market of people who own or buy smartphones is not the same as those who buy consoles (even though there ls likely some overlap).

Is this a fair comparison?

No, it’s not.

Worse, anyone who writes such a thing—regardless of their background or vocation—is only communicating that they do not understand antitrust.

There are two important differences between the smartphone and video game console markets, at least from an antitrust perspective.

The first is the business model: Consoles are explicitly sold at a loss, and so their makers charge higher fees for games in the hopes of recouping the cost of the hardware. These companies also try to release cost-reduced versions of their consoles over time for the same reason. Some—Nintendo, especially—are better than others. Microsoft has never made money on consoles.

The second is market definition (size): Where the smartphone industry sold 1.2 billion devices last year and 326 million in just the fourth quarter, consoles sell at a much lower rate. Microsoft’s best-selling console, the Xbox 360, sold 84 million units, but it was in the market for 11 (!) years. Apple has sold that many iPhones in just one quarter (an estimated 80.5 million units in Q4 2023). That is an order of magnitude difference. Even the sales of the best-selling console of all time, the PlayStation 2, at 155 million, are dwarfed by those of smartphones.

These businesses are in no way comparable.

The sweet spot

Akis asks:

Out of curiosity. What would your ideal combination of hardware + OS + applications look like? Feel free to go crazy and propose combinations that don’t work together. We are in the wish-land here.

For example, I’d love to have the form of surface X, with the battery and performance of Mac Book Pro, the Windows 11 without the annoyances of ads, a Siri/copilot that would work for me as an assistant (automatically taking care of appointments for example) and a mail client that would integrate with notes and Siri/Copilot.

These kinds of things change over time. As I get older, I prefer larger laptops, for example, so I’ve kind of moved from 13.3-inch designs with 16:9 aspect ratios to 14, 15, and 16-inch designs with 16:10 displays. But of course, these things come with weight and portability issues. Today, I would say that the 15-inch MacBook Air is just about ideal from a hardware perspective—it’s curiously thin and light for its size—but I would like it to be running Windows 11 on Arm, not macOS.

Longer term, I think a lot about how folding displays might change this ideal yet again. There are still big usability issues with the models I’ve tried so far, but something like the ThinkPad X1 Fold 16, which weighs just under 3 pounds including the keyboard/stand, bundles up like a book, and yet still offers a 16-inch display, is quite interesting. That said, the battery life is not there, there’s complexity with all those parts, and usability can be tough in certain scenarios (planes). So for now, the traditional laptop works best, at least for me. (And the MacBook Air is only 3.3 pounds. For that size, that’s incredible.)

Folding smartphones are further along. If Google could make a Pixel Fold with the same camera system as the Pro, I could see switching immediately. But that may happen regardless: Even with a Pixel 8-style camera system, this type of phone is very interesting, and would eliminate the need for a separate tablet. That’s the dream, at least for a hybrid device.

Longer term, it’s likely that we won’t even need to worry about hardware displays, as they will be projected in some way in front of us, wherever we are. That could be interesting.

Software-wise, we’re so far down the hole now that I just want the OS to respect my choices and not harass me. Here, macOS (and Linux and ChromeOS) are better than Windows. I just like/am familiar with Windows more. But I could adapt. And pushed hard enough, I will. (Alternatively, maybe this type of thing can help solve some of the issues.)

I’m not sure about assistants. I went all in on that stuff but eventually got rid of most of our voice-powered devices, and we ignore voice on the few that still support that. When I was younger, I imagined that future Paul would speak articles and whatever into a word processor, but now that I could do that, I don’t (and won’t). It’s just not as efficient. My goal for work is less, not more, but to be clear, I mean that in the sense of extraneous non-writing tasks (meetings etc.). All I really want to do is write, and my goal, over time, is to try and get rid of the other day-to-day requirements.

New Outlook woes

JaviAl asks:

I am really surprised by the launch of the new Outlook and even more so because it intends to replace Microsoft Office Outlook, which already has a death date in 2029, so I understand that Microsoft will not improve or add anything to the old Outlook.

A couple of things up front.

(Sorry for cutting much of your question. But I think I hit on all of it.)

The issues here are many, but it all boils down to intent: Why would Microsoft replace something like classic Outlook with the new Outlook? And there are a few reasons, some defensible.

Outlook, as you note, was derived from an email-less app called Schedule+ and it was originally designed solely as a client for the then-new Exchange Server, which ended up being Microsoft’s most lucrative server product and the primary driver for enterprises moving to Windows Server in the early 2000’s. But the timing was unfortunate: The first version, Outlook 97, arrived just as the Internet was taking off, and it didn’t support open Internet mail protocols, forcing Microsoft to rush out Outlook 98 midstream between Office 97 and Office 2000.

I suspect that Outlook’s biggest uptake occurred in the Office 2003 time frame, when it went from being a laughing stock to being the core tool that now-always-connected information workers used as their workday dashboard. That’s a path that many successful Microsoft products followed. But we forget how little liked some of these things were initially. (Windows XP and 7 were both like that. By the time Microsoft retired them, they were the most beloved products it had ever made.)

But that story hints at the problem. Sure, lots of people still rely on Outlook, but it’s also a product from the 1990s. And like any successful Microsoft product, it was beaten to death with new features (and different versions on multiple platforms) over time, creating the complex, wobbly product(s) we have today. Microsoft has done what it can to eliminate the big reliability and security issues, and to bring together all the different implementations, most obviously by switching the extensibility model from VBA (I’m pretty sure Outlook was the last major holdout on that) to something web-based, where one extension would work across all the desktop and web Outlook versions. And now it is taking the next logical step by making Outlook itself web-based, which creates further efficiencies across all the versions. It is notable, and pertinent, that all new Microsoft 365 apps—Teams, Loop, the new Outlook, whatever—are web-based. This is a direction it could and should have gone in over a decade ago. So in some ways, it’s making for lost time here.

(The conclusion of my Windows Everywhere book, which started as a series of articles on the site, is that Microsoft should have embraced the web 20 years ago but instead chose to embrace and extend the web in a proprietary fashion, leading to the failures, in turn, of the Windows Presentation Foundation and Metro/Universal Windows Platform app platforms. This strategic mistake, combined with the rise of the web and modern mobile platforms, killed native app development on Windows. The only major new native Windows apps created during this time were web browsers, which are themselves just hosts for the web platform.)

One more: Outlook isn’t just old technically, it’s an old way to do things, and it’s been supplanted by newer, more modern tools like Teams for pretty much everything but email (and you gotta think that’s coming). This is another classic issue with Microsoft, where it keeps the old and new tools in the market at the same time because it can never say no to its change-averse corporate customers. But the schism here, while not exact (what is?), was predictable: The old guys still prefer Outlook and the younger crowd prefers Teams. Microsoft has done what it can to ensure that users of both can collaborate with each other in the tools they prefer, and there’s complexity to that. But the new model is Loop components that work everywhere. In theory. We’ll see.

I look at this product and the timelines and, I gotta be honest, I don’t see the issue. The new Outlook is ready, right now, to replace the lackluster Mail app in Windows (Calendar is fine, but whatever). And the schedule for replacing classic Outlook on the commercial side is generous to a fault and will almost certainly be stretched out as customers keep complaining. That’s what Microsoft does for the commercial side.

You list a lot of missing features from classic Outlook, but almost all of those will be added before Microsoft even considers replacing it, and some you mention, like offline support, are already rolling out. Those that will not are either security-related (like legacy extensions) are just plain dated. It’s never going to be one-to-one, I guess, but the new Outlook is at least modern. Deriding it for being a web app is missing the point: That’s the right architecture for desktop apps (and mobile apps, too, but … Apple) today. When Outlook 97 first shipped, it only worked well when you had a solid network connection, which almost no one ever did. Things evolve.

That said…

Worst of all, this new Outlook is not really a mail client that can connect directly to any mail service: GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail, iCloud, Outlook, Exchange, etc. via POP3, IMAP, etc. You need to actually send your credentials (username/password) to the Microsoft servers of your mail services and they are the ones that connect to the mail servers to process yours emails, both received and sent, parse the content of the mails and share them with the 800+ partners Microsoft has to make cash from this. This is unacceptable.

I could not agree more. This is a huge problem.

The way that the new Outlook handles mail services, by routing all of your mail traffic through Microsoft servers in the cloud, is how malware behaves. This reminds me of the conversations we have today around antitrust, where a dominant company uses whatever business practice (implements a feature a certain way, whatever) and there are good reasons and bad reasons that kind of co-exist. That is, I’m sure there are good technical reasons for this architecture. But I’m as sure that this is suspicious, dangerous, and just wrong. And that it will have to change: Regulators in the EU, for example, will not stand for this.

In addition, and despite the efforts of all companies to combat Spam, the new Outlook shows you advertising as if it were mail in your inbox (more Spam) something that had never happened so far with an email client.

This also goes back to that intent bit. For commercial customers, the goal is to make something modern and more maintainable. But for consumers, it’s to get them to pay. And that can happen via a subscription or ads, as is the case elsewhere.

But the ads only appear when you aren’t paying for Microsoft 365. (If that’s not the case, it’s a bug.) It’s gross, yes, but it’s also defensible. It won’t impact business users at all. And if you’re a consumer, then either don’t use the damn thing—there are ads in Outlook.com too—or just pay for it. Microsoft 365 Basic is just $1.99 per month.

What do you think about all this? Do you think that the same thing could happen to the new Outlook as to OneNote for Windows UWP? And, what will Microsoft do if in 2029 the vast majority of users are still using the original Office Outlook and very few use the new Outlook?

No, Microsoft will retire classic Outlook, if anything it’s overdue. But this is Microsoft, and this product is huge with its commercial customers. So it won’t make that transition until the new product meets the need.

And apart from that, it’s been years since we have seen any real Win32 application from Microsoft programmed in C++ and compiled to machine code like Microsoft Office, Visual Studio, etc. All the latest developments are made with inferior non-compiled web technologies (electron, etc.). Even parts of Windows like the new taskbar or the new start menu are programmed with web technologies. Has Microsoft lost the ability to develop real Win32 applications with high performance, power and speed? Has Microsoft lost the good programmers it had before, replaced by young people who only know web programming (because this is what it seems about the new Microsoft)?

Yes, that ship has sailed. And it’s OK. Win32 isn’t just old and antiquated—it dates back to 1993 and was Microsoft’s last successful native apps platform—it’s basically in maintenance mode now (new low-level features are still added as needed, but not new UX). As noted, Microsoft’s major new apps are all web-based now. And there’s nothing wrong with that. PCs are so powerful today and the web as a platform is so sophisticated that the arguments of the past no longer apply. The video editor I use is a web app, and it’s incredible. There’s no reason Outlook can’t be implemented as a web app.

Inertia will help here, too. The biggest critics of this shift tend to be older people who will be retiring in the coming decade. So the timing is fine. They can go out using the app they prefer, and the next generation won’t care either way.

I’m astonished Microsoft never transitioned the core Office apps—Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—like this, to the web. Yes, there are limited web apps, but they don’t even work offline. I suspect this is tied to the same inertia that kept Outlook bumbling along all these years, and that now that this team finally got the memo, they went for the low-hanging fruit first. Moving full Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to the web is long overdue as well. But I bet it happens next.

Language lingo

OldITPro2000 asks:

I recently started using Duolingo to help learn a foreign language (German at the moment). I remember reading a few months back about what apps/strategies you were using to learn more Spanish. I tried to find that post but couldn’t so I’m asking again here. Any tips for new language learners?

Nothing beats immersion, but if you can’t just be in Germany or another German-speaking location then you have to do what you can. The next step down is in-person training/classes, and that’s something my wife and I did for French (at the Alliance Francaise in Boston) years ago when we thought France was our future. The next step down from that is virtual training/classes, and that’s something my wife is doing now, twice a week, for Spanish. She uses a service called italki and has really liked the couple of teachers she’s used there.

Beyond that, mobile apps are probably your next best bet. And my wife and I do both use Duolingo, which has improved greatly over the years and now meets various domestic and international standards for language learning. We pay for Super Duolingo, the poorly-named premium subscription (it removes the ad and has other benefits), and we both do it every single day. (My current streak is 343 days, though my longest was almost two years.) I feel that this, together with the time we spend in Mexico City, is the right combination for me right now. But if we weren’t there so often, I’d likely take virtual classes as well.

Site/comments avatars

OldITPro2000 asks:

I noticed a few weeks ago that I still have a profile photo in my account but somehow it seems to have fallen off for any comments I post. Recently I tried to solve this by changing my profile photo thinking it would update my comments photo but that didn’t happen. Around the same time I saw a thread about the same issue which suggested updating a Gravatar image, but I don’t have a Gravatar account. Any ideas here?

No, but I’m still trying to work with OpenWeb to see if we can fix this. There’s been some confusion on this, but the issue is us, not them: Because of the way the site was architected (pre-Robert and the current web team), it’s not currently something we (or they) can fix, at least not easily. We will keep trying, but I obviously can’t afford to overhaul the site backend because of avatars not synching. I’m still hoping for a simpler/cheaper solution, and will be discussing this again with Robert soon.

Windows lightning round

jeroendegrebber asks:

In good jest, but feel free to ignore: are you up for a sort of lightning round?

Always. 🙂

Let’s say we meet, you get one breath of air, me a stopwatch and you have 30 seconds to name all the things you’d change with Windows/Microsoft? 3..2..1.. Go!

This is one is easy: Respect user choice and stop harassing me to use services in a way that’s only beneficial for you (Microsoft) and not for me. At the very least, let me pay to end the enshittification.

Given a bit more time to expand on that, I would list the grievances, in order, as:

• Telemetry data – I should be able to configure Windows to never send any data to Microsoft. Ever.
• Default apps – In Windows 10 and older, you could easily configure any app you liked to be the default for all the document and protocol types. Bring that back.
• Default web browser – If I choose a default web browser, I want to use it for everything. Let me uninstall Edge or at the very least never run Edge when I choose otherwise.
• OneDrive – Stop harassing me to use OneDrive folder back. And even more important, do not you dare turn on this feature behind my back when I explicitly said no.
• Turn off the nags – Every time you ask me to do something, there needs to be a “never show me this option again” choice. This is true of Windows and Office.

What’s interesting about this list, perhaps, is that most of these complaints are addressed by the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA). So I guess I could condense this even further to, “Make the DMA changes available to customers everywhere in the world.” (Some issues I had in the past, like the terrible feed in Widgets, have been addressed worldwide, which is nice. But it’s not enough.)