Ask Paul: April 19 (Premium)

Happy Friday! This is another monster set of questions with many deep-thought debates to consider. So buckle up, it’s going to be a long ride.

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Before getting into this, I want to figure out a plan for the ideas I mentioned in the “Some questions for you” section of Ask Paul back on March 29. But these things can get lost when you bury them inside something else, so instead of writing that here, I’ll put up a post over the weekend describing where I’m at based on the feedback to those ideas. But I’d like to get started on some reader interaction posts/videos/whatever. So more on that soon.

OK, let’s dive in …

Strata

jrzoomer asks:

Paul, as a Windows “power user”, do you go into the registry at all for anything? I’ve been going through your Hands on Windows series and haven’t seen it and curious to know if this is a thing anymore.

Interesting timing.

I think about this stuff in terms in layers, or strata perhaps. That is, you’ve got Windows, which is GUI-based. You’ve got the underlying registry settings and/or local/group policies, which is a hive of utter nonsense. And in the vast gulf between the two, you have various third-party utilities, some professional (Start11 and other Stardock products), some less so, and some very technical. And then you also have command line tools, built-in things like PowerShell and exterior utilities like ViveTool (the latter of which I don’t discuss enough but often use myself; more on this in a moment).

Windows 11 is evolving so quickly (and unpredictably) that it’s difficult to keep up. So from a content creation and coverage perspective, there’s a bit of editorial decision-making going on here, whether I’m thinking about literal news for the site, commentary on whatever is happening, what I discuss on Windows Weekly, what goes in the book, and then what appears on Hands-On Windows.

The last two are tied together: I think of Hands-On Windows as an extension of the Windows 11 Field Guide, and had TWiT not offered me the chance to make that podcast, I’d have likely just made my own short videos for the book instead. And for the book, the editorial direction, such as it is, is to focus on what’s new and unfamiliar in the product and point out when and where these things are useful.

But the problem with the book, as I’ve pointed out a few times recently, is that’s incredibly long, longer than I’d like, and I still have a lot to add, with more coming in the near future. So moving past what’s just in Windows 11, and mostly in the GUI, is daunting because it’s another layer of material. And because it’s technical and difficult, and I want to solve problems when possible, and certainly not cause them (such as what might happen when someone makes a mistake editing the registry).

I coincidentally wrote about this recently, but when I think about solving problems in Windows specifically, there are fixes and there are workarounds. And sometimes, maybe oftentimes, you need to move past what’s in Windows, or at least in the Windows GUI, so make either happen. I have long intended to cover third-party utilities that solve problems in Windows 11 in the book—again, Start11, etc.—but haven’t gotten there because the book is too big as it is. So that’s the struggle there.

But Hands-On Windows also affords me the opportunity to branch out a bit. I did so a fun episode on web browsers a while back that’s not based on anything in the book, and I’ve been thinking about a follow-up. And I’ve discussed with Brad having him come on to discuss Start11 at the very least, but perhaps other Stardock tools too. Which leads me to this idea about a series of third-party tool episodes. Which would cover just that top strata: The solid tools I can comfortably recommend to others. There aren’t many. One tool, called ExplorerPatcher, is so dicey that I ended up not doing a Hands-On Windows episode about it, and I instead made my own short video. I’m just worried about mainstream users trying that and screwing up their PCs.

Anyway. Yes, the registry is still a thing. And yes, I do edit it in very specific ways from time-to-time. The most common registry change I make is one that disables the Caps Lock key, I do that on every PC I use, and I have a .reg file saved to OneDrive and Google Drive I just run on every new installation. But there are others, depending on the situation, and when you think about the “Allow Diagnostic Data” policy that’s only available in Windows 11 Enterprise, or the new EEA capabilities tied to the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA), my mind immediately goes to this place where I know that these things are possible everywhere, on every Windows version, and that the key to unlocking these things, to fixing the problems with Windows 11, will be some set of registry keys (and/or policies) that are configured manually, via some set of command lines, or, ideally, via some GUI where you just click a button and get on with your life. I’m holding out hope for the latter, but as the situation with Windows 11 gets more dire—in my case, bad enough that I’ve started moving away from Microsoft apps and services I’ve used for decades—this need becomes more pronounced. And so, yes, it may be time to move down a layer or too, figure this stuff out, and fix the problems. It’s coming to a head.

I mentioned ViveTool briefly above. This is related to the issues I have with the sporadic and unpredictable nature of Windows 11 updates because Microsoft often releases new features and changes—in the Insider Program and in stable—over time and randomly via Controlled Feature Releases (CFRs), and I can’t afford to wait on them. I need to write about this stuff, not just for the site, but for the book, and I want to cover them in Hands-On Windows. And ViveTool is the way around that: It seems like with each new build, there’s some new ViveTool workaround to a CFR.

ViveTool is something I use for myself, but I’ve been thinking about creating tips for enabling specific features immediately, and this would be the best way to do that. So, not quite editing the registry, but maybe the next strata up, a scrabbled-together third-party (command line) utility made by enthusiasts (including my trusted friend Raphael, a font of knowledge when it comes to this stuff) that solves problems. I think I’m ready, probably first on the site and then we’ll see about the book and the podcast.

I hope this makes sense.

The Samsung situation

MichaelMDiv asks:

Paul, thanks for answering my question about Samsung apps last week. I share your dislike of them and how difficult Samsung makes it to get rid of them. On a related note, How To Geek has run two articles recently about how good Samsung apps are and that Samsung’s ecosystem is just as good as Apple’s (without the lock-in is what they argue): https://www.howtogeek.com/samsungs-ecosystem-is-just-as-good-as-apples/. I know how you feel about Samsung apps, but what do you think about the overall ecosystem? Does it have advantages over Apple?

The only real advantage that Samsung has over Apple is the same advantage that Google has over Apple, which is one of about one hundred reasons I can’t stand what this company does to Android: It provides choice in the form of an alternative to iOS and iPhone, and not just in hardware or specific apps and services, but in a platform that is not as locked down, and via an ecosystem that is not as good. People choose Android (from Samsung or whatever other device makers) for all the well-understood reasons, and for many of the same reasons why people chose Windows PCs over Macs back in the day, but in the end it’s about choice.

No choice is perfect. People who choose Apple, go deep on the Apple ecosystem and experience, benefit from a wide range of integrations across its hardware, software, and services. There are so many, in fact, that my article on this topic may have to wait until my MacBook Air review is published. It’s kind of incredible. But there is also a dark side to that integration, that lock-in, and we’ve been discussing that for many years, and it’s playing out right now in various antitrust cases. The debate will never end because that’s what choice does: It introduces subjective preference into the argument and we all prefer different things. For every “nothing but Apple” person, there is a “never Apple” person, but also a limitless variety of people in-between.

The problem with Android is likewise the same problem with the PC: All that choice results in compromises too. When everything you use—hardware, software, services, whatever—comes from different companies with different agendas, a premium, high-quality, and consistent experience is difficult to impossible. This type of ecosystem just can’t match what Apple does, specifically because it provides more choice than Apple does. So it’s good and bad.

In the PC space, Microsoft tried to emulate the Apple ecosystem via its Signature PC program, and then later with Surface. In the smartphone space, Google tried the same, first via Nexus and now with Pixel. The parallels are so obvious there’s no need to even discuss them: In both cases, the platform maker that partners and offers choice see/saw the issues with their ecosystem and the advantages of the more closed competitor (Apple, in both cases) and attempted to bridge the gap, provide that elusive best of both worlds experience. Imperfectly. It may be impossible.

The problem with Samsung in this context is that they are working outside the central ecosystem battle and have introduced a third option, one based on the choice side of this equation (because it has to be), one that acts like that third, independent political candidate who screws everything up for everyone. Instead of feeding its innovations (or at least ideas) upstream to benefit everyone in the chain, as Microsoft and other Chromium browser makers do in that space, Samsung instead differentiates itself with its own peripherals, apps, and services. Its own ecosystem, an often redundant superset of what’s available in just Android. But because Samsung has no class at all, to channel Steve Jobs, it’s just a copier, with few unique ideas of its own. It sees what Google and Apple do and then it makes one of those things of its own.

We can debate whether individual Samsung apps or services are “better than” the alternatives in Android or Pixel, or in the Apple ecosystem, and maybe someone can find examples of things that are objectively better. But the net effect of this ecosystem is to muddy the waters in this platform choice, which makes that entire side of it less good. Lower quality. Less consistent. Something that will never equal what Apple does, at least in terms of integration and focus. Much of what Apple does is questionable and even terrible. But the cross-product integration experiences are, overall, an amazing advantage.

What would it take for Google, Samsung, or now Microsoft, which is trying to make this stuff work via the Phone Link app in Windows, to implement something as basic as bidirectional Android/Windows copy and paste? (That’s rhetorical, who cares?) It just works on Apple. It’s pretty freaking amazing. But then move it up the chain. You can use an iPad as a second screen for a Mac. You can use an iPhone as a webcam. You can use an iPad as a Wacom-like tablet with an Apple Pencil, undercutting complaints that Macs don’t have touch/pen-capabilities. On and on it goes. And while each scenario can be addressed by utilities and a lot of work, they will never be as seamless as what Apple can do.

Consider something like Samsung DeX. This is a fairly obvious idea, like Microsoft’s Continuum feature for Windows Phone, that turns a smartphone into a desktop system when connected to a dock and its external display, keyboard, and mouse. But this needs to come from the platform maker: Android should scale from a phone-sized screen to a PC-sized screen. Google has done some work in this area, but it hasn’t delivered a true DeX/Continuum experience that would be a great differentiator for Apple’s “everything is another device purchase” strategy. And possibly even superior if it was done right. But this is Android, there are partners with conflicting strategies instead of a single, cohesive vision, and we can’t have nice things.

My central problem with Samsung has never changed: What it makes, by and large, is superfluous and redundant and thus unnecessary. The harm this does to Android is unquestionable. But as with everything else that is terrible, there are people who defend it. People who, for whatever my brain is wired this way reasons, look at something goofy (to me) like Samsung Internet or its ridiculous App Store and make an immediate connection. They don’t just like that, they prefer it. We’re all different.

I don’t care what How-To Geek or anyone thinks about Samsung. Even if one prefers this company, perhaps because its hardware really is superior, that I agree with, surely they are objective enough to see the soft underbelly of its strategic aims and how it undermines that platform on which it runs. And how that thing does not, and cannot, duplicate the quality and integration we see on the Apple side of this fence. You can buy a Samsung Galaxy Phone and Galaxy Book PC of whatever kinds, and it’s all just a hack. The integration is there to some degree, but it requires lock-in, in this case to Samsung hardware, and for you to accept a lower level of quality. Maybe because your disdain for Apple is that strong. This is not good decision-making.

My hopes for Android all rest with Google, as they must. It’s the platform maker, just like Microsoft is with Windows. We can work around the problems with hacks and workarounds, maybe get a few free or paid utilities. But unless the platform maker delivers the quality inherently, this is all just treading water. (I spent several thousands of dollars trying to turn an Apple IIGS into an Amiga in the late 1980s before I finally realized I should just sell it and get an Amiga. An Amiga that was much, much less expensive and far more capable. This was also bad decision-making.)

I am not saying that Apple is the answer. There are things I very much do not like in that ecosystem, despite the excellence I see with certain devices like the MacBook Air or the iPhone. But that’s not what this is about. It’s about the other, partner- and choice-based side of the fence, Google (and Microsoft). And until and unless these guys show up and do the right thing, we will always have a second-rate, compromised experience. Add Samsung to the mix and it’s third-rate (again, aside from the hardware). The perfect Android device (to me) would be a flagship Galaxy with Pixel Android and native Windows integration (copy and paste, file transfer, screen sharing, etc.). For others, the mix might be different. But none of us will ever get everything we want. Certainly not from Samsung.

Google has made slow progress with Pixel, but it’s not there yet: The phones are excellent now, but the broader ecosystem is terrible. And while I understand looking to Samsung, or some other company (or companies) to solve the problems—some still pine for a Microsoft device of whatever kind—I don’t see the basic issues ever being solved. We will always find ourselves working around limitations. I wish this were better.

It’s hard having strong opinions about this stuff. The Apple side is too restrictive and the Android side is too compromised from a quality perspective. If I just didn’t care, life would be easier.

Move fast, break things

j5 asks:

Paul honest and sincere question here. What are your personal feelings about mental health and tech? I’m a Gen X kid. So I still remember a world of not being connected well into my 20s and early 30s.

Steven Wright has a joke that goes something like, “I drove cross-country recently, and we could only listen to one cassette because it was stuck in the tape player. I can’t remember what it was.” My version of this joke is, “I used computers for several hours every day for over 15 years before the Internet was a thing. I can’t remember what I did.”

Point being, yes, I remember this too, of course. And I struggle with the pros/cons of everything, really. There’s no denying the benefits of this connectivity, but there are problems too, problems with our attention spans, our inability to think clearly and ignore fake news, and so on. In having access to more, we are in some ways becoming less.

I’m not a psychiatrist or whatever. I’m just floating along with all of you, observing the same things here. But I do try to address what I see as problems. I’m a life-long reader, for example, but have struggled to read long-form writing in recent years—thanks, Internet!—and so I’ve forced myself to try, sometimes by re-reading familiar and beloved long books (The Stand, for example), and sometimes by reading something unfamiliar. (I’m reading Stephen King’s Desperation for the first time right now, actually. It’s OK, not great, and it’s a struggle. But I read at least a bit of it every day.)

A lot of the more personal writing I put up in From the Editor’s Desk lands in this area. I feel like we all have shared or similar experiences. I’m absolutely not an expert in any of this, and I am not positioning myself as having found an answer, let alone the answer. But through sharing, hopefully I can help some people, and their feedback often helps me too. It’s nice.

I’m married with teens and younger children now. My teens deal with anxiety when it comes to their phones, apps, FOMO, and having to have their phones with them all the time. I love tech! But now that I deal with the stereotypical teens and smartphone issues…I find myself despising tech. I’ve been frustrated and sometimes “ugh hate you X company/brand because you’re not working right’ etc. but I’ve never had feelings of despisement for tech before.

My kids are in their 20s now, so they were older when smartphones took off. My son’s first smartphone (of sorts) was a Kin, and at that time in his life—he would have been about 12–it was the perfect device, something south of an iPhone functionally but good for him. That Kin failed is a different topic, but he moved onto whatever iPhone and at least had that starter experience to build on. I can’t say that I ever worried too much about locking down the kids’ computers or phones, though we did of course take advantage of the location stuff when Mark was a teenager and went through the typical rough patch. But that just lucky timing, I guess.They’ve never struck me as particularly phone obsessed. They can certainly sit there as we watch a movie or whatever, staring at their phones. But I’ve also seen them look to see what a notification was and then toss the thing aside again, unconcerned. They’re not addicted.

We’ve done all the typical rules, screen time, can’t have in your room, no social till we think you’re mature enough, and all the parenting advice under the sun when it comes to tech and teens. But just like kids do, they always find a way right lol. So they still become affected by all these FOMO anxiety conditions anyway.

Yes. We’re all familiar with the notion that antitrust regulations and laws in general can’t keep up with the pace of technology, but this is similar: Our understanding of the impact of technology, especially the impact on our mental health, isn’t keeping up with the speed at which things change. And this is particularly acute because our understanding of mental health in general, forget about the technology, has likewise lagged our understanding of health generally. I wrote about this a little bit in From the Editor’s Desk: Mental Health Will Drive You, Well, You Know (Premium) and in the video A Discussion on Neurodiversity, with Stephen Rose. We are absolutely getting there: My daughter is much more open about her own mental health struggles, while I am a founding member of the last “Suck it up generation,” and I struggle to just understand my struggle, let alone address it. Work in progress, etc.

So as someone who’s been a tech journalist for a long time, and seen how the industry has progressed along with pop culture and the world at large, what are your thoughts on this issue? Do you find yourself affected by FOMO?

I would answer no to this, but my wife would tell you that I am. I guess I see FOMO as doom-scrolling through Instagram and wishing I was on some trip or whatever, or leading someone else’s life, and I don’t suffer from that kind of jealousy. But I do keep up on what’s happening on my world—”my world” being personal technology—and my wife has commented on me looking at my phone or even a laptop when we watch a movie or a TV show at night. I don’t actively work at these times, but I feel like this is justified, and if something does happen, I can handle it.(It’s not lost on me that this sounds like something an addict would say.)

What do you do to keep all these tech “addictions” under control? Did you have any “tech rules” with your kids? One thought I have is that, is tech really to blame. I mean every generation progresses in different ways that the older generations loathe. You can find newspaper articles of the WW1 generation complaining about how lazy and entitled the WW2 generation “The Greatest Generation” is.

Yeah, it’s important to know that this has always been true and will aways be true. The current generation, which was in its own way coddled compared to its predecessor, looks down on the next generation for the same reason. I got a Commodore 64 when I was a young teenager, my son got an iPhone. His son may get a flying car or whatever. That’s the nature of things. (My father had a record player, probably. But it is notable that his generation is particularly inept, generally, when it comes to PCs and phones.)

And here’s another thought to consider. How will AI affect all these tech issues? How will it affect/change future generations? Will it cause less creativity, and laziness (not spending time reading a book, gaining the wisdom from reading, just gimmie the facts)? Will AI cause us to be filled with factoids and devoid of wisdom and experience?

This is the central debate of our age. Here, I would just say that it will do those things, but it will also benefit others. For example, I was always a big reader, and I had a weird moment in high school when I saw a friend, in the 12th grade, holding The Hobbit with his schoolbooks and asked about it. He had been assigned this book in class. Meanwhile, I read The Hobbit in the 6th grade—and then The Lord of the Rings, Beowulf, and The Odyssey—as part of an accelerated English program. And so we were in very different places from a reading perspective.

But over time, we’ve seen things like graphic novels of classic literature make those things more accessible to non-readers, and maybe turn some of them into readers. You could look at that as nonsense—it’s a comic book for crying out loud—but it’s still a good thing too. AI is like that. We’ll have comic books, graphic novels, and great novels and literature. It’s the gamut. This is the thing I feel like many AI deniers don’t understand. We are right to worry about it, and should debate it. But in the end, it’s technology. There are good outcomes and bad, and the goal is always for it to be a net positive.

Here’s another example that kind of hits on this. When cars first appeared, you had to be a mechanic to even own such a thing, able to fix anything that went wrong with it. Today, we push a button and it starts. And we open the engine bay and see a solid block with no wires, spinning parts, or other mechanical doohickeys to screw around with. People complain that we’ve lost our ability to fix things, or understand complex machines, that you need a computer to service the vehicle. But it’s better, right? Overall, it’s much better. That’s exactly what’s going to happen with AI.

To the laziness bit, I will just say that AI will let people, whatever their skills and interests, focus on those things they care about and ignore those they do not. For a writer, that might mean getting past writer’s block by generating the bones of a fiction story with AI and then building it out in their own words. Is that lazy? Creative? Better/worse? It’s maybe all of those things. But it’s an advance. Just like a GUI is an advance over a command line in that it makes computing accessible to far more people. While the UNIX command line guru over the corner grumbles about kids these days. Using a mouse is lazy.

I know this was kind of a mishmash of ranting and questions.

No worries, we are all struggling with the same issues and have similar concerns.

When you see the phrase “as a service,” think “as a subscription”

will asks:

I heard a rumor that Microsoft may be looking to increase the price/change the M365 subscriptions but will bundle Copilot on the higher tiers as a way to get Copilot into more users. Curious if you think something like this could happen? Part of me thinks it could so Microsoft has the AI features in front of more people, but with the unbundling of Teams from some Office SKUs I am thinking maybe it would not?

There is a bait-and-switch aspect to a lot of online services, where things that are free become paid over time, or things that are paid become more expensive over time. And we can see this as a form of enshittification, of course, but it’s also perhaps a normal course of business. As is our very human reaction to it as customers.

A few quick thoughts on this.

Looking just at Copilot to keep it simple, it is rather astonishing to me what you get for free there. And it occurred to me recently that I could easily get away with not paying for Copilot Pro (which is $20 per month) if all I wanted to do with it was generate images. The only major difference that I would experience is that the free version only generates 4:3 images, whereas the paid version defaults to the 16:9 aspect ratio I need and prefer. Right now, that’s literally it.

Of course, there’s more to Copilot Pro (and Copilot for Microsoft 365). Key among the advantages being Copilot in the primary Office apps across desktop (Windows and Mac), web, and mobile. I don’t use these features a lot. But they are very useful, and after discussing ways in which she might take advantage of this functionality, my wife has started using Copilot pretty extensively for summarizing notes from meetings, documents (some of which are medical and complicated in nature), and videos. The value there is obvious to me, but our needs all vary.

When Microsoft announced the pricing for Copilot for Microsoft 365, I had the same knee-jerk reaction everyone else did. An additional $30 per user per month seems like a dramatic upsell for a subscription that otherwise costs as little as $6 per user per month (in commercial). Typically, add-ons and upsells are percental in nature, not exponential.

But a more nuanced view is that businesses can justify that expense if the capabilities save them money and those savings are dramatically more than the cost of the additional subscription. And I came to understand, in my own use of Copilot Pro ($20 per user per month on top of whatever Microsoft 365 consumer subscription), that there was another layer to this value, not so much in a savings, but rather by adding a capability—pervasive, high-quality image generation—that would otherwise have been impossible. There is a value to creating something that is unique and others don’t have. Previously, I spent a lot of time browsing through royalty-free image libraries like Pixabay or whatever to find images, but that time is a cost of a sort, and whatever images I found were not mine and can/will appear elsewhere. So I see the value. And that’s just for that one feature.

Should Copilot Pro and/or Copilot for Microsoft 365 cost more than they do now? My knee-jerk reaction to that is hell no, in part because I feel that the natural order of things is that prices come down as the cost of providing them goes down. But then again, we live in this age of enshittification, and a big component to that is the ever-escalating price increases we see across all online services (entertainment, productivity, whatever). This is a gut-check moment for people and businesses, but it seems to be working out … for the service providers, not the customers. It’s a bad trend. I hope it’s reversible. But it will lead to me and others employing new strategies of our own, in which we start saying no. (Amazon’s $3 vig on top of Prime Video is an example of this for me. Screw that.)

We’re never going to get what we think we want. Some a la cart version of Office where we just pay for what we want will never happen, just as some version of an Apple One subscription with just the services I want will never happen, just as some version of Netflix where I can actually block content I don’t want (shows from India, for example) is also not happening. But we can hope for improvements, and we can vote with our dollars.

For Office, Teams, and Copilot specifically, we will always have some form of subscription tiers, whatever the prices, a dwindling set of so-called perpetual products for the legacy components we can’t seem to move past, and a broad set of alternatives that is increasingly compelling. I can’t say that I would have seriously considered Google Drive a few years ago, but the negative aspects of OneDrive drove me to that. I would certainly never have seriously considered LibreOffice Writer (though I did and do routinely test such things), but the crap in Word drove me there. We all have to make our own decisions. And there are alternatives to Copilot, free and paid. Some will be quite good. Some might be better. Some of that will depend on your needs. (I find ChatGPT’s image creation capabilities lacking compared to Copilot/Designer in the same way that I find Samsung’s AI-based magic eraser alternative lacking compared to the Google original. We have choices.)

Given recent history and the way our world is going, I do sadly expect to see prices go up. If and when that happens, I will evaluate my options and choose accordingly. But the older I get, the more inclined I am to say no. I’m in this for me, not for Microsoft. And we need to think that clearly and be prepared to make changes. (Not just with this company and this product, but everywhere.)

There’s a great line in Heat, a great (and, yes, almost infinitely rewatchable) movie: “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” That’s how I feel about all of these services I pay for. I need an exist plan for all of them.

Price hikes

Related to the previous (and next) question, ianceicys asks:

This week Microsoft announced that Dynamics 365 is set for a major price hike of 16.7%. I’ve been surprised on just little outrage there’s been from the drum beat of rising prices across tech. Rising prices is the twin brother of enshirtification. Enshirtification is not going to stop, and neither will rising prices…and with each price increase companies get bolder about raising MORE prices. Where’s the outrage on all of the price increases?

Microsoft Dynamics is right on the other side of the fence when it comes to topics I write or care about, so that might be part of it. Were this a Microsoft 365 price hike, I suspect we’d see a lot more outrage because it would impact so many more people and companies.

But looking at this announcement, I’m reminded of another, earlier form of enshittification that always bothered me, something I think of as the “SKU-ification” of products, a strategy Microsoft first deployed with Office by creating different product editions, each with some mix of apps and price points, and then rapidly expanded it so that it seemed like there were too many choices to count. This was so successful that the Windows team copied it with Vista and 7 before coming to its senses in later releases. And it’s what we see in Microsoft 365 today, on the commercial side. There are an incredible number of top-level subscription tiers and even more add-ons now. It’s a mess, a matrix of functionality that few people could conceptualize, let alone understand fully.

But Microsoft (and other companies) do this because it works. This is just an upsell strategy, get someone in the car dealership by advertising an unreasonably cheap vehicle but then convince them to spend more because they will want whatever additional features. This is what Apple does with its devices; the MacBook Air, for example, comes with too little RAM and too little storage so that the entry price looks great, but the one you really want—and that most buy, I bet—is hundreds of dollars more. This is almost certainly a core concept of marketing.

As for Dynamics, my God, this product somehow has almost 15 separate SKUs (product editions). To me, that is more appalling than the price increase. I realize that even Apple can’t go back to the simpler days of that four product grid that Steve Jobs touted in the late 1990s, but I’m surely not the only person (or business owner) who values simplicity. This feels like an argument for a flat tax rate. Which, go figure, I support. I’m a simpleton, perhaps.

You can’t spell reorg without AI, or something

ianceicys asks:

What are your thoughts on the Google Android AI announcement (Building for our AI future and Google’s newly formed platforms and devices team is all about AI), seems like Google is turning Android into AAS (AI as a Service), from your perspective of 10 years of WaaS (Windows as a Service), why as an industry can’t we learn from our mistakes — faster, more frequent doesn’t mean better? >>In general, he says, the plan is just to make everything faster. To update Google’s devices more often as AI models improve. We can’t airdrop a new SOC into existing products,” Osterloh says. “But we can design for longevity, and then update our software frequently.”

I need more information.

Based on what Google has said explicitly, it appears that it is trying to accomplish two things, one of which is sending yet another very public message that it is very serious about AI and that we should ignore whatever problems we think it may have in that area. But the other is a recognition that the partner- and choice-based strategy it uses (per the massive Samsung thing above) has issues, and that with the world moving so much more quickly now, it needs to make changes to how it develops its products and services that can meet the needs of that speed. It needs to decide faster and get to market faster. And with the right products and capabilities.

Good luck with that, Google. It’s one thing to talk but another thing entirely to implement, and among this company’s many problems (as I see it) is the sleepwalking-like nature in which it does most things. Like anything genius, individual or company, it hit on something super-successful, milked it for all it was worth, and then, convinced that they had stumbled on a winning formula, proceeded to fail at almost everything else they did. There’s real genius there, and Google has a chance to ride AI as hard as Microsoft does to great success. But you have to worry about the culture there and its inability to change.

As far as specific products and services go, we just don’t know enough yet. We will get clues with each passing announcement, big or small, layers of that onion that betrays what’s really happening at the core. As a fan of Pixel, I worry about the implications for that product line. As a fan of choice and as someone who needs Android to be as good as it can be, I wonder about that (just as I wondered/wonder about the Surface/Windows link-up). I don’t think hybrid strategies are even possible. You’re either horizontal or vertical, you partner or you don’t, you’re laser-focused or you’re all over the map.

So we’ll see. The good news for Google is that its competitors are struggling with the same and similar problems. Apple has been an industry darling and the world’s biggest company for so long, we don’t even know how to react when it looks like it was caught flatfooted by competitors and by AI. Ditto for Microsoft, which was so quiet and polite for so long, we’re surprised to see it not just punch back but beat the living crap out of others again. Oh, right. I remember that company. Welcome back. Or not.

The other day, Google One sent me an email to tell me that features that were previously exclusive to my membership—Google Photos features like Magic Eraser, Magic Editor and Portrait light—would be made available to everyone and/or more people (depending on the feature) and that it was killing two additional perks of this subscription, free shipping on photo prints and the Google One VPN. There is nothing in this email about the price of this subscription going down as a result, nor is there any list of new features I’m getting to make up for the loss and non-exclusivity of existing features. I’m sure they are legally required to inform me of these changes, but I feel like they could have sugar-coated it. But they did not.

What I will be looking for specifically going forward are changes like that, but applied to Pixel and Android. Pixel-specific features expanding to all Android users. And new Android features that, in the past, might have been Pixel-specific. And each time that happens, I will worry that Pixel is on the way out. That’s how I am.

But right now? I don’t know. All I have to go on is what they said publicly. And it’s a perfect corporate communiqué in the sense that it’s long and wordy and doesn’t really say a lot that impacts me or other customers directly. They want us to know that things are changing. But not any of the specifics.

So we’ll see.

Proton all the things

Christian-Gaeng asks:

Hi Paul, if I remember correctly, you wanted to test Proton Mail. How is that going so far?

I don’t have much to say on this right now, unfortunately. I have signed up for a Proton account, I have redirected some of my accounts there, and I do monitor it regularly. But for me to see whether this is something I would pay for, I would need to go all in. And right now, I just have too much going on. So it’s there, it’s happening, and it feels like a good service to me. As do many of Proton’s other services. I really like and respect the privacy angle here. In some ways, the company reminds me a bit of DuckDuckGo, and if those guys could ever get their browser act together, I think there’s an interesting combination of capabilities between the two that could totally recast the way I approach most of what I do online.

I can’t make any specific recommendations yet. Just the promise that I will not give up on this and will chime in when I do have something worth saying. And that I will chime in: Like my year-long password manager shift, something is going to happen here. I will be surprised if Proton wasn’t part of it.

But anyone even remotely interested in Proton should just sign-up. It’s free to start. There’s no downside to just seeing it for yourself too.

The Chromium conundrum

TheJoeFin asks:

It has been a few years since Edge moved to Chromium and Microsoft really started working on the Chromium open source project with Google. Any idea how this working relationship has been going? The two companies have famously not been enthusiastic collaborators and I wonder if how Chromium is built has changed now that it is contributing to the improvement of Edge as well as Chrome.

At a corporate level, Microsoft and Google will never partner in a meaningful way. But the Edge/Chromium partnership exists on a much smaller scale, and at the same intersect as does .NET, open source, and cross-platform. And there, the partnership is strong, not just between Edge and Chromium, but even between Edge, Safari, Firefox, and other products made by companies that don’t otherwise partner with Microsoft or with each other.

You can see this specifically in Speedometer 3.0, where the browser teams from Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and others all partnered to standardize something core and key to the web app platform. And in Interopt 2024 (Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla again) Which was previously Interopt 2023, Interopt 2022, and Compat 2021.

You can also see this with such things as Visual Studio Code (cross-platform web technology), GitHub, and even Linux to some degree. There are parts of Microsoft that get along great with parts of competing companies and with the open source community. This is that “embrace and extend” thing, in the current age. Real partnerships are about giving and taking, not just taking. You contribute. On this level, there is peace.

This is how science works generally, of course. Russia and the United States may be odds, or whatever, but the astronauts, doctors, researchers, and others who are working on advances to benefit mankind do so outside the world of politics as much as is possible.

Whatever the industry, but especially in personal technology, I like to see this kind of thing. And I hope that these successes will inspire other parts of these companies, and then maybe even the executive suite, to see the light. It probably never happen, but hope springs eternal.