Ask Paul: May 10 (Premium)

Happy Friday! We’re all feeling a little angsty with the Xbox stuff, but I think I can put that in perspective and maybe answer a few other questions too.

Art mart

helix2301 asks:

Paul where do you think surface lands in the art community I see lots arts using iPads n Apple Pencil. I don’t see much surface n surface pen or Wacom anymore.

I normally wouldn’t use anecdotal experience to try and define a product’s success. But it’s fair to say that Apple has seized on the stylus-based interaction model with the iPad line, has aggressively (if somewhat inconsistently from a compatibility perspective) iterated on Apple Pencil, and has used its historic ties to the creative world to its advantage. And for all my complaining about Apple not letting iPad run free with traditional productivity functionality—which I’ll define as, “please just look at the core Office apps, obviously”—the firm has embraced Pencil-based note-taking and writing, art, and other related apps and use cases. As important, iPad is a durable, proven business that generates several billion dollars in revenues every quarter, is popular across all user segments, and stands alone in the “pure” tablet market. It’s popular and successful.

So where does Surface fit into all this?

Surface Pro remains Microsoft’s only successful contribution to PC form factors. And while it’s nowhere near as successful as the Ultrabook form factor that came out of the second-generation MacBook Air, we should remember that it was the inspiration for modern iPads with keyboard cases and the Apple Pencil. It was at least that successful. We’ll always have that, I guess.

That Surface Pro sells in small numbers compared to the iPad is obvious. Less certain is how well it performs when compared to iPad Pro when used in a similar configuration (with a keyboard cover and/or Apple Pen). Whether you or I see these things out in the world or not is beside the point. I suspect you’d see a ton of them in the Seattle area, for example. And anecdotally, I know more people who use Surface Pro than iPad Pro. In fact, I’ve never seen an iPad Pro out in the world, come to think of it. Nor any iPad being used with a keyboard, not in the last several years anyway.

So I don’t know. But I think the ratio of Surface Pro to iPad/iPad Pro users varies by use case. That there is a market of people who really like this form factor but work primarily in those traditional productivity apps, and that this audience likely prefers Surface Pro. (My daughter is among them, she had a choice of PCs and Apple products, picked Surface Pro, and loves it, and she uses the Surface Pen all the time for notes.) Where things shift a bit, obviously, is in that creative/art world you’re wondering about. I suspect there’s a mix of Surface Pro and iPad Pro there. And that iPad Pro will prove more popular over time. But that’s just an opinion. I have no data to back that up.

More objectively, there just aren’t many people who “need” a stylus of any kind, this is a small market overall. It’s arguably not even that important of a market in the sense that this group won’t typically influence others to do similarly since so few people can even write anymore, let alone draw or paint. I know most Surface Pro owners, and most 2-in-1/convertible PC owners, just use those devices like traditional laptops most of the time (and not anecdotally, I hear this from PC makers). And that is a market that the iPad can’t steal away, not yet, in large part because Apple keeps handicapping iPadOS. I feel very strongly that this is Apple’s market to steal. I’m curious why they don’t go for it.

Privacy is a basic human right, or it should be

dremy1011 asks:

Primarily being a Windows and Android user, what is your take on Microsoft’s and Googles user privacy vs Apple? Do you find those products provide a benefit that outweight those concerns, or are Apples privacy protections overblown?

All three of these companies promote privacy, Apple most successfully, but all three of these companies also use dark patterns, misleading language, various prompts, and other methods to convince their users to drop the shields and allow them to better track their activities online in the guise of providing a non-existent improved user experience. That said, of the three, yes, I do believe that Apple’s privacy protections, while sometimes self-serving from a marketing perspective, are stronger than what’s offered by Microsoft or Google.

That said, the central lie of the Apple ecosystem is the “what happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone” tagline: This is only true if you ignore the fact that Apple collects tens of billions of dollars per year from Google to be the default search on iPhone, meaning that this device in its default configuration is sharing everything you do with Google and its advertising partners. That said, you can change your search engine, and should, and you can disable ad-based tracking, which you should as well. And when you do all that, Apple still tracks you online, and still shows you ads in its apps (like the App Store, where paid placement comes ahead of what you search for). Not as nefariously as the others, in the sense that it does not sell this information to third-party data brokers. But it still does that work itself.

Google and Microsoft are almost identical from a privacy perspective, meaning they’re in the same gutter. It’s just that Google has been at it longer and is much more successful (so far). But don’t worry, Microsoft is doing everything it can to catch up. I long ago termed Microsoft’s privacy nonsense in Windows as “privacy theater,” because you have no control whatsoever over its most egregious practices. And it’s gotten worse since then, with Microsoft ever-more aggressively pushing its users to configure Windows and Microsoft Edge in ways that will advantage its ad-based strategies.

The underlying question here, of course, is what can we do about this? And that hasn’t changed: Not much, certainly not much that can solve the problem without causing issues. I use NextDNS on my phones, for example, and tracker/ad blockers in my desktop web browsers, but neither is a complete solution, and both can cause usability issues.

(My wife tried to set up a robot vacuum recently and couldn’t get it to configure it for the Wi-Fi. After failing for an hour, she asked me to help, and I failed too, after trying all kinds of Eero configuration changes. It was NextDNS.)

If you live in certain places, like the EU, you at least have strong privacy laws. Here in the US, not so much. So what we’re left with is this compromise between privacy and functionality. Most simply give up so they can get full functionality across their platforms, apps, and services. Life is short.

But the dark underbelly there is that these companies aren’t content with the defaults. They will keep trying to take more from us. This is the whole “Edge still harasses you when you choose it” thing I’ve been discussing recently. Even if you don’t make a single configuration change—like switching to Google Search as an obvious example—this browser will keep pestering you to make configuration changes to further advantage Microsoft’s strategies.

Here’s one simple example that every Edge user has seen.

This looks innocuous, and the language seems innocent. But it’s deceptive by design. If you click “Got it!”, Microsoft will configure Edge to track you more. If you click “Manage settings,” you’ll go to the option in Edge settings that toggles this additional tracking. (It’s in Privacy, Search, and Services, under “Personalization and advertising.”) Notably, there is a link to the Microsoft privacy dashboard, and another link that opens a pop-up of what it is that this feature enables. Don’t do it.

This is one of the central battles of our era. And we are going to lose this battle, are, in fact, losing it right now. The only question is to what degree. And which companies to which we will lose.

The Goldilocks wearable?

dremy1011 asks:

Did you ever end up getting the Samsung fitness tracker?

And so does beckerrt :

My apologies if I missed this, but did you end up purchasing the Galaxy Fit 3 fitness band? I think you had mentioned that you were considering it previously. Curious to hear your thoughts if so. Thanks!

So, yes, I did get the Fit 3.

What I’ve not done yet, oddly, is use it. The Samsung Galaxy Fit 3 isn’t technically sold/supported in the United States, but I was able to get it at Amazon.com. This seems like a good compromise between the Fitbit Charge 5 I currently use, which I like for its simplicity and days-long battery life, and bigger, more complex, and less efficient smartwatches like Apple Watch and Pixel Watch. The price is right ($65!), the battery life is epic, the screen is color and a bit larger than the Fitbt. So it’s right there.

And it was waiting for me when I got home from Mexico back in mid-March, two months ago. I charged it up, downloaded the app I thought I needed, and proceeded to not be able to get it working with my Pixel 8 Pro or Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. It just wouldn’t connect, as it’s not supported by the app (in the US, I assume). And then I got on with life and semi-forgot about it, though it’s sitting there on my desk, so I see it every couple of days and think about it.

But thanks for the reminder: I’ll charge it again and see if it works now. It seems like it should, and maybe the app has been updated. I’ll find out.

AI and Arc

argrubbs asks:

Hope things are going well for you, Paul. I know you use DALL-E for generating pictures and have written about ChatGPT and Copilot. What are your thoughts on the potentially less well-known options like Claude 3 and Tabnine? Have you experimented with any on-device AI tools like Ollama or StableDiffusion?

I’ve only briefly tested Stable Diffusion to date, but with AI PCs becoming a thing, that will change.

Your question about these second-tier AI solutions is timely: I can’t recall where or when this came up, but I believe I at least mentioned somewhere that one of the concerns Microsoft should have (assume it does) is that the pervasiveness of AI could undermine its desire/need to monetize it. That is, there will be so much free or inexpensive AI everywhere that products like Copilot for Microsoft 365 might be considered unnecessary. And as on-device AI capabilities spread—both through hardware and the software that targets it—that will become further problematic.

Oddly, Microsoft is contributing to this problem by adding features like background removal to Paint: That app does a better job of that than the paid apps I use, and I actually turn to it now for that reason. (And then do the rest of whatever task I’m doing in a more complex app. ) Clipchamp is like that for video, not specifically because of AI, but just as a free (or, with subscription, inexpensive) app that’s easier to use than better-known paid apps and just as good for my needs. I use things like Grammarly and Language Tool for AI-based spelling and grammar, which lessens my need for paid writing tools. Browsers are getting free built-in AI capabilities, it’s everywhere.

Early on in this cycle, I wrote an article, When Everything is AI, Nothing is AI (Premium), that was more about the marketing of AI and understanding what was AI and what wasn’t. But when you think about paid services, it’s a similar problem: If AI is everywhere and works well enough, then selling AI becomes less viable. And I think smaller, third-party tools and models will be quite successful. We’re going to spend much of the year learning about these things as they keep improving.

In this same vein, I had a conversation with a friend who works in healthcare about the use of AI. He asked if I would be comfortable if my physician responded to a question I would have with, “Let’s just check [insert AI tool].” I personally wouldn’t have an immediate problem with this because I’d hope the doctor would be knowledgeable and professional enough to know if the answer it returned with was bogus or not. All of that being said, how do you feel about the use of AI in medical settings? How would you feel if you were in this situation with your own doctor(s)?

We already live in a world in which we’re much more educated going into doctor visits than ever before thanks to Google Search. And AI will only expand that. I don’t expect my doctor to reference AI in my presence anytime soon, but I will be doing so long before that happens, I bet. A credible doctor or professional of any kind will only use such a tool when it’s known to be good. Meaning accurate.

But with medicine/health specifically, there’s an interesting double-edge sword to consider. First, this is a field in which there is a finite amount of high-quality source material that can be used to ground an AI in science and facts, so there’s no reason this can’t work. And second (and conversely), our understanding of what’s truly healthy and safe evolves all the time, and so the advice we’re getting right now from our doctors, who are presumably both learned and up-to-date, if often wrong anyway. I see this with my own doctor, who is still unjustified worried about cholesterol despite the science. Which, granted, keeps changing.

Ultimately, this is one of those things that sounds scary, but it’s no scarier than trusting any doctor right now. If it’s serious, you get a second opinion. If you can’t trust this person, you get a new doctor. And if there isn’t a person who knows what they’re doing at the end of some chain of AI activities, you can’t trust it (or them). So you get a new AI. Er, doctor.

Show me the way

christianwilson asks:

Did you ever get involved in making maps for all of those awesome shooters in the 90s? Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, Unreal, etc. I never got the hang of Doom maps but I had a blast making deathmatch maps for Quake, Duke, and Hexen 2 (I worked on a Rocket Arena mod for that game called HexArena). That was a fun time for FPS games. They were so hackable and moddable.

No, sadly. I wish I had, in a way. I was fascinated by this aspect of gaming, especially with Id Software games like DOOM and Quake, and this is a big part of the biographies written about the company (most notably, Doom Guy: Life in First Person and Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture.) I did half-heartedly look into it, especially with DOOM and the WAD system, and all the editors that sprung up. But as the Wolfenstein engine turned into the DOOM engine and then into the Quake engine, it just got more and more complex. So I never made any serious efforts.

Game studios, Xbox, and faux outrage

j5 asks:

What are your thoughts about Microsoft shutting down some game studios? I follow some gaming news YouTubers and everyone in that space is freaking out over this. I’ve worked in oil and gas for a while. So I can emphasize with people who have been laid off and had to go to work wondering if today is the day that you’ll be “called into the office”. Or during the pandemic get a Teams invite with HR…ugh. So totally get it.

I understand the concerns, but I also feel that the outrage/despair we’re seeing is greatly exaggerated. That doesn’t excuse or exonerate Microsoft: The issue here isn’t that studios are closing and people are being laid off, of course, they are, that’s a sad reality and should be expected. It’s that Microsoft has done a terrible job of managing this process and explaining it publicly. I mentioned this on FRD this morning, but instead of ripping off this band-aid, they are instead slowing pulling it off and extending the pain. It’s thoughtless and unnecessary.

Here’s the issue: In acquiring Activision Blizzard, Microsoft created a massive gaming business that has tremendous overlap, and so consolidation and layoffs were inevitable. (Not according to the FTC, apparently. They should know better.) And when you spend $69 billion on that kind of transaction, it’s likewise reasonable to expect the resulting business to come under some internal scrutiny in which each constituent part justifies costs and positions itself to be profitable going forward.

That’s what we’re seeing in Xbox/Gaming right now. And it would be acceptable—still terrible, but understandable—if Microsoft didn’t handle it so poorly. This should have happened as part of one, long, transparent process. But instead, it feels like we get a new layoff or studio closure every few weeks. And that brings out all the Chicken Littles, the people who opposed the acquisition but could never enunciate any logical or legal reasons why it shouldn’t happen. They just didn’t like it. And so now they can point to these things and say, “See. I told you so.” Except that this isn’t what they were worried about, and this was always going to happen. It’s a business. It just didn’t need to happen this poorly.

However, I’m not a console gamer or PC gamer. But I keep up with the news in this area because it overlaps with other tech news. As an outsider looking into this, I wonder if Microsoft bought all these studios with the idea of buying the IPs, and licenses, and the idea of expanding into other console markets. Microsoft leadership isn’t “dumb” or idiots. And I think it’s too simplistic to say “blame capitalism” because it’s capitalism that brought the Xbox into the world in the first place ?‍♂️.

Well, it’s real enough in its own simplistic way. Had Microsoft not acquired Zenimax or Activision, do we really think these studios would have just been kept on indefinitely, losing money at a smaller company? Or would these things have happened sooner, and just gone under the radar because those companies aren’t as big as Microsoft? We can’t really know for sure, obviously. But that’s what it feels like.

Is this a “dumb” move on Microsoft’s part? Is it an out-of-touch executive move? Is it part of some strategy they had in mind in the first place? Did something change with the gaming market?

No. This is not an executive with a spreadsheet seven levels up the chain behaving stupidly. Microsoft and the Xbox/Gaming org are smarter than that. We don’t have all the information we need to speak intelligently about the why’s of this, but I think this was just the unfortunate outcome of a reasonable review of the business triggered by a massive acquisition. And that the studios involved were not successful. But again, this could/should have been handled better.

I don’t like hearing about people losing their jobs. I know some really bad stories about people who lost their jobs. But this is part and parcel of working for a corporation as well. It sucks for sure. Especially when you see very rich executive leadership staying afloat in layoff situations.

No one wants that. But I have to wonder if these studios were kept afloat longer than should have been the case.

Here’s a relevant comparison.

In 2014, Microsoft announced that it would purchase most of Nokia, bringing its devices business in-house. Microsoft promoted this move as a positive, a way to “increase the success of Nokia’s Lumia smartphones and accelerate the growth of its share and profit in mobile devices through faster innovation, increased synergies, and unified branding and marketing.” But that’s not what that was. Nokia was failing and would have gone out of business, taking the only meaningful Windows phone hardware business down with it, and that would have killed the platform. It was so bad that Nokia had started selling Android-based devices in a last ditch bid to stay in business. This $7.3 billion purchase was a Hail Mary attempt to save the platform.

And it failed. And so one year later, Microsoft laid off 20,000 of the 25,000 employees it had acquired with Nokia and took a $7.6 billion write-off and a massive restructuring charge. This was far more dramatic than anything that has or will happen in Xbox/Gaming, but it mostly happened all at once. It was one news cycle, one hit, the band-aid ripped off instantly. And while some still wrongly debate this decision—it was the right one—no matter. Microsoft at least handled it correctly and it acted decisively.

“The [layoff] number is huge, but when you peel back and look at the details, it’s not as big as you would expect,” analyst Patrick Moorhead said of the Nokia layoffs a decade ago. “There’s duplication between some of the hardware people, at Nokia and Microsoft, so these reductions make perfect sense.”

Hm.

Here in 2024, Microsoft has made a much, much bigger acquisition than Nokia, and it has laid off far fewer people. And yet the news cycle never ends because it’s dribbling out the bad news over a long period of time. That’s bad PR. But it’s bad internally, too, because everyone is on edge wondering if they’re next.

But again. 20,000 people were laid off in 2014-2015, 18,000 of them at once. What’s the number this past year in Xbox/Gaming?

2,230.

Between January 2023 and May 2024, Microsoft has laid off 2,230 employees across its various gaming studios.

Not great, to be clear. But come on. A little perspective goes a long way. Using these events to market an “Xbox is dead” agenda, as we’re seeing some pundits doing right now, isn’t just wrong-headed and selfish, it’s silly. Xbox failed as a console, and if we care about Xbox, we should embrace its more expansive strategy. This still makes tons of sense to me.