Ask Paul: August 2 (Premium)

Happy Friday! We survived a silly outage last night, so I’m more ready than ever to get started on the weekend and little downtime. And this is a great place to start.

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Yesterday was busy enough to begin with: I had a Hands-On Windows recording scheduled for 4:30, and those days are always oddly stressful, in part because I’ve had so many technical issues despite the hours I spend before each recording making sure everything is working properly. But I wrapped up my prep work earlier than usual, and I was pretty pleased about that.

With some unexpected free time to kill, I started writing up a few articles ahead of the recording. I had just posted about Apple trying to get its US antitrust case dismissed (good luck with that) and had moved on to a post about the Arc browser coming to Windows 10. As you would expect of such a post, I wanted to link to our previous posts about Arc for Windows, so I searched Thurrott.com for “Arc,” switched back to Word, wrote a bit, and then returned to the browser. But instead of my website with the search results, there was that familiar Cloudflare outage page.

I wasn’t worried. Thanks to the diligent work of Robert and his team of developers, Thurrott.com has been in great shape for a long time, and we’ve not had any of the weird outages that proved so problematic in the (pre-Robert) past. I figured it was just a temporary glitch. So I refreshed. And waited. And refreshed. And waited. And … it never came back.

I contacted Robert. As always, he responded immediately and got to work. In short order, he discovered that Cloudways, our hosting provider, had pulled us offline—without warning, mind you—because of a DMCA violation. I knew what meant, and so do you if you read How the Mighty Have Faceplanted (Premium): That bullshit complaint that I thought was already resolved was not resolved. It’s just that no one thought to tell me.

The rest of this is a haze. In time, we discovered that the decision to pull the site offline had been made by Cloudways because Digital Ocean, the service that was hosting our images, demanded it: They, like Cloudflare and Cloudways, had apparently received the same (bullshit) DMCA violation notification from the same India-based security bot that had triggered this episode. But Digital Ocean, unlike Cloudflare and Cloudways, never brought this to my attention. The only communication I got from them this past month was to let me know I had paid my monthly bill.

I went into the Hands-On Windows recording in a foul mood, as you can imagine. But the recording actually went off without a hitch, which is rare, and I got three episodes done in about 50 minutes, which is fantastic. And then it was back into the shit.

The rest of this is, likewise, a haze. Robert and I separately reached out Cloudways and Digital Ocean support repeatedly. Cloudways responded each time, but was useless, as if only the B team was at work. Digital Ocean never responded: I received an automated acknowledgement hours later. As the outage grew and the support help continued doing nothing, uselessly, Robert and I finally agreed to pull the plug on Digital Ocean, which had worked well without incident until this episode, and move everything to a different hosting provider. A bit after 10 pm ET, Robert pinged me: It was back. We checked things out, he fixed a few small problems, I posted four articles I had written earlier, and we signed off for the night around 11:30 pm. But I couldn’t sleep, I was too tired. I didn’t go to bed until 1 am. And then I woke up at 5 am.

This is all a long way of saying that it’s going to be a long day. It looks like the site is OK, at least. There are a few fixes needed on the backend related to WordPress plugins, but nothing major. I hope I can take a nap later. And I’m not sure what this post will read like as I write this. But here we go.

Anyway, that was my Thursday. Sorry for the downtime.

–Paul

Failing upward

train_wreck asks:

Do you think Crowdstrike will survive?

Sadly, yeah.

My initial knee-jerk reaction was that this company is going to disappear overnight. After all, who would trust them now? But then I remembered that Microsoft, a trusted name in security, somehow, has survived many, many security blunders, hacks, and outages. And it’s still going strong with the Fortune 500. So I suspect that CrowdStrike will be fine. The idiots. But perhaps they will at least lose some customers over this.

This is a goofy comparison. I recall when the Jack in the Box fast food chain had an E. coli breakout in the early 1990s that caused the death of four children. And everyone was saying, well, that’s the end of that company. Who would ever eat there now? But my response was, that’s the safest place to eat in America because you know they’re really paying attention now. So in a cynical (perhaps stupid) way, maybe this was the wake-up call CrowdStrike needed to do better. I bet they don’t ship another buggy kernel driver update, at least.

Well, probably. That, in turn, reminds me of another bit of stupidity. Years ago, when we were first married, we had put up our first Christmas tree, which was a real tree, not an artificial one, and some friends visited. One of them looked at the tree, and remembering a big incident from my past, asked, “Hey, didn’t your house burn down a few years ago because of a Christmas tree?” I was like, yeah, but if it happens again, we’ll definitely get an artificial tree next time. Joking, not joking, I guess.

Related to this, the CEO of Delta Airlines, which was offline because of the CrowdStrike outage longer than any other company, airline or otherwise, has lashed out at both CrowdStrike and Microsoft, claiming that this episode cost the company $500 million. And he’s been curiously stupid about this, ignoring the fact that it wasn’t Microsoft’s fault, describing Windows as “probably the most fragile platform.” And then he dropped the stupid bomb, asking, “When was the last time you heard of a big outage at Apple?” Um. Apple doesn’t offer corporate infrastructure. It makes iPads.

Here’s the thing: What we should be asking here is, why did it take Delta so long to come back fully when its competitors moved much more quickly? It seemed particularly vulnerable. Perhaps the CEO’s complaints are a misdirection, like Microsoft trying to blame EU regulators. But he comes off as incompetent to me.

When the heart rules the mind

rtillie asks:

Would you personally go for the Yoga or the Surface?

In the end, thanks to all your insights, I went for the yoga. I got the 32GB / 1TB version for 1649 euros, couldn’t justify the huge price gap to 2499 euros for the surface for the same configuration.

Just the 32GB configuration is a 450 euro price hike here for the surface, that is just ridiculous.

Yep. This is a tough one for me personally. But it’s an obvious decision for most people, and for the reasons you note: The Yoga Slim 7x 14 is much less expensive, offers RAM and storage upgrades for bargain prices, and even has a few features that Surface lacks like OLED (vs. Surface Laptop) and presence sensing.

For me, Surface hits at a slightly emotional point. It’s big and heavy, but I love having a bigger display. And … yeah, I can’t really justify this in any way,

But this reminds me of the issue I had with Surface for the first several years, when I was actively reviewing each product as they came out. I could logically see the flaws, and had no problem pointing them out. But there was always something special about Surface, especially since Surface Pro 3, that was difficult to explain. Between the missing features, the cost, and the reliability issues, there was no way I could recommend Surface to most people, most of the time.

With Surface Laptop 7, at least (and, I bet, with Surface Pro 11), the quality is there, at least. But they’re still very expensive. And compared to the Yoga, in particular, too expensive. So it’s easy to recommend the Yoga as the obvious choice for anyone who wants a Copilot+ PC, and with those upgrades. It’s definitely the best of the lot, overall.

Email woes

ken_loewen asks:

How do you block spam on your personal email accounts? Somehow, my primary account has gotten on some list and I get a dozen or more spam emails every day despite using the “report and block” functionality on Microsoft’s Outlook.com site. I’m thinking of killing my primary account but nervous about my ability to be successful because the account I want to move to is in one of the relatively new domains and isn’t supported by many companies on whose sites I try to register.

I kind of fell into a strategy that ended up working out for me, but I can’t take the credit for it working out. Long story short, I have multiple email accounts like a lot of people, and I’ve used every email service imaginable, and experimented with various ways to do custom domains over the years. And when I got to BWW Media in late 2014/2015, and we decided to go with Thurrott.com for the new site, my [email protected] was on Gmail (probably G-Suite at the time, I guess), which was mostly coincidental, as I had used the domain with Microsoft as well. But BWW was using Google Workspace/G-Suite (whatever), and so it made sense. And so flash forward to now, and it’s almost a decade later, and all my email is routed through a corporate Gmail account (in Google Workspace). And the spam filtering is fantastic. It’s just worked out.

I see the constant issues that people seem to have on the Microsoft side, consumer and commercial, and while I don’t laugh at that, of course, I do silently thank the luck that got me out of that world. With the exception of a commercial Microsoft 365 account that’s for testing and not really used normally, all my email accounts, including my primary Microsoft account (MSA), are piped through Gmail, so they’re empty at the source.

Semi-related to this, I have written about the configuration I’m using a couple of times, having experimented in both instances with different ways of handling this. But both times, I came to the same conclusion (at least for myself, and I guess for anyone with multiple accounts): You have the one central account (Gmail in my case). For all the secondary (other accounts), you forward all email and delete/archive at the source. And then you configure the central account so that it can respond to emails from other accounts as if it were those accounts. It’s pretty seamless, the Gmail web interface (and mobile app) is great, and who knows, maybe it’s benefitting from two levels of spam detection too. But it seems to work.

The only issue I do have is unavoidable: I get on a lot of press lists for tech companies without having ever signed up for them. But I block email from the unwanted intrusions and then mark it as spam, and then I never see them again, though there is always more. I probably do this 1-5 times each morning. But it’s not difficult or time-consuming.

I guess that would be a 2nd question – do you use the new domains or go with Outlook.com or Gmail.com for the ubiquitous support?

I’m grandfathered in with Outlook.com because I was using all of its domain name services dating back to Windows Live Domains, if my memory is right about whatever the first one was. So I have a [email protected] custom domain for my MSA, which is really [email protected] (an account I created in 2002 for Xbox Live). And I have Google Workspace for [email protected]. I also have 2-3 other consumer Gmail ([email protected], etc.) and MSAs ([email protected], etc.), each, and then that one commercial Microsoft 365 account (that’s not integrated with Gmail).

I think I just lucked out, honestly.

No, thank you

Anlong08 asks:

Around a year ago I went back Mac as my daily driver, before ever upgrading to Windows 11 on my many PCs. I recently got 3 mid grade laptops to use for PowerPoint at events and the Field Guide was a godsend getting it setup and removing as many of its annoyances as possible. If you lived here a nice dinner for you and your wife would be on me. Can’t thank you enough.

Appreciated, thanks.

I was just thinking about this guy on Twitter who called me a “tech charlatan” the other day, and how one would get to that place based on my activities over the years. I blocked him, of course, but I also had this brief internal question about the impact one has, and that you want it to be positive, or at least not so bad that you’re just in the way. And I know from decades of interactions that most are negative, especially online, and there’s nothing you can do about that. But … thank you. I really do appreciate it.

Acquire this podcast, you won’t regret it

jrzoomer asks:

Paul have you heard the Acquired podcast about Microsoft?

Specifically would love to hear your thoughts as an expert in Windows and Microsoft history on Part 2, about 1:58 and beyond where they go over Windows releases from XP onward. Does it sound fairly accurate?

And If you haven’t, wanted to bring it to your attention.

I’ve not listened to this yet, but I will. I had never heard of the podcast, but when we were in New York last month for the HP event, my wife and I went out with Mary Jo the night before and she mentioned it to me because she had been interviewed by the hosts for a few hours on background. She seemed to think they were good guys and recommended that I check it out. So I did subscribe, but I’ve only listened to part of the first episode. (I guess they often do three episodes per company, and they’re all very long). They certainly do their research: The list of sources for that episode is quite lengthy.

I was going to sign off with, I’ll try to listen this weekend. But a transcript is up on the website, so I scanned through just about half of it—it’s very long—to see if there was anything I disagreed with. And there’s not much. In fact, it’s quite thorough.

Some notes.

I like that they’ve brought up some forgotten bits of history (Paul Allen’s AOL investment, for example, or Microsoft’s big push with media). They’re correct that The Road Ahead basically ignored the Internet. They got the “embrace, extend, innovate” bit right (I wrote that about a few months back). I feel like they overplay Sinofsky’s role in getting Microsoft aligned on the Internet, but it’s also clear he is their source for that. And I feel very strongly that the defining moment in Windows history, which is captured in the book Breaking Windows and the conclusion of Windows Everywhere (and, in essence, of Sinofksy’s Hardcore Software, too) was the late 1999s decision to halt the shift to web technologies for the shell and apps. (I wrote about this separately as well.)

Steve Jobs using Microsoft’s antitrust issues as leverage for the investment that saved the company, that Apple could have otherwise sued Microsoft for further infringements, is interesting. The antitrust stuff is always interesting, and the parallels with Apple and Google today are particularly obvious. (This is my “paradox of antitrust,” where the actions of Big Tech can be simultaneously good and bad, and that it’s not mutually exclusive.) The best example? Judge Jackson tells Microsoft to ship Windows with IE and it does so, with a version of Windows that does not work, echoes of Apple’s “non-compliant compliance” today in the EU.

Also lost to history: Jackson’s behavior got him removed from the case … and it just went away, despite him ordering that Microsoft be split into two companies. 911 happens. A change of presidential administrations. Suddenly, Microsoft doesn’t seem like the biggest problem in the world. It’s rather incredible. Microsoft settles.

The importance of Steve Ballmer, spot on. That Bill Gates never really left, a problem that kept recuring and is, by some accounts, still happening. How Microsoft’s transition from enthusiasts and then consumers to businesses of all sizes transformed it into an enterprise giant, multi-year licensing (subscription) agreements, positioning it for the later cloud era (which positioned it for AI), huge. The over-use of the term “bundle,” which is clearly from Sinofsky.

The Steve Ballmer quote about money and resources is fascinating. As part of the discussion about Xbox never being profitable, Ballmer told the hosts in an interview that, “We only lost money. It’s funny, but it’s such an important point in the context of Microsoft. Money is not the scarce resource. The scarce resource is time and talent and focus.” That sounds silly. But the numbers, which we might relate to the AI investments we see today ($19 billion in infrastructure costs this most recent quarter), make sense of it. The firm was making so much money it could afford to stomach the costs to grow the product line, even if it underperformed.

And Xbox led to Xbox Live, which led to Azure. And Xbox “really did make Microsoft relevant with a whole new set of consumers when Microsoft was completely irrelevant in their lives.” You can see them trying this again with AI and Copilot. Very interesting.

Anyway. I will absolutely read the rest of it, and sooner rather than later. I recommend that anyone who cares about Microsoft listen to (or read) these shows as well. Mary Jo was right as, I think, you were to mention it.