Ask Paul: January 3 (Premium)

Happy Friday, and Happy New Year! Let’s kick off the first weekend of 2025 a bit early with a great set of reader questions.

⌨️ Ergo-ish

wright_is asks:

Have you already ordered the new ergonomic keyboard from InCase?

Not yet. We’re heading to Mexico in about two weeks, and for the first time, we don’t have a return date, so it’s not clear when we’ll be back and how that might overlap with this being released (it’s just listed as “early 2025”) for now. Otherwise, I would have preordered one immediately, if only to try it: I switched to using split ergonomic keyboards years ago and feel that this has protected my hands from carpal tunnel or a similar issue. My hands had started cramping up, and still do when I use laptops too much.

It looks very slick, but the use of chicklet keys with relatively little travel put me off. I have the last of the Ergonomics with real key travel (a Natrural 3000 and a Microsoft Ergonomic).

That bit doesn’t bother me, though I’d have to try it to be sure. The favorite keyboard, still, is the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard, which I always got in set with the baseball-shaped ergonomic mouse. I’m not sure what the literal key travel is on that, but it’s almost certainly 1.5 mm.

At one point, I had three extras in boxes in my closet, but as they’ve worn down, I’m left with only two, one here and one in Mexico. That said, I have an HP 960 Ergonomic Wireless Keyboard here in Pennsylvania now and have been using that for the past several months here. It’s also quite good, and it addresses some of the issues with the Sculpt Keyboard. I do still prefer the Sculpt Keyboard overall, in part because of the key travel, go figure (the HP is about 2 mm). But it would work if needed.

I’m hoping it won’t be needed, of course. Microsoft and Incase announced one year ago that the latter would keep selling many Microsoft-branded keyboards and mice, including the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Set. But they’re mostly still listed as “coming soon.” So this week’s announcement gives me hope that the others will finally arrive, too. When I first saw this new keyboard, I thought it was a new version of the Sculpt Keyboard, one that was more compact and didn’t require a proprietary USB-A dongle. But it lacks the negative tilt (I mistakenly call this reverse tilt all the time) feature that the Sculpt and HP keyboards both have. I find this to be necessary. (It’s optional in both devices.)

What I’d really like is something like the Microsoft Ergonomic, or this new InCase, but with real keys using real switches (E.g. Cherry MX Reds). But I’ve never found anything in this direction, although I did just check again and this Perixx just turned up: Perixx PERIBOARD-335BR … Just seen that it also has Reds and discounted to 59€, so I ordered it straight away.

I look around for this type of thing from time to time, but it seems like the ergonomic keyboards with mechanical switches are always semi-radical designs. I know even the Sculpt Keyboard-type split design is off-putting to some, but I’ve come to really prefer it. If I had to, I guess I’d go with a fully split/truly ergonomic design. But the keyboards I prefer are a good middle ground for me.

Oddly, that Perixx keyboard looks a lot like the keyboard my wife uses in Mexico. I’ll have to check when we get back, but if that’s not it, it’s at least close. This type of thing is obviously hugely subjective, but I only went in this direction, starting with the original Microsoft ergonomic keyboard, because I had to. I bet I’ve tried almost every ergonomic keyboard Microsoft ever made, but for whatever reason, the Sculpt feels ideal to me.

(Also, Perrix makes a Sculpt-like keyboard, too, I now see. Hm.)

Tied to this, helix2301 asks:

Where do you stand on the whole mechanical keyboard thing? Are you into custom keyboards?

My need for an ergonomic keyboard undermines this a bit. As noted above, many of the ergonomic mechanical keyboards are fully split designs that feel extreme to me. But I also prefer shorter-throw keys, and mechanical keyboards feel like throwbacks to the keyboards we saw on the original IBM PC or whatever in the 1980s. I do always think about this kind of thing, and I research this from time to time, but I feel like I’ve landed in the right place, keyboard-wise, for me.

? Read or listen … or both?

jrzoomer asks:

Paul, I read your articles My Favorite Books and Audiobooks of 2024 and For the Love of Reading and wanted your insight into your thoughts between listening to audiobook and reading ebooks. Thank you, it’s motivating me to get back to reading again.

That’s great. You bet.

I, like you, do read non-fiction, and I find that when I listen to an Audiobook, a lot of it just “flies over my head” and I’m doing more passive listening, maybe even multitasking, and not paying attention to detail (and often can’t recite what I just listened to for the last 45 minutes). But when I actually read, I’m paying way more attention, and have better recall (even if I do have to reread sometimes). How do you reconcile the two methods?

Yeah, this is definitely a consideration when choosing between a written book (paper or e-book) and an audiobook. It may be the prime consideration.

This may also be tied to an issue tied to our declining attention spans. We’re inundated by information these days and I feel like reading, like a lot of entertainment, has shifted decidedly towards bite-sized chunks that we can easily digest, even in off times. But the negative side effect is that it makes it harder for us to read–and pay attention to–longer works. It’s certainly a problem for me, which is ironic since I often write really long things and have a difficult time reigning it in.

To combat the latter issue, I’ve semi-forced myself to try to read longer pieces more often, and to make that work, I’ve been going back to books I’ve read before and really like. Key examples being The Stand by Stephen King and The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, books I’ve read repeatedly. But this has only been semi-successful. I still struggle to read what I’d call “normal length” books, fiction or non-fiction, that are new to me. I’m working on that.

The reason I bring that up is that it impacts what I get on audiobook too. When I read on an iPad or whatever device, I am focusing on that one thing, as you note. (And part of the appeal of an e-ink tablet/device is that it’s even easier.) Maybe some people do this, but I’m not going to sit in a chair, or lie in a bed, or whatever, and just listen to something intently. Instead I listen to these things when I’m doing something else, like shaving and showering, washing the dishes, driving, going to the gym, and so on. Plus, audiobooks compete with shorter content like podcasts that are easier to move in and out of; it doesn’t matter if you miss something for the most part. This all makes audiobooks tough, especially if it’s new to me. I’m distracted, or can be, and I don’t want to miss something important.

I guess you do have to make time with either type of book. But I have more time–or, I make more time–for written books. So most of the books I read are written. There are some exceptions. One of my favorite book last year was Alex Van Halen’s Brothers, and when I preordered it, I got both versions (Kindle and Audible) because I knew I’d want to get through it quickly–I was really looking forward to it–and that’s usually easier (for me) in written form. But I also knew I would want to listen to him, and that this book in particular had some new music in it, in audiobook form. So I got both. Plus, I figured I would re-listen to it repeatedly if it was good enough. I don’t do this a lot, but in this case, I did go back and forth between the Kindle and Audible versions on the first read.

Coincidentally, my favorite audiobook the previous year was Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story by Bono of U2, and in that case, choosing between the written and audio versions was easy: Bono reads his own book, and he’s an incredible storyteller. And there’s a lot of music on the audiobook version throughout. Those two things together really puts it over the top.

I’m not sure I ever really formally listed this out, but when it comes to getting an audiobook instead of, or in addition to, a written version, there are several things I consider.

The first is tied to my thing above about attention span: If there’s a great book I know I will/have read/listen(ed) to repeatedly, getting an audiobook version is a good choice because I can get distracted and it’s OK. This was discussed a bit in Re-readable (Premium) as well.

The second is likewise tied to the above issue: Short story collections are ideal in audiobook form, too, because each story is literally shorter and unconnected from the rest. Here, there’s a weird nexus of a favorite author, in this case Stephen King, and short stories, as he writes a lot of them. So I have all of his short story collections in audiobook form.

There are certain narrators that I just love, and that can put the audiobook version over the top: I literally bought Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein on Audible this past year specifically because it was narrated by R.C. Bray, one of my favorites. It’s a good book, not great, but the narrator did it for me.

Biographies, history books, and science/health/etc. books are also usually good choices for audiobooks because of the way they’re broken down into specific chapter topics. So are industry books. I have re-listened to specific chapters in the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson many, many times, and the narrator, Dylan Baker, is quite good. More recently, I have re-read Steven Sinofsky’s Hardcore Software so many times I finally broke down and got the Audible version too. (I am literally re-reading the Office chapters right now. Some may not believe this, but I literally learn something new every time I go through this book. It’s messing with my head.)

Sometimes there’s no way around it. You zone out, many minutes go by, and then you suddenly realize you need to rewind. It’s OK. But choosing the right content helps. This will vary by individual, I’m sure.

?️ To the cloud!

AnOldAmigaUser asks:

Do you think Microsoft will ever sort out PWAs for its Office online apps. The Office app is a PWA, but opening a file in Excel, Word, etc, will just open a browser. None of the PWA apps they offer will work offline. Perhaps they see it as cannibalizing sales of subscriptions. It is not a problem to just work in the browser, but PWAs would certainly be a more elegant solution.

I think about this a lot.

Coincidentally, I just (re)watched the Bill Gates keynote from COMDEX 1999 because I was reading that part of the story in Hardcore Software as noted above. This is when Microsoft announced the predecessor to the Office Web Apps, called Office Online, and this keynote hits at a crucial time in history: Microsoft is making its big push for the enterprise with Windows 2000, Windows Sever 2000, Office 2000, and a growing collection of enterprise server products, but it’s also still making a big consumer/retail push, and the PC is still growing, so Microsoft’s (and our) worldview is still PC-centric. But the web has happened, and the web is where Microsoft lost its grip on developers. I didn’t know this for sure as I wrote the article series that became Windows Everywhere, but it became clear as I researched and wrote that story, and I wrote the conclusion long before I finished the series. Sinofsky comes to the same conclusion in Hardcore Software.

In any event, about two-thirds of the way through this presentation, Gates brings up David Jaffe to discuss Office Online, which was basically the now-classic desktop Office apps for Windows, hosted on an on-prem Windows 2000 Server, and accessible from any device, which at the time included Windows CE-based devices, including some that came in laptop-like form factors. The trick at the time was that the Windows (and Mac) versions of Office were the only truly rich versions of the client, but Microsoft was expanding into–and addressing–non-PC devices and online services, which were new at the time, and the web wasn’t mature enough to handle full-featured apps yet.

This is all obvious today, but the advantages and disadvantages of this solution have parallels with today’s world. As with a web app, Office Online is hosted online and only needs to be updated once, and not on clients all over the world, which is appealing. But in being online, it requires an amount of bandwidth that was not really available via the web/standard Internet connections in 1999, so it required on-prem infrastructure. But the world evolved, the web–and then mobile–took over, and Microsoft adapted. Today, its enterprise focus is cloud-based, not on-prem. And there are Office clients of varying capabilities everywhere. But the richest, so to speak, is still on the Windows desktop. What happened?

Microsoft was always worried about cannibalization, of course. And with Office this was a particular problem: By the time Office 97 arrived, its chief competition wasn’t rival office productivity suites, including the free options that had started appearing–Sun purchased StarOffice in 1999 and gave it away for free, for example–it was previous versions of Office. There’s a lot that goes into this, but it made things like improving the Office file formats difficult. And this is tied to Microsoft’s shift to volume licensing and focusing on the enterprise over consumers; customers on what is basically a subscription plan had access to all supported versions of the product, which made the need to upgrade to the latest version even less desirable.

The web was an inflection point for Microsoft and it chose badly, opting to stick with its proprietary software and not embrace openness, and in addition to losing developers, and then eventually consumers, this meant that the Office Web Apps that eventually appeared would always be hamstrung, with far fewer features than the desktop versions (and even mobile versions, eventually). The company was Windows-only and then Windows-first for so long that a truly cross-platform web platform just never happened. That and the sheer complexity and breadth of functionality we see in the desktop versions. The shift that’s happening with Outlook right now is a classic example of this problem: This is a product with millions and millions of users, and it feels like every single one of them relies on a different esoteric feature that may or may not ever make it to the new version, and everyone hates it as a result.

I don’t see a world in which the Office Web Apps are ever as sophisticated as the desktop versions. But they could be a lot more sophisticated, starting most obviously with offline support. It boggles my mind that this has never happened. But I feel like there is some happy middle ground to be had here. The Office app for Windows evolved into the Microsoft 365 app (and will evolve again into the Microsoft 365 Copilot app), and it has gotten a bit better recently. Initially, if you opened a document or started a new document from the app, that would happen in the web app version, even if you had the desktop suite installed. But now it happens locally if you have the Office suite. (Conversely, the Office app links in the new Outlook all still open the web versions. This is classic Microsoft. But they’ll get there, I’m sure.)

I do feel that an updated set of Office Web Apps could become the mainstream solution for most users, even on mobile. But I don’t know that this is happening or even a goal. It should be, and the consolidation we saw previously of a common and web-based extensibility platform for all Office versions–desktop, web, and mobile–is a hint at how it could happen.

On a related note, have you noticed that OneDrive does not seem to open from the Office homepage when using Brave? It will open if referenced directly, but not from the Office homepage for me, on multiple platforms.

I saw something about this a few weeks (months?) ago and had checked in various browsers. But looking at this again now, it’s coming up normally (at least using my consumer account). I wonder if this is related to an extension? But I don’t normally access OneDrive that way.

? Robin Williams called

SeattleMike asks:

In the ongoing debate between remote work (WFH) and return to office (RTO) in tech companies, who do you think will ultimately come out on top?

From a high level, this is one of those “you can’t put the genie back in the bottle” situations, by which I mean that we’re never going back to a world in which we all go back to some office. But I also respect that certain things work better when people can collaborate in person. I’ve been working from home for over 30 years now, and I saw multiple times at both Penton and BWW that people need to be in the same room sometimes to get things done. So I feel like what we’re seeing now is a correction, and it may even be a healthy/desirable one. The needs and wants will vary by company, of course, as will the pushback from employees.

I spent most of my professional career trying to find a balance between staying home, where I could write efficiently, and traveling, when I would interact with coworkers, peers, representatives of Microsoft and other companies, and so on. I also came to understand very early on that getting out was also healthy for my relationship with my wife, in particular, especially since she started working from home in the early 2000s.

But even early on, when I was sort of a weird unicorn to my friends and family, and a curiosity, I felt that working from home wasn’t for everyone, that certain individuals just couldn’t deal with the open world nature of that, and maybe needed a little structure. And that, on the flip side, even those who could adapt would need to wrestle with being OK with taking breaks, doing household chores, and so on.

I have two friends I grew up with who both started working from home during the pandemic. One is an accountant, and in his case, he remained fully WFH. The other is a developer, and he thought he was doing to be mostly WFH with maybe monthly in-person meetings or whatever, but his employer eventually decided they wanted people in their office more often, and so they came up with a floating schedule that employees can structure as they will. So he goes into the city twice a week now, and he feels like this is an OK compromise for his job.

A lot of people see irony in technology companies like Amazon, Apple, or whatever requiring people to come into the office. (Zoom is perhaps the most extreme example.) But I get this. The goal is the same as ever, though, to find the right balance. Some companies will get this right. Some will get it wrong. And there will be ongoing shifts until each finds the right place.

I also feel like some of the pushback is misplaced. I get that working from home can be desirable, but in some cases, that’s unrealistic, either full-time or part-time. Mistakes are being made on both sides of this.

? Innovation is as misunderstood as intuitive

helix2301 asks:

Jason Snell and a bunch of people did the end-of-year tech review. One thing they said was that the most innovative Apple product of the year was the VisionPro, and it was also the biggest letdown. I’m wondering your thoughts. I think Apple’s Intelligence could also be in that same category.

I feel like we’re misusing the term innovative here. Also, limiting a product discussion to one company seems overly insular to me. But I like Jason Snell, so I will allow it. 🙂

Back when this debate mattered, there was this notion of Microsoft stealing ideas from Apple and bringing them to the masses at more affordable prices and with more choices. Right or wrong–that steeling was bidirectional, for starters, and most of those ideas did not originate with Apple–I did always believe that making technology more accessible–either by taking it away from what I imagined were specialists in white lab coats or by making it more affordable than Apple ever did–was both a good thing and, in its own way, an innovation.

So I’m trying to see Vision Pro in that light. And I’m struggling. If Microsoft is/was all about making technology more accessible, I feel like the modern Apple’s claim to fame is taking ideas that others pioneered and then taking the time to “get it right,” whatever that means, and add value in a way that often seems uniquely Apple. The iPod was a great example of this in its day, and so was the iPhone. But in recent years, this strategy has taken on a real long game vibe. When the first Apple Watch arrived, the company pushed it as a truly personal precision timepiece that integrated with the iPhone and other Apple products and services. What it did not push as much, what was not the focus, is what it became, a device centered on health and well-being. For v2, Apple dropped the stupid-expensive versions, focused on health, and now this is what Tim Cook believes will be his legacy and, more important, how Apple will be remembered.

Whatever happens there, the Apple Watch is a good example of the company sticking with something that makes sense. But it’s also a product that’s relatively inexpensive, as it should be, since it’s an accessory. The Vision Pro makes zero sense, and I don’t see real innovation there. I hate to even write this, but I see a lot more innovation in the far more affordable Meta MR products. So maybe there’s a long game win here. But this feels more like a classic “I told you so moment”: If and when this product evolves into affordable glasses that don’t look like you’re a wearing a face hugger from the Alien movies, the guys who believed in it all along will incorrectly say, “I told you so.” To me, the “I told so” is reverse, this happens when/if Apple actually ships a product that makes any sense at all. Vision Pro makes no sense at all. It can’t look like that and be innovative as a product for individuals.

At least Jason got the letdown bit right. 🙂

Looking for innovation from Apple in 2024 is sort of missing the point. To me, the innovation there is spread across all the “it just works” scenarios they enable. It’s not one thing, that’s over. It’s all the things.