Ask Paul: August 1 (Premium)

Happy Friday! We’re heading into our final weekend in rainy Mexico City for this trip, so let’s kick it off a bit early with another great set of reader questions.

⚠️ You gotta look out for yourself

AnOldAmigaUser asks:

Last week, the UK’s Online Safety Act came into effect. Proton is moving all of their services to EU servers as Switzerland debates online tracking of citizens. Many States in the US are passing laws requiring age verification by government id. Now Google is starting to use technology to determine user age…and we know they can determine a lot more than that already for advertising purposes.

Short of certain technology choices, what do you think the average person can do to protect themselves from these continued assaults and insults to our privacy. It really feels to me that the surveillance state and the surveillance economy are merging for their mutual benefit.

I sometimes wonder whether we live in a particularly unique time or if this just more of the same and we’re stuck in some endless loop. But in keeping with a comment I made about Apple and how what one does is more important than what one says (in Apple’s case, marketing), I have been personally moving more of the technology I rely on away from Big Tech and into what I now think of as Little Tech. This isn’t some new plan, per se. But I don’t know. Maybe it sort of is.

Events like the ones you mention can trigger us to react, it depends on the individual and the nature of whatever event. In January, when we suddenly couldn’t access our YouTube channel and all the content it contains, I had to scramble to figure that out, and got lucky and was able to re-access our accounts, and so the reaction there was twofold. I backed up that content and set out to make sure I did so either automatically or on some schedule. And I started reevaluating things with online accounts more generally and started making changes there too. And I’m a writer, so I’m writing about these things in my Online Accounts (2025) series.

Ideally, we don’t spend the rest of our lives just course-correcting every time something happens that we don’t like. But that’s the nature of things, you can only predict so much, and be prepared for the right disasters isn’t a science. I’m old enough that I have whatever collection of experiences to work from, but Big Tech, world governments, and whatever else will always surprise from time-to-time. All we can do is react when something bad happens.

One of those things I’ve learned has come up a lot lately, and I was just discussing this with my wife. I use this phrase, “optimize for the every day,” and it applies in lots of places in life. Something simple like packing for a trip to whatever place and deciding what to bring and what you can do without; many will overpack and then cart around all these things they’ll never use, like umbrellas, hair dryers, or whatever. And I try to land on the far side of that, packing as lightly as possible, carrying as little as possible, and if it rains, oh well, I’ll spend $20 on an umbrella and probably pay it forward by leaving it for the cleaner in whatever hotel rather than carry it home.

In tech, I’ve seen this all week long. For example, I wrote about Proton Authenticator, which I was very happy to see, but there’s a lot of “what if” pushback. What if Proton suffers from some security breach, as if Proton were somehow uniquely susceptible to such a thing? What if someone offers Proton $1 billion and it tosses aside its legal protections as a non-profit organization to cash in and it suddenly does a 180 and coughs up all our personal data? What if, what if, what if?

What? Let’s focus on what we can control. And in this case, we can choose more trustworthy companies, like Proton. We can choose more trustworthy products and services. We can choose to be redundant with our data, etc. … or we can choose to stick money under a mattress, I guess. But be educated about whatever it is and do what’s right for you. Not what’s right for Microsoft … or for Proton. This is the right place and time to be selfish.

To sort of bring this full circle, I kind of lay this out with regard to personal technology in that Little Tech article. It’s not about being hard core in removing as much Big Tech from life as possible as it is evaluating what makes the most sense for ourselves at each juncture and choosing correctly … for us.

You could apply this to almost anything. While we didn’t buy a place in Mexico as some weird backup plan if the world just went to shit, it could be used in that way if it did. But that’s not where our heads were (or are) at. I’m sure some think differently, and we’ve met a lot of people here, Americans, who no longer live in the U.S. and rarely go back. That’s not for us. But I like to see people making the right decisions for themselves, even if it’s not what I’d do.

Anyway. We need to keep alert. The world feels a little weird now. Maybe it passes. But maybe it gets worse too.

? Kibitzing about Xbox

OldITPro2000 asks

First, have you seen any of Laura Fryer’s YouTube content? If not I believe you would really appreciate her Microsoft insight. I watched her entire catalog over the past week (all of the videos are 15 minutes or so or less) and was left wondering if Phil Spencer is falling into the same hole as Panos Panay or Terry Myerson.

I’ve only watched a few of her videos. And this is a bit unfair, especially given that I’m a podcaster and on camera at least five days every week, normally, but I find her whole schtick to be a bit grating. From her voice to her style to her opinions, I find myself saying “Nope” out loud a lot. (I am self-aware enough to state that I’m sure people do this with me all the time. It’s OK.)

But I think a lot of that comes out of my inherent rejections of fanboyism in all things. When she says something like, “this is Microsoft abandoning everything that made the Xbox great in the first place,” I just recoil. Because that isn’t just wrong, in my opinion, it’s wrong-headed.

What was “great” about the Xbox in the first place? It was made by Microsoft at a time in which it was dominant and still believed that it could just sleepwalk into any new (to it) market and be dominant there too. It was a PC, basically, because that was Microsoft’s world-view at the time. It was just another videogame console, filling a space left empty by Sega, that went on to lose every single console generation it competed in. So … what was great? I don’t get it. And how is the Xbox returning to its PC roots now somehow not in line with what made the Xbox whatever it was from the get-go?

This is what I see when I look at Xbox. A business that tried whatever strategies and failed. But rather than give up, which maybe Microsoft should have done if all you care about is profits and losses, it pivoted and reimagined what Xbox could be. And over time, what we got was a platform that is the most pro-gamer games platform there is, with a ridiculous amount of backward compatibility, and now with a much broader range of devices on which we can play. All of this is pro-gamer and anyone who cares about Xbox, as a brand, a business, or whatever else, should want this thing to succeed and see that this part of Microsoft is trying to make that happen. Whether we agree with specific parts of that work or not.

Complaining that there are no “exclusives” today is beyond tired. We don’t need exclusives. We need as many games as possible in as many places as possible. Having to buy one expensive device to play one game that only works on that one device feels bankrupt and broken to me. Complaining about “native console games” in the context of Xbox is silly to me. I want games that just work, look and run as well as possible, and are available where I want to play. What are we even talking about here?

When she rips on the Xbox ROG Ally gaming handhelds it’s because they’re not “native” console games, again, whatever that means. It’s “just” Windows 11, as if being compatible with the broadest and deepest catalogs in the world is bad, and ignoring that it’s not “just” Windows 11, it’s been optimized to work as a device and be more efficient, reliable, and performant, so we can hopefully get to a best of both worlds (compatibility of Windows combined with the benefits of Linux on lower-end hardware) place.

I feel like this community is just in a perpetual complaint loop. It’s OK to complain when things are bad, it’s the right thing to do in some cases. But I’m not a big fan of these types of complaints. They feel fake, calculated to draw views. We can feel bad that Xbox has failed over time. But we should give credit to Microsoft for trying to make Xbox work, respect the incredible amount of money it’s spent on that, and evaluate the individual strategies as we will. Given the cards it’s been dealt, some by previous leadership, but all out of their control, I think the current Xbox leadership is doing the right thing, generally. But I very much believe that they’re trying their best to do the right thing. Compare this to Windows a generation of leadership ago where it felt like the inmates were running the asylum. It’s not like that.

Meaning, given a nearly impossible task (make Windows a service) and/or run the business this way (don’t try any more innovative Surface hardware designs) and if all of Phil’s actions of the past few years are because of this. To my understanding, Phil is a “gamers gamer” and I wonder if he harbors disappointment about where Xbox is.

I am sure that he’s disappointed that Xbox is not more successful. You can feel the frustration that certain things haven’t come together yet (for example, with a push to an Arm-based console platform) because he wants to push forward. And he’s very clearly the real deal from a gamer perspective. He loves games. The whole Xbox everywhere thing is about trying to tear down the barriers that maybe have been good for Sony or whatever but not as good for gamers too. The nice thing about Phil Spencer is that he can’t help himself. He talks about things the leadership is thinking about, maybe planning, sometimes far out, and sometimes that might not even happen. That lack of restraint is about passion, but it’s also him being a real person, and not some slick marketeer who always stays on script.

I love those people. We need more of those people.

? They think they’re AI

OldITPro2000 asks

I am curious if you have tried any of the less mainstream AI offerings, such as Grok or Meta AI and if so what you thought of them. Similarly, aside from a huge case of FOMO, what do you envision Meta’s end game is here? I am sure it is nothing good, based on their past history.

No.

I will never use an AI made by Meta or X. Ever. I do not trust these companies. The leaders/founders of both have betrayed this country to China just as Apple has, in Zuck’s case by creating open source AI specifically so the Chinese don’t fall behind the U.S. in this space, with Elon Musk through Tesla giving away all its electric car technologies, a business that China now leads, technologically, and by sales.

We need a term for these types of companies. We have Big Tech and Little Tech, but they are something else. Morally bankrupt. Evil. Corrupt. Empty Tech? I don’t know. I reject everything these people purport to stand for. And I could not care less about their AIs.

Meta’s end game is to get Facebook and its other service into China (in some cases, back into China), and so it is bowing down to Beijing and giving up everything, including its U.S. customers’ private data, to that government. The book Careless People is disturbing on too many levels to count, but it’s final chapter documents this work. It’s horrific.

?️ Saying nothing in as many words as possible

train_wreck asks:

You may have already written or spoken about it, but what are your thoughts on the Satya layoff letter? He’s clearly having a “bet the company” moment on AI, but IMO his legacy is considerably tarnished by how bungled these layoffs have been.

I wrote a bit about this in the first section in Microsoft Earnings Analysis: FY2025 (Premium). But the more I learn about Satya Nadella, the less I like him. He’s not the calm, cool engineer that Microsoft markets, he’s a robotic personality that grates, one that favors big businesses over people. He makes shockingly dangerous bets, especially with money. It’s not clear he’s running things at Microsoft, which you can see for yourself by reading or listening to the most recent earnings call. Amy Hood corrects him or sidesteps him all the time. I don’t understand any of this. But if anyone believes that this engineer somehow drove Microsoft’s amazing financial successes, they don’t understand how business works. This was all done by people who know how to manipulate money, not create products and services. Is there anyone out there who really believes that Microsoft somehow has “better” technology than whatever competitors, and that that’s why it’s so financially successful? Your honor, I present Windows 11 and Copilot as prosecution exhibit A.

As far as this memo goes, it’s a horrible combination of traditional corporate-speak and all-to-familiar Satya-isms. If this man has any skill, it’s saying as little as possible using as many words as possible. I’ve joked that you could put any of his speeches into Word, ask it to summarize the talk, and Word would come back with an empty document. There’s no “there” there.

This memo starts off with a “thoughts and prayers” thing that any employee should find insulting. He acknowledges the uncertainty that his recent decisions triggered without mentioning the salient point that he is the cause of that uncertainty, and without promising he’ll do better going forward. There is a fake empathy in this I hate. But no worries, he moves on from that pretty quick. That memo isn’t really about the layoffs. It’s an implicit warning that the uncertainty is only going to continue.

The “why” of Microsoft used to be a computer on every desk, a once lofty goal that today reads as quaint and limited. It wouldn’t be difficult to map that to a more modern goal. But Satya can’t string two words together, so we get gobbledygook instead. He mentions “the enigma of success in an industry that has no franchise value” and then never explains what that means. That Microsoft “earn[ed a] social permission to operate” but that’s no longer enough, whatever that was. On and on it goes.

I could rip on this forever, but in the context of my comment above regarding Microsoft technologies, he states that the company’s three business priorities are security, quality, and AI transformation. Microsoft has historically failed at the first, and trust is hard to win back. The second is patently ridiculous. And the third is the biggest bet this company has ever made; whether it is successful or not is for the future to tell us, but I can say this right now, and with certainty: Microsoft’s madcap AI push has betrayed this company’s “soul” in the sense that it has severed trust internally and externally. It will go on to whatever level of success, I don’t care either way. But it has stopped pretending that the people who work for it and use its products matter in the slightest.

I hate what’s happening to this company. And I will afford it the same level of respect it affords me and every other customer.

? Xbox hardware is hard

helix2301 asks:

Paul I got Logitech gcloud gaming and it’s great device. I didn’t like Lenovo or ROG handheld because of price and known issues. Where do you think Xbox going to thrive on handled xcloud or local hardware?

I like the idea of portable gaming devices. There is a small market there. And I feel like Xbox “should” have a presence in this space, especially since it has zero presence on mobile right now.

But I don’t see handheld gaming devices as a major console generation or something that will save the hardware business. We’ll see future first-party hardware, console and portable, they’ve said as much. But I think one more generation will do it: Xbox, or Microsoft Gaming, makes sense as a business only when it jettisons that hardware. Cue shrill YouTube complaining otherwise.

The most recent example of why that’s so is in the latest Microsoft earnings. 500 million monthly active users because of Activision Blizzard and its games being everywhere instead of locked into a single console platform no one buys. 50 million MAUs on Call of Duty alone. Nearly 40 games in development, none locked to a single console. Game Pass hit $5 billion in revenues. And console hardware? It somehow managed to see a revenue decline of 22 percent, and that’s against a quarter a year ago in which console revenues fell 42 (!) percent. (And the year before that, it declined 13 percent.) Despite this, Gaming revenue overall was up 10 percent and Xbox content and services revenues were up 13 percent.

It’s all upside. Except for hardware. It’s time to set the hardware free. And I believe that to be the plan.

? Virtuous cycles

helix2301 asks:

Apple earnings report showed huge growth in services. Apple has said in past Apple TV and Apple arcade are not profitable on their own. I know Apple now bundles AppleCare Apple Music Apple card and google search money under services now do you think that’s the bulk money. What you think where Apple services money comes from?

I believe Apple executives admitted during recent testimonies that the biggest chunk of that is from the App Store, which is why Apple has a death-grip on those unreasonably high fees and has instituted so many anticompetitive policies. The next biggest revenue generator is likely the $25 billion-ish that Apple makes from Google’s search engine payoffs each year. And then it’s a mix of traditional upsells like standalone iCloud storage and the Apple One subscriptions.

The latter is an obvious but also genius offering because Apple can rightfully promote the value of saving money on multiple services, while taking advantage of human nature. Customers pay for these things and don’t use most it because “you never know.” This is the polar opposite of my “optimize for the every day” thing, above. We fall for this regularly, all over the place. At least Apple’s services are usually high quality.

Getting into services was smart on Apple’s part. It’s been successful re-monetizing customers that don’t upgrade hardware as often as before, and this is a space in which Microsoft has been much less successful. But Apple has a better reputation with consumers, is more of a consumer company, and, again, the value is high. This, at least, is more of a win-win in the sense that individuals who want these things are well served and those who don’t can just ignore most of it. This the type of relationship we all want with the makers of the products and services we use and it’s why Apple fans are so loyal.

? Backups and the NAS

Jollytik asks:

I heard you on Windows Weekly talking about your Synology NAS. Could you detail your setup on how you backup and save your files. One thing that perplexed me is if there is a way to backup your Personal Vault back down to the NAS. Thanks

I’ve not tried to back up the OneDrive Personal Vault, but I suspect that wouldn’t work well in an automated sense.

I’m not sure how you use Personal Vault, but I access it only occasionally, and almost always because I have some new credential or whatever personal data that I want to put there. For me, Personal Vault is one example of that “what if” thing that’s come up a few times earlier in this rambling mess (sorry). Not a focus, but it’s there just in case. And yes, you do need a backup, but if it’s not changing all that much, that can be an occasional manual process.

But as of now, I’ve not tried that. Going into this NAS experience, I wasn’t sure whether its role would be secondary to cloud storage (so, more of an archive and/or backup) or whether it would be central to my work day-to-day, which would make cloud storage secondary and more of an archive/backup. My success with it so far means that the latter is true, but I have one more major step to take: I’ll be getting a second NAS, which I’ll eventually bring to Mexico, and syncing the two actively.

If that works well, and experiences tell me it will, then that’s the way forward for me. And I’ll evaluate the right ways to use cloud storage, and the right ways to back up or archive what’s on the NAS. One way would be local storage, at least for backup, via drives in the NAS itself or external. But I already have my data in various cloud storage services–OneDrive and Google Drive, mostly, but also OneDrive for Business and iCloud–and so I need to sort through all that. I don’t mind an archive I’m never going to touch to be replicated in, say, Google Drive and iCloud, or whatever. Redundancy is good.

Regarding backups, I don’t actively back up PCs. I wrote about my process in Roll Your Own Windows Time Machine (Premium) a while back, and though some details have changed, I do basically the same thing still. But I work out of Synology Drive, not OneDrive or Google Drive. My current work files sync to all the PCs I use, and stay current with the NAS. As noted, I’ll soon have two NASes in sync. At that point, I will want backups. Local and cloud.

I do back up phones, mostly because it’s seamless and supported natively by Android and iOS. But I never use those backups. I might, someday. Like OneDrive Personal Vault, it’s OK that it’s there. I may eventually need it. If I don’t, that’s fine.

For the most part, I treat any of these devices–PC, Mac, iPad, smartphone–as throwaways in the sense that none should have data on them that’s not synced elsewhere. My phones all back up their photos to Google Drive, OneDrive, and Synology Drive. I work on PCs using Synology Drive-based folders that are synced to the NAS and accessible from any device. Etc.

In some ways, this is tied to the first question up top, this notion of doing what’s right for you and choosing the right products ands services. When I wrote Roll Your Own Windows Time Machine (Premium) in August 2023, I was still using OneDrive actively for day-to-day work. That fall, Microsoft started enshittifying OneDrive by force-enabling Folder backup, which continues to this day, and so I experimented with and then switched to Google Drive. That’s worked great ever since, but I got the NAS back in May and starting using Synology Drive, first in a limited way, and then completely for my day-to-day work. So in those two years, everything changed from the perspective of what I used. But nothing changed in how I do what I do. Synology is as seamless as Google Drive and OneDrive. I moved on twice, both times choosing something that I felt was better for me. But I didn’t have to change how I did things. (I would have if there was a good reason, of course.)

I referenced a quote in the movie Heat in a recent Ask Paul, or at least I thought I did, since I can’t find it now. But that quote is relevant here as well. Robert Dinero’s character is a mentor to Val Kilmer’s character, and he gives him this bit of advice: “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 the way I feel about these tech products. Use what you have to use, but always have a Plan B. Ideally, that Plan B is as seamless as my storage moves. But many times it’s not.