Ask Paul: October 24 ⭐

Happy Friday! Here’s another great set of reader questions to kick off the weekend a bit early.

✍️ It’s always a series of mistakes

louiem3 asks:

Hi Paul, any plans on doing or continuing another Programming series or something like it related to Windows? The last one you did was a good one!

Thanks … yes, I have worked on and off on an expansion and possible reworking of the Programming Windows series, which turned into the book Windows Everywhere. The expansion would/will include the Windows 10 years at the least, but also some other content bits throughout. But the reworking idea is stuck in the back of my brain because I feel like the existing series/book may be a little off-putting to non-developers/technical people even though I feel like a lot of it would be of interest to a broader audience otherwise.

When I started that, it was as described, a look at the various Windows application development frameworks/SDKs that Microsoft came up with over the years and the mistakes and successes that happened along the way. But as I reexamined those things chronologically, a different kind of narrative presented itself. And I started to think about it more in terms of the broader strategies for Windows and how it and Microsoft either reacted to industry trends or defined them. And I became semi-obsessed with a topic that matters quite a bit to me, which is when it all went south. That is, the moment in time when Windows was the most relevant thing in personal computing and then suddenly wasn’t.

That moment is described in Programming Windows: Civil War (Premium). Microsoft had committed to recasting Windows with web technologies, which has strong parallels to what’s happening now with Windows 11 and AI, and how Microsoft wants to reimagine the platform as being agentic and “AI native,” which is a nonsense term. But an internal battle over that direction (in the very late 1990s) led to Microsoft reversing that decision and going back to what had worked in the past: It embraced and extended open web technologies into a proprietary platform it called .NET. And that was the end. Windows never recovered as an app platform. This is basically the conclusion of the series even though I wrote it in the middle in Programming Windows: We Fought the Web and the Web Won (Premium).

Anyway, because of the way I wrote the series, these things only became obvious in time and I feel like I could/should rewrite it with that perspective in mind. And maybe to make it less technical.

But the parallels between events in different time periods are always interesting to me, and the decision to protect the cash cow at all costs was a classic short-sightedness mistake, and you can see this happening today with Apple and its App Store policies and refusing to concede to what is obviously the right thing to do. Not being able to change will eventually bite us all on the backside. Especially when those in charge are so convinced they’re right.

Beyond that work, I do think about other series that might be considered narratives or historical in nature (as opposed to just technical topics). And I do have a sort of “big idea” thing I’d like to write that I’ve discussed with my wife, but it’s still ill-formed. And it’s possible there isn’t enough Adderall in the world for my feeble brain to put it all together in a reasonable time frame. We’ll see.

? The Ringworld engineers

helix2301 asks:

Have you thought about testing any health rings? Samsung, Oura, or Ringcon. I know you have really focused on Apple Watch and Fitbit over the years. Just wondering if something you have thought about or had any interest in looking into going forward. There have been a lot of rumors about Apple coming out with a ring. I just don’t see that happening.

I think about that a lot, actually, in part because I just don’t “use” whichever smartwatches I’m wearing to any degree. For the most part, these are things that collect data over time and, worst case scenario, will hopefully warn me if there’s some issue. But I don’t babysit them each day, I just look at the information over time, for example, when we come to Mexico City my resting heart rate will spike because of the altitude and I watch that to make sure it goes down over the next week or two, as it has so far. If anything, they’re more of an irritant than anything else since a watch will randomly ping loudly, I’ll look at it, and it’s some nonsensical notification that I thought I had previously silenced. I can’t think of the last time a watch pinged and I looked at it and thought, oh, nice, that’s useful. I’m not sure it’s ever happened.

That said, you don’t miss things until they’re gone, and I apparently look at the clock on my watch quite frequently, so there’s that need for a screen of some kind. And less frequently things like the weather, date, step count, or whatever else. I bet my number two use case for looking at the screen is to see the battery life of the watch itself so I can charge it as needed. Super useful.

So the Oura ring or something similar could probably do all the data collection I need, which is good. But then I would miss the watch bit and the other less frequent uses. So I feel like the more obvious direction for me, at least, is to get a smartwatch or tracker that has a decent-sized display and several days of battery life. Which is basically going back to Fitbit, or would be if those devices were ever updated in a meaningful way and if the sleep tracking/software wasn’t so terrible. So I guess something like that but not that. Or something.

I don’t know. For now, I’ll stick to whatever smartwatches I have (Google Watch 3, Apple Watch Series 10, both about a year old now). But I do think about this and I pay attention when there are new devices. And I would move along to something else if it made sense. Ideally that thing would work across platforms as that whole proprietary mess is a big problem for people like me who do go back and forth between iPhone and Android.

❄️ Tim Cook is Mr. Snow Miser

noelt1955 asks:

Is it just possible that Apple is becoming (slowly) less “cool”?

Almost anyone could effectively argue that any company worth almost $4 trillion cannot possibly be “cool” in the accepted sense of the word. And that Apple has the same marketing/reality gaps as the other Big Tech firms in that it markets itself as being all about privacy and protecting its users when all it’s really doing is protecting revenues, often illegally and often at the expense of its customers. There is no bigger hypocrite in Silicon Valley, and that is a high bar.

It’s not clear if this is a problem per se. But the appeal of Apple as it was rising again under Steve Jobs in the 2000s was that it was this scrappy upstart that could only win users by actually being better. And being better in that era meant carefully choosing which markets to enter and which products to build based on where it could make a difference in terms of quality. Inevitably, being successful, especially to the degree that Apple was/is, means growth and losing the ideals that made it special. But it’s difficult not to believe that, had Steve Jobs lived, Apple today would be less financially successful and also a “better” company, meaning in this case not that it would get everything right, but that it would have continued relentlessly pursuing quality over quantity and profits.

Today, Apple benefits from the same inertia that kept Microsoft going even as it was ceding market share to Amazon, Apple, Google, and others during the 2000s and 2010s. It has a huge and loyal customer base that has proven resilient to all the horrible information we’ve learned about this company and its leadership under Tim Cook, who is about as soulless and unimaginative as Steve Jobs was unique and imaginative. He is driving Apple into a very expensive coffin. But more important, to me, is he’s ruined what made Apple special—or cool—and set it up to be supplanted by smaller, younger companies that actually meet the needs that Apple today couldn’t care less about.

Obviously, there are people and products at Apple that still show some spark. There are these occasional moments of clarity, of getting it right. But Microsoft had those 20 years ago too. Neither is the same company it once was, and in Apple’s case, the rot starts at the top.

? Training day

spacecamel asks:

We are thinking of taking an Amtrak trip across the country next year. Being the train expert, are there any lines that you would recommend? We are looking at the line across the southwest going into LA but still looking for good ideas.

This is something I’ve never done, sorry, but it is something I’ve looked into. And the reality of this type of trip is that it will require switching lines multiple times and having completely different experiences on different types of trains. Which may be interesting, honestly. I like the idea of a U.S. south to southwest type trip, and then maybe up the west coast.

But the two train adventures I’ve always wanted to do are a cross-continental trip across the bottom of Canada with those glass-roofed cars that give you a vista view and then a summer (or whatever) of arbitrarily traveling from city to city around Europe with a railpass. The latter of which would more closely resemble the Amtrack experience getting across the U.S. but would be much better in the sense that it’s a better infrastructure and system.

? Time management is my Achilles heel

owllicks asks:

In your day-to-day work flow, do you use any time management apps or have recommendations on something to use to help better focus on tasks throughout the day?

I am not good at this. I was just discussing this with my wife, coincidentally, in part because I was curious how she handled this type of thing. The problem for me, I think, is that I don’t like having a schedule that’s full of time-based to-do items, and as these things pile up, it feels insurmountable and it’s easy to freeze up and get nothing done. Maybe this is my own personal shortcoming, maybe it’s tied to the nature of the work I do, which is mostly writing. I don’t know.

What I do, and maybe this is more of a warning than advice, because I’m not recommending it, is the following:

• Tasks (time-based to-do items) go in my calendar instead of me using yet another app (a To-do app or whatever). This is partially because I am already using the calendar and it works for this type of thing and I don’t see the point of another app. But I know that works for a lot of people.
• Project-related to-dos are usually in Notion. We have a Notion for the Eternal Spring book, for example, which my wife and I update as we get things done and we discover new things to write about. Notion as an “everything” app is an interesting idea on one level, but I also find the tree structure-based organization doesn’t scale very well, and that’s kept me from just literally using it for everything.
• I have a To-do folder in whatever cloud service I’m using at the time (Synology Drive today, Google Drive and OneDrive previously) that is perhaps the wrong name (it’s really current, ongoing writing) but has all the articles I’m working on as well as assets related to things like this site, Eternal Spring, Desk to Destination, and so on. And a Books folder for book work.

And that’s it. It doesn’t work very well.

This could be some weird mental block. I can look at a given week and think, OK, this is what I would like to get done. But then life happens, it’s busy with things I never saw coming, and the week ends and I got nothing done from that original list. I did get things done. Just not what I wanted or planned on. And I never seem to catch up. This happens at every level. It happens on individual days, almost aways. Weeks. Months. Trips, like this one, where we may be away for two to four months, I have this set of goals to accomplish while we’re here, and then suddenly we have to go home and I got almost none of it done.

I often joke that procrastination has never bitten me in the ass, the joke being that that’s what always happens. But being disorganized, which is odd to write in one way because I’m actually well-organized otherwise, is the same thing. I hate being forced to manage my time better and I very much need to manage my time better.

In short, I am the worst person to ask about this. Sorry. :/

?‍? Hardware is hard

OldITPro2000 asks:

Do you know what the profit margin is/was for Surface? I’m sure that team received a target to hit just like Xbox/Gaming.

No, and Microsoft now hides that completely by putting Surface under a Devices umbrella that also includes peripherals and HoloLens. I know it’s never had a profitable year, and we can be sure that it’s not had a profitable quarter in many years because they would absolutely say so otherwise. This business never did well and has been declining, financially, for years.

To be clear, I love Surface and would like to see it survive. But these products don’t sell in volume, and that makes it difficult given how low margins are in the PC market, even for those dedicated specifically to that business. It never really had a chance.

As an aside, this likely also explains why Microsoft hardware accessories like keyboards and mice are no more. I know Incase technically produces them now…but still.

I wonder if the Microsoft hardware business succumbed to the company’s bigness. These products were well-regarded and I have to think it was a successful business. But maybe it was just too small a business, comparatively. Microsoft’s decision to kill that off and keep a handful of peripherals under Surface didn’t make sense to me at the time, and it still bothers me now.

?‍♂️ Folly

train_wreck asks:

You mentioned AI as potentially being “Satya’s Folly”. Care to elaborate more on that?

This was a reference to the U.S. purchase of Alaska in 1867, which critics of the day called “Seward’s Folly” because it was driven by U.S. Secretary of State William Seward. The idea being that Alaska was useless and far away, and that the purchase was really just an attempt to divert attention away from whatever domestic issues dominated the news headlines at the time. But Seward saw the strategic value of Alaska at a time when the U.S. was keen to see Great Britain leave Canada, with the latter perhaps joining the U.S. So he engaged in a propaganda campaign to get congressional approve and pushed it through. But the Alaska gold rush of the very late 1890s finally made sense of the acquisition, as did its strategic location later with regards to the Soviet Union/Russia. Seward’s purchase of Alaska was no folly, it was the deal of the century.

Given all that, the parallels become obvious. We have Satya Nadella, or perhaps Microsoft’s senior leadership team (SLT), convinced that AI is the way forward. They are pushing this on shareholders and Wall Street as the next era of explosive growth, and they dismiss the great expense of the required investments by positioning this as a do or die existential moment. And this will either work out or it will not. Microsoft will spend this money, go to all the effort of contorting its many products and services for AI, and we’ll see if it matters. This will either be yet another Microsoft miscalculation or one of the most brilliant moves in the company’s history. But to critics of Copilot and AI, it can be seen as Satya’s Folly, as he is the face of this push. Is there a gold rush waiting Microsoft? Is this a strategic hedge against Amazon, Google, or other companies pushing similar AI initiatives? Is it both?

We’ll find out soon enough, but this wasn’t necessarily me criticizing Microsoft/Nadella for the AI stuff, though I have my opinions about that. It’s more just a reference to perception at the time the thing is happening. And how things can turn out differently than some might assume. Or not. That’s how this works.