Ask Paul: January 30 ⭐

Happy Friday! It’s been another crazy week, in my case complicated by a wonderful bout of food poisoning I can’t quite shake. But that’s as good an excuse as any to start this weekend a bit early. And as always, I like to do that with some great reader questions. I will do my best.

?‍? You can’t switch until the fat lady sings

wright_is asks:

With the new Vivaldi release this week, it got me thinking again, Opera has been pushing its browsers heavily through influencers recently.

In my experience, Opera PR has always been wonderful, but I’m not aware of the influencer push. I suppose a grass roots effort is a reasonable idea given how many small browser makers there are now and how difficult it is to differentiate.

My only real issue with Opera, and it’s a small one, is that they have too many browser versions. I understand that everyone is different, but I feel like you add things to a browser, typically via extensions, to make it your own and that the base product should be minimalist. This may be why Opera Air is my favorite Opera web browser.

Now that is a majority owned subsidiary of a Chinese investment firm, and therefore essentially an extension of the Chinese government, what are your feelings about Opera and whether it can be trusted?

I guess I never really thought about this. Opera is so European, it’s all over their website and communications. And while its parent company is owned by a Chinese company, it’s still based in Europe and I suspect it’s just about 100 percent run by Europeans. I’m likewise not sure as a blanket statement that every Chinese company is essentially an extension of the Chinese government. But China is, well, China, and as an authoritarian state, and there is always the reasonable fear that it will require whatever company to open up whatever data it controls.

But what data does Opera have? There’s an Opera account and, unlike with Brave, that data is centrally stored and synced between your devices as needed. Opera says that it doesn’t log your entire browsing history, though it uses generalized data for ads. And you could just sign in with a Google or other third-party account. But web browsers are unique, of course.

So, I don’t know. I understand the distrust of the Chinese government, though it’s unclear how this is any worse than Big Tech and the current U.S. government, honestly. I also see that Opera doesn’t exactly play up its owners. I deal with a handful of people from the company and can see how it presents its products to the world, and I don’t see anything troubling there. But I guess this is up to the individual. I’ve made my case for Brave, for example.

? What’s next for Windows?

uk user asks:

Ok, so what is the future with Windows? Yes A.I. and all that but all the different segments, especially one of my favorite, OneNote, are, to me, a mess. Incomprehensible I would say with so many ‘features that I don’t need, or want, getting in the way of what was once a pretty straightforward, and usable set of programs.

Fundamentally, Windows is fine. There is news of a quality push for 2026 aimed at regaining customer trust, and that is sorely needed. But years of neglect, mostly, plus all the well understood enshittification has left enthusiasts reeling if not heading for the exits for years.

The thing is, this isn’t about us. Windows is just a tool. A really mature, well-worn tool. When the news about Windows 11 hitting the one billion user milestone hit, I braced myself for a new round of hate and disbelief, because that’s all our community is these days. And it was even worse than I imagined. People can be terrible, and there is nothing worse than confident ignorance.

But most people who use Windows, literally 95+ percent of them, don’t “care” about Windows per se and I bet a similar percentage don’t see or care about the issues we all complain about every day. They use this thing to get work done and then they move off to their phones, or maybe an iPad, and do fun things there. This dynamic is normal and even desirable. But I feel like a lot of the negativity around Windows just boils down to enthusiasts or technical people who are burned that the thing they’re experts in is no longer the center of the universe. And the disconnect here is that they believe that “fixing” Windows will somehow reverse that.

It won’t. There’s nothing to reverse. The world has moved on. PCs are what they are, they will or will not adapt to this latest AI-based wave of change, and we will all move forward regardless. I don’t see Windows or PCs disappearing anytime soon, but there are always potential threats chipping away at the edges.

Of course hiking the subscription fees, using the excuse of these ‘features’ as enhancing work flow, they don’t, they just contribut to the mess. But will Windows next version be renamed Windows A.I. it wouldn’t surprise me in the least. And another thing a customisable version would be useful. I don’t use, or need, Powerpoint, Teams , Sharepoint, or Acess/Publisher. Just a thought.

Look, AI is going to be integrated into Windows. Whatever one feels about a standalone Copilot app, or a standalone Copilot app and a standalone Copilot 365 app both being in Windows is sort of beside the point. Of course there will be that. And of course the apps in Windows and throughout Microsoft 365 that would benefit most from AI features will be augmented that way. And Microsoft’s plan to implement agents in Windows as apps, from a UX perspective, actually makes sense. It’s a way forward. Saying that none of these features enhance work or whatever is incorrect. Much of this work is excellent.

We’re burdened by history here. Our collective reaction to all this and our perception of these changes is tied to the trust issues we have because of those years of neglect and abuse. We are suspicious of everything Microsoft does with Windows now, wish Microsoft would “just leave Notepad alone” (or whatever, like this thing reached some apex of text editing 20 years ago), and have an over-the-top knee-jerk reaction to Recall and blankly believe bad-faith claims about its problems because of bias confirmation. There are these real problems. And then there is a host of imagined or exaggerated problems that we all obsess over too much.

To me, what this comes down to is whether we can opt-in to or opt-out of features or behaviors we don’t want, regardless of their AI-ness. Opt-in is ideal, but I also recognize that Microsoft, a for-profit company and not a charity, wishes to put new features, and potential new revenue streams, in front of customers that it has few if any direct ties to who are using this complex product for free every day. So opting out is OK, not ideal but better than nothing. Being able to disable or remove things you don’t like is good, too.

And we’re kind of mostly there right now, right? It’s not that difficult to customize Windows to be what it is you want. You can uninstall Copilot, disable all the AI features in Notepad, ignore Recall, or whatever. And if Microsoft gets any of this right, an open question, then maybe some of us will embrace it and just move forward. Or they will move on. It’s up to all of us to decide.

? Oh, the places you’ll go

noelt1955 asks:

Hi Paul, I note that you generally make jokes about, or regular sneering asides that insinuate that you regard the whole co-pilot AI experiment as either barely relevant, laughingly incompetent, or just sad – except in Paint.

No, no. Not except for Paint. I hold up Paint and Notepad as examples of things that are far better apps today than they’ve ever been because (per above) so many in the community complain about any change to these things regardless of merit. The Photos app falls into this category too: The AI enhancements made over the past year or so are excellent. I use Photos to upscale old scanned photos for free. It’s such a great tool.

My commentary about Copilot is mostly about the product as a chatbot, a competitor to things like ChatGPT or Claude. Not sure about the sneering bit, but it’s fair to say that Copilot is a resounding dud and that those who use and pay for AI use the competition. This is reminiscent of Internet Explorer back in the day, where most people were using Chrome or Firefox and not the browser built in to Windows. That’s what’s happening to Copilot as an app/chatbot right. But that doesn’t impact all the AI functionality that Microsoft is building into individual apps across Windows and Microsoft 365. Much of that work is very good.

How will this impact on your writing of a user guide for a product that sees copilot as being a core (in fact, essential) component?

I’ve been talking myself into understanding the shift here and trying to make peace with the reality of where we’re at and how I can best contribute. In the 1990s, Brian Livingston would write a Secrets book and a magazine column of literal secrets about Windows, a system that was still new, changing a lot, and on the way up. And the ways in which we discovered, published, and consumed this information were primitive, time-consuming, and paper-based.

The rise of the web changed that. Publishing became electronic and immediate, and also democratized, so that enthusiasts who previously had no voice beyond a very local situation could see their discoveries about how Windows work read widely all over the world. By the time I started working on what became Windows Vista Secrets, there were no more secrets. Everything was out on the web. And so that book became a sort of compendium of the best information, hopefully, curated and presented in a kind of traditional way.

After Windows 7 Secrets, I moved to a self-publishing, all-electronic model for books that continues to this day. But starting with Windows 8, I could feel this shift, subtle at first, that the focus for a book about Windows was mostly about helping people overcome unfamiliar new interfaces and, when possible, do things the ways they were comfortable with. That all started reversing, thankfully, as Windows 8 failed, but with Windows 10 I saw the start of what we today call enshittification. And that changed the focus too.

For the Windows 10 book, and then later with Windows 11, the focus shifted to working around or fixing bad behaviors. It started with what you should do right after you successfully brought up a new PC. I added a privacy chapter, something I’d never even thought about previously, so you could be sure your were protecting yourself as much as possible. I added a chapter on the correct way to configure Edge, whether you planned to use it or not, because of all the troubling behaviors there. Then there was the forced OneDrive Folder Backup usage. And so on.

For the AI stuff, one of the logistical issues is whether there’s just an AI section in which I document how that works for those who want and how to kill it all for those who don’t. But one of the many things that’s come up as I move to a 25H2/26H1/whatever edition is that these AI bits are either standalone apps (Copilot, Click to Do) or literally individual features in existing apps. And so I’ve kind of gone back and forth on how to cover it all efficiently.

Fundamentally what hasn’t changed is that AI requires me to provide information about both using and removing it. The book isn’t really a place for me to editorialize. But if behaviors are bad enough, it’s difficult to avoid. But things like Copilot, Click to Do, and Recall aren’t really at the level of bad behaviors in Edge or OneDrive. That is, they are mostly not enshittification. They are mostly just things some people seem not to like. We don’t hear from those who do like them. I bet that audience is bigger.

And, perhaps of greatest interest to me, even though you and many others joke about its absurdity, could you share with us your current understanding of whether or not enterprises are actually using it, and if so, to what end?

Not many, at least so far.

We can only evaluate the cherry-picked and often vague information that Microsoft provides. In the most recent quarterly report, we learned that there are 15 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats out of a total of 450 million paid Microsoft 365 seats. So a bit under 3.5 percent sell-through there, after two and a half years of availability. Daily users of Copilot is up 3X year-over-year (YOY), or 10X for Microsoft 365 Copilot, but both are subject to the laws of small numbers. And Microsoft claimed that “over 80 percent of the Fortune 500 have active agents built using Copilot Studio and Agent Builder,” though that could be one agent per company and I’m not sure what these things are being used for. 80 percent of 500 is 400, by the way. Also not a big number.

There is a lot of evidence that broad deployments of AI of any kind, not just Copilot, are generally unsuccessful. But I chalk a lot of that up to the hype cycle, meaning our expectations are unrealistic and so we’re disappointed when nothing works the way that these companies promised.

I just had an odd thought.

One of the many tragedies of Windows 8 is that it was a solid desktop update. This got lost then because of all the angst around the touch-first user interfaces, but the Windows 8 desktop upgrade was to Windows 7 just about as good as Windows 7 was to Windows Vista. There were big updates to Explorer, especially file copy performance. Task Manager got a huge update. It included BitLocker, BitLocker to Go, and Storage Spaces. And so on.

Anyway, we all hated Windows 8 because of Metro. Just as today we all hate AI because it’s being forced down our throats, and chaotically, and is over-hyped. But if you sit back and think about all the small changes through the apps, Windows and Microsoft 365, and the handful of AI-specific apps like Click to Do, there is a lot of good there. A lot of good. And so this is like Windows 8 in some ways. This one big bad thing and dozens of useful small changes that we overlook because we’re so focused on the bad.

My direct experience suggests that co-pilot is essentially a Windows “skew” of Chat GTP and that if Chat GTP prospers (very much an open question), so too may Copilot, particularly in the enterprise.

This is accurate. On the desktop, Copilot+ PC is an unofficial new SKU of Windows 11. With Microsoft 365, Microsoft 365 Copilot is an unofficial new SKU of that. In the former case, at least, you’re getting a better PC. In the latter case, you are paying more per user per month for features that I believe should simply be included in the thing you’re already paying for.

In short, does Thurrott.com still see Windows in its future, or are we witnessing the mid-stages of a complete pivot to “Consumer hardware and software site for those a bit older than The Verge audience”. Been with you from the start, but I still use Windows and quite like it, so not sure of how you see its relevance to YOU in the future.

When I started Thurrott.com, I specifically targeted personal computing, not Microsoft or Windows, so I could more easily/naturally cover the entire market. But I can’t escape my history as “the Windows guy” any more than I can escape my own personal preferences. And I still prefer Windows. For all the shit, for all the terribleness, I do still prefer it. And use it. And will continue doing so.

That said, I will also keep doing what I do, which is experimenting with any and all alternatives across the board. Replacing Windows with Linux, a Mac, a Chromebook, or whatever else isn’t seamless or non-trivial. But I’ve replaced a lot of Microsoft stack products and services with third-party alternatives over the years. So anything is possible. All I can do is remain open to whatever outcome and keep trying.

? Windows 11 on Arm Home to Pro

anoldamigauser asks:

Any issues to be aware of in upgrading Windows 11 Home to Pro on ARM devices? I bought an Omnibook 5 on sale but it came with Home. Mainly I need it for encrypting external drives with Bitlocker. Any chance Microsoft will include this feature in Home at some point? It seems fairly arbitrary to limit it to Pro and Enterprise.

No issues at all. Just get a valid Windows 10 Pro license, which can be had for as little as $10 online, and input that key into Settings and you’re good. I did this with my Surface Laptop 7.

I don’t see Microsoft adding full BitLocker to Go support to Home. This is arbitrary, but these things are always arbitrary. In an ideal world, we’d have just one Windows client SKU. But this is not an ideal world.

? Oaxaca

anoldamigauser asks:

On an unrelated note, any recommendations in Oaxaca? Planning a trip there this summer.

Assuming you mean the city and not the broader state, which includes a sea-side area we’ve not yet seen, yeah. It’s one of my very favorite places in Mexico, and I suspect we will visit at least once a year going forward.

It’s going to be hot. Very hot.

The airport is basically a bus stop. There is no Uber there, so the first thing to do when you walk out of security is to arrange a taxi, which will likely be a van with others going to various hotels/Airbnbs. There will be a line, most likely.

The Monte Albán ruins outside the city are incredible and shouldn’t be missed. It’s kind of a slow boil in that the initial impression is OK, but once you get in a bit, you see how much there is and realize this is a neat place.

We spend most of our time in the Centro area of the city, which is basically where the big cathedral, Catedral Metropolitana de Oaxaca Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, is. That whole area is gorgeous, but be sure to check out the three big markets (Mercado Benito Juárez, Mercado 20 de Noviembre, y Mercado de Artesanías) right to its south and the Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán and the Jardín Etnobotánico de Oaxaca (a botanical garden) to its south. The whole place is very walkable. The Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán is worth touring, it’s basically a museum.

Our favorite bar there is called Cantinita. It’s in Centro. El Espacio is cool too.

Favorite restaurants so far include Tr3s 3istro Restaurant & Oyster Bar (right on the park in Centro, just south of the cathedral), Restaurante Catedral, Crudo (a sushi/Mexican mashup, Michelin level), Los Danzantes (also expensive), Casa Oaxaca el Restaurante, La Olla/La Tizatería (I can’t recall which has the nice rooftop seating). Chocolate drinks are really big in Oaxaca. La Chocolateria is right in that cathedral/Tr3s 3istro area. I feel like I’m missing some, but there is a lot of street food all around and quirky places of all kinds.

? Comments about the comments

OldITPro2000 asks:

I like the new comment system, especially that it works great in dark mode! I’d like to know what the plans on for additional features coming to it that we had in OpenWeb, specifically around notifications. With OpenWeb there was the bell icon you could hit to see if someone had replied to you or left a reaction and you could be notified on the site, by email, or both. I see the new system now has a “Get notified about replies” toggle but it’s not clear if that’s configurable or where you would even go to configure it. Similarly I’m hoping the new system will allow for avatar editing which I could never get to work in OpenWeb.

Right now, we’re focused on getting the OpenWeb comments database moved over to this system so we can cut the cord on that. But we will look at the feedback and see what’s possible. And I am monitoring the day-to-day workflow to make sure nothing that I previously relied on is broken.

Anyway, we’ll get it there. But first things first.

?‍? Fool me once, you can’t get fooled again or something

OldITPro2000 asks:

Today there was reporting that Microsoft is listening to customer concerns about Windows and planning to make improvements this year. While I’m sure this will net some positive results, color me skeptical about systemic changes as I believe much of what we consider wrong with Windows today is more of a company culture issue than engineering challenges. How much of a change do you believe we’ll see from this?

I addressed this a bit above. But I’m of two minds here. Well, more than two.

On the hand, there’s been a big reorg in Windows and a lot of people have moved off or moved around to new positions.

I would like to believe that Pavan Davuluri will do the right things. But he is as beholden to the broader strategic needs of the parent company as much as his predecessors, and they did not end well. More to the point, yes, quality can and should improve. But we should not for one second believe that those changes will halt or pause the other work to integrate AI or whatever else it is we don’t like into the product.

Years of experience weigh heavily on us all. There have been these little moments of hope here and there, especially around security, but far too much neglect and enshittification. How can we trust this organization? Why should we? Talk is easy. Results matter. I will be watching closely, as I know many of you will be as well.

? The future’s so dark, I can’t wear shades

OldITPro2000 asks:

My hot take and wild predictions after earnings is that new Xbox and Surface hardware has an expiration date no later than 2030 with Windows Consumer moving into Intelligent Productivity and Xbox Games spun off into its own studio/publishing company. I can’t see why this ultimately won’t happen, unless there is too much desire to see laptops with the Windows logo on the lid…but I’d bet an Incase-like “Designed By Surface” deal could be made with Lenovo or Dell or whoever to continue it. Do you think this is way off and won’t happen at all or it will happen but earlier/later than 2030?

There have been questions about the future of Surface and Xbox since there have been Surface and Xbox. Of the two, I feel Surface is far more vulnerable. Microsoft never mentions Surface explicitly during its earnings reports each quarter, it’s the “Devices” part of “Windows OEM and Devices,” and a drag on the earnings from the former. It’s an unprofitable, poorly selling line of products, and the only thing saving it from a timely grave, I bet, is the NFL contract. My own hot take here is that the NFL thing will shift to Copilot in time and then Surface is toast.

The Designed by Surface idea is an interesting one. I don’t understand why we don’t see a Windows logo on other PCs right now, honestly. This seems like a reasonable requirement of PC makers. But given how poorly Signature PC went down with those companies, maybe it’s too much to ask them to give up even more differentiation.

Xbox is more complicated. Calls for Microsoft to spin off Xbox are recurring, but with the shift to a game publisher, it’s a business that can make sense and be profitable. The trick is killing the hardware. And Microsoft appears to be doing everything possible to make that happen. Xbox fans hate that, but once it happens, this business will be in good shape.

Whether it makes sense for Microsoft as part of the company or as a spin off is a debate. But right now, Xbox is the only decent consumer brand at the company and it’s had a tough couple of years. I feel like what this thing really is, is Activision Blizzard, which is a bit unfair since there is also Bethesda and all the other Microsoft Game properties. But this thing should just be called Xbox. And in my brain, it should be its own company, unburdened by Microsoft’s broader needs.