Chris_Kez

For everyone out there using a chat-based project collaboration tool (e.g. Teams, Slack, Hangouts Chat) can you tell me how long you're retaining those messages? Does it differ for 1:1 messages vs. groups/rooms? Our Legal team just announced we're moving to a 14 day retention policy, which seems way too short for a project collaboration tool. Any suggestions on what I might say to convince them to change their mind?

Their note said in part:

"The decision to implement a retention time limit on messaging was made

after a considerable amount of research and reflection, including a

comprehensive review of best practices at our peer companies. Further,

our reliance on messaging for storage creates challenges for knowledge

sharing, especially when associates leave the organization. Additionally,

while we have relatively few litigations overall, in recent years our costs

from processing email and other messaging for litigation or regulatory

reviews have been extraordinary due to the high volume of irrelevant

material that must be reviewed."

Evidently the Mobile Nations sites (e.g. Windows Central, Android Central, iMore, etc.) now auto-detect dark mode on your device and update the site accordingly. Can we please get that to happen here? Reading mode does help with the articles, but that doesn't help with the home page or with the forums. See announcement Tweet and example image:

https://twitter.com/derekakessler/status/1186720579971358721?s=20

Paul, you may want to update and re-post your Pocket Casts story. I received an email from the company late last night pointing me to a new blog post saying they have "decided to provide any user who previously purchased our Web version with lifetime access to Pocket Casts Plus. This includes the Mac and Windows apps as well. No renewal, no monthly charge, no questions asked. This means Desktop App purchasers will also gain access to all of the Pocket Casts Plus features on their mobile devices."

https://blog.pocketcasts.com/we-heard-you/

I know dark mode is in a staged rollout as part of version 4.0 released last week. I'm just wondering if any of you have actually gotten it yet. I know it will come eventually but I find it disappointing that with all the testing they do, Microsoft can't push out something like this more quickly once it is officially "released".

There's a big WW2 air show every June at the Reading Regional airport near you. I'd love to go some day and ride in one of this.

https://www.maam.org/maamwwii.html

Microsoft doesn't make it easy to renew Outlook Premium so I thought I'd share a link to the information I just used to renew myself. It is apparent at this point that Microsoft is hoping to make this a war of attrition rather than just formally pulling the plug on this service.

https://www.epinionated.net/how-to-renew-outlook-premium/

In Paul’s article this morning about another Google anti-trust violation in the EU, he notes Bloomberg reports saying that AdSense is becoming less and less relevant. It’s interesting that AdSense (where Google pays websites to host ads) is continuing to shrink while AdWords or Google Ads (where advertisers pay Google for search and display ads) continues to see big growth (I assume it is since Google’s overall ad revenue is growing).

So that means while Google is collecting more revenue from advertisers they are paying less revenue to sites that actually host ads. Presumably this reflects more and more ad dollars moving into search, and also puts into sharp relief competitors’ criticisms about Google essentially scraping content to serve up information directly to consumers (and bypass sites themselves).

For people deep into online advertising this is probably obvious stuff– and even I understood the relative difference in cost/value of search vs. display ads– but I hadn’t ever bothered to look at this distinction between AdSense and AdWords in the way this article has prompted me to. Of course, I could be misinterpreting the whole thing and perhaps there are other dimensions I’m ignorant of. If so, I’d be interested in hearing what others have to think.

Paul's article this morning about advertising in Windows and how dumb it can be (e.g. serving Office 365 ads to people who already subscribe) reminded me of something I've been wishing Microsoft would do: use some of that telemetry and their AI/ML capabilities in the service of helping me be more productive. How about analyzing the apps and services I use (and how I use them) to surface some really deep and helpful tips and tricks? Analyze what I'm already doing and then show me how I can do it better.

-"I see that you use a number of keyboard shortcuts in PowerPoint but always use the mouse to click through the toolbar for XYZ. Did you know you can use ____ keyboard shortcut to complete this action?" Or "I see you've used this Excel tool 100 times in the past month; I've gone ahead and pinned that to your toolbar for easier access. Would you like to keep it there or shall I delete it for you?" Or "I see you get the same question a lot, and you tend to answer it the same way. I've created a smart reply option for you." The list goes on and on. As a long-time user of Office there are probably hundreds of ways I could do things more efficiently but just haven't bothered to learn. It would be nice if Microsoft started doing some of this for me.

If I click through to a user's profile page, I land on their list of Posts. If I click on the Activity tab to see all of their recent comments it comes up empty. I have tested this on several user profiles including my own. In each case the list of Posts comes up fine, but the list of Activities is blank.

Yesterday's The Internet of Things Podcast with Stacey Higginbotham and Kevin Tofel features a discussion about Azure Sphere (1:57-6:43) as well as an interview with Microsoft's Galen Hunt (28:50-46:30). Highly recommended if you're interested in this space.

https://iotpodcast.com/2018/04/episode-160-a-deep-dive-into-microsofts-iot-security-platform/

In a comment this morning I was kind of tough on Apple when I heard that the Mac Pro would be a 2019 product, six years after the last (failed) design.

But reading this piece by Matthew Panzarino made me sit up. In it he reveals Apple’s new Pro Workflow Team, which has brought together Apple engineers with actual pro users to optimize the platform from top to bottom.

“And we’ve brought in some pretty incredible talent, really masters of their craft. And so they’re now sitting and building out workflows internally with real content and really looking for what are the bottlenecks. What are the pain points. How can we improve things. And then we take this information where we find it and we go into our architecture team and our performance architects and really drill down and figure out where is the bottleneck. Is it the OS, is it in the drivers, is it in the application, is it in the silicon, and then run it to ground to get it fixed.”

This is the kind of thing that Windows’ professional users (as well as ideally the Surface team’s target market) would love to hear in light of the recent doom and gloom around the “decapitation” and “demotion” (Paul’s words) of Windows.

This level of focus on executing against pro users’ needs should also give Panos and team a kick in the pants. They’ve been enjoying a recent narrative about how Microsoft (and Windows) was stealing some of the Apple mojo and turning heads within the desirable creative professional class, fueled in part by things like Surface Studio and Surface Book 2– but also a wide range of extremely powerful and flexible Windows machines.

Read the article and let is know what you think:

https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/05/apples-2019-imac-pro-will-be-shaped-by-workflows/

I realize there are very few people using Cortana on iOS or Android, but if there are any of you here can you let me know if location-based reminders are working? This always worked well for me on Android, but since switching to iOS a few months ago I have not had any success with location-based reminders using the Cortana app. I've logged this feedback with Microsoft. I have all of the appropriate location permissions granted, and I have the latest versions of iOS and the app.

I wanted to share a short but interesting post– with data– about input lag, latency and complexity. There’s something here for both young and old users but the tl;dr is that if you seem to recall computers of yore feeling snappier, you’re not crazy– they probably were! It’s the same story for iOS vs, Android.

Excerpted from the original post: “Fancy gaming rigs with unusually high refresh-rate displays are almost competitive with machines from the late 70s and early 80s, but “normal” modern computers can’t compete with thirty to forty year old machines.”

I encourage folks to read the original article and take a look at the latency tables for various devices. https://danluu.com/input-lag/

There's been talk of lower priced memberships and per-article pricing, both of which are ways to potentially increase membership while still doing so profitably and without undercutting current subscribers.

But there is another way to grow the bottom line, and that is by offering even more expensive tiers. It certainly shouldn't be the focus, but Thurrott.com may be leaving money on the table by not at least offering a higher tier. If you look at Kickstarter, Patreon and other subscription-based sites there are often opportunities for people to contribute at a level above the baseline value proposition for different perks. I bet there are readers out there who would pay $100/year, or make a special one-time payment for something special.

Obviously this could devolve into farce (e.g. tandem bike ride with Paul; drop Brad in a dunk tank; have the guys leave you a happy birthday message), but I think the basic premise of giving people a chance to be super-contributors isn't entirely untenable-- especially when you're talking about a niche audience that also likely contains some very passionate fans.

Don't get me wrong; I fully embraced the decision to widen the scope of coverage versus the WinSupersite days. I was fine when we started getting articles about iOS and Android; Microsoft makes a lot of apps for those platforms after all. I was okay with the iPhone reviews-- it is the standard-bearer for mobile devices. I nodded along happily as the Android device reviews started rolling in; okay, lots of former WP users are migrating to Android right alongside Microsoft, and it is the dominant personal computing platform. I even started digging into some of the IOT and smart-speaker coverage-- I mean, ambient computing and voice control are the next wave am I right? I remain a bit skeptical about AR/VR, but I even dip into those; hey, all the big players are in there mixing it up this year, and its a big focus for Windows.

And then... I saw Mehedi's tweet this afternoon about the first Snapchat article on Thurrott.com. [record scratch] Sure enough there it was. I didn't click on it. I won't even open it just to comment. I don't want to give it the page view. No, this is where I say "enough". A man has to draw the line somewhere, and for me Snapchat is it.

Thurrott Team, I want you to look at your collective self in the mirror and say out loud "I write about Snapchat." I can't imagine that feels good. What's next, E-Sports? YouTube celebrity profiles? Animoji karaoke? Where does it end? Please, if nothing else think of the children. Thoughts and prayers.