#785: Enshittification (Part II) – snapping & mapping fails

Posted on February 4, 2026 (Updated February 10, 2026) by ewand

Around a year ago, old-school Tip of the Week had a “2025 Enshittification: part 1” post which looked at how online services routinely drop features that people like because it suits the provider to not sustain them. It’s high time to revisit the topic, specifically looking at changes being made to online mapping services and one popular document scanning app.

In truth, if you’re going to rely on a free service, be ready to expect the provider to muck it up for you. If you like to look at your old house on Google Street View, best head over there now and screengrab it as some day they may decide to stop storing previous captures or something.

It feels like it’s only a matter of time before Amazon starts making Alexa a paid-for service, or subsidises free use for telling you the weather or play the radio by playing “would you like to buy a new Carlos Fandango umbrella to protect you from tomorrow’s rain?” inline ads.

Microsoft Shutters Lens

A bit niche, maybe, but Microsoft has been offering a scanning app for smartphones for years. Originally called Office Lens and available for Windows Phone since 2014, later rebranded (of course) Microsoft Lens and even gaining “PDF Scanner” to tell you what it’s primarily for. It was previously discussed in old ToW #682. There used to be a PC app as well as iOS and Android ones, but that has gone already.

Despite nearly 1M ratings of average 4.8 and over 50M downloads on Android, its days are numbered. Rather than keep Lens alive, Redmond has decided to build some of its functionality into other apps, like OneDrive and/or OneNote. Sadly, neither is as simple, fast or fully-featured as Lens is/was. RIP.

Of course, there are plenty of other alternative scanning apps, including the built-in one for Android users, where you just point the camera at something which looks like a document and it’ll give you a shortcut to Google’s own scanning software which can detect page edges, bundle multiple scans into a PDF and so on. Since the scan feature is part of the Files app, you can go there and start a scan directly too.

At least Lens had a fulfilling life in the sun, unlike Viva Goals, a product of acquisition which likely cost Microsoft $200M+, and was deep-sixed after only 2 years.

Google “Privacy” copout

How many times have you seen a statement like “for your safety and security”, and realized that its primary goal is actually to make somebody else’s life easier?

Google had a neat feature, if you chose to turn it on, where Maps on your phone would keep a record of where you’ve been and upload to your Google account, so you could view your travels within Google Maps on your computer. Called Timeline, it was briefly covered in previous ToWs including the trend for apps to be replacing websites and not always to the users’ benefit.

Timeline was discontinued so you could no longer go to Maps and see where you’d been in the past. It’s tantalizingly still there in the menu today, but all it does is tell you to use the mobile app and offer more help on the activity controls.

The reason? For privacy’s sake, Google was no longer going to store all that info on its servers, rather the tracking data would only live exclusively on your primary phone. Sounds fine, unless you lose the phone and don’t have it backed up, or some other calamity occurs and deletes all the data.

Is this to protect the user? Or is it to protect Google from liability in case its service was somehow compromised, and the whereabouts of millions of people over time had been made available?

The DIY Alternative

If you like the ability to track where you’ve been, whether that’s to make your mileage claims easier or just to provide yourself an alibi when accused of being somewhere else, there are alternatives to Google Maps / Timeline though none are quite so easy to use. Self-hosting – as in running a server on your own network rather than relying on a cloud provider who might vanish tomorrow and/or start monetizing your data – is a favoured option for tin-hat wearers and honest folk concerned with privacy and/or who prefer to make their own lives difficult.

The leading alternative to Timeline is probably an open source project called Dawarich, available either as a subscription cloud service or software you can run on your own. If you have a Synology NAS device with enough oomph to run Docker, there’s an easy to follow* guide, How to Install Dawarich on Your Synology NAS.

*easy to follow may be relative to your exposure to config files, IP address mapping etc

Dawarich lets you import location history from Google Maps or you can have apps on your phone regularly tracking and reporting your location history directly to your Dawarich server.

Is Bing Maps really a Zombie?

Sticking on the theme of making mapping stuff worse, Microsoft has been busy “evolving” Bing Maps.

Launched as “Virtual Earth” over 20 years ago, it morphed into numerously named Windows Live, MSN and eventually Bing Maps for consumers as an alternative to Google Earth and Google Maps, and also aimed at enterprises in the hope that they would build mapping services into other applications and pay for the privilege. There had been a previous set of software and services called MapPoint dating back to the Y2K, now superseded.

There were some cool features that differentiated Bing from Google when it came to maps – things like high-resolution “Birds Eye” images taken from spotter ‘planes…

… to free use (for UK users) of the Government’s Ordnance Survey mapping data. At one point, Bing even licensed the old A-Z maps for London, as “London Street Maps”.

Bing also offered drive-by imagery akin to Google Street View called Streetside. It was never quite as good as Google’s service and it took years to become available internationally, but there were places where it would have more up-to-date pictures compared to Google’s own Street View pictures and data.

As you can see from the view above, the images were taken by cars operated by veteran satnav provider, TomTom. Similarly, the Ordnance Survey maps and Birds Eye images were licensed from other 3rd parties.

Unfortunately, when a licensing agreement exists then it also means at some point, one or both parties might decide to not continue it. Such has happened with Bing Maps, the consumer offering – it has dropped pretty much everything of interest beyond basic map and satellite views. A 3D option does offer some cartoonish generated models of some areas, though it’s a long way from being universal.

Microsoft also had a Maps app for Windows, which was a wrapper for the Bing Maps service but could also deal with offline data. Presumably due to lack of use, the Maps app has now been taken out behind the bike shed and given a good knobbling:

On the plus side, one useful feature which wasn’t present previously, the latest Bing Maps will show the exact address (including Post Code or Zip Code) of any point you right-click on, also displaying the lat/long coordinates and even the height above sea level.

It was announced that Microsoft is shutting down Bing Maps for Enterprise and migrating everything at the back end to using Azure Maps, which has a different set of functionality primarily aimed at developers looking at embedding maps into other sites and overlaying other data onto a map. It’s easy to wonder at what point Redmond will pull the plug from Bing Maps altogether.

Accessing Missing data from Bing

Sadly, there’s nowhere else providing the TomTom Streetside views, nor the Birds Eye images, other than going to Google Maps and seeing what they have.

If you miss the OS Maps feature from Bing Maps, there are few alternatives – the best is probably OSMaps.com, which still offers (for a subscription) what they call topographical maps (i.e. OS LandRanger or Explorer). It’s a little clunky but has a reasonable mobile app too, so you can plan trips and take them offline with you.

#778: Out of the box thinking IRL

Posted on September 10, 2025 (Updated February 10, 2026) by ewand

Cats love boxes, especially ones that are a little too small for them

Firstly – this is not “Tip of the Week”, it’s “Not Tip of the Week” since it isn’t Weekly any more. I have picked up from the last ever Tip of the Week and decided to carry on with its numbering. The goal is to do something occasionally, maybe monthly, and it will probably be longer form.

Analogies abound for scenarios where someone has a solution to a problem that was not necessarily foreseen because they looked at it from a different perspective.

A great one was coined by ex-colleague Darren Strange, when thinking about how smart people often approach a set of targets. As well as setting the goals, the authorities will lay down a set of rules by which they expect everyone to operate. Sometimes, playing fair and within the technicalities of the rules can yield bountiful results. Darren likened these clever people to the velociraptors in Jurassic Park – systematically attacking the electric fences designed to contain them, in order to find and exploit any weaknesses.

We should celebrate the velociraptors in our lives and find ways to think like they do. Without the killing and eating people bit. Obviously.

Making the <…> go faster

Some of the best examples of genuine innovating thinking is when coaches look to improve performance by focussing on making the environment better, or engineers are given a set of regulations and they come up with ways to “beat” the rules by using a new approach.

It could be a fanatical focus on the end goal (see Ben Hunt Davis’ “Will it Make the Boat Go Faster?”), or Dave Brailsford’s legendary “marginal gains” approach where a 1% improvement in every aspect compounds to make giant leaps in results. In some sports, innovators or engineers might concentrate on shaving off every gram of weight, such as was famously done in cycling by the legendary Eddy “The Cannibal” Merckx milling and drilling bike components to lighten them…

*Merckx was famed for his weight-saving tricks, but he wasn’t alone – look at the brake levers and calipers of his competitor in white…*

Motor racing is similarly obsessed with weight and performance, where millions of dollars could be spent chasing a fraction of a second per lap speed improvement.

The Professor

Talking of things automotive, one legendary velociraptor is celebrating 60 years in the industry this year: Professor Gordon Murray CBE. He was celebrated at Goodwood FoS and has appeared in various magazine specials. If you haven’t come across the Prof’s work, it tells a story of someone not like most of us.

Arguably most famous for one of the most impressive cars ever made, explicitly designed NOT to be a racing car yet almost forced by their customers to develop it for competition… and when they did, it won the hardest race in the world (The 24 hours of Le Mans) at its first attempt: the McLaren F1.

The Greatest Car … in the World

Top Gear’s Tiffany Dell reviewed it at length in 1992, and again 10 years later. Everyone, it seems, loved it.

Well-known owners included Rowan Atkinson, who famously pranged his car leading to the largest ever car insurance claim in the UK at the time (costing nearly £1M). A certain Mr Musk got his in 1999 and binned it (while uninsured) a year later, showing off to Peter Thiel (apparently, he said “Watch this!” and then went straight to the scene of the accident).

You might think famous people have a bit of a habit of crashing F1s – Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason, custodian of the very first F1 GTR racing car came a cropper somewhat publicly in a track parade at Goodwood.

The F1 was unique and ground-breaking in so many ways, largely because Murray assumed the brief of making the best car in the world, bar none, whatever it cost. The driver sat in the middle because that was better. It was made of motorsport-grade materials so despite developing incredible amounts of power (627hp), it weighed not much more than a ton and was the fastest road car in the world for decades. Even the engine bay was lined in gold leaf because it was better at heat management.

At the time, the F1 was rare and arguably a commercial flop – it was £540,000 +tax when new, which in 1992 was a lot. That’s about £1.2M in today’s money, but one of the 64 road cars that were made would probably cost you £15M to buy today, if not more.

The Other F1

Gordon had cut his teeth in the Formula 1 industry, becoming the chief designer at the underdog Brabham team at only 26, promoted by its then new owner, Bernie Ecclestone.

Gordon went on to great things with Brabham and later onto McLaren, where his cars won ¾ of the races they entered. Bored with achieving everything, he went on to develop the F1 road car and has had some other notable successes more recently.

The Pit Stop

But one of Murray’s innovations from a decade before the F1 went on to have a seismic effect on the whole of Formula 1, and it was largely because he thought of something that hadn’t occurred to anyone else: using pit stops strategically rather than when something went wrong.

In recent years up to that point, when a car stopped in the pits it was because of a puncture or some other problem, which could take minutes to fix. Wheels were attached with nuts and wrenches, and coming into the pits was a surefire way of losing the race.

Some engines, like the new BMW turbo unit that Brabham was using in 1982, were especially thirsty and comparatively heavy, compounded by needing to carry the whole fuel load from the start. At that point, if cars needed fuelling during qualifying or testing it was slow and alarmingly basic – literally pouring fuel in from “milk churns”.

From the Dutch National Archives – http://hdl.handle.net/10648/ad1a9284-d0b4-102d-bcf8-003048976d84

During the 1982 season, Murray’s team came up with an array of kit that nobody else had thought of – pressurised refuelling rigs made from beer barrels that could pump a whole family car quantity of fuel into a racing car in a few seconds. Wheel fixings and compressed air guns that could remove and replace a wheel in a fraction of the time it would have taken with spanners and brute force.

As well as being weighed down at the start of a race with a full tank of fuel, the cars only used one set of tyres during the race. Murray calculated that a car with less fuel (ergo, less weight) would be faster from the outset and its tyres would take less punishment. Also, by the time everyone else was lightened through having burned most of their fuel towards the end of the race, their tyres were worn out.

If the Brabham could pit half or even two-thirds of the way through the race and get nice new boots, they would be 2 or 3 seconds a lap quicker than everyone else. Doing the numbers meant that even if they lost 30 or 40 seconds bringing the car into the pits to add fuel and change wheels, they would make the time up by being faster all the rest of the time.

One problem was that when new tyres and wheels were fitted during the race, they would be stone cold and would take a few laps to get up to temperature and produce enough grip. The solution was to design plywood-carcassed, gas-fired “warming cupboards” that could keep a set of tyres nice and toasty.

The team tried it (not very successfully) from halfway through the 1982 season; their car was so unreliable that it barely ever made it far enough into the race to need a strategic stop.

Murray expected that everyone else would do the sums and turn up with the same technique the following year, but they didn’t. Not only that, but he designed the 1983 car specifically with refuelling and pit stops in mind (for instance, it had a smaller fuel tank) and with BMW fixing the engine reliability issues, they were much more competitive. Nelson Piquet went on to win the driver’s championship with Brabham, and the team came third in the constructors’.

Red Bull TV produced a great documentary in 2016 charting the development of the pit stop, and celebrating the modern efforts to reduce the time taken to replace all 4 wheels on a modern car – McLaren currently holding the record at a scarcely believable 1.80s.

Watch on Red Bull TV’s website – The History of the Pit Stop | How it came to F1. Red Bull TV also has apps for various Smart TVs; there’s also an unauthorised rip of it on YouTube, along with expanded interviews with Gordon Murray on the subject.

Read the rulebook, rewrite the rules

This out of the box thinking exemplified by Gordon Murray came because (he said) he read the rules cover to cover and inside out. He saw what the constraints were in his field of operation, and figured out how to do things that nobody else had thought of. Instead of looking at the rules as defining what he could do, he adopted the approach of finding things (within reason) that the rules did not say he couldn’t (see also the earlier Brabham “Fan Car”).

Even though the F1 authorities banned refuelling the following year, when they reintroduced it – in a more controlled, regulated fashion – in 1994, then the fuel and tyre strategy of every team became an intrinsic part of their race plans. Pit stop strategies can still decide race wins today (see Max Verstappen somewhat controversially winning his first drivers title in 2021, since he was on fresh tyres and his rival Lewis Hamilton was not).

The great velociraptor Gordon Murray and his team revolutionised the sport by thinking like nobody else.

*Arnage (yes, that’s really his name, and sister Mulsanne was sitting behind) proving that cats don’t think outside the box*

#70: Two Score and Ten years

Posted on April 5, 2025 (Updated April 5, 2025) by ewand

50 years ago to this very day, a small company called Micro-Soft was formed. Over the last half-century it has grown unbelievably, touched many lives and at varying times has had legions of fans and detractors alike.

There has been a lot of coverage on Microsoft’s own social channels and on their special website, Cheers to 50 years – Microsoft Unlocked, which covers a lot of ground and tells some interesting tales. Other takes include last year’s Wired special, slightly less curated by corp PR, Microsoft at 50: An AI Giant. A Kinder Culture. And Still Hellbent on Domination.

Stories often help to define a corporate culture but also to explain it to outsiders too. Sometimes, they feature as a backdrop to something else entirely. Let’s look at one in particular, the rocket that took Microsoft into orbit: the original PC.

Project Chess came to town

Much has been written about IBM deciding it wanted a piece of the burgeoning early 1980s home/small office computer market, as defined by popular machines like the Trash 80 or the Apple II. Big Blue was worried that it might miss the bandwagon and at the same time was concerned that corporate customers could put a highly spec-ed Apple II on their desk and run financial analysis from there, instead of relying on the IBM Big Iron in the Data Processing dept. Finance Directors and accountants could get instant answers for a few $K with VisiCalc on their Apple II, instead of waiting for the wonks in DP to turn reports around in 24hrs.

An Apple II with 48K of RAM had a list price of over $2.5K (something like $12K in today’s money), but the cheapest IBM computer at the time was more than five times as much. When IBM brass gave the go-ahead for what was to be “Project Chess” – to build an IBM personal computer – one stipulation was that it had to be ready in 12 months, with a prototype to be produced in only 1 month, with a target cost of $1,500.

This compressed timeline, and the need to keep costs low, meant usual IBM practices of building everything in-house had to go. As much componentry as possible was sourced off-the-shelf – controllers, disk drives, etc – and when it came to choosing software, they beat a path to Bill Gates’ door for Microsoft BASIC. At the time, every computer needed a programming language, and that’s what Microsoft did – developer tools for hobbyists, essentially.

So the Suits came to Redmond, and licensed Basic (and other languages). They happened to also ask if Bill & co could point them in the direction of a suitable operating system. The popular CP/M was identified as a possible – in fact, Microsoft made a bit of hardware called SoftCard that could run CP/M on Apple II machines, so compatible apps were also available to Apple users. CP/M was produced by a company called Digital Research, which was rumoured might have merged with Microsoft at one point (and was later acquired by Novell).

That NDA

When IBM’s reps went the following day to visit Digital Research in California, the boss – Gary Kildall – was not around (there are various stories as to why, but they’re not important right now). IBM’s team slapped their standard and very one-sided Non-Disclosure Agreement on the table, but DR’s lawyer and COO wouldn’t sign it; it could be summarised as, “Don’t tell us anything confidential; if you do tell us anything and we act on it, you can’t sue us. If we tell you anything confidential and you act on any of it, we’ll sue you”.

After a protracted impasse with DR, IBM went back to Microsoft and asked Bill to sort out the operating system problem; Bill & Paul Allen had already worked with a guy from another small company in Seattle, to do the prototype of the CP/M SoftCard and as luck would have it, partly because Digital Research was dragging its feet on 16-bit CP/M, he had built a 16-bit OS for Intel chips. Microsoft bought it, hired its author, and then built PC-DOS and later MS-DOS for the IBM PC, which went on to be wildly successful.

For more detail on the IBM side of things, see this good summary from PCMag – Project Chess: The Story Behind the Original IBM PC.

IBM’s missteps opened the door

IBM’s management believed that their economy of scale meant that even if other companies tried to build a “PC”, they could never do it cheaply enough to be a threat. Over the next few years, other pioneers managed to consolidate the number of chips and other parts required, but IBM’s proprietary BIOS chip, whose software controlled how the hardware worked together, was the key to true compatibility. Even if you built an exact copy of the PC hardware, it wouldn’t run DOS or any of the other applications with 100% success, unless the BIOS looked and behaved the same as IBM’s.

A company called Phoenix first reverse-engineered the IBM BIOS and started selling their “compatible” version, allowing for companies like Compaq and Dell to spring up, building 100% compatible machines which were cheaper than Big Blue’s, and in time got the jump by adopting newer and faster hardware (like 386 processors) before IBM did. The genie was now well out of the bottle, and despite their attempts to re-assert control with the PS/2 system and OS/2 software, IBM’s grip on the massively growing ecosystem had slipped. 20 years ago, they bailed out of the PC business they had invented, selling up to Lenovo.

The best deal in corporate history…

When IBM agreed to buy the operating system for that first Personal Computer 5150 – “PC Disk Operating System”, aka PC-DOS, the initial offer was to pay Microsoft to develop it but to give IBM all the rights. Bill pushed back and said Microsoft wanted to have the rights to sell a version – MS-DOS – to other companies too.

IBM was in such a hurry to do the deal – and thinking that nobody could build a cheaper, compatible machine anyway – agreed to let Microsoft have rights on MS-DOS.

Without this decision, it’s almost certain that the PC industry would not exist. There would be no Windows; maybe OS/2 would have been the GUI on the high-end, only-available-from-IBM PC (such as the strategy was behind the PS/2). Apple might have dominated with the completely proprietary Macintosh, and would that have evolved as much without the competition from hundreds of PC vendors? Would something else have come along instead?

The availability of a Phoenix BIOS and MS-DOS meant anyone could build a compatible and competitive machine. By the mid-1990s, over 200M PCs had been sold, though IBM had only around 8% of that market (Compaq overtaking it to be the largest single PC vendor in 1994).

Thanks to that one business decision made by IBM, Bill Gates & co, a multi-trillion dollar industry grew up.

Microsoft revenues from 1984 – 1999

#26: Further Outlook Calendar Fun

Posted on May 10, 2024 by ewand

Following on from last week’s tip on New Outlook and its addition of the “In-person” switch to designate a meeting as taking place in actual 3D, here’s a quick look back at another calendary thing that’s been in Exchange and Outlook since the year dot – the meeting status.

When you create an entry in your calendar, you can set whether it shows you as busy or not – the original status choices being free/tentative/busy/OOF. Microsoft added the new “Working elsewhere” more than a decade ago, though it never really took off. It wasn’t helped by the lack of support on some clients, and an initial gnarly bug in Exchange 2013 which meant Working Elsewhere appointments sometimes disappeared. It does work pretty well now, though – Think of it like a soft Out of Office which doesn’t get in the way of people booking time with you, but it does signify that you’re not physically in the office. That’s a lot more likely these days than it was 11 years ago.

Showing your actual availability is a bit more nuanced than it was when Outlook was launched in 1997; you might be technically Out of Office but still able to be contacted in some ways. You could set a status message in Teams to add context to where you are or how available you might be.

Of course, making sure other people can see your calendar (at least sharing the high level view of where you are and what you’re doing) will help, and do tell people to use the scheduling assistant in Outlook when trying to book meetings with you. Maybe also set your Work Hours to make it clear if you habitually work at different times to your colleagues, take Friday afternoons off etc.

If you have a group of people who work closely together, you could try using a variety of other tools to track whereabouts and make it easier to meet – check out TeamLink, a free Power App that runs inside of Teams, or perhaps the supposedly forthcoming feature set formerly introduced as Microsoft Places.

Finally, there are two stages of Out of Office – there’s the automatic message you might set to respond to emails to say you’re away; the best OOF messages might just apologize that you’re gone so will probably never read these emails. Alternatively, you could set the status of your appointment to show OOF and then people who can see your calendar will know you’re just gone for a while, such as away for the afternoon, but you haven’t gone to the extent of setting up an auto-response.

Both of these can also help with voice messaging, either external telephone calls if you’re using Teams Phone or just “calls” directly into Teams from colleagues or other external contacts. Look in Teams settings, and you can set up how you want to handle calls that go unanswered. You can record your own greeting, or just type in a message and have the system say that to the caller.

Note the granularity where you could have a message played only during times when your calendar is showing Out of Office.

#18: Linking Phones and PCs

Posted on March 15, 2024 by ewand

If you’re using a PC with Windows 10 or 11 and you have a smartphone, it’s worth exploring the Microsoft Phone Link app which lets you interact with the handset from your computer.

Microsoft has made several attempts to link phones and PCs, from the Continuum feature at the twilight of Windows Phone’s life (before it was knifed) to a variety of bespoke apps for Samsung devices and ultimately “Your Phone”. The latter has now evolved and expanded to be “Phone Link”. The array of features varies slightly depending on what OS your phone is using, and which manufacturer it originates from.

The app is likely pre-installed on Windows; make sure it’s up to date. It then needs to pair with a companion app called Link to Windows on your phone – either Android or iOS. For step-by-step instructions on how to set it up, see Sync Your Smartphone to Your Windows Computer.

For Android users, arguably the most compelling quick win is being able to easily access Photos without requiring them to have synced to Google Photos or OneDrive first – while the phone is connected to the PC either via Bluetooth or through the same WiFi network, you can interact with the last 2,000 photos on the device’s camera roll, so copying and pasting them into other apps is a snap.

iPhone users will have to use other means to get their hands on pics, at least for now.

The Phone Link app allows notifications on the device to be seen and managed on PC, which sounds more useful than it really is. It can also set the PC up to use the phone to make and receive calls (think of it like the PC is a smart Bluetooth headset), though some handsets might be a bit flaky. It seems even new phones don’t always provide the right level of support for some features to work well, such as Google nobbling the ability to output to an external display over the USB-C port on Pixel phones (a behaviour which will be fixed, at some point).

Some Android devices will allow you to display and control phone apps on the PC itself (or even mirror the whole phone screen) – which can be very useful, especially if you’re having to input a reasonable amount of text. It’s pretty much always going to be quicker to type on a keyboard than tap on a screen. Other options do abound, though, depending on the apps you use – there’s a native WhatsApp client for the PC, for example, so you could use that rather than relying on Phone Link.

You can use the PC to work with text messages on the phone, even supporting iMessage for Apple devices. Arguably the handiest part is when you get a text message as part of a multi-factor authentication sequence like logging into a bank account. The notification which Phone Link displays includes a “copy” shortcut so you can easily grab the code and paste it into the waiting logon page… even if the phone is on the other side of the room.

#12: Should I pay the (co)Pilot?

Posted on February 2, 2024 by ewand

Microsoft has a habit of over-pivoting to use the same terminology for lots of different things, sometimes even giving the same name to related but quite specifically different things. Think OneDrive / OneDrive for Business, OneNote / OneNote for Windows 10, Skype / Skype for Business, Teams and Teams (work account) etcetera. At times in the past, everything was seemingly appended with “.NET”, or given a name starting “Windows…” “Live…” or “One…” (or all three).

Here’s the Copilot

With all the hoo-hah in recent months about “Copilot”, it can be confusing to pin down exactly what it is – a search engine, chatbot, a tool to write code, or something that will draw pictures while summarizing your email?

There are whole standalone experiences like the Bing search which was originally Chat but has now been renamed Copilot …

… and the Edge browser integrated Copilot panel, activated by the icon in the top right. Preview versions of Windows have a Copilot button on the taskbar with the ability to tweak things inside the operating system. New PCs will soon have a Copilot button on their keyboard.

There are other “Copilot” things coming out all the time. Want some help in writing a Power Automate cloud flow to integrate stuff between systems? If you’re a salesperson, Copilot in Dynamics Sales lessens the drudgery of keeping CRM up to date. Or if you’re a developer, Github can help you write better code, more quickly. Some are free and some need you to subscribe to.

It’s very likely that these things come from different sets of technologies under the hood, though Microsoft is increasingly talking about there being a “Copilot platform” behind each of these experiences. Things are certainly moving quickly – as BizApps MVP Steve Mordue commented in his chat with Charles Lamanna. Expect the effect of AI on regular applications to move from being an addon or a side panel, to fundamentally changing the apps we use – why build a BI dashboard if you can just ask the questions you need or even have the information suggested to you?

Copilot Pro and Copilot in M365

The recently-launched Copilot for Microsoft 365 integrates priority access to some of the public web services (akin to ChatGPT Plus), and adds in-app integration with Microsoft 365 and Office applications, promising also to be able to put the back end magic to work across your own organization’s data too. It’s been in preview for a while, for certain customers – initially it was invite-only for some of the biggest (who still had to pay for it) but recently has been extended to anyone with a Microsoft 365 Business subscription.

Somewhat confusingly, Microsoft at the same time announced “Copilot Pro”, which is really for individuals and integrates with Microsoft 365 personal or family subscriptions, for a monthly fee of $20 (or £19 – forex, huh… though the USD amount doesn’t include tax whereas the GBP one does).

If you’re not a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscriber you won’t see a lot of the value which Copilot Pro adds, on top of the GPT-4 Turbo and DALL-E 3 usage. If you are already using a M365 home subscription, then for your £19/month you’ll see Copilot functionality showing up in the desktop and web versions of the Office apps. (NB – that’s £19 per user; note that the £8/month you might pay for M365 family gets you up to 6 people… they’d each need to be enrolled into Copilot Pro if you wanted all to get the benefit, so it could work out quite expensive).

Select a block of text or a page in OneNote and you can summarize it or build a To-Do list on what actions it might contain. Word shows a little Copilot icon on the left of the text editing block, and will offer to draft some text or rewrite what’s already there.

Excel’s analytical Copilot is still in preview (and works on files already saved in OneDrive/Sharepoint only), while PowerPoint offers some frankly amazing abilities to generate fluff from thin air, or jazz up the dreary text-laden slides you might already have.

Buying and deploying Copilot for Microsoft 365 business users – available to small business users on Business Standard or Premium, or Enterprise users who have E3 or E5 licenses – is something an organizational admin would need to control, so if you’re an end user then you’ll need to wait until they decide you’re worth it.

The business version (priced at £30 per month, inc VAT) gives you everything that Copilot Pro does, and also access to your own organization’s date, and, integration with Teams, where Copilot can prepare summaries of meetings you have, or offer a chatbot that can find other information in different sources.

Should I buy it?

If you’re an Office apps user and have a M365 family or personal subscription, then it’s worth taking a look at Copilot Pro – the first monthly subscription of £19/$20 will give you a chance to have a proper play with Copilot functionality, and then decide to keep it going or cancel the subscription and it’ll expire at the end of the month. It might even give you an idea – as an end user – what Copilot for M365 could give you, and thus petition the powers that be to enable it for your M365 org.

One downside of the M365 business Copilot licensing model is that, although it works out at $30/£30 per month (give or take), it’s an annual commitment which must be paid up front. So if you’re looking to kick the tyres, try the $20/£19 a month Pro first.

#9: Go for a walk

Posted on January 12, 2024 (Updated January 15, 2024) by ewand

Hello, ToW readers! It’s been a few couple of months now since the recent yet erstwhile host of “Tip of the Week” was acquired and their new owner has thus far not completed the repurposing of their content, and therefore not given me confidence in writing any more for them, for now. In the meantime, I’ll continue to dribble this stuff onto LinkedIn each Friday (as Tip o’ the Week always was, in the days when it was a Microsoft internal email), following from the restarted numbering system as at the time it changed from Tip o’ to Tip of.

I do hope you enjoy. Yay.

Now that we’re finally in the grip of the New Year, some NY resolutions might have been sacrificed already; eating less, moving more, not drinking too much and the like. If you’re still keen, maybe each weekend, why not get out into the great beyond and go for a walk?

Step 1 will be to decide where you’re going to walk to. Technology provides lots of help in that regard – from local website guides offering “10 great winter walks to take in your area” type articles (typically stuffed with clickbait and stupid advertising, though), to mobile apps and web sites like MapMyWalk, AllTrails and Visorando. Community enthusiasts might post their favourite routes on these and other fora, possibly with reviews to tell you how muddy they are / how many angry bulls you might encounter etc.

Screenshot 2024-01-12 134756 If you like the good old method of staring at a map and making up your own way, there are all the usual mapping tools available too. Google Maps clearly has a market share leadership position, and offers handy offline capabilities and walking directions, which sometimes include off-road footpaths as well. Not bad if you’re mostly in a built-up area, but once you’re in the sticks, you might be better off with more tailored alternatives. If you’re walking in London, check out Footways – a site showing a curated set of suggested “quiet” routes from A to B.

Apple pushes their alternative mapping software for Fruity device users, however if you follow a link to an Apple Maps location – eg https://maps.apple.com/?q=47.641944,-122.127222&t=k – and you’re not on an Apple device, it will send you to Google Maps instead. DuckDuckGo lets you view the map using another browser – eg https://duckduckgo.com/?q=47.641944%2C-122.127222&iaxm=maps – in case you feel like you’re missing out. [You’re not, btw]

If you’re planning a walk in the UK countryside, you’d do well to look at Ordnance Survey, a government funded department which publishes maps at varying scale and with key attributes highlighted. The organization dates back to the 18th century, set up to accurately map England in order to counter military incursions from troublesome neighbours. They still produce not-insignificantly-priced paper maps, however pinch-to-zoom is somewhat problematic on such offline media, so a mobile subscription based app with route planning, offline guidance and the like might be more fitting (and they have a 30% offer on annual subscriptions right now).

If you’re not inclined to subscribe, there is one alternative that’s useful when planning walks, even if you need to print the map out (or screen grab it to save the image to your phone): use Bing Maps.

It’s easy to forget about Bing Maps (jump to bingmaps.com in a browser to get there quickly) since there’s no workable mobile solution, so most people will rely on the other main platforms. If you’re in the UK, however (and you set United Kingdom as your region in the hamburger menu on the top right) then you’ll be able to access Ordnance Survey mapping for free.

Look at the “Style” icon near the top right and you can choose road maps, satellite view and more, including Ordnance Survey. If you don’t see that option, you will need to play some more with your location settings. Zoom in or out until you get the right level, and you’ll see Explorer (slightly more detailed) and Landranger map views, showing key attractions with public footpaths marked.

It’s brilliant. Right-click the map to use the measuring tool to draw your walk and calculate the distance. Screen-grab (WindowsKey+S) the section you want, and you could highlight your route from within the Snipping Tool before printing it out, nice and big and easy to read.

688 – This IS the End

Posted on June 30, 2023 by ewand

The first Tip o’ the Week was sent on Friday 4^th December 2009, starting life in response to the Microsoft annual employee survey, where team members could give feedback on how things are going. One common complaint was that tools they had to use – internal, mostly – were less than ideal, so a local task force was formed to decide on how best practices could be shared amongst a wider group of 50 or so people. “Why not a weekly newsletter?”

Quickly, ToW evolved into sharing productivity tips and news about (Microsoft, mainly) technology. Membership to the newsletter spread organically until thousands of people received it every week. The “Best Practice Tip o’ the Week” lost the “Best…” bit by #87, and at #100 became part of an internal Microsoft “Love it” project (and outlasted said project by some years). When it turned #300, ToW gained Bill Murray’s endorsement. Eventually, it went online and onto LinkedIn.

In all of this time, the fourth wall was rarely broken.

No longer. This IS The End. This is the last ToW. It is time to rest.

ToW has never been about me, it’s always tried to find and share some hopefully useful tips and tricks, often aided by suggestions from readers or even a few who wrote up the sollution themselves, presented in an informal and somewhat irreverant format.

It is now over. It’s been a blast, mostly. Sometimes, more effort went into the side-eye links than the topic in hand.

The best ToWs? Well IMHO, they are (in no particular order):

350 – Killing me Softly, part I – all about stuff that Microsoft finished off. There’s an internal ~~Yammer~~ “Viva Engage” group called “Next of Kin”. It’s that kind of thing.
489 – What’s the time? – it was heavily influenced by watches and the first moon landing – and who doesn’t like talking about time & space?
558 – Sharing your holidays – how to not annoy everyone by blocking their calendar when you’re trying to be polite by telling them you’ll be away.
578 – Let’s talk about fonts – I mean, what is wrong with Comic Sans, anyway?
71 – Formatting tips for Office apps – the F4 trick for Office Apps was old hat even in 2011.

The most fun was probably 662 – How to make the perfect martini, for obvious reasons. One I use every day? 406 – A path! A path!, though now Copy as path is built-in to Windows Explorer on the right-click.

The emails might be finishing but keep an eye on Tip o’ the Week on LinkedIn as, one day, it might resume.

In the meantime, thank you all!

STOP.

648 – F’ing Home Networks

Posted on September 16, 2022 by ewand

The profusion of wireless devices – from PCs and phones, to all kinds of internet-of-stuff, has exploded in recent years.

IoT reached peak buzzword in 2014/5 and analysts predicted 200+ billion t’Ings would be internet-connected by 2020. Unsurprisingly, they were wrong by a factor of 5 or maybe 10.

Still, few people probably imagined they’d have dozens of electronic devices in their own home which connect themselves to the internet. Do you know how many things you have? Careful people might have a separate network isolated from the rest of their house just to host all their connected stuff, reducing the risk of attack from the unknown services that sit behind their internet-connected radiators, washing machines or home automation rigs.

You probably have a lot of Wi-Fi enabled kit, using TCP/IP to connect through your home router. Do you really know how many there are? If you log onto your own router’s admin page, you can probably see everything that has been given a network address – maybe you’ll see the IP address assigned, and the unique MAC address which the device has presented to identify itself.

Figuring out what is what can be one of the minor annoyances that leads people to such crazy actions as not renaming their home router SSID or changing its default password.

If you’re not all that interested in managing addresses on your home network, you may still want to peer into what is on it and why. Never mind joining your laptop to a guest network – what else is there, too?

A neat app called Fing has been listed in the Windows Store, which gives an analysis of your network, using a source database to tell you what other machines are there. The unique physical address that each device presents usually contains a reference to its manufacturer, and Fing has some logic to figure out which is what, so you’ll get a description for most or all of the devices, with unknown ones flagged as worthy of investigation.

You do need to sign up to use the app, but once you’ve done so, it will show an intersting view of your network. Some premium paid-for features in proactive security monitoring and in-depth reportingmay tempt you to spend a few montly £ to see what they could do for you.

There are lots of other freemium tools in the Store which can help understand or even troubleshoot the network(s) you have at home – WiFi Analyzer, for example, will show you lists and graphs of all the wireless networks it can see in your vicinity.

515 – Whiteboarding Teams

Posted on February 4, 2020 (Updated July 4, 2024) by ewand

Microsoft Teams continues to attract more fans, as Office 365 licensees deploy it and end-users embrace and enjoy Teams as another way to other communicate and collaborate. As part of a blog post in November, some best practices and references were shared, as was the widely-reported figure of 20m active users.

After a while, Teams becomes prevalent as a way of managing online meetings: handy, for example, when the usual seasonal rain in Seattle gives way to the odd bout of debilitating snow.

If you’re having meetings with Teams, there’s always the chance you’ll want to collaborate on a virtual whiteboard, something that was discussed a bit back in ToW #440.

Just go to the Share control within the meeting and scroll over to the right – past a list of PowerPoint files you have recently opened; yes, it is possible to display PPT content without sharing your whole desktop – and you’ll see Whiteboard as a category.

The Microsoft Whiteboard that is listed within is a simplified version of the main application; as used in Teams, you get less control and fewer pens etc. You could just start then share out the main Whiteboard application, but as it would be a single-user application being displayed, you wouldn’t have the same fidelity of multi-user interaction.

It is possible, however, to open up the Whiteboard canvas associated with a Teams meeting, back in the separate Microsoft Whiteboard app. So, if you want to use the groovy tools like highlighter and ruler, start Whiteboard, then look in the gallery of existing whiteboards you’ve used.

One of them will be the Whiteboard from the meeting: open it up in the main app and you’ll also be able to interact in real-time, even if the meeting is still taking place with others contributing.

Whiteboard is available as a Windows app, an iOS app, and also as a web app – here – and the web app provides the same kind of slightly more basic functionality as the Teams version. Who knows, they might be related…?

There’s also an even-more-capable whiteboard app that needs you to sign up for a free account and provides a commensurate web experience – Freehand by InVision. The Teams app basically embeds the web UI of that app too, but it provides a wider choice of features (like holding ALT down to force your freehand shapes to snap to real ones, or press SHIFT to force a straight line even if drawn with a mouse or a pen) and some additional organisational control. It’s worth looking at both Freehand and the simpler Microsoft Whiteboard.

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