Happy Friday! October flew by in a blink somehow, and now it's November already. But we can lighten that inconvenience with some great reader questions. Maybe we can finally relax a bit this weekend, too.

Surface + NFL

helix2301 asks:

I know you talked about Microsoft surface business declining and them keeping business going. On my question last week on ask Paul. Where do you think the NFL deal lands in the mix of surface, revenue and business?

Like so many Big Tech partnerships--witness the incredible Apple/Google deal for search defaults on iPhone that neither company has disclosed to shareholders or the SEC--the Microsoft/NFL Surface partnership is now completely secret. The original deal was for five years, and that was extended at least twice. But as of now, no one outside of Microsoft or the NFL knows the terms: How long it lasts, how much money changes hands, etc.

That said, no I don't think this partnership impacts Surface or its future in a material sense. The most recent report I can find claims that the NFL is using approximately 2,000 Surface Pro whatevers. That's not a big number, so it's not a revenues issue, it's more for marketing and getting the Surface and Microsoft brands out there, and in a market (sports) that is dominated by Apple and iPad. This one is tricky because Apple technically wouldn't need to do anything to own this market, since most networks and broadcasters would simply use iPads regardless, the exception being a company paying them to do otherwise. So that's what Microsoft is doing.

But it could kill Surface tomorrow and let the Surface NFL partnership go until its conclusion easily enough. At most, it would just need to rebrand the cases to Microsoft, Windows, Teams, or whatever else and remove the Surface name, to save face or whatever. There's no way this deal is lucrative enough to warrant keeping the Surface business alive: Hardware is incredibly expensive and has extremely low margins (unless you're Apple, of course), and in Microsoft's case, it's losing money. But the original 5-year deal was valued at $400 million ($80 million per year, $20 million per quarter). Even in the context of just one quarter of revenues for More Personal Computing--$13 billion-ish in the most recent quarter--that seems like chump change.

iWork, uWork, we all Work

helix2301 asks:

Jason Snell on MacBreak said iWorks free and is Apple way of giving you everything you need on Mac and that you really don't need office on Mac. Just wondering your feeling on iWork considering office was actually first made for Mac.

Apple's iWork is incredible, and it's the right set of features for most people. You can see it as a minor example of Apple's strategy of ending its reliance on any outside party, where having that in the OS makes sense because it can be one item on a bulleted list of reasons why one might choose the Mac (or Apple's broader ecosystem, really, as the apps are on iPhone and iPad too and have ni...