Ask Paul: March 22 (Premium)

Happy Friday! This has been an incredible and momentous week, but I’m ready for the weekend and some terrific reader questions. This one’s a doozy.

Eternal Spring

doon asks:

Wanted to take a moment and say “thanks” for your Eternal Spring series. It’s fascinating and informative to watch your experiences in Mexico. Your candor is invigorating. It’s also helpful to both my wife and myself as we consider a move outside the US. While we’re not nearly as adventurous on the culinary side, the cultural changes look really interesting.

Well, thanks. 🙂

For those who aren’t paying attention to this YouTube channel, my wife and I recently discussed our plans to write a travel guide for Mexico City based on our experiences there and because there is no Rick Steves-style expert for the area. In some ways this will be like the Windows 11 Field Guide and my other recent technical books in that it will be published as it’s written in the open and with the hope that readers will improve it with feedback. But in some ways it will be quite different because this book will be much more visual and will have a beautiful design. That’s something that still bothers me with Leanpub and the Field Guide titles. Maybe that’s something I can fix eventually.

Individual Office apps

stevem57 asks:

Why is it so difficult to get a new copy of MS Access? I’ve been using it since 97, made a living with Access and VB until I retired 5 years ago. I still manage a few databases for church. When I looked into it all I got was an endless loop of Microsoft websites.

Funny you ask, I was just thinking about this myself, regarding Microsoft Word in my case. And in looking around for such a thing—the standalone apps are out there, as it turns out—it occurred to me what’s happening. Obviously, Microsoft would prefer for customers to move to Microsoft 365 subscriptions and the steady, consistent revenues those subscriptions generate. And as obviously, Microsoft can’t kill off the perpetual standalone versions of the Office suite, given the customer demand (and the resulting regulatory overtones should they try to do so). Some keep expecting that whatever standalone version of Office is “the last version,” but they keep announcing new versions, each of which is limited in new ways. The recently announced Office 2024 will not be compatible with paid Copilot subscriptions, for example.

But what about standalone Office apps?

In the sense that previous versions of Office were long the biggest competitor to the new version of Office, I think we can safely assume that good enough products continue to be the biggest competitors today, and that in this age of Microsoft 365 subscriptions, those things are standalone (perpetual) Office suites, third-party office productivity suites (OpenOffice, LibreOffice, etc., plus the former iWork apps on Mac), modern new productivity solutions like Notion and Slack, web-based solutions like Google Docs or even the Office Web Apps (or whatever they’re called today), and whatever else. The point being, none are as powerful as full desktop Office, but depending on the customers’ needs, they can be good enough.

But we should also include standalone Microsoft Office apps in that list: When Microsoft moved Office from a bundle to a suite—the differentiation being that the latter included more cross-app integration and more similar/identical user interfaces—it changed the value proposition of these apps and lowered prices because many uses simply wanted one of the apps (usually Word or Excel back in the day) and would only choose the suite if it was reasonably more expensive. And that is likely even more true today. For example, I might want to use Notion and Slack but also see the value in Word, and rather than pay for Microsoft 365 all up or a standalone suite, I could just get that one copy of Word cheaply and add it to my ad-hoc mix.

Or, I would if I could. (This a theoretical example. I love Notion, but Slack can go f#$k itself for all I care. Moving on.) As noted, you can buy standalone copies of at least some of the key Office apps on Windows (and Mac). But you won’t because they’re so expensive: A standalone copy of Word for Windows/Mac costs $160. Meanwhile, Microsoft 365 costs $6.99 per month/$69.99 per year and up for consumers, not counting sales, and so you could subscribe for over two years before you’d hit that price point for just Word, and the subscription includes all of the apps plus 1 TB of OneDrive storage. (Business prices are similar and go up to incredible levels.) And the cheapest standalone Office perpetual suite, Office Home & Student 2021, is $150. It’s $10 cheaper than just getting one of the apps it contains. Come on, guys. (I could be wrong about this one, but the cheapest perpetual Office suite that includes Access might be Office Professional 2021, which costs $440.)

If you look at the Microsoft Store on the web, you will see that Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and possibly other Office desktop apps can be purchased individually like Word (and some apps, like OneNote and Teams, are just free). But they’re hard to find (I had to search Google), by design I bet, and some of the less commonly used apps, like Project Standard, are crazy-expensive.

The good news, such as it is, is that you can but a standalone version of Access for Windows/Mac too, and it’s the same $160 price as Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. But Microsoft doesn’t want you to do that.

Related to this, Microsoft doesn’t allow Microsoft 365 subscribers of any kind download and install individual Office apps on Windows. I’m sure there are some technical justifications for that, but I don’t see any reason why I couldn’t, as an individual, just download Microsoft Word or whatever. Interestingly, on the Mac, you can: I see Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook as individual downloads in the Mac App Store alongside OneNote, OneDrive, Microsoft To Do, and I wish the Microsoft Store in Windows offered the same. (Oddly, Microsoft Teams is not in the Mac App Store. I can’t explain that.)

Anyway, we might view this situation as an example of enshittification: These limitations serve Microsoft’s needs, not its customers’ needs.

Future Xbox hardware

madthinus asks:

How terrible would it be if Xbox does not do a Series X Pro / Ultimate? Just feel like they should not do it. The price is one thing that is problematic. Also, they already have two SKU’s and what is the sales pitch for this device? Unlike the Xbox One generation, the sales pitch was 4K.

I think about this more than I should, and I keep coming back to this notion of modular Xbox hardware that would be a walled garden middle ground between locked-down, non-expandable traditional consoles and fully upgradeable but complex and expensive PCs. But this idea, whether it makes sense or not, doesn’t seem like the type of thing Microsoft would implement mid-stream in a console generation. Instead, that would need to wait—if it happens at all—for the next generation. Which, cross your fingers, could be Arm-based.

Given that, and given the way that both Sony and Microsoft have evolved how console generations work, I think it’s more reasonable to assume that we will see mid-generation refreshes of the Xbox Series S and X, and that they will maintain compatibility across the board but offer bumps in resolution, frame rates, and graphics quality (and, let’s not forget, storage too, hopefully). And that Microsoft will rely on component cost reductions for much of the console parts list to balance the added expenses related to specific new parts. In other words, if they’re (and we’re) lucky, these more powerful new consoles will be the same price or, ideally, less expensive than the consoles they replace.

Right now, the Xbox Series S is an unparalleled value (~$275) in the console market, and it’s often on sale too. The issue, of course, is storage: The base console has just 512 GB of storage, which is probably enough for two top-tier titles and not much else. There’s a 1 TB version now, of course, and storage expansion, which is still too expensive. And then the Series X, which is likewise expensive (and that 1 TB of storage won’t go as far since games will be bigger on-disk on that console because they will use bigger assets). Super scaling can’t get here quickly enough.

Remember, consoles used to be written in stone. But Microsoft has been experimenting with mid-stream upgrades for years and I think that’s been successful overall. The Xbox 360 was original just 720p, but eventually went to 1080 (and then had at least two cost-reduced console versions that also fixed the RROD issues). The Xbox One saw two incredible upgrades mid-stream, the One S and One X, that really made up for the first tank of a console. And in the current generation, Microsoft launched two consoles right away (as did Sony, though in a slightly different fashion). Regardless, I think it’s reasonable to expect the Series S and X to see at least one mid-generation spec bump/cost reduction release. That should happen this coming holiday season. It’s time.

US v. Apple

Brianahodges asks:

What do you think about the US Department of Justice lawsuit against Apple?

So many thoughts.

But I need to write something separately about this, which I’ve already started. The short version of my opinion is that this is overdue and necessary, and that I agree with most of it at a high level. There are two specific things, at least—I’m still going through the 88-page complaint, so maybe there will be more—that I very much disagree with. One of which is …

Do you think Apple will try to cut it off by incorporating all the EU mandated changes and RCS chat now? That could render some of the US Government’s charges moot.

They should do that, yes.

This came up on First Ring Daily this morning, that Apple should for some reason be forced to bring iMessage to Android (and also bring Apple Watch to Android) is ridiculous. The solution here is what you suggest, that Apple simply implement the RCS standard on the iPhone, enabling true interoperability (and security) with Android users.

Anyway, I don’t mean to cut this short, but I will be writing about this at length separately and don’t want to undermine that.

If not Windows, then …

spacecamel asks:

If Windows becomes too crapified and have to switch, do you think you would switch to Mac or Linux?   Or would you consider a Chromebook? I am asking this since you got a new MacBook and wondering if the lack of ads changes your thoughts.

In my Notion article yesterday, I documented a few of the high profile Microsoft apps—OneNote, OneDrive, Word—that I’d stopped using because of various issues, and I referenced an early example of me looking at an alternative to Windows—Slackware Linux in the mid-1990s, which had an all-text setup routine that spanned dozens of floppy disks—back in an era when I had just started writing books about Windows and other Microsoft products. But as noted there and elsewhere, I’ve been testing my relationship with all the software I use for decades, and there are many more examples. I don’t know if this is pathological or just some weird character trait, but I’m just wired this way. I feel like many people find something they like, and they’re done.

(Like many of my stories, I’ve told this one before, but I was visiting a friend many years ago now and his wife for some reason felt compelled to tell me that she stopped using Windows because it was so unreliable and moved to the Mac. I asked her how long it’d been since she used Windows and she replied, “seven years.” And I responded with, “Then your opinion is irrelevant.”)

To date, Windows has withstood these tests.

But it’s fair to say that Windows has also suffered from a degree of enshittification that is somewhat unique in personal technology. And it’s important to understand why this is notable.

Enshittification is everywhere in personal technology, and it’s the type of thing you can’t stop seeing once you’re made aware of it. For example, I often complain about Netflix, which show me what seems like hundreds of Indian TV shows interspersed in my recommendations, and how I would like to filter those out because I am simply not interested and never will be. But it is in Netflix’s best interests to advertise this content, which it paid for, and they even brag about viewers from the U.S. watching this stuff in their earnings announcements now. This is Netflix putting its own needs over those of its paying customer(s), when in a normalized world, the firm should instead be customer-focused and, in this case, give me some kind of filter feature so I can more efficiently find things I want to watch. This is, put more simply, enshittification.

Of course, Netflix is just an entertainment service. Windows is another thing entirely. It’s a desktop computing platform that we use to run apps for work. It is the platform I’m in every day, every single day. And the constant interruptions, badgering, underhanded pushes to use more Microsoft products and services, ignoring of my explicit configurations and choices, and the even more underhanded way that it silently changes those configurations to force me to use its products and services (as it does with OneDrive folder backup) is not just inconvenient, it’s an afront. I use this tool to get things done, and it would ideally deliver innovations that make me more efficient. But I would accept it simply getting out of the way as a minimum.

That’s not what Windows does now. Instead, Windows gets in the way. It slows me down, it ignores how I want to use the system, and it undermines me as I work. This is perhaps best described as an abusive relationship. And rather than hide the bruises, I’ve decided that I’m going to broadcast the abuse to see whether it can be fixed for me, and for others. And when the abuse gets bad enough, I walk away. That’s what I’ve done with OneDrive and Word in recent months. (Though I am ironically—hypocritically?—writing this using Word on the MacBook Air. Please bear with me here, I’m testing things.)

Anyway, that’s a long way of saying that, as I was writing that Notion article, and describing a few incidents from the past, and many more I didn’t mention, I was literally thinking to myself, what would it take? How bad would Windows need to get before I just gave up? What specifically could it do it finally drive me away?

This is complicated.

It’s complicated by the fact that I do literally prefer Windows, even given all the issues.

It’s complicated by the fact that I am a Windows guy, possibly the Windows guy, and that I have spent my entire career—30 years this year—writing mostly about Windows, trying to help others make sense of this thing. And that to do that effectively, I can’t use another platform full-time. I can’t use Windows in Parallels on a Mac or whatever. I need to use Windows. I work on the Windows 11 Field Guide almost every single day, for example.

It’s complicated by the fact that these decades of usage have instilled certain habits, traditions, and workflows that make me more efficient on Windows. And that when you think about such things as me moving from OneDrive to Google Drive, part of the success of that transition is that I can keep working exactly the same way because only the plumbing has changed. I don’t have to learn new skills or new ways of doing things.

But it’s also complicated by the fact that the competition has yet to rise to the level of functionality or user experience—or whatever—that I expect from using Windows. That is, it’s not just that Windows, for me, is “better,” it’s that ChromeOS, Linux, and macOS are all, in some ways, not as good. (To me. We all have different needs and wants.) It’s not for a lack of trying: For as much as I mention how much I test alternatives across the board, I think many would be surprised by how much time I spend on this.

But Microsoft keeps trying to push me away, seemingly. And I wonder about this.

The why of the behavior in Windows 11 is confusing. When we talk about enshittification, we can rationalize behaviors by trying to understand why doing wrong by a customer is somehow still the right thing to do because there is a net gain for the company. But when I look at Windows 11 and its bad behaviors, I have trouble rationalizing them. They just don’t make sense to me.

Think back to Windows 10. For users, the big front-facing improvement was that the system was returning to a desktop centricity that would benefit most of the 1+ billion user base, few of whom were even using tablets, let alone using multitouch semi-exclusively. This seemed customer-driven, and I guess it was. Certainly, the commercial base had pushed back on Windows 8 in a way that even exceeded that for Windows Vista, and changes needed to be made.

But there were also internal needs to be met with Windows 10. Satya Nadella had charged Terry Myerson with making Windows make sense in the cloud-centric Microsoft he championed, for example. The result was Windows as a Service (WaaS), a plan by which Windows, this legacy monolithic software stack, would somehow be updated as if it were an online service. The idea is ludicrous, honestly, but we should acknowledge two facts here: It actually worked: Today, Windows is updated, mostly reliably, literally all the time successfully. And it took several years and many big problems to get us there. In the end, Myerson was rewarded for this success by getting pushed out of the company as Windows became less and less important to the overall strategy.

Tied to this, as Windows falls in importance, there is a reining in of resources and investments. There are small examples of the impact of these changes—everyone knows about the Q&A team that was let go—but the broader ramifications have been far more problematic. Windows doesn’t attract the top talent in the company anymore. It’s almost a punishment, like working on Bing. And the quality suffers as Microsoft’s attentions are elsewhere and as B-teamers—and now C-teamers—are all that’s left. Windows isn’t just smaller, it’s smaller from a thinking perspective. All we got under Panos Panay was a surface-level spit-shine that’s painfully similar to the work the Windows Mobile team did for version 6.5 back in the day. And more enshittification.

I hoped that AI would be a wave that lifted all ships at Microsoft and that Windows would be part of that. But the Windows-specific parts of Copilot are a joke, and the recent reorg seems to exclude Windows, indicating that the decline will simply continue. I have little hope that this once-proud product will ever experience a meaningful resurgence, which to my mind involves improved quality and customer-centricity. This is troubling.

I will continue testing the alternatives.

ChromeOS has always seemed like a good idea to me for all kinds of reasons, and the recent Chromebook Plus push addressed some of my key concerns about this platform. So that is better than ever.

Linux has always been of interest, as noted by my Slackware story, and though it never took off on the desktop, and probably never will, it’s mature, stable, and offers a lot of choice on many levels, including the user experience. And if you consider the underlying platform, the shell, to be a sort of commodity or dumb pipe anyway, why not choose something that just works? Workflow and app/service availability is still a bit rough, but also better than ever.

The Mac kind of breaks my heart.

There was a moment in the early 2000s when I seriously considered a sort of dual-use scenario where I split my time between Windows and Mac OS X. And it was inspired, in part, by work I was doing at the time on an educational title that required me to use a Mac, so I got the then-current sunflower-like iMac G4, which was a striking computer. The author and creator of this book, which was updated annually, was retiring, and the publisher wanted me to take it over, and that could have changed my direction dramatically. But in the end, it didn’t work out: I clashed with the author’s weird Apple-centricity and ended up walking away.

In Windows Everywhere (and the Programming Windows series that pre-dated it), I wrote about the several key moments in which Steve Jobs and Apple interrupted and then completely disrupted the dominance of Windows with the NeXT-based Mac OS X, major improvements to Mac OS X when Longhorn was flailing, the iPhone, and then the iPad. And each of these was a major gut-check moment, not just for Microsoft but for the Windows community and for me personally. I described the iPhone as the asteroid that killed the Windows dinosaur, which is a cute way of describing the end of the PC era and the shift to the current mobile/web era. But I’ve also still continued the prefer Windows on the PC/desktop despite all the explosive changes that have occurred all around it.

I’ve always had at least one Mac, dating back to my first iBook G3 in the early 2000s, and I think many would be shocked if confronted by the long list of Macs and other Apple hardware I’ve owned. But aside from that brief dalliance with that educational title, which would have been quite lucrative, I’ve never seriously considered using a Mac full-time. Using a new MacBook Air M3 now, however, I can sort of see it. I can at certainly understand why others would make this choice: This is elegant and powerful hardware running a platform that is the antithesis of enshittification. It respects my choices—many of which involve disabling Apple apps and services—and it never harasses me. It’s what Windows should be, and could be. But isn’t.

Again, me buying a Mac is nothing new. As noted, I have purchased many Macs over the past 20 years. And I intend to buy a Qualcomm-based 15-inch Surface Laptop, or some other Snapdragon Elite X-based laptop, as soon as I can. My next transition is to Arm. Probably not to the Mac, but definitely to Arm. I can see it.

So that’s where I’m at. I don’t like what’s happening to Windows. But this shift to Arm holds my interest, and I still prefer Windows to the other platforms. That could change. But that’s always been a possibility. It’s just never happened.

In the end, we all need to make the right decisions for ourselves.

Read more

VMax asks:

Is there any OpenWeb documentation on, or have you (or anyone else) been able to work out via observation, the logic of how/when “Read more” appears in comments? It doesn’t seem to be by a set word count or number of paragraphs. Often it’s between paragraphs, but now and then, it appears mid-para. I think at least it doesn’t break sentences, but I can’t be certain I’ve never seen that. This is utterly unimportant both as a question and as a function, but hard to unsee once you notice how inconsistent it seems.

This wasn’t explained to me explicitly, but I actually did ask about that, and my goal was to simply turn it off. Related, I also wanted to fully expand all conversation “trees” (not sure what the right word is there) so that one could simply see all the comments under an article without clicking all over the place. Seems logical enough, right? But I can’t do that either.

Well, it turns out that these two options don’t exist for performance reasons. We don’t “host” OpenWeb comments on the site, they’re remote, and so figuring out how to display this thing as quickly as possible is job one. And they have whatever algorithms that determine how much you see on the fly. So my guess is that it’s not based on something simple or obvious like a specific number of characters or words. But rather that it’s determined in real-time and based on any number of metrics that (could) include connection speed and latency, the number of other comments/threads, and so on.

I guess you could think of it like AI in that you ask AI a question repeatedly and each answer is unique: With OpenWeb, you display the comments and how much you see of an individual comment can vary as well. This is one of those things where the overall value of the system outweighs what is a relatively small issue (or just a curiosity). But yeah. I would change it if I could.

Email and calendar

LordMartarius asks:

What apps do you use for your email and calendar needs? 

I haven’t used a standalone client app for email or calendar on the PC in ages, though I can’t recall when that changed. I was never a fan of Microsoft Outlook, but I did like apps like Internet Mail and News, Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, Eudora, and the Calendar app in Windows Vista back in the day. But I’ve long used web apps for these needs, most recently Gmail and Google Calendar, as thurrott.com is on Google Workspace (mostly because that’s what BWW Media Group was using when I came on board in 2015). I would use Outlook.com or Outlook on the Web if it made sense, but I’m so stuck in the Google ecosystem now, in part because of pass-through sign-ins on the web, that it likely wouldn’t make sense to switch.

That said, I am intrigued by Proton Mail and the other Proton apps and services, and I am looking at these now. In keeping with my bit about always experimenting with alternatives, I could see making this shift. I hope to have more to say on that soon.

Mexican radio, er ah, TV

LordMartarius asks:

Are there English speaking tv and radio channels in Mexico City, or do you use internet and VPNs for your entertainment needs?

We don’t really do much in the way of local TV or radio in Mexico: When we first got Internet access there two years ago, there was a cable TV box as part of the package, but we never used it and that summer I canceled it to save a bit of money each month. This parallels the way our TV watching has evolved at home: Sometime between 2017 and 2020 or so, when we had first moved to Pennsylvania, we dropped cable TV and now watch content on services like Netflix, Hulu, and Apple TV+ exclusively. We subscribed to YouTube TV during November, December, January, February, mostly for sports (and through the Super Bowl), and we usually subscribe to MLB.TV each season to watch baseball.

We were in Mexico during the Super Bowl this year, but a friend who owns a restaurant/bar puts TVs out during big TV and sports events, so we watched it there. But other than that, we just watch (most of) the same services there that we do at home. We have an Apple TV and a television there.

I haven’t listened to the radio in many years, home or away, and while my wife used Sirius XM for several years in the car, she gave up on that at some point. She listens to Spotify playlists now, and I mostly listen to podcasts and audiobooks, and I create my own music playlists in YouTube Music. That all works abroad, of course.

(Semi-related, we hear a lot of Latino music in bars, restaurants, and even Ubers while in Mexico, and I use Shazam or the music detection feature in the Pixel to identify the music we like so I can add it to a playlist. I’ve actually found several new songs this way while in an Uber, but that’s pretty much my only exposure to the radio in Mexico.)

I haven’t used a VPN for entertainment purposes in Mexico beyond a few tests, but I do use one occasionally for specific reasons. On this last trip, I used a VPN called TunnelBear three or four times because it’s free for up to 2 GB per month and I didn’t need it for any sustained reasons. Otherwise, I’ve used ExpressVPN, which seems to work well. I just don’t need it that often.

PC games

jrzoomer asks:

Paul what are some of your favorite PC games on Steam? Do you prefer to play the classics, or more modern games ? And also, would like to know do you prefer to use the mouse + keyboard, or do you use an Xbox controller?

I mentioned the Steam Sale the other day, and while that has ended, I should have mentioned that Epic Games is also having a sale, and that runs through March 28 (next Thursday), so there’s still plenty of time on that one. I spent time with each, though I ended up not buying anything new.

These days, I am leaning heavily into older games, mostly on the PC, though I did get Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story on Xbox recently, and I pay for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and played the beginning of Resident Evil II Remake on that console as well. I just downloaded Resident Evil III Remake and will check out that this week. When the Activision Blizzard back catalog starts appearing in Game Pass later this year, I will take a look at that and perhaps do a bit more on the console.

I didn’t play any games in Mexico over five weeks, which is surprising. But now that I’m home, I’m going to pick up where I left off Black Mesa (the OG Half-Life remake), which I purchased on Steam and highly recommend. I would also like to revisit Half-Life 2 (from Steam) again this year, and Halo 2 and/or Halo 3, both of which I have as part of the Halo: Master Chief Collection in Steam.

I was a big keyboard/mouse gamer on PC before I switched to Xbox with the Xbox 360 in 2005. But I stick with an Xbox controller now, even on PC. It is perhaps notable that all the games I play these days are single player. I did nothing but Call of Duty multiplayer for more years than I wish to remember, but I’m looking for a calmer experience these days.

PWAs are everywhere

Christian-Gaeng asks:

Hi Paul, if I remember correctly, you are a big PWA fan. I use PWAs on an extremely small scale. So I would be interested to know what you think now after a few years. PWAs haven’t really taken off. Microsoft seems to have a problem finishing new things. They announce major revolutions and quickly lose interest. This seems to be a general problem with Microsoft and not just PWAs.

This comes up from time-to-time, as does a curious resistance to certain technologies from enthusiasts. But PWAs—or, more generally, web apps—are all around us and most of us use them every single day even if we don’t realize it.

The relative success of PWAs/web apps hinges on two contrary things. One, that Apple has actively worked to ensure that web apps don’t work seamlessly on its mobile platforms because its services business is built on the 30/15 percent fees it can’t charge if this apps platform succeeds. And two, that when done right and successfully, as is the case on Android and Windows, these apps are just in the store alongside other apps. Because they are just apps, and are not limited in any meaningful ways as some still assume.

Most Windows users probably know that Clipchamp, an in-box app in Windows 11, is a web app. But all modern Microsoft 365 apps—Teams (all versions), the new Outlook, Loop, whatever—are implemented using web technologies (e.g. are “web apps”) and that’s the norm going forward. I once wrote that for Windows on Arm to be successful, it would have to be boring, because it would just be Windows, and everything would just work. And that’s true of PWAs/web apps: We’re wondering about a revolution that never happened, except that it did happen. It’s just that we didn’t notice it.

Microsoft realized literally decades ago that—aside from web browsers—there were no major new native apps being built for Windows. And so it embraced the two app models that make sense today, mobile apps (Metro/UWP) and web apps. On Windows, mobile apps have failed. Web apps have not.

It’s a bit more nuanced on mobile because of the native app lock-in tied to app store fees. But that’s going to change too, and in a perfect world, developers of most apps will create a single web app that runs everywhere, on mobile and desktop. It’s already true in many cases, but this is clearly the apps platform of the future on mobile, broadly. Anticompetitive business practices have slowed this inevitability, with Apple. But it can’t be stopped.

Ultimately, users don’t care “how” apps are made, and they don’t care if a service they access is a site, a web app, or a PWA, as long as it meets their needs. Netflix is the same on the web as it is on mobile. But there are far more complex web apps—Microsoft Word for the web, Photoshop for the web, Clipchamp, etc.—that speak to the maturity of this platform. (Word being interesting in that it could support offline usage but doesn’t, because Microsoft.) Copilot being an instance of Edge in Windows is perhaps interesting because of steering issues, but it was also the quickest and easiest way to get that thing into Windows, and it’s compatible with all the other Copilot implementations because it’s natively a web app. The web platform made this possible.

Looking just at Windows, I think I could successfully make the case that PWAs/web apps are the most successful app platform since Win32 or VB6, both of which date to the 1990s. That these web apps work everywhere—other desktop platforms and mobile—isn’t just part of the appeal, it’s the reason why. But this also required Microsoft to embrace the web, which it’s done. And every day, developers are spinning up new apps. That’s not happening on WinForms, WPF, UWP, or the Windows App SDK. It’s only happening on the web. (The bone for .NET developers is that Microsoft provides Blazor/ASP.NET/C# for this purpose.)