Ask Paul: May 20 (Premium)

Happy Friday (or Feliz Viernes, I guess) from Mexico City. Our flight home was canceled, so we stayed here a few days extra. But that doesn’t mean we can’t tackle some questions this week…
AMA
navarac writes:

Not a question, but a thanks to you and Nick for the AMA today (Thursday).

Thank you. I hope everyone had a chance to watch, but if not, you can watch the replay here, and dftf left a very detailed summary of what we discussed.
Store in a store
cwfinn asks:

Does Microsoft and/or Amazon have any plans to expand their pathetic selection from the Amazon AppStore? With very few exceptions, they are silly childish games. Since I use a Kindle Fire, I can see the "real" Amazon AppStore which is WAY more complete. :-( Clearly, the "trial" must be finished!

Technically, it’s still a preview, but, yeah, it’s reasonable to wonder why the app selection and quality haven’t improved---or changed at all, from what I can tell---since the initial release. Looking at this again today, I can identify less than 15 useful apps and a lot of crappy, B-quality games. So, no meaningful changes.

This was arguably the number one selling point of Windows 11 at the announcement last summer. This needs to be better.
Microsoft v. Apple
hrlngrv asks:

This is asking you to be a psychoanalyst for a corporation.

I feel uniquely qualified to do this. :)

More seriously, I do believe that corporations have personalities and that those are shaped by the personalities of their leaders. Apple under Steve Jobs is a great example (though that was just one personality). And I think of the Windows org at Microsoft like this: each generation takes on the personality of its leadership.

Is MSFT fundamentally shaken by Apple having a larger market capitalization? If so, what would you rate as the most unfortunate consequence of that? I've expressed the cynical opinion that MSFT does what it does for money, but is MSFT also motivated by a desperate and somewhat pathetic yearning for relevance (I hate that term, but it seems aptest) in the Age of the Ascendant Smartphone?

I think there was a collective moment of dread as Apple’s market cap rose and then surpassed that of Microsoft. But that happened several years ago. And I think that time has made this a bit easier. Apple was the first company to surpass a $1 trillion market cap, and the first to reach $2 trillion and then $3 trillion too. I feel like Satya Nadella, and thus Microsoft, understands that Apple is a very different company, and that its success is based on a business, hardware sales, in which Microsoft is not successful. Likewise, Microsoft’s current and future is based on cloud services, and while Apple has a successful services business, that is tied to their handsets and isn’t the same thing.

Apple isn’t as different from Microsoft as, say, Saudi Aramco (which, oddly, is worth more than Apple as I write this), and the two companies obviously have a shared his...