Ask Paul: July 1 (Premium)

Happy Friday! And welcome to another epic edition of Ask Paul with another great set of reader questions to kick off the weekend.

Snover

OldITPro2000 asks:

I was shocked to see the news that Jeffrey Snover is leaving Microsoft. Any insight to where he is headed to? (I wasn’t thinking anywhere in particular until I saw that Javier Soltero is leaving Google. Probably just coincidence though.)

For those who aren’t familiar with Jeffrey Snover, he’s best known as the inventor of PowerShell. But I’ve known him for years, and he’s long been one of my favorite Microsoft friends. He’s had a long-time “feud” with Mark Russinovich over which of them gets better scores for their conference talks, which I always found particularly amusing. But he’s just a great guy.

Anyway, Jeffrey announced his departure recently on Twitter. The short answer to your question is that I don’t know where he’s going next, and I don’t believe anyone does yet, and he hasn’t provided a single hint. But if you want a longer discussion about this, we spent an inordinate amount of time speculating about the possibilities on Windows Weekly this past Wednesday. (That link will go right to the beginning of the discussion.)

Google is copying Apple again

cwfinn asks:

Now that Amazon and Google have stopped playing nice together, what is the long-term impact of no longer being able to buy Kindle titles on Android devices?

So, let me start off by tackling this from a different direction. I don’t think this is about Amazon and Google having a falling out. I think this is about Google seeing what’s going to happen to mobile app stores from a regulatory perspective and making a smart move to protect revenues in the future.

For the most part, Apple and Google approach their respective app stores identically, and, yes, this is absolutely a case of Google simply copying what Apple does. But until recently, the big difference was that Google didn’t enforce certain policies for certain big app makers, like Amazon. So these app makers were able to offer stores in their apps for content (Kindle eBooks, Audible audiobooks, etc.) without having to pay Google a 30 percent fee on each purchase, as they have always had to do on Apple’s platforms. But Google announced last year that it would be enforcing the rule it already had (which was identical to Apple’s, basically) by whatever date (June 1, I think). And so Amazon changed its apps on Android and now you can’t make purchases there. They work the same as their apps on iPhone/iPad now, in other words.

So why would Google do this? Is it just about revenues? Yes, I think so, but not short-term. I think Google sees that their world is about to change, that some combination of antitrust regulations from multiple countries is going to force them to lower fees. Google has always done what Apple did, but by enforcing their existing rules, now they are literally doing so. And so when the U.S. or the EU, or whatever government/regulatory body comes down on one or both of them, they will both be forced to lower their fees (and whatever else, like allow alternate payment systems).

So let’s pretend that the fees are lowered to something reasonable, something similar to what credit card companies charge, like 2 or 3 percent. In this imaginary future, Apple and Google will collect 2 or 3 percent on every in-app purchase, including content like eBooks and audiobooks. And because that fee is reasonable, many/most app developers will simply stay put and not bother with alternative payment systems. Apple’s App Store revenues will go down dramatically. And Google’s will go down less so, because they weren’t collecting this fee from some key app makers like Amazon. Google will actually be in a better place in the future because of this change.

We can quibble over whatever the eventual fee structure looks like, but that’s not the point. Whatever form it takes, app stores will be less onerous for developers, and Google and Apple will be in a similar place. By enforcing the rules it already has, Google is just putting itself in place for that future. Is my theory, anyway.

Is it temporary posturing or permanent? It was very convenient to find a title on, say, a Samsung phone using the Kindle app and then click “buy”. Now ones needs to go to Amazon.com, which is a PIA

Yes. This is what iPhone/iPad users have always dealt with. It’s terrible. And it’s a great example of why Apple’s (and Google’s) exorbitant and non-defensible fee structures hurt everyone, not just the biggest developers. Those fees are non-sustainable, and it’s why Amazon can’t let Apple just take 30 percent of every sale for doing nothing. I believe this will change. The timing is anyone’s guess.

The end of native apps?

wbeck asks:

Interesting discussion on Windows Weekly about the failure of Microsoft’s frameworks for writing native Windows apps, that there are no killer apps being written for Windows at this point.

We opened this past week’s Windows Weekly with the end of support for Windows 8.1, and I ended up going off on an extended rant/discussion about how we’ll always be stuck with the “cancer” from Windows 8.x, as I wrote in The End of the Windows 8 Era? Hardly (Premium). Point is that, for all the good that came out of Windows 10, the one major bit of bad that came forward was the Universal Windows Platform (UWP), which dates back to Windows 8.0 and is a mobile app platform not a desktop app platform.

There are pluses and minuses to that, but to me, there are two big issues. First, the Windows 8 team didn’t base their new platform on .NET, but rather went with a less sophisticated COM-based approach that undermined what was then 12 years of software development advancements. And second, the Windows 8 team didn’t work with the Windows Phone team to bring their development platform (which was based on .NET) to Windows 8 and instead created something similar but new and different. Had Microsoft united Windows and Phone then, Windows Phone might have had a chance. (They did so later, with UWP and Windows Mobile 10, in 2015. It was too late.)

Anyway, all that led to a discussion about what it means to create apps for Windows today. And I had a lot to say about that, of course, but here are some key points. No developer is going to create a Windows-only app today, which of course makes the notion of a “native” Windows app a lot less compelling than it was 20 years ago. Most/all native Windows apps work today is about maintaining existing codebases. Microsoft has moved to a web-based model for modernizing and extending existing complex desktop apps, like those in Office. And developers who wish to create new apps today will target either the web or a cross-platform framework (Flutter, perhaps, MAUI, whatever) so that their apps will run everywhere. But from a desktop perspective, it’s mostly about web apps. Teams. Notion. Whatever. All web technologies. (Hence my early conclusion to the Programming Windows series, We Fought the Web and the Web Won.)

Today, Windows is this weird amalgamation of technologies, and developers who wish to target this platform have a crazy number of choices. What they do not have, and what they will not get, is a modern Microsoft framework that specifically targets the desktop. There’s just no call for it. (And no, the Windows App SDK is not it. That’s just an improved UWP, which is mobile-based and limited when it comes to desktop functionality. WinUI 3 is interesting for user interfaces, for sure. But it’s a coat of paint, and is only about UIs.)

For people like me, this is a bit hard to take. But I have to at least grudgingly admit that there’s no alternative. As noted, no developer would ever start a major new app that only runs on Windows. That ship has sailed. So Microsoft will never repeat the major client platform shift that occurred with Longhorn and the WinFX, Avalon, Indigo, and WinFS technologies, all of which were based on .NET. It’s over.

The same could be said for Apple’s Cocoa/Objective C and new Swift language/frameworks; only the now-extinct Carbon frameworks seemed to have any traction, and that was because of the need to port existing MacOS apps.

I’m not as well-versed with the Apple side, but I have recently been researching Swift and SwiftUI and there are parallels between what Apple is doing and what Microsoft did, as well as with modern frameworks like React Native, Flutter, and MAUI. For Longhorn/Vista, Microsoft created an XML-based language called XAML that could, among other things, be used to declaratively create app user interfaces. This is still used in UWP/Windows App SDK and MAUI. But today, more modern frameworks from outside of Microsoft use programming languages like Swift (Apple), Dart (Flutter), and Kotlin (Jetpack Compose) to create UIs declaratively. And I’m kind of intrigued by that.

Apple’s solution is called SwiftUI and it’s a modernization and simplification of the NeXT-era UIKIt framework, so there are pros and cons there. But it’s improved a lot, and quickly, and from my not-quite-educated standpoint, it appears to be roughly on par with the other solutions noted above. And like Microsoft with UWP and now MAUI, Apple is promoting SwiftUI as a way to build a single app that can work across its various platforms (macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, etc.). I don’t have experience with this, but since Apple’s platforms mostly share the same underpinnings, I guess you could argue that this is more “native” than Microsoft’s approach. But whatever. They’re similar at a high level for sure.

Apple also offers its Catalyst technologies for developers with existing iPhone and iPad apps that wish to bring them to the Mac. This will require a little or a lot of work depending on the complexity of the app and the level of customization that the developer wants to do to make the app Mac-friendly (keyboard shortcuts, explicit mouse support, etc.) This, to me, is similar to the work Google did to help developers make Android apps work better on Chromebooks (and on larger-screen Android devices, like tablets). And, of course, Microsoft is opening up Windows to some Android apps, though I’m not sure there’s a developer play per se. I guess there should be. (Maybe Android apps on Windows can simply benefit from the same improvements that an app maker might have made for Chromebooks or tablets.)

And yet both Microsoft and Apple promote the “millions of apps” available on their app stores, nearly all of which are crapware. Paul: what would you recommend to Microsoft and Apple to stop the obvious trend that the only new apps run on the Chrome “platform.” It seems like a doomed strategy to allow Google essentially to control how future apps are going to be developed.

To date, Apple’s biggest offensive with regards to apps has been against cross-platform frameworks, though that seems to be softening (it was originally about Adobe, I think) and, more recently, web apps. And it’s because both undercut the benefits of native apps that run on Apple’s platforms and the benefits of Apple’s expensive flagship devices. If apps are just the same on Android and iPhone/iPad (and the web), Apple could lose ground. You can see this in their BS lack of support for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), for example.

But I don’t think there’s much Apple (or any other platform maker) can do at this point. Mobile has matured in the same way that desktop computing did, and I think the excitement/engagement that used to exist around new apps is deflating. Apple and Google can both boast of billions of apps. And Apple and Google both allow all kinds of different apps on their platforms. (Similar to Windows, when you think about it.)

So what this boils down to, I think, is not so much about enticing developers to build new native apps. But to protect the positions they already have, keep existing users happy and on the platform, and continue to try to entice other customers to switch platforms. And that battle has shifted past the app store. (Well, beyond the services play that Apple has been very successful at to drive new revenues.)

Honestly, it’s a lot like what happened to Microsoft 20 years ago. In the wake of all that .NET/Longhorn era developer innovation that I speak so highly of, Microsoft discovered that no one was creating new Windows apps anymore anyway. This is what’s happening to mobile, I think. It’s about cross-platform now from a developer perspective. But cross-platform isn’t just web, though that will be a big part of it. And if Apple is seriously worried about the Chrome-ification of apps, it’s time to embrace PWAs and make them run best on Safari. One wonders if they have what it takes to make that step.

Xbox vNext

madthinus asks:

Not really a question per se, but wondering what your thoughts are. Do you think we will see a mid cycle refresh on the Series X|S? What do you think Microsoft will target with the refresh?

The first thing we’ll likely see is one or more cost-reduced versions of the consoles. And if history is any guide, and it probably isn’t—I feel like console lifecycles are changes—the earliest we’ll see such a thing (at least in new/updated form factors) is holiday 2023.

Microsoft, of course, would respond to this by saying that the existing consoles have a lot of headroom and that developers are only now starting to best take advantage of their capabilities. And there’s some truth to that. But as far as actual upgrades, something akin to an Xbox One X or whatever, with better graphics and performance, I’ll argue that they can’t move too quickly because their segmented approach to this generation already requires developers to do a lot of work to optimize for two systems. Would a third be too much? I don’t think so. And I’d love to see a higher-end console take over for the X, pushing the other two down the chain a bit, so to speak, until the X simply replaces the S as the entry-level version. This will require a couple of rounds of cost-reduction, I think.

So what could screw this up? Component shortages, of course, and the resulting component pricing issues. Plus we need to pay attention to what Sony is doing. I’m sure they’ll have their own cost reductions, but the bigger deal there (to me) will be when they make smaller consoles. The current PS5s are beasts.

Overall, I bet this Xbox generation will be with us for a long time, probably longer than any of its predecessors. But that we’ll see new models with improved specifications alongside the obvious cost reductions. But, as noted, the timing is murky.

EdgeOS

justme asks:

Given Microsoft’s answer-non-answer regarding an Edge OS (or perhaps even a Teams OS) how concievable is it, given Microsoft’s history, that they really are working on an Edge/Teams OS? Would/could this be an effort to push consumers to the cloud (as in – Edge/Teams minimal local install and everything else runs in the cloud) so that Microsoft could ostensibly charge a subscription to allow you to run?

Interestingly, this is a third topic that came up during this past week’s Windows Weekly. (And privately, this was my favorite part of the show, because Mary Jo said she knew where I was going with this and I joked that she, like Nostradamus, should predict what I was going to say, and she was right.) And it was based on questions about why Microsoft would bother adding so many features to Edge that seemed like they should be native features in Windows instead.

The recently announced gaming features (which have rolled out in Edge 103) are an obvious example. Think about it: the vast majority of Edge users are on Windows, and Windows already has these features and more built into the OS. So why bother? The number of people using Edge on Mac, Linux, Android, and iPhone/iPad must be tiny. Naturally, I speculated about EdgeOS, that topic that comes up from time to time: will Microsoft ever offer this as an alternative to Chrome OS?

I can only say that it’s possible.

We know that Microsoft intended to create a low-end, mobile-focused version of Windows called Windows 10X that would, among other things, allow users to run desktop Windows apps in a virtualization/container technology, and that those efforts failed. And we know, more generally, that every time Microsoft has released something with Windows in the name that wasn’t really Windows, that has failed too. So what if it took those learnings and made a lightweight OS based on web technologies instead? What if that thing, which we’ll call EdgeOS, could run Android apps? At what point does it become viable?

A lot of things have to happen for this to work. Its Office web apps need to become a lot more sophisticated (offline support, etc.), for starters. And Windows 365 needs to be more affordable for those that need some native app support. But I could see it happening. And I might even argue that it makes more sense than Windows 10X ever did. I suppose what we call EdgeOS could also be based on Android, instead of Windows. It’s lighter weight, and if native Windows app execution isn’t an issue, why not?

Of course, we’ve been speculating about this for years. And there is no hard evidence that Microsoft is working towards such a future. But if you somehow made it through my lengthy discussion about native apps and developer topics above, and look at everything else Microsoft is doing “around” this, you can see that these things are all related. And that EdgeOS could happen.

Xbox Series S

gorem asks:

Are you still using an Xbox Series S? If so, why? It’s great but I figure you have access to an X, too. (Remember you mentioning this to Leo a few months back, but if you talked about it on this site, I missed it.)

Yes, I switched to the Xbox Series S over the winter holidays, I think, and have been using it daily ever since. I did this for a few reasons. First, I mostly play a particular set of games, mostly Call of Duty, and, for now, a years-old version (Black Ops 4) that runs identically on this console. And I wanted to test it for use with Xbox Cloud Gaming, which I feel is the future.

The Series S, for now, is all I need. It’s smaller and quieter than the X. And it’s probably a better value. I just wanted to really use it and not ignore it. My son is using the Xbox Series X now. He plays more modern and diverse games than I do. Suffice to say he was delighted when I suggested the swap.