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. ...