Windows Weekly 879 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell are here. They're both home, weirdly enough. Of course, richard's got a great recommendation from his visit to Romania. Paul's got a game. He likes a lot of browser too. We'll talk about the Microsoft earnings report. It was, in short, a very good quarter. It's going to be a very great show. Stay here. Windows Weekly's next Podcasts you love From people you trust. Weekly is next Podcasts you love From people you trust.

00:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is Twit.

00:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell, episode 879, recorded Wednesday, may 1st 2024. The Cockroach of CPUs, it's time for Windows Weekly. Yee-hee, woo-hoo, ha-ha, the show where we talk about Windows. Did you just sit?

00:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
on a pin what?

00:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
happened. Ah Ooh.

00:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's Paul Theriot in there.

01:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ooh, hey-o, lower McCungie. Lower McCungie's favorite son, little Paul Thurot. Hey there, hey-o Lower McCungie. Lower McCungie's favorite son, little Paul Thurot. Hey, paul, how you doing.

01:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know if I'm ever going to be accepted. Lower McCungie no, this is a big joke at the bar we go to.

01:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like you know to these guys I'm Boston, you're Boston.

01:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, mccungian, you're a you know, mccungian, you're a freaking Patriots fan, aren't you? That's a good point.

01:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not sure if I want to answer that question, you've got to be an Eagles fan, don't you, yeah? Or a Penguins fan. I don't know what the teams are for. Lower McCungie, the lower McCungie Penguins. I would vote for them. Flyers, flyers, flyers.

01:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Flyers the Philly Flyers.

01:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Pittsburgh, hensburg, pennsburg, the Pennsburg.

01:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That, ladies and gentlemen, is, of course, our hockey expert, because he comes from beautiful Canada Richard Thompson, richard Thompson, richard Thomas, richard Campbell, I don't know.

02:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think you're. John Boy is who I think you are. Now I desperately need there to be a TV series like Portlandia, but called.

02:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Canadia, hello Canadia, oh God, here we are. Where are you?

02:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
is where I want to know I'm home. I'm home. That's why the view right. And I got the dual camera rig now so I can just flip between the views. So pretty Now there's white caps out there today, the strong southwesterly coming in.

02:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You should see, I have all of these lower thirds for you Stockholm, nevada, romania. I can't even say some of the names.

02:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm getting a little tired of this. I also have a view, and that's my view, and screw you guys. That's what I got, I got nothing.

02:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, it's good to be home for a couple of weeks. Yeah, the next time we'll do a show away, I think Paul and I'll be together at Build. How exciting.

03:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That'll be fun, we'll be fun.

03:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Forward to that, but all of June on the road, just like utter madness.

03:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If my life goes accordingly, I'll be in Mexico in June. I'm so jealous.

03:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I will be sitting on this little saddle on a stick for the foreseeable future. You don't believe me, do you? But if you look at, it. It sounded more like just the stick it's more the stick than the saddle, but see, there's the saddle, look at that little thing how small is your butt?

03:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
how do you fit on that thing?

03:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you perch. It's supposed to be good for you. I do a lot of stupid things because they're supposed to be good for you. Kevin Rose was in on Sunday. He's the king of weird stuff. He always is telling me about the latest thing. Now he gets in an ice bath. He has a custom water chiller thing he gets into. Dear God, dear God is right. That sounds painful, so I'm just going to stick with my saddle on a stick.

04:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're talking about going the other way. We were talking about putting a sauna in.

04:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He did tell me actually that there is good evidence now that a daily 20-minute sauna, not too hot, 175 degrees, reduces the risk of dementia by 30%. Like it's significant, so get that sauna. I'm getting a sauna just for that.

04:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That said, buying a sauna is a sign of dementia, you know.

04:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good point, excellent point.

04:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And we could. You know, we've got the guest house here, Leo, so if you, want to.

04:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm dying to come up. I am, I'm actually Come shoot from up here.

04:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We've got good bandwidth, we've got gigabit ethernet, we got two channels.

04:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're very kind, don't keep saying it, because I might take you up on it. Don't say it unless you mean it. But you mean it. It's a new deck, that's nice.

04:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You got the deck in Good Deck's, in no railings though, so it's a sign of being a middle-aged white man.

05:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I fall a lot. So tell me, gentlemen, what's up in the world of Microsoft.

05:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, you'll be happy to hear that. From a business perspective, I think Microsoft's going to be okay.

05:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You think they're going to be all right. Huh, they have taken it. They had a good quarter that plucky little startup from the Seattle area is they're doing okay? Ever since they left Albuquerque, things have been looking up. Yeah, it's been on an upward trajectory ever since Albuquerque.

05:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's true of me as well. Yeah, ever since I left Albuquerque, things have been going better. I miss Albuquerque.

05:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's just another quarter over quarter growth, Like it's unbelievable.

05:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it AI driven or is it Azure driven?

05:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yes and yes. So the thing like a couple of points here. I wrote about this, obviously, and then the next morning I got up and I was reading the paper on my iPad and I saw the news story. I think it was the New York Times. I'm like, let me just read this, let me see how they kind of frame this, you know, and then we all do this right, even though you know our wives don't care. I kind of blurted out no company this big should be able to have double digit growth and profits and revenue with this. What the hell's going on? They're almost 50 years old, like what, how you know? But this is, it's crazy, like how successful they are at this. Net income was up 20 percent year over year. Revenues are up 17 percent year over year. Wow, this should not be possible.

06:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, that's amazing, but I think so.

06:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah and AI and Azure are kind of hand in hand because the one takes the other, but here's the like. I should have found the exact quote, but Amy Hood, the CFO, right during her talk at the post-earnings conference call, commented on. I don't know if it was a response to a question or she just kind of said this, but she said you know, we're living in a year in which the figure is variable. I think this particular quarter was $12 billion, but they're investing between $10 and $15 billion per quarter on AI infrastructure. They purchased Activision Blizzard for cash, like I would go buy a Twinkie and their margins are up.

07:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is a company that is just like. The alternative is more share buyback up. It's like this is a company that is just like wait, you know there's a corollary to this is the alternative is more share buyback. Right, like you have to put this money to work, and I'd much rather you did this than just bought back shares. Yeah, and this is what a public company is supposed to do is put their money to work.

07:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This. So the the striking difference between Microsoft and, say, google, um, who also had a very similarly awesome quarter, is that Microsoft can attribute a lot of their earnings to AI a lot of it through Azure, of course and Google cannot. Google is all ads. You know, google is also building out AI infrastructure and it's weird because they we'll talk about this later too but they, they they really were in the lead until Microsoft decided to do the open AI thing and, you know, jumpstart it all, um, and now they're very much perceived as being behind and it seems it still seems. It's kind of weird to me, but a year later, it still seems like they're tripping on their own feet and hitting the rake in the face and all that stuff. So it's kind of an interesting comparison, but these are two companies that are just, you know, going gangbusters either way, like they're, yeah, or businesses are doing great.

08:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's not like Google's going out of business. No, just not. They're not innovating at the same rate Like I. It's. It's reflected in the share price share. The investment shareholder, the investment community knows the difference.

08:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I mean, I think that the ai behavior is rational in any way. Um, I mean rational, it's rational, I mean, I guess, from a financial perspective, in the sense that microsoft now has a decade of experience knowing what drives the stock price. You know, and they're they're pretty good at gaming, that I guess. Um, of course they have to deliver, and that's the whole thing. I mean, richard was the one who said this first last year. You know that this year is about actually implementing it. They're doing it right.

09:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I'm I'm building an interesting story arc on GitHub co-pilot now talking, going back to folks that are two years in and how they're changing, uh, and their, their behavior with it. They sort of we're getting over the rush. You know, I think I I feel the same, starting to feel the same way now as I did about the ipad two years in. You know where the ipad was going to be, everything the first year, and then it was just a thing and then it was, uh, when do I ever need to replace this? Like, yeah, you know, there's that sort of evolution and we're already seeing bits and pieces of it now, which is good, you know. It speaks to maturity, ok.

09:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean I, you know you could look back in the just the history of the computing industry personal computing and you see these moments where people are just denying things like most mouses and GYs or Internet access and pervasive connectivity. You know, no one's going to ever have fast enough connections for this to make any sense. Mobile devices as the primary PC yeah, exactly Never going to happen. And it's like you know, really. I mean, you won't find a bigger supporter of the PC than I am, but I'm glued to my phone like a teenage idiot.

10:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The relationship with the phone is completely different. And I'm still sitting here staring at all of this AI stuff going A terrible name and like literally an impediment to success. I argue. And B, is this a product or this is a feature of?

10:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
product. Yeah, that's actually. That's a very good point and I think that ties into the commentary we had earlier you know, months ago about there is no such thing as an AI killer app. It's a bunch of little things, right, and that's another way of saying a feature. You know of other things, right? So AI as a feature for the app you use maybe Microsoft Word, or AI as a feature for you know your web browsing and you want to summarize a document, or AI as a feature for whatever, right?

11:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah and again. Every time it becomes a useful product, you drop the AI a summarizer or an image recognizer or data analytics right.

11:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
As long as you call it AI, it's because it doesn't work Well yes, that's right, because, well, even I mean, look, even before this Microsoft had started referring to things like spell checking, grammar checking as AI right.

11:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It makes started referring to things like spell checking. Grammar checking is ai right, it makes it sound more impressive you know we're.

11:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're not just comparing a hash table, we are just just anyway. It's ai. Don't listen, everything was in the cloud, you know, and um yeah, so everything's ai. But uh, yeah, I mean I, I think I said this about ai, or yeah, I think it was ai. I said if you know, if everything is ai, then nothing is ai. Yeah right.

11:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
so, and again, to me that's also that signal of this is a feature that's going to integrate in other things, and it's just going to be an expectation that software is responsive this way.

11:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There is still kind of that disruption element to this, though, because I think Google is particularly vulnerable. If you know, we find alternatives to search Rather than building the next search engine. It's like, well, what if? What if it just wasn't search? What if it was something else? The same way that, for a long time, what Microsoft was worried about with Windows was what if the Mac? Or what if Linux, what if net PCs or netbooks and whatever it was, what if these things replace Windows? And it's like what if it's something that's not a PC, which I don't think a lot of people were ready for, but that's kind of what happened with the phone, right? So you know sometimes, well, this is what has to happen. I mean, it's not. You know, the innovation here is not going to come from or not. The innovation, the disruption, is not going to come from Google and search. It's not going to come from Microsoft on the desktop.

12:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean the disruption did come from Google and search 20 years ago right, that's what I mean.

12:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean now that they're established like the forces that led them to where they are are what you're really describing.

12:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Here is Microsoft pivots again.

12:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and here is double digit grow. Yes and again. Everyone knows yes, steve Jobs business case study. But I'm telling you, this company is like Jason Voorhees on Friday the 13th Every time you think they're gone, lightning strikes and he comes rising up out of the grave with a machete in his hand.

13:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And a bad attitude.

13:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so I mean not too many surprises in the quarter. Intelligent Cloud, which is Azure. Biggest business, by the way, I'll just point this out again biggest business by revenue. Also biggest business by growth, which is kind of you know.

13:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Again it speaks to it. And this time last year, or even before that we were talking about, growth rates in cloud are fading off. What are they going to do? Are they just going to say the market is maturing, nope, got a new product that runs on the cloud. Growth continues, that's right. And this strategy of bundling these different businesses together so that you can paint the numbers you want to paint, I know I'm not a fan.

13:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're talking about the Microsoft Cloud stuff, basically.

13:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, by the way, I changed Intelligent Cloud to now mean also the AI products.

14:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I didn't. I don't discuss this anywhere and I won't but other than here to mention very quickly that I I often exclude or not, do not discuss this thing, the Microsoft cloud, because it's invented. Uh, but I will say I could be wrong, but I think this was the first quarter they ever actually spelled out what it was like it was. It was always like a cherry picking of the best parts of Microsoft.

14:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I could have some good news.

14:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that sort of competed with AWS or Amazon or whatever Right, and this quarter they actually specified which, which products contributed to it, to the whatever figure they, whatever magic number they came up with again.

14:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Do you see that as enough confidence to say we are now a neck and neck, or at least, or ahead of AWS?

14:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But isn't that the implication? Yeah, maybe I. I wonder if it wasn't just investor confusion, because people look at the line numbers and they're like so you keep talking about this microsoft cloud thing, but where's this business? You know, like it's not a but why answer now?

14:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
people have been asking that for for 10 years. I don't, I don't know, I'm just. I'm just recognizing that this is all an act or you, you know, a legally constrained performance. Yes, well, you know, none of no decisions here are made by accident. They're all done very carefully.

15:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, I, I'm just, I'm saying is this first time I believe they've ever done it and I've never seen it, and that to me speaks to.

15:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
their numbers are good enough now that they're willing to share. Hmm, yeah, are good enough now that they're willing to share. Yeah, it could be.

15:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, Of course we still don't know the constituent percentages of each of those parts.

15:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, let's not get crazy.

15:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
now, mr Thurot yes, it's still pretty opaque. Productivity and business processes again number two 12% growth there, you know, almost $20 billion in revenues just by itself Incredible. Microsoft's continued use of the term Office 365 and their financial disclosures is, I know, but they used it. You can look it up. They used it, I mean, 25 times.

15:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it's crazy and then the case for that is because if you're going to Microsoft 365, then you're putting Windows revenue in there, and I don't think you want to that's okay, that's interesting, you know.

16:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then more personal, um, you know, uh. And then more personal computing, which is windows, and then all this other stuff that does terrible, uh. Well, no, it's not fair. Xbox has uh call of duty now. They're actually doing pretty well. If you pretend they don't make hardware, um is was, you know, brought up the rare, as always, um but I mean there are no losses here.

16:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, they have. This is the gerrymandering of financial reports.

16:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You have organized it so that everything has growth well, it depends on how granular you could get, and this is as granular as we can get. I think if we were to get into individual businesses like surface and xbox, you would see losses right, sure, um? There are short term losses associated with the activision Blizzard acquisition which are related to the transition. There are longer-term, or I would say more persistent losses tied to their hardware business, which has done horribly Like it somehow manages to keep doing worse. You know worse. You know um, but you know, I look, we could make a case for them not making console hardware, although I think that would have a whatever the opposite.

17:13
It's a strategic investment part there. Yeah, I think it'd be a big problem, um, and then also for surface right, and I I do want to sort of wonder if this isn't going to be a make or break year for surface. They've kind of um chipped away at that product leadership right?

17:26
yep, yeah, but it was a year ago that we saw the crazy yeah, and the year ago was them finally having that moment where they said we can't keep doing this? You know, and I I don't know this, but I suspect that panos panay leaving was some combination of him not being okay with these changes here and in windows, right, yeah, and uh, them just not being okay with these changes here and in Windows, right, yep, and them just not being okay with his continued inability to deliver. So I think I don't know, I'm just I actually don't know, so I shouldn't speculate, but I think it was some combination of those things.

17:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So now it's a smaller the man did deliver a bunch of great hardware over the years that never sold well. You know, that's the problem, and they weren't meant to right. They were supposed to be okay.

18:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
well then, I guess it was successful yeah, uh, they were expensive for what.

18:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They were right, but they certainly set the high water mark to give a room, room for the dells and others to make products that fit underneath there. Yeah, that was the kindest interpretation. I have the whole thing. Yeah, I'm not. I have I, I okay, I don't know, because you don't like server that you don't want microsoft to make the best laptop in the space from a price performance perspective, because then they're competing in their own ecosystem. Right, this is the business that bill always made. We make the software that runs on all the machines.

18:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this is a I I mean this is going to be an age old. There's no solution to this debate, right? There's no right side, like it's just Microsoft as a model.

18:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Microsoft's making so much money on cloud. They could lose $1,000 on every Surface device and they're not going to go broke, but they could totally sabotage the PC ecosystem in the process. Yes, right, okay, and probably run afoul of the doj as as the dells and lenovas of the world started screaming bloody murder. So they're not like I said, there's no, there's no.

19:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look I, I we're gonna constrain the in-house pc company because we don't want to compete with PC makers. Like, what are you doing, then? Why do you do this?

19:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, like it's kind of a Just set a high watermark to make sure the PC makers are making good PCs? Yeah, I'm not sure if they are setting a high watermark. I think that might be Now. That is a way more interesting question.

19:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like are you really um a type of device that, like that apple makes, is hugely successful on that side of the fence, and you bring it over the pc side and no one seems particularly interested in it, and, um, I do?

19:53
think you want a co-pilot button on a keyboard rather than negotiate with a dell you just make one putting a logo on a small piece of plastic, I think is a Microsoft wheelhouse Building high quality. You know? Premium PCs, Maybe not, I don't know. I will say I'm sort of emotionally pulling toward a Surface laptop myself, you know, I mean, that's where my head's at.

20:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm holding out. I've got my Surface Studio 2, which I do love, but I hadn't looked at those Snapdragon'sons, man, and going yummy, yummy.

20:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, paul, your review of the MacBook Air was pretty positive. Yeah, got a lot of traction too. I saw it on Tech Meme.

20:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It depends on who you talk to, Leo. You know some people react with horror, one way or the other.

20:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know. You didn't say it was perfect, so I'm going to hold that against you.

20:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's not. It's pretty close though.

20:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think it's the finest machine made today. Wow, and I am not in the Apple ecosystem.

20:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thanks for dividing some of the heat from Mr Thurot. That's good, now we can write down. No, the way I look.

21:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That the rot. That's good. Now we can write down the way I I look.

21:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That doesn't make it perfect, just my fine machine, my bonafide switcher. I'm not perfect even I mean. Okay, I don't know, have you seen your chair? It's pretty awesome, it's perfect. I can't see it. It's under him.

21:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm covering it might be entirely somewhat a little concerned, in fact maybe even overlapping it a little bit Like a tent.

21:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hopefully it doesn't expand or something it doesn't pop open like a tent.

21:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I got to talk to HR now. This is not the right time.

21:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What else you mentioned, amy Hood's comment that they're doing so good.

21:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that just was the most striking thing to me and that's a good point. I kind of said you know, does them coming clean about Microsoft Cloud show a certain confidence? Yeah, I think her saying that does for sure, you know. I mean, you don't say something like that unless you know things are going great. You know hard numbers are tough with Microsoft. I put some in my article. I didn't really put too many in the notes here, but you know over 60% of the Fortune 500 is using Copilot, whatever that means, it's not a hard number. But GitHub Copilot 1.8 million paid subscribers, 35% growth year over year that's a hard number, that's good. Bing has over 140 million daily active users. Wow, oh my God.

22:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, come on, come on. Who are these people? Well, that's probably Bing AI.

22:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It must be up right from previous. Yeah, I think it's their accounting usage of Bing through Copilot, of course. Yeah, so there's really not too much there. Activision Blizzard right now is kind of a mixed impact on them, obviously, but this is something that's going to deliver about $2 billion-ish of revenue every quarter.

22:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I wonder where they're going to stash that. Yeah, I remember reading. I mean, they've got a productivity group. Is this a non-productivity group? Are they sticking to personal computing? The fun? I don't know.

23:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The fun. It's the fun, it's where the fun starts. The party group.

23:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The party group, and other than Windows, PC, blah, blah, blah, Surface stuff, I mean. Double-digit growth in each of these businesses in the next quarter too, is the expectation. So everything's going great.

23:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's amazing, that's amazing.

23:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it is, it's crazy.

23:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, are they a $3 trillion company? Yet they are. They have been for a while. Yeah, yep, wow, it's just. Yeah. The scale is uh hard to comprehend. Yeah, I know, and, and they're doing well, that's the thing I mean, I think, better than even, frankly, better than apple don't tell the mac break weekly voice, but uh, they seem to have a more coherent you know I, I, this is a do.

24:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I say this. This is a terrible thing to say in a way, but because Apple is a huge company, they obviously know what they're doing, but there is such a belief in that world that there's a secret. Don't worry, we've been working on this AI stuff for a year. We're going to destroy. Everything else Remains to be seen.

24:21
This is like the Nazis have a secret weapon that's going to end the war, kind of theory, you know, like this almost religious belief that we can't be defeated, you know. So I think the truth is actually somewhere in the middle. I don't think they're all surrounds or they're going to fall apart or anything, but I think they have so much money and such a rich record of partnering successfully with other companies, I think they're going to be fine. It's hard to say that without laughing. I think they're going to be fine. It's hard to say that without laughing. I think they're going to be fine, obviously, and I like their on-device message. I think that's going to be a big chunk of it.

24:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're talking with OpenAI now. So the rumor a few weeks ago was they were talking with Google about Gemini and now they're talking about OpenAI. I bet you they offer a variety Google and now they're talking about OpenAI. I bet you they offer a variety. Google just shipped Gemini as a replacement, if you want, for Google's Assistant on its phones, that's right, which is kind of interesting. I like Gemini. Yeah, gemini, gemini, gemini, gemini. Right, I like Gemini. That's because you're a hippie, oh wait.

25:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What are we?

25:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
talking about. I don't use it for, like, writing letters. Yeah, I use it for prose, but it's great for coding Without any extra training. It really does a good job. Yeah, so I don't know?

25:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I'm not surprised. Yeah, I think Google's going to be fine, we're all going to be fine, everything's okay, yep, everything's fine. How are you? We're going to run.

25:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's talk about Intel, but first, but first actually, yeah, let's take a break and then we will talk about the other companies.

25:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There are others, Just cue the flushing sound as we start that segment.

25:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There are other companies and other earnings learnings to be had. But first let's talk about learning with ACI Learning, a show today brought to you by ACI Learning, a longtime partner and a great company. You know the name, I'm sure, because we mentioned it forever all the time of ITProTV, right? I mean, I'm not springing anything on you when I say that Well, itprotv is now ACI Learning and this is really great news for people who are in IT or want to be in IT or have an IT team Binge-worthy, video-on-demand IT and cybersecurity training the best there is. With ITPro, you get certification ready with access to their full video library. It keeps growing. Every time I check it's bigger. Now it's 7,250 hours, and this is not out-of-date old stuff. They're making new material every week.

26:54
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27:39
It Pro from ACI Learning makes training fun, and that's important too. When you've got a team and you say, okay, I've got 50 hours of training for you If they don't go, oh great. I'm thinking, oh, you know it's going to be like pulling teeth, but they love the IT pro training. It's engaging, produced in a talk show format. They call it edutainment. That's because their trainers are experts in the field. They're not book-learned, they're out there in the field doing this stuff. And, what's interesting, they have a real passion for it and I think that's what makes it great. It communicates, it makes you excited about what you're learning.

28:15
Take your IT career or your cyber career to the next level. Be bold, train smart with ACI Learning. If you're an individual, visit goacilearningcom slash twit and use the offer code twit30 at checkout. You'll save 30% on your first month or first year of IT pro training. That's big savings. Goacilearningcom slash twit. The offer code's twit30. Goacilearningcom. Slash twit and don't forget that offer code twit30. All right, let's talk about those other guys. There are other companies in the tech sphere, other guys, those other guys.

28:51
There sure are, and they all stink they all suck, I hate them all.

28:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I hate them all. Yeah. So we've seen, and we are going to see today, multiple indications that the PC market is making a little bit of a comeback this year, which is kind of nice, and Intel is one proof point for that their client computing group, which is responsible for microprocessors that ship in PCs. $7.5 billion in revenues up 31% year over year. Now, granted, last year was my call point.

29:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
When you're coming from the depths of darkness.

29:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, a little bit of light is a lot, yeah, and and relieving side, the quality of these actual chips, um, for now, uh, five million ai pcs have shipped with the new core ultra processors so far. They now expect to beat their previous forecast of 40 million by the end of 2024 do they really think the ai part is what's selling them?

29:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
or is it just because it's the next chip they now expect to beat their previous?

29:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
forecast of $40 million by the end of 2024. Do they really think the AI part is what's selling them, or is it just because it's the next chip out? We are overdue for a what do you call it a buying cycle, and I think that plays a bigger role. This is a big thing. I have a.

29:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think I'd link to it later, but yeah, this is certainly advice I gave on Run as for last year, which was hey, this is the year to talk to your CFO about not buying machines. Maybe get some extended warranties. Yes, everybody was jumpy. Well, it's a new year, man, and maybe it's time to buy. You know, those extended warranties are getting expensive too.

30:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're going to mention AMD briefly in a second, but you know Intel and AMD, their next gen chips, which next-gen chips, which Intel, in their case, says will ship in volume in the second half of this year, the core Ultra Gen 2 chips will finally offer the level of for lack of a better term AI acceleration or performance, whatever you want to call it in their MPUs.

30:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is killing me. This is the measure of.

30:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
PCs. We're going to get there I feel right now we're using incompleted, incorrect language but it will finally reach the level at which Qualcomm is at or will soon be at right with this first gen of Snapdragon Elite chipset. So, heading into 2025, I think we're going to be on kind of even footing there. It shouldn't surprise anybody listening to this that the first generation of anything is usually not quite there. You know it will quickly be surpassed by something that you know is refined or better in some way.

31:09
So I now have tested, or am in the process of testing, like all three what do you call it gen-con generations, but tiers of Intel's current gen Core Ultra, and the one thing they have in common is they're all pretty middling, honestly, and I don't mean just AI, I mean just across the board, right. So anyway, the problem for Intel is that, even though they did were profitable again for the first time in quite a while and they had a revenue gain year over year, they warned about the current quarter and I don't think anyone I mean, I'm not sure this is almost turning into steve jobs at next, where it's like a few your years in and you're like haven't these guys been telling the same story for a while, like what's? When's this going to turn around?

31:56
yeah, I'm gonna have a good news order at some point, right, it almost has to happen, right, surprise yeah, I mean I, I mean I'd have to go back and look and I'm too lazy to do this, but you know, Intel right now, by revenue, is still over twice the size of AMD, but weren't they like four times? I mean, like what's going on here? There's definitely a wave that has lifted Microsoft. That has not helped Intel on the hardware side, right, and a lot of that is self-determination. I mean, Intel had a bunch of strategic mistakes, I think. But anyway, here we are. The world has changed and they haven't really adapted to it yet. So we'll see what happens. Intel may if they are successful, it may ultimately work out that the way that they're successful is in building chips for other companies. Right, they might become that kind of backend, and you always, you hear this line every so often.

32:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It should just become a foundry, like they have TMSC. Tmsc envy, but I think most other companies envy the fact of you're the original CPU maker for crying out loud. Yeah, it's supposed to be the land of innovation. It's been a while.

33:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's been a while.

33:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This has come up with some other things I've been doing lately and I'm like listen, every time Intel has really innovated, come up with a new chip, design entirely, their customers have punished them for it. One would argue it's just because they've come up with bad designs, but at the same, their customers have punished them for it. Right, one would argue, it's just because they've come up with bad designs, but at the same time it's like there's a reason they've stuck on the x86 chipset.

33:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's the only thing they don't get crucified for each time they try and deliver. Yeah, They've had some good moments in there. I mean, I'm trying to think of one. There was the 8th gen where they doubled up the cores and that was fun, With no efficiency downside. That was good.

33:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know we haven't got any good ideas, let's just put in more.

33:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is the Intel playbook. This is the megahertz wars guys.

34:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, no these are the guys who invented the whole. You build for the next generation machine because you're going to get all this additional performance, Except for that part where you just stop being true.

34:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The world's moved on. This is the thing. The central argument that I find myself in these days is always with enthusiasts who can't accept that web apps make any sense, that simple things like Chrome OS make any sense. They're all like I want the cockpit of the 727. And I think that's the Intel world. You know, and it's like you know, most people are just using these fanless small mobile devices.

34:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And it's generally like they you're talking about them being just being trapped in the previous generation and still are they not going to modernize. Now they've got enough money and they certainly have enough spending.

34:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're getting help by the U? S government. Yeah, that works.

34:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a question of are they going to find their way forward? Yeah, I don't worry about any of these then these companies going broke today, but you're either. You're either finding a way forward or you're not, and really what I see in the Intel reporting is we haven't found our way forward.

35:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I I I don't have any issues with Pat Gelsinger. I think you know you're given the situation you have given. You know he looked at Intel and obviously almost I'm sure he really debated taking this job, understood it was going to be a huge challenge and I think he's doing the best he can do with. You know you go to war with the army. You get. You know, but you're kind of. You know it's just like anyone, like someone who takes over Windows today, for example. You know you're kind of stuck with the decisions from the past. You know there's not much you can do. You can't just turn on a dime and say everything's going to be different again because nobody cares. You know you got to transition. So I think they're doing what they can do. I just feel like, with Intel, I think we expected it to happen a little more quickly and it's starting to wear. You know.

35:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's just going to these things take a long. These deaths come slowly, right, yep, and there's plenty of opportunities to right the ship right. You think about IBM's transformation to a services company? Not that I think it became, you know, as wildly relevant as they once were, but they know how to make money.

36:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, that's the thing. They're a stable, money-making machine that nobody cares about. But you know, fine, that's fine. You know, companies like Intel and Microsoft are like this. They rode this wave of fame and success. Right, not just success, but fame. And they, you know, they want to be the center of attention still, and it's like, you know, no offense, but you guys are kind of like plumbing. We've moved on. So it's not a horrible future if you can make money doing it, but it's not like the past.

36:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and I definitely feel like they're burdened by this instruction set and this architecture that just have not had the nerve to shake off, and we're at the cusp now where a new architecture is able to emulate them faster and they can run their own stuff.

36:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So was it the Z80? That was just the mainstream normal version of the Z80 that just went out of production. The Zilog chip. They were still making Z80s. They were, I believe, until like last week, what? So here's the thing.

36:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like I this will be the light bulbs or something. Yeah.

36:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like the, the Motorola or the not. What do you call it? The, not Motorola? The? What is it called? The 6502, whatever, that is yes.

37:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
MOSFET, mosfet, mosfet, the MOSFET, mos.

37:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know same thing like just decades of life. You know well past the point where it's kind of famous for being in personal computers whatever. There's no doubt that the x86 will outlive all of us in some capacity. It's the cockroach of the microprocessor world.

37:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's in the instruction set of the AMD.

37:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but as far as it being relevant, you know, we might have already, I think, peak Intel, peak x86, we'll call it. It's probably a long time ago, right? I don't even want to think about that. That's kind of scary, but I think we're moving on here.

37:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We've hit peak x86.

37:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wow, yeah, well, I think we possibly hit that way past 2002 or something I don't even know. I'd have to really think about that. What does it even mean? Well, I mean, the PC market peaked in what? 2011,.

37:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think yeah 2011. That'd be the peak it's got to be 300-something there was got to be.

38:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, 300-something. There was going to be a day when there were 500 million PCs sold a year. Yeah, you know, wow. But now there are phones and tablets and you know, I don't know, you could apologize and say well, those are computers too. Okay, relax, you know what we meant.

38:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean, there's so much computing in everything now that, of course, these legacy nodes will live forever. It's probably, though I have to say, a 6502 is much better as an embedded processor.

38:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That was its original intent anyway, yeah, and there's a simplicity to it that makes it very attractive. It's known to be reliable, right? You know, the Voyager out in space there's probably using one of those kind of chips it's probably you know one of the reasons these things work right, because thank god it's not running and they would have had like a penny and flaw. We would have discovered it when it was up by saturn.

38:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, like I like oh there's no floating point anymore, sorry, yeah.

39:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, yeah, so right, exactly. We'll just disable that part of the chip, yeah.

39:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're roughly 60 trillion miles away.

39:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. And then you know the other side of the x86 coin, amd Also, you know, not great. I mean almost flat earnings. Honestly, I think it was a 2% gain. Yeah, 2% revenues. Honestly I think it was a 2% gain, right. Yeah, 2% revenues $5.5 billion. Their PC business, though again they tanked. They had a massive loss a year ago, but their revenues are up 185% right, almost doubled right $1.4 billion. So they are also touting AI, accelerated, in their case Ryzen. Whatever they are 8,000, I think series chips X. Number of partners are going to deliver AI PCs based on these processors by the end of the year. They're doing great.

39:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They also have an ARM node, don't they? I mean, I know Intel says they do, but I think AMD really does, doesn't it, don't they, I think?

39:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it didn't. If Intel does, this is new, because they actually at one point Intel dropped ARM.

40:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh yeah, they actually stopped licensing. Oh, never mind.

40:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Never mind. Yeah, yeah, amd could, yeah, for sure. In fact, I'm going to be honest, I kind of expected them to go ARM at some point. I'm surprised you don't hear more about that, but anyway. But AMD, like Intel, will have a next-gen AI PC-based microprocessor that will be competitive from an MPU perspective with what Qualcomm has, which is like saying you have a Maserati that will be competitive from a steering wheel perspective with a Volkswagen Beetle, but whatever you know, they'll get there. So that's fine. And then the rest of that company is not doing that Well. Their data center stuff is doing actually very well. Their data center stuff is bigger than their PC stuff. Actually, amd is, so that's good. Thanks to GPUs, right? So they used to sell a lot of gaming GPUs. Now they sell a lot of data center GPUs. And what the hell is this world we're living in? What happened?

40:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's so weird.

40:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just so different. Like I said, alphabet, google, which is google, right, I mean google being 105 of alphabet's revenues. Uh, 105 rather uh, 80 billion dollars revenue is bigger than microsoft 23 billion in net income. Those are also double digit gains. Not quite as big on the revenue side, but 15.4 still good. Um, what is the figure here? 77, 77 of their revenues came from advertising. Wow.

41:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, so a one-product company.

41:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, yep, that is the ultimate definition of a one-product company. It's brutal. But you know, google Cloud keeps growing really well 28% this quarter, 9.6 billion in revenues Not bad. And then they this seems fairly new to me, but Google subscriptions, platforms and devices which may reflect that new reorg right. 8.7 billion in revenues. No word on profitability there, but nobody cares.

41:55
And then you know, they didn't really talk too much about AI, other than talking about how great AI was. Right. This is one of those things like Amazon does this. They talk a lot about like milestones and things that they did in the quarter and it's like, yeah, but how much did you make from the Kindle? You know they don't really do that. So Microsoft was very explicit about AI. Google was not. Amazon makes more money than God. We all know that. Much lower, but at much lower margins. Yeah, that's right. I remember it cost them a full 45 cents, uh, on average to ship something to you. So, uh, they're doing great. You know, amazon, they're going to be a business case study. It's unbelievable. Um, they are. You know they had their own challenges 2 billion non-operating loss associated with that rivian. Uh, investment doesn't matter. 10.4 billion in profits, $143.3 billion in revenues. Are you kidding me?

42:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's your cash flow.

42:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, 17% growth. It's doing awesome. So that is now. They call this a. It's not really a $100 billion company, but they're on a $100 billion annual run rate, which is a cute way of saying. In one quarter they made $25 billion. So if you multiply that by four, it's a run rate. See, it's $100 billion. So it's not really, but maybe it will be next year. We'll see that's a good idea.

43:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's the idea, right, I mean, that's what it means. That's what it means.

43:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the number. And then blah, blah, blah Store's doing great, by the way, their advertising business. Huge 24% growth, of course. Yeah, actually that's the big one, isn't?

43:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it.

43:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah. Microsoft and Amazon, both are like we can do this. Why aren't?

43:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we doing this Ads are good.

43:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Ads are money. Well, ads are easy money, right. So that thing's growing faster than stores, growing faster than AWS. It's awesome. It's almost like it's not quite free money, but isn't it? So they're going gangbusters. There's not a lot of hard data from Amazon. A lot of froofy customers are excited about something. Who cares, I don't know they're, they're they're. If you could condense their earnings announcements down to three sentences that have dollar signs on them, it's nothing. No, it's ridiculous. Like it's they're. They're impossible to read. In fact, I should use AI for that. Summarize this and only use the sentences that have dollar signs. It'd be three sentences. I guarantee it'd be nothing. And then Samsung not a big deal here, but they've rebounded as well. They obviously overtook Apple last quarter and their phone and memory businesses are doing great, Doing great, so they're going to have new flagships, more AI, blah, blah, blah. All this stuff, Everything you would expect, Lovely, All right. What's the show called? Again Windows, let's do.

44:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Windows. Let's do some.

44:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Windows stuff. Here let's talk about Windows.

44:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So we're starting to it's not always earning season.

44:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's just usually earning. It feels like it is always.

44:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It feels like it is always. It feels like we do this like every three months. You're writing about this.

44:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Are you kidding me? This is like torture for me. I don't remember what day this is. The other day I finished up late doing something. I think my wife was heading out to go to the gym or whatever. I'm like I'm going to work on the book. It's going to be nice.

44:54
I cracked open my laptop. I think it was Google. Uh, oh, it was a Google. It was last year, google, microsoft. I'm like, oh, and it was like other companies too, like Roku and a couple of Spotify or a couple of others, and I was like this is like.

45:09
I ended up working past the time she got home, you know. It was just like, yeah, end of the quarter, everything is ruined. Yeah, it's. I know it's coming and that happens and it's like a surprise Anyhow.

45:22
So we've been dribbling, or we haven't been, but Microsoft or sources, rumors, whatever. There's been a bunch of information about 24H2. So this is a part of the company that is particularly non-transparent. But back in February, through the Insider Program, they said hey, by the way, this thing you're testing now in dev and at the time Canary, is 24H2. It's the next feature updates coming later in the year. Since then we've learned a lot more about it. It's still kind of dribbling out, but it's starting to come together and I think a week or two ago, whatever it was, we talked about this kind of staged rollout where part of it's going to happen in time for these new Snapdragon-based PCs and then the other part of it's going to happen in the second half of the year at the normal schedule. So there'll be a 24-inch too, and then they'll keep adding to it.

46:07
You know, because nothing matters anymore. Versions don't mean anything, it doesn't matter. So that's me coping with it. So let's just leave it there and the stuff we're getting in the short term is small and the stuff we're getting in the term is on. You know, it's on, it's fuzzy and I think we're going to learn more at build.

46:25
Um makes sense. But yeah, we learned, uh, or we're learning through some like people like zach boden, etc. That there are. There's an ai explorer feature coming which to me is very vague and I don't quite understand it. You might have heard this rumor that it might be exclusive to qualcomm. I'm actually wondering if it might be exclusive to Qualcomm. I'm actually wondering if it's not exclusive to a certain level of performance that, as the AMD and Intel and PUs get up to speed that they'll be allowed into this world, that the current ones just don't work. You got to be 45 tops or something. Yeah, that's what I'm just guessing on that one. But it doesn't make sense to me that they would make anything exclusive to a product line that to date has sold seven copies and exclude the volume part of the market.

47:05
You need to beat this AI to play this AI, exactly Like a ride at the park, yeah, yeah, I think there's something to that. And then I read the description of this and I have no idea what we're talking about anymore. So this is like if you thought AI was already unnecessary and unwanted on your computer. How do you feel about something that will run in the background all the time, capture everything you do, create memories for you, like OneDrive does now with your photos? You can search for anything you've done using natural language, which I take to mean like a chatbot type thing, like we have now with Copilot, and what did I just describe? I don't even know what that is.

47:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you've described M365 Graph, except now running in your machine locally.

47:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and this is. You know. This is a problem, I guess, for Microsoft for lack of a better term that you know, in the commercial space, they do have the graph right and we'll get onto some Microsoft 365 stuff, but I can assure you that the April update for Copilot and Microsoft 365 is all about the graph right. I mean, this is grounding AI, et cetera, et cetera. It's a lot harder to do this for individuals, which is why they're pushing OneDrive so hard on people. It's why they're pushing this new outlook so hard on people. If they can get you into the little ecosystem here, they'll have a lot more data to work off of, right. Yeah, and they'll know more about you and, um, you know right now, microsoft knowing more about you says a lot of to me. It's a lot about, uh, advertising and it sounds terrible tracking and all the stuff you don't want in windows, you know. So I'm not sure how people are going to react to this.

48:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean the happy part of this is the viva email. Right when you're in m365 you get an email every so often. It's saying hey you know how you said to so-and-so that you do that thing by the end of the day. Did you do it? Because I never saw the email of you following me and I would have seen it, because I'm looking at everything, because I'm watching everything.

48:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I mean, just cue up the sting song there, paul.

48:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is what we were talking about. If Windows was going to be the hub, it's because it can see across all applications, not just Microsoft.

49:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah you're right. So when Cortana was briefly a thing in Windows, I went through a three-month period where I got a lot of complaints from people who were like, what is this thing? It needs all these permissions, why would I do this? And I'm like I don't know. You click the button. It's a personal assistant. I mean, by nature it needs to know about you, right, that's how it is. You don't want this person knowing what you're doing with your calendar. They can't be your assistant.

49:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's the, that's the point, right, and and that kind of came when you know cortana obviously didn't take off on the desktop, so it wasn't really a big take off anywhere, but you know, except maybe in um, in the video game, uh, right, right and, and even there she went insane, yeah, and tried to kill everybody.

49:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, the AI meme returned A great name to use for something you want people to use in their houses.

49:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But calling it AI Explorer doesn't make it better.

49:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's a terrible name. No, explorer, what does that mean? Like Explorer, like we're doing, like a?

50:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Who's exploring?

50:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
who here? What are we examining here exactly, I mean? So I think this is going to rub people the wrong way, based on everything I've seen so far from people and their reactions to AI. So we'll see how they market this.

50:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's got to be packaged as an assistant of some kind, and so, yes, it needs all of those rights. What you described is essentially the issue. The real challenge here is presenting the benefit.

50:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what I mean, like you have to right, you have to exactly. We're going to see how they do that and I. The problem is, for this to work, it kind of has to be not so much opt-in as just in you know, and no one's going to like that. Well, the question is Not so much opt-in as just in you know, yeah and no one's going to like that.

50:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
When you say AI Explorer, are you thinking alternative to File Explorer?

50:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Because that is the interface by which most things get to you. That's not what it sounds like. No, this is a back and forth.

50:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, because File Explorer has been going really well lately. I don't know if you've been listening to the show, but I don't remember.

50:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Remember when people used to complain, a Windows computer and you would stop doing anything, like you stopped typing and then all of a sudden the hard drive would spin up and the light would come on and they were like, what is this thing doing? What is it doing? And it was this huge conspiracy thing. It's sending information to the Russians. It's like whatever it is, and what it was doing was indexing your drive, because when you weren't using the computer, it would, you know it would do that. So this is kind of the new version of that, right, I mean, in that case it was nothing, I mean it was to your benefit. I mean, honestly, it worked logically, like do it when the person's not using the computer, don't impact performance. But we live in a different age, right, I mean, we have infinite processing power. This thing is, I don't know, I don't know. And look, I suppose to some, some degree you'll be able to, if not turn this off, at least minimize the data collection, right, yeah, but I mean, I don't even care about minimizing it.

51:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Show me what you know right, yeah, well, this is what the gdpr got right back in the day was the. What do you know about me? I get that you're indexing, but show was the. What do you know about me? I get that you're indexing, but show me the index. What do you know?

52:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep. So if you go up to your Microsoft account page, your site accountmicrosoftcom, and go to the privacy section, you can see the information that Microsoft has collected about you through Bing, through edge, through windows, whatever and you can, you can delete it, can delete it, you can do different things with it. You can't stop them from collecting it. But you can go in manually and say, okay, whatever is there now is gone. So there is that. I think there'll be something like that. I would assume.

52:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, there'll have to be something like that for this.

52:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it's not a right to be forgotten, it's a right to delete what we already collected. But we're going to keep collecting.

52:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're not going to stay forgotten. You just you know it's like we're meeting for the first time. Let's go collect all your data again.

52:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is a fun little game I play with the Dropbox promotion app that's on so many PCs. I right-click it and say uninstall, right, and then I wait for two seconds and I watch it reappear in the start menu and then I say right click on install and it went a few seconds and it comes back and it's like, yeah, you know, for those two seconds I got exactly what I wanted. It was fine. I don't know why I'm so unhappy. It's a little bit like that.

53:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So, like I said, we'll see there's not enough information yet, and of course we have not was wondering where this was. So I'm feeling like, okay, somebody's trying, yeah, because windows did have an opportunity to be important here. It may be late, uh, and but they, you're also getting that sense of they are feeling around.

53:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's why it's in the insider program, because they just don't know what they want, I feel like a lot of my readers have got their finger poised above an eject button and they're just waiting for what they consider to be the final insult, and it's going going to be related to AI. I think it's really. It's like you know the tracking when you say something like we're going to look, we're going to track what you do with windows, and the reason is it's not nefarious. We want to make windows better for everybody, so this is a way we can see if there are common problems, and if there are, we'll fix them. And okay, I mean like on some vague theoretical level, this sounds fine.

54:04
You know, a lot of people still don't like it. I mean, and I do agree. I mean, even if you have to jump through some hoops, you should be able to turn that off. But because most people wouldn't right, but they don't give you that, and it's like, okay, it's vaguely behavior that leads to this. Right, it's like we got so good at this telemetry thing. We're going to, we're going to like, pile that data into this and they can even say stuff. I bet they'll say stuff like the data we collect in you doesn't leave the machine. Well, how could it not, though it has to go to your Microsoft account.

54:35
I don't know, we'll see what happens, but it's I'm not nervous about this for me, like I don't. I mean, I don't know enough yet to care, but uh, I'm, I'm, I'm just seeing how people are reacting to things. Already I'm thinking this is going to be a bridge too far for some people.

54:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, I wonder, but you know, eject to where is I got to think we you know what Apple's upcoming AI offering. Do you think it's going to be different than this?

55:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I mean it will probably be more on device and they do have that. I'm not saying it's real, but they do have that. You know, what stays in your iPhone, or what happens in your iPhone, stays in your iPhone.

55:12
It goes to iCloud and occasionally gets leaked. Yeah, it stays on your iPhone. I don't know why we have the answer for everybody. No. Is chromebook an answer for everybody? No, is linux an answer for anybody? No, I mean, but yeah, I mean I the. The fact that we're kind of stuck with windows is not the message I want to send anybody, but I mean I, you know well, and these things tend to do best when they do have competition and an actual threat. And uh, I don't know yeah, I don't.

55:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know if they and again it's like is this going to provide us, as the customer, some advantage, or is it just another way to harvest our data for their income?

55:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I. It's impossible to hear that and not think it's the latter Right. I mean I'm not trying to be cynical, but I mean we've already seen them go down this path right.

56:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is what happened with edge, that's right?

56:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, exactly. Um, yeah, I just don't get me started on it. I've been updating the book for edge and I'm this is you think Edge is even worse? It's brutal. I love Edge because it abuses you when you choose to use it. That's the.

56:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There are alternatives.

56:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You think it's bad when you chose Chrome and it still berates you. Just choose Edge and watch it still berate you. It's a perfect example of an abusive relationship. A couple of points from the Insider Program. There was a beta channel build last week and not much going on there, although they are fixing the file. What do you call it? The address bar issue, right, where they replaced it with that WinUI control and now you can't drag files to it. So that's going to be fixed and they call those. If you think about the path that appears in the address bar, those segments it's called a breadcrumb. They used to call it a breadcrumb bar, in fact, I think that was the name of it at one point internally. But each of those, each folder on the way to the current folder, is a breadcrumb, right? No-transcript? I think that screwed people up and that's most widgets and stuff. Who cares? Um, I think last week we talked about a dev channel build where, um, whatever happened happened, but since, since that thing came out, now this is 24 H two, right, this is the, the 26, 100, uh series build numbers.

57:53
Now, this is what's going to be that first release of 24 H two, and a bunch of people have noticed that all of the local account work around string setup don't work anymore, right? This is the NRO stuff, the you know hello or whatever, the fake Microsoft account, blah, blah, blah, whatever the Rufus stuff, right? So I spent a good chunk of the weekend working with this and what I discovered was that, yes, it's true, those workarounds like the ones I published in the book will stop working in 24-H2. They're not getting rid of local accounts. I mean, at the very least, you'll always be able to sign in with an MSA, create a local account, sign in with that and then never use the MSA again. You could delete it whatever. That will always work. I don't really see a world in which local accounts go away. But talk about eject buttons. That's going to be a big one for people if that ever happens.

58:45
But there is another workaround that does work, and I believe this works today too, but only in pro. So in pro, when you set it up, you have a choice to configure for a personal or work or school account. The personal one is an MSA, obviously. But even if you intend to use a local account now, you can choose the work one and then there's actually a screen where you say choose another way. Whatever the link says, you just click the little link that says another way to sign in. You just create a local account. It just works. So that's there. At least it's not going to help people on home.

59:24
I do think that we're going to see other workarounds and they'll be formalized into tools like Rufus and so forth, so I wouldn't stress too much over that. The new Teams client, the Unified Teams client, is there. It's super buggy and terrible, but it is there. And then some minor changes like quick what do you call it quick settings. You can scroll through all the little buttons in there. It used to be one screen only and now you can scroll through. Spotlight is on the desktop by default. That's kind of fun if you like that stuff. I mean nothing big. So I think the 24-inch 2 release we get initially the one for the Qualcomm stuff is going to be a fairly minor update and then the big stuff happens the second half of the year.

59:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's starting to unfold and, like I said, we probably know more in the build time frame. We should take a couple more weeks. That's exactly right.

01:00:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and I don't know, it was a week or two ago. I mentioned Tiny11 Builder, which is a PowerShell script written by NTDev, the guy who did Tiny11 and other things before that. That basically turns off as much of Windows 11 before you set it up as possible. But the goal of having a smaller footprint right, which is not a huge issue for me and I don't think for most people right. I mean, most people just have super powerful computers with more stuff than they need. But I do think there's a GUI probably coming here and an option People will work.

01:00:35
Because it's a PowerShell script, anyone could edit this. I could say like, look, I want this thing, but I do want Clipchamp installed or whatever. It might be right. But when I evaluated it and I compared it to my checklist of things that were wrong with Windows 11, it didn't solve any of the big problems. These are the forced OneDrive and edge usage stuff and he is working on it. He actually he was nice enough to. He kind of chimed into my in on my comments, which I liked, but he has since updated it and has in fact addressed one of those Windows 11 and certification issues which is telemetry related. This thing will not send data back to Microsoft. Now would Microsoft update your computer in two seconds to fix that problem. Of course, this is like the Cold War.

01:01:24
Yeah, we're going to go back and forth on that one for a long time. But the point is he's finding this stuff and he's looking very explicitly at certain issues to see if he can fix those, a lot of them having to do with the harassment stuff where pop-ups are coming up and so forth. So it's a good tool and I think it's about to get it's. It's gotten a little bit better and I think it's going to get a lot better over time. So it's something I'm going to keep looking at because, uh, I I still I maintain I use tiny 11, the predecessor to, to build out a laptop using windows 11 without edge, and I keep that thing up to date. I use it and edge has. Edge has not reappeared, it's. It's just an experiment for me. I don't really care if Edge is there, but that one's been working fine. He's doing God's work.

01:02:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you have to have an ISO? How does?

01:02:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it work. You get to download the ISO and then it yeah. So the problem with Tiny11 was that he used Microsoft's kind of deployment tools to create his own custom ISO, and you've got to be careful with that kind of thing, right? You don't know what you're getting. I mean, I do trust this guy, but I can't tell anyone else to trust him.

01:02:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's not a good way to deliver stuff.

01:02:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's not so. The way this works is you download the stock ISO from Microsoft and then you run a PowerShell script against it to create a custom version and you can read the code. So if you, I think it's great, just look at the code. Nice yeah, and you could customize it to your own needs.

01:02:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a decrapifier from the command line. Yeah, yeah.

01:02:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like a pre-crapifier it does it before you install it.

01:02:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I love that it doesn't?

01:02:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's a good idea.

01:02:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I might wipe this drive and start over.

01:02:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I was thinking about this machine needing a wipe.

01:03:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's the older one yeah, I spend half my time every week doing this kind of thing. This is all I do is install Windows. I install Windows more than I use Windows. At this point, it'd be nice if it used.

01:03:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Winget and kind of built the system, took out everything and then used Winget to build it up and you could have a whole deployment.

01:03:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's lots of room for improvement at every step of this way and then used WinGet to build it up and you can have a whole like deployment. There's lots of room for improvement at every step of this way. Honestly, I'd like to see some automation with WinGet for updating and I'd like to see some WinGet-based configuration stuff.

01:03:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is WinGet scriptable at all?

01:03:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I mean, I do have scripts that I use that run WinGet as a command in the script. Is that what you mean? Like a you can put it in a script.

01:03:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean yeah but you can't like it's not. You can't break it down to smaller molecules.

01:03:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean it has constituent, you know commands and so forth. Okay, yeah, Sounds like it is. Yeah, that should just be part of the system, right? I mean that should be a.

01:04:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, let's take a time out and come back. We have lots more to talk about. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thorat and Richard Campbell, our show today brought to you literally brought to you by Cachefly. For over 20 years, Cachefly has held the track record for high-performing, ultra-reliable content delivery, serving over 5,000 companies in over 80 countries. We're one of them. We've been using Cachefly practically since the beginning. We are in our 20th year now and I think it was only about two or three years in, maybe even not even that long before I was howling I need help and Matt Levine of Cachefly, one of the founders, came to me and he said I can help. And he did, and we are still with Cachefly, our content delivery network.

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01:06:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I've lost track. What planet is this?

01:06:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Microsoft 365.

01:06:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're at M365.

01:06:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, Well this one's good because it's a little bit of both. So this is the third month where Microsoft has provided a kind of monthly all-up. Here's what's new in Copilot for Microsoft 365. Most of the features they talk about are actually coming in the coming months. Some of them have just been made available in the previous month or are just that day becoming available, but most of this stuff is happening in May and a lot of it is grounding based.

01:07:25
And to richard's point earlier is kind of how you see copilot as a feature of microsoft 365, right? Um, you have copilot chat inside of outlook, and this is all versions outlook, don't freak out, it's not just the new one. It works in classic outlook, outlook on the web, etc. Oh, and I should say this is commercial microsoft 365, not the consumer version. Um, because that's the only place you can get co-pilot, right? Uh, well, you know, that's where you get co-pilot for microsoft 365. Obviously we have co-pilot pro, but, um, grounded chat, uh, grounded to the microsoft graph, in other words, grounded to your organization, so you can go in and ask it questions or get information. That does not involve the internet or anything out in the world, it's just stuff inside of your company chats, emails, files, et cetera. So there's going to be a lot of this stuff and, I think, a lot of fine tuning of this stuff.

01:08:16
Copilot, grounded to local data that's very interesting, right. So apparently I don't have the commercial version, but I guess you can already do this for data stored in OneDrive or OneDrive for business right or SharePoint, but starting in May they're going to allow you to also include locally stored files on your computer as well. So, again, you're doing whatever you're doing with Copilot and it will take that stuff into account, rather than working off of some global, global data source. Same thing with Microsoft Word. Right, there's some efficiency stuff coming. It's a long list of stuff, but basically you're writing a document and you can ask it questions that are grounded to the graph. In other words, does this meet our corporate standards? Is this violating any you know NDA information? Whatever it might be, it will take into account anything that's in the Microsoft graph. So this is like just everywhere. Like it's kind of it's very interesting.

01:09:07
I can't say that, looking through this list, I mean, none of this is particularly exciting, but it's all very kind of pragmatic stuff. You know a lot of commercial data protection stuff. You want to make sure that this thing is secure, it works properly, et cetera. They're kind of expanding the reach of the product so that you can access Copilot not just in any app but also, like you have the Copilot mobile app, it can be grounded to your work data and also make sure that that doesn't get out into the world, all that kind of stuff. So it's all you know. It's that basically, separately, they co-pilot for microsoft 365 coming to 16 more languages, um, including klingon, and no, no, it was uh, you know whatever, and uh, like all the stuff you would expect, no big deal there.

01:09:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um, it is one of the strengths of llms right, it's the tokenization strategy.

01:09:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Makes it very naturally multilingual yep and it and it's going to be 17 very soon it actually works with. There's two Chinese right, is it like mainland and whatever traditional, so both work. One is supported, but the other will be supported this month. It's just that they have some fine tuning to it. They don't want to officially support it, but if you want it, you can enable it. It's there and you can enable it. It's there, and you know that stuff can only get better. Right, this one. I'm curious. I have been wondering why we don't have offline capabilities and what I still think of as the office web apps. Right, the web versions of the word Excel and PowerPoint, especially right, I guess, exclusively, actually, I. That seems like a curious limitation, one that maybe is on purpose, right, but they recently. Microsoft recently redesigned the OneDrive web app for both commercial and consumers, obviously same backend, just like with the OneDrive app in Windows. And now, on the commercial side, they are this month enabling offline capabilities in OneDrive for the web, including files on demand what is?

01:11:13
the use case. I guess in the commercial space, with a BYOD scenario, you could have a user who is on their own computer and doesn't want to or can't whatever it is, maybe it's insecure to install the OneDrive client. I'm trying to imagine what the point is. But you use the web app instead of the file system integration. I suppose if you're using a Chromebook this would help, right, because it doesn't have sync there, or Linux, but I don't know if anyone listening just has an idea. I'm trying to understand what the use cases are like, why they would do this, but also why they would do this first as opposed to like Word, excel, powerpoint. But now I'm wondering, actually, after the story had been I didn't write the story, laurent wrote the story but after I kind of went through this, I thought, you know, maybe this is the first step toward what I just described that to get these kind of document-based applications, web applications, to work properly capable versions of the web, versions of Word, excel and PowerPoint that only work offline in any meaningful way. If you're using OneDrive, right, instead of like saving to your local disk, and plus, that'd be easier from a data protection standpoint to protect those documents. Maybe that's it. I'm just speculating. I actually don't know, but I'm confused about what the use case is for a web app version of a cloud storage service having offline capabilities. Like I don't quite get it. I refuse to believe it's to make Chromebooks better, but maybe I mean, I don't know, maybe to make Chromebooks better, but maybe I mean, I don't know, maybe I will say in a random coincidence, google last week, late last week I guess, announced better, I'm thinking of this as OneDrive, but it's really better integration with the Microsoft 365 web app, which is the thing you get when you go to officecom, right, and these are those web versions of Word, excel and PowerPoint I was just talking about. They do some work on the Chrome OS end, that when you install that web app, you go through a little wizard and it kind of connects everything up and it allows you to, among other things, access your OneDrive folders from the Files app in Chrome OS, right. So it kind of feels a little native and you can choose when you open a file which application you want to open it. It could be like Google Docs or it could be Microsoft Word, the web, right. There's no offline capability, there's no sync, there's no. No, that's not true. You could actually. I think you can make. I think not 100% sure, but I believe you can make OneDrive files available offline, but there's no broad sync capability. But you can choose and it will open in the you know the word or whatever web app. You have to be online, right, cause they don't support offline.

01:14:09
Maybe the feature I just talked about with on the Microsoft end and this thing will someday combine to make the office web apps, as I refuse to not call them usable offline on a Chromebook, which would be a whole brave new world, right, yeah? Yeah, maybe, I don't know. I can't explain it. I used it though. It works. It works good. It's a goofy handoff, though, because if you have a, like I say, a Word document on your local disk on the Chromebook, or it's in Google Drive which you can access to the Chromebook in the Files app, and you open it and you say I want this to open in Word, it will save a copy to OneDrive, because that's the only way that Word or web works, which explains what I said earlier.

01:14:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're sort of doing sync between the yeah, it's not even sync.

01:14:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't think there's sync, it just copies it Like it's a one-way copy. Yeah, yeah, because if you edit that document, you're not getting the edits back to the original.

01:15:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Which that's problematic, right? If you don't make that clear to someone and they're used to working in Google Drive then all of a sudden it's like, well, I made these edits, where are they?

01:15:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And, by the way, further problematic and anyone who's used OneDrive has run into this at one point or another. That thing saves to the root of your. If you're OneDrive, you can't change it Like there's. No, it's not Google's fault, it's just the way this stuff works. Like it's kind of goofy. So just like we used to have crap in our C drive like the root of C, now we have that stuff in the root of OneDrive and it's like we all have that document, document one you know like everyone. This happens to everybody. Like, if you ever like stooped using the Office web apps, you run into this problem. It's kind of strange. I mean you can from there change the location. This is a little ponderous.

01:15:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, but the next time you do it it's going to put it back, yeah.

01:15:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I mean, I think, I know, rather I know you could, if you open this thing in Word for web, as I think of it, you can click on it and then, from and from there put it in a different location. But Google can't do anything but copy it to the root. There's no version of a dialogue or something, or setting a default path, or whatever I mean.

01:16:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
the joke, of course, is only old people care about the hierarchy of files, right? Young people are just like store it.

01:16:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'll search. No, I know this is how the iPad has ruined the earth, you know.

01:16:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is just you can't even look at files. Google was firmly there too, right?

01:16:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, gmail did this.

01:16:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, look, I guess this is my old man moment. You know the yeah.

01:16:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
In my day we organized our files. That's right. In my day I do this now. There was a hierarchy.

01:16:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't edit files, I organize files. What's wrong with you, you know? Yeah, no, I know, I know, so I could find them again.

01:16:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You don't use search. Search doesn't work. Okay, well, I will say you know.

01:16:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Google proof with Gmail in a way that the search can work. And I don't have enough experience on the Google Docs side, but I suspect that's the theory there.

01:17:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Don't worry about it. In my experience with Google Docs working with certain companies, unless you send me the link, I cannot find the file because I have a hierarchical nature that goes looking for stuff. Yeah, we're dinosaurs, we're going to die out eventually. No one's going to care anymore. You know the asteroid can't come soon enough. Honestly.

01:17:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I agree with you. This just came up today. So as part of the US the Google antitrust case, they released some evidence publicly and one of them is an email that Kevin Scott said. It might not be the first email, I mean, based on some wording it might not be no this is the very first, but this is the pitch email I'd heard.

01:17:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I heard about this more than a year ago.

01:17:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's fascinating. It is. I don't know how big it is because most of it's redacted, but from a sort of a volume perspective it's probably it's like 80 percent redacted, so it's not a lot.

01:17:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's mostly about Guthrie strategy yeah.

01:18:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But? But the central premise here is that Kevin Scott, he wrote this to Bill Gates and Satya Nadella and then Satya Nadella forwarded it to Amy Hood. But the basic premise is I didn't think this was a threat. I didn't think this was a threat. Oh God, this is a threat and we are way behind Google when it comes to these language models and it's a huge problem. And, uh, it lit enough of a fire that obviously 13 billion dollars happened and now this is the email that led to the billion.

01:18:34
This is his version of a an internet, uh title wave memo totally or the secure computer, yeah, I can't. Yeah, someday we're going to see the whole thing, but even the small bit we get to see today, it's very clear.

01:18:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And Sachin Adel, you know it's interesting to think that it was originally Google brain that got OpenAI created. Right, there was a concern of what was happening with Susquehara and hinted in those folks that it had all been acquired by google in 2013, that all the stuff was going to happen behind closed doors is that was the push to create open ii, which was teal and musk and a bunch of other tech billionaires, who promptly did nothing with it. They just coaxed a bunch of that talent out of google and into another entity that was underfunded. Yeah, and then elon tried to take it over at one point and go yeah, at two points, as it turns out.

01:19:21
But yeah, yes, yeah and then yeah, and so there they are struggling with money and stuff starts to work just at that, at that same point. And you know, I I wonder if scott didn't write it this way, because open ai being strapped for cash was not a compelling threat, but google taking advantage of open ai was oh my god, that would have been the end, right.

01:19:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think this was the nuclear option, like we don't do this, we're dead. Yeah, well, you know, from the outside we often talk about how fast AI moves, right. We don't maybe think about it from the perspective of internally at Microsoft. They could see that they were like six months behind Google on this AI model stuff and, yeah, we could do the work. But the problem is, in six months now they're 18 months ahead. You know, like we catch up to where they were and now they're even further ahead. And that's the nature of it and that rates.

01:20:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know we're now running into an issue where there's simply no more data. They, yes. So you know, the, the exponential function is kind of halted by okay, you consumed everything, yep, yep, yeah, but but, and that's a good thing, right like that. In some ways it's like now you have to.

01:20:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You just we're describing now let's make it better. Yeah, and you?

01:20:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
know that whole grounding model. That's about hey, how about you don't hallucinate, right? How about you only use high confidence data, right? That's in the end. This is a probabilistic engine, so you know, unless you're scoring in the top 10 percentile, 90 percent or, or better, just say you don't know, right, and that turns out is pretty good answer for a lot. In a lot of cases it is just kind of an advanced search engine. We're doing it. It's just that by default, you hit the unlucky button each time and hope for the best.

01:20:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think you know there are certain things that generate a lot of books. You know, in our industry, like the early history of the industry with Apple and Microsoft the Microsoft thing, I trust stuff was a huge thing for a while. Apple's rise to fame and fortune under Steve Jobs obviously a big deal. But this stuff, I think is this is going to be the subject of so many case studies and books.

01:21:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I can't wait to hear the full story but I think the real question is how much of that billion dollars was cash and how much of it was as your credit yep, well, they needed both, you know, which is, I mean, that's the hilarious part. So I gave it, gave it to you, but then you just paid it back to us.

01:21:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, that's that's the thing. So, uh, sancho nadela writes uh, seven words basically, or 15 words to amy hood, and basically what it amounts to is I want us to do this, and the problem is we don't see what he wants us to do, because that part's redacted. That's the strategy part.

01:21:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So it's not clear how fully formed, which is probably just how much of it is. Azure credit yeah, but we've got to do something with this company like we have to, and this gets back to Guthrie's strategy, which was find workloads for the cloud Like that. We've invested in all this stuff. We have to put this to work. Migrating or sister customers only go so far and they could always migrate back Right See repatriation Make us things that need cloud.

01:22:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah right, it's not just Microsoft, but I just know more about the Microsoft stuff.

01:22:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, obviously. Yeah, no, I'm not saying, anything is secret. This is what everybody's been doing in the tech giant world.

01:22:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, we have to do this, but we also have to not kill our bread and butter. You know, it's one of those weird, and that's the advantage of bringing new products right.

01:22:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That is staying in the blue ocean.

01:22:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I should have put this in the Walking Cat on Twitter has published a series of internal talks that happened at the Microsoft campus from. Oh god, I'm losing my brain. The former chief scientist at Microsoft after Bill Gates was that guy from.

01:22:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Lotus and Groove.

01:22:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Thank you, now, this is one of the most plain spoken, smartest, wonderful human beings that's ever existed and he talks a lot about the creation of Azure, which he played a major role in, and all this other stuff, and one of the most plain spoken, smartest, wonderful human beings that's ever existed and he talks a lot about the creation of Azure, which he played a major role in, and all this other stuff and one of the and a lot of internal interactions. It's fascinating, but one of the um, one of the conversations involved uh, they were talking about, like, we have to build the website the web was the web app thing I was just mentioning and we, this has to happen. Like we're, we're doing this. And, uh, Bill Gates was like, yeah, we're not doing this. You, um, this is, this is going to our, our revenue. We look at the where the money comes from right now.

01:23:32
And Bill Gates was not running the company. Uh, Ballmer was at the time, but, but you know, major role, right, they were like, yeah, no, this is all revenue for us. We can't hurt that revenue stream. And so the guy I don't think it was Jeff Rakes, but I don't know why I have Jeff Rakes in my brain, but whoever was running Office, whatever Office became at the time, him and Riazzi both decided between themselves privately that, you know, let's just proceed with the understanding that this is probably going to happen in the future and we'll do what they say now. But you know, look, this is going to they're not going to be right forever, you know, and that kind of thinking doesn't happen a lot and you know, things often get constrained because of competitive necessity and Microsoft could have. You know, there's no reason why Microsoft didn't transition fully to the web, except they're protecting a cash cow Well and transition fully to the web.

01:24:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Except they're protecting a cash cow well and, to be clear, this isn't even gates. At that point, gates is mostly in africa.

01:24:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is bomber. Yeah, no, but he mentioned specifically it was. It was bomber and gates like the. It was the two of them who kind of tag-teamed on this and were like, no, like you're not doing this, yeah, like it's. And you know, yeah, bomber was the ceo at the time.

01:24:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, that's true and um, and you know, what you didn't see was any chime in from gates on the email from scott, from kevin scott, yeah, probably because that would have happened through the dark web.

01:24:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, like I mean, um, sorry, I'm on jeffrey epstein's island right now. I'll get back to you on monday. I mean, like I don't, you know, I there's a whole kind of wormy thing going on there which you don't want to address too much. But yeah, I mean, well, but he was, you know, when Satya Nadella became CEO, which was five years prior to this, yeah, 2014. Bill Gates was, you know, was known he was going to be an advisor to the CEO, that kind of stuff. So he was probably cc'd on a lot of things. That went, you know, that went to such especially strategy stuff.

01:25:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And there was certainly a period there where product teams were back to quote, unquote, going before Bill. Yeah, that Bill was back to reviewing product, which I thought he was extraordinary at, right, you know, except for all the other stuff.

01:25:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The problem with him? Yeah, at least two times I can think of. Microsoft has explicitly said that he is no longer involved in anything. Yes and yeah, he was, you know, and yikes.

01:25:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I don't know. I mean an argument. Arguably, at this point he's not involved at all. I would hope so, but you know what? I hope you're right. I hope you're right, I do know. I mean, I know of various advisors, yeah, various advisors that are still in names you probably recognize that are no longer marquee names at Microsoft, they're just involved. Anyway, this is fascinating. I hope more of it does come out. Yeah, I can't wait to learn more these will be great stories.

01:26:15
It is an extraordinary moment and I don't know. What's important about this is that Kevin Scott found a way to make it urgent. Yep.

01:26:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, we'll never know what that way was Well.

01:26:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, we don't know it was, it was the.

01:26:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Google threat. One day we will, yeah, yeah. Well, he just saw how you know I he got he steps no big deal, we can do this easily. And the second one was like oh, that's kind of interesting. And the third one was like oh crap, this is a problem Like we actually have to, you know we need to jump ahead, and we don't do it now, catching up is going to be hard. Like we can do it, but it's going to be really hard.

01:26:58
And I think again. It's like this is how you get a billion dollars that are doing great work, but they're small and we're going to throw money at them for sure.

01:27:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Actually, the fact that that is dated for 2019, I mean I guess that was the original investment. Yeah, that is the original investment Because after that they start getting results right In 2019, they're still GPT-2, and they're trying to build GPT-3. They don't have the resources.

01:27:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, if you go and look at the models that he was so scared of, I think today they would be laughable. They're ridiculous.

01:27:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're silly this.

01:27:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Eliza's really good. Yeah, he was. He cited specifically the auto response stuff in Gmail, but it happened so quickly.

01:27:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean that email's in 2019, and ChatGPT is November 22. Yeah, it was pretty prescient, even though you and I might have laughed at the time, and at that point it was a billion, then it was two billion and then it was 10 billion in 23. Yep.

01:27:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they kept getting results.

01:27:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, you know, Well, and I remember Resinovich doing the press piece for the original GPT-3 before ChatGPT, because he quote unquote built the fifth largest supercomputer in the world inside of Azure Data Center.

01:28:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I'm an Azure guy. We need it, you know. This is a great example of how well we're scaling.

01:28:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and there was a part of this where it felt to me like hey, just spent two billion dollars, you should at least get some pr from it. Yeah, because at that time none of us really thought this was going to amount to anything.

01:28:27
It was ai experiment, clearly had much bigger aims than that, but yeah that's and we are talking about a company that was bringing in, even at that point, 40 to 50 a quarter, like two billion dollars, was just not that big of a deal. That's only one B, one bomber for crying out loud, okay.

01:28:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Speaking of open AI, I guess now they're calling this feature memory, and the idea is that if you have to pay to get this, you have to be a chat GPT plus subscriber, but if you pay you can enable a feature called memory and then the chat bot will actually remember things that you said, you know, like my wife does, and then use it against you. Um, you know, I'd rather use it as sort of context, right? So, um, I would hope and assume that, um, you know it, I don't know. I like I, if I generate images, for example, which I don't use chat gpt for, I guess you wouldn't anyway use dolly, but whatever it might be, like it would, it would remember the types of things I like and then maybe push it down that path, etc. Yeah, I don't know.

01:29:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Just save the prefixing of your prompts for what I like, right? I just really am appalled by the anthropomorphization, right? It's like. Don't call this memory, Come on.

01:29:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They really like to use these terms. I mean, this is firmly embedded in the whole.

01:29:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're fighting a losing battle.

01:29:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richard, I completely agree with you, but it's too late.

01:29:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's another way to look at this, which is like regulate me please, the more you use this frightening language, the more you're asking politicians to freak out.

01:30:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Make sure every rack in the data center actually has a human face on it that animates as it does things Just make it as scary as you can.

01:30:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Sometimes it smiles and sometimes it frowns. Sometimes the eyes all turn red.

01:30:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, if it makes a mistake, it gets upset with itself and then just hits itself in the head repeatedly.

01:30:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Stupid. No, we're not talking, it's fine.

01:30:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He'll get fed tonight, it'll be fine, it's, it's a slop, he likes it, uh. So, uh, amazon, I think, back in november, had announced something called q, which stands for question, or q, the guy from star trek, whatever you can pick your choice. They use quantum. Well, it might be quite. Maybe it's not quantum competing based or anything, but whatever. At the time this was promoted it was a preview and it was for enterprises and now it is available, generally available for enterprises and for developers, which is kind of an interesting pivot. So they have the two different offerings Q4, business Q4, or actually just Q business and Q developer. That's fine. And there's a preview of something called Amazon Q apps, which is not as exciting as it sounds. But basically you're creating GPT. So it's like what all the other ones do you create custom GPT.

01:31:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So an Amazon Q is Copilot? Yes, all right.

01:31:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There you go. Yes, it is Yep, yep, yep, about time they had a brand out there, you know?

01:31:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's just one that's even more opaque because AI was too long. So Q yes.

01:31:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And you know their direct enterprise services tend to do great. I'm sure you could name 17 of them. Nope, no one can. Yeah, I don't know.

01:31:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So, whatever, there's the q reference from star trek, and doesn't he try? To kill all the civilization.

01:31:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, although it's, about the same thing, right, he tried to save the save the federation from the borg.

01:31:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So, oh, there's a good microsoft reference for you.

01:31:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's why they're q to save you from the borg I'm hoping either one of you can explain this one to me, because I I read this three times, I looked at the demo, so I have no idea what this thing is. So, github, of course, the original Copilot they have different you know SKUs, different you know the business offerings, et cetera. They announced something it's a technical preview, called Copilot Workspace, which is I'm going to call it a chat bot based Copilot style environment. It runs right in the GitHub website. There's no, it doesn't. It's not visual studio code, it's nothing like that.

01:32:27
You basically go up to a repository, you open a window like a chat window and you talk to it and what it can do is look at the issues and it can look at the check-ins and it can find problems and I don't know what it. I have no idea what it. I, I, I, I, every once in a while, really struggle with something and in the, in the sense that I, I feel like I'm kind of getting AI, I'm, I'm this one I'm having a lot of trouble with. I don't quite understand what's happening here.

01:32:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's an alternative. They approach to doing software development, a chat based approach to software development. Yep, uh, which I mean? I've been arguing that there ought to be a chat window in visual studio. Yeah, I think I'm sure there will be, by the way. Well, I would hope. But the main thing being to get away from the 747 cockpit effect. Right, it's like, hey, we got every. Everything you want to do in studio is there. You just can't find it right it's like you're all.

01:33:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Github has its own little density. I mean, even for people who are developers, I think github can be confusing. Oh, that's a man line thing, yeah, and I mean I, whatever it's worth, I use github every day, but I don't want to oversell that because I'm I'm not very good at it.

01:33:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I would also argue that a novice developer getting into development today is very hard. The tools tools are not well suited for it. Yeah, it's very challenging to get started.

01:33:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they talk about using this to kind of expand or lower the barrier of entry for people who can build software. Obviously, in this first iteration it's not doing that at all. I think just signing into GitHub could be troubling for some people.

01:34:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But this is coding for people who hate to code. It's not aolcom you like to code we? Yeah, we want to code.

01:34:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yes, but, but I, I, I do agree.

01:34:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In other words, but there are people who don't want to I understand well, or there are just some tasks.

01:34:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're just boilerplate or onerous or whatever, like I once converted a giant uh no, I'm forgetting the details now. I think it was a, a giant charles petzold c-sharp printing thing for probably win forms to visual basic one time.

01:34:38
It took forever probably c plus plus, actually no it was actually that direction and the reason I know that not it was that direction, because the reason I know this is I later discovered, after I completed it, that someone had actually converted his book and made a VB version of it. So I got the book used and I flipped through and I looked at it. I compared it to what I did and I was like pretty good, pretty good, you know, like I did it right. But that's the type of task which is like thankless and takes forever, right?

01:35:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I would like to say to something like this say, I want this, but in VB, you know like that would be an awesome use, not that VB is the direction, and that is something that Copilot does pretty well when it comes to language translation, but I would argue the one thing GitHub hasn't had is a dev environment.

01:35:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So when I saw this headline, I thought that's what this was going to be Yet another Visual Studio based they had Adam Visual Studio.

01:35:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Code based.

01:35:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They had editors, they had a dev environment, and that is not what this is. Well, I mean, they call it a dev environment I know they do which I think is part of the confusion.

01:35:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is a dev environment an IDE? What is a dev environment? That's the confusion. Is a dev environment an IDE? What is a dev environment?

01:35:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the thing. So this is not an IDE. I mean, what does it do? This is a chatbot that lives for now in the GitHub website. I don't think you could summon it. In fact, I'm just going to say I'm fairly positive. You cannot summon it from the GitHub command line Like this is not that thing. But you sign into GitHub on the web you will have probably like a team project with different people working on it. Maybe you're a non-developer or something. Someone's stuck on something, there's an issue and you can look at this issue and say let's fix this, and it will kind of go through and work with you on it and provide you with steps to take and you can verify that it works, et cetera, et cetera. Before applying it. You can do you cetera. Before applying it, you can pull your own version down, work on that locally or wherever, in your own repository.

01:36:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like a workflow manager, which is you know, when you think about what Visual Studio actually is. On one hand, it is an editor, an integrated debugger and so forth, but at the same time, it's also a project management tool. Right? It does literally call things projects, Projects, yeah, exactly, and deals with all of parts.

01:36:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
this feels like the project piece pulled out on its own, with a chatbot interface on it it's interesting, though, that they did this at the github level and not at the I guess I'd call it editor level.

01:36:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like that, instead of making an interface for visual studio code and or visual studio, I mean, it's literally on the website for github, you know I would also mention that, while Thomas Demke is the CEO of the wholly owned subsidiary known as GitHub, his direct report is Julia Lusin, who runs DevDiv, and that's Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code and NET and everything else. So they, in theory, are working together. I'm sure they are. I'm sure they are you would hope, and so maybe this was the best place to put this is. I've certainly been an advocate for studio should be good for novice developers because it got everything already included. It's just too complicated to use and maybe a chat interface would simplify You're a light switch fan, aren't you?

01:37:41
Well, you know what I had admiration for that. I also am not afraid of Power Platform because, in the end, my job is not to write code, it's to bring solutions to customers, and so whatever tools I need to use to do that. So maybe this is the best way to present a new way to pursue solving problems for customers using software.

01:38:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, I mean in a team that includes developers and non-developers. Maybe this will become an approach for a non-developer to contribute and say, look, I did some grunt work with the AI thing.

01:38:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, if you look at GitHub's goal is to make sure that everything becomes an issue inside of GitHub, having non-developers willing to use it because they're living in the workspace and feeding that issue. Matrix does give us a common repository, Like you think, about what GitHub's actually afraid of in this world. It's the Atlassians of this world.

01:38:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah okay, and so I kind of like the idea that everything is in some ways a GitHub issue. You know Like I could live my life like that.

01:38:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no, and there's lots of folks that do right. This is where you maintain your recipes. I've seen people write books through.

01:38:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
GitHub, I do. I write my two most recent books over a thousand pages each, and they're all in GitHub.

01:38:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And so the idea that they're essentially building tooling to move down this path. Like it'd be interesting to spend time with this workspace and not go to anything code related, just manipulate text files all right, I still don't get it.

01:39:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But you know what? Life is too short, so I'm going to move on. Uh, and then leo mentioned this earlier. So this real quickly. Um, apple had talked to open ai about bringing their stuff to the iphone. They moved on to google and apparently they're talking to open ai again, so I don't know what that means. No one does Right, so we'll see.

01:39:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're kind of bearing down on developer show season, though, and yeah, the fact that they're still in conversation, I mean they go last, but it's pretty late to still be trying to make a deal. I wouldn't be surprised if they do both.

01:39:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know that's, I'm thinking the same thing, and both, and maybe more right, more right. I guess they've also talked to anthropic. I mean, yeah, one thing, you, it's already pretty obvious right now and it will change all the time, but for right now, these models some of them are really good at this, this one's really good at this, you know you, they might be able to cherry pick this and and have it make some sense.

01:40:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know, we'll see, but yeah, but it's always a good idea, when you're trying to negotiate terms, to have alternative options.

01:40:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's yes well, that's it, though. So that's the other option. What this could just be a ploy to, you know. Make a better google, like it, google search. There was no competition to speak of right. Um, with the ai stuff there's competition, so maybe they get a get a better end of the stick here.

01:40:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and it may also be. They're just saying who are you who's going to pay us more money?

01:40:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what I mean. We are prepared to entertain your offer which of you can pay more? Yeah, yep, just kiss the ring and we'll see how it goes.

01:40:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah well, I would argue, OpenAI hasn't got the money. But Yep, just kiss the ring and we'll see how it goes. Yeah well, I would argue, openai hasn't got the money, but Google sure as heck does.

01:40:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I'm curious. Microsoft has never entered into this conversation. It doesn't mean that they're not in the running somewhere, but you never hear that.

01:40:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, there's another angle on this, which is OpenAI feeling a little too bound to Microsoft and saying hey, you know, we have alternatives too.

01:40:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yes, Yep, yep, but why not play those two off each other? Who knows if they aren't?

01:41:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
right, as you mentioned, developer season is coming.

01:41:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is Build going to have a keynote? We should stream.

01:41:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is going to have a keynote that you could stream. Is it private? No, no, no, this is going to be public. Is this May 20th?

01:41:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
20th, I think, is the day, the Monday of whatever that week is. No, no, this is going to be public. Is this May 20th? 20th, I think, is the day, the Monday of whatever that week is.

01:41:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no, sorry. Tuesday, wednesday, tuesday, yeah.

01:41:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I'll tell you what Next week. Ask me that question again. Would you find out? Yeah, because we're trying to decide what we should do.

01:41:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, May 21st, I think, is what they said.

01:41:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And it would push our shows back on Tuesday. But if it's worth covering, we'll cover it.

01:41:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, let's talk next week We'll talk next week. You're watching Windows Weekly, you, winners and dozers. This is Paul Thorat and Richard Campbell's lair and they are layering it. We'll have more in just a moment. I'm sorry. Actually, this would be a good time to do the Xbox segment. Mr Throt, I throw it to you.

01:42:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, we have a pretty good Xbox segment. There's a lot going on in some ways and then not so much in others. Blizzard Games yeah, blizzard Games.

01:42:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Blizzard Games. Blizzard Games Don't egg him on, that's mean.

01:42:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Blizzard Games. I'm getting the Twitch Twitch. I've lost all track of anything I was thinking. So, Microsoft announced an Xbox game.

01:42:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well done, Richard. Well done.

01:42:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You have no idea how much this bothers me.

01:42:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Two minutes in the box. Feels shame.

01:42:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, I think you got a couple of teeth on that one.

01:42:49
Xbox Game Showcase is coming on June 9. This will feature games from Activision, blizzard, bethesda and Xbox Game Studios. Here we go. Okay, so it's only been nine months, so anyway, that's fine.

01:43:00
Okay, they also vaguely reference another event which is the next installment of a beloved franchise, and everyone is of course, guessing that it's Call of Duty, and I guess this was pretty obvious to everyone. But I further guessed that it had to be Call of Duty because they have redacted things on it I'm sorry, black Ops, because they're redacted elements of the graphic and that's a big part of the whole Black Ops thing. Right, it's that whole Cold War or start of the Cold War redacted document thing. So actually, as it turns out, I guess they've been talking or it's been known for a while that the next game will be a Black Ops game. So, black ops game. So on june 9 we're going to learn about that. So that's that's great. Um, and then, okay, um, and then we get into richard's point. Um, we got the first couple of uh, or the first ship of games to game pass early, four in the beginning of may. None of them are activision blizzard and I. I don't have a problem with that. You know that. You do it on your own schedule, microsoft. I don't care, you don't even have to tell me, just don't even worry about it. I don't have a problem with that. You know you do it on your own schedule, microsoft. I don't care, you don't even have to tell me, just don't even worry about it, I don't care. Except that I care a lot and you know nothing dramatic here. One of them is the Tomb Raider Definitive Edition, which is, I think, the it's like this more recent trilogy of Tomb Raider games. So they're all on Game Pass, I think now, or they will be soon, I think, tomorrow, as we record this, and hasn't everyone on the planet played these games already? I don't know, Seriously, do you have a studio that has no games except for one on Game Pass? That maybe you could plumb a little bit? I don't know. Maybe we're waiting for June on that. Could I pause my Xbox Game Pass subscription so I don't pay for it until this comes? I don't know. I guess not, if you don't care as much for the AAA stuff as I do.

01:44:45
Microsoft has always been heavily involved in the indie part of the gaming market as well, and they just held an idea Xbox Digital Showcase for a bunch of games that are coming across the platform this year Xbox series X and S, xbox one, windows PC and game pass. A bunch of fun looking stuff there. You know it's just so. That's good. That actually, honestly, that looks stronger than the game past stuff. So so that's good. Am I missing something? You know I guess not. And then not that I have an attitude about it or anything, but back in February Microsoft announced they were bringing four Xbox games cross-platform. With the release of Sea of Thieves the other day, they now have delivered all four of them. So apparently they can deliver Xbox games to other platforms really fast, but bringing their own games to Xbox Game Pass a little harder.

01:45:34
I'm sure there's a reason for that. I think you're better. I'm sure there's a reason for that. I think you're better. I'm okay. But you know, sea of Thieves I don't play this game, but this is a great example of when Microsoft gets it right with a game Like this thing has had 40 million gamers over the years, all kinds of extra content. Now it's cross-platform. They're really extending the life of this thing. I think this is smart. So that's fun. It's great, right? I mean for the same reason that being able to play against that bigger audience of people in call of duty or whatever the game is a great benefit. So it is playing with them cross platform in this game as well, so that's good. I think we talked a little bit about the Fallout TV series last week. Yeah, so they have been doing next-gen updates for some of these games, and Fallout 4 is now available on Xbox Series X and S and, I think, playstation 5. I've never played any of these games Really.

01:46:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know, not even 76?.

01:46:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know I'm confused by this, because I love the whole post-apocalyptic thing and I can't explain it, but I haven't Anyway. So these games are now, like you know, they're 4K, 60 frames, a second, blah, blah, blah, et cetera. So you know, I love this. I love this. I love taking classic games that everyone loves and then making them more viable on modern hardware. It's awesome.

01:46:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know. So this is yeah. I mean I would argue that three was the great game that got everybody hooked on what was the three scenario?

01:47:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
where did three take place? Uh?

01:47:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
washington dc. Okay, but it's very much the classic. You know. Leave the vault storyline, yeah, and explore the world and find out. Maybe I should take a look at it out of those or then you get into vegas and vegas they're experimenting as gamers with storylines that are not compatible. So you, it gives you multiple playthroughs, because if you make a commitment on one path, you cannot go back to the other path.

01:47:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, which was the one that was like the appalachia. Is that 76 or I? Don't know the game is it Vegas, boston, I know, and then one of them maybe that was 76.

01:47:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think 76 is the one to play, I think but my problem with the 76 one is that they were trying desperately to make an MMO out of it, and so they subverted the game to try and make the.

01:48:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It has building and there's other people in there and apparently, you know, I just read an article that said there's. You know, yeah, it had a rocky start, but the people who stuck with it are actually pretty cool and they help you out as a newbie, yeah. I think I saw that too, and that's fun.

01:48:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
College is exactly the same. If you, they help you out as a newbie and, yeah right, looks kind of that's fun. If you don't know what you're doing, people are really nice to you. I don't, you know. Yeah, it's just like boston people are super nice to you.

01:48:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's great so you think he should play four?

01:48:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
uh, he should play four because he's from boston, I think I think three is the purest manifestation of the genre because it is just um four. It's got some interesting twists in it. I mean they certainly play up the boston angle and this commonwealth angle. There's a lot more interaction with the larger entities, that you get a sense of a bigger world that's trying to recover after after the apocalypse. Um, and it plays pretty well.

01:49:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not a fan of 76 just because they subverted the storytelling to try and make it MMO. Yeah, okay, is the picture quality on 3, though up to snuff.

01:49:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I think that's the question is have they upscaled that one up well enough, Right I?

01:49:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
sure which ones they've done.

01:49:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know they've done at least a few I mean, I would think just a tad, I think, oh, here we go, here's the yeah, yeah, and this one is, this is four this is three.

01:49:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and this. Now we get into one of the things that bethesda was magic about, which is they built. They allowed these communities to emerge that it was the fans that upscaled the graphics in Fallout 3.

01:49:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So that happened. With Half-Life, they did that great Black Mesa conversion Became official right.

01:49:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The art of playing, of tinkering with Fallout 3 at this point, is going on to Nexus mods and pulling together a set of mods to make the game look the way you want.

01:50:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have to say this looks more like the TV show plot. Yeah, it's interesting. I was thinking the same thing.

01:50:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Which I think is going to be appealing. I know Fallout gameplay has gone up dramatically because of the TV show right, people are interested in this, so this is good timing for them.

01:50:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, they're all on Xbox, aren't? They Are they all on Xbox, I think they are, yeah, and Steam and PlayStation 5.

01:50:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And PC and PC.

01:50:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Was that still around?

01:50:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Some of us here in the Master Race are perfectly comfortable with, you know, not just missing out on what a game can be.

01:50:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Alright, that's the Xbox news across the nation. Now let us pause. And when we come back, the back of the book with Paul's tips and picks and yeah, we have some nice brownish liquor to talk about.

01:50:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, it's brownish.

01:50:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's brownish, it's that lovely amber color that you like.

01:50:59
Yes, but first I want to do a little plug for the club. I know a lot of you listening are in the club and I know what a great group it is because we had that open house a couple weeks ago. Lovely group of people came by. I go into the Discord, you know, all the time, every day, and there's just wonderful conversations happening in there.

01:51:22
Club Twit is more than just supporting the network. I mean it really does support the network. Your $7 a month really makes a difference to our bottom line. We can't go on without it, to be honest. But I think there's a lot of benefit to you too. Sure, you get ad-free versions of all the shows. You get video of Paul's hands on Windows, Micah's hands on Mac, the Untitled Linux show, the Home Theater Geek show. You get special events like the Book Club coming up next week. We're going to all get together at the LaPorte House, share some brisket and watch Fritz Lang's classic Metropolis, and you can watch along with us.

01:51:59
Yeah, so there's a lot of things, but I think what's great about the club mostly is the people in it are our members, and I'd like to invite you personally to become one. Seven bucks a month, Not much. It really makes a difference in in the growth of our network, the survival of our network, the survival of our network, and I think there are lots of benefits to you. Twittv slash Club Twit if you are not yet a member. In the words of is that Ryan Gosling? No, I don't know who that is. It'd be rude not to join. That's the word. Who is that? I don't know. It's what Ryan Gosling's going to look like someday. All right, Paul Theriot starts us off at the back of the book. Yeah.

01:52:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I spent about five weeks with a MacBook Air. I think this triggered a little bit of angst, but I don't know why you liked it too much.

01:52:56
I did like it quite a bit. But you know, the truth is I've owned at least one Mac for 25 years. I mean, I use Macs all the time, you know, but mostly for testing, right. I do a lot of parallel stuff and you know, just to make sure I know where things are at, et cetera. But I went out and used this thing a lot and you know, I uncovered like a million inconsistencies in the UI. It's weird, but I did like it quite a bit and there's a kind of a fit and finish thing there I'd like to see on Windows.

01:53:26
But it was interesting to me because I tried very hard just to do it the Apple way and not, you know, I didn't want to install third-party utilities to make it a little bit more like Windows or remap the keys to make it a little bit more like Windows, although I can't tell you how many times I sit down at a Windows PC now and hit Alt-C instead of Control-C, because that's where the command key is on the Mac and it's like, seriously. But anyway, the differences can be maddening. But I don't think many people go back and forth, I think people just switch or don't switch or whatever. But it's okay. But I did finally in the end, break down and after I published my review, I installed a couple of those utilities and thank God, I can now actually see every window, nice when I try to switch between things or, and I installed, I did a couple of things, but I eventually, of course, went back to parallels and I don't know, I guess not many people do this, but they have.

01:54:11
I think it's called coherency or coherency. But at that moment is where you can run individual Windows apps alongside Mac apps, and I got to tell you for me because I use I know this sounds goofy, but I use these apps like Paint is a great example, which is built into Windows, but it's so, so efficient. And I had a real trouble, real real trouble, trying to find an efficient. I never found one like an efficient bitmap editor for the Mac. I know there are things like Acorn Pinta and and there's quite a few Someday, talk to me.

01:54:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
talk to me and I can help.

01:54:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, but the issue the issue is they're not keyboard friendly and I know you can do it. I know people keep telling you, you know, paul you can, maybe not.

01:54:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The Mac isn't really a keyboard driven.

01:54:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's not, it's a I. There's a great. I have a great example in there of the 17 steps I have to do to resize and rescale an image in on the Mac and then the three seconds it takes me to do it on windows Like it's. There's a real stumbling block there. So it was for. If you were worried about how much I love this thing, I will just say the good news is, in the end I needed to put windows on it to for it to be whole. So, um, it really now it's awesome. You know it's even better, but, um, it's kind of goofy. Like you know, windows is a feature. Um, and then we talked we, I guess we did talk about fallout, so I don't have to mention that again other than say, seriously, watch the show, it's fantastic. Um, super adult, super violent, but super violent. I'm actually a little turned off. Awesome. My wife was like after two episodes she's like we're not watching this. Right, yeah, we're watching. I'm like I'll watch it by myself if you want.

01:55:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think we saw the third. What's the one where they?

01:55:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you're going to say like a head exploding, I'm going to say which one, because there were a couple of those. Yeah, there's one where yeah, I know it comes down and grabs, so the violence is gruesome, but but here's the thing. I'm not. I'm not saying violence is okay or anything like that, but there's a there's a goofy, happy humor to it. That offsets that, I think nicely, and like it's not as as grueling as like the game the thrones was hard to get through, cause it was just so unremittingly terrible.

01:56:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the pulp fiction of video game.

01:56:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's fun. There's a fun factor to it. Like it's fun. Like it's like those perky, happy people that you know and they're all like that. Honestly, to some degree, it's kind of fun. They created a really neat world you know I'm not saying it's a real world, but it's cool.

01:56:30
I think it's cool Not to beat it to death. And then ARC, or the browser company, has announced the 1.0 release of ARC browser for Windows, so it's public now. There's no wait list. I've been, I've been using this thing straight through. I'm not noticing any huge change here, but ARC Sync works across. They also added ARC Sync to the iPhone app, which is called something else, but whatever, and yeah, I like it. I like it.

01:56:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I feel like the windows is pretty close, uh parity to them.

01:57:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it's getting there yeah, it's not quite but it's. Yeah, it's closer than it was.

01:57:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yep it's certainly usable um yeah, I like it.

01:57:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, yeah, and I uh this is just chen generally in a way. Uh, microsoft open sour sourced something called MS-DOS 4.0. I say it that way because they actually went from like 3.3 to5 for like 99% of the planet and no one ever saw a 4 and was confused by this, and I guess there was some special markets. They needed to have something in the interim and it's kind of a weird crossbreed thing that has some code in it that didn't exist in DOS really anywhere else. There's some weirdness to it. But there's a great Scott Hanselman story. In fact I saw Scott on Facebook, like last month, asking anyone if they had 5.25 inch floppy drives for a project. This is what it was he was trying to, and Ray Ozzie was involved. He helped recover some of these disks and they worked. They partnered with IBM, you know, getting the team back together and they open source this thing and it joins a couple of other older versions of MS-DOS that they had also previously open sourced. I think it's fun, you know. So I don't know why you would run this.

01:58:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's becoming a strategy to preserve technology. I love it, yep.

01:58:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And I'm on board with this.

01:58:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Because you don't have to spend anything on it anymore. It doesn't cost much to be up there, those who care about it have access to it. Like it's just an interesting strategy to say, hey, let's just open source this, and not as a dumping ground, but as a preservation technique.

01:58:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep yeah, I think it's, I think it's cool. So this, yeah, dos four is a weird um halfway between. It was something it was gonna be like a multi, not multi-threaded, a multi, it was multi-threaded.

01:58:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Multi-threaded it was being, you remember, desk view, like it was yeah it was gonna be something like that I did this all the time where I'd run two instances of dot a dos window, essentially split in the screen to screen for certain hacky things that I was doing. It was useful to have both and so, yeah, we used DeskView stuff and they were trying to incorporate that into DOS. It happened better in 5, but in 4 it was different.

01:59:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, and then of course OS 2 was happening too, so you know I don't remember the exact schedule there. There was a GUI involved in that and that was gross. Well, eventually you're right, but the first release of, uh, os two was actually just a command line, right, so it was like the one point. Whatever version added presentation manager. But um, yeah, yeah, okay. So anyway, this is. It's a neat little slice of history that no one knows anything about it, cool.

01:59:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Back when a CPU had 63 instructions. Yeah, you could actually learn the whole thing. It still exists somewhere inside of that Intel chip you're using today, which is good and bad. Right, we agree.

01:59:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's frozen cons.

01:59:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is legacy yeah, yep.

01:59:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, run is radio time. Mr Richard Campbell, what's up?

02:00:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
uh, back in march at the fabric conference I got a chance to grab a show. This was one with uh, miles, mazahid and bob ward. Bob's one of my regulars. He's one of the sequel server dudes who's everywhere. Miles, I met for the very first time, just a stunningly brilliant mind like he. Just you just had that moment after you talked for a while. It's like, wow, you think differently than me and she's firmly in the machine learning space and one of her responsibilities for the SQL team is to bring LLMs into SQL Server in various capacities.

02:00:31
So we sort of went through the various views that she had on incorporation and how it's going to appear in SQL Server and this sort of broke down into three categories Essentially. The first was SQL Server. Is that Swiss army knife data store? So they are adding, for example, vector data types to do vector storage for building machine learning models. So that's one aspect of it and that helps you to be able to build machine learning elsewhere. Where you're going to put that data? You could set up a separate vector database. Or hey, you're already paying for SQL license and here's the data storage to make that work for you. So good combination there.

02:01:09
Then there was the. I'm trying to navigate around the features of SQL Server as a DBA and so having essentially a chat interface that helps you with diagnostics or understanding a query plan, or trying to figure out how to scale properly or partition a table all of those now are emerging as features that a large language model understands about your SQL Server so they can help you write the code to optimize your SQL Server. And the one that Bob and I laughed about the most was querying the database with text. You know, decades ago SQL Server had a natural language query interface that was terrible and, you know, for the most part, abandoned after a while because it was just so difficult to use. But, yeah, that puppy's back around again, again, only this time it's an llm, and then the llms are pretty compelling for being able to write natural language queries.

02:02:03
So we, uh, we ran through the gamut of various options and it to me it's just another reminder of this is what's happening everywhere. Microsoft, even on a product that has its legacy going back to uh, to even pre windows versions, right, those side-based versions of sql server, uh, are still around, you know, there's still a thing. And then they became in as of sql 7 and sql 2000 and the great jim gray great late jim gray and that amazing version that makes sql server still dominant to this day. And here we are still adding features and still evolving and still great capability. So it was a fun conversation, very bright people, good time.

02:02:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very nice. I think we deserve a drink oh my goodness.

02:02:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I have one. There you go. As you are well aware, because we did a show from there, I uh was in romania and in the past I have talked about the brandies of that part of eastern europe, although the last time it was event, which is actually from tirasapol, which is in the semi-autonomous region of moldova, known known as Transnistria, which has a long history that I'm not going to get into because it's particularly not funny these days. Let's talk about Romania, because Romania now we're talking about a country not a whole lot different than the size of Minnesota, although Minnesota has about 5 million people and in this place has about 19 million people in it. It's a very nice place, it really is, but there's a problem when you're a very nice place in between a whole bunch of world powers. Ask France yeah, well, you know they're on the edge, they've got an ocean backing them, the main geologic.

02:03:53
There's two primary geological features to think about when you think about Romania. If you're not familiar with the area, it is the end of the Danube River. The Danube starts in southwestern Germany, travels through Austria, hungary, croatia, serbia, it's most of the southern border of Romania and Bulgaria, before diverting up towards the end when it empties into the Black Sea in an area known as the Danube Delta. And so this is the original superhighway, like that's how you navigate before you can build roads. And then the other big feature of the Northwest is the Carpathian Mountains, which span across a lot of Europe, but the bulk of it is in Romania, and that's also the area. So the southern area where the Danube is is called Wallachia, and that has been around for long before even the name Romania was used. And the northern part is Transylvania, which for better or worse in the Western world has been subverted into Halloween fodder.

02:04:47
And this bloody Bram Stoker's book from the 1897 called Dracula and I should I mean, I got to bring it up just because, like, look, there was a guy, his name was Vlad Dracul, so he was actually Vlad the second. This is not the one. This is not the one, this was the second son. He was called Vlad Dracul because he was actually a part of the Order of the Dragon which he was given and this is in the 1400s by Sigismund of Luxembourg Is Vlad the Impaler. Vlad III, his son, was the guy who ended up with the name Impaler.

02:05:22
So this is at a time when the Ottoman Empire is pressing into Europe. You know this is the mid-1400s, this is, you know, 1453 is when Constantinople falls to the Ottomans and ultimately that push by the Ottomans is stopped in Vienna and the Great Siege in 1529. And of course the Ottoman Empire will persist until World War I. So you know, not 500 years later. For better or worse, wallachia is sort of the front line between the Ottoman Empire and the Turks coming out of the south and western European powers such as they were in the 1400s. And so Vlad II makes a deal with the Ottomans to be a vassal state, to balancing off against the Saxons to the north, who are actually controlling Hungary and Transylvania. And Vlad III and his brother Radu are sent to the Ottoman Empire, which is controlling hungary and transylvania. And vlad the third and his brother radu are sent to the ottoman empire, which is typical. It's kind of a hostage thing this way you're going to behave because we have your sons, but in exchange they educate him in the modern ottoman thinking, which is arguably is one of the reasons why vlad becomes quite as ruthless as he actually is. And when there's some betrayals goes on, his father is killed.

02:06:37
Uh, vlad the third is sent in to try and take control of wallachia again, and then he ends up fighting. He gets, he loses and goes back to the ottomans and fights back. It goes back and forth and by 1460 he has peace, um, and has control of wallachia. And then the ottomans are like okay, well, it's time to start paying your taxes, do your homage. And he goes, no, and he has the envoys impaled.

02:07:00
Now, previously, during his battles to control the land, he had successfully captured and sacked some cities or some towns in Transylvania and he also took those people and had them impaled. It's like you impale a whole village. They call you an impaler. One way to look at it is like this is very cost effective, uh, um, murder by the state, right and plus it makes a good scene like the one where he, where he, took out the whole village. He literally had the posts put down in the road that way and had the villagers each impaled one after the other. So you got to enter the town looking at all the dying body dying and dead bodies, impaler.

02:07:40
Uh, and oddly enough, when he rebels against the ottomans, the ottomans then have his younger brother, radu, which they had back in the time, and they send radu in to get it back from him. And this is where the whole cruelty story really comes from, because at that point the ottomans are mad at him, the saxons are mad at him. Uh glad, the impaler retreats into hungary and they imprison him for a decade, and so they become popular stories. And it happens to blend in with the fact that vampirism is a folklore of the transylvanian mountains. So those two things go together. But it wasn't until bram stoker that they combined. Is this why wine is red?

02:08:19
no, but they do make they do make a wine called vampire blood there not that I would drink it. And yeah, I have been in romania a number of times and there have been occasions when we were doing tourist things and I have bumped into a dracula tour where a whole lot of goth looking people are riding together to find out. This is a book, it's not real. So what has this got to do with wine? Well, almost nothing really, but it is one of the things to realize about Romania is that a big piece of it is on the 45th parallel. This is the same line of latitude that the rhone region of france is. The piedmont region of italy is heck. Even the willamette valley in oregon is all is near the 45th parallel, and this same region is in wallachia in in romania.

02:09:11
So they're a bread basket. They grow a lot of food and they grow a lot of fruit and it is very normal for the farmers in that area to turn a certain amount of their fruit into alcohol to stop it from spoiling. Right, the original pro projects called tuya uh, tuika, tuika. I try and get it right. The pronunciation uh and well, in tuika, if you directly translate, it literally translates as booze and it's traditionally is made with plums, because plums grow like crazy in that part of the world and in fact, you know, that's why the Poles have Slibovitz and the Bulgarians have Rakia, like it's all.

02:09:52
Plum brandy which, by the way, is typically about 20 to 30 percent alcohol. Plum brandy which, by the way, is typically about 20 to 30% alcohol. I actually had some while I was there. Just to remind me that it's only the EU requirements for spirits being 40%. There's no market or no legislation around how a 25% alcohol should work. It's too strong to be wine. It's too weak to be spirits. It shouldn't exist. It's delicious actually, at that, at that point, when you make it up to 40, it's not so nice. And because your friend's uncle is making it, sometimes it's 80 and you can strip engine parts with it. Uh yeah, but though, that's the fruit stuff. But we're now we're talking about grapes and, more importantly, we're talking about brandy, which is really you've made some wine and the wine's going to spoil or it's not that good, and now you're going to convert it to a higher alcohol again to preserve it. And that's where we get into this term, and it's this is what's on the bottle vinars now, vinars is a direct translation means burnt wine, which may sound weird, except that that's really what brandy is too. The original name for brandy is brandy wine, as in also burned wine, which is you are distilling wine into a higher spirit. So brandy is the generalized name.

02:11:14
Anywhere in the world can make a brandy, it's just distilled wine. Typically they're aged in oak barrels, but there's really no restrictions on brandy. Sometimes it's just maybe six months or so forth. But there's a couple of famous types of brandy. One of them is cognac, and cognac is from the cognac region in france and their rules are only wine twice distilled in lambic stills, although there's exceptions and a minimum of three years. In oak. Vinares, which is the romanian equivalent, follows almost an identical set of rules minimum three years, twice distilled um. Vinares is almost of germanic variation. So there are other vinares.

02:11:54
There is a Swiss fruit brandy called Vinars as well. They do try to standardize the aging practices. Because numbers used to be hard, they would use letters. So you have VS and VSOP and XO and XXO, vs being very special, which means three years in wood. Vsop is actually short for very superior, old, pale, great name. For cognac that means four years. Vinars, it's five years. Then there's an XO, which I have here, which, for cognac, is 10 years but vinars is only seven, and then the XXOs are, or the extra-olds are 14-plus years old.

02:12:37
The particular product I have here is called Brankovian. It's named after Constantine Brankovian, who was a prince of Wallachia in the 1600s, and he's a hero of Romania, much the way Rad Dracul was because he resisted the Ottomans, which ultimately led to him being beheaded. Seems to be a common theme. The actual distillery here is the Alexandrian Sabre 1789 distillery which is in Delemerue, which is in Polychiette, which is north of Bucharest, about 50 kilometers. Again, right in wine growing region. Thelexandra and saber group has wineries. They also make a variety of distilled products. They've merged a few different companies together over the years.

02:13:24
Uh, the original facility that's from 1789 is actually from up in bucovina, which is in the far northeast of romania, north of yash, where I was, and they make some liquors and some brandy. And then the alexander distillery, uh, which is right in yeah, used to be right in Yash and part of the post-Soviet era, primarily brandy, the current again. This current distillery is further south now it's just outside of Bucharest, 50 kilometers out of Bucharest. So they have stainless steel pot stills that were adapted from grappa production, although they're currently in the process of modifying two of them to add copper to them, because they want to start making whiskey and you need whiskey. You need copper when you're going to distill whiskey because you need to take the sulfurs out of the barley and they're using Romanian barley. They say basically half the price there. This particular type of brandy, the Vinares, only went into production in 2006. So relatively recent product. They don't have a lot of really old stuff. It is not easy to find in America, does it?

02:14:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
come in a book like this.

02:14:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is that the box? So that was actually the gift box that I got.

02:14:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like you get a copy of the Lord of the Rings with it.

02:14:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, it had two glasses in with it as well. Oh, that's cool. I like it. It was a nice little gift package. It's a nice gift box. Yeah, so I mean. What we're talking essentially is a seven-year-old's cognac for about. They put it at $50 US, which would be about a third of the price of a French XO cognac.

02:14:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hmm, Is it as good is the question.

02:14:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Eas XO Cognac. Is it as good? Is the question? Easily, really no. Beautifully made, it's the same practices, it's just things cost less there if you can get them, and for the most part, you haven't seen these products in the West because they were going east. The Russians were buying them all, but they haven't been lately, and so there's a bit more availability here. Nice, this is beautiful, so there's a bit more availability here. Nice, this is beautiful. It's a lovely bottle, isn't it? And I mean I'm, I'm going to put this in my decanter because, uh, that's what I do when I'm, when I'm, when I show off a bottle like this, it's like it's going to go into the counter and I'll drink it over the next.

02:15:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm looking for something to put my, to put in my louis the 15th beautiful crystal. You know bottle, yeah, just to fill it up.

02:15:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
People won't know the difference just put something in there, put a. You put iced tea in there, who knows? Well, I want to serve it. I think I've done that gag is I've done that gag on a talk where it's like all the software's beta is going to crash, so I have I bring out a bottle of whiskey that's actually filled with. I see it, it's like every time this crashes I'm going to take a big slug and just sort of gulping the bottle down as we kept blue screening over and over again until people are like you're going to die. It's like no, it's iced tea, come on.

02:16:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Devorak told me that there was something Costco had that was perfect for putting in there. Nobody would know the difference and it was cheap and nobody would know the difference, that it was cheap.

02:16:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But the Costco folks often buy specific barrelings, often under the restriction that they can't admit where they got it from.

02:16:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
essentially, yeah, see, this is beautiful, this is a beautiful Louis 13 bottle. It's gorgeous, not bad cognac either. Yeah well, it was great, cognacac, although I noticed the bottles are for sale for thousands of dollars on ebay, so the cognac is maybe not the most valuable. No part of it, I don't know.

02:16:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a, you know it's nice I mean I, I try and avoid showing you folks things that you can't buy. It's just mean I know. Uh, I certainly enjoy my travels and I hope you like the story. I felt like I wanted to give Romania some love. They've been great to me.

02:17:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I had a lovely time there. It's beautiful. I'll go back anytime yeah.

02:17:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And just an understanding of like these places have been attacked by every nation near them for a long time because they are a wildly productive and valuable and they still are. You know, post the end of the cold war, romania grew immediately. They grow a tremendous amount of food. They have a highly educated population. There's some phenomenal tech centers there, places like timoshar and kluge just amazing. And the show we did in yash was lovely and along the way they make some great products. You know everything is local. Uh, there they take that very seriously and so it's, and to me when they're. When I was invited out, I invited to a home to have a meal and they said like what would you like to drink? It's like local, whatever it is. Yeah, your wine. Yeah, I prefer red.

02:17:49
I will drink your palinka budweiser, yeah, not so much you know, I'm in wisconsin, fine, yeah, I'm miller white drink drink what's low.

02:18:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The beer that made milwaukee famous, there you go. Yeah, infamous. I think they script that one, so you pronounce it brancoveno brand covina brand covina. Yeah, okay, x and boy, that's a good price for that and beautiful bottle. I want the book, yeah.

02:18:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, if you can find that package with the glasses and so forth in the box, yeah, and very reasonable price it's also. I mean, we made hot toddies with it last night because it was a bit cool. Yeah, you know, a little hot water, a little lemon. Yeah, in a little hot water a little lemon. It lifted up very nicely. Not a pretentious drink, just tasty.

02:18:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
For those who know.

02:18:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Brancol Veneau.

02:18:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It turned into like a Suntory ad, but with a vampire. For those who know, I don't always drink wine, but what I do, I drink brandy.

02:19:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There is this stop on that bloody Dracula tour that I ended up at as well, not because it was Dracula tour, but it's a castle, and it's exactly the castle you think of when you think of like Dracula's castle. Oh, that's fun. It has nothing to do with Vlad.

02:19:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, I think of it every time I see the Disney castle. It's a tax castle right, it's a tax castle right.

02:19:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's beside the river. It's the way you collect money from merchants trying to travel, but they have one room dedicated to Dracula. That says this place has nothing to do with Dracula.

02:19:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a book. Well, thank you, Mr Richard Campbell, for your erudite explanation of all things alcoholic.

02:19:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
My pleasure. The only thing better than drinking this stuff is knowing the story of how it was made. Yeah, I love it.

02:19:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love the little history lesson on there. You are the Rick Steves of booze.

02:19:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Romania is a cultural bouillabaisse.

02:19:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You'll find Richard when he's not in Madeura park, uh, at run as radiocom. That's where run as radio his podcast and dot net rock. His other podcasts, dot net rocks, are run as radiocom and of course he's here every wednesday, 11 am, pacific 2 pm eastern for windows weekly. That's paul thurot on the left there. He is, of course, at thurotcom. That's Paul Therot on the left there. He is, of course, at therotcom. That's his blog. Be a premium member and get more. I like how you did that with the Apple MacBook review. You had kind of the initial review open to the public, but then for the deets, like some things I wanted and I needed and so forth, that was good. Are you keeping the MacBook? Did you buy it or are you sending?

02:20:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it back to Apple? No, I bought it.

02:20:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, I'm going to keep it. Raycast. Just get Raycast and start delving into what it will do. R-a-y-c-a-s-t it is. You know, apple has Spotlight, which is the equivalent of like hitting the Windows key, but Raycast does everything, including Windows arrangements, so you can hit Command Space and type left, half, right, half, center, half and arrange the whole thing. It does so much more. It's a very powerful free tool, open source tool. It's really good. There's my little tip to you know, because I want you to like it as much as you like your Windows machine. Well, it's not good, it's crazy. Paul's books leanpubcom, the Field Guide to Windows 11, windows Everywhere, his book all about the history of Windows through a developer's perspective and, of course, his soon-to-be why I Love the Mac. Screw you Windows. It's going to be a great book. I can't wait.

02:21:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The title is tentative. I'm just book, I can't wait, the title is tentative.

02:21:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm just teasing. I'm just teasing Windows Weekly. That's where his heart is, his home is. That's where you dozers are, and you winners as well, if you don't want to be here. By the way, the reason I mention when we do it on Wednesdays is because you can watch us do it live on YouTube, youtubecom slash twit. But if you don't want to be here, then you can always get it online at twittv slash www. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly and, of course, you can. Best thing to do is subscribe on your favorite podcast player. Get it automatically the minute it's available. Paul, richard, we'll see you next week. You'll both be home, I think. Yes, yep, another week at home. Have a wonderful week. We'll see you next time on Windows Weekly. Bye-bye.