Windows Weekly 892 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 Faratz here, richard Campbell's here, I'm here. We're going to do this a little differently. It's going to look a little different. This is the new format. Kevin King will be practicing on the keys. We'll be talking about Microsoft's earnings. You won't believe the ludicrously capacious amount of money they spent on AI in one quarter that and Paul finally finds something to replace his precious Xbox. All coming up next on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell, episode 892, recorded Wednesday, july 31st 2024. Capacious Chirons. It's time for Windows Weekly, the new, improved Windows Weekly, now with lower 18ths. New improved windows, weekly, now with lower 18th. Uh, joining us from his fortress of solitude and beautiful lower mcconjie, massachusetts, pennsylvania, pennsylvania. Right, paul dot com. I don't know, I'm confused. Hello, paul, without the lower thirds. I just don't know. Oh, wait a minute. There it is in the fine print. You're in lower mcconjie, pa. What is happening here?

01:26
no one knows let's say hi to richard campbell. He is in madeira park, british columbia. Yeah, I'm at home. Home is good, so weird.

01:36
You're both at home, yeah now ladies and gentlemen, watch this trick a three shot. Wow, it's great. We're playing with the new, as you might have gathered, the new software which we will be using after this week. We are going to be moving to my attic Micah's basement, wherever you guys are and everybody at home. Kevin King, who is our producer, is now our technical director. He's never done that before. I used to TD the show for the last 18 years I think I TD the show for 892 episodes, 91 episodes. Td means the guy who pushes the buttons, makes the camera switch and stuff, but the new system is too complicated for me, so we will have somebody in their home pressing the buttons, and it's Kevin King today rehearsing down the hall. Nice, hello there, gentlemen. How has your week been?

02:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Excellent, a little less stressful than the previous week You've recovered from.

02:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
CrowdStrike week, which, by the way, we will from now on call the fourth week of July CrowdStrike week. How about that Every year?

02:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I still think it sounds like a terrorist attack, but whatever.

02:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It does. I guess it's a brand. It's just a question of who the terrorist is.

03:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually, today it's time for earnings learnings. Oh no, you have some earnings learnings for us. Was it a good quarter or a bad quarter?

03:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
well, depends on what you care about, right. Okay, if you're a microsoft investor, it's pretty great. Um, there's still a lot of questions around ai, and if you like any of microsoft's consumer hardware, you might want to look the other way, because that's an ugly crash nice um well, tell us all, give us the deets yeah, so microsoft's fiscal year ended on june 30, so that was the fourth quarter of fiscal 2024.

03:41
So for the quarter, 22 billion dollars in net income on revenues of almost 65 billion we'll call it up double digits in both cases and for the year, 88.1 billion net income on revenues of 245.1 billion also up double digits in both cases. And they're doing pretty good, pretty good, you know the traditional stuff.

04:09
I care about not either not mentioned or barely mentioned or just really bad news. So it's kind of it's kind of a kind of a gut punch for, like me, but you know, the part of the company that's going gangbusters is well, aside from the stuff that's sort of on autopilot, like Windows and Office, you know, there's all this cloud, azure, ai stuff. Lots of takeaways from this quarter quarter. But to me, the big one is we have been talking about microsoft's costs each quarter to build out their or, as they say, scale out their ai infrastructure. I've been describing this as 10 to 15 billion dollars per quarter. It was 19 billion dollars last quarter and it will be more this quarter and they will spend more this year than they did last year on building out this infrastructure.

05:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is good as knows. They have the cash for it, so why wouldn't you?

05:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that's yeah so that tied to that is microsoft for the first time. Let's see if I can find this figure. It's 119, I know, for the year. Yeah, uh, generated, uh, over 100 billion dollars in free cash flow for the full fiscal year, fiscal year. So the figure for the last quarter is 23.3 billion.

05:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So this is a very simplistic, but they're um with cash yeah, but that's an important thing, because the alternative is a stock buyback again. Yeah, right, like it's far better that they're actually putting the money to work.

05:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, now, I don't recall off the top of my head, with activision blizzard, but that was a 68 billion dollar ish acquisition. Cash is a strong term, but the the, the problem with that is well twofold. But the big problem, well, the two sides are kind of um, uh, the way that microsoft uh recognizes revenues from activisionision Blizzard has changed completely because it's in-house now. It used to be a third-party partner, right, so there's been kind of a weird shift in money there. But there are ongoing costs running that business and those costs are enormous. And we've had a lot of bad news this year about them closing studios and laying off people. And God, did they not discuss that even for one second?

06:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
no, I'd be very interested to see what something like world of warcraft costs annually to operate yeah, I yeah I, I, yeah.

06:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so, um, the microsoft sorry, the activision blizzard acquisition generated a lot of additional ongoing costs. There are temporary costs associated with the acquisition that will slowly go down and then go away, but I mean their margins are lower as a direct result of this. Their operating expenses are double digits higher than they were as a direct result of this.

07:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're talking in the Xbox world. I'm talking about the whole company. The whole company, yeah, the whole company I mean the whole company still got a 30 margin on revenue. That's insane, yeah, in the tech giant industry yeah, it's good.

07:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, honestly, you think like software could even be higher. Remember, like arm uh, arm holdings is like the licensing company. Their margins are like 99 because they make nothing. No, I know, um, but it's also what is it 250 000 employees, so that's 400 400 000 return per employee like that dude.

07:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Those are huge, huge, crazy numbers. It almost justifies a three trillion dollar market cap, almost yeah, yep, it's, I don't know.

07:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So we you know, uh, big picture, we're looking at AI expenses and cost to cut, or costs and benefits if I'm on the board, I'm all over them about the gaming.

07:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like what is the strategy here? You bought this huge thing. It's been a year. What are you?

08:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
doing so here's, here's what they this. Okay, so I have some theories, because they're not saying anything and we have to voice the theories right, because they won't come out and say this, if I'm right, um, I I you probably haven't noticed, but I've been super critical of them not putting games in game pass, right, no, no, I know I've been subtle about it, but yeah, um, I'm sure there are technical reasons behind this. I was discussing this with brad this morning, if anyone watches first ring daily. But, um, it is inexcusable that this company has not at least voiced, uh, an excuse for what's going on here.

08:38
It's almost a year now. Like, what's what's happening, but okay, but there's got to be a reason, right. Like what's happening, but okay, but there's got to be a reason right. And I think that we've heard rumors that the next-gen Xbox hardware will be ARM-based. Right, I think there is an incredible inflection point, or whatever, a nexus or whatever you want to call it, where AI and ARM hardware and Xbox kind of collide and something good comes out the other end of it. But we're not there, right? So microsoft disappointed everybody a couple of weeks ago, I guess, whatever it was, when they announced like sort of new versions of the existing consoles.

09:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean same exact designs, one, I think, one new color in on the xbox series yeah, but it's an improved chipset, like it'll be a lower cost, it'll be lower heat, like that's the usual thing you do at a rev, but sony does plenty of those yeah, so there's that.

09:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I I think microsoft wants to. Well, they voice this, but I don't know that I trust it. You know, always have an xbox console business, but the thing is, when you look at activision blizzard's impact on micro, on xbox, on microsoft gaming specifically, it's everything right if you forget about hardware, which I think Microsoft would like to do right, that's part of this platform shift. Most of Xbox, and most of it's, certainly most of its gains by far are from Activision Blizzard, right, sure, so there's. There's not a lot of data um to point to, but one of the things that microsoft noted in their post earnings conference call was that the xbox platform has over 500 million active users. Okay, so most of those have to be activision blizzard, right? So what does that look like? Well, the last time that activision, for all its problems and it was a horrible company was incredibly transparent every time they issued an earnings release because their numbers to give us they're huge

10:34
they used to give us this figure every quarter, so the last time they reported active users it was 356 million um.

10:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It had been higher, by the way, it was 360, something earlier that year it was a bleed off of off of warcraft for quite a while okay, so, interestingly, um, about 200 million of that is mobile.

10:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's like king. Interesting, the stuff we don't really talk about too much and the reason microsoft claimed they wanted this company in the first place. What is the mobile story? Yeah, reason microsoft claimed they wanted this company in the first place. What is the mobile story? Yeah, call of duty, which everyone talks about, is, uh, about 90 million ish users, so mobile is actually twice as big as um call of duty from a user-based perspective. Right, revenues, necessarily? Um, I don't know so vaguely. You know, s Nadella, we're energized about the future. We were investing in fundamentals. Okay, that's cute, but I think the end game here is you know, you know how this business would be super profitable if they didn't make hardware, you know, and that's not the outcome anyone wants. Right, I just described something.

11:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, I just described something terrible, I mean, that being said, if you made a Snapdragon X Xbox, because I have plenty of friends that are in the game development business and their whole conversation is about using these generative AI models to make a better game. That's right, yep, you lower the cost of the games. Yeah, well, you do, because you eliminate voice acting, for example, because you're going to generate messaging straight.

12:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh God, yeah, Generate messaging straight back, right? Yep, I always use the example I think that you brought up originally, which was open world games, where it could just keep generating more side quests, more content, more areas, more you know, more planets.

12:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If it's a science fiction game, whatever, but just the idea that you describe a plot and these and and describe characters, language, the way they should speak, but that no two conversations are ever the same. There is no scripted path through the game right per se, like with a word for word, just the general concepts. That's phenomenal. Let's talk about an experience yeah, you, just every time you played it they'd say different things, and the idea that you could have incremental effects on them, like we always talked about this where you know they'll do three scripts for a given character based on. Are you?

12:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
good, yeah, you're a bad guy. It's like now it could be your own Adventure book or something you could go in different directions. I look you could do this today in the cloud, right, it would just be expensive. Could you do it in an Xbox, but could you do it in an Xbox. I think that's the. I think that's what they want.

13:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I really yeah, well, they also means changing how games are made.

13:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But wait, somebody owns some Studios right, right, and they just laid off a bunch of people interestingly and, uh, consolidated Studios, and we'll see. I don't know it's yeah x.

13:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know what, you know how you change the minds of a bunch of developers in a hurry, lay off a quarter of their friends. Shouldn't have a conversation about how you want to do things differently wow, that's uh darth vader a strategy right there.

13:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, yeah, I don't know, xbox is tough, um, it's know, xbox is tough, um, it's this, the console business. I mean, think about, look, I, I look this up and xbox console hardware xbox hardware, which is mostly console, was down. Uh, double digits, right, 40. Look at it, I'm sorry, I'm trying to have it innovated there. Yeah, but it's not like the quarter. Yeah, it was 44. No, that's not it, it's 40. Where's the hardware? I thought it was 41, 40 somewhere in the 41.

14:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's supposed to be a break-even business anyway. You don't even care how big it is yeah, but they've never made, they've never.

14:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That whole model has never worked for them, right? They've never made it work. Um, so the the problem is they, this business, this part of the business, has had declining revenues. I think it was in six of the eight previous quarters, including the one we're talking about right now. The hardware yeah, it was 42% revenue decline over the same quarter a year ago. Last year was not great. It was not great.

14:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, and some of that you can absorb in a pandemic correction. But yeah, if you don't innovate in this game space soon.

14:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You really have just been throwing money away yeah so, but the problem is there are two companies in this market that are doing pretty well in this market sony and nintendo, right, and you know, they've just never well, they had that brief moment, the 360, they were right there and, uh, they ended up lost their way around maybe they see a leadership change you know, yeah, well, yeah, I know, you know I don't want to go there yet, but yeah, that's all right.

15:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They could put Bobby Kotick in charge. What could go?

15:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yikes, sometimes you need a fixer.

15:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's all I'm saying, that's all um so yeah, but you know they have with frustrating here, paul, they have the ingredients. Yep, I know top tier studios. They actually have a pretty good hardware pipeline.

15:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They could genuinely innovate yeah, no, I, I, I know, but I at some point, you know, you just, I don't mean you one, does I? Because I, yeah, I keep saying the future looks bright for xbox. And then it's like like these recent changes.

15:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The game. The other side of this is junk the hardware and just be a game maker. You know they, the company is called microsoft, right?

15:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, I agree with that, but a lot of xbox fans viscerally react negatively to that.

15:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh yeah, without a doubt and unarguably, I don't see Nintendo or Sony particularly focused on bringing AI to the equation. If I'm snatching Adela Bringing, I'm sorry, ai. Is that what you said? Yeah, yeah, like, if I'm snatching Adela, I desperately need AI to work. I'm going to go down every single imaginable path I can find to create an AI workload To that point.

16:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That post-earnings call started with a little monologue by him sort of explaining to investors. To be clear, the audience, you've got to think about who you're talking to. I just want to offer some perspective on why we're doing this thing we're doing investing in AI the way we are, why we're spending almost $20 billion on infrastructure in one quarter and it's only going to go up. Yeah, you know there's AI. I think, in the same way that cloud made sense for Microsoft, ai does make sense for Microsoft. Yes, even if you're you know, even if you've been fearful or hating this stuff from the very beginning, or you feel that, like an AI feature in a word processor or something is silly, which I can agree with. I mean this is sort of a, a fundamental strategy. Um, it's azure. It's about azure ai.

17:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's about azure open ai well, and it's like every time you say ai, you're actually meaning azure consumption, and that's good for the company.

17:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's exactly right yep, right, although you know, interestingly, I big. When you're big, it's still hard to grow. You know quickly, yeah, as your growth this quarter was 29%. Analysts were looking for third, I want to say it was 30 to 32, or maybe 31 to 32.

17:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's insane.

17:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know and, but this thing was 70% growth for such a long time there's still this like well, what's going on here? Why is this slower than we thought? It's like it's big now. That's why yeah.

17:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So we don't actually want to collapse the entire planet into cloud resources Like, eventually you start to fill in a market Right.

17:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right.

17:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Now, and so you know we also saw this pivot towards AI right about the time that those numbers were starting to ease off meaningfully.

18:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So you know definitely done the. You know, look at the puppy.

18:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Look at the puppy. Kind of distraction play Yep, Recognizing also that it's going to prop up the cloud business. Anyway, the consumption is huge.

18:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah Right, in the end we might view Microsoft's whatever success that they may have with AI as being a part of the cloud. You know, we to date have sort of talked about this as a new generation, a new era for Microsoft, but maybe it's just really a continuation of the cloud?

18:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, no, without a doubt, it is just all about cloud. Right, they got into open AI to consume cloud. It happened to pay off and generate this entire spinoff business. Right, you know there's many ways to to keep on spinning this, but I don't see anybody else in a place to actually bring generative AI to gaming Even close to what Microsoft's got in their pocket right now. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, so it could be a breakthrough like that. You know you could. In a year, you could turn this around in a big way, like this next fiscal year, talking about how much money gaming made because of the models.

19:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There are interesting outside factors that impact the Xbox business. Over time there was a like this particular quarter, for example, he mentioned Sachin Nadella mentioned the Fallout TV series and how this put some previous versions of Fallout like the usage of those things went up like 5X right.

19:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and you totally missed the opportunity to take advantage of that Like good Lord. That could have been 10 times.

19:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, yeah, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know what to say to that. I mean, I'm not sure if anyone could have predicted how well that went. The Halo TV series probably hasn't resulted in much of anything.

19:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, everything else has been a loss, but at the same time, build a DLC Like good Lord, especially since they've now signed a second year, like if you don't have a DLC now, you're missing.

19:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that matches the show. Yeah, I agree.

19:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I don't even think the chances of the second season being as good are very low yeah.

20:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But no reason not to double down. The first one was no, no reason not to double down. First was amazing. There was a thing a couple of years ago where they didn't name it. It was funny. They talked around it, but it was Fortnite. Like Fortnite usage sent Xbox usage skyrocketing for a couple of quarters in a row and that was a big deal.

20:16
Like that kind of thing has a big impact on them xbox especially, microsoft, whatever but they could in many ways win by losing, meaning it may not be them who takes direct advantage of ai and some title that they sell, but some game that does. That's running on azure, right, yeah, it takes off and it. Maybe it runs on xbox, maybe it's cross platform, maybe it's pc only, it doesn't really matter. Um, but microsoft still kind of wins there because you know they're're they're, they're winning on the backend, right, so that's, we'll see. I mean, that's a fanciful way to look at it, maybe, but interesting to me anyway. Yeah, um, all right. So just like big bucket, mostly consumer stuff. I'll just say not much. I, I, I. I've been doing this for a couple of quarters, maybe almost a year now, like I start counting the number of times that the Microsoft executives say certain terms like Windows Office, surface devices, xbox, ai you know Windows way down.

21:16
It mentions. The only pertinent stat that came out of this is PC markets not going great. A little bit of growth from PC makers, commercial side is okay. But they literally said that was random because sometimes a bunch of licensing changes for a little while for a couple of companies it makes a deal. We can't predict it. It happened, so that was good.

21:38
But they mentioned that Windows 11 active devices, which is kind of a usage share number, was up 50% year over year, which sent me looking for some data. The only source of usage data for this that we have that's of any value, even though it's probably horribly unreliable, is stat counter. According to stat counter, windows 11 is almost 30% of the install base, compared to 66% for Windows 10. Using their numbers, the year-over-year growth was not 50%, it was 17%. But I don't know. Like I said, this stuff is just who can say so. I don't know.

22:18
And literally that's pretty much it for Windows. They obviously mentioned the Copilot plus PC launch thing. Pretty much it for windows. They, you know. They obviously mentioned the copilot plus pc launch thing. You might argue that maybe revenue from pc makers should have been better, slash, worse or whatever because of that in this quarter or not, depending on the timing, because those pcs didn't launch until the very end of june but yeah, I don't think you know, you and you mentioned, like no game from copilot plus pc, but it's like there is no time.

22:44
Well, except for one thing, I mean those, the bulk of those sales, probably did occur right away. Yeah, and those Windows licenses sales, licenses sales, license sales, I guess to PC makers would have occurred months earlier. I mean I don't know, I mean no one does because they're not saying but you know, we'll see HP, dellvo, we'll start talking about their earnings.

23:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But you've got to give them a year to sell these things.

23:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but it's like a Hollywood blockbuster. The big sales are day one, I think, drops off.

23:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So Q1 of 25 is really when you're going to see it. Yes, it's.

23:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
when do you realize the revenue, right, right, and so that's also true on the Surface side, and there's a hint there that what you just said is true, right, so surface has been in the dumpster for a long time.

23:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, so you don't know really post pan panos, but even before yeah, so I did the same thing with surface.

23:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I did with, uh, xbox. I look back at the previous eight quarters. It's been. Where am I looking at here? It has. Last time they posted a revenue gain was two years ago, um, now I don't know whatever that means. Um, it was two years ago, which I think is what led to panos leaving, right, because he resisted this strategy where they only focus on premium pcs, etc. Etc. Um, but device sales, which in this context means surface sales, because they're not really selling anything else. I know hall lens is technically in that market, but that's not really impacting anything financially. Um, you know, down double digits, right? Yeah, so I don't know how we fix this. The the one little glimmer of hope, uh, which is what I alluded to at the beginning, there was that when they look at the current quarter, microsoft actually predicts a low to single digit growth in devices, and maybe that is tied to the copilot plus pc bump or whatever. So we'll find out next month.

24:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm definitely going to look forward to that Next month or next quarter.

24:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Next quarter, yeah, yeah, next quarter, the current quarter, I guess we'll call it. But, yeah, you know, revenues was 11% down, which Microsoft said was what we expected. It's like okay, great, so that is not great. There's not much to say. Office office is mostly commercial products. Um, strong growth there. I'm you know what. This is nothing to say, there's nothing very interesting. And then we kind of hit on the AI stuff. I mean, this to me is the big, this is the big thing and, like I said, you know so capital expenditures in this quarter were 19 billion dollars.

25:27
Wow, in four months yeah, three months, and oh my god, that cloud and ai related spend represents nearly all of that money. So roughly half is infrastructure and the other half is cloud and a related spend for cert on servers, cpus and gpus. So at 19 billion, um, yikes, I don't think now like the alternative right, but you're back to the same thing.

25:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know if tenable, it's unsustainable billion dollars, except for one thing.

26:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So they generated a free cash flow of 23.3 billion dollars. So they're not, they're just paying for this. They're literally just paying cash for the infrastructure build out so they can afford it.

26:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But see, one of the things that I know they can afford it every quarter at that run rate right, but you still need to explain to shareholders who it's 19 billion a year or is it?

26:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, no, it $19 billion in a quarter. No, no, it's $19 billion in one quarter. That was one quarter.

26:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's more than their profits, isn't it? That's not true. No, it's not.

26:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What is their profit?

26:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was $22 last quarter, but it's $80. Yeah, it's a bet.

26:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The alternative is a stock buyback or a dividend. They're putting the money to work. They're putting the money to work, yep, yep. That's true, you're right. What?

26:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
would they do with it besides give it to the shareholders?

26:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Buy a video game company Like I don't know.

27:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, but that's the thing. They Well, but they say that's the thing. They did. That, too, that's what's amazing here, right? This company had so much cash on hand, generates so much cash every quarter, that they acquired Activision for 68 point, whatever, or whatever. It was $68 billion. They spent between 10 and $19 billion a quarter, every single quarter, during that fiscal year, and they generated 120 billion in cash while doing that. Yeah, so you know this is the, you know this is what they do. You know this is the company right now.

27:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And arguably that's what a well-run company looks like.

27:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I guess I don't know how to answer. I don't even know how to respond to that. I don't know.

27:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know what it turns out.

27:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
As long as you're right, you're great well, this has a little bit of a fake it till you make it vibe to it. But um, to me all of the description of ai.

27:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Without a doubt, yeah, but but yes, like I say, they aren't committing that's right.

28:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, microsoft, bill gates, especially, used to always talk about these bet you're. You know we're betting the company on bing, but no company on skype and it's like, no, you're not, but well, that's the thing.

28:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is there an example? I understand if they were borrowing money for this to be that's true about the company.

28:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is cash well, it's a good point, but that's okay.

28:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But I mean okay, but what this stuff is still costs, and the cost don't end just because you spent it. That hardware sits there and doesn't serve customers, it depreciates and it becomes useless. And then you have data centers that no one is using. I mean, it's still. You're still betting a lot. It's still a bet. Yeah, you hope you can keep it busy. Yep, I mean, according to them, we they would have built more if they could have. You know, they they were. They're doing this as fast as they can, just like CrowdStrike, rolling out updates.

28:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apple's entire R and D budget for a year was 30 billion Right Sure.

28:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
For a year that was, I mean Apple, uh, in Steve Jobs era their R and D budget was almost hardly spent Anything.

29:01
Microsoft has always spent a ton of money on R andD. That's always been an interesting contrast. So I mean, apple maybe has I don't want to say normalized, but compared to the way they were before, I mean probably right. Anyway, microsoft makes a lot of money. They spend a lot of money, but they're investing it and, like I said, they could win in AI by losing. They're investing it and, like I said, I don't, they could win in AI by losing and, you know, by just being that back-end infrastructure company and hopefully some of their first-party stuff will take off as well, right, whether it's in video games or through Windows or Microsoft 365, which is probably the most likely culprit. You know, they say things like you know, GitHub Copilot is the most successful culprit. You know they say things like you know, github Copilot is the most successful AI-powered developer tool. I'm sure it is, but it can't generate that much money. I mean there aren't that many developers using it. It's, you know, it's relatively small. All of this is a deficit. Now, right, I mean everything is losing.

29:57
I heard it was. Yeah, we heard that. Yeah, that's the of the.

30:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's it for earnings. Really. Here's your report, okay. Um well, let's take a break. Yeah, I think, yes, you're watching no windows weekly paul thurot in lower mcconjie is it still lower or are you now in middle mcungee?

30:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
well, I'm glad you asked, leo. It depends, see physically, geographically this is the conversation I am in lower mcungee. Okay, as far as the us government is, is understands it. My postal code, whatnot? I am in mcungee spiritually, not in opportunity is there an upper mcungee? There is an upper mcungee.

30:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We hate those guys civil wars have been fought over less that's right, somebody's going to throw in a west mcungee at some point.

30:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's really going to be trouble mcungee heights and is there a park?

30:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
in madeira park? That's the other question there are quite a few parks in madeira it's all parks, it's almost. How do you know the difference? How can, can you tell the difference? Grizzly bears, yep, oh.

31:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If there's grizzly bears then it's a park.

31:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you're in the park and you're about to die the playground doesn't take off.

31:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wow, the playground fails, okay.

31:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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34:38
Melissacom slash twit. That's M-E-L-I-S-S-A. Melissacom slash twit. Melissa is a 4.0 student. I got to tell you melissacom slash twit. We thank them so much for supporting Windows Weekly. So we have done the earnings learnings, but there are some kind of related stories. For instance, one of the ways Microsoft is spending all the money they're not spending on AI is giving it back to the guys. That's nice.

35:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you know, obviously Microsoft layoffs have been a big story of the past year, at least the last six months especially. But this company has actually grown from 150,000 employees four years ago to I think it's 230-something thousand today, yikes. To go to I think it's 230 something thousand today, yikes. So they apparently announced internally that they were going to give employees a one time cash award this year on top of their normal annual bonuses. There weren't any specifics for numbers, but the understanding from GeekWire, which is Todd Bishop's publication we love and trust, is that it will be in the thousands of dollars. You know, it's not like a 50.

35:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Applebee's gift card. Like up to 25 of your bonus Wow eligible salary. That's nice, that's a nice thing.

35:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's probably gonna be pretty good a chunk of change, that's yeah this will.

35:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This will go over well with the people who were, uh, laid off in the past year, so that's gonna be, yeah, pretty much we're saving so much money now that we got rid of those jerks that, uh, we thought we'd give it back to the guys who were left but it was.

36:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's not for the execs, this is for the. They're in place, yeah, workers. Yeah, good todd's thing says level 67 below, which is below partner level, basically yeah, yeah, um.

36:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean I I don't know too much of the details of how this works internally, but I think with executives now I I don't know too much of the details of how this works internally, but I think with executives now, a lot of their pay is including such and analysis can be based on success with ai. Right, they're getting. Yep, you know it's not enough just to you know the part of the business that you're doing, working in or in charge of, is doing well, it's like no, you've got to show up and do this it's a, it's a base salary, it's a unit profitability, and then it's shares.

36:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay, and so as you get more senior in the company, the compensation in shares is worth so much more than everything else combined. Yeah, yeah, yeah, especially, yeah, I mean is the share price doing well.

36:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I haven't really followed that it came off a little lately, you know yeah, uh, I don't have too many details on this because it was in the information and I'm not paying for that, but they reported today that TikTok had been spending about $20 million every month on open AI models through Microsoft Azure through at least March. According to this publication, that's close to one quarter of the total revenue that microsoft was generating from this business, and it was on pace to generate 1 billion dollars annually, or 83 million dollars per month, according to a source, and that's all I know.

37:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
so um, because 20 billion, 20 million would be 240 million yeah I don't.

37:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is like the math of the uh windows 11, um, you know uh, installed base.

37:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And this is not all the ai revenue, specifically the open ai on azure. That's right. That's right because yeah, which I think is an important part, because I tell you, at 20 million a month still sounds experimental for what tick tock moves in money like that doesn't.

38:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I I purposefully don't call follow this company very closely so I'm not really sure what they generate, but I'm sure it will be infuriating, whatever it is, to me well, they're like a 10 billion dollar company right plus so to spend 20 mil yeah it's a couple of percentage points, right, okay, I mean you could look at that just from a stream of sentiment analysis a statement of of comments on tiktoks.

38:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You could burn that for that. Yeah, I, stream of sentiment analysis, a statement of comments on TikToks. You could burn that for that.

38:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean I'm sort of coming at it from Microsoft's perspective Like this is an example of a company spending this kind of money and the goal should be that they see.

38:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The point of the story is that there are customers buying this $19 million investment and they're customers you've heard of.

38:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, TikTok although that are agents of a foreign government.

38:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Tiktok's 20 million a month, I'm sure we're not funding the Chinese military if that's what you're suggesting, but I think it would be larger if it were they do say that TikTok's 20, because I subscribe to the information, because I believe in supporting good journalism, tiktok's 20 million a month. It's close to 25. I don't even consider such a thing, yeah 25% of the total revenue Microsoft was generating.

39:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So if I multiply by four that's 80 million a month. I don't know where that is About a billion a year.

39:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Billion a year.

39:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this is specifically OpenAI models running on Azure, so this is most likely something called azure open ai services.

39:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, it's that oh, I see that's the segment of the business, yeah, yeah, and of course there's some incremental value from doing co-pilot on the pcs. We don't know how much, but they're selling that and you know there's value in it.

39:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm just looking at that 19 billion, that's all I hope they didn't spend it on spellcheck and notepad, you know I don't know.

39:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Hey, that ain't cheap. I already said the worst thing they could do. Would you just use it as a sentiment analyzer?

39:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
but yeah, you know the red squigglies aren't going to pay for themselves, so I don't know anyway, um, yeah, so okay, I guess we're never going to get hard numbers on this stuff. This is the problem, well, other than through reports like this, because Microsoft is never gonna come out and say, hey, we made X number of dollars doing this thing.

40:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They don't do that. No, this is specifically an anecdotal reference. We could also safely presume that TikTok is the largest buyer then because why else would we need an anecdote?

40:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that should be the logical next question right is that?

40:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, right, maybe they are well, and the only reason maybe they're number two and and, and you pick them because it's hip right, it's ticked off.

40:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, this was just a. I mean, this was like a leak or something, wasn't it? I don't think anyone talked about this openly. Okay, yeah, I'm not sure where this comes from.

40:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They also have this table how select corporations purchase access to OpenAI's models, whether they buy it through OpenAI or through Azure or through both. And look at all these big companies that go through Microsoft, AT&T, CarMax, Coca-Cola, Fidelity, H&R Block, Ikea, Intuit, KPMG, Mercedes.

40:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know why they do that, Leo? Because no one ever got fired for choosing Microsoft.

41:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

41:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What is this blue? But look.

41:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But now look at this list again and say why did they pick tiktok from this list? Yeah, really, they could have said coca-cola. Well, tiktok must be the biggest right yeah, so I I think it's probably the rest of these are all standards.

41:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the hippest but there are, um, okay, but these companies all kind of speak to the diversity of companies that would want to use AI. It's likely that in just in any part of this, that there's a you know some big accounts like this one, and then there's a million little, a little nippy, you know accounts that are just doing little bits here and there right and that.

41:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
A million here, a million there. Yeah, pretty soon talk about real money, yep, but no, it's very interesting to see. You could have said coca-cola, you could have said h&r block, you said it. Could have said kpmg, you said tiktok this is coming from, according to someone who saw internal.

41:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I don't, I think it was just a source like saw, maybe maybe it stood out because the number was bigger and they were looking at a spreadsheet. You know, I don't know, but this, this is just. It's not. This is not a planned pr moment. This was a leak, right? Yeah?

42:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
and so somebody else picked tiktok. But you know, coca-cola is what five times the size of tiktok like for crying out loud, although the margin yeah, but how much ai do you need to generate sugar water right? Malted battery acid is the way I usually remember seriously.

42:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Seriously, tiktok uses it as filters. I mean, they use this. They could we don't know. Well, we don't know, but I would guess they have a lot of AI filters. Yeah, a lot of them. You've seen them Turn yourself into a Disney princess. You've done that. Come on, tell me you haven't done that, richard.

42:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You don't know what I'm wearing the lower half of my body right now. That's a separate issue. Me and my tutu are for me.

42:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is not the first time that Richard and the term princess have been used together in the same sentence, actually. So it's interesting because at the bottom of the information, article the part that you unwashed masses can't see.

42:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It says the Verge reported last year that ByteDance was using OpenAI's GPT-4 model to train its in-house ai models interesting.

43:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, especially we talk about social media, the thing you're going to go after is inappropriate sexual content, violence like those kinds of.

43:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they may use it for screening, but is there anything I would worry about inbreeding?

43:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
when it comes to ai, I'm going to use ai to train this model, I train this model, to train this model, and I want to go like we.

43:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think they're training, they're training their own model and then, using open AI, as the validator say, are we doing as good as open.

43:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ai Recognize these things.

43:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So it's a test platform. Yeah, I need to test that my model's good, so I use somebody else's model.

43:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
20 million bucks, though Geez, yeah, I didn't know testing's working on a pretty big freaking model, which they probably are actually responded to the verge, saying they were employing open as models to a very limited extent to develop their own models. So they may go. I think maybe. Yeah, although there's a commenter and, by the way, the information commenters are very good, uh who says it's highly likely that tick tock is using azure open ai to generate the data they need to train their own AI. That is not highly likely. I don't know if it's highly likely.

44:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, because all evidence shows that that is a very bad idea. Yep.

44:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you know, it's how we got mad cow disease. That's all I'm saying.

44:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's it, yeah, stop eating grains that spread really well.

44:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like what's the difference?

44:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
When you think viral, you think mad cow. I mean viral a cancerous.

44:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Which one are you looking for the outcomes? Chris fell disease is a viral. Well, it's pre-taught, but let's not get technical yeah, yeah, very good.

44:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, and then, uh, this is I didn't just this, because we talked about I wasn't really sure where else to put this, but amd announced earnings. I'm, you know, intel. Obviously the peacemakers will be coming soon, but the interesting thing to me here is that the majority of their revenues are now coming from data center.

44:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, um yeah, do you think that's just because you, because everybody else is out of stock?

45:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
but they had. Okay, I mean that's fine. I mean, if I look, there's a reason burger king exists. Yeah, you know, um, that's not a bad place to be, but no, no, they're two number two makes a lot of money like there's no two ways about it.

45:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
These guys are doing just fine, but there's so much pressure to expand clouds right now I wonder if you get the cpus you can get. There's nothing wrong with amd cpus. Arguably they do better cloud workloads than just about anything.

45:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, microsoft mentioned the silicon, like CPU, gpu, mp, whatever they're using in their own data centers in their earnings, and they specifically called out AMD, nvidia and then themselves, right, because they've done their own things. I guess it was twice as big. I'm sorry. It's about 2.8 billion from data center, 1.5 billion from the client, 1.5 billion from the client group. That's desktop, you know, computers, right, pcs, um, and then what used to be the big thing for back when it was radio and uh, gaming revenues fell 59 percent to 648 million you know you don't see in their play at all ai yeah, so well, uh, yeah, I I bet, if you.

46:04
Well, except that the GPUs are selling to data centers are used for AI, right, like that's AI, you know. So in some sense you could see them as a kind of a mini NVIDIA. But they also have this PC play, which I think NVIDIA might have soon again as well in the CPU sense, right, I know they like video cards.

46:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Paul, don't you think all of the vendors will be pursuing putting NPUs and PCs from now on? It's such a vital part of our workflows.

46:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I sense sarcasm there, no, but they are of course right. So today, actually, AMD launched.

46:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think somebody would have enough nerve to say, hey, we'll do this when it actually does anything useful In the meantime. You're wasting your money. You can save it buying AMD.

46:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh well, I mean so their next generation PC processors started launching today the mobile versions. The desktop versions were pushed back a couple of weeks, but these are the. I think it was 50 tops.

47:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
All right, so they're on the MPU bandwagon. They're All right, so they're on the MPU bandwagon, so all of us can have it. Doesn't matter where you go, you're going to buy an additional processor that doesn't do anything.

47:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it's just a processor, so it's just a part of the processor.

47:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's not doing anything. Yeah, the third one in each of these.

47:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah, so anyway they're doing okay.

47:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm glad they're doing.

47:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
well, I don't think they're going to rock it up like NVIDIA. Let me get into how NVIDIA is rocket going these days. Yeah, we need a number two, so I'm glad they're doing something. I think it's a good business for them to plan.

47:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think it's an unreasonable comparison a GPU manufacturer versus a CPU manufacturer.

47:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, I mean, they make gpus like yeah, that's not what they're known for yeah, right, um, yeah, but I think that maybe this is part of that shift, um, but we'll, I don't know, it doesn't matter. So this must have been over the weekend I guess it was friday. So microsoft has posted a couple of times about the behind the scenes stuff, with the crowd strike, right. So we got that john cable post, uh, last week that we talked about last week, I'm sure where he was talking about the thing I was talking about, which is the need for these, everyone in the security industry, to kind of work together and to solve these problems, and he didn't say it this way, but it's like we don't have to involve regulators, let's just do the right thing for everybody, you know, which, to me, is just common sense and makes so.

48:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like, hey, the regulators are coming, get yourself in order, because the closer you are to having good order, the more likely you are to be part of the regulation. Yeah, right, right. At least I hope so here's a common.

48:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Goodness knows, since then I think I guess this was Friday Microsoft has published a detailed post about what happened technically with this crowd strike, with this outage, right, why it happened, how it happened, yada, yada, yada. But, as they point out, microsoft actually has implemented a lot of security controls in Windows, in windows, specifically windows 11, that these companies are not taking advantage of, and a lot of that stuff allows them to do exactly what they are doing, but without going into the kernel. Yeah and um, that's part of their. This is not just true of pcs, it's servers and also azure. But, um, they're going to, uh, they're going to work with these guys and maybe we can fix this Right. So they're obviously in close. They're in a close relationship and they've been.

49:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean you presume that George Kurtz is going to come out and say hey, we're going to make sure this never happens again by getting ourselves out of ring. Zero Right. We're working closely with our partners to make that.

49:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, they're going to talk a lot about processes and you know all that stuff. They are it's like we will be more careful next time is not a strategy yeah, yeah, the the interesting thing about this post is that they they mentioned some uh like common sense things that companies can do to the secure data and whatever else, and and you can almost read like a consumer post in here it's like back up your data security.

50:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know scarily and often we're going to screw up more often you should plan for that.

50:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, right, right, um. But yeah, security stuff, this is the thing we're gonna. I'm going to talk a little bit about password managers later and that we rich and I were kind of talking about it before the show. But yeah, the what I've found talking to people is that a lot of people are like me, which is that security is often so daunting that they maybe, every once in a while we'll kind of give it a shot try to be better do the right things to secure their online accounts and then panic and run and hide under the desk.

50:36
Well, they give up, right it gets, it's so complicated, and so you know you're being asked to make decisions that you do not understand. Don't make the decision. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a, it's right, it's a. It's probably an evolutionary tactic. You know, it's wired into our dna it's the, it's the paradox of choice.

50:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, it's like there's too many different options here. I don't understand them. I can't make an informed choice, so I will not choose. Yep, yeah, no. Now, according to rush, you still made a choice, but she's not a good one. You made a choice not to do anything. There you go. I just threw you a tom sawyer reference I was just gonna say the real

51:15
tom sawyer, I see, there you go, so um, um, I don't think you do, I don't think you, I don't know. Um, okay, so neil pert was awesome oh, was he awesome.

51:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What, what anyway? Um sorry, we're just a little canadian humor here, it's okay, anybody would argue about any number man

51:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
anyhow. Um, so in the windows space, we are also in the Windows space. Last week, I'm embarrassed to say, I let week D pass, I believe, without mention. We didn't talk about it. I don't think If we did, it was only to say that week D came and went without. Well, it eventually got one. But Tuesday weekdays, normally, when you get the updates right, the preview updates, and that never happened. I kind of zoned on it, I think. And then Thursday friday, in that week, microsoft actually it must have been thursday, late thursday pushed it.

52:11
Microsoft actually released the preview update for windows 11 versus 22 and 23 h2 right, containing the features that they had previously put in the release preview about two weeks prior. So we had talked about that and I said look, this will be the next one. So that's unfolding on schedule, although the actual day of the preview update when it was a few days late, that's not a big deal. These features are not major. This is the duplicate file tab thing in File Explorer, the ability to drag an app shortcut from the top of start down to the taskbar to pin it there, and then a kind of a weird taskbar shortcut related feature that I don't think anyone's ever going to use, it doesn't really matter, um. So nothing, nothing major, but that is happening, and these features are. You know they're on the slow roll, so you might get one, but not the other two or three you might. You know it's. It will change over time, because that's how we do things.

53:08
To me, the bigger deal, though, is 24 h2, right, so it's only been out for a couple months. It's only limited availability copilot plus pcs unless you went and did the manual install, like I uh provided the info on um. There was no week d update for 24 h2, which is unusual, but then that same day, in fact at the same time, they released a weekday update for 22 and 23H2. They released a new build of Windows 11, 24h2 to the release preview of the Windows Insider program, and I don't think that is coincidental. So I think the time is a little mixed up, but I think these features are the things we are going to see in 24H2, and then again, you know, later in 22, 23h2, possibly as soon as August's patch Tuesday, which is less than two weeks away yeah, just under two weeks away, like. I think that's going to be the schedule. I think this could have been the week D update.

54:02
So, um, the four tiles you see on the lock screen. Now most people only see three or less, but it's supposed to be for the account manager experience, which actually I see right now in oh, this is 24h2, so I'm actually seeing this somehow. This is when you click on your profile picture and you get little uh indicators for microsoft 365, copilot pro, xbox, game pass, whatever you subscribe to, and it will tell you if those things are active, how much cloud storage you're using in OneDrive, etc. Completely pointless the file explorer stuff we talked about, but also the ability to drag and drop files into what they call the breadcrumb bar, that segmented part of the address bar. So if you want to copy or move a file from the current location to a root, a root folder, you can do that again, like we've been able to do since I don't know 2000 at least. But they broke it in that 23h2 explorer update. Um, many more changes.

54:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I do not know why this. Innovate there needs to be innovation in this space. This is a pretty known world, right? Yep, it's silly.

55:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's, it's all of this is all of this is silly. You know the ability to share by sending yourself an email. You know it's like seriously, um, so yeah, this, this, it's nothing major, but they, but they're testing, and so I think the thing to look forward to now is in a little under two weeks we're gonna get a patch. Tuesday update 22 and 23 h2 are absolutely gonna get that thing. That's in the preview update. If you want to get that now, 24 H2, I bet we get this, I bet this is what happens, I bet that. I bet that's how it happens. If not, it will be the next month. I mean, they're obviously heading in that direction. So there's that, ok.

55:39
Yep, a couple of other minor windows insider bits. Um, everyone is probably familiar with um pc era. I maybe I'm not familiar with it with uh phone link, which used to be what was I think it was called pc link before a phone or whatever you mean, the app I keep giving up on because it keeps needing me to re-authenticate and switch stuff on again, and again, and again, until I'm like you know what?

56:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
How about I don't use you?

56:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so they're rolling out a related feature in all Insider channels called Link to Windows. That will let you access all of the folders and files and media that's on your phone through the File Explorer right, without doing the link thing, and it works over Wi-Fi, right, in addition to a cable. So it's not quite the same as the current implementation that you get through Android.

56:31
And yeah, that's fine, right, there's fun little things like you can click on the phone icon and the address bar and you'll get a little fly down that shows you how much storage is there and how much you're using, and yada, yada, yada. So it looks fine, looks fine, looks nice. That's a good idea. I can't wait for them to put it on the iphone. Uh, and then some minor changes to the in the beta channel for the widgets feed. That will enable a pretty major change, if it ever happens, which is the ability to use third-party news feeds in the widgets boards, in widgets board, instead of the terrible microsoft feed. Right, my expectation is that if any appear, they will also be terrible, because who would ever do something like this. But we'll see. It can't be as bad as what's there now, so hopefully that will be pretty good.

57:21
And then just a couple of things on these new AI ai pcs, right? So, um, I reviewed the hp elite burke ultra, which is their business class co-pilot plus pc. It's okay, this is the first one. That wasn't awesome, right? Wow, um, the battery life was about two hours less than the other two I've reviewed so far doesn't that take time for it to really settle out into what the battery life will be?

57:44
yeah, no, I, I, I did this over the same amount of time as the others. Um, I don't know what happened there. It's it's also technically, um, because they're changing all their brands. It's actually a replacement for what used to be called the dragonfly, which is an awesome computer, right? Um, there hadn't been a new one in two years and it really just doesn't live up to that legacy, unfortunately, um because it was a dragonfly Chromebook as well.

58:06
right, yeah, there was a Dragonfly Pro Chromebook. Yeah, actually, I think there's a normal Dragonfly Chromebook as well, so I think there are two.

58:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, didn't they make it with different hardware? Yeah, the.

58:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Pro ones are AMD-based and different bodies yeah, so.

58:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know what made this less wow than the others.

58:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's only one model. It's non-configurable. It's expensive because it comes with three years of warranty.

58:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Whether you want it or not, there's a consumer version.

58:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You could save 500 bucks by getting that one instead. It's the same thing, mine, you know it's. It's. It's fine. It's not bad, I don't. It's just that the other two were so good. Yeah, I still pick, I still start typing on the the surface laptop and it's like yes, this is what I want this to be like.

58:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's wonderful yeah, I figured it was. You didn't even before you type, because you opened the screen and it just came on.

58:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're already well they all do that. Now. I thought this used to this.

59:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is there that's boring to you. Is that that? Okay, I appreciate that it's very funny.

59:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The other day I opened the EliteBook 1040 that's based on the meteor-like thing and I turned it toward my wife and I said do you notice anything? She goes, it's booting. And I said yes, it is booting.

59:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's cute.

59:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's cute, you tried.

59:23
I'm charming of you. Yeah, you're delightful. Anyway, it did boot up, at least. That's, I guess, a step in the right direction. Yeah, and then Intel just announced that it is going to launch its Lunar Lake Core Ultra Generation 2 mobile CPUs on September 3, which is right before IFA. Right, so that will allow the PC makers that will be there, which will be all of them to announce Lunar Lake based laptops then. Right, so this is gonna be kind of a big show.

59:53
Amd's gotten a lot of press for these Zen 5 era AI PC or AI PC chips. Right, and, like I said, those just started rolling out today in PCs and, I think, just in stores. You can just buy them. Well, that's the mobile version. Sorry, the ones you can buy are going to be desktop based. Those will be in a couple weeks, but it's Intel, they're going to make a splash. So I want to be super clear about this. They need to be yep, and I mean I hope, I guess I hope I don't want anything to go wrong. So, yeah, I do hope that they are able to get it right.

01:00:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We'll see Well didn't they just announce some big layoffs?

01:00:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I didn't see that in time for the show, but yeah, they also yep.

01:00:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Something to talk about next week, but it's like thousands and thousands Yep.

01:00:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it's a big company, it's a big company.

01:00:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
When you think about what they're trying to do. I mean I, I guess you could compare it to what Microsoft's doing, yeah, but to me it's always engineers or admin staff like that, because those engineers are irreplaceable they, they have a skill that only works in like three places in the world.

01:00:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So what do you do? Yeah, but that also makes them more valuable, right?

01:01:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, if you're that place those are the guys you want. They'll they'll get a job right away, no doubt. But yeah, but there's only, like I said, there's only a few places to go intel can't get past their current generation chips fast enough.

01:01:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just you know they have so many problems it's and it's not just the ones that people know about um, there's a lot really there's more you think, oh yeah, there's a lot more.

01:01:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yep, oh, there's more you think, oh yeah, there's a lot more. Yeah, oh, jeez, a lot more. Oh, jeez man, jeez, man, jeez. I mean when you have a chip that crashes.

01:01:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What they're doing is complex.

01:01:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I understand, but there's competitors, yep.

01:01:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I know and I hear AMD is up this quarter.

01:01:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right Now granted up this quarter. Right now granted, it's mostly because of data center, but I uh, actually I'm going to talk about an amd laptop later in the show, because I did get an amd based laptop in for review and it's, it's very interesting.

01:01:54
You know, the dragon uh fly pro. The windows pc version, also runs a very interesting hybrid, uh, amd chipset. That's not about a year old but, um, very interesting. Right that, that, uh, that pc is incredible performance and great uptime and it's not arm, you know. So, yeah, amd is doing something right.

01:02:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's no doubt about it we'll take a break and when we come back I know you've been waiting for it Together at last, microsoft 365 and AI, wow. But first I just want to give you a moment to take it all in. First, a word from our sponsor, 1password. So here's a question that kind of a low. I admit it's a loaded question. Do your end users always work? Always work on company owned devices? Of course they do, and I t approved apps? Of course they don't. No, so how do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all those unmanaged apps and those will byods? One password has an answer to this question and they call it extended access management. One password, extended access management is the first security solution that brings all those unmanaged devices and apps and identities under your control, ensures that every user credential is strong and protected, every device is known and healthy and every app is visible. It solves problems traditional iam and mdm cannot touch.

01:03:29
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01:03:45
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01:04:43
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01:05:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Continue on, my friends well, here's a name you haven't heard in a while oh man, ben kenobi.

01:05:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No obi-wan kenobi, there's a name.

01:05:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I haven't heard. Uh, skype. So microsoft announced yesterday, I think it was, that skype is now ad free, and I know the question you're all asking was it to have ads?

01:05:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
there were ads in skype. Yeah, how would we know? Yes, that's the problem.

01:05:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I actually use skype every single day, so do you notice that?

01:05:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, you use that with brad. What do you use skype for?

01:05:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's rapiel and mary joe, oh um. You talk to mary joe every day no, not every single day, but I I talk to her regularly he's cheating on us, richard man, I know what. Um I'm promiscuous. The point is um I'm not really sure what the point is. Um, they've been really kind of building out this Skype UI in ways they don't really like.

01:06:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um they've added uh an AI chat, so just been doing stuff yeah, it's right.

01:06:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's almost like a let's experiment here, because not that many people will notice now that we're irrelevant let's go, yeah. So in addition, like you, there are channels and you can like kind of use it as an almost like a news feed that's probably AI based and blah blah blah. So this is like I'm just there to chat with people, right, and sometimes to do like an audio call or whatever. Like it's not. I just this stuff like Skype today, like like like it's another outlet for that crappy Microsoft news feed.

01:06:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like I just don't need or want this right no nobody does no um, so to me that's you're being so sufficiently irrelevant that even the ad guys at Microsoft are like whatever yeah, I know they're not saying it that way, obviously, but they're promoting it as hey look, it's a, it's a nothing, nothing else gets you to use this yeah, but don't worry, the new Outlook for Windows that's full of ads, that's that's not changing.

01:07:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So yeah, don't worry. The new Outlook for Windows that's full of ads, that's not changing. So yeah, don't worry about that one. And I guess I didn't. Laurent told me this, but the Outlook mobile app also has a channels tab, which is just like the Skype channels thing. I want channels in my email it has like a news feed in it and there are ads in there. Still, I don't, you know. I guess because it's not Skype, it doesn't get the ad-free experience. I don't know.

01:07:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, if more of us can quit Outlook, maybe it'll go ad-free.

01:07:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've been advocating just that for 25 years. What a hairball. Anyhow, last week, openai announced Google's biggest nightmare, which was something called Search GPT. Right now, it's just what they're calling a prototype. There's a wait list and it's a bunch of AI search features that they're going to roll into ChatGPT, based on feedback and testing and so forth. Addressing the concerns of the New York Times and some other people, they partnered with the Wall Street Journal and the Atlantic to provide some up-to-date information from the web that the chat bots typically don't have, or that chat bot to any chat that that one in particular doesn't usually have. Um, it works like chat gpt. It's a chat bot interface. You ask questions, it gives answers, you can continue it in a conversation if you want, or you can start new chats, etc. So, um, I signed up for it. I haven't gotten in. I don't think I.

01:08:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm sure they look at me and laugh politely. I look at it two ways. I mean, everybody's happy to put a shot across the bow at Google. That's always fun, but more importantly, you're getting ready for an IPO. You've got to show you're still innovating and there's new products, because if you're going to look at their revenue, you're going to be disappointed.

01:08:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they also. I didn't write about this, but back at that big event I think it was back in May where everyone expected OpenAI to announce a search product, they started rolling out one of the features for ChatGPT that they showed off then, although in a very limited preview, with a limited audience for those more natural voices. So when you interact with chat GPT using your voice, it sounds more like you're talking to a human being, which is creepy and cool at the same time, I guess.

01:09:11
No, you're not doing it right if you don't hit the uncanny valley.

01:09:14
Yeah, exactly, Exactly. One of the things I have to say I'm really happy to see happening is that Canva, which is a company I don't think I would have thought too much of, you know, they acquired the Affinity Creative Tools a couple of months ago and now they've acquired Leonardo AI, which is an AI image generation startup, and you know they're oh remember, they're doing the you can use our tools for free for six months thing, right, I bought them, I probably the last year on a big sale, so I didn't really spend as much as I could have, but they are dramatically less expensive than Adobe and maybe, more to the point, are not subscription-based, right, which I like. You buy it, you own it and you don't keep paying and paying, and paying and paying, and this I don't. They've said they're not changing their business model, but the fact that they've acquired an AI company just shows, you know, they're gunning for Adobe in a very serious way, which I love.

01:10:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah. At the same time, it's like what was Leonardo's prospects, because there's a lot of AI companies who's acquisition, yeah, running out of money?

01:10:18
Yeah, and it's like hey, how about I stop you from being embarrassed? Employ all your people and just clean this up for you. Yeah, yeah, great, because Canva is a successful business. They're Aussie. They brought in some serious money. I think they've got some cash. They're publicly traded and so they can afford to do if they've got some cash flowing around. It's a great time to be buying AI companies for the talent.

01:10:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I just looked at this stuff recently because microsoft put a designer out of preview and then someone asked me about these tools. So the three big players in that part of this space are canva, adobe express and, um and uh, microsoft designer. So, um, no, this is for consumers, like, in other words, you. You're designing. These are what I would call modern versions of what used to be like page publisher programs. Like I need to make a flyer, I need to make a like I had I want to welcome my new dog to the family and send out like a card to everyone.

01:11:19
We don't do these physical things anymore, so they're digital now. But of course, everyone today has like a youtube channel or a blog or you know whatever it is. You're doing a facebook marketplace, something, something you need graphics, whatever it is like. This is kind of the modern version of that stuff and it used to be remember like print shop pro was kind of the lame consumer version of like a desktop publishing package or whatever. Um, these things started out like that but they've gotten very sophisticated now they have, uh, you know, generative ai, image creation capabilities, etc, etc. So, um, it's interesting watching this stuff kind of mature and turn into something interesting turn into the feature of a larger product, which probably is a better outcome yep, yep, yeah, exactly, uh, and one that's not called Adobe, something.

01:12:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, so if you are until Adobe comes to buy you.

01:12:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, that didn't work with Figma, you know, I mean they didn't try.

01:12:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I didn't cripple Figma in the process.

01:12:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't achieve the goal. Well, that was their decision. They stopped working on stuff. Maybe they shouldn't have, yeah, but you can see why they did.

01:12:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I don't have a company going through acquisition. That doesn't. That doesn't happen like it is a punishment yeah, it's what happened with nokia.

01:12:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's one of the lumia line was going nowhere during that entire purchase process and then microsoft got them in-house and they were like, so what's next? And like we don't have anything next. What do you mean?

01:12:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, like we were waiting for you to buy us? Took you, took you a. What are you doing?

01:12:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was one of the many, many problems there. Yeah, so if you're an Apple fan or an Apple user and who isn't really, or even if you're not, if you're a human being, you would have heard that back in June, apple announced this Apple intelligence stuff coming in the fall, not necessarily day and date, but with iOS 18, ios, but with iOS 18, ipados 18, and whatever Mac OS I can't remember what it's called Sequoia, maybe there's always been this indication, like most or all of this would not appear in V1. And then Apple I guess it's just confirmed it because, in addition to having an iOS 18 beta and an iPad, mac OS, whatever, they now have an iOS 18.1 beta that is specifically to test the Apple intelligence stuff. Wow, yeah, and that's like. I think that's a first.

01:13:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's what I was thinking. Apple usually just goes it's going to be here, and they deliver.

01:13:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I mean, I guess in the sense they must test current, they must have like an iOS 17. Something going on somewhere, I don't know, because they have no insider program Like nobody knows anything.

01:13:45
Yeah, I've never seen this in the app before, so it was very interesting to see iOS 18 and 18.1 as choices in software updates in addition to the stable channel or whatever they call it. So I opted into this. You get on a wait list. They approved me 10 seconds later, so I was right in and the only two things I've used so far are the Siri thing, because now they do the Samsung style ring light when it comes on, kind of rainbow colored, which I think is really attractive and kind of fun, and then the summarize feature in Safari, which is limited to reader mode, and I've used it to summarize several of my longer articles. You know the three to 7,000 word missives, right, and it's pretty good.

01:14:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Summarize your own stuff, like you're not upset at their summary of your stuff because you, I'm a little upset.

01:14:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm a little. I guess what I mean is that the quality of the summaries are pretty good, like there were a couple of assertions where it was like that doesn't follow, that's not what I meant, kind of things. But um, some of the really long ones, I'm like let's see if it can make sense of this, because I can tell no one else did and it was like yeah, okay, like that's pretty good, it's all, it's almost, if anything, a little too subtle, like uh, and they're not very long summaries. For the most part most of them were just a couple sentences.

01:14:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I think jay has a tough time prioritizing summary statements.

01:15:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like the one thing, yeah, human does a good job of.

01:15:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
When you're looking at a bunch of words like that, it's like yep, this is the most important statement in this. There's like five points made by.

01:15:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Clearly, this is the important point and I don't think the summarizer can do that the big difference between this and the, the article, whatever content summaries I've seen before right. So, for example, if you use copilot for this on the web and you've got a web page over here and you like summarize this for me, um, and those use bulleted lists, yeah, to kind of highlight the main points. That's the fundamental structure. And the apple one is more conversant. I guess it's just a two to five sentences single paragraph, usually pretty concise Like, and I think you could make a case for both. You know ways to do that and maybe even have some kind of configurable setting to determine what it looks like. But the Apple one, I will say it's interesting, like I kind of like it. It feels a little less engineering and a little more like personable or human or whatever.

01:16:04
So it sounds very apple plus rainbow colors.

01:16:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Come on, guys, it's fun, I'm just you know so they um, and then I always say stuff is hard, especially when you're coming in late, like okay, she's so brutal to apple?

01:16:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it might be better to come in a little late, you know?

01:16:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, somebody else take the arrows in the back.

01:16:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Exactly this gives you a chance to survey the table, see what all the hands look like, and yeah, well, let's be clear, they came up with the best name.

01:16:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm still waiting on the right. Oh my god, co-opted the acronym that's the best, brilliantly oh yeah, you know what ai means brilliant um.

01:16:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And if using twitter, or as they call it these days, x is the kids call, it.

01:16:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I refuse to call it that. He did a poll saying should we change the net back. It came up 90%.

01:16:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He said no, he's like, yeah, fuck it Please keep X.

01:16:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We don't like the confusion.

01:16:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this is the Stephen Snotsy School of Management. We listened to your feedback and we acted in accordance. We did what I was going to do anyway. So, um, apparently, uh x, as we'll call it, is using public post to train its own chatbot, which also has a wonderful name grok with a k. It's the traditional k spelling of grok. Yeah, it's from stranger in a strange land yep, yeah, but you know what's funny?

01:17:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
because when he they put out the press release, yep, yeah, but you know what's funny? Because when he they put out the press release, yeah, they didn't. They didn't say stranger in a strange land, right, they said I forgot what. Some other sci-fi it's probably quoted like some, uh, what do you? Call it, said grok, as in you know, yeah, moon is a harsh mistress and it was like what no, what no, yeah, it was.

01:17:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's weird because usually everything on twitter is so accurate, so accurate, accurate. I never expected. You definitely want to train data on this set of misinformation spreading losers, but anyway, whatever. So they're doing that you can opt out of it. As it turns out, they don't really publicize this, but apparently if you go into settings you can opt out of it. So I just make fun of X on X, so I'm going to let them use mine. I think that's going to help balance things, but we'll see terrible.

01:18:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's good at dad jokes, apparently.

01:18:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So yeah, it's all dad jokes that's pretty much my entire career at this point dad jokes all the way down all right, xbox segment just around the corner.

01:18:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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At bigidcom slash windows They've got a free demo. So you have BigID can help your organization reduce data risk and accelerate the adoption of generative AI. You can have both. Bigid is bigidcom slash windows windows. They have a lot of white papers there too that I think you'll find very useful. Little late night reading. There's a free new report that provides valuable insights and key trends on ai adoptions, challenges and the overall impact of gen ai across organizations. If you're if you're a cso, if you're a cio, uh, if you are in uh I t management. This is stuff you need to know right now. Visit bigidcom slash windows to learn more big id. Thank you, big id for supporting windows weekly. And now we continue with the long-awaited, much desired, ever-loving xbox segment. Is that too too much? Did I oversell it? I? We can make you a jingle.

01:23:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We can, I'll just like get the hat going. And you know I have a few things, I guess. So microsoft is testing a big uh xbox os update with insiders, so it's not public yet, but it's all aimed at making discord a better experience through xbox. So the two big things to me are voice chat, which is expanding dramatically, and then really improving the streaming experience. Um, it's not going to allow you to stream directly to youtube, but the overall quality is going to go up. If you want 1080p 60 frames, you have to pay for like a discord nitro subscription or whatever. But I guess this has been a fairly lousy experience, uh, since it happened.

01:23:38
So they're finally working together to fix that problem, so that's fun well, gamers Discord, you got to be there, yeah, so every once in a while I mentioned the fact that a year ago, march, I stopped using my Xbox and still going at it, yeah, yeah, and've filled that time. Uh, which is what now? What? 15 months or more, um, not playing games, mostly honestly. But, um, but the games I do play I've been playing on the pc right, and the thing I've noticed is basic pcs, by which I mean kind of u series, you know, integrated graphics type based laptops, are getting better and we're not that far away from being able to get an inexpensive, decent laptop for less than a thousand bucks a lot less in some cases that plays games really well. And the first indication I had that this was starting to happen was with actually with Meteor Lake right. So last December, when I reviewed the first Meteor Lake PC I got in, one of the things Intel had promoted was dramatic improvements to the integrated graphics on not U-Series but above U-Series. So if you're on U-Series at Meteor Lake, you still have the old Intel XE graphics, right. But if you have H-Series or better, you know mobile I think it's just H series you get these new arc graphics incredibly better, you know, better performance, better quality, et cetera.

01:25:05
So I installed a bunch of games and tried it and, yeah, like it kind of worked. Like there were some games that definitely weren't happening, but it did pretty well. And you know, not a gaming PC, obviously, but, um, even without dedicated graphics, like you could see, this was maybe kind of coming, and I've heard from multiple people that amd is actually in a much better space for this kind of stuff because of their integrated radeon graphics. And I've been waiting for some, something, something that I could, you know, see the truth of that. And a couple weeks ago, uh, lenovo offered me a couple different things, but one of them was like, yeah, I don't know, oh, amd, I'm like, yeah, I'll take it.

01:25:42
So it's just a little, you wanted to take an amd machine out for a spin, just wanted to see, oh, yeah, for a long time, I just don't get enough of these things, right. So this is just a standard uh idea pad. It's actually it's a two in one, not a traditional clamshell, but that doesn't matter. 14-inch screen, 1920 by 1200, nothing special, right, but um, amd ryzen 7, 88, 45 hs hs is their kind of h equivalent um radeon 780 graphics as configured, about 600 bucks. Wow, yeah, and this thing can play games, baby, like really well, like really well. And it is almost shocking to me to tell you that that's true, it's as a laptop, for you know it's. I have it here, I've been.

01:26:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just remember when a sub thousand dollar laptop was a piece of junk yeah.

01:26:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So actually there is some. This thing, compared to other laptops of this ilk, is heavy, it's thick. I don't know yet the battery life. I've been. I've been dying to try this. Um, I just turned it, I just opened the lid to see if it did anything. It did not. Oh, no, it's. It's putting up. Oh, that's okay. Yeah, welcome. So that's doing that. It's still x86, but okay, actually that came on super fast. By the way, that's what we came. Maybe came out hibernate. Yeah, that was. That was actually very good. That's much better than media lake. That's okay, that's cool. And this is just for the price. Are you kidding me? Yeah, it's a little clacky, it's not? I mean, it's made of aluminum this is the machine.

01:27:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You get a kid for sure. Yeah, this is my center of this computer.

01:27:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is not bad, I could. I could live with this thing. It's fine a little loud, little loud when you type on it, clack, clack, clack, whatever.

01:27:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But this is shocking to me, like it's nice, it really is nice Sub-thousand-dollar computers, on the rate I mean. The big thing here is that AMD bought Radeon ages ago and so it's what you get now. When you buy an AMD machine, it's always going to have a Radeon processor on it, which may not be as fast as the top-of-the-line NVIDIAs, but they are legit cars, it's damn good.

01:27:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And the top-of-the-line AMD Radeon desktop set is a competitor, every time for a top-of-the-line Intel. Nvidia set Because it's on Game Pass. Now I put the most recent call of duty game on there. It runs at native resolution at 60 frames per second. Nice, it looks incredible. Six hundred dollar machine yep, and I stopped playing it because you know it's called 2di, but I, uh, but it looks amazing, like it looks amazing and I I don't know what to tell you. Yeah, and hardware upgrades are cheap.

01:28:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If you want more ram, more storage but this is where tom's hardware comes out and says, hey, if you want more RAM, more storage. But this is where Tom's Hardware comes out and says, hey, if you want a low-priced machine, you buy a Radeon.

01:28:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is funny because I think Richard's getting to you, Paul, and you're turning into the PC master race.

01:28:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I wouldn't say it that way.

01:28:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's just a better place to live for the joy.

01:28:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yes, I'm with you, but Paul's such a console guy.

01:28:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, here with you, but I just paul's such a console guy, I. So here, well, here's the thing. So for me, uh, gaming is a kind of a secondary activity, but this is, you know, bill gates would have called this like the magic of software, like the. The notion that this, the pc, which is so versatile, um, can do this in a form factor that is also very good for the things I need most often, is what makes this interesting. Right, I don't need another device. The thing I already have will do this, and it will do it to the quality that is good enough for me for the amount of time I'm going to use it, and so I've been. Like you know, I've talked about some of the games I've been playing this year. I will absolutely finish Doom 2016 on this device. There's no doubt about it. I will move on to the other game I was playing, that I always to the other game I was playing that I always forget the name of it.

01:29:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a weird name the shishua. Whatever is this? Is this dedicated? Graphics or is it? Is it the amd?

01:29:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so it's it's, it's the radio mobile, it's the 780. So I, I it's. If it's dedicated graphics, it's as low it's, I believe. See, I don't actually know, I don't want to say I, I, it's not like a. Actually, no, I don't want to say I, I, it's not like a, I don't, I don't, I can't, I'm not 100 sure, I gotta be honest, it's, it's. The thing sounds like a jet engine when it comes on when you play a game, for sure.

01:29:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, that checks out which is dedicated graphics.

01:29:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Ask but that you know what the truth is if you play a game on any pc, even a snapdragon nowadays, yeah, they, they they wind up with a game so that's why I'm actually sure there.

01:29:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There is dedicated RAM for the graphics that suggests yeah, they call it integrated graphics, but it's in 2023.

01:30:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's why I know. So it's hard to say. Amd refers to these chips as like APUs, right? So to me I don't know enough to say for sure. I don't want to sound like an idiot, although I think by stammering I'm sounding like an idiot because I just don't know but it's.

01:30:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I would equate this to be, uh, integrated graphics, yeah but because of their architecture, some of the benefits of dedicated graphics 768 shaders like okay, it's no rtx 4090, but good lord man, no, it's good it really is good and it's really good still pulling down teraflops yep, it's good.

01:30:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this thing could be paired with a much better. Yeah, the Shenua saga. That's it, hellboy 2. Yeah, much better screen would be nice. Bigger screen would also be nice, but you know, it's 60 frames a second Full HD plus, nothing special.

01:30:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But honestly it's pretty great. Like you know what it is, you know what really makes it. Integrated graphics is that it's shared memory.

01:31:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it's a shared okay, I'm sorry that speeds it up, though right, that's a good thing because you're sharing memories faster, but it's busy, right, yeah, but it also means. I mean. That's what, as people claim, is the benefit of apple. Silicon's integrated memory is right. You can use all the ran it's a yeah, it's a shorter path.

01:31:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um yeah I'm sure local memory, local cache is going to be faster, but sure you know dedicated and more capacious, more space and more capacious because video cards so I mean, I you know, like all I'm saying is like this game, doom, that I'm playing, is, you know, a few years old, bigger suitcase this is v-sync on graphics setting ultra consistent 60 frames a second, like it's awesome. It's awesome, yeah. So I don't know amd, uh, f, s and it's 600 bucks scaling 600 now as as you would like it equipped.

01:31:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How much is it?

01:31:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
600 bucks. Yeah, you couldn't spend more than 700 bucks on this if you wanted to. Yeah, that's outstanding.

01:32:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you credit this to the amd? I guess you do, yeah, yeah, I think amd's chips are um cheaper I, as I mentioned, I am an amd gamer. I have my game machine is an Alienware. A big old Threadripper is a powerhouse. Yeah, two ways about it. It's an energy hog.

01:32:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh yeah, no, it'll heal room, but if everyone else is up 40, 90,. It'll burn your fingers from a distance.

01:32:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right. Anyway, yes, it's fantastic. And then, just you know, from 2005 until last March, I was all Xbox, and that started with the original Xbox 360, which launched in November 2005.

01:32:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Was that the first one?

01:32:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it was the second one.

01:32:49
But I had the first one, but I still played games on PC through that. And then, by the time the 360 arrived, I'm like, all right, I'm going console, this is it, it's all good, yep. And now I'm like, all right, I'm going console, this is it, it's all good, yep, and now I'm not. But whatever, and they have, you know, xbox 360, obviously supplanted by various generations of Xbox One and now Xbox Series X and S, but they just this past I think it was two days ago wound down, closed the Xbox store for Xbox 360. So you can't actually buy games anymore for the console. This thing has been around for I know it's almost 20 years.

01:33:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's crazy but it was also. I mean, there was always a big debate if this was a good idea because they went to the custom asic approach, right like yeah, devs hated this thing because it was a bear to build, it was a power pc.

01:33:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah right, I mean, it was a completely different architecture, it generally screwed everything up hard to build software yeah, yeah, I mean I, you know they.

01:33:41
This was an interesting console because they remember it launched with, I think it was just 720p, but if it wasn't, then it was like 1080i, but I believe it was just 720p. I think you're right. They later added 1080i and they later added 1080p. You know they kind of you know they. They actually I don't know they. I think everyone needed a little while to get caught up on the hardware and kind of figure it out, but you know, they got it right eventually. It was definitely a high point for microsoft and xbox. Yeah, this was up against the power.

01:34:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The playstation 3, which is also power, pc right like. Yeah. It was a period of time where they thought it was the arm of the day. Yeah, the well, it's just this mindset of we need to build dedicated hardware to compete with the power pc master race. They were wrong, but that's what they were trying to do and the bigger thing, I think, was it made every game development more expensive by a lot by slowing the dev cycle down, by requiring more hardware like it was really costly yeah, well, they've solved that problem right?

01:34:41
I mean, games are oh wait uh nobody introduced a different problem right like at this at this moment and I was. I'll tell the story when we get to the end here about my weekend sitting with the top of top tier game developers just talking about how much money it costs to stress a ps5. Like just the sheer amount of graphical assets and reasons like you can't build a ps6 because we can't afford to make a game for it, like we'll never take advantage of the machine that was so it's funny you say that I'm reading a book about the history of pc gaming right now.

01:35:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's pretty good, and one of the points this guy makes and you kind of forget about this stuff is like when the 386 came out and then especially the 486 and they moved from like vaga graphics and multiple colors etc, etc. Those things were so expensive that it was just too expensive to develop a game that targeted it didn't make sense.

01:35:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was like you never sell enough of them. It was cheaper to throw the video card in the box with it.

01:35:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and that almost often like doubled the price. At the time it was crazy. Yeah, anyway, interesting, uh, I guess that's it, that's okay yeah, a lot of that's a lizard conversation there.

01:35:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I really appreciate that.

01:35:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Thanks very much oh, I forgot to add all the uh games that microsoft added to uh game. Pass the uh games that microsoft added to uh game pass from activision yeah yeah, oh, this page intentionally left blank.

01:36:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice, I will have in our new studio a crickets sound effect. I'll have a wampum.

01:36:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think I got that one don't worry, but at least they raised the price of my subscription.

01:36:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Wow, raise your price of your subscription.

01:36:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richard Richard Campbell on the trombone. Everybody.

01:36:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There you go. Me and my P8 pad are working jazz.

01:36:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I shouldn't have, but I have ordered a number of pads and doodads. Oh good, Doohickeys.

01:36:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'll match my sound effects against yours. We'll have some fun.

01:36:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that'll be fun.

01:36:35
Yeah, that'll be fun. Our show today, brought to you by us, the actually really by the club twit members, but I consider us a community, a good group of people who are tech enthusiasts, who like to learn, like to laugh while they're learning. Uh, enjoy hanging out with their friends. If you would like to join the club, we would love to have you. It is a club open to all. You would like to join the club? We would love to have you. It is a club open to all. All you need is seven bucks. That's how much. It is seven bucks a month.

01:37:02
You get some great benefits ad, free versions of all of our shows. Uh, you, you get, um, access to the club, to a discord, a great place to hang. You can actually watch our shows live in the discord. You could chat about it as well. Uh, you also get, uh, um, some other things. Oh, yeah, video for the shows that we only put out in audio, and that includes ios today, hands-on macintosh, hands-on windows, the new ask the tech guy. Uh, what else? Uh, lots of shows. Scott wilkinson's home theater geeks, untitled lin, linux Show, paul's wonderful Hands on Windows I think I mentioned that. Anyway, you get that. You get the events, the special events we do, and going forward.

01:37:44
We're Twitter's pivoting. We're doing Twit 4.0 now, and the new thing, as I move up into the attic studio and Micah moves down into the basement studio, is I think we're going to be going live more often. I kind of think maybe going live for an hour or two every day, and, of course, that'll be club members only. Join the club. We'd love to have you. It helps us do what we do best, which is make content for you, and I want to really focus more on the community as a whole. So twittv, slash club twit and join the family, will you? Now it's time for the back of the book, and Paul Theriot has a tip of the week.

01:38:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I'm going to kind of co-mingle the tip and the app pick and, if you do watch Hands on Windows, sometime soon there'll be the first of what I think are going to be two episodes about password managers and I'll be recording the second one. I think it are going to be two episodes about password managers and I'll be recording the second one I think it's going to be two tomorrow, but I don't know when that comes out exactly. It's going to be a few weeks down the road, but the central theme here is that we've talked a lot about passkeys over the past year. We've talked a lot about 2FA forever, but when it comes to securing your online accounts, you know, password manager is kind of a kind of a key and you could use one that's built into your web browser, like everyone has done. Um, a lot of those are integrated with the underlying platform. If you use, like an Apple, google or Microsoft um browser, it's okay. They all do the same things, but they also all fall short in the same ways as well, and I feel very strongly that you should use a third party password manager, but I feel even more strongly that you need to not make the mistake everyone else makes and I mean everyone makes, I should say which is you probably use different browsers and you probably use different platforms. You probably use password managers, may have used a few of them, and I bet most of you didn't think to go delete all your passwords from the old ones ever, so it's a pretty good chance. Your passwords are sitting in multiple vaults all over the planet and maybe you should do something about that. Just a thought. But when you look at the functionality that you would get with a third party password manager by the way, some of which are free, you don't have to spend money, and if you do, it's a little bit of money.

01:40:02
In addition to storing passwords, managing passwords and basic things like addresses and phone numbers and payment methods and so forth, good password managers will also generate 2FA codes for you. They'll be like an authenticator app, right, so they can be used for 2FA as well. They will store passkeys, which makes them portable, right. Passkeys are hardware or device specific. If you create a passkey on this computer, this is the only place you can really use it. By storing it in your password manager, which you will install on every device you own, those passkeys will be available everywhere you are. It's awesome.

01:40:42
Most password managers do things like look for insecure passwords, repeated passwords, passwords that have been involved in some kind of a leak somewhere online. Third-party ones usually offer also dark web monitoring, right, and the feature I actually like the most and this is the one that's not everywhere this one makes it a little bit tough is in the same way that a password manager today will alert you if, hey, there was a leak and we saw one of your passwords or accounts is in there, you should change the password, do something about it. These things will scan your accounts and they'll look for accounts that support 2FA and or PASCIs, depending on the solution, and then tell you hey, you should put 2FA on this account, you could better secure this thing, or you could add a PASCI to this account. That's super smart and this is key, because keeping up with this is literally impossible for any individual. You need to secure those accounts now, but then this will keep you up to date, because some random account will add to have a support maybe, or pass key support someday You'll never know, you know probably, and this thing will let you know, and then you can add that and you'll be more secure. It's genius. Personal pet peeve.

01:41:53
I also like the idea of a passwordless password manager pet peeve. I also like the idea of a passwordless password manager, and what I mean by that is a password manager that does not have what used to be called, and maybe in some cases it's still called a master password, its own password. In other words, the primary way that you get into it is through a password. There are okay solutions that make this a little better. For example, obviously using 2FA would be one to have that second factor of authentication, not just a password. But I like the idea of a password manager not having a password itself, and Dashlane was the first to do that in stable, and that's why I've been using that for several months. But I know 1Password, bitwarden, and I'm not sure about ProtonPlus, but ProtonPass I don't know what I called that, uh, or they're working on it, um, and maybe that stuff's available.

01:42:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know um, I've gone down the ubiki path, but I'm not recommending to anybody else.

01:42:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, because that's just yeah, the trick, the problem with security is complexity and inconvenience and, um, I, I just think there's a good balance to be had. I don't think it's particularly I. I do this all day, every day literally, where I have to look at my phone to either get a code out of an authenticator app.

01:43:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm at the point now where I'm ready to move off authenticator too, right like I'd like. I'd like a secure solution that didn't require authenticator and didn't require ubkey yes, and so the the only right.

01:43:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So my argument is that it's not that inconvenient to have to use a phone for authentication. Whatever the solution might be, you probably have a couple of them right up to drop the phone off the boat.

01:43:28
Yeah, it's fine, but, but you could have that in multiple devices etc. You know that. Um, yes, but yes to your point. Yes, but from a convenience standpoint it's okay because everyone has a phone. But the only thing more convenient than requiring you to pick up this device you do have is to have that all be on the device you are using right now. Right, which is where that password manager that can do 2FA, that can do passkeys and that works on every single device you have. That's why that becomes so important. It's with you wherever you are. You don't have to have this device, you just have to be using one of your devices, whichever device it is. So I, rather than pick one, because I'm still evaluating these, I I've been using dash lane since the beginning of the year I've been using. I switched to proton pass possibly as long as a month ago.

01:44:17
I'm going to look at one password again very, very soon, although I'm having trouble and you're not bringing the spouse along for this ride, right no, I'm going to find out something I'm going to find something that works, and then we're going to discuss this with stephanie so I'm on bit warden, having getting gotten off of last pass.

01:44:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Because the piece, because last pass, exactly, yep, yeah, and again, I'm not going to blame the tech, I'm not going to blame developers, I blame the private equity firms that passed that company around like a bong that they kept spilling.

01:44:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I looked up the history of LastPass because of what happened.

01:44:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's just horrifying. Well, so the last act.

01:44:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They were bought by the company that was like I'm going to get this backwards. It was like the company that unlogged me in, or whatever that company was. They literally spun this thing off within the past year. They literally dumped it.

01:45:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, they got rid of it. So they basically studied it, realized what a mess it was and got it out of there.

01:45:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, that happened, so I don't use GlassPass.

01:45:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I got to think every knowledgeable developer bailed like three handovers. Oh God, yes, it's gutted, it's a wreck, it's a piece of crap, yeah, and it's not safe. Get your data out of there.

01:45:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, no, I wrote a. Did I talk about that last week? Because I wrote a big thing about LastPass.

01:45:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
LastPass is not on that list of three.

01:45:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Terrible. I went from there to Bitwarden, but that's because the spouse is there and she cares about the shared house accounts.

01:45:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've got her all the way in. That is an issue You've got to have that Nothing.

01:45:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm going to say here is if you're using one of these four, switch to one of these other. That's not the point. It's just that Only Paul skips around password managers.

01:45:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, don't you do this, that's a nut. No, password managers, because yeah, don't you do this, that's a nut.

01:45:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, don't you do this. Yeah, the biggest thing everyone should be doing is getting rid of the passwords and other password managers. Right, that's the biggest thing. But as far as apps go, I will say, of all those extra things that third party tools do, the one that does the most of them in fact, I think does all of them is one password. I'll just say that I'm not using it right now, but that's the one and I would also push.

01:46:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Have I been pwned in that who?

01:46:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, I'm just okay, I'm not familiar with that most of the password managers actually you that I know of use. Have I've been pwned to let you know if you've been compromised so you may? You may not even have to visit. Have I been pwned because?

01:46:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, well, you know what you're an accountant. Have I been pwned? You just get an email, let you know how bad things are doesn't hurt, yeah, but the nice thing there is when I get that email from, have I been pwned? I just go change the password for the latest breach. Like that's just reality.

01:46:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's um, you don't reuse passwords, though I don't at all, and I still of course not yeah, yeah, okay, make sure. Yep, you got us going, paul, you found a topic we can all get in, get involved in we're here.

01:47:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm going to do a demo of each of those features I was discussed earlier that's great. Yeah, honestly, having used all of these and more any password manager, even last pass better than none okay, that's fair, but the problem is most people actually are using um, probably multiple password managers and not realizing it and Chrome is the big one Because they're using the browser.

01:47:24
Yeah, because one day they're like I used Edge for a little while, then I went back to Chrome and they don't really think about this and this stuff is just kind of out there, this, but apple, google, microsoft you're protecting this account, right like you have 2fa, all the stuff. I mean, I talked specifically about securing microsoft accounts several months ago, but, um, as long as those accounts are as secure as they can be and they can be very secure you're probably fine. But the problem is, randomly maybe use firefox ones or you know whatever. It was like a lot of you and I have absolutely this data is like everywhere. You got to be really careful with this stuff first thing I do about it.

01:48:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Any browsers turn off a save passwords for me? Yeah, so yeah, a, because they're not secure and b, because then you have this password spread out everywhere. Yeah, and, and you will know it, with the minute you try to, you go to a site, you don't know the password and you're on the different browser. You'll say huh.

01:48:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, there's so much. This, Like all password managers, including the terrible ones in browsers, will recommend strong passwords when you create a new account, and that's good. And I think people have a knee-jerk reaction like, well, hold on a second, I need to know what this password is. No, you don't. No, you very much do not need to. There's nothing better in this world than knowing none of your past. Here's the idea. You know one thing you know how to get into your password manager. Forget the rest of it, because that thing will be available everywhere yeah, I totally agree.

01:48:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, sign up. Have I been pwned?

01:48:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's free you know, yeah, there you go look there, uh, it's, that's troy hunt.

01:48:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He's good people, he's the. He's the one all these folks depend on. Look, I've ever used it.

01:49:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, you haven't come on really you'll get some emails you could just go there and enter some of your passwords and see what happens.

01:49:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, the main thing is sign up with your email address and then it's going to email you that you know, right, every then you'll know that you know how does it know what your passwords are, though, richard?

01:49:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, it doesn't, it doesn't necessarily know what your password is.

01:49:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What it knows is what breaches you showed up in like troy oh, your what breaches?

01:49:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
your email has showed up.

01:49:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, yeah, well, and troy hunt has transitioned to this weird place where not only all the good guys count on him, but all the bad guys count on him too, because you've only achieved a breach when troy hunt agrees that that's a breach, because there's lots of fake breaches out there, to the point where the hackers send him a copy of the data because he will validate it and say nope, this is a legit breach they they have and safe to use.

01:49:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But on how there it is, have I been pwned? You have, if you see, at the top there's also passwords. There's an extra little service that's a little different from what Richard's talking about. Richard's saying give them your email address and you'll be notified if your email shows up in a breach. But up there on passwords, it'll show you if your password has been seen in a breach and people say, well, well, I'm not putting my password in there, but it's completely safe. He only sends a hash. But it is a very interesting thing and it's only useful if you reuse passwords, because which you should never do you shouldn't be doing.

01:50:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, because you don't enter your old password everyone you used back in the day.

01:50:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When you use the same password everywhere, enter it there and see it's mine shows up in literally everything did we?

01:50:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
did you talk about pass keys much? Because, boy, the passkey situation is bad.

01:50:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean 400 according to the dash lane. 400 increase in passkey usage yeah, what's the success?

01:50:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
rate though, yeah, we, we went from one to 400.

01:50:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah exactly.

01:50:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know I use pass keys wherever I can, but I was telling Richard before the show that um.

01:51:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, look at, you entered your password in. Kevin entered his password and it's been breached 91,000 times. I just hit monkey one, two, three. Oh well, there you go that's, that's the one that's won 91 000 times. Um, yeah, so I I'm still holding out hope for pesky's, because it's really nice and when it works it works so nicely. Github is the one place where and google I can use it pretty good.

01:51:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and I've got a show coming up talking about paskies in the enterprise, so clearly going, oh good you think ahead of single sign-on?

01:51:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that seems like if I were an enterprise, that's what I'd say.

01:51:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a far more complicated topic. Yeah, and it's got multiple storage to it. It's it's. That's very challenging okay, all right.

01:51:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's one of the things I love about the authenticator with windows. Yeah, you know. Oh, yep, 83. My number is 83. This time, yeah, it's like playing bingo.

01:51:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I like that. Sometimes it makes you pick the number from a list. Sometimes it makes you type the number in. Sometimes it shows the number of the authenticator. You got to type it into the site. Like they really do mix it up.

01:52:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's good they should. That's exactly what they should do.

01:52:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's very clever Google started doing this too.

01:52:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, richard, what's coming up? Wow, speaking of security.

01:52:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
My goodness, my old friend Richard Hicks because we love sharing a name came back on the show. I think it's his 12th go-around. I own a sub sandwich now To talk about Microsoft moving private key infrastructure into the cloud. So Cloud PKI is a service that Microsoft started to as part of the intra suite of tools under Charlie Bell, and so he's he. I normally talk to Richard about remote access stuff.

01:52:51
This guy knows so much about remote access that Microsoft calls him to have him explain remote access to them, the stuff they wrote, all in all the different versions, conditional access, like there's so many different products in that space it's confusing for folks.

01:53:01
But he pinged me about this because he'd gone all in on working with Cloud PKI, admittedly in early times, but he focused on the most important part and it's just I mean strictly an enterprise problem, which is you are dealing with a company that wants a high level authentication, so you're distributing client-side certificates to remote machines to allow them to connect to anything and that means you're managing a huge certificate infrastructure on premises for your Active Directory and the one major feature that the Cloud PKI infrastructure has now through Azure is to offload that so that all the certs related to desktop machines distributed through Intune can be managed in your Azure instance and still allow you to authenticate into your local Active Directory.

01:53:47
So that's just a huge weight lifted off your shoulders in terms of infrastructure operating. What it doesn't do yet is handle servers, because you don't normally onboard servers through Intune. So there's now a whole conversation about what that's going to turn into. But in the meantime, the advantage of being able to use this level of encryption and to support on-prem but run it through the cloud it's pretty important, and so we're encouraging folks who are looking at their on-prem infrastructure and saying like, if you're doing client certs, you need to move because this will save you a lot of grief. But it's not the all-up solution yet.

01:54:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Excellent, and now the moment you've all been waiting for. Some people have this is one of the better named brown liquors. Oh, it's got a name on it, doesn't it? I like it.

01:54:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I have a bit of a preamble because I only met this whiskey this weekend, because I went to the Okanagan Valley this weekend. So a very dear friend of mine invited us up a bunch of friends of ours actually so we all went up to stay at his place and he lives in wine country. He's got a lovely place there Perfect weather, without a doubt, and there, perfect weather, without a doubt and so we did some wine tours and so I came home with a couple of cases of wine. But we also found a local distillery that had that and my wife had organized it so she'd warned them that I was coming and I'm serious about my whiskey. So I got one of their very senior people for the tour. We had some really great conversations about it.

01:55:17
A little warning Just sort of set the stage for what we're talking about. The Okanagan Valley. This is between the coastal and rocky mountain range in the central British Columbia, it's semi-arable desert. It's wrapped around a big lake about 75 miles long, two to three miles wide and 700 plus feet deep. We have our own version of Loch Ness in that, called Ogopogo, and there's a few good sized towns. The at the north end of the lake is Vernon, the south end of the lake is Penticton and it's roughly in the middle is Kelowna, which is about 150,000 people.

01:55:51
It's always been a good fruit growing region, so there's a bunch of native berries but some of you probably not heard of, like the Saskatoon berry, which the Saskatchewan folks will tell you only grows in Saskatoon. It's not true. It also grows in BC, although arguably the prairie version is better but also choke cherries, huckleberries, elderberries, which are typically only known in Europe, but there are North American versions the red ones are toxic, don't eat them and thimbleberries, which are as good as raspberries but super fragile, so nobody ever ships them anywhere. The very first non native fruit made in the Okanagan Valley was, of course, wine grapes made by the Catholic church in the mid 1800s to make sacrament wine because, goodness knows, you can't save souls if you don't have the blood of Christ. Shortly after that, they did plant. The Catholic missionaries also planted apples which, if you follow the lineage of apples, actually come from Kazakhstan and are only propagated by clippings apple trees. If you plant apple seeds, you will not get edible apples. They'll be terrible. They're normal, default, random apples. The genetics are so unstable, they're not very good, and so when you get a good species of apple, you graft. You take branches off and you graft it onto existing trees. I have met an apple tree that grew 30 varieties of apples, all on a different branch. They got cherries by the late 1900s. Today it's cherries, apples, peaches, apricot plums, pears, nectarines and, of course, lots of wine grapes. Now the Catholics planted what they call domestic grapes or La Brusca grapes, which are not the real good grapes. They're the cheap grapes, but they also grow well.

01:57:25
In North America they were largely replaced. During prohibition. They were they mostly switched over to food crops. But after prohibition, as they started getting back into grapes, there was an initial push towards what they call the French American hybrids, grapes like Foc, which do still grow well. Quailsgate, one of the oldest wineries. There still grows a great Foc that I've drank a bunch of, but it wasn't until the 1970s that they actually got into the Vinifera grapes, which are the ones you know and love the Cab Francs, cab Saps, all that sort of things.

01:57:53
And today, british Columbia, the Okanagan Valley specifically second largest wine growing region in all of Canada, the largest being the Niagara Peninsula in Ontario. So, and just as a final aside, while I talk about wine, before I get into whiskey, in 2020, in January this year, there was an unprecedented freeze in the Okanagan Valley. It went below negative 30 degrees centigrade for three days. It was an Arctic displacement front front, so what was normally air that would be over the arctic came down into British Columbia and it killed every single wine bud, so literally no wine is going to grow this year. It killed a non-trivial number of the vines as well and most of the fruit, to the point where the fruit processing collective BC fruits cooperative just announced this month that it's shutting down because they don't have the funds to function and they also don't know the fruit.

01:58:47
This is the place where all the different orchards deliver their fruit to be stored, sorted, processed, packaged and sold, so the entire industry is in a complete uproar, and I sat with a new friend at one of the wineries, a guy named Jesse, and we drank a lot of his wine and talked about the decimation, which is not even true, because the decimation is only one-tenth. This is like a 99% destruction of the fruit industry in the Okanagan, at least for a season. It's bad industry in the Okanagan, at least for a season, it's bad. But we were talking about whiskey and my wife found there's a few distilleries in the area and we went to this particular one and thank goodness we got Jesse, the senior person there, who took really dug in deep on how this industry came along. We started up in Vernon, which is that northern part of the Okanagan Lake, in 2004, and they started out making kirsch.

01:59:41
There was a bumper crop in the early 2000s of sour cherries. These are the ones that typically go into fruit pies and things, not the ones you'd eat out of hand, to the point where they were rotting because they couldn't have enough market for them. And so if they're going to rot, why don't you make them into booze? And so if they're going to rot, why don't you make them into booze? And so they managed to acquire an older multifunction still a still today. They named Stilla and ran it there and started picking up other fruit as well. They make grappa and other fruit distillates, a whole line of liqueurs that are award winning. They eventually got into vodka and gin as well, of course, and they made a line of absinthe, which was the first real noise that they made on the marketplace, because they caught the early wave of absinthe becoming a legitimate alcohol again.

02:00:27
Absence, gone through an interesting ride if you follow along on these things. It is a wine so typically made from wormwood, it tastes like licorice and it's vaguely illegal for years, and it was, and for no good reason. Uh, this was a booze, the. The egyptians have papyruses talking about making booze from wormwood. Interesting, but the big production of it happened in the 1800s with the pernaud family that is today ricard pernaud, one of the large alcoholic collectives. The main thing you gotta realize about that era of booze is that you never knew what was going in the cask in terms of ABV. They didn't have specific gravity measures, and so sometimes these things came up 70, 80% alcohol and they'll make you sick, right. And so, as the abstinent movements kick it in the early 1900s, they go after absinthe, first right.

02:01:18
There's some incidences related around it. Um, it was, you know, they, the bohemian movement, made it into some kind of hallucinogen. You saw that. You saw the universe drinking this stuff, none of which is green fairy, and that's right, yeah. And so ultimately the solution to ban it without branding the rest of the booze by the temperate movement was to ban Wyrmwood, and so that's how it kind of went off the market as a lucid Now again. None of this actually true, stop me if you've heard this one with a bunch of other products. It's not until the 1990s that this pushback against Wyrmwood really comes along and they bring it back into play and the ban is lifted in 2005, pretty much worldwide. Not that there ever was a band in Canada, but the folks at Okanagan Spirits jumped on board, made a version of Absinthe and made a whole show of it. I personally find this stuff dreadful and so I don't drink it. It's not good.

02:02:14
But it was around that point in the first couple of years of operations for Okanagan Spirits that they were making money off of the fruit brandies and then they started contracting out making whiskey so other folks who wanted to make whiskey. They had a still to run, so they did contract whiskey for a while and that started bringing in some real cash for them. That a few years later they were growing rapidly and the whiskey business became substantial. The challenge, of course, is that there are major whiskey producers in Canada and the rules that govern spirit production in Canada and British Columbia are very specific to manage these ultra large companies. And so the folks at Okanagan Springs were part of a group of people that pressed the BC government to create a thing they called the craft distilling system, and really more than anything, this was about allowing micro distilleries to function, because making small production whiskey is expensive and when you've got rules built around huge companies where you're taxed, and very heavily the supplier tax in British Columbia for a whiskey producer is 124% and so it just means you can't make money on whiskey until you produce a massive quantities, and that's hard to do. And so what they did was they said the craft rule is really about a small production place. True, initially under 50,000 liters, so that would be 65,000 bottles a year, which a big producer like Alberta Spirits produces that a day, two or three times that a day. But they also put some other rules in place that make these very interesting products. So if you're to qualify to be a BC craft distiller, you can only use BC products grain, fruit. Any products used in the fermentation, they have to come from British Columbia. You have to do your own fermentation and distillation. You cannot add coloring. You cannot add preservatives or any other flavors at all. You can also not add any neutral grain spirit or any other flavors at all. You can also not add any neutral grain spirit. So it's distillate that has been aged. What do you get for following that? And you have to stay under 50,000, although today you can go up to 100,000 liters of production per year, so about 133,000 bottles per year. What do you get for staying in the craft world? So the first is you're allowed to directly sell. You don't have to go through the liquor distribution board so you can sell the licensees, you can sell the private liquor stores and you're also exempt to the supplier markup, 100% exempt if you're under 50,000 liters. And then it's graduated, they add, until you get over 100,000 liters, which point you're not a craft distiller anymore. So it's a pretty good deal for a small operation to make craft booze. So when I think about the conversation we had just a few weeks ago about folks like Rasse and Ballandock, which are also micro distilleries, little distilleries making small points, what's happening in British Columbia here is they're protecting them from these larger business approaches these larger business approaches so they can still tax heavily the alcohol, which is a big revenue source of the large scale things, and allow these smaller markets to grow up, possibly to be acquired into bigger companies. There's choices there.

02:05:26
But talking to the folks from Okanagan Spirits, they were clearly a lifestyle place. Small team of people, six or eight. They got two locations in 2014. They expanded the Vernon operation, which is their main operation. They have one of the largest column stills anywhere in North America. They call it stillzilla. Uh, and then the and then also opened up a facility in Kelowna, which is where we went to see stilla, which we sat right beside. It wasn't running at the time, it was there for show, but it was alive still.

02:05:59
It was plumbed and powered and so forth, and they make a big variety of liqueurs, but they also now make an array of whiskeys, and one of so a few of them. They make one they call brbn, or bourbon, which is just corn and barley, no middle, quite sweet but definitely a bourbon. They make a true rye in the sense that it's 51% rye, which is a tough grain to work with We've talked about this before as well as barley. And then they have one they call one malt, which is a hundred percent barley. The particular whiskey I'm talking about today is their current edition of the Laird of Fintree. So these were. This is their high end single malt product.

02:06:43
They've made a bunch of different versions. When they first started making these back in 22, they were so rare you had to enter a lottery for the privilege of buying one. This particular one they have. They've finished them a bunch of different ways. They typically put them into bourbon casks for five years. Initially I believe this was Jack Danielsley sort of obliquely referred to a Tennessee bourbon. There's only a couple of choices there, but Jack is probably the most likely one. But then they often do an additional finishing stage. A few years ago they did one in rum and they've also done one in Quails Gate dark wines, this particular one which you call the BSV pipe finish. Bsv actually stands for Black Sage Vineyards, which is down in the south of the Okadog and actually an area called Soyuz, which they call the Narimata Bench, where they make a brilliant Cab Franc, one of my favorite wines. In fact I'm pretty sure I've fed some to Paul already.

02:07:41
But a pipe cask is actually a variation on a style of port from Portugal. So this is a port-finished whiskey. So five years in bourbon casks and about a year, maybe nine months, in the BSV pipes. They got from Black Sage, their particular port. That Black Sage make. They actually do a mix of Cab Sav, merlot and Cab Franc and during fermentation, once it hits a particular Brix level, the sugar is almost gone. Then they add neutral spirit to it, which is normal for a port, which usually kills the yeast, bumps the alcohol up a level around 20% or so and then they barrel it for three years in neutral oak to make their port Common port practices makes a good port cask, which has now made this particular whiskey. So when we look at the color of this absolutely a port finished whiskey it's got all that color for what is probably barely six years old and from a noise perspective, you're still smelling a fair bit of sweet and but nothing, no burn, it's only 42%, relatively low. And remember, they do not chill, filter and they do not color.

02:08:52
You know one of the points that the lady we were working with for this said we're not worried about making the same whiskey every year, whatever happens happens, just enjoy it, which is legit.

02:09:01
It's more like wine making. Right, the 24 is going to be different from the 23, it's okay. Yeah, you're going to drink that all day long, just slides down, goes hello. Thanks for playing. You know, very easy. So a little pricey 85 Canadian, so about 60 bucks US. If you could find it basically not exported, sorry about that You'll have to find somebody who's willing to go, take the risk to shed it across the border for you, which is very difficult to do. But now that you know about craft distilling, you also know that most of that money actually goes to the distillery, not just the taxes, which to me makes me want to buy it more, because it's an incredibly honest manifestation of a British Columbia whiskey following some certain Scottish styles no two ways about it, but not caught in the big alcohol machine that exists here to turn most of the stuff into our health care with lots of taxes.

02:10:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you know, here I am happily poisoning myself and giving the money to people who poison me as it should be, as it should be, instead of the people trying to fix you, yeah, instead of the people trying to fix me.

02:10:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Who cares about those people honestly? But you know, I had a lovely tour from those folks. The okanagan valley is, of course, incredibly gorgeous and great, and the time if you're really into wine you go there in october this year is going to be really interesting because literally there are no native grapes this year, so all of the different wineries are scrambling to adjust. See, can we get the rules adjusted so we can buy grapes from Washington or Oregon, or should you stick strictly to Canada and buy them from the Niagara Peninsula? Like they're all trying to figure out how to make a vintage this year, because that freeze killed virtually every grape in the, in the in the area. It's unbelievable. But uh, in the meantime we're uh, having a sip. They, we found a. Now I realize like there's 60, 70 of these micro distilleries in BC. Because of this craft rule, it just allows these small operations to work, and so we could be talking about different BC whiskeys for a year. Easy, wow, and good ones, which is nice so far. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

02:11:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This one is lovely, but you know what you could mess up whiskey in small quantities too ladies and gentlemen, I give you mr richard campbell, toastmaster, extraordinaire host at run as radiocom and dot net rocks and, uh, our, our esteemed leader when it comes to brown liquor.

02:11:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Thank you, richard, always a pleasure and you know I love that I have an excuse. It's like we had to do this because it's my job.

02:11:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And apparently you're becoming renowned for this.

02:11:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Folks are excited. I had a really good time talking to them and it's like you know, every distillery guy I've met when, in doing this, just excited somebody cares. Yeah, that are really.

02:12:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's it and and I think I'm gonna guess there are a lot of pretentious people who act like they know this stuff and when you go in you actually do. Uh, they feel much more appreciated. There are a lot of blowhards in this.

02:12:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I think most people that show up just want a free drink or drink for cheap, right, I think that's the vast majority of the folks that go in and take a tasting. It's just a thing to do, right, and maybe they're interested, maybe they're not. Certainly there's plenty of blowhards in this space. Oh, yeah, and certainly certainly they were approaching me like I was one of those, and then, yeah, then they realized right, yeah, you take some time and you laugh about the words. Yeah, I know, as soon as I was asking about the foaming issues around rye, the lady looks at me like huh okay, I must reassess.

02:12:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's not just here for the booze, yeah, uh, well, we are here for the booze. So, thank you, richard. We also, like he, is at therotcom and his books are at leanpubcom. That's where you'll find windows everywhere and the field guide to windows 11, with now, with windows 10 inside, and every day, every tuesday, wednesday we get together, we gather to think, to talk, to speak about microsoft and windows weekly. A special thanks to kevin king today, who did something he doesn't normally do. He's our producer, but today he had to push the buttons too, because we're trying a whole new way of doing things. Uh, this, we'll do the show in the studio one more time next week and then after that, uh, I will be in my attic, kevin will be in his, whatever, his, uh onsen doing the show, uh, remotely which will be very interesting for you, leo I think this is gonna be great.

02:13:55
Well, we'll see. I won't have that nice lake you have out the window, that's for sure.

02:13:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'll give you the view before we wrap up okay, uh, it'll be a little different.

02:14:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, thank you for bearing with us everybody. Um, this is the new look. We would love your feedback. One of the things that we're debating right now is the size of the lower thirds. They're so tiny which is fine, but yeah, they're out of the way, but but I then I looked at it on on like a phone you can't you can't tell what it says, so I I'd like your input.

02:14:26
Uh, audience members, let us know, especially you, club members. Um, we can make them bigger on this platform. We can't make them bigger on restream, we can make them bigger on this platform. Uh, there is, you know, there's an aesthetic debate apparently I'm very old and the big lower thirds are old-fashioned.

02:14:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You've got a chiron fixation and I do. The generation can't spell chiron, so they don't know.

02:14:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Chiron, what's that? What's that? Uh, and it is true, you know you look old TV like from the 90s football games and stuff, and it's terrible looking. So I know times change so maybe I'm just old fashioned, steven says they look way better you ever think of that.

02:15:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Huh, maybe if you just write.

02:15:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's what I tell them, but they don't believe me. There you go, look at that. Oh wow, I didn't know you go Look at that. Ooh Wow, I didn't know you could. Oh, there was text in that little white thing. That's fine. Well, that's the thing I mean. You know, as you get older, it gets harder to read small print, and I thought maybe it's just me. Right, maybe it's just me, but I don't know. I didn't realize you could do that so easily.

02:15:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Good, don't you think that looks better? I mean, the font is excellent.

02:15:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's clean, it's simple, doesn't have a lot of color. We're just. We're just, it's informational, but it has to be big enough to read. I think that's what we're going back and forth on. There was text in that little white thing says paul laron oh, oh, interesting, uh, we will be back next wednesday, uh 11 am. Pacific 2 pm, eastern 1800 UTC.

02:16:00
We are streaming now part of this move. This pivot for twit means we stream everywhere and we have chat everywhere. So that's a big shift for us. So if you're in the club, you can watch in the discord and chat there, but you can also everybody's invited to chat on YouTube, youtubecom, slash, twit, slash. Oh, look, it's something's happening there. It is, the chat is ready to display messages and this is the unified chat. So that's a youtuber. Yeah, increase the font size without increasing the size of the box. That's, that's actually an interesting thought. Um, so, youtube twitch we're on twitchtv, twitch linked, linkedin, facebook, xcom and kick. So there are now seven places you can watch us live.

02:16:43
I still think most, most people will prefer to watch us, uh, on demand, like a, like a podcast, and if you want to do that, there are many ways to do it. You can go to the website twittv, slash ww. Paul also puts the video of the show up on his site, thurotcom. You can also go to youtubecom there's a Windows Weekly channel there for the video. But I think the most convenient method would be to find a podcast player we have links on our webpage to a bunch of them and subscribe. That way you'll get it automatically as soon as we're done, as soon as Kevin edits this sucker. Thank you, kevin. Automatically, uh, as soon as we're done, as soon as kevin edits this sucker. Thank you, kevin king. Good job today. Thank you, paul thurot, richard campbell. Thank you to our club members. We will see you all next time on windows weekly bye.