Windows Weekly 951 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.

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul and Richard are here. The Windows taskbar is on the move. Google's making music in 30 seconds, and Xbox is quietly setting up its next act. Windows Weekly is next. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell.

Leo Laporte [00:00:31]:
Episode 971, recorded Wednesday, February 18th, 2026. Texas English. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, you winners. Hello, you dozers. This is the show where we cover the latest from Microsoft, not Macro Hard. Don't get confused. That's Paul.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:51]:
1970S.

Richard Campbell [00:00:52]:
I know.

Leo Laporte [00:00:53]:
That's Paul Thurrott, Thurrott.com. Hello, Mr. T. Hello, Leo. Hello, Paulie. And to his left is, your right, is Mr. Richard Campbell. Mr.

Leo Laporte [00:01:06]:
C, hello, Mr. C. Hello, friends.

Richard Campbell [00:01:09]:
Ask me sometime, probably not on the show, about the Azure Dancers, and I'll give you a different version of the Microsoft name.

Leo Laporte [00:01:16]:
The Azure Dancers.

Richard Campbell [00:01:17]:
The Azure Dancers.

Leo Laporte [00:01:19]:
It's all done in the cloud.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:22]:
This is like a you put the ass in Azure moment, or what are we talking about? What's happening?

Richard Campbell [00:01:29]:
Oh, it made the world news at the time.

Leo Laporte [00:01:32]:
Yeah, uh, I remember the funeral for Linux.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:37]:
Well, uh, the funeral for iPhone was a big one.

Leo Laporte [00:01:40]:
That's right, they had a procession across the campus.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:43]:
Yeah, how's that going? Is iPhone— oh, it's still around. I see.

Richard Campbell [00:01:45]:
Okay, uh, somehow getting by.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:50]:
Oh, I tell you.

Leo Laporte [00:01:51]:
Hey, um, Is there any Windows news?

Paul Thurrott [00:01:54]:
Only a little bit.

Leo Laporte [00:01:57]:
Um, you had a big one. I didn't realize how big it was last week. The, yeah, 26H1 was like, everybody was.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:02]:
Like, oh, it's serious. I, I was nervous about that one because there was just so much to it. And then, uh, apparently I took last week off because I don't know what.

Leo Laporte [00:02:11]:
Happened, but all the news last week.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:12]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I will say on the 26H1 slash whatever front, no new news, right, since then. Um, Nothing has happened, but I guess that's okay. Um, well, I don't know, maybe we could look at the Patch Tuesday stuff that's coming up in that light, but we'll start, I guess, Week D first, whatever. Anyway, okay, but what we do have is a rumor from Zack, our buddy over at Windows Central, telling us that Microsoft is working to bring back some features that disappeared when Windows 11 debuted back in 2021. The key of those being the ability to move the taskbar to different sides of the screen.

Richard Campbell [00:02:49]:
Yay!

Paul Thurrott [00:02:50]:
Yeah, people were confused why the taskbar—.

Leo Laporte [00:02:53]:
Wait a minute, that's the new thing, is you can move that?

Richard Campbell [00:02:58]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:02:58]:
What's the taskbar?

Paul Thurrott [00:03:00]:
So if you're asking me, is that what you're leading with, Paul? The answer is yes.

Leo Laporte [00:03:03]:
That's the big stuff. Um, the taskbar is that— taskbar is.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:07]:
That bar at the— yeah, at the bottom of the screen with the shortcuts.

Leo Laporte [00:03:09]:
Okay, where the Start menu lives.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:11]:
That's right.

Leo Laporte [00:03:11]:
So Windows 11, you could put it on any side of the screen.

Richard Campbell [00:03:15]:
Yes, you could.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:16]:
Right, so a lot of change. Richard, on the left. I'll tell you where to put it, buddy. Um, so in Windows 11, the big change visually, and I guess functionally, was that, um, everything's centered. So the taskbar is centered, the Start menu is in the center of the screen by default. You can move it back. Um, and it lost a lot of the kind of right-click context menu, the ability to add toolbar, all the kind of additional, um, you know, bulk or whatever you want to call it that used to be in the taskbar. So why is that?

Richard Campbell [00:03:44]:
Call them features, Paul. They were features.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:47]:
Yes, so the reason is the Start menu and the taskbar were completely rewritten for Windows 11, so they're not— it's not the same code. And I don't know that this has happened yet, but one of the little mini potential controversies that we'll have in Windows someday, if it hasn't already happened, is the task— the old taskbar, and I think the old Start menu code is actually still in there, right? And so these companies or individuals that write little utilities that, you know, bring back the old, you know, Windows 2000 Start menu or whatever it is, or like Start11, that type of utility is actually using some of that stuff in the background or was, you know, and at some point that is going to disappear. But obviously when you have that kind of a functional regression, because there was a bunch of them, remember, you know, for example, when Windows 11 debuted, if you right-clicked the taskbar, you only got one item in the context menu for taskbar settings. In Windows 10, you had about 117 items and with multiple little submenus and stuff. And a lot of power users especially relied on that kind of thing. And of course they lost the ability to move the thing around. Lots of other stuff too, by the way, but those are kind of the high-level things. So there's been a lot of complaints about that, but from a kind of a telemetry perspective, the story has always been, actually not that many people use it.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:05]:
Anyway, they've addressed some of the concerns with the taskbar and with Start. Actually, there's been, I'm going to call it two major revisions to the Start menu since Windows 11 debuted. They added a second, uh, item to that right-click menu, right? So, you know, there's progress there.

Richard Campbell [00:05:21]:
But now it's very exciting. Yeah, yeah, we all got our Task Manager back, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:05:26]:
Yes, that's right. Yep, it's big stuff. But, you know, I, I sort of appreciate the notion that when you add things like this, additional features, there's a support penalty to this for Microsoft, right? That, you know, they have these ideas and I don't think we talked about this, but I think in the context of the PowerToys, there's this— they're just looking at it now. I don't think you can actually run this code, but when you go to Linux, a lot of times you'll have some kind of a taskbar-like entity, usually at the bottom, but maybe on the side of the screen. But there's often like a menu bar type thing at the top as well. And there's an exploration going on within Microsoft about whether that kind of UI might make sense for Windows as well. Um, and of course the problem now is if we're going to start moving the taskbar around, that kind of thing becomes more difficult, of course, unless you just say, well, we're not going to the top. And I kind of argued when I saw this that maybe that should be the taskbar, like there should be one thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:25]:
Um, so I don't know, but, um, so anyway, we will see.

Richard Campbell [00:06:29]:
Um, so that's the habit of putting the taskbar on the left for me came from coding, just that all vertical space to me is important for lines of code.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:38]:
Yeah, and this would be true for a lot, like, just productivity, right? Like, yeah, when you have like 16:9 displays, the extra space is on the sides, you know? Yeah, so that actually makes sense to me.

Richard Campbell [00:06:48]:
But the stuff on the side these days, on this machine at least, I have a widescreen machine screen on the left and I have a portrait screen on the right. So the taskbar for Windows 11 is actually on the right-hand screen. So you can days in the big screen.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:03]:
Yeah, the one thing I miss here now, because I'm using— this is essentially my wife's setup, um, which we've decided we will share, you know. So when we have calls or things like this, you know, we can come in here or whatever. And so there's a main screen that— which is what I'm looking at. There's this laptop screen because that's how I'm connected, but there's also like a portable display that's actually 16 by 10. And the way I had that oriented was portrait mode because I love that. It's great for like the show notes and things like that. It's great. Yeah, it's great.

Leo Laporte [00:07:31]:
It makes sense. I keep my tabs on my browser on the left.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:33]:
Yeah, see, that's, that's the thing. So I, I— now she prefers it the other way, right? So literally today I was like, so I said, do you think, uh, what do you think about putting this in port? And she's like, no, I like it that way. Oh, like, yeah, okay. Uh, so it's, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay.

Leo Laporte [00:07:49]:
You can have your own login, you know.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:51]:
Oh no, I, I— well, no, it's a physical screen.

Richard Campbell [00:07:54]:
Like, I'd have to actually turn the screen. Nice.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:56]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:07:57]:
We got, we got pretty good login controls, but we can't do that.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:59]:
Yeah, no, I have my own computer. I don't need a login, but I just, yeah, it's whatever. It's fine. Um, anyway, uh, so there's the taskbar and I look to me, the thing Leo just said, the, the ability to have vertical tabs in a browser is for some reason has only worked for me when I was using Arc. Like I really liked it there.

Leo Laporte [00:08:20]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:21]:
When I tried an Edge or Chrome or whatever else, it's like, ah, it is something about it. And of course, most of my screens are not quite— they're not 16:9 anymore for the most part, right? Most of them are 16:10, which is not quite square, but I kind of wish they were square, honestly. Um, I don't know why I can't adapt to that, but, um, yeah, I've tried. I will— if they bring this back, I mean, I'll try it again. I've tried it so many times. I've tried it— the taskbar in different— I always just go back. I don't know.

Richard Campbell [00:08:47]:
Yeah, well, there's a thing with you, you're out with so many machines that reconfiguring them all is not a trivial— that's true.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:56]:
It's— and yeah, there's, there's a whole micro version of that too. Like, for example, lately I've been working on that Panther Lake laptop, right, which is 14 inches, a little smaller, but whatever, it's fine. And, um, I had— because I'm using Affinity, the new version of Affinity, it doesn't support some of the same keyboard shortcuts. So I created a new shortcut for export, which I, you know, basically image crop, resize, and I export it so I can use it on my site. And like, well, it's not running, I'm not gonna look, but it's some crazy 4-key keyboard shortcut. I was like, I don't have that many fingers. So I created a shortcut for it where it's just Ctrl+E, right? So, but it's not on this, on that laptop. So I kept, I'm sitting there like hitting Ctrl+E, Ctrl+E, Ctrl+E, Ctrl+E.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:38]:
I'm like, why isn't it working? I guess I just have to redo it on every single computer he uses. It's like, I hate that so much.

Richard Campbell [00:09:45]:
Back to your install scripts. Can you get to this level of granularity? Get your shortcut keys pre-programmed?

Paul Thurrott [00:09:50]:
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, yeah, maybe that app becomes more semantic and I can do that.

Leo Laporte [00:09:53]:
I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:54]:
I don't know. I've never— I don't know. The other one though is Microsoft has, like I said, at least two major revisions to the Start menu. The computer I'm using actually does have the latest version. The latest version brings what used to be All Apps out to the front and it puts it in the category view, which I find to be incredibly inefficient by default. But you can change it to a normal list view or a grid. They call it a grid view. Grid view is list view, but all of the apps that start with the same letter are horizontal instead of vertical, if that makes sense.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:27]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:10:27]:
Um, that list view is painful.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:30]:
Yeah. It's not great. It's not a good use of space, but apparently they're going to, um, work on that as well. And, and The one thing I would say, and I think this might be part of it, I don't understand how the Start menu isn't resizable yet, right? I mean, think about this, like, why wouldn't they just support that? I mean, I know, again, it's because they rewrote it from scratch, but you get the feeling sometimes with the UI stuff that the people who made this don't actually use Windows, you know?

Richard Campbell [00:10:57]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:58]:
It's like they don't understand the normal use cases because I'm not, I don't want a full-screen Start thing like we had in Windows 8 exactly, but I would actually make that wider. Why not?, you know, or just, you know, take up more space, whatever, you know, just resize it the way you want it. I mean, it seems like a pretty.

Richard Campbell [00:11:15]:
Decent— I mean, I'm very much a Windows key name of app person, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:11:20]:
That's why I do most. Okay, so since, since you said that, um, I would— I, I— Microsoft's not going to do this, but there are a lot of apps like Start 11 that replace the Start menu. It's very complicated. Um, there are also apps from Microsoft like, uh, what's it called, the, uh, whatever, the new— the PowerToys Run, but the new version of that It's got a different name. I'm sorry, I forgot that. I'm zoning on the name, but whatever that is, where you can— it has its own keyboard shortcut by default, but then you could assign a keyboard shortcut. What's it say again? Quick Launcher. No, Command Palette.

Richard Campbell [00:11:52]:
Sorry.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:53]:
Command Palette. So, let's see if it comes up. No, I think— every computer is different. That's my problem. But anywho, it would be neat to me because I use Windows, the Start menu the same way, right? So, I would like to just hit the Start button and have Command Palette come up. Because all I'm doing is typing because I'm looking for something specific. I'm not browsing the Start menu. I don't look at stuff.

Richard Campbell [00:12:15]:
I don't care.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:17]:
I don't think so. Yeah. So that to me would be an even better improvement, but there is no— there's no news along those lines. I don't know. So we'll see. Maybe someday we'll have a completely configurable something something, or maybe we'll just be running Linux and we can just laugh and pretend this never happened.

Richard Campbell [00:12:34]:
I don't know. I just did an interview with Michael Leehaus about the life and death of Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, which is finally over.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:42]:
Yes, yes, yes.

Richard Campbell [00:12:44]:
And we had all this conversation about configuration, and I always think of you because I just— you hammer on this so.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:51]:
Hard.

Richard Campbell [00:12:52]:
You know, you have unusual requirements, Mr. Theriot.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:54]:
You are the only— Yeah, well, I— part— one of my requirements is repeatability.

Richard Campbell [00:13:02]:
Right?

Paul Thurrott [00:13:02]:
I, I, I don't want to— I can't do something once and be like, all right, here's how you do it. That's not how things work. And by the way, today that's especially not how things work. Yeah. Because there's so many different things on every computer. This is something I experience all the time. I could have— I have had multiple computers lined up side by side. Start menu 1, start menu 2, start menu 1, 1, you know, like, and then every— pick any feature, it's going to be different on every computer.

Richard Campbell [00:13:23]:
Yeah. Why is that search box pill-shaped and this one is square?

Paul Thurrott [00:13:27]:
And yeah. Right. That was one of the early, actually.

Richard Campbell [00:13:28]:
One of the early— I watched you rage about that. It was fascinating.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:32]:
Yeah. I'm a canary in the coal mine with anger management problems, basically. Um, so yeah. Okay. Um, and then last night we got a beta build through the Insider Program, but not a dev build. Um, remember the beta and dev streams or whatever we're going to call these things, channels are both on different build What do we call— what's— I need a term for this. What do you call this? They're on different build number, like number series or something. Sequences, I guess.

Leo Laporte [00:14:01]:
I don't know. Siamese.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:05]:
Sequences. They're joining. It's like DNA sequences. But my theory is that— and well, now that we know 26H1 is not turning into 26H2, I guess I would say now that Dev's probably going to be 26H2 at some point, not 26H1, right? So Canary is 26H1. That's nothing happening there. Anyway, we got a beta but not a dev build. And then we got two— sorry, we got one Release Preview build that affects two versions of Windows because that's what they're still doing there. So the Release Preview one is a preview, if you will, of what we're going to see Week D next week sometime.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:40]:
And then that is itself a preview of what will be Patch Tuesday for February— sorry, for March. This is stuff we've already talked about, right? Because we've seen it in other parts of the Insider Program. So it's Emoji 16.0, which I know this audience is super excited about. Auto-enablement and new functionality for quick machine recovery. This is the thing that originally, as originally envisioned, which as soon as I read this description, I was like, what? If it runs into a boot problem, it will try to find the fix. And if it can't, it will reboot and try to find the fix. And if it can't, it will reboot and try to find the fix. And if it can't, it will reboot., and it's like, wait, that can't be how this thing works.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:18]:
And now that is not how this thing works. So now it will just boot normally. They're describing this as a network speed test built into the taskbar. That's a bit of an overreach. Through— it's so bizarre, but there are options off of Wi-Fi and I want to say cellular data settings where you can trigger a network speed test. And I think it's also in the Settings app, but it just runs a web browser window and goes to netspeedtest.com or whatever that, you know, the site everyone uses, right? So it's not actually built into the OS, but okay, whatever. If you have a compatible camera, you'll see pan and tilt controls in the Settings app when you look at the camera. Some minor improvements to widgets and other things.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:01]:
So actually not a big, big deal. And this is the maybe the one thing that ties into what we were talking about last week, which is that whether this is, I don't know, on purpose or not. None of these are superfluous UI changes or, you know, fancy high-level, you know, they're all kind of little low-level, you know, product improvements.

Richard Campbell [00:16:25]:
Like, okay, guys, just working down the list of small things they can fix.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:28]:
Yeah, which I, you know, I support 100%. I should say this one's getting Sysmon too. The Sysmon goes into this, uh, so.

Richard Campbell [00:16:34]:
That— so this is a few weeks ago, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:16:36]:
Yeah, it's just gonna be in Windows as of next month, so that's fantastic. And some other things— the beta channel build is disappointing. There is one functional change, and that is that if you have a Microsoft 365 consumer subscription, they will try to upsell you to a more expensive Microsoft 365 consumer subscription inside of account settings in the settings.

Richard Campbell [00:17:01]:
I was worried about that.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:03]:
Yeah, I feel like I haven't been upsold enough in Windows 11, so that's kind of a refreshing change. Um, this is ridiculous. Um, and then this is only summary related because it's PC industry stuff and we, you know, we do earnings as they come. I assume by next week we'll have HP's earnings as well. But did we talk about Lenovo? Maybe we did talk about Lenovo, I can't remember. Maybe not. Anyway, Lenovo had a blockbuster quarter, actually.

Richard Campbell [00:17:28]:
Um, record, uh, recently I think it's pretty reliable.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:32]:
Their, their, their take on this is interesting though, right? So $22.2 billion in revenues, which is a record for them, uh, a gain of 18% year over year, right? It's a holiday quarter. Um, I'm going to say two-thirds to three-quarters of their revenues come from PC or from devices. PC, they, they sell tablets and phones, but I think we can agree it's mostly PCs. Um, the PC and devices part of that did grow 17%, which kind of bears that out a little bit. Um, they have outpaced the rest of the PC industry from a growth perspective, meaning year-over-year growth, not whatever else, for 10 consecutive quarters. Um, they have set another record for market share in the PC, uh, industry of 24.9%. So the first time any PC maker has ever gotten anywhere close to 25%, interestingly, except for maybe IBM in 1983 or whatever. Um, but They said a lot of this growth is because there were fears among their customer base that RAM prices were going to keep escalating, right? So customers were buying these things, um, a little earlier maybe than usual.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:36]:
So it's possible this year we're going to see things kind of, you know, flatten out, which is what we might—.

Richard Campbell [00:18:40]:
Sooner or later they're going to have some tough quarters because it just can't—.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:43]:
Yeah, it's just going to flatten, you know. But we've heard this from other quarters as well, so sure.

Richard Campbell [00:18:48]:
But what I I mean, obviously their server business is going huge. Yeah, the desktop business is doing well.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:56]:
Like, he predicted the end of the PC. I know, I know. Um, yeah, I, I— well, we'll see. There's, there's always new competition in the space. You know, Linux is doing better than ever, but still very low, single digit. Um, iPad has turned into a computer if you want it to be. Android is working on that same thing. They're gonna Swatch— Swatch— they're gonna switch the Chromebook over to an Android base, and then whether they call that something different, we'll see.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:24]:
But, you know, that will be a kind of an Android-based computer, obviously. So, you know, we'll see. But Windows, I have my theories about inertia and whatnot, but Windows has, you know, retained its kind of position for the most part, right? I mean, You would think, you know, for example, that the Mac would have grown market share dramatically over the past 10 years, but it hasn't. It's been kind of stuck in the 8-9%.

Richard Campbell [00:19:49]:
Always my question when I look at these numbers is how much of this.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:52]:
Is consumer and how much of this is business. Yeah. And this is tough because you don't see a lot of breakout of that kind of thing from like IDC or Gartner or whatever. But, um, you know, I keep saying this, but historically at Microsoft, historically, I mean, over a 20-plus year time span, it was about two-thirds business is one-third consumer. I bet it's more business now than it was. I would think so. I think so too, but it's hard to say. Lenovo, a lot of their growth, you know, a lot of their business is commercial, right?

Richard Campbell [00:20:21]:
Well, and you're also— I, I'm not going to predict this, but I would expect there is a Win 11 wave that you are as a business buying new machines because you're moving to Win 11 so you don't pay the ESU.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:33]:
Yeah. Yep. Yeah, I, I, I, I feel like maybe Microsoft telegraphed that well enough that it's being spread out maybe more than it would have otherwise.

Richard Campbell [00:20:42]:
No, I think, I think everybody doesn't believe them because they keep moving the goalposts on a regular basis. You wait till they actually do it.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:47]:
Before you pull the trigger on that. Yeah, yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:20:51]:
So they told us April, then they said October. They're like, yeah, maybe. Okay, it wasn't a maybe, apparently not. So yeah, all right, fine, we'll, uh, we'll do it.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:00]:
I mean, the world hasn't ended. No, weirdly enough. It's not because of this. You know, remember, like, you know, Consumer Reports was like, you gotta, you know, gotta push this back. The thing I say to people who complain about this is Windows 10 will, by the time it's said and done, will have been supported longer than any version of Windows ever made. Without a doubt.

Leo Laporte [00:21:20]:
Ever.

Richard Campbell [00:21:20]:
Well, we still don't know that sort of XP scenarios, right? Like the Navy depends on it, or.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:28]:
ATMs depend on it. Like, yeah, well, right, like the, yeah, the British Hospital Network depends on it, right? Which was one that happened during the Windows 10.

Richard Campbell [00:21:34]:
Well, and there was that Win 10 IoT Edition. So I wonder how many rare, like, specialized devices are out there that's like, I'm sorry, you're really supporting this code base. Yeah, here's, here's the bucket of money, keep going, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:21:48]:
So I mean, I, I'm just, when I think of this, I'm mostly thinking about people running a computer, you know, or businesses with people in it running it, you know, that have a computer. So, um, I don't know, we're getting— look, we're— we still see Windows 7 in subways or something, and we're going to see Windows 10 for years to come. There's no doubt about it. I mean, this thing was on at one point probably 1.4 billion or more computers. Now it's whatever it is, 700.

Richard Campbell [00:22:13]:
It'll be when the— when they don't want to do ESU anymore, 2 years, 2, maybe 3 years from now, that's when you're going to get the stories of these large entities that are like, oh no, we won't be moving, just tell us what the check is, we'll do it.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:28]:
Yeah, right, right.

Richard Campbell [00:22:29]:
Well, that must be nice. That was the Navy basically said that. I think they were— it's like $600 million they were paying Microsoft to keep XP for chips.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:38]:
Yeah, yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:22:40]:
Wow, that's good.

Leo Laporte [00:22:42]:
It happens. Well, fortunately they have lots.

Richard Campbell [00:22:46]:
Of money. Well, you lovely taxpayers do such a good job.

Leo Laporte [00:22:50]:
Yeah, we love giving them our money. Yeah, what would we do with it after all?

Paul Thurrott [00:22:57]:
Exactly, retire? That's crazy. Why would you want to do that?

Leo Laporte [00:22:59]:
Well, I like working. I'm going to keep working forever. You're watching— speaking of which, uh, you're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell. So glad you're here. Now let's continue with Windows Weekly. What's it— what else is up, guys?

Paul Thurrott [00:23:19]:
Oh boy, it's been a light week. Did I mention that? Um, so not much on the AI front. I mean, I— there's always things happening, but I'm trying not to get too far afield. Um, Google is adding, uh, 30-second music and audio generation through Gemini, which is, you know, of course they are, you know. I was— a couple of weeks ago, Google had introduced, I think it was called Project Genie. This is the thing that did the video game asset generation stuff. People were losing their minds. I think a lot of video game company stock prices like fell through the floor because it's like, oh, the, you know, the end is near.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:54]:
And then today I saw a headline that said, uh, yeah, this is not going to be a problem for the industry. It's like, yeah, yeah, no, of course not, you know. But we kind of overreact to everything right away. That's our way of doing things now. But, um, you know, we live in an era of wonder, I guess. So, you know, every day there's like a new thing, and, and here we go.

Leo Laporte [00:24:12]:
Hollywood's crazy about this, uh, new Chinese video generation, uh, tool. They're both excited and worried at the same time, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:24:21]:
Yeah. Look, I, I, I feel like I just keep repeating myself with this stuff, but video game gener— making, or video game creation, whatever, is an obvious place to me for using AI. I mean, I, I don't mean to replace developers or designers or whatever, but in the same sense that a developer or designer out doing whatever they're doing out in the world would, you know, uh, use AI to improve whatever it is they're doing. I mean, of course we're going to do this in games. We talk about these open world games that it can just generate, you know, more and more content, whether it's like some Wild West scenario or a space scenario, whatever it is. And I don't, you know, like, I, I feel like this is additive. And, um, and Richard, I assume I, I've been trying to avoid some of the AI stuff on.NET Rocks, not because I'm not interested, but I, I feel I just kind of want to experience some of it before I know too much about it.

Richard Campbell [00:25:15]:
But I— and we're very focused on the dev scenario.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:19]:
Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I, I don't know, I, I feel like From an app development perspective, AI is going to open up what we think of as app development to a wider audience for these little one-off apps we talk about, right? But for professional developers, either in companies or individuals or small companies, whatever it might be, I don't know, like in the old days, I think, or, you know, meaning like 2 seconds ago, you might open Visual Studio or whatever environment or whatever editor you're using and start coding. Compile and run and compile and run and play and blah blah blah, whatever. And it's possible, I mean probable even, that maybe a lot of these new projects will start as some kind of a prompt and it generates something and then you go from there. And that's vibe coding, I guess we're going to call it. But I, as I said when that first came around, I mean, for a professional developer, you're not done, you know, for the most part. It's not like I didn't make a little to-do list for myself. Like, anyone could do that, I guess.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:19]:
But making a complex professional app, that's just the first step. I mean, you have to— it's not going to compile, run, and then we ship it. There's so much architecture work to do and whatever else. So I wonder, I mean, it's possible that the, I don't know, day-to-day process changes a bit. Like, it did. We got IDEs in the late '80s. Probably with like Turbo Pascal, Quick C, etc. And then Windows, and, and, you know, we get these bigger environments, your Visual Studio now, etc.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:47]:
Um, you know, so the, the, the way we approach these things maybe has changed a little bit over the years, but I feel like that's what it's going to do again. But we're still going to need people that know what they're doing. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:26:59]:
Um, you know, every piece of software starts with a conversation about what you wanted to do. The fact that we now make that part of the process of making the software, you know, doesn't— isn't that far afield. It's just that more and more that you've done that way. And even before the LLM stormed on the scene a couple of years ago, the no-code, low-code movement was doing the same thing in a lot of— oh.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:21]:
My gosh, for 20 years. I mean, I, you know, Richard and I probably have more memory or knowledge of this than a lot of people because, you know, we're just in the thick of it. But, you know, Visual Studio Lighthouse and Power Automate. And over— I mean, this goes on and on and on. Like when I say lighthouse, light switch. Yes. Um, yeah, I mean, this has been the dream, you know. And so I guess in many ways AI maybe is going to realize that dream.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:47]:
But I, I think— I don't know, it's a big topic, but I'm more interested to see how this impacts apps, frankly.

Richard Campbell [00:27:53]:
Like, um, yeah, but it's a great conversation about, you know, what— when you buy SAP, what buying, right? What is it? Because it's, it's your data. The data structures are not that big of a deal. Like, ultimately you're paying for a workflow, uh, and, and some people are foolish enough to spend a lot of money trying to adjust that workflow in SAP. And over years we've learned you probably shouldn't do that. You should adapt your company to the workflow that SAP plays. But when that workflow is now described as a set of prompts, it's pretty hard to justify the price tag for.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:26]:
That kind of product. Yeah, right. And I think enough of that is what leads to, I just said this to Brad this morning, you know, again, if you're in the Microsoft space, if you're our age and you remember all this stuff, you know, back in Windows 95, Microsoft introduced this concept of a document-centric interface that went nowhere, absolutely nowhere. But it's a good idea. The idea is that like, and we do this today on our phones, but back then on a computer, you'd say, okay, I need to write a letter or whatever. So, okay, what's the tool? Okay, it's Word. So I gotta find Word, I gotta launch Word, and then I gotta write something in Word and save that as a document. And the Microsoft idea at the time, which I think is a good one still, was, okay, but actually you're just making a document.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:06]:
Don't worry about the tool. Just start a new document. That's been the old vision all along. Yeah. Windows Phone did this. We're putting you at the center, right? Common hardware. Yeah. Kind of de-emphasize apps.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:18]:
It's like, I want to edit a photo or something. I want to share a picture or whatever it is. You know, today we all do this. We met, you know, it's weird how much we manage technology. You pick up a phone, you have arranged the icons on your screen, you have done it so that you have muscle memory and you're like, okay, I got to post something online. That means I click this icon. And then we still think in terms of apps. And I think that this AI processing Flow stuff is going to maybe change that and eliminate some apps, you know, that— and again, I just, because I have to repeat myself, it's just easy.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:49]:
But, um, you know, I do the, the chart for the PC article every January, or once a year I have to make a PowerPoint presentation. Um, you know, maybe I don't need to relearn this app once a year every year, or find some expert, or spend the time to, you know, watch videos about how do I use this app. It's like, I just need a chart. I just need a, you know, whatever the thing is. This was the point in many ways behind Loop. We, you know, we talk about this sometimes where Microsoft was going down that path again, right? Because they over— maybe over-engineered it. But the idea was, you know, we got to stop thinking about these apps. Like, just like you have a— you're doing something with a team or by yourself and you want to share elements of it or whatever it is as a project, whatever, however you want to think of this.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:34]:
Stuff. And, you know, today you could use Notion or something or whatever tool you prefer, and I— you don't really think in terms of, well, okay, I got to go out to the database app because I need a, you know, whatever it is, and I have to go over here because I need a chart, and I have to go over here because I need an infographic. And who are these people that know how to use all those tools? It's crazy, right?

Richard Campbell [00:30:54]:
So yeah, and, and does that mean anything anymore when the goal wasn't to use a tool, the goal was to get something like done, right?

Leo Laporte [00:31:00]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [00:31:00]:
I mean, even saying the phrase edit a photo is kind of vague. It's like, I'd like to remove that person from a photo, or I'd like to make this photo look better.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:08]:
Why do I have to master Photoshop to cut around a, a person to get rid of the background and then change the background or whatever it is I'm doing? Like, you know, the sheer amount of work involved to get anything, um, and.

Richard Campbell [00:31:24]:
And we we do it so reflexively now where we forget the initial goal and just get— oh yeah, tools.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:31]:
Like, this is every one of my days. This is the, the simplified version of this is you're standing in front of an open refrigerator and you're like, why am I here? Yeah, you know, and, and but you do that with like a developer's— I think I, when I try to be a developer, which is hilarious, I find myself doing this every, every time. Like, I, okay, today I'm gonna add this feature to this app.

Richard Campbell [00:31:52]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:52]:
And then it's 3 o'clock in the afternoon, I'm like, what was I doing? And because you spent all your time learning like a new C# language feature and looking at different frameworks and blah blah blah, and you're like, down the rabbit hole. Google announced yesterday that I/O this year will be May 19th and 20th. There has been overlap between I/O and Build for many years, and some years literally the same exact timeframe. Microsoft has not announced a timeframe for Build, have they, for this year?

Richard Campbell [00:32:16]:
They have not announced about a time frame.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:19]:
This makes me wonder, because we're getting kind of close. I mean, I guess if they could, they could, I have— they could probably do it before the end of the month, it would be fine. But, um, it did make me think when I saw this announcement, you know, I know they're not going to Seattle. Yeah, but if they were to go to, say, San Francisco, which seems logical, what if they can't be there in May, right? What if Build has to be in, you know, whatever, July.

Richard Campbell [00:32:44]:
Well, the question is, what do they do for a venue? So, I mean, my usual technique is when I'm trying to figure these things out without knowing any secrets, it's just.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:52]:
Go look at what's allocated. Yeah, you could probably find out right now. It probably is, right?

Richard Campbell [00:32:59]:
Like, it is, but it's not out. It doesn't— I don't think it's allocated to Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:02]:
So, right, that's what I mean. So, right, so we'll see. We'll see.

Richard Campbell [00:33:08]:
What happens there. Um, I— but you're right, I mean, they— it's remarkably late.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:15]:
It's February, you know. I— yeah, I— yeah, I guess I didn't get that correct for some reason.

Richard Campbell [00:33:22]:
Anyway, um, okay, so, you know, normally it is in around May, and it's often been on top of Google, so one would presume it's in that neighborhood.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:31]:
But we usually— there's nothing, you know. There's nothing. Yeah, not yet. Okay. Yeah. So maybe we'll learn something soon. Um, tied to the I/O stuff, Google announced the first beta of Android 17. And I, I follow this stuff.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:45]:
I follow the Apple stuff too. We'll talk about that one second. But, um, there's something going on. You know, we complain here because we cover Windows, right? So Windows is constantly updated, right? This is the Windows as a Service thing that we have different term for it now, but The idea is that this thing is continually being revved with new features, which, you know, I find annoying personally, but whatever. I'm old. But Android is also undergoing big changes, right, in their development schedule. They used to also be in that kind of annual cadence. Now they have like basically what I would call a quarterly thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:19]:
They've shifted the schedule for each major version to accommodate Samsung, frankly. And it's likely that this thing will be done by the middle of the year, but the way they're describing it, it's like they've already accelerated the schedule starting with 16, but now this one's going to be even faster, it looks like. And then this will be the one that will begin that shift to Android as a computer platform as well, right? And so one of the things that's changing with this release, which I don't actually have in the story, is that you can no longer as a developer opt out of the bigger screen modes, right? Right. And so today, if you publish an app to Google Play Store, you could have a phone-shaped app, and if you run it on a Pixel Fold or a Samsung Fold or whatever, or a big screen device, it's going to run as a phone app, right? And it's like, no, this thing's gonna— it's gonna fit the screen now. So they're gonna actually enforce that, and good for them. Um, and then, uh, Apple just shipped the first beta of iOS and then everything else, 26.4. These are the versions that we're supposed to have finally, 2 years later. Um, the conversational Siri thing that Apple talked up at WWDC 2024.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:31]:
But, um, there were rumors, I don't know, a week or 2 ago that actually it might be 26.5, it might be 27. They'll get it right eventually.

Richard Campbell [00:35:41]:
It's cute. But that— the whole Siri team, everybody's— it's all been reorganized. Nice, right? Like, it sounds— it's so rare to see a battle inside of Apple, and— but you saw it with the AI stuff in the Siri team.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:54]:
Yeah, it's like watching someone keeping— like stepping on a rake and then doing it again and again, and you're like, please stop. It was funny the first two times, now it's like sad. Like, just— I don't— so I don't know what's happening there, but, um, but yeah, if you ever want to feel bad about the quality of Windows 11 or anything else in our space. Uh, just try Siri on an iPhone. It's hilarious. It's really bad. It used to be great. Well, it was the first one, you know.

Leo Laporte [00:36:19]:
It was great because we didn't know any better, maybe.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:22]:
Well, I mean, obviously Apple saw that— that's— what was the company that made it? Do you remember the small company that made Siri originally?

Leo Laporte [00:36:28]:
I think it's Clari, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:36:30]:
That's right. Yeah, that's right. I mean, Apple bought them. Obviously they saw the potential of this, and they were like, oh, this is amazing. And, you know, then it seemed like.

Richard Campbell [00:36:37]:
They sat on it. One of the generative AI proof models from the very beginning, the same time that, you know, Susskevar and those guys are doing ImageNet and doing— and solving recognition. SRI is doing voice.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:51]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:36:51]:
And except they left out the Australians, so Siri initially was terrible for Australians.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:57]:
Was it really? Yeah. I was, um, I just watched a Commodore video, uh, with these guys before. No, well, that, that's where it started and it went down some, you know, right? So it was like an engine, like these engineers from Commodore slash Amiga speaking at some event a couple years ago, but they were saying that like they had speech recognition. It was, um, I swear this is— I swear to God this is true. Um, it was a speak and play technology product, and they, they were going to put it in some computer. I don't remember, but they showed it to the executive staff and they couldn't get it to work. It didn't work at all. It didn't even do any— it didn't do anything, and they couldn't figure out why.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:35]:
And so they were dejected. It was, you know, they, they weren't going to put it in the product. So they all went back to the lab, and they were— and then this one guy goes, wait, I think I know what it is. And he spoke in a Texan accent to it, and it worked fine. And it was because the guy who made it was from Texas. Yeah. And he had this really exaggerated accent, and it only understood Texas English.

Leo Laporte [00:37:55]:
That's like— there was a hysterical video back in the day of, uh, a Scots person trying to use one of.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:02]:
The— like Cortana or something and doesn't understand anything.

Leo Laporte [00:38:04]:
It was really annoying. But you know, it's funny, remember in the early days of speech synthesis, like Castle Wolfenstein, you know? Yeah, right. And, and that was about 40 years ago.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:16]:
It's just noise. It's like noise. It's like, uh, remember the— in television they had the crowd noise? It was— yeah, all you have is just like noise. It's just the white noise.

Leo Laporte [00:38:24]:
Yeah, it'll be white noise. Uh, but that was 40 years ago, and we've, you know, now of course it sounds like it's indistinguishable from human.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:33]:
Oh my God. Yeah, to the point where the guy from NPR is suing— yes, Google, I.

Leo Laporte [00:38:37]:
Think— for copying his voice, right? Yeah, which they didn't. But anyway, uh, we'll talk about that in, uh, on intelligent machines. But, um, the article in The Washington Post actually referred to me saying others say it sounds like former tech podcaster Leo Laporte. Nice. But.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:56]:
I'm not sewing.

Leo Laporte [00:38:57]:
And I am not a former tech podcaster.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:59]:
Thank you. What is it like to be, how does it feel to be all washed up, Leo?

Leo Laporte [00:39:03]:
You know, when it comes from a former newspaper like the Washington Post, I don't mind. And I think you're a lot more former than I am, to be honest with you.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:13]:
Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:39:14]:
That's funny. But I'm just, my point was we're accelerating a lot faster pace. That Scottish elevator that you couldn't talk to was only a few years ago. Now, you know, I have on all my machines, I'm sure you do too, a button I can push so I can talk to a Claude Code or whatever, or dictate. I don't need to type anymore.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:35]:
And increasingly I— And this is, right, a million years ago I was in the Dunkin' Donuts in Dedham, as one would be. And when I say the Dunkin' Donuts, I mean one of these 7 that are in Dedham, but whatever. And this guy saw me, he was sitting at a table and he's like, oh, he goes, do you write? You know, he somehow knew who I was, whatever. And we were talking and he used to work at IBM and I don't know if I misunderstood him, but I thought he said that the Dragon NaturallySpeaking stuff might've come out of IBM and then it went out separate or something, or maybe IBM had licensed it or whatever. But he was talking about all that. And he was telling me at the time, he was like, yeah, we were positive this was going to be the future of computing. Computing. And I was like, yeah, I, I used it once because I was like, this is how I'm going to write stories.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:15]:
I know I am. And I tried it one time and I was like, no, no, like no way, right? Because I do this now with like a text message. I'll be like, you know, blah blah blah comma blah blah blah. And then because it's Apple, it will actually write the word comma. Comma. It will write the word smiley face.

Leo Laporte [00:40:31]:
And I'm like, okay, it's taken me a long time to learn I don't have to say period comma new paragraph to whisper.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:37]:
Sometimes I want to format it the way I want it for, you know, whatever it might be. But, but smiley face? Has anyone ever wanted that written out?

Leo Laporte [00:40:48]:
Like, what man wants that? Uh, I remember in— it was 2008, 2009, on a cruise with David Pogue.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:55]:
He was using Dragon. Yes, he was actually the one person who used it extensively.

Leo Laporte [00:40:59]:
Yeah, but he said, I couldn't use it to write the book, but I can use it to do the index. Now you could use it for not only write the book, you wouldn't even have to talk, it would write the book for you. I know, my God, we're in interesting times. Yeah, we really are. You were actually talking about, uh, agentic AI. You know, one of the big breakthroughs with Claude Code now is they're having it write Excel stuff, and it's really good. Excel plugin's really good.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:25]:
It's really good. So this is— Richard was and I were talking about this semi-pro— not semi-pro— privately or offline or whatever you want to call it, like on WhatsApp. You know, for Microsoft, it's, um, it's kind of a huge embarrassment that those guys shipped like agents for Office apps that are just there and working, you know.

Leo Laporte [00:41:47]:
In weeks. Yeah, we live in— as I said, really interesting times.

Richard Campbell [00:41:50]:
Certainly one of the things I've been paying attention to is what, what groups are actually using their tools and getting the acceleration they kept promising everybody would have, right? And this is the trick. Anthropic and Google seem to be the ones who are actually getting the benefit.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:05]:
From their own tools. Yeah, I mean, Google benefits from the massive number of consumer services they have that billions of people use, which is— so they just have these natural places to put this stuff. Yeah. Um, and then Anthropic, I, I can't explain other than to say that in the world of big tech, I guess you'd call them kind of like a middle-tech kind of company. They're being very nimble. And so they're kind of running between the feet of the dinosaurs or whatever you want to call it. And, uh, they're, they're solving problems. You know, this is that thing that Microsoft— we talked about this— this is the infrastructure problem.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:34]:
Microsoft's like, okay, we see this problem. All right, let's build a platform. And Anthropic's like, no, let's build a thing that solves that problem and then we'll solve the next problem. And then, you know, and, and, and in this fast-moving AI era, that's pretty much what you have to do. They're.

Leo Laporte [00:42:50]:
Doing a good job. You are doing a good job. No, you're doing a good job.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:55]:
That's Mr. Paul Throt. That's how I talk to AI.

Leo Laporte [00:42:57]:
I'm very complimentary. I do. You know, it's so weird, uh, the other day I said gong hei fat choy just to see what it would do because yesterday was Chinese New Year, and it responded in Chinese and it said happy Lunar New Year, Skip.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:14]:
It calls me Skip. I love that you're that familiar, but go on.

Leo Laporte [00:43:17]:
Uh, I throw in stuff every once in a while to see if— how it will respond. Yeah. And, and it's, it's instant. It's not like it looked up, oh, what is going— it just kind of knew.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:28]:
You could almost picture that, like, HAL or the Cylon thing. It's like it's looking at you trying to understand, like, what's he doing?

Leo Laporte [00:43:33]:
What's he doing? But there's— but it's— but there's no latency, right? So it's— I could see how people fall for this. I know it's a machine.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:41]:
I know it's computer code. You do. But even sometimes you find himself.

Leo Laporte [00:43:45]:
Just— it's— I could see how people would fall for it because he's very human.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:48]:
My wife and I will be in the car driving to Boston or something, right? So every time we enter state, it's like, welcome to New Jersey. And I swear to God, the two of us simultaneously, like, thank you. Like, we like, you know, like, like, who are we talking to? Like, you know, welcome. But we do it like every time.

Leo Laporte [00:44:03]:
It's funny, actually, I— when I see the signs, I read the signs out loud. So I'm bad. It's just, it's bizarre. I tell my kids, welcome to New Jersey. Yeah, excited. Thank you. Um, Windows Weekly on the air. Glad you're here every Wednesday.

Leo Laporte [00:44:18]:
Hope you will come by every Wednesday. We do it around 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern, 1900 UTC, and we stream it on YouTube, Twitch, x.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick. Plus, of course, for our club members in the Club Discord. I don't, I don't see how this is possible. It's not even lunchtime and we're already the Xbox segment.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:38]:
I can't wag the dog, you know. But so there are two kind of big topics I, I do think are worth addressing that aren't necessarily news stories but are just, you know, out there. Um, one is if you think about Xbox over the past 2-3 years, right, a lot of negativity of course, and a lot of change, a lot of uncertainty about the future, massive hardware losses every quarter that I don't understand how this could persist over this many years. But meaning like double-digit decline in revenues and hardware every single quarter for several years in a row now is bizarre to me. Like, I— at some point, doesn't it just hit zero? Like, I, you know, maybe I don't understand.

Richard Campbell [00:45:22]:
Maybe it's somehow a negative number.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:23]:
There's more returns than purchases. Exactly, exactly. Where are we? That's how I look at like, I'm going to start an OnlyFans account and I will pay it money because who would want that? But, um, the, the thing that has been a constant throughout the troubled times has been the reassuring voice of Phil Spencer, right? Phil Spencer, if anything, especially from Microsoft's perspective, has been too outspoken, right? He's too willing to address rumors. He's too willing to talk about things we talk about internally at Microsoft.. He's too willing to say, "Yeah, we think about doing a mobile handset all the time. We think about this. We want to do this." Blah, blah, blah, whatever. So he's been kind of a nice counter of sorts to a lot of the bad news.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:07]:
Have you noticed he has disappeared? Yeah, lately. I have not heard from Phil Spencer possibly in months. It might be since before the holidays. The end of the holidays. Like, he used to be a regular—.

Richard Campbell [00:46:23]:
Like, he would just pop up like a little, uh, got things to say.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:26]:
Little mole, you know, a little— what do you call it— whack-a-mole kind of thing. Um, but I haven't heard from this guy. I'm kind of numb. Is that— that's not good news. That— well, I mean, obviously, if Microsoft is doing something with Xbox, you have to be careful there. You can't reveal that early. And maybe that's why I'm trying to take I'm going to take the glass.

Richard Campbell [00:46:46]:
Half full version of this story, but I'm digging around here, man. Like, you're right.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:50]:
Last stories are in October. It's been a while. Like, and it took me a while to sort of realize it, right? I just sort of thought of this the other day. I'm like, you know, I can't remember the last time I heard from this guy. It's a little alarming. So there's that. There is— Microsoft reached out the other day. They're going to are— they're going to be at the GDC.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:14]:
This is the Game Developer Conference. It's in San Francisco in mid-March, early March, March 9th to 13th. Yeah, they're going, as they do. They're going to talk about the future of Xbox game development. And that's interesting because I feel like we've talked about this a lot, but I feel like the next Xbox console will in fact be a Windows PC, right? And for that to happen— and I don't mean based on a Windows PC. I mean, literally Windows, right? Right. And it will be— that's clearly what they've been doing. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:45]:
I mean, but there, there's a lot of moving pieces that go into this. And the big question mark is, to me, the central, uh, value proposition of Xbox as a platform has been— well, there's a few things, but one of the key tiers, or however you want to say that, or tentpoles or whatever, is this kind of backward compatibility piece, right? That They went back as far as they could, OG Xbox 360, Xbox One, brought everything forward that they could, right? And there are licensing issues around some of that stuff where they can't. There were some where they worked with the original developers and they helped make them some— make some changes to make that stuff work. There were some examples where Microsoft just did that for them and the developers like, yep, we don't care, just do it, it's fine. And we're at the point now where I think every game that could be brought forward from the past has been, right? And so now we have these digital libraries of games that span multiple generations of consoles. And even though there were a couple of different architectures in there, we get that backward compatibility thing. It's nice. It's nice.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:46]:
It's a nice little piece. But if they're going to move this to the PC, that means that backward compatibility of Xbox console games has to occur on the PC. And that's really interesting to me. Um, because the two potential outcomes there, assuming if everyone just kind of agrees for this conversation that the next Xbox console, real Xbox consoles, will be PC-based, then either that's just going to happen, or there might be a licensing issue, right? Because the license, the thing that developers or publishers agreed to back in the day, was that, um, this was for consoles. And now you're saying, well, hold on a second. So now, now this could work on billions of computers. We never agreed to that. Um, and they might want to renegotiate terms or something something, whatever it might be.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:33]:
So I guess in the back of.

Richard Campbell [00:49:34]:
My brain owns a whole bunch of those companies now.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:36]:
So that's true, they do only— yeah, 40% of them actually.

Richard Campbell [00:49:41]:
Yeah, yeah, no, it's fair enough. Um, but to be clear, with the exception of the 360, like Xbox games.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:48]:
Were built on PCs and deployed the Xbox. Yeah, absolutely. But to me, that's why I brought up licensing. I think it's really a licensing issue. I think it's tied to the same licensing issue they ran into with backward compat, that if it was up to Microsoft, they might have just brought the entire collection if they could have forward. And that I do know because they talked about it, that in some cases developers like, yeah, no, we're not interested in that, thank you, you know, we don't want that, we want to sell the new stuff, whatever. Um, and, and, you know, you can see that, right? You could picture Activision Blizzard before they were part of Microsoft saying, you know, we have a new Call of Duty to sell. We don't want to make it easy to run Call of Duty Ghosts or whatever, or the original Modern Warfare, uh, you know, on a new console.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:24]:
We want you to buy the new game. Like, and okay, you know, you, you can, you can kind of at least understand it. Um, anyway, uh, we'll see, right? And so GDC, this is about a month from now. Yeah, a little under a month. Um, We'll see, I guess, is all I can say, right? And so I think that's part of it.

Richard Campbell [00:50:46]:
I did go check the GDC roster and like Phil Spencer is not listed.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:50]:
Anywhere, so he's not registered as a speaker or anything. Yeah, I'd be— yes, if he doesn't show up there, that— yep, then I— yeah, then my heart kind of drops a little bit because that's kind of bizarre. Um, last summer I had written something called, you know, what exactly is Xbox now, right? And I looked at it from the perspective of the hardware, which, you know, still talking about evolving, the potential that maybe that what they wanted to do, because this was in those leaked, uh, documents we got a couple years ago, move to the ARM platform, for example, right? Which has not happened. Um, and then software and then services, right? So software is pretty straightforward. Microsoft owns a bunch of those publishers, like Richard just said. And then, um, the services play is essentially Game Pass now at this point, right? But before any of this stuff happened, before any of the GDC, I wrote a follow-up— that was just called like, "What's Next for Xbox?" And it's kind of what we were just talking about. In other words, if you look at what it means to bring this platform forward, if it really is going to be the PC, which I believe it is, which is kind of, you know, makes sense. I know this bugs people, but honestly it does make sense.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:58]:
If you think about a gaming PC or just a PC now, because even mainstream laptops can play games, right? About the PC as this kind of infinitely expandable thing, because it is. The, the idea, or one of the reasons why someone might play games on a PC, is that they could have whatever system they have today, and then they could upgrade the graphics card and get better performance and better graphics and better resolution, etc. It's, it's a thing you can keep, you know, building on if you want to. Um, I don't think that that fact precludes some mainstream part of the market that just wants to buy a thing, you know, that is already just works, right? That was the point of the console. Um, and so if that thing is a PC, but it's a, you know, they'd have to have, again, we'll see what they come out with, but there would have to be some baseline. Like if you think about Xbox today, when they came out with Series X and S, they were like, all right, look, here's the two tiers. They're very close, but there are storage, processor, I think GPU core, whatever differences between the two. You need to build for this.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:07]:
I don't know what's— the world's falling apart out there. You need to build for the S, but you can't ignore the X. Although, by the way, Microsoft did that a couple times themselves. Yeah, but the idea there is that at least over time, you come out with some game and maybe you're hurting, you're hitting 30 frames and, you know, we'll call it 1080p or whatever on the S, but then when we get the X, you're hitting 60 frames and.

Richard Campbell [00:53:27]:
Maybe it goes, you know, 1440p or whatever. The whatever, yes, it was 1440, the X was 4K.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:32]:
Yeah, that was the claim. So if you— when I look at things like Panther Lake or the integrated graphics that AMD has, um, and we'll see what happens on the Qualcomm or whatever ARM front with Nvidia especially, but there you can almost see like this notion of these tiers now. And so you— it Maybe part of the deal when Xbox becomes the PC, assuming this is true, is they're like, look, it has to— you have to build to this level at least, but you also need to support the people who are going to build PCs that have crazy graphics cards and they're going to do 120 frames a second at 4K, whatever. Do you? You know, well, I mean, I don't— that's just a question, but I feel.

Richard Campbell [00:54:13]:
Like for the for the Xbox.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:15]:
4K 60 seems to be reasonable. Sorry, I just, I didn't mean that as a literal benchmark. I'm sorry, I was just trying to exaggerate to make the point. But, um, if there are going to be Xbox consoles that are essentially PCs, whether they're made by Microsoft or a third party, I feel like there's going to be these baselines for maybe different tiers. And maybe there are 3 or something, and it's like, you know, at the very least you have to be able to hit whatever this, you know, whatever. And then mid tiers, whatever.

Richard Campbell [00:54:39]:
And then the higher end, just the higher end system. You see this in normal PC games too, where you can dial up the resolution modes and, you know, you're going.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:47]:
To run this in ultra detail or not. But it's got to see, it has to be a little more automatic is the point, right? Like one thing that you see on gaming PCs and one thing you see from, you know, NVIDIA graphics card, AMD does this as well, is this kind of auto optimization functionality. It's like, okay, so you have this NVIDIA 56, whatever the thing is, it's it's got this much RAM, and it evaluates each of the games you have installed on the PC, and it automatically makes that thing play well on your PC. You don't actually have to tweak it. You could— a lot of PC gamers are probably kind of used to that, but for someone coming at it from like an Xbox perspective, that kind of needs to just work.

Richard Campbell [00:55:23]:
So I feel like that's part of it. Um, but I appreciate your thinking that it should be 3— well, 4 levels. This machine can't do it. And then a base level of, okay, this will work, and then it looks.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:35]:
Nice, and then like, wow, we're heating space, right? Like, you, you're not getting the Xbox logo unless dot dot dot, right? Right. Um, you have to meet some requirement. That's essentially what the, you know, what we have today. But yeah, I mean, I— but the reality is Microsoft would be better off letting third parties do this like they're doing with the little handhelds, um, even though they wanted to do their own, right?

Richard Campbell [00:55:58]:
And, um, Microsoft dabble in hardware and.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:00]:
Then they keep running away from it afterwards, right? Like, they don't seem to be very good at it, frankly. But, but there— maybe the, the more fair or fairer thing to say is.

Richard Campbell [00:56:09]:
That there are companies that are very good at this. And yes, maybe like, why? And it's not in your best interest to compete with them anyway.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:16]:
You'll fail, or at best you'll fail.

Richard Campbell [00:56:18]:
Now you've made the worst— you'll damage the market and cause it to fail anyway.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:21]:
That's just no good outcomes. Here. This is, uh, yeah, good news will float all boats kind of a situation. But I feel like Xbox as a platform is actually in really good shape if you ignore hardware, which is a terrible thing to say because I know for a lot of people that's all they think of when they think of Xbox is that console, right? But I really feel like this is more software and services, and the services part of it is in Microsoft's wheelhouse, to be sure. I'm not saying I like it, but you know, whatever, subscription services. And then and we can debate whether or not Game Pass even makes sense.

Richard Campbell [00:56:53]:
As a business as it plateaued. And then we could have this whole conversation about the living room compute experience, full stop, right? Yep. Yep. How, how, to me, how many Xboxes spend their time running Netflix?

Paul Thurrott [00:57:08]:
Like, that's actually what they're used for. So more than I want to even think about, because I hear this from people a lot, and I, you know, again, in my own simplistic ape brain, like I always say something like, that's like taking a battleship through the Wendy's drive-through. It's like you can, but like that doesn't, that's not the most efficient way to do that. Especially when you get like a little stick thing that goes onto an HDMI port in the back of your computer and doesn't generate heat or destroy your electric bill or whatever. But okay, I mean, that's part, that's Microsoft in a way being, Good at marketing because they sold it that way, right? I mean, that was the point. It was going to be a multimedia machine. I always think back to when, um, the original Media Center launched and, uh, the first box at the launch, the only box actually, was an HP and it was like a giant— it's not a mini tower, it was a tower, it was a humongous thing. And of course back then it was all cables and wires and connectors and you had like an IR blaster and a giant remote and all this stuff.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:06]:
And then you get it all set up and everything's going great. And then, uh, and of course we didn't have, uh, what was it called? Cable card did not exist quite yet, at least certainly not in the media center space. And, um, and then a dialogue would pop up in the middle of the screen and it didn't matter what you did with the remote, you were never clicking it and you had to go grab a mouse, you know. And so all of us had like a mouse keyboard thing on our living room, you know, stand or whatever, because that was going to be necessary at some point. And it wasn't a good fit, unfortunately. Anyway, aside from the hardware, right? Um, I do feel like, you know, because I've been— I've actually purchased a bunch of games on PC across different stores, right? I've bought stuff. I have a bunch of stuff on all these stores, but, you know, Steam, Epic Games, Xbox as well, meaning Xbox Windows. Um, and, you know, I— it's getting there.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:57]:
I mean, you can And you can do that full-screen experience today. It's not perfect, right? Of course it's not. And people will still say, well, yeah, but Linux runs better on the same hardware, which of course it does. But Windows gives you that complete compatibility and generally speaking, probably better performance and higher resolution graphics, et cetera. Because most of the games running on Linux are Windows games that are being emulated essentially. And it's like, you know, that's not necessarily efficient. So I don't— I think it's— I think the— this is something I— we were gonna do this 2, 3, 4 weeks ago, whatever it was, and we went long and there was an interview coming up at the top there, so there's no way I could talk about it at the time. But I feel like, you know, Xbox has to change to survive.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:44]:
Um, yeah, we should all— if you're a fan, that's what you should want, right? And they clearly are not getting it right with hardware. I— the Xbox Series X and S, when they came out, I thought were very competitive and, uh, are fine and they work well. I— the other big piece I should mention too, the thing that Xbox does right that just is— it's not a thing on the PC, it makes me crazy, is the automatic update overnight thing. Yeah, they really got to figure this out for the thing that will be called a console, whether it's running Windows whatever, I need to be able to— anyone does. Anyone who's a gamer, if you want to play a game, you want to play a game. And let me tell you what you don't want is to start that game and be like, nope, you have an 18-gig download, 180-gig download, depending on, you know, the game. Call of Duty is a horrible example of that. Um, you know, you could configure it otherwise, but on the Xbox today, the consoles, you can configure it to always be on and always downloading updates.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:40]:
Updates, and you— and I'm not saying it never happens, but pretty much never.

Richard Campbell [01:00:44]:
Will you have to wait to start a game. And yeah, it's an interesting part of what the Xbox team can do is to get into a mechanism where games.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:58]:
Quietly self-update. Yeah, um, you know, I— in a vague way, I guess, uh, Windows as a Service is a nightmare. I hate it so much. But— and there's been all kinds of problems and including as recently as January. But they did actually get it really good for a PC, right? Right. If you've ever updated a mobile platform like Android or iOS, or you've ever.

Richard Campbell [01:01:20]:
Updated a Mac— I don't have a choice. My Android phone just stops working properly.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:24]:
Until I allow the update to complete. Yeah. But those things— it gives up like— the way those update feel very antiquated to me. This is one area where I feel like Microsoft/Windows is actually kind of ahead, but when you compare it to the experience on an Xbox console, I can't speak for PlayStation and Nintendo, I'm not actually sure how that works, but the Xbox is dramatically better. And that should be coming into Windows. We need this.

Richard Campbell [01:01:50]:
We need it not just for games, by the way. Yeah, Xbox update got good enough you've.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:56]:
Forgotten that Xbox updates. Right, right. And I'll tell you, because I switched, you know, you go to the PC, you really notice it. Like, you really notice it. And, you know, we can complain, and we will, and we'll keep doing it about the Windows updates every month. But these game updates, oh my god. I, you know, we use Notion for the notes for the show, and I love Notion. But, and, and I'm impressed that Notion is not required me to pay for it to do anything anymore.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:27]:
Like, I just keep expecting that to happen, so I sort of appreciate that. But man, I cannot run— I can't start this app without it telling me there's an update. And I'm— I want to be super clear about what I just said. I'm not exaggerating to make a point. Basically every time I launch this app, I have to install an update. Stop, dear God, stop. Like, it's maddening. So I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:52]:
Anyway, okay. Um, I'm— I cannot wait. I, I don't normally look forward to GDC per se, but I'm actually kind of looking forward because I, I— there are answers here that I, I need, you know.

Richard Campbell [01:03:00]:
I think we all need.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:02]:
Are you going? You're not going? No, I'm not going, but I mean.

Richard Campbell [01:03:05]:
I, I'll pay attention to this.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:06]:
Yeah, there'll be the big screen stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I— yeah, my expectation is it's going to be a PC, but we'll, you We'll see. It is the past the middle of the month, and so now we have a new set of Xbox Game Pass games. To me, well, actually the biggest one is probably Avowed. I'm gonna talk about that game in a second. Avowed, it came out last year, I think, right?

Leo Laporte [01:03:34]:
But there's an anniversary update for that. It's like Skyrim.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:37]:
Is it fun? Is it a good game? I've never tried it, so people keep keep telling me I need to play it. Now that we'll talk about that one second. Um, okay, uh, The Witcher 3 is in there. Um, Avatar Frontiers of Pandora, an Avatar game, I guess, because Avatar already looks like a video game. That makes sense. Um, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, not the best name. Um, I would like my character's name to be Piggy. Uh, yeah, exactly.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:04]:
Um, nice, man. That's where we're going with Deliverance. Okay, that thing, the main character's name is Hitler. I don't know, what do we— um, kind of a weird choice. Um, yeah, so Avowed, uh, I want to say it came out last year, right? I can't remember when, but this is Obsidian Entertainment, so this is part of Microsoft. Um, it is a, you know, fantasy RPG. Um, it launched today on, um, PlayStation 5 the first time. Yay.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:32]:
But there's also a major update, right? So anniversary update. This is for all platforms, so Xbox, PC, and PlayStation 5. Um, there's a new game mode, new races, there's a photo mode, uh, weapons.

Leo Laporte [01:04:44]:
Characters, blah blah blah, whatever. So there's blood, more violence, and intense.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:48]:
Language apparently as well. Yeah, it's got everything a growing boy needs.

Leo Laporte [01:04:53]:
Yeah, it looks great. Um, there's a little PlayStation 33 feel to it.

Richard Campbell [01:04:56]:
Uh, must be Yeah, I mean, it's probably the Unreal Engine, right? It's all swords and sorcery, and then the guys have guns.

Leo Laporte [01:05:02]:
Yeah. But they're glowy guns.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:04]:
They're glowy, so it's okay.

Richard Campbell [01:05:06]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:06]:
It looks fun.

Richard Campbell [01:05:06]:
It looks good.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:09]:
Yeah, it looks like a good game. Oh, we have a, actually, before I move on, there's a breaking story. Uh-oh. No, just in the Xbox space. Microsoft is bringing post-game recaps in the Xbox PC app on Windows to insiders. It's not out publicly yet, but, um, after you finish a play session, you'll get like a little recap video of moments from your epic defeat at the hands of someone who was teabagging you, uh, in Call of Duty.

Leo Laporte [01:05:41]:
In my case. Uh, okay, I guess I was talking about 23-year-old yesterday. I said, what game you playing these days? He said, Call of Duty.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:47]:
Really?

Leo Laporte [01:05:47]:
I said, oh yeah, you play online? He said, no, I play zombies. I don't— the People— there's too many.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:53]:
People online, like, who are 12 and play all day. Yeah, it's, um, it's a toxic environment, I think, is what I would say. So I mute everybody.

Leo Laporte [01:06:03]:
Yeah, I don't engage in any chat. It's still fun to play.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:06]:
I would think play more against humans than, than AI. 100% to me. Yes, that— yeah, yep, yeah, yeah. What's the phrase? What was that when the, the book or whatever, the movie about the guy was hunting humans the something game, the, the greatest, most dangerous game. Dangerous game. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, bots are fine. Zombies is supposed to be a big deal.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:26]:
Like, I played it, you know, many times over the years. Yeah, yeah, I like multiplayer. I— yeah, old-fashioned, I guess. I don't know what else we got. I didn't even know this was a feature, but apparently Xbox's platform lets you create as a gamer Social Clubs. Um, I guess this is kind of a Discord-type feature. Um, they're gonna get rid of that. Oh, it's only on the console.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:53]:
That might explain why they're getting rid.

Richard Campbell [01:06:54]:
Of it, by the way.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:55]:
I just hang around all the time and I mean, never— I guess it.

Richard Campbell [01:06:59]:
Never really took off. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:01]:
Well, since Discord, where would you go, right? Yeah. Well, yeah, right. So Microsoft, I forget all the names now, but you know, they had Mixer at one and then eventually was like, all right, look, people who stream games are gonna— are they're basically on YouTube, they're on Discord. What's the other big one? Twitch, right? So we don't really need this stuff anymore. And yeah, just keep it on Discord. And then for the 3 of you who care about this one, GeForce NOW, the Nvidia cloud game streaming service, is available on newer Fire TV Streaming Sticks. It's limited to 1080p at 60 frames, which— limited, I mean, that's pretty much what most people are doing anyway, so that's pretty good. It's also available on Android TV, some smart TVs, I think Samsung and probably LG.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:54]:
It's kind of, you know, it's kind of everywhere. I don't know, I gotta look at this. Maybe this year I'll take a— you want to fire these— all these different services again. How's Stadia? Still a thing, right?

Richard Campbell [01:08:06]:
Stadia's doing good, probably.

Leo Laporte [01:08:08]:
I don't remember. Actually, I think they killed that, didn't they?

Paul Thurrott [01:08:11]:
But they— but Amazon— I'm so confused. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:08:13]:
Well, Luna is the closest you can get to it. Amazon has the Luna.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:18]:
I have GeForce Now, but I— do you use it for anything?

Leo Laporte [01:08:21]:
Like, what do you— I want to play on native. I think, yeah, that whole streaming gaming— you were right, remember? That was the whole excuse for slowing.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:29]:
Down the Microsoft Blizzard acquisition, like, oh no, we got all the games. I'm like, who?

Leo Laporte [01:08:32]:
Nobody, nobody wants this.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:34]:
Just give it away. Who cares? It's not good. You can all have it. Nobody's gonna use this. It's terrible. I mean, I— it's probably fine for casual games, I guess, but not for.

Leo Laporte [01:08:42]:
The games I play. There's no way.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:44]:
No.

Leo Laporte [01:08:44]:
I even tried the casual games because we were doing a Club Twit event with a game, and I was gonna play with the guys. I didn't— I only had— I didn't have it on PC, so I was trying to play the GeForce Now on a Mac and it was, it was.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:57]:
Too slow, it was too late, and it just was not usable. Stadia, whatever the— like Doom 2016 or '17, whatever that year that was, I played that single player, was okay. Uh, whatever the, the at the time new Far Cry game, again single player was okay. Um, but I— you can't— there's no way. I— we have a hard enough time doing multiplayer normally.

Richard Campbell [01:09:21]:
I don't see that ever working correctly. Yeah, personally, least of all one player.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:25]:
Out of a group, you know, crippled. Oh, I know.

Richard Campbell [01:09:29]:
My God, could you imagine? Yeah, exactly.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:31]:
So is everybody else who's trying to play with you. Your character's just driving around on a giant tricycle. Yeah, I don't know, it's just not gonna work.

Leo Laporte [01:09:39]:
He's not contributing. We got the back of the book, uh, coming up already. My God, you guys, I'm gonna have.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:45]:
Plenty of time for gas station I never saw.

Leo Laporte [01:09:52]:
Anything like this, Ted. This is unprecedented. Well, back of the book coming up, we've got a whiskey pick. Before we go too much farther though, I would like to do a little plug for the club. Our club is so important to us. Maybe you noticed, maybe you didn't. Maybe you enjoyed the fact that this show was an ad-free show. A little taste.

Leo Laporte [01:10:11]:
For those of you in the club, because if you're in the club, of course, you don't get any ads. Maybe there are some ads in this inserted later, which makes them even more fun. And the problem is when we don't have ads on a show, the show is operating at deficit. And I never have wanted ever to decide what we do, what shows we do based on what advertisers will buy. But, uh, if— well, I mean, the ideal would be to have you support it. If you like this show, if you like, you know, MacBreak Weekly— only had one ad yesterday— if you like Security Now, if you like TWiT, if you like This Week in Space and Untitled Linux Show, all the shows we do, the best way you can help us is by joining the club. Lisa told me last night, she said, you know, if we got, if we got 4 or 5% of our audience to join, we wouldn't even need ads. We could just stop doing ads entirely.

Leo Laporte [01:11:13]:
That's a great stretch goal, isn't it? Right now it's about 1.5% of our audience. 1 person, 1.5 people in every 100 listen, pay for the show. The rest of you hear the ads. Wouldn't you like to be that special group of people that don't hear this for instance, and all the other ads. It could happen. Just go to twit.tv/clubtwit. You get ad-free versions of all the shows. You get access to the Club Twit Discord, which is a party, uh, just a lot of fun.

Leo Laporte [01:11:45]:
By the way, uh, you know, you've probably been hearing about Discord asking for age verification. We're not marked as an adult channel, so there you don't have to do.

Richard Campbell [01:11:53]:
Age.

Leo Laporte [01:11:56]:
Verification to join us in the club. Um, you get special events that we do in the club. There's lots of great stuff. Things like Micah's Crafting Corner, which is tonight. Very chill place to hang out and do your craft. He's doing, I think he's doing paint by num— adult paint by numbers, which you can join him in, but you could bring anything you like to do. I sometimes come in with coding, cooking, crewel, needlepoint, whatever it is you're into. The nice thing is it's just a chance to hang with Micah and other club members and just kind of do your thing for a while.

Leo Laporte [01:12:28]:
The photo show with Chris Marquardt is Friday. We've brought back Johnny Jet, our travel guru. He's going to join us every, I think it's third Wednesday of the month. I can't remember. It's on the schedules in the club. Just look in the Discord. Stacy's book club, all sorts of great stuff. Lots of shows that we only do in the club.

Leo Laporte [01:12:47]:
All of that because of your generosity. And that's the key. The club now represents about a third of our operating costs. Without the club, we'd have to cut back by that much. Twit.tv/clubtwit. It's $10 a month, $120 a year. There's a 2-week free trial. There are plans for families, multiple memberships in a family, or multiple memberships in a business.

Leo Laporte [01:13:10]:
Find out more at twit.tv/clubtwit. And, and Larry, open claw could be your hobby. Certainly is mine.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:20]:
Twit.Tv.

Leo Laporte [01:13:20]:
So yeah, that's actually maybe my favorite show that we do in the club is the, uh, is the AI User Group, which we do on the first Friday of every month. It's so much fun. You are not a person, Newman, half a person, you're a full person. So it's 15 people in every 1,000. Is that right? No.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:37]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:13:38]:
We would like to make it a little higher. Join the club. All right. Enough said.

Richard Campbell [01:13:45]:
Enough said.

Leo Laporte [01:13:45]:
Now it's time to go to the back of the book.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:49]:
Paul Theriot will kick things off with his tips. Of the week. Yeah, so I think last week I talked about this book, this short book that I'm working on, this Deinsuredify Windows 11. Um, I've gotten 3 more chapters. These are kind of the core chapters for the book. So it's the clean install if you want to go that route, which is the, you know, the Tiny11 Builder that we've talked about, which is fantastic. That hasn't really changed too, too much. Super clean base install.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:20]:
You can get rid of— well, it does get rid of, I should say, Edge and OneDrive, and you can bring those things back if you want. But you know, if you don't want them, that's nice. If you have— if you don't want to go that route and want to use— to clean an existing install, everyone has their kind of pet peeve, like utilities they like. And I can't write or say anything about this without someone saying What about WinHands? What about the Chris Titus thing? What about blah, blah, blah, whatever. Okay. So, well, what about the thing I'm talking about? So the thing I use is called Win11 Debloat. It is a PowerShell script like Tiny11Builder, but now there's a graphical interface. When you run the script, it actually runs a UI, which is very pretty.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:03]:
It works really well. There's 3 main screens. The first one is just the list of apps, which you can filter to just the apps that are installed. I don't know why that's not the default view, but, uh, and you can get rid of anything including Edge and OneDrive if that's what you want. Although OneDrive you could just remove, you know, normally. Um, but the, uh, the System Tweaks screen is where the important stuff happens. That's where you can get rid of all of the telemetry in Windows 11. You can get rid of all the AI features.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:30]:
You can make Windows Update not reboot your computer easily every time it does something because it's going to do something all the time, blah, blah, blah, whatever. So this is an awesome tool. It achieves all the goals. Like, I, I don't remember, it was probably early 2025, I'd come up with a Windows 11 certification checklist. And both these tools, whether you start fresh with Tiny11Builder or just clean an existing install with Win11Debloat, both achieve all of it. The one minor exception being you can't actually stop Windows from updating, updating, right? There's no way to stop it from updating, but you can delay it somewhat. And by the way, in January, that would have paid off big time. It's not something I do, but, um, there's all kinds of stuff you can do there.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:13]:
So there's the objectively terrible stuff that I would call insurance-ification, and then there's just the stuff that's like pet peeves or annoyances or whatever you want. It covers both ends of that spectrum. Um, the one thing I did want to take a little bit of time with though is privacy. I had forgotten. In fact, I think my general coping mechanism is to block things out. Like, I forgot about this. In Windows 8, Microsoft began using like an automated form of telemetry, but they also started assigning an advertising ID to computers, which they had never done before. And that's a way to uniquely identify essentially a user, although it's anonymous, right? The reason they do that is because— and the reason they do both these things is you can develop a profile of this individual without saying this is who he is and where he lives, but you're actually kind of getting that information.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:12]:
And then they can use it themselves, Microsoft, either by directing you to MSN slash whatever Microsoft sites by forcing you to use Edge like like they do in Windows 11, right? Or they can sell it to third parties and other advertisers can track you and target you with ads, which is by the way what happens on mobile as well. But the escalation really happened in Windows 10. And the thing I had forgotten was the privacy— this is when I invented the term privacy theater, which was that in the original version of Windows 10, there was a screen called Get Going Fast. And it was like, you're gonna give up everything. You're gonna let Microsoft personalize your experiences. You're gonna let, give up your app, your location to everything. There's gonna be an advertising ID. We're going to see what you're doing online in the browser and use that to help protect you against malicious web content, but really to help build that profile, et cetera.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:07]:
Your browsing data is being sent to Microsoft, right? This got a lot of backlash and there were multiple antitrust regulators looked at it. This screen is insidious. I, like I said, I forgot the text is small, it's hard to read, but there's a giant button in the corner that says Use Express Settings and it just opens up everything to Microsoft if you do that. There's a tiny text-based link on the other side of the screen that says Customize Settings, and that thing is one hue of blue lighter than the blue that is the background. You almost can't see it, it's crazy. So Microsoft announced in early 2017, this is a Terry Myerson thing, and it's amazing to read this now, that they were gonna make 3 major changes. They actually had 3 levels of data collection originally, which again, I forgot. They moved it to 2, so there's basic data collection, which is required, required.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:03]:
And then there's the optional level where you open it up to more data collection for some reason. I don't know why anyone would do that. That screen I described, it went away. They got rid of Get Going Fast, and now they have a privacy settings screen. This is where I talked about privacy theater, where they give you a list of, at the time, 5, and today up to 6, like high-level privacy settings you can turn— you can just toggle off, right? So you could say from the screen, I, I don't want location services on, which by the way doesn't actually turn off location services, but speech recognition diagnostics, which is their friendly term for telemetry, you can't turn it off. But when you turn it, it goes from full to limited essentially, or required, I guess. Tailored experiences— this is how we're gonna use everything we know about you to to target you with ads, and people are like, oh yeah, I want that. I don't know why people do stuff like that.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:59]:
And then something called Relevant Ads, which is just crazy. It's all like ads. It's crazy. And then they also launched a web-based privacy dashboard up in the Microsoft account website. This blows my mind. And this continues in Windows 11. So if you set up Windows 11 today, you have the same exact screen. It's prettier, but it's the same screen.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:21]:
It does absolutely nothing. It's pointless. But you can check a couple of boxes and feel good about yourself. Most people will never go and look at settings. And good thing, because if you do go look at settings, what you're going to discover is that these privacy settings are in 117 different locations. And so one of the things I've done over the years is kind of collect the things that are the most important ones. Some of the things that are just an on/off switch in that settings screen are in fact very granular controls. Controls and settings.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:45]:
So for example, if you— yes, you can toggle on or off location services, but you can also determine which apps get location services. If location services are on, every app gets vague or general location, not exact location. But you can also go in and say, well, I want the camera app to have this. I don't know why you would do that, but the weather app you could imagine, or the news app. Maybe you want the local thing because you're getting the weather, right? So you can see where you don't want that on, that's fine. But it is— it blows my mind how terrible this is. Like, it's just everywhere. The suggestions, the recommendations, the personalized offers, they're all over the Settings app.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:28]:
Like, they're everywhere. And there's some of it's in Personalization, some of it's in Privacy and Security. It's ridiculous. If you do use that WinDbloat tool, Win11 bloat. And I know other tools probably do this too. They have 6 or 7 high-level choices, which pretty much solves all the problems, right? So you can actually disable telemetry the way that— and I gotta have to give credit to the author of this app. There's a link next to each one of these things where you can click and it gives you a— it tells you— well, actually goes to the website, and then the website tells you what the registry key is for all this stuff, right? So, for example, there is a registry key that determines whether your computer does basic or full telemetry sending to Microsoft. But there's a registry key that doesn't have a UI that is never send that information to Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:18]:
And that's how that works to, you know, to actually turn that off. There are other ways, right? You could use like a DNS thing or whatever, but it's interesting to me that in Windows there is in fact a control for this. But they just don't give you a UI to do anything with it, right? You can disable all the tips and tricks and suggested nonsense everywhere in the Windows itself, in the Settings app, on the lock screen, disable Windows Spotlight, which we'll talk about in one second actually, disable all the nonsense in Edge, get rid of the Copilot ads in the Settings app. It's like it goes on and on and on. Like, it's, it is kind of amazing How much of Windows is an upsell today? Which I feel like when Terry stood on that stage in January 2015 and talked about Windows as a Service and how we're going to keep everyone up to date and we really hope to get everyone on the same Windows version or whatever, wasn't part of the marketing of this, you know, but very clearly, uh, he at the time and Windows generally since then has been under this need, uh, from on high to generate more income per user per month, right? Other than that one-time thing where you bought the computer or paid for Windows somehow, if you did that. I don't know, people don't really do that. But, um, anyway, you really have to work at it, and I think that stinks. But, um, if you just use Win11 to bloat, you can pretty much blow away most of it in one whack.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:44]:
And I, I do strongly recommend doing that. Um, I'm working on the security chapter now. There's going to be a Copilot AI chapter. There's going to be kind of— I'm not going to call it this, but kind of a just general apps, something.

Richard Campbell [01:23:54]:
Annoyances, get rid of just things that I'm not— the security side could be.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:57]:
A whole book, dude. It's like there's so much privacy thing could be a whole book. But so here, so here's what I will say at a high level. Um, privacy in Windows is horrible. Like it's almost non-existent. You can get it to a point where acceptable. Security in Windows is actually very good. I will say that the— there's an irony to this, that when you bring up a new computer for the first time, you might see if you go into the Windows Security app, because you'll have like a yellow or even a red bang, there might be one or two features that are not enabled that will make your computer more secure.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:30]:
And the reason Microsoft doesn't enable them by default— wait for it— is privacy reasons, which is like What? But look, whatever you— wherever you are in the privacy spectrum, right? Because there are people who feel very extreme about it, and then there are people just don't care at all about it. Even if you care about it quite a bit, giving a bit of anonymous information to Microsoft about you and, well, pretty much your computer really, to help protect it, that seems like a fair trade-off to me personally.

Richard Campbell [01:25:01]:
But that's kind of where I'm at there. And there was a time once in a while where when you were having a crash or something, if it sent that data to Microsoft, it'd actually go, oh, I need to replace this such and such driver or do this thing and it would make a difference.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:12]:
But you do have to allow that.

Richard Campbell [01:25:14]:
Haven't done this, by the way, but.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:16]:
In— I haven't seen it for ages. No, I was going to say that there's a— in Windows 11, if you like, let me just bring it up and tell you. I'm trying to— I'm zoning on the exact name. If you go to— how am I going to find this? Goddamn it, it's in here somewhere. There is a tool you can enable that will show you— yeah, it must be— of course, now that I said that, I know exactly where it is. There's something called the Diagnostic Data Viewer. You actually have to download it from the store. You have to enable it first.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:43]:
It takes up a gigabyte of hard drive space. It generates an XML file that literally is human readable because it's XML. But it was also literally useless for a human being because there's so much of it. And if you've ever seen an XML document, you know it's like this tree of— it's just like this. And if you leave the thing running, I left it running for 10 minutes while I was writing something, I looked back, it said, you have 540 new events. I mean, you can't keep up with it, right? This would be a good example of something if you were going to vibe code a little app for yourself, you'd be like, you know what, I'm going to turn this thing on and I'm going to tell AI, Tell me, what am I sending to Microsoft exactly? Like, what's the biggest offender? What is sending— it's going to be Edge, by the way, if you use Edge. But I'll just ruin that little surprise. If you turn on Microsoft Edge, that thing never stops churning out data.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:32]:
Like, it's just constantly sending stuff to Microsoft. It's insanity. It's something, you know, for the technical people reading, listening to the show or watching the show, this might be something to look at. It's kind of interesting.

Richard Campbell [01:26:43]:
Not because you want to read that for yourself.— to think about collecting your.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:49]:
Digital effluent, so to speak. Exactly. Yes, exactly. Right. It's like collecting it in a bag, sending it to a lab, and they're like, yeah, well, you might have cancer. It's like, no, this is Windows 11. But it's— this would be a good example of where AI, I think, would actually be helpful. We should be turning AI on the help reporting stuff, like the event viewer, right? Like, you can't sit there and watch the event viewer like it's a TV show.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:12]:
The thing is like, you know, it keeps— this is like that. And, um, it would be interesting, I think, for a vibe-coded, uh, analysis tool, you know, for these things. I'd like to— that's something I actually might think about doing. It's kind of interesting. Um, but yeah, you could— oh geez, I don't know. I just want— I just want there to be like an off. I just want off. I just don't— nothing.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:33]:
None of it.

Richard Campbell [01:27:35]:
None of it. But that does not exist. It's, it's like, uh Yeah, the problem is your office is giant script, just all of these steps. There's a whole— you're just running all over the place pressing all these off buttons, that and that and that. Like, I come at this from a network point of view thinking I kind of want to snap a filter onto this machine and say like, are there.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:57]:
IPs I can just sync? So, you know, just— yeah, so if you were an ad blocker, that's one of the approaches blocking telemetry in Windows 11. People have looked to see what are the addresses that it's connecting to, and you know, that are something.microsoft.com usually, and then just block those. Yeah. And that, and that has that effect. The problem is I feel like that could change at any second. So one of the concerns with Windows 11, any kind of cleaner, debloater, de-enshitifier, however, whatever you want to describe these tools, is you you just installed what we used to call a monthly cumulative update, which is now called a security update, because Microsoft, seriously, or an annual feature update, whatever it is, is that some of the stuff that you adjusted might go back to the Microsoft defaults, right? And that's the type of thing I think about, like I want to have something that monitors this system. I have what I would think of as the last known good configuration, and.

Richard Campbell [01:28:51]:
I want to make sure it's always— Yeah, there's a tool on the server.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:54]:
Side called Desired State aid configurator.

Richard Campbell [01:28:55]:
Yeah, there you go. That's, that's a better term. Yeah. And it literally monitors for changes like.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:01]:
That and often in many cases can set them back. So, but it's— yeah, that's what, that's what I want. Never seen your computer. Yeah, you get a little notification says, hey, by the way, Windows 11 just changed your whatever.

Richard Campbell [01:29:13]:
It's a dot dot dot. You're like, that's true. Yeah, yeah, we talked about it. We, back when we had to build web farms, like 15 servers to run a website kind kind of thing. Yeah, the SC was the tool because it was stunning to find this one.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:28]:
Machine, these settings have changed on it for some reason, right? Yes. And, and look, this is— we, we use Windows, we run into this all the time, whether it's this show or some other podcasts or whatever. Invariably, I haven't touched anything, I haven't changed anything, and I sign in and it's like, oh, my camera's on the wrong camera, you're on the wrong microphone, phone, you're on the— well, how— it's the same thing. How is it not just working all the time? I can't explain that. I don't know. Anyway, there's a lot to this. So this is, you know, it's a book, but it's not a pamphlet. It's smaller than like, you know, the Windows 11 Field Guide is 1,100, 1,200 pages, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:05]:
Yeah. This is going to be more like 100, 150.

Richard Campbell [01:30:08]:
So it's going to be more concise. But we'll see how, depending on how thoroughly you go down the security privacy.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:14]:
Path that gets a couple hundred there. I literally, like you said, I could do an entire book on security. You're right, I could do one on privacy too. And that sure surprised me a little bit because again, my primary coping mechanism is blocking things out.

Richard Campbell [01:30:26]:
So I'd kind of forgotten how bad this was.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:28]:
You start digging into it and you're like, oh, this is— I don't like this, I don't like this. It's like, you know, it's like the, uh, if you guys have not seen the SNL skit about Uber Eats wrapped, and it's like they explain like what it is. He's like, oh no, I know what it is, I just don't want it. Yeah, you're like, exactly. Like, no, I know exactly what it is. I— no, please, dear God, no, please don't do that. Um, this is just the random— this is kind of a weird pick coming from me because, God, it has the word Bing in it. But, um, you know, but, but bear with me for one moment because, um, one of the things I was kind of surprised to see in Win 11 Debloat is you can actually turn off Windows Spotlight in the, in the desktop.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:13]:
So if you're not familiar with what that means, is if you go into Personalization, uh, Background, right, we've always had the ability to do a solid color, right, dating back to forever. We have a picture and we have a slideshow, and a slideshow is where you tell it X number of photos, whatever. But there's, uh, recent years— I don't remember when this debuted, but sometime in the Windows 11 timeframe, I guess. And it's also Spotlight. Yeah, I mean, right, I know there's like one on the lock screen, but this is like specifically on the desktop. Um, you could say Windows Spotlight. Windows Spotlight is essentially those kind of Bing image of the day things, which, by the way, whatever one thinks of.

Leo Laporte [01:31:51]:
Um, Bing, those are beautiful photos. I mean, I use those on all my machines. Yeah, I just don't use Bing extension. I have a little shell script that gets the big photo of the day.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:02]:
So all my Linux boxes and the version— the reason I, I like the images. The thing I don't like— the images are beautiful. The, the thing I don't like is the, the— essentially what it is is an icon on the desktop. It's— you can move it, but you can't remove it. And it's, it's how you find out more about that image, right? On the lock screen there are multiple things you can click on and most of them are ads, right? And I, look, I don't know about you, but I don't spend a lot of time staring at my lock screen. So I walk up, it sees me, I'm in, I don't really think about it too much. I don't care about that. But I don't, maybe it's just 'cause I have like ADHD or something, but like I keep my desktop clean for the most part unless I'm working on something.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:44]:
I do not want this stupid superfluous icon. I like the images, right? So I noticed that when 11 Debloat had a way to remove that feature. And if you do that, you just don't get the option. So you go into Personalization, Background, and you get Picture, Solid Color, and Slideshow, but not Windows Spotlight. And it's like, okay, but like, like, I kind of like the idea of like a different image. And I do like the Bing Image of the Day, right? And so I just randomly Googled, Googled Bing Image, Bing Wallpaper, because I know that's a thing. And there is a Bing wallpaper app, right? You can download it from the web, you can download it from the Microsoft Store, it's the same.

Richard Campbell [01:33:23]:
App.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:23]:
And it does exactly what Windows Spotlight does, right? And you can, if you don't like the image you're looking at, you can bring up a UI because there is a, there's a tray icon and not instead of an icon. Actually, no, there is something on the desktop by default as well. But the thing that the Bing thing does that makes it okay to me is it lets you go into, let me just go into settings and I'll tell you what you can do. You just remove all of the widgets from the desktop. So it has like something in the top right that helps you learn more about the image. There's a recommendation news thing, which is like, seriously, you can get rid of visual search. Do not want. I know what it is.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:57]:
I do not want it. You can click on the desktop and have it actually go to Bing. Absolutely not. But you can actually turn all that stuff off. So now you just get— I mean, there's a tray icon that's hidden. Right? Because it's in there. But, but all you— you just get the picture. And I'm like, okay, like, so I like that.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:14]:
There you go. I'm recommending something with the word Bing in it.

Leo Laporte [01:34:18]:
So that's crazy. Yeah, just mull over that one.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:21]:
There's also, uh, a web address that you can get.

Leo Laporte [01:34:22]:
Yeah, no, I'm sure there's a picture, which is what I do. I don't even interact with it in any way. I just download it every day. I have a little cron job that downloads it every morning, and I put.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:34]:
That as my wallpaper. Yeah, I don't— I'm probably not going.

Leo Laporte [01:34:37]:
To recommend a cron job, but it's.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:39]:
Uh, it's, uh, stealing it. I'm stealing it.

Leo Laporte [01:34:40]:
No, it's fine, that's fine. There's no reason. I mean, they put it on the.

Richard Campbell [01:34:43]:
Web, so why not?

Paul Thurrott [01:34:43]:
On the web? Yeah, of course, they're for the taking.

Leo Laporte [01:34:46]:
They're beautiful images, you know, a lot of them. I love them. Last yesterday was a beautiful Chinese image for New Year.

Richard Campbell [01:34:52]:
I can't remember what it is today, but I like a dark space image.

Leo Laporte [01:34:56]:
So I, I have curated my own set. There's also the Astronomy Photo of the Day, but.

Richard Campbell [01:35:04]:
Unfortunately Astronomy Photo of the Day often has non-astronomical things.

Leo Laporte [01:35:07]:
So also very bright things that I— yeah, yeah. No, I agree with you.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:11]:
I want galaxies.

Leo Laporte [01:35:11]:
I want the Horsehead Nebula. I don't want— yeah, you know, nothing too bright kind of stuff. Uh, you're— yeah, if you want to. So do you have a— it's not automated?

Richard Campbell [01:35:25]:
You actually go out and look?

Paul Thurrott [01:35:25]:
Yeah, yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:35:26]:
Savage. Well, plus, you know, when you put.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:28]:
A 1440 screen portrait mode, like, your selection of pictures is challenging. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's like a phone.

Leo Laporte [01:35:34]:
You're almost looking for like a phone wallpaper, basically.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:37]:
Yeah, yeah. That's interesting.

Leo Laporte [01:35:39]:
Or have one that goes across multiple displays too, you know. You know, we have completed Paul's section in the back of the book, so.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:44]:
That means— well, let me think, that could be one. I'm not going to ignore you, Richard.

Leo Laporte [01:35:47]:
But I am going to go get a drink. Go get a drink while Richard gets.

Richard Campbell [01:35:55]:
Us the Runner's Radio episode of the week. Episode 1024, what a great number. You know, nice solid binary number. And this is a show I did with one Erica Burgess, first time on the show, specifically talking about her work using LLMs to do red team hacking. And she's all in. So she's using a host of agents working through various practices for testing vulnerabilities and things like that. And red teaming is literally, hey, here's the mission. We need you to get this data from this system, and you find a way in the process of ultimately identifying those vulnerabilities to protect from it.

Richard Campbell [01:36:37]:
So phenomenal conversation, brilliant woman, definitely thinking the contemporary approach of using LLMs where it's a series of agents almost in adversarial modes where they're challenging, pressing against each each other to test various aspects of a system. So certainly could be used for evil, but in this case, and, you know, very much a red team effort, she has collected bug bounties off the back.

Leo Laporte [01:37:00]:
Of using tools like that to work through these things.

Richard Campbell [01:37:02]:
So does she talk about what models she uses for this? Yeah, that's a conversation about a variety of them. None of them were particularly special, right? It was literally the suites of tools And, you know, her point was, I've run these tools myself. It takes days sometimes. And now I'm firing agents off to run them simultaneously. It's amazing. Yeah, it's just much, much faster of what, you know, what it would have been a full day's worth of work for me.

Leo Laporte [01:37:28]:
Now the tool's knocked out in a few hours. So yeah, I mean, when Anthropic released Opus 4.6, they gave it Python and a couple of debugging tools and it found 500 flaws in open source software. I mean, I think that's going to be really great.

Richard Campbell [01:37:46]:
You know, that's going to be really great.

Leo Laporte [01:37:47]:
And it just speaks to the arms race that's taking place. Yeah. Well, that's right. Because the bad guys are writing them.

Richard Campbell [01:37:53]:
As fast as we're finding them. Trying. Yeah. And so, you know, it's a dual back and forth and we'll see how it goes. But it's good to have someone like Eric on the good guy side. Yay. Great. Demonstrating just the power of these tools.

Leo Laporte [01:38:08]:
To to help secure software even faster. We are getting ready. You don't have a PowerPoint. Oh, I'm sorry. No.

Richard Campbell [01:38:19]:
PowerPoint.

Leo Laporte [01:38:19]:
Sorry for squishing you. Let me unsquish you. And you folks are watching— you fine folks are watching Windows Weekly, and this is the part of Windows Weekly coming up that everybody looks forward to.

Richard Campbell [01:38:32]:
It's time for Richard Campbell's whiskey segment. Yeah, so we, I mean, the last two episodes we've had PowerPoints because I did go on tours of distilleries. And so I wanted to share some of those pictures, talk to you about my experiences going through it. But today I'm at home for a while and I'm really enjoying being home. Yeah, there's still some work going on in the house. You know, everything takes longer than planned. I remember when we talked about done by Christmas and here we are middle of February. And tell me about a few weeks away.

Richard Campbell [01:39:01]:
So I have been reading a lot about Canadian whiskey. Again, I thought I knew, but I'm learning new things and grabbed a bottle of The Lot 40. This is a J.P. Weiser 100% rye whiskey, which is cool. You know, 100% ryes are unusual, or at least they used to be until modern microbiology came along. It was— that's not a thing you would normally do to use 100% rye. Although if you recall, when I was in Pennsylvania and got buried in the history of Pennsylvania whiskey, the old-style triple stills they used, these wooden chamber stills, allowed for extraction of alcohol more reliably from rye. They just didn't survive Prohibition.

Richard Campbell [01:39:45]:
And so today when we're strictly, you know, column pot stills and rectifiers, it's much harder to distill with rye and making malt is difficult and it tends to foam and so forth. And so ryes have not been very popular. But when you go back to the early times, it's much more common. Now, Lot 40 is a brand of J.P. Weiser, and the J.P. stands for John Philip, who was born in 1825 in Oneida County, New York. So actually an American of immigrant parents, of course, that were farmers. And he was educated in New York, but he was focused focused on farming, so his interest in distilling comes a little later.

Richard Campbell [01:40:22]:
He's married in 1856, he'll have 6 children. In 1857, he starts running the Charles Payne Distillery and Farm in Prescott, Ontario. So how does he end up in Canada all of a sudden? Now Prescott is actually up the St. Lawrence River, just south of Ottawa. It's only 150 miles from Oneida County, too. Like, this is all the sort of Canadian-American border zone there. And in fact, he was in the farming business, and so his interest in the distillery was purely for the waste product that comes out of stills, which they use as cattle feed, right? The, the leftovers that come from that. Although he'll get drawn into the whole distilling business.

Richard Campbell [01:41:05]:
And I should point out, I'm saying Ontario, and although that word Ontario is hundreds of years old, this is 1857. This is before Canada is Canada yet. Confederation's not till 1867. So at this time, it's the Province of Canada, which is— was the unification of what was once known as Upper and Lower Canada in 1841, but they were kind of squabbling with each other, so they petitioned the British to largely unify them into a Province of Canada. And instead of calling it Upper and Lower, they called them Canada West and Canada East. So nominally, when When, uh, Weiser came to the Payne Distillery, he was coming to Canada West. Now, the, the, uh, farm in question was owned by Weiser's family. It was actually Charles and Amos, uh, Egert, although it had been acquired by another distillery down in the U.S.

Richard Campbell [01:41:58]:
side that Weiser was already working for. And so the commonly known story is that he went to work for family and bought them out. The relationship was more complicated than that. It was already through through an acquisition, but by 1862, Weiser is the sole owner of the distillery and is now much more interested in the distilling part. The farm pipeline is still running, and Prescott's right on the major train lines, so it's easy to get to Montreal, it's easy to get to Toronto, it's easy to get to Ottawa, and there's a train line that does connect up to the northern, the New England train lines down in the north. So that allows them to produce whiskey at scale, as well as also the distribution. Now, I'm probably going to, we're going to do several of these, so I'll do various parts of the Canadian whiskey history as we go along. That, those 1800s era, the 1850s, kind of the end of what they call the pioneer era of Canadian whiskey making, where they were all local product, just, you know, includes the traditional farms producing excess that gets turned into whiskey that's a saleable product and so on.

Richard Campbell [01:43:05]:
The transformation of the Canadian whiskey industry for the first time comes during the US Civil War. So around the time that Wiser now has sole control of the Prescott Distillery, the US Civil War is on, and that means most US distilleries are shut down for the duration. The volunteers, production problems, supply problems, everything is put pushed on the war, and so Canadian distilleries pick up the slack. The Americans are buying a lot of Canadian whiskey, including the Union, and so it makes a huge explosion in whiskey production in the 1860s, and Wiser is certainly a beneficiary of that as well. And they are making what they're calling at that time Canadian whiskey, which is largely rye, although the mashbills are not as restricted. The real restrictions on what is called whiskey is post-Civil War. It's 1875 when the Canadian Food and Drug Act— so now we've had Confederation, which is 1867. It's now 8 years on.

Richard Campbell [01:44:00]:
And so the Canadian Food and Drug Act sets up the first rules around whiskey. And we've talked about this before, but they named it Canadian whiskey, Canadian rye whiskey, or rye whiskey. It has to be mashed, distilled, and aged in Canada. It has to be at least 40% alcohol. Very standard stuff. Uh, wooden vessels no larger than 700 liters. All the time they would've been using gallons and a minimum of 3 years. They don't have to char barrels like the Americans.

Richard Campbell [01:44:26]:
You can use raw wood, but most people don't. Even then, whiskey is largely made— corn's very popular in the area, although corn doesn't grow well on the north side of the St. Lawrence. So, you know, one of the reasons the Americans grew so much corn is 'cause it grew better down there, where rye can take those tougher soils, those shield soils and so forth, so rye does pretty well up there. Weiser's famous for, in 1893, he gets a huge booth at the Chicago's World's Fair and starts selling whiskey in bottles. Most whiskey at that time is sold in casks. It's not the first bottles of Canadian whiskey, that are out there. The Herrim Walker, it already was already selling bottles as well, but it was the first time that Wiser geared up for bottle production.

Richard Campbell [01:45:17]:
And one of the reasons was for the Chicago's World's Fair. And so many folks who went to the World's Fair first came home with a bottle of Canadian whiskey through that World's Fair. After that, you know, previous to that, it was largely casks. J.P. had a number of sons. The son that liked the whiskey business most, a guy named Harlow, And he was— and got involved in his 20s. By 1895, he died of a heart attack at 36, which is unfortunate and apparently very much derailed Weiser's efforts in the business. A few years later, in 1911, Weiser himself will pass away.

Richard Campbell [01:45:58]:
Two other sons will take on the business for a while. Unfortunately, in 1912, a fire destroys the Prescott Distillery, and it won't be rebuilt, at least not by the Weiser family. Uh, one of the competitors down the road in Belleville, Ontario, Corby Distillery, did pick up the slack for them. So many barrels— the barrels— many of the barrel houses survived. The distillery was destroyed. And so they had the barrels, but they had to produce that. They had to actually make the additions and bottling and stuff. So they did it through the Corby Distillery, and the Corby Distillery also produced some of their whiskey for them.

Richard Campbell [01:46:31]:
So the Weiser line extended, it stayed on for a while till about 1920 when the Corby Distillery bought the Weiser family out entirely. They bought the brand, they bought the remaining barrels, they started doing their own production, which is great timing because Prohibition's around the corner. And again, Prohibition, while terrible for the US, was amazing for Canada. So Canadian whiskey explodes during Prohibition, grows immensely. And the Corby Distillery gets to a size that by 1935, the big player in Canada, that's Hiram Walker, acquires Corby, which means also acquires the Wiser line. Although at that point, the Wiser's not been involved for a good 15, 20 years. They also own Bally's and a few others. And if we've gone through this story before with, with Hiram Walker, this is a distillery out of Walkerville near Detroit, and that's acquired by, uh, Ali Domic in 1989, which is now owned by Pernod Ricard, which means that none of the Wiser stuff exists at all.

Richard Campbell [01:47:29]:
It's purely a brand. The distillery is the same one we've talked about before, which has both column, pot, and rectification stills. They buy their grain mostly from Ontario. They have huge storage facilities and a big bottling plant. And so this particular product, Lot 40, is made in that distillery with its own distinctive recipe. So the name Lot 40 actually comes from a guy named Michael Booth, who had an ancestor named Joshua Booth, who made whiskey going back to the 1700s in Upper Canada, same rough era. And of course, this was largely rye. The name Lot 40 actually is the name of the lot that his ancestor got as an immigrant to start growing, and also where he built his gristmill and distillery.

Richard Campbell [01:48:12]:
Now, back then, the old school rye, and I'll spend more time on this as it comes around, you would malt your rye, which is very time-consuming, but you wouldn't malt very much of it. That was enough enzyme to do the rest. So normal old-school rye distiller, rye production was 90% unmalted, 10% malted. And that was enough to provide the enzymes to actually make enough sugars to make the rye worthwhile. Today, we don't do that. We don't bother to malt rye at all because we've now bioengineered enzymes to break down the carbohydrates in rye to make the sugars to do the production. And so in a case of this thing, like Lot 40, it's 100% rye because they use a customized enzyme for that. Lot 40's approach is again, 100% unmalted rye, and then they age in new American oak barrels, but they are charred.

Richard Campbell [01:49:00]:
So they're buying the barrels out of Missouri, produced down there and charred to what they call the number 2 char, which is very much a bourbon measure, but they have never had bourbon in them. Their actual production, even though right on the bottle it says copper pot distilled, that is true, but the first distillation is in a column still, very normal. It's what bourbon also does, typically gets them in the, in the young 60% range. And then there's a 12,000-liter copper pot still that does the finishing distillation, which will raise it into the high 60s, and then they cut it to 43. Although first they'll put it into barrels. There's no age statement on this bottle. The minimum, of course, the law is 3 years. They, according to the documentation, it's probably between 6 and 7 years, not old enough to be worth putting a statement, an age statement on it, so they don't do that.

Richard Campbell [01:49:47]:
Now, the funny thing about Lot 40 Rye is that it was actually first made in the '90s, in 1998, and it didn't sell. And so they stopped making it, mostly because rye was not all that popular. People didn't know really what it was. It had been lost. Through the prohibition eras and so forth, and people were mostly just drinking bourbon. But then it became popular, and it became popular because a guy named Dave Pickerel, and Pickerel used to be the master distiller at Maker's Mark, and Maker's Mark famously, as a bourbon maker, does not use rye in their mash bill. They use red winter wheat as their flavor grain. So mostly corn, little bit of barley for the amylase, and then the red winter wheat, that's what makes it.

Richard Campbell [01:50:29]:
Makes Maker's Mark, Maker's Mark, but he loved rye whiskey and he wanted to make his own. So he established his own line in 2008. And the branding he used is Whistlepig, which you've probably heard of. And Whistlepig famously started making rye production. And then they geared up, Dave was able to gear up quickly because he bought already aged rye from Canada. So this is when Alberta distillers and all these large facilities, including the Hiram Walker facility, were already making rye, which they used in blends. And Dave Pickle recognized the quality of that, and actually his early editions of Whistle Pig, while he was still aging his own, were actually using Canadian rye. And as that became popular, I mean, and all of the major brands started making their own ryes, the Hiram Walker Group responded to that, brought back this Lot 40, re-released it in 2010.

Leo Laporte [01:51:29]:
2012.

Richard Campbell [01:51:30]:
So 43%, um, let's have a little taste. Very Canadian, that is to say not a lot of punch, not a lot of burn on the nose. Some sort of spicy— it's a fun.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:40]:
You know, the heat comes on, it's like, ah, I'm drinking whiskey.

Richard Campbell [01:51:48]:
Did you just say apologetic? Yeah, that's good. So, and this, admittedly, it's a Canadian product, but it is easily available in the US. BevMo's got it for $47. Oh, that's not so bad. Not wildly pricey, you know, and really most when you look at 100% rye made by American distillers, like I think the Whistle Pig 10 is $80. So, by the way, that exceedingly rare, the Riser 24 that you've got on the screen right there, I'm looking for.

Leo Laporte [01:52:16]:
A bottle of that. I'd love to do a review.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:18]:
It's beautiful.

Leo Laporte [01:52:18]:
What a beautiful bottle.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:19]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:52:19]:
That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about this. No, we're talking about a Lot 40 is a line of Wiser's. It's way more approachable. And the thing at $47, make an old fashioned out of it. You know, you're not going to hurt anybody. That's fine. You can throw it on ice.

Richard Campbell [01:52:35]:
You can drink it neat. It drinks very, very well. So, you know, you've got lots of choices there.

Leo Laporte [01:52:39]:
Yeah. I think your ad filter is killing you there.

Richard Campbell [01:52:44]:
There to— it sure is.

Leo Laporte [01:52:47]:
42-Year-Old Canadian whiskey.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:48]:
Wow, that's pretty scary stuff.

Richard Campbell [01:52:49]:
Uh, yeah. How much is that though?

Leo Laporte [01:52:51]:
Not that fancy bottle. That'll be a $500 bottle. It's sold out, don't worry about it.

Richard Campbell [01:52:55]:
You can't get it at any price. I got you. I'm sure there's a collector's edition somewhere. Yeah. And yeah, this is the stuff that.

Leo Laporte [01:53:02]:
You can get off the shelf. It's nothing. You don't have to go— this is good. This one's bold, brash, and unapologetic.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:10]:
Apologetic.

Leo Laporte [01:53:10]:
So if you want apologetic, yes, the, uh, get the whatever it was you were recommending.

Richard Campbell [01:53:16]:
And, uh, what is the one you like?

Leo Laporte [01:53:19]:
I'm drinking—.

Richard Campbell [01:53:21]:
I'm telling the story of Lot 40's Lot 40. Yeah, yeah. And it's just, they, you know, it's funny that they anticipated, you know, that ryes would be popular. Just, they were a number of years early. It took time for folks to get on board. And then when they realized they liked.

Leo Laporte [01:53:41]:
It, everybody's making one now, and Lot 40, no exception. I don't know if.

Richard Campbell [01:53:47]:
I've had a rye whiskey. How would you characterize Short Rye? Well, most people think of rye in the context of, at least Americans, in the context of bourbon, because it's the flavor grain. It's the reason reason the bourbon is spicy, right? Right. And that's a little unfair, uh, just because rye comes in different— it comes in different ways depending on how you treat it. And so that spiciness is not real sharp, it's not alcoholic, right? It's a flavor.

Leo Laporte [01:54:17]:
It's like cinnamon. I like that.

Richard Campbell [01:54:20]:
Yeah. And so not like rye bread though. No, no, that's so dark. Nutty. And remember, a lot of this flavor is coming from the wood anyway. So in a lot of ways, this is an American oak. Yeah, right. And we know that the American oak, especially when charred, has a lot of those vanillas and caramel.

Richard Campbell [01:54:40]:
Yeah, you're getting there. Yeah. So nice. Yeah, it's a— it's super drinkable for a reasonable price. And the fact that it's 100% rye is kind of irrelevant. Right? It's whatever. It's nice tasting whiskey. It happens to be 100% rye and it has this microbiology bent to it and so forth.

Richard Campbell [01:54:59]:
But ultimately it's just, it's a good.

Leo Laporte [01:55:01]:
It'S a good whiskey.

Richard Campbell [01:55:02]:
Maybe it knows I'm an American and that's why it's not showing something like that. Yeah, because like, you're right, it might be only the stuff you can buy because the link I gave you should have taken you directly to this bottle.

Leo Laporte [01:55:13]:
But it might have to link.

Richard Campbell [01:55:16]:
I clicked Yeah, yeah, it keeps asking me, you're how old again?

Leo Laporte [01:55:19]:
How old could you be? How old? How old are you?

Paul Thurrott [01:55:22]:
Let me try one more time. Maybe if I like the alcohol sites that have like a date already plugged.

Leo Laporte [01:55:27]:
In, it's like 1971. You're like, yep. Or just the ones that say you're old enough, right? Yeah, you're like, oh yeah, yeah, I'm old. You can trust me. Yeah, see, it says page not found.

Richard Campbell [01:55:35]:
I don't think that's— I think that might be an American. Anyway, it's It's weird how much I've talked about rye in the past few months, it seems, just because of the European encounters I've had with Starke, and then spending time in Pennsylvania and getting drawn into the whole Pennsylvanian rye story. And of course, rye's very popular in Canada and always has been, and so, and they didn't have the disruption that the Americans had. Yeah. So, you know, a lot— there's a lot more lineage there. That being said, only Walker, that only that distillery is from that pioneer age. Like, all of those other facilities, they're gone. So, you know, today the contemporary production of whiskey in Canada is, is very contemporary.

Leo Laporte [01:56:24]:
It's a different machine.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:26]:
Uh, you're drinking history, my friend.

Richard Campbell [01:56:28]:
Yeah, I'm drinking kombucha, but yeah, no, but he's drinking history. Well, and so part of me is enamored of the historical pieces, but also just recognizing most of them have gone. There were fires and there were consolidations. And ultimately, the contemporary distilleries in the US are, in Canada, are much like what happened in Ireland with the consolidation on the New Middleton Distillery, where we have many brands, but we only have one set of stills. And so our system is designed to switch between recipes quickly, it's not dedicated to any one product anymore, where traditional.

Leo Laporte [01:57:02]:
Scottish whiskies are very much a one-product kind of thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:04]:
Look out, the fire's over in your place. I think the ship's coming into.

Leo Laporte [01:57:11]:
Port. I don't know what the heck that was. Richard, as always, a real pleasure. I enjoy the whisky segments. If you want to see them all.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:22]:
There are literally more than 100 now at somethingweirdfrommycloset.com.

Richard Campbell [01:57:24]:
Just so good. Uh, which takes you to the best.

Leo Laporte [01:57:26]:
Domain names I've ever bought in my life.

Richard Campbell [01:57:28]:
You're getting the mileage out of it. Yes, you are. Uh, and I, and I just talked to Kev before we started today, and he got, he got a new one up. Oh, uh, yeah, he finally, he got the, the, uh, the Anita Black Label up, which we, we talked about ages ago. I think it was one of the last of that whiskey tasting session I.

Leo Laporte [01:57:48]:
Did in the fall with my buddies Stavanger. Nice, nice, nice.

Richard Campbell [01:57:54]:
The Kyoto Whiskey Kuro Obi Black Belt Blended. That's the new edition, just added on.

Leo Laporte [01:57:59]:
To the list just less than a day ago. Uh, of course, Richard's also a podcaster by trade, a public speaker and podcaster, and you can catch his podcast as runhisradio.com. That's where he has that side gig, that little side hustle called podcasting. Yeah. Uh, and.NET Rocks that he does with Carl. And, uh, of course he is a public speaker, an accomplished public speaker.

Richard Campbell [01:58:27]:
So where— if people wanted to hire you, I know you reach out to me directly, although a number of bureaus reach out to me every so often.

Leo Laporte [01:58:36]:
I'm not that hard to find. Find him.

Richard Campbell [01:58:39]:
If you can't find him, you can't have him.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:41]:
Exactly.

Richard Campbell [01:58:41]:
But, uh, you know, you have to earn your way. The spring keynote sessions are going to be interesting. This, uh, this talk on the post-AI hype, uh, it's been very popular, folks.

Leo Laporte [01:58:53]:
Plus, they— people love my undersea network talk too. That's a good one. Yeah, I'm looking forward to your property, Cape Canaveral talk when we go out.

Richard Campbell [01:59:00]:
To Zero Trust World in a couple. Oh yes, we're gonna spend the day, and you couldn't get the VIP tour, so I'm gonna give you my I can't wait. Yeah, we're gonna do, you know, Cold War stuff, and then we'll spend some.

Leo Laporte [01:59:12]:
Time on Apollo, we'll spend some time on shuttle. Lisa's looking forward to it too.

Richard Campbell [01:59:17]:
And Anthony's coming with us, so Anthony, I think they can get an education. I hope you'll have a great time. I famously took a group of Google guys around there once where I said, point at anything, let's see if I can do 20 minutes on it. I think we did— I did 20 minutes on a frangible bolt, and they're.

Leo Laporte [01:59:34]:
Like, okay, we get it, please stop. Otherwise, yeah, I think the Artemis 2.

Richard Campbell [01:59:37]:
Might still be sitting on the pad. I think it might. It almost certainly will be.

Leo Laporte [01:59:41]:
Hydrogen leaks are difficult. So yeah, it'll be there. Paul Thurrott at Thurrott.com. That's where his— you should join as a premium member. That's where the bulk of his writing goes, although he is writing this new book on de-enshitifying Windows. That will be at leanpub.com along with A Field Guide to Windows 11 and Windows Everywhere, his other books. Um, you know, guys, I was hovering my finger. I have a Lunar Lake, as you know, uh, ThinkPad X1 Carbon, which I dearly love.

Leo Laporte [02:00:10]:
Yep. But everybody's raving about the new Panther Lake, and it's apparently the battery's amazing and the GPU is really great. And Dell's got its XPS 14, and I'm just— I have my finger hovering over the— talk me out of it.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:24]:
Is Panther Lake that much better than the It is for graphics. Yeah. Um, I still have questions about reliability. Oh really? I would— I'd wait. I'll wait and see what else.

Leo Laporte [02:00:34]:
See, let's get, get some time behind.

Richard Campbell [02:00:39]:
It.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:39]:
See more. What's the reliability issue? Crashing or— it's ever— Jesus, I, I see this is the problem. It's one computer.

Leo Laporte [02:00:43]:
I can't tell if it's the computer.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:44]:
Oh, it's that? You're— which one do you have? I have a— it's an HP, um, Book X or— that looks really nice too. Yeah, it's beautiful. It's a beautiful laptop. But, um, you know, you open the— you open the lid and like, we'll.

Leo Laporte [02:00:56]:
See what we get today. I don't know, you know. See that? I don't have any problem with the X1. Although it's funny, it was hesitating. It had been going great and then it was hesitating last week. And I said to Claude, my good personal friend Claude Code, I said, I don't understand, the laptop used to turn right on when I opened the lid. And it said, well, let me check. I said, well, you've got fuse running and that's a notorious problem.

Leo Laporte [02:01:22]:
Because, uh, the fuse, uh, service will, uh, hang up. And then, oh, by the way, you should probably also check Bluetooth because it's not letting it sleep. Every 10 seconds it's waking up to see if there's Bluetooth. And I said, well, fix that, will you? And it fixed it. Yeah, nice. I— this is— we live in a different world now where I have a, you know, a sysadmin in my laptop. It's incredible.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:42]:
Anyway, all right, so I'll wait, I'll wait.

Leo Laporte [02:01:43]:
Thank you.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:44]:
I would wait.

Richard Campbell [02:01:45]:
You saved me a few thousand bucks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I am genuinely trying to figure out if the problems I'm having with my Intel workstation, uh, which is an Arrow.

Leo Laporte [02:01:57]:
Lake.

Richard Campbell [02:02:00]:
Yeah, is the CPU issue.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:00]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [02:02:00]:
Whether or not— and they will explain before— the OEM is so important, and.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:04]:
I guess Lenovo does a pretty darn good job, uh, with their— yep, and.

Leo Laporte [02:02:09]:
They explicitly support Linux, which is nice.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:11]:
For you, I guess. Um, and Delta has two. I get those two.

Leo Laporte [02:02:13]:
Yeah, and Dell does. Yeah, okay, fair enough. But no, but I'll— I think I'll stick with it.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:16]:
I'm very happy with the thing.

Leo Laporte [02:02:18]:
Well, I mean, ThinkPads are awesome.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:20]:
I wouldn't— I wouldn't replace it. It's light as a feather, whereas it feels like an engineering sample. Like there's nothing in here, you know.

Leo Laporte [02:02:28]:
It'S just a plastic shell. Awesome, awesome. All right, see, I get, uh, I.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:32]:
Get special personal consultations with these cats every day. Well, I mean, yeah, you don't jump.

Richard Campbell [02:02:40]:
Out of perfectly working airplane.

Leo Laporte [02:02:41]:
What are you doing? Do that. That's practicing. You too, you too can get the expertise of Paul and Richard every Wednesday. We do Windows Weekly. You, as I mentioned, we stream it live, but you can also get it on our website at twit.tv/ww. Uh, it's a— there's a YouTube channel for the video where you can, uh, clip and share pieces of the show. But the best way to get it is subscribe in your favorite podcast client. We have audio or video waiting for you in, uh, whatever podcast client you prefer.

Leo Laporte [02:03:08]:
Subscribe and leave us a nice review while you're at it. We'd appreciate that. We'll be back here next Wednesday, 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern, 1900 UTC. Thank you, Paul.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:21]:
Thank you, Richard. Have a great week. Bye-bye.