Windows Weekly 973 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.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Coming up on Windows Weekly, I, Micah Sargent, I'm subbing in for Leo Laporte, who's in Florida at the moment. I join Richard Campbell and Paul Thurrott. We talk about Windows 11. First, about ASUS and Dell working with Windows 365 Cloud PCs. Then in AI, we talk about Nano Banana 2, Google making App Functions for Android, Build 2026 happening in San Francisco in June.

Richard Campbell [00:00:29]:
What?

Mikah Sargent [00:00:29]:
Will it overlap with WWDC? And have a good time talking about Resident Evil: Requiem and how it's kind of annoying when games focus too much on puzzles and not enough on the story. All of that and more coming up on Windows Weekly.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:47]:
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:59]:
This is Windows Weekly, episode 973. With Richard Campbell, Paul Thurrott, and me, Micah Sargent. Recorded Wednesday, March 4th, 2026. Bob's Rumor Store. Hello and welcome to Windows Weekly. The voice you're hearing is not Leo Laporte's because it is instead Micah Sargent's. Yes, I am subbing in for Leo, who is in the ever so humid Florida. I don't know if it's humid right now, but we'll find out.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:28]:
This of course is Windows Weekly, the show where we talk about Windows and so much more. Joining us from Mexico City currently, correct, Paul Theriot.

Richard Campbell [00:01:39]:
Hello, Paul.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:41]:
Hello, Leo, or whoever you are.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:46]:
Are you sitting in that daybed right now, or are you sitting in front of it?

Paul Thurrott [00:01:49]:
No, I'm sitting in front of it. Yeah, this is my wife's office. We've been trying to experiment with using, um, the same space for this kind of thing. And it's sort of working out. I don't know.

Mikah Sargent [00:02:04]:
You sound very thrilled. Joining us live from the show floor at the ThreatLocker conference in Florida, so you can tell us if it's humid there, it's Richard Campbell. Hello, Rich.

Richard Campbell [00:02:18]:
Hi, Matt. Of course it's humid here. It is always humid in Florida. It's only degrees of humid. There's humid and really, really humid.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:26]:
It's like the, the salsas they serve in Mexico City. It's like, this one's hot, this one, yeah, don't touch that one.

Richard Campbell [00:02:33]:
Uh, you know, that is not for you.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:34]:
Yeah, we'll just put that— we're going to move that over the other side of the table.

Mikah Sargent [00:02:40]:
Uh, well, as you know, this is the show where we talk about Microsoft, not just Windows. Uh, and that said, we're kicking things off with Windows 11. What's the latest in Windows 11.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:54]:
So this is literally the latest. I just added it to the notes, and we haven't written it up yet. We're waiting for a comment from Microsoft. But apparently, if you install Edge Canary, which is, you know, what, 2, 3 versions out, uh, and you click in the text box in any AI chatbot, you know, OpenAI ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, it gives you Copilot writing help tools. And so when the person, the guy I work with showed me this and I said, "No, this has got to be something they're just doing to all text boxes. Let's not make too much out of this." And he is like, "Yeah, no, that makes sense." And then he came back and he goes, "You know, actually it's just happening in the AI programs." So apparently they're up to some shenanigans. So we'll see what happens there. We haven't heard back yet., there's still a chance this is a, you know, one of those horrible mistakes.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:53]:
Just kidding, we didn't really mean to usurp other people's AIs. Uh, you know, they would never do anything like that. I mean, everyone, everyone loves Copilot and stuff. So anyway, we'll see what happens there. I don't know.

Mikah Sargent [00:04:08]:
Everyone loves Copilot. Yeah, uh, that's, that's what I hear anyway.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:12]:
I'm going with it. Um, okay, so there's that. I— we haven't written this up yet. I think we're probably going to when we hear back from Microsoft, but I thought this might be of interest to people because, you know, everyone loves Edge and everyone loves Copilot.

Richard Campbell [00:04:27]:
But if it's the Canary version, it's far enough out for them to, you know, change their mind.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:31]:
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, feedback indicated something, something, something, something.

Mikah Sargent [00:04:38]:
Well, moving along, I think very exciting that, uh, we're seeing a third-party password manager, uh, add some— yeah, add a good new feature.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:48]:
I need to test this because I'm not 100% sure I'm reporting on this accurately. I just, this just came in right before I went to lunch early today because we're doing the show at a different time. And, you know, obviously now we're doing the show, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna test this. But if you are familiar with signing into Windows 11 at all, you know that, um, if you have an online account of any kind, Microsoft account, Entra ID, whatever— well, those are the two online accounts, um, you know, you have to create a PIN, you can use Windows Hello If you use an Entra ID or a Microsoft account, Windows 11 creates what's called an on-device or a device-bound passkey, which is then used to pass through authentication to OneDrive, Edge, whatever, store apps, et cetera, et cetera. But most people, including myself, would recommend actually what you want to use is a third-party password manager that is portable and will bring those passkeys everywhere. And, you know, the first time you sign into Windows 11 on a new PC or a newly reset PC, you don't typically have to enter a password of any kind. You'll usually use, you know, your Microsoft Authenticator app with a code, or maybe you'll scan a PIN or whatever it might be to get into the system. So we have all these third-party passkey managers, but they can't handle that part of the equation.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:06]:
They can't handle that initial sign-in. They can't handle future sign-ins. And I think most people are familiar with this idea that you have a passkey manager or whatever authenticator on your phone, and you'll sometimes get a QR code on the screen on your computer, and you can use that, you take a photo and sign in with the passkey. So Bitwarden is one of the— was one of the early adopters of passkeys across the board, and as new passkey capabilities appear, they've been adding support for that stuff as well. So they support, for example, portable passkeys, like I was saying. And I— this one is, I'm a little iffy on, but I believe they are the first third-party password manager to support passkey-based sign-ins to Windows 11, the operating system. So among the options that you would get when you try to sign in, however you're doing it, would be to use a passkey or security key, and then they'll pop up a a dialog with a QR code, and you use your phone because you have Bitwarden on your phone, and that would sign you into Windows. The part I'm unclear on, and I believe that if this is true, this is the first I've ever heard of this, is if you have Bitwarden the app installed in Windows, you should be able to sign in with Windows Hello facial or fingerprint recognition directly from the lock screen.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:27]:
How is that going to work?

Richard Campbell [00:07:28]:
I was like, that's interesting. Like, how do you get Bitwarden running that early?

Paul Thurrott [00:07:31]:
You're not even logged in, right? Um, yep. So this is— that's why I'm not 100% sure. It's possible. Well, if you think about it, I mean, think about how Windows Hello works with your device-bound passkey from Windows. Um, you know, you have this— yeah, I don't know. I really— I'm trying to understand this. They work with Microsoft on this. I— there will be others that do this, that's for sure.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:57]:
I know that the phone-based thing I described is accurate. The Windows Hello part, I, I need to test this. I need to see if this is, you know, possible. Obviously, the very first time you sign into a new computer, there's no app installed, so— and you haven't signed into it even if your IT put it there. So you would have to use your phone, and that's fine. That's very— that's standard. But, you know, you want to make this as seamless as possible. It's kind of an— you know, I— it's not a big deal.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:22]:
I don't think most people would care. I'm just trying to think of this scenario here. Like, in other words, a device— the point— well, the problem with the device-bound passkey, in other words, the type of passkey that Windows 11 itself creates, is that it's only on that device, right? Um, if you lose the device, you can't— you know, it doesn't work anywhere else. Or even if you don't lose the device, it doesn't work anywhere else. If you lose your phone and that's how you're signing in, that's okay because it's still in your BitLocker, uh, Bitwarden, uh, vault, so you could use any other device, right? Um, you could get a new phone, you know, get that going, you know, you don't have to worry about it, it's portable.

Mikah Sargent [00:09:00]:
So yeah, I'm asking portability.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:01]:
Yeah, yeah, I'm not— yeah, I need to test this anyway. This just happened, so I could be, you know, partially wrong anyway. Um, but I believe what's happening here is actually really interesting, so we'll see.

Mikah Sargent [00:09:15]:
All right, we'll have to keep an eye on that.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:17]:
Yeah, I'm gonna try to test this today actually. I'm kind of curious about this now.

Richard Campbell [00:09:20]:
Yeah, and I'm a Bitwarden user too. I'm all over this if it works. Yes sir, please.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:24]:
It will definitely work from the phone. Um, but yeah, the thing is, if it could work on the device itself, that's amazing, right? Um, that would be great. And that makes sense.

Richard Campbell [00:09:33]:
Zero code running in system level, which always makes me nervous.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:37]:
Yeah, if you think about the progression of passkey capabilities in Windows, they cut— two versions ago they added just passkey support. It did almost nothing. And then in the most recent version, they added the ability to extend that or to replace that essentially with a third third-party passkey manager. So it kind of makes sense now that the next step beyond that would be— this would in essence fully replace that, right? It also opens up the possibility that you could create a local account, create a password, create a PIN, use Windows Hello, and then install your Bitwarden passkey, you know, password manager, and then use that to authenticate yourself, which would add a new layer of security to an account type that frankly It's not very secure. So that's interesting if that's true. So again, like I said, I need to test this.

Mikah Sargent [00:10:29]:
Yeah, 'cause one, I love terminology I don't understand. And so the first thing is your device is Microsoft Entra ID joined.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:40]:
Yeah, so that's not Microsoft account. So that's a, what might, well, what we might call a Microsoft work or school account.

Mikah Sargent [00:10:47]:
Ah, okay, okay. Yeah, so this is in order to use—

Paul Thurrott [00:10:49]:
Like a managed environment, yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:10:50]:
Like a Microsoft— in order to use Bitwarden to log into your Windows device, there are 3 prerequisites. Your device is Microsoft Entra ID joined, your organization has enabled FIDO2 security key sign-in, and then of course, lastly, that you have that registered passkey in the Bitwarden vault.

Richard Campbell [00:11:05]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:05]:
All right, there you go.

Richard Campbell [00:11:06]:
Yeah, so that's going to limit it, but I mean, it's, uh, business class M365.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:11]:
Yep. So I— that is, you know, that's not going to be super interesting to a lot of individuals, obviously, but I feel like the next step is Microsoft will allow this for Microsoft accounts as well. But either way, I can test it now. I'm just curious about the on-device-ness of it, if that makes sense. Being able to securely authenticate against your Bitwarden vault without needing a phone is interesting. That's a little tedious. I mean, obviously you sit down in front of a computer, if it has facial recognition, it's just going to boop and you're in. That's nice.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:44]:
Having to do that additional step with the phone where you scan the code, it takes a little while. It's not ideal, but whatever. It is secure, but it'd be nice to be able to do that right from the device and authenticate with Windows Hello. So I believe that's what's happening. They specifically mentioned Windows Hello, so we'll see. I need to experience it, but we'll find out.

Mikah Sargent [00:12:04]:
All right, uh, we also have some news from the Windows Insider Program with new builds. Uh, anything exciting going on in the, uh, in the new builds?

Richard Campbell [00:12:19]:
No.

Mikah Sargent [00:12:19]:
Um, but you know, every time I come on the show, that's, that's, that's the answer.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:22]:
Well, yeah, there are big weeks and small weeks, and this is a small week, but this is a small one. Canary, um, has got a bunch of features we've already seen everywhere else, including this past Tuesday in Stable, right? Which is, you know, one of the weird things about the Canary, uh, channel. You would think this is the most furthest out stuff, you're gonna get stuff first, etc., but that's not how that works. And so If looking through these features, I see things that are older than this past week, but some that are just new to this past week, like the network speed test, the quick machine recovery improvements, uh, tilt and pan, uh, in camera settings, etc., etc. So this is just stuff we've talked about a bunch. It's not new, but it's new to Canary. And then if you're in Dev and Beta, which today are both testing 25H2 features, You know, nothing major. There's some improvements to shared audio, which is a feature that's very common on mobile, and now it's starting to become kind of a Windows thing as well.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:22]:
And then small other things, you know, Narrator improvements. And then if for IT pros or for anyone writing or implementing policy in a managed environment, there's a new more secure mode for processing batch files. Batch files. It's like 40 years old, 40-year-old technology, but, or almost 50-year-old, but whatever it is, 40, we'll call it 40-year-old technology, whatever. So yeah, that's it. That's all we've gotten, um, from the Insider Program other than that there was a paint update, um, that is kind of inconsistently rolled out across, uh, the Insider Program. It's available in, I think it's the beta, beta channel, which is the freeform rotate capability. Capability.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:06]:
But basically, so that's basically everywhere, and I think we can assume that's going to come to Patch Tuesday— or I'm sorry, to Stable this month sometime. We'll see. Um, and then I think if I lose track of when things happen, but I feel like maybe Richard would remember, last year at Ignite, Mike, or the previous year at Ignite, I don't remember, but, um, Microsoft announced the Windows 365 link. Actually, that might have been to a year ago at Build, so about a year ago now. And this is the Windows 365 Cloud PC device. It looks kind of like a NUC. It's, you know, mostly a, uh, like a cloud streaming type device. So that's kind of sat there by itself for quite a while, um, as the only device that does this, I guess.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:57]:
And now, uh, ASUS and Dell have both announced Cloud PC devices, which are essentially NUC-like devices that don't have a lot going on, um, locally, right? Because you're mostly streaming like a Windows environment from the cloud. Um, although this, you know, CPU and RAM and obviously Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, blah blah blah, whatever. But, um, these are, these are just, you know, for— I don't know who these are for, to be honest. I mean, for obviously for huge organizations, but, um It's the type of thing I think enthusiasts look at like, oh, that's awesome, I want one of those. And it's like, yeah, you can't really run Windows on it. And it's like, oh, that's not— why don't they have a version like that? I don't know.

Richard Campbell [00:15:40]:
But yeah, it was Ignite 2024 when they announced it.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:44]:
Okay.

Richard Campbell [00:15:45]:
Yeah, that's— and it's very much the, you know, slim PC mindset where there's no compute basically. It's just an interface that then runs back to, uh, to a cloud. So you're completely cloud-dependent, like your actual instance is a virtual machine in the cloud.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:59]:
Yeah, this was like— was it Citrix back in the day? And then eventually Microsoft got there, um, with terminal services as well. But back then, that was— you had a data center of your own, and that's where you were hosting servers that were running these remote instances, and you would, you know, stream. And today we're doing it over the internet, obviously.

Mikah Sargent [00:16:17]:
So the number of times I've heard when we talk about you know, cloud PC devices, that this is the future is, you know, I can't, I can't count how many times. Do we, are we still feeling that?

Paul Thurrott [00:16:29]:
Is that still the situation where Scott McNealy, who is not dead, is rolling in his grave? Because when he was running Sun Microsystems, this was their vision. Remember the, it was, what was their, um, they had this tagline like the network is the computer, you know. Um, the network of that day was largely dial-up networking, which was not much of a computer, but they talked about it as an internet PC.

Richard Campbell [00:16:50]:
And now we're talking about it Cloud PC, but it's the same thing. Like, there's plenty of organizations where you don't want the end user to have access to the computer. Like, the computer literally isn't there. It's just a— it's just an endpoint. It's a slim PC thing that has nothing in it, so you can't take any data out of it and you can fully secure it.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:11]:
Yeah, I mean, it's right. So in a highly managed environment, there's call for this kind of thing. I— is it— it's not— I wouldn't describe it as the future. It is one of many ways to run Windows apps on a local screen with a local keyboard and mouse. But in this case, not— I mean, there's enough RAM and processing to make that, you know, display, and, you know, the performance is reasonable, etc. But, um, it's just one of many ways to do that, um, you know, alongside things like an actual physical device, obviously, or virtualization, or whatever, whatever else is out there.

Mikah Sargent [00:17:46]:
I feel like if you're, yeah, because it feels a little bit that if you are investing, if it still needs to have a certain amount of local processing power and then you need to get the peripherals for it to go along with it, then it's coming to a point where you're going, why not just build a laptop?

Paul Thurrott [00:18:05]:
Yeah, because, well, it's a support, um, it's a support, uh, idea. And like, you know, you're really locking this thing down. This might be for, this is people, it's also a security angle.

Richard Campbell [00:18:15]:
Right?

Paul Thurrott [00:18:15]:
Yeah, you just show up, maybe you're there for a week because you're on some site or something, you do this work, and then next week you're somewhere else. I mean, it's not, it's not designed— well, I mean, you could, I suppose a business might give it out to employees to bring home, I don't know. But I—

Richard Campbell [00:18:30]:
more likely, this is the most impersonal PC.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:34]:
Yes, I like it. Yeah, it's the IPC, and the I does not stand for internet, it stands for impersonal. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:18:42]:
Yep. But you know, the other side with the virtual machine and so forth, I can, as the administrator, just reset them, right? So you're literally back to a standard template. Like, this is actually not a bad solution for a student lab where they can't mess with them. You can take a snapshot image to rebuild all the virtual machines immediately and just stand them back up again.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:02]:
So are you suggesting that walking around a classroom with a USB key to reset Windows 10 S computers is a bad idea?

Mikah Sargent [00:19:11]:
Why?

Paul Thurrott [00:19:11]:
Yeah, yes, yes, I am.

Richard Campbell [00:19:12]:
Why?

Paul Thurrott [00:19:12]:
Yes, class will start in 40 minutes.

Richard Campbell [00:19:14]:
Uh, yeah, just please stand by. Yeah, no, it's the idea that now I can run a script that literally just hops all those, makes a new set of virtual machines so they can get to work and kills the old ones.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:26]:
Yeah, yeah. So there's that. Um, a lot of this stuff is sort of indirect Windows news in a way. Um, Google announced I think yesterday that they're going to move Chrome from a 4-week development schedule for each version to a 2-week development schedule. I only mentioned that here because— and it— well, I should mention too, I think they switched from 6 to 4 weeks, I want to say, 5 years ago, 3, 3 to 5 years ago, if I remember correctly. Um, but when they, when they made that schedule change last time, everyone that made a Chromium-based browser followed, followed suit, right? And so that's very common in the industry. Mozilla is also on schedule. Apple, you know, because they're Apple, still ties, um, Safari development to like OS versions, which is kind of bizarre, frankly, in the— in this 21st century we live in.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:20]:
But I assume we're going to see Microsoft someday, some— now, you know, between now and September when this change is going to occur, announce that they too will be moving Edge to a, um—

Richard Campbell [00:20:31]:
I mean, the implication here is that if you're going to go to a 2-week build of Chrome, that means you have to do a 2-week build of Chromium. Yes. And so that's right, everybody uses Chromium, pretty much has to push out a build.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:40]:
Either you're going to skip a version or— yeah, yeah. So I, I expect they will. I— the little asterisk here is that one of the things we talk about basically every single week is the chaos that occurs from all the frequent updates we get in Windows 11 now. And you hear that they're escalating this schedule and it's like, oh, I don't like that, but you know, that doesn't sound good to me. But The way Google described it was this means that each version will not be as big of a deal, right? Um, the, the more you do, the smaller the changes are going to be and that this should actually be less chaotic. And of course browsers update pretty quick anyway. Um, I will also just point out because I've complained about this also just about every week on the show that I'll come in here, turn on my computer, bring up Notion. And I, uh, this is not an exaggeration.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:29]:
I think every time I run Notion now it says, oh, there's an update. Like every time, um, every day.

Richard Campbell [00:21:35]:
Same for me. Everything I open now is updated almost every time.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:38]:
Yep. So I mean, honestly, if anything, Google's moving too slow here. I don't know what they're doing. But yeah, I, I only mention it, like I said, because I think Microsoft will probably do the same. I think they're gonna have to.

Richard Campbell [00:21:52]:
But yeah, I don't really have a choice. You don't skip versions of Chromium. You don't know what's going to fix it. It's usually The other thing with this case is there's no longer security patches, there's just updates.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:02]:
There's just updates.

Richard Campbell [00:22:03]:
Yeah, that's just like, why would you— you don't need to do a special update if you know you got one coming every 2 weeks, really.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:08]:
Yeah, I mean, this is, um, again, Apple a little bit of an outlier, but the way that Google has changed the Android development schedule is kind of speaks to this kind of thing as well. But there are— there were always late these annual releases, and there still are, but there are also quarterly releases, which are usually new features, but there's always security updates that are part of that. And then there are monthly security updates across the board. And then of course, zero-day, whatever, you know, you, you roll out security updates, uh, as needed. And that's our world. Like, we're in a world of just constant updates. So I'm not worried about it. It's not in certification.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:43]:
Don't even— I don't even know why you— why did anyone even mention that?

Richard Campbell [00:22:46]:
I can't imagine why you would think such a thing. That's crazy.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:49]:
It's crazy. This is all done for our benefit. We should thank our overlords, uh, wherever they may be.

Mikah Sargent [00:22:57]:
Okay, I do need to briefly mention we, we kicked off the show with, um, talking about Bitwarden, and Bitwarden is a sponsor of the network. So there's just a little disclosure. Um, Paul was, uh, talking about Bitwarden because it's a new feature.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:15]:
Uh, yeah, I'm Regardless of them being a sponsor, Bitwarden is one of two password managers I can recommend to anybody without reservation. So I mentioned them because they're relevant. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Not because they're a sponsor.

Mikah Sargent [00:23:33]:
If you want to hit those semi-related points, and then I believe we will take a break and Leah will join us.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:42]:
You've missed all the fun with earnings, Mike. I'm sorry. Oh, man. Yeah, we went through the big guys, the Microsofts, Apples, Googles, all that kind of stuff. And then the PC makers start chiming in and usually it's Lenovo and HP usually racked up next to each other. You got chip makers like Intel and AMD and Qualcomm. And now we got the bringing up the rear. So we're kind of hitting the end of the season for the big companies.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:08]:
Dell, which is the third largest PC maker in the world somehow still, announced their earnings this past week. They're doing great, but not because of PCs necessarily. Most of that growth is coming from their AI data center server offerings, as you would expect these days. That business is bigger than their PC business already, but it's also experiencing really big growth. So for example, The PC part of that business was $13.5 billion in revenues, which is up 14%. But the infrastructure group, which is the data center AI stuff, is $19.6 billion, up 73%. And they're already talking about this year, it's like, "We're basically sold out. We'll build as many of these as we can, but we're going to sell all of them and more." So they had kind of a nice outlook for the rest of the year.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:06]:
So unlike a lot of these companies, they're doing pretty good. And then Nvidia, which is doing better than anybody in some ways, or at least in this space, record revenues of $68 billion in the quarter, up 73% year over year. Wow. Net income.

Richard Campbell [00:25:25]:
They didn't do that in a year 2 years ago.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:28]:
They did one quarter of that a year not that long ago. I mean, it's ridiculous. But the thing that really strikes me is how profitable this business is. Net income was $43 billion on $68 billion. Their profit or their margins are like 65— I mean, I'm just doing this in my head. It's not really exactly that, but it's like 65%-ish. I mean, it's crazy. That's better than Apple.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:55]:
I mean, that's crazy. For the fiscal year, $120 billion straight up profit on revenues of $216 billion. Again, just killing it.

Richard Campbell [00:26:07]:
Makes you want to invest in AI companies if you got that.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:10]:
Well, not AI companies, AI company. Because in this kind of circle jerky kind of world of AI in the data center and all this CapEx spending all these companies are going, are making. The point I've made from Microsoft's side, which I would make from all of the software provider sides, meaning OpenAI, Anthropic, and then Amazon, Microsoft, Google, is they're paying real money to build real infrastructure and they're building it on the promise that they're going to get revenue someday from companies that have promised to pay them that may or may not be able to pay them. But when Nvidia post revenues. They've sold hardware. They made something and they sold it. They're on the other side of that equation. To give you an idea of how small they used to be, their gaming and AI PC business, $3.7 billion in revenue.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:09]:
So I'm tough on math, but that's one half of 10%. Well, I guess that's 5%. You know what I'm saying? That part of the business is tiny, but the data center, whatever, the Blackwell, NVLink, all that stuff is just still— I don't know how they— Every quarter I think this is going to be the one where it's going to be under 70% growth. Nope. Not yet. It's incredible. They're doing okay.

Mikah Sargent [00:27:39]:
I was going to say, yeah, I think they're doing all right.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:43]:
They're going to be okay.

Mikah Sargent [00:27:45]:
Well, uh, I believe it is now time for a brief little moment with Leo, who is here to tell us about the sponsor of this week's episode.

Leo Laporte [00:27:55]:
This episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by ThreatLocker. ThreatLocker's Zero Trust platform takes a proactive deny-by-default approach, blocking every unauthorized action to protect you from both known and unknown threats. Modern attacks hide inside the endpoints. Attacker-controlled virtual machines, sandboxed environments, or VM-based malware evade traditional antivirus software. Not ThreatLocker. ThreatLocker Zero Trust prevents VM-based attacks before they can launch. ThreatLocker's innovative ring-fencing constrains tools and remote management utilities so attackers cannot weaponize them for lateral movement or mass encryption. ThreatLocker works in every industry.

Leo Laporte [00:28:38]:
They have great 24/7 US-based support. They support Windows and Mac environments, and they enable comprehensive visibility and control. Just ask Emirates Flight Catering. They're a global leader in the food industry, 13,000 employees, and they use ThreatLocker. ThreatLocker gave them full control of apps and endpoints, improved their compliance, and delivered seamless security with strong IT support. The CISO of Emirates Flight Catering said this, quote, The capabilities, the support, and the best part of ThreatLocker is how easily it integrates with almost any solution. Other tools take time to integrate, but with ThreatLocker, it's seamless. That's one of the key reasons we use it.

Leo Laporte [00:29:17]:
It's incredibly helpful to me as a CISO. ThreatLocker is trusted by global enterprises like JetBlue, Heathrow Airport, the Indianapolis Colts, and the Port of Vancouver. ThreatLocker consistently receives high honors and industry recognition. G2 High Performer and Best Support for Enterprise Summer 2025. PeerSpot ranked them number 1 in application control, and GetApp gave them their Best Functionality and Features award last year. Get unprecedented protection quickly, easily, and cost-effectively with ThreatLocker. Visit threatlocker.com/twit to get a free 30-day trial and learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. That's ThreatLocker.

Mikah Sargent [00:29:59]:
Threatlocker.com/twit. How appropriate that ThreatLocker should be the sponsor on this week's episode of Windows Weekly with Richard Campbell coming to us from that ThreatLocker conference.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:11]:
This—

Richard Campbell [00:30:11]:
go ahead. Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, let me, let me just pan up and show you that we're here. Let's see. Here's the big logo of the ThreatLocker conference. It's been a ton of fun. These guys are really great.

Mikah Sargent [00:30:25]:
Awesome. Glad to hear that. Now, uh, we of course before the break we're talking about Windows 11. We're back from the break and now it's time for everyone's favorite AI.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:39]:
I mentioned the unfortunate phrase circle jerk earlier, and now I will refer to OpenAI in that context. Um, they disclosed a $110 billion funding round which values them at $700 $30 billion, up from $500 billion in October. You know, they have an annualized revenue run rate of about $20 billion, so I don't see any problem with them ever paying that back or whatever.

Richard Campbell [00:31:07]:
But— 35 times, 40 times?

Paul Thurrott [00:31:11]:
It's normal. It's fine.

Richard Campbell [00:31:12]:
It's really not. That's not normal.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:15]:
I know. I'm curious, you know, the way Anthropic is been making inroads lately. ChatGPT, for example, now has 900 million weekly active users. So it's closing in on that billion number, which is so important. But like the Nvidia growth stuff, it's like, okay, so this is going to have to slow at some point. And I wonder now if Anthropic or Cloud, whatever we're calling it, has such a good impression among people out in the world that maybe, I don't know, We seem to understand that we have options that are just as good or better depending on what it is you're doing.

Richard Campbell [00:31:50]:
So. Because Anthropic's really focused on the enterprise, right? Which is, I mean, a tougher sell, but a sticky sell when you get it done.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:58]:
This is the— Yeah. It's almost like the Apple-Google thing where Apple is like, "Look, we're going to be a little more expensive, but you get what you pay for and you get this kind of level of quality." And that's the Anthropic angle where Google is like, "Yeah, we have expensive stuff, but we also have this really cheap stuff." And it's you know, you have this kind of range of options. And so that's the OpenAI angle in a way. Yeah, we'll see. Anthropic so far has somehow managed to thread this needle pretty well.

Richard Campbell [00:32:28]:
Yeah. Well, we've been talking about, you know, who's going to be Netscape and who's going to be Google in this story. And Anthropic's looking way more Googly.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:37]:
Yeah, we'll see. I'm curious. I mentioned earlier how beloved Copilot was. One of the other themes in AI is that everyone is doing it, I think is the way to look at it. And in this case, what I'm referring to is we have AI agents that to my knowledge have never done anything for anybody. But now we have this notion of AI that kind of spins off agents to go do individual tasks and then come back and you can have multiple agents going at the same time. And so We see this across all the AIs. Microsoft has implemented something called Copilot Tasks, and I believe that's been available for a while if you were a business customer or developer, but now it is also available as a preview for consumers.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:29]:
So if you have a consumer version of Copilot, you have that thing like OpenAI has an agent mode on its paid plans. And Tropic, I think that's part of the whole co-work or code, you know, cloud code offering, where part of it is you, you spin up these, um, agents and you're working on something, but you— it's doing these little subtasks and then we'll come back and say, okay, this thing's done and whatever. But I, I don't— I Aside from the Copilot branding problem or whatever you want to call that, marketing, whatever, this feels like a complex thing to me. I'm not really sure how normal people are going to react to this.

Mikah Sargent [00:34:19]:
We'll see.

Richard Campbell [00:34:19]:
Yeah, we've yet to see good user interfaces for these sorts of things. So folks that can, yeah, the average person can get into it. It's tough enough for techies.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:27]:
Yeah, and this was centered to the controversy last, October, November, when, you know, Pavan Davaluri was talking about Bill— or, I'm sorry, Ignite at the time— and that he was going to have be part of a presentation about how they were going to add agents to Windows, and everyone lost their minds, you know. And look, whether anyone wants this or, you know, likes the idea of agents in Windows, or whatever you want to frame this, um, the UI that they came up for Windows is one that I think makes sense in the sense that You think about, well, they're calling them apps. I think of these agents as more like background tasks, and then the app itself is the kind of the front end that does those, runs those background tasks, right? And so, um, but they'll present themselves as, uh, icons in the taskbar. They'll pop up notifications if they need you to interact with it for some reason, to approve something or say yes or no to some decision it wants to make, or whatever it might be, or when it's just done. And You know, in the context of Windows and how Windows works and how people who use Windows are used to things working, it's like, yeah, okay, I mean, that makes sense. Um, but I don't know, there's a lot of AI from day one, uh, day one being like 2 and a half years ago or whatever that was. Um, you know, the modern AI era, um, has been kind of drowning in terminology that I think is intimidating to normal people, frankly. Agents, it's like, what are we doing here?

Richard Campbell [00:35:56]:
I don't know. But everything's an agent, it seems these days, or everything's at least agentic.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:01]:
Right, exactly. Which I'm going to skip ahead one just because it's tied to this in a way. One of the things I keep talking about is that I refer to this as programmatic apps. If you think about Windows, because that is what we think about here, and the way that apps in Windows, whether they're apps built into Windows or third-party apps or whatever it is, can expose their functionality to AI and especially AI agents so that those agents can run some task that is a feature of the app. To me, that— I was for a long time trying to find a word for that. So to me, it's like programmatic. The app is basically exposing an interface that the AI or agent or background service or whatever can consume. And I think the right term is semantic., but you don't actually see that a lot for some reason.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:54]:
Um, that AI agents functionality in Windows that's coming, uh, or Copilot Tasks is sort of that thing. Um, if you right-click on documents or images in Windows, you'll see AI actions and, uh, individual features from individual apps, right? And so that's like a way to make that make sense in the UI that we're familiar with. Um, Google just announced that the next version of Android which just hit beta 2 this past week and will be out by mid-year, will have a similar feature. They're calling it App Functions. They're comparing it to MCP, which is how AIs interact with each other. But in other words, we're going to give that kind of functionality but to apps running in Android. And so of course all the Google apps will do this, but it will be basically the same thing where you have, in this case, maybe you're using Gemini and you are on an Android device and you're, you know, you're researching something or whatever it might be.. And that in this case, Gemini might fire off agents to go run tasks against individual apps.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:55]:
And it will be this functionality that allows that to happen at kind of a system level, right? It'll just be a system function, right? And this is all operating systems are going to do this. So I mean, I'm not surprised, but they, the fact that they announced this, you know, Google I/O is in May and they announced this in— it might have been still late February at the time, or very early March. Um, you know, they want to get developers going on this stuff. So it's just interesting to me that it's so similar to what Microsoft is doing in Windows. But then again, of course it is, right? I mean, it makes sense. Um, like it's almost one right way. Yeah, I, I kind of wish these companies would settle on terms, you know, like just have the right— I would like that as well. Yeah, yeah, it's because it's confusing enough already, but Okay, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:43]:
I don't know.

Richard Campbell [00:38:44]:
It's good luck.

Mikah Sargent [00:38:45]:
Yeah, well, because they've settled on, uh, what is it, the, the, the model that lets them communicate?

Paul Thurrott [00:38:54]:
MCP. Yeah, MCP became a standard. That was something Anthropic invented and kind of gave to the world, and everyone else said, yep, we're doing it. And this is based on that. Um, but you know, micro— I don't, uh, I'm not sure what Microsoft's calling it, but I'm gonna guess it's not going to be called App Functions. It's such a Google name. But whatever. And then Apple will have to do its own thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:16]:
Or will it? I don't know. No, it will. Of course it will. It will have to do its own thing. The way Apple works is they'll do it for themselves first. So you'll see some, whatever it is, iOS 27 will have all these integrations with the built-in apps in the phone. And then the next year they'll probably bring it to everyone else or whatever, because the way they do things. But that's fine.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:38]:
Let's see, was it January, February? Whenever it was, maybe for January, Microsoft confused me, but by releasing something called the Windows App Development CLI. This is a command line interface for software development projects. Now, the initial release was mostly kind of Electron web projects, and it was like, I don't— what's the point of this? But in the latest release, this is still an early preview, so this is like version 0.2, um, they've added support for.NET projects, right? And that's like including WinUI 3, but Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Forms,.NET console apps, whatever. And okay, I— this is the type of thing I think if they had mentioned this was coming and I was like, okay, but now that I see that, I'm like, all right, this is starting to make a little bit of sense. I, I also questioned why we needed a Windows Store CLI. That was something that came out last month very quietly, which is yet another command line interface to the apps that are available in the Microsoft Store, right? So we already have Winget, which are the Windows Package Manager, which handles store and web-based, web repository-based apps. The Microsoft CLI only handles store apps, which have certain advantages or whatever, but it's also a smaller list of apps, but I guess it's kind of a curated list. So the Windows App Development CLI actually integrates with the Microsoft Store CLI and not Winget.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:06]:
So in this case, you do the, the command line is WinApp. So you can actually just type WinApp store and then whatever the store commands or arguments are, and it will, it will just pass that through. And that might be actually why the Microsoft Store CLI even exists now that I'm thinking about it. But So yeah, this is starting to come together. So the idea here is that you're a developer, maybe you get a new PC, you have to fire up a new project or whatever it is. And anyone who's ever used Visual Studio especially, but I guess Visual Studio Code as well, depending on what you're doing with it, there's a lot of prerequisites, there's a lot of versioning issues, packaging issues, all kinds of things. And this sets that up for you. I've not used it, so I don't do anything complex enough to need this.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:53]:
I'm basically using Tinker Toys. But this is interesting because you can just literally initialize a new project from the command line and it will just do all the right Windows SDK version targeting, the NuGet references you need. It's going to generate all the XML and assets and blah, blah, blah, whatever it might be depending on the type of project you're doing. So it's, it's interesting.

Leo Laporte [00:42:19]:
It's—

Paul Thurrott [00:42:19]:
I don't know, I feel like it's going to click eventually.

Richard Campbell [00:42:22]:
We got a.NET Rocks coming up where we talk about CLIs in general. Yeah. And the sort of key part to know is that LLMs work way better with CLIs. Uh, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:42:33]:
Okay.

Richard Campbell [00:42:33]:
So one of the driving forces is the automation tools. Yep.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:37]:
That are coming. Okay, that's, that's a good point. So I haven't written about this yet, but I've been using AI to work on a programming project. And one of the weird issues I ran into was trying to get it to build successfully from the GUI. And eventually the thing came back to me and said, "Would you just go to the command line and type this in and it's going to work fine?" And I was like, "That's not how I do things, but okay." And then it did work. And I was like, "Okay, you suck." But I But I think that's the point because you can do what is essentially, or it can do what is essentially like screen scraping for GUIs that have like a dialogue or an error message that's inside of like an IDE or something. But the CLI stuff is exactly the way it communicates and the output is something it can just read natively. You don't have to worry about whatever GUI.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:33]:
So yeah, I think that actually that's a good point.

Richard Campbell [00:43:36]:
That's almost— Yeah. And that's been the, and it's the whole push in that show is like CLI should be your first interface when you're building out an application, which has interesting consequences when you start thinking about what your interface is ultimately going to look like from a GUI perspective or any of those things.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:49]:
But, you know, this is the worst. Realize first, uh, all of us except for Micah, uh, are old enough that we have now experienced the same things at least 3 or 4 times, and it's starting to get irritating, right? Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:44:05]:
So for example, be an age thing, but yes.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:07]:
It's literally an age thing. So if you go back into— Richard will have a better memory of this, but I want to say it was probably Exchange 2003, but maybe 2007. At that time, you know, Monad or PowerShell had occurred and Microsoft was going to do the opposite of what they did traditionally, which was build a GUI for whatever. And then later when they realized they might need some kind of command line way to access those functions, Write that separately and maybe hit the same underlying code or however they did it. And then for whatever version of Exchange, they said, "No, we're going to do this completely the opposite way. We're going to create everything from the command line first, and the GUI is just going to run that stuff. It's going to be a front end for that." They did that with Internet Information Administrator too. Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:57]:
So that makes sense to me with the caveat that I don't believe I ever heard much about it after a couple of years. New versions of Windows Server and other servers came out, and then eventually obviously we go to the cloud and whatever happens there. I just don't follow this world as closely, but to me, from a software development perspective, it actually does make sense in my stupid little ape brain that you would build all of this stuff to be accessible from either a scripting or programming language first, and then build your GUI on top of that. To me, that makes sense. So whether or not that is what has happened, I actually have no idea. But as we head into this AI space and now it makes even more sense for all—

Richard Campbell [00:45:42]:
it's even more driven. But that's, you know, where that really ended up was WinAdminCenter. WinAdminCenter was a set of web interfaces over top of generating remote executing PowerShell.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:55]:
Yeah. And which I think speaks to the reason why that approach makes so much more sense, right? Mm-hmm. It is, it enables, well, it more easily enables those kind of remote scenarios, which is every admin scenario. I mean, yeah, now, I mean, the notion that you're not saying you're hitting them, you're on the computer logging in, it's like, no, no, no, you are not.

Richard Campbell [00:46:19]:
Yeah. You know.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:19]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:46:19]:
Well, and the reality is they were trying to get rid of RDP and they couldn't because there's some admin tasks and some security profiles where it's like we count on RDP as a way to jump because they're just in GUI, and thus you have to remotely access that desktop. It is not easy to do remote access PowerShell. Like, it is definitely a challenge. And so as much as Microsoft pushed us to do that, there's just a certain group of tasks and a certain group of people are like, nope, I cannot give up RDP. And so they still do remote in. That's just reality. You want to PowerShell all things. I mean, the most important PowerShell script in my life is the one that remotely mutes my wife's computer because she leaves the music on and walks away.

Richard Campbell [00:47:06]:
It makes me crazy and I'm not going over there. Like, I'm not doing it. So I wrote a great effort.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:12]:
You're like, look, I could get 10 seconds of exercise twice a week or I could spend 3 hours writing a PowerShell script.

Richard Campbell [00:47:19]:
More hours than that. Remote executing without a domain controller. My God. Yeah, it was not easy to do. But you know that little icon sitting on my desktop that makes that machine go quiet? It's my favorite icon, man.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:32]:
It's a goodie. Sometimes I just trigger it when I'm on the road just to mess with it.

Richard Campbell [00:47:35]:
Yeah, just to be happy. That's funny. Yeah, remote execute PowerShell is not simple, but it is a core skill when you think about administrating, especially at scale. You know what's amazing about PowerShell is pipelining, saying, okay, I now have to send this command to 100 machines. You're going to do that in RDP?

Paul Thurrott [00:47:57]:
You're there for days. I know this is going to cause like, uh, uh, you know, tingles down everyone's back, but I mean, obviously with the Windows App Development CLI, we're talking about, you know, app development or software development. Um, but yeah, I mean, the— this remote capability is, you know, there are going to be AI-assisted admin tasks as well, right? Of course there are. I mean, so Yeah, this just makes sense. I don't know. Hopefully they were doing this all along. I feel like they weren't, but I feel like there are two sets of interfaces. There's the, I guess what we'll call the CLI interface for now, and then the GUI.

Richard Campbell [00:48:38]:
But if you go back through the catalog of 2,000 or so.NET Rocks episodes, 2,000 is coming up real soon now. You're going to see a whole, just search on the phrase first.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:48]:
Right?

Richard Campbell [00:48:49]:
Because we've done internet first and web first and mobile first, and now we're doing CLI first. And I just, you know, there are days where I'm like, I'm clearly just—

Paul Thurrott [00:48:58]:
so you see this, you're— you just— you said it better than I said it, but you just spoke to what I was speaking to, which is like, when you've been around long enough, yeah, you're like, we've done this before, you know, we've done this many times.

Richard Campbell [00:49:11]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:11]:
And after a while, it's like, this is just irritating now. When I was 20 years younger, this was exciting. And now I'm like, no, just stop. Like, enough.

Richard Campbell [00:49:21]:
Yeah, it's a different— yeah, I'm not gonna— no. Yeah, I know, I know. And I made that— I've made that show again. I have a CLI-first show now. It's like, am I, am I sad about it?

Paul Thurrott [00:49:31]:
No.

Richard Campbell [00:49:32]:
We're not wrong, right? Things have evolved again.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:34]:
Well, like I said, I mean, this, regardless of AI, although this amplifies it, I— this to me always When they talked about that, it's 25 years ago, it's 20 years ago anyway. I was like, "Yeah, no, this is the right way to do it." I think the rejection there was that was the way it worked on Unix. Everything in Unix starts from a command line and then eventually they build these really terrible UIs over time and then eventually they get better, but they came at it from a different perspective. Microsoft's thing, Windows NT and then just Windows Server, was always like a response to Unix and it was trying to fix some of the things they perceived as the problems with Unix, which with a little bit of hindsight, maybe not all of them were correct, but, um, it was always like everybody was experimenting, man.

Richard Campbell [00:50:21]:
We were all trying to figure stuff out.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:23]:
Yeah, I'm not pointing any fingers, uh, at, you know, Dave Keller or anything, but I, I'm just saying, you know, we, we came at it from a different perspective.

Richard Campbell [00:50:33]:
Um, hey, Unix went command line first because that's what they had, you know. It's not a crime to vision, it's what they had.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:41]:
No, I absolutely— and look, Dave Cutler and that team came up out of DEC. I mean, they came from that world too. I, I suspect that the, um, uh, the requirement to do GUI first or slash only— really first, but let's call it GUI only— came from above, right? I mean, this was like, you know, at some point it was like, this thing has to look like Windows, this thing has to run Windows apps, this thing has to be Windows, you know. And that's I'm sure left to his own devices, Dave Cutler might have— and that team, it's not just one guy— but might have gone in a different direction from an interface perspective. Meaning there would have been a GUI, of course, but they probably would've— it might've been a more kind of a thorough PDP or Unix-style kind of command line interface, maybe. I don't know.

Richard Campbell [00:51:31]:
But we got DOS. Yeah, my experience with senior people is that they tend to go back to fundamentals and that fundamental is gonna be command line. Like, that's what they knew. It's where they started. That's how they—

Paul Thurrott [00:51:44]:
I can't remember if I mentioned this, but I think I might have, 2, 3, 4 weeks ago, like, Microsoft last year announced a command line editor called Edit, right? Which hearkens back to the great DOS editors of, you know, yesteryear. Headless. And you know, it's like, what's the point of this thing, right? It's going to be included in Windows 11 allegedly. I believe it's not in there yet. You can download it from GitHub or whatever. Um, you might be able to even get it from the store. I'm not sure how you get it, but it's wonderful. I mean, it's wonderful, right? It works like all your keyboard shortcuts.

Richard Campbell [00:52:17]:
It's aimed at you.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:18]:
I know, I, I, I'm in love with this thing. And I think this might be another aspect of aging where you I'm regressing to a baby eventually, but for now I'm, you know, I've gotten to the point where like when I first discovered computing and it's like, you know, command lines were the thing and I, I love it. I figured out how to add it to the Open With menu.

Richard Campbell [00:52:40]:
There is a PM out there with a big note that says nostalgia interface and they're making sure they hit your button.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:46]:
Oh my God. And you have to hit the, it's gotta have that exact DOS font, you know, from back in the day where it was just, you know, like you see it and you're like, oh my God, this is awesome. It really is awesome.

Richard Campbell [00:52:56]:
I love it. Does it do green text on black background?

Paul Thurrott [00:53:02]:
Well, I mean, you run it in terminal, so you can, yeah, you could have it be anything you want. Well, there you go. The editor interface has its own thing, but it looks, you know, the colors are kind of like, well, it depends on the, actually it depends on terminal. So yeah, you could, I'm sure you could. I haven't, but yeah, I'm sure you could. Scott Hanselman probably has this going already.

Richard Campbell [00:53:19]:
Inevitably, you know he does.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:20]:
All right. You know he does. For sure. Um, just apropos nothing, I just love this thing. I— text editor, it's beautiful. Um, I really do, I love it. Um, we had been speculating or wondering what's going on with Build this year given what happened last year with Build and, well, and then Ignite before that. Um, they had moved Ignite to San Francisco.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:41]:
The guess was they were probably going to move Build to San Francisco as well, out of Seattle.

Richard Campbell [00:53:46]:
And, um, normally that's the main thing about Seattle was too much homeless, too much drug use, so they went to San Francisco. Yep.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:55]:
Okay, interesting choice. That's like saying Mars is too hot, let's go to Mercury. Um, it's, you know, it's one way to do it, as you say. I just adore— I just, it's just so mental. But, um, so they just announced that yes, it will be in, uh, San Francisco as we expected, but it's going to be in June, which we did not expect.

Richard Campbell [00:54:16]:
It's also not going to be at Moscone.

Mikah Sargent [00:54:18]:
It's at Fort Mason.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:19]:
In June during WWDC?

Richard Campbell [00:54:22]:
That's the thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:23]:
Oh, man. For years, and I mean over a decade, the issue with Build has been that it often fell right on top of or literally at the same time as Google I/O. One of the issues with having a show like this is you have to find a venue that has an opening that can take that many people, et cetera, et cetera. And I suspect for San Francisco, like the Moscone Center was probably pretty full booked up or whatever, and they were trying to figure that out. But, but now they're going to overlap, I think, or very— if, if not be very close to, uh, WWDC. And I, you know, someone— I had someone on some Twitter, whatever social network, was like, oh, that's like kind of a bold move, you know. I'm like, no, it isn't. They, they didn't want that.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:05]:
They know that anything they announce will be overshadowed by, by a stupid color bauble thing that Apple announces. So, um, you know, like, I— they do not want that thing overlap with WWDC. It's like a, you know, this is like WWDC, it's a developer show allegedly, but it's, you know, the keynote and whatever they announce is like on the nightly news locally. I mean, Microsoft will announce— they could announce the greatest thing, we solved quantum computing, it won't even be on the news. I mean, not if there's a new Apple device or a new whatever it is, iOS 27 or whatever we're calling it. Um, so no, I don't This is not them being bold. This is them taking what they can do, you know.

Richard Campbell [00:55:47]:
Um, they heard the feedback. Only a 2-day show, which is small. Yeah. And the Fort Mason is a smaller venue, I think.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:54]:
Is it like at a community college or something? Like, what is this?

Richard Campbell [00:55:58]:
Like, uh, it's an old army base. Yeah. But, you know, uh, GitHub did a GitHub Universe there a few years ago. Uh, okay. And I think it was 2,000 people. So I, I've also I've heard it is— well, it's cheap.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:12]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:56:12]:
And well, it is invite only.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:13]:
You have to apply. Oh, nice. Okay. Um, I— look, the, the problem for anyone that wants to attend this show, aside from the obviously obvious cost logistical stuff, is that Microsoft has not communicated here's what we're going to talk about, because why would they? Depending on where you are as a developer, you may or not want to be at this thing, right? I mean, if you're a, you We've spent, uh, God, a decade and a half, I don't know, wondering why Windows wasn't a bigger deal at this show. I don't think we wonder anymore, but depending on where you are in life, this may be incredibly relevant or not. And I wish there was a little more guidance there, but we'll see.

Richard Campbell [00:56:55]:
But a $1,000 ticket for a Microsoft show is half—

Paul Thurrott [00:56:59]:
that's a bargain. Yep.

Richard Campbell [00:57:01]:
But I don't know that it's a good look.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:04]:
Are they going to offer like hotel, uh, accommodations that will also be half price for San Francisco, or what I would call a normal price anywhere else?

Richard Campbell [00:57:12]:
Um, also look at how close Fort Mason is to any hotels, so I hope they've got a bus shuttle set up too.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:18]:
It's on the waterfront. I— we all both have had enough experience with these kind of shows, like say Chicago, to say that, uh, the bus thing's going to work out great. What's your problem?

Richard Campbell [00:57:29]:
And did Boston You know, like, we've been there before. I just know that there's anybody working there that worked on a show with bus service at this point.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:37]:
It's been a long time. I mean, Boston— South Boston was only connected to Boston proper about 17 years ago, so it's no wonder that didn't work out. But, um, there's still no— I mean, there's never going to be a subway there, right? Like, it's, it's all buses.

Richard Campbell [00:57:50]:
So it's just the way it is. It's gonna have to be buses. I don't know. It's interesting. I don't know if I'm going.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:56]:
That's the great, you know, I mean, unless something dramatic changes for me, I can't imagine going to this. Um, yeah, yeah, it's too far to go for too short of a period of time for too much stuff I just don't think I'm gonna care about that much, I think. But I don't know, you know, I don't know.

Richard Campbell [00:58:12]:
But this show is also scaled like the old Connect show where it's literally just gonna be a streaming event with an applause track.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:19]:
Yeah, kind of like, uh, Build was before they started letting people back. You know, after the pandemic, that kind of thing. Yeah. You know, the first year there or two where they only had like a very small local audience and the new part of the convention center, and then most of it was just streaming, you know.

Mikah Sargent [00:58:37]:
All right. Uh, up next, it's going to be time for Xbox Corner. Xbox Corner is up next. All right, Paul, tell us what's going on in the land of Xbox.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:51]:
Box. There's a lot. Um, I've added a couple of items, uh, since I originally posted the notes, but I'll start with the stuff that, um, was already there. So it's March, in case you didn't know. Um, my favorite, uh, headline of the year is always, uh, daylight savings is coming, here's what you need to know. And what you need to know is when is it. That's it, that's the whole thing.

Mikah Sargent [00:59:18]:
Um, so I like that.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:19]:
That's good. Yeah. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:59:21]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:21]:
You know, so, but twice a month typically, sometimes more often, we get new drops of Game Pass titles across console, PC, and cloud. And they just did the first one for March. And the big one to me is Cyberpunk 2077 is coming to console and I think cloud, but not PC. And it's like, I actually kind of want to play this, but maybe it's already on PC. I'm not, I should look this up, but that's the big one. But Final Fantasy III is in there. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, we talked about, I think at one point. Uh, EA Sports F1 25, which I assume is a racing game and not yet another soccer game, or as the rest of the planet might call it, a football game.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:01]:
Football. Um, Hollow Knight: Silksong, that was kind of a big one. Um, and Gabby's Dollhouse: Ready to Party. Oh good, it's either gonna be awesome for a guy like me or the worst experience of my entire life. It's kind of hard to say, uh, but based on the name, that could be anything from Jeffrey Epstein's island to some little girls playing with the dollhouse. I have no idea, which I guess is Jeffrey Epstein's island. Anyway, I'm sorry, I'm off track. So that's happening.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:29]:
This wasn't in the notes originally. Microsoft pinged me right before the show, and this is kind of tied to something I'm going to talk about in the back of the book, but they're highlighting— I guess they do this every month, but they have an indie program obviously through Xbox. Um, every month they do an indie select where they just— these aren't necessarily brand new games, but they're indie games, um, that they recommend, you know. And a lot of them are pretty inexpensive, which is kind of cool. The thing that's really shocking about indie games these days, and I think this is only going to get better and better, is like how high quality they are. Um, there's a term I've not really thought about too much since the 1990s, but if you think about the advent of CD-ROMs right back in the day. And there were CD-ROM kind of add-ons for computers and consoles even. And there were some consoles that were just original, like CD32, like the Commodore thing, or CD-i— remember that? Um, that were CD-based, right? And back then, the, the height of technology in this space was FMV, uh, full motion video, which was probably 320 by 240 or maybe 600 by 400 or something.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:40]:
Um, one of these games is a horror title called Heart of the Forest. It's, it's completely full motion video, so it looks like you're watching a movie. Whoa.

Mikah Sargent [01:01:50]:
And it's—

Paul Thurrott [01:01:50]:
I'm kind of curious about it. It's $13. You know, it's kind of like I said, it's going to tie into something I'll talk about later. But if you look through these games, by and large, I mean, some of them are, you know, gamey and kind of cartoony looking, but But some of them are like, wow, these are small teams of people making incredible high-quality games. It's worth looking at. If you have— I'm losing where I am in the notes here. No, that's not it. I'll find it eventually, I promise.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:22]:
I guess I won't. I think I have the wrong link, that's why. So yep. Yeah, I always do this at least once. So if you have an Xbox ROG Ally gaming handheld, which you probably don't, but eventually this is the, the type of stuff that's going to come. So yeah, both of you guys, um, or some other gaming handhelds like this little Lenovo, um, Go 2, which is the version I reviewed last fall, which is kind of a little bit bigger than the ROG Ally but, uh, will become an Ally device, meaning they'll get the front-end UI and all that kind of stuff. Um, they are now pushing, um, AI-based game recaps, uh, which is, uh, how do I say this? If you're in the Xbox Insider Program, you can see this on any computer. So I've actually seen this in Call of Duty.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:12]:
So like, I, you know, which is goofy because I don't— I launch Call of Duty and I play multiple multiplayer games, and then I close the app, right, or close the game, and then this thing comes up from the Xbox app. It's like, hey, you did great that game. It's like, shut up. You idiot. So it's that kind of thing. It's like, I just played 17 games and you're gonna have a commentary about one of them? Like, what is— what are you doing? But anyway, that's now shipping in stable, I guess, for Xbox. Rog Alley, you don't have to be an Insider program. I didn't mention this up at the top of the show, but this week is Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:47]:
So lots of mobile and even PC kind of announcements. Lenovo always announces a bunch of computers. So there's a bunch of new ThinkPads and they have concept PCs and it's all very interesting. But to me, the big one is a concept for that Lenovo Legion Go gaming handheld, right? So the way that thing works today is it's like, you know, like any gaming handheld. It's got the controllers on the side of the screen, which you can pop off if you want, but nobody ever would. They have a version— this is a concept, not a shipping computer— but it's basically a folding screen, computer. I mean, like, um, like the, you know, you don't really see a lot of— like a laptop essentially, right? So in its unfolded dimensions, this is like a 7.7-inch display, which is a lot like gaming handhelds, about roughly 7-8 inches. But you can unfold it to 11.6 inches, and you can do it vertical or horizontal.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:45]:
Now obviously for game, most games, you're going to want horizontal. Of course, then you play it on here or something, but This is kind of a cool idea. I, I think that the central, um, advantage of any hybrid device, if it's successful, is that it can replace two devices, right? Um, you know, so if Apple comes out with their folding iPhone, it's like, okay, this is like an iPhone and an iPad Mini maybe, right? It's like, okay, that's interesting. You know, a folding laptop or whatever can be like a giant screen with a detachable keyboard, and it's like cool, but when you transport it, it's a smaller thing. And so this is something you could tuck in your bag. It's the same size as a gaming handheld, but when you're actually playing, you can fold that thing out. It's like this awesome huge screen. I'm like, yeah, no, this, this actually sounds like kind of a cool idea.

Richard Campbell [01:05:31]:
So, and, and to be clear, when you unfold it like that, it goes seamless, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:05:36]:
Yeah, it's one screen. It's not like there's no border.

Richard Campbell [01:05:38]:
It's, it's just one. Okay. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:42]:
Yep. That's, that's crazy. It's interesting.

Richard Campbell [01:05:43]:
Yeah, it is crazy. Yeah. But that's Lenovo. They are the ones who go nuts innovative machines.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:48]:
Like, they, they're fun. Yeah, they've taken that mantle for sure. And they have different versions, but they're fun. Yeah, well, I mean, they are now shipping one rollable screen device, like, in, like, to the world. Um, there's the version, you know, that you kind of pull up on it like a shade and it's like a tall screen, which, you know, depending on certain scenarios, like, I could kind of see. But you also want the version where it rotates and then you open it kind of like this way. And then it becomes more of a traditional laptop screen. But the, the goal there is you have, uh, hopefully a full-size keyboard and a trackpad, and then this screen can be whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:25]:
It could be like kind of small if you're in like a tight little, uh, coach seat on a plane, or if you've, you know, if you're home or wherever you are, you could just kind of open this thing up. Um, it's kind of— it's a cool idea. It's, uh, yeah, there's no reason not to try this for gaming.

Richard Campbell [01:06:38]:
I think that's a good idea. I love these guys, they're innovative. I'm not going to buy all their crazy things, but I am—

Paul Thurrott [01:06:43]:
no, I'll let someone else buy the crazy things. But, but Yeah, no, it's still interesting. Um, yeah. Um, this also just— this happened since we started the show, but, um, there is a rumor. It's in Bloomberg, so it's not, you know, like Bob's rumor site or anything, but, um, apparently all my rumors— okay, me too. Um, there was, uh, Sony, like Microsoft, But you could make the argument for Microsoft, this makes sense because this is their platform, has been porting a lot of their PlayStation 5 games to the PC. Last year, they released at least one game and possibly two or three that actually shipped on PlayStation 5 and the PC on the same day. Uh, and in fact, one of those games I think shipped on Xbox later, which is like, wow, like it's like a weird, weird, weird place.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:39]:
Um, Apparently there's a rumor— well, not apparently, there is a rumor that Sony is apparently considering, um, only shipping first-party PlayStation games on PlayStation, like not bringing any of them to the PC. And I don't know if that means like day one or just later. It's kind of a— it's a weird backtrack because to me, when you're a game publisher, which Sony is, um, you know, you want those games to be as many places as they can be. That's how this business will be the most successful.

Richard Campbell [01:08:07]:
The conflict of interest of owning the console and also to be in the game publisher. Yeah, it's like the one— the guys who have the console wanted to just be on the console, and I—

Paul Thurrott [01:08:17]:
game publisher wants it everywhere. I think the argument you could make here— so the one thing that's been generally true across the board is that a new game comes out, it doesn't matter who makes it, if that thing is on the Xbox and the PlayStation, it always looks better on the PlayStation, right? Pretty much. Especially if there's a PlayStation 5, uh, Pro optimized version, right? It's just gonna be better frame rates, better graphics, etc. Like, they'll be the one they always show But when you get to the PC, things get interesting because PCs scale basically infinitely. Bigger screens, more horsepower. There's all this. Yeah, you can always make it look better on the PC if you want. And so I suspect from Sony's perspective, like Microsoft, this would not bother them, right? Make it look great on the PC, fantastic, who cares? Um, but from Sony's perspective, you don't want something overshadowing the best console that you make, right?

Richard Campbell [01:09:05]:
And that might And that's impossible because PCs get new hardware every couple of months and consoles come out years apart.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:13]:
Yep. Yep. And that, the one thing I've noticed, you know, playing games pretty exclusively on PC over the past couple years now is that you get a new PC with a new graphics card and it's like, oh my God, you know, it's like you have new eyes all of a sudden. Like everything looks better. You see things you never—

Richard Campbell [01:09:28]:
Yeah, no, it's insane. So here's the question, you know, Sony's done this a few times now. They did the dual release. Have they now come to the conclusion that the PC sales were undermining their PlayStation sales. I don't—

Paul Thurrott [01:09:38]:
this is— that's why they don't know.

Richard Campbell [01:09:39]:
Yeah, that's a good— if they're really doing it.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:41]:
Like I said, it's only a rumor. So, uh, the author of this article, who by the way, now that I'm seeing his name, I believe is the author of that book about, um, Activision Blizzard, or Blizzard— I get the Blizzard part of Activision— uh, Jason Schreier, says that one of the reasons they might be doing this is that The next Xbox is going to be a PC, right? If you— by making the Xbox a PC, that makes targeting the PC less attractive to Sony potentially, because now what you're basically saying is Microsoft's platform is, is the PC, um, and that's where it looks best. And you don't want that, right? I mean, we've seen this with Xbox games. I mean, there have been Xbox games that look better on—

Richard Campbell [01:10:29]:
we're now— we're not going to talk about the hypocrisy in this of, you know, Sony screaming at the FTC, you can't let Microsoft buy Activision Blizzard because they're going to make it all, you know, unique titles.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:41]:
And I'm going to talk about nothing but the hypocrisy of this. I feel like— like, no, this was always like during the Activision Blizzard, uh, antitrust stuff, Sony was just harping on this constantly, and it was just the most— it was ridiculous. But it didn't matter how many people from Microsoft, no matter who they were at any level of the company, who would say it would be insane for us to buy this company for all these billions of dollars and then restrict where the games go. Like, that's not, that's not a business. That's stupid. And, you know, and look, whatever anyone thinks about them buying Activision Blizzard, they followed through on this, right? Like PlayStation 5 is still the PlayStation in general, still the biggest platform form for, uh, like Call of Duty, you know, for example. Like, that was the big fear. They're going to take away Call of Duty.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:28]:
It's like, we're not taking away Call of Duty, you crazy. Like, that doesn't make any sense. Um, it's also possible maybe that Sony's place— or Sony's PC games just haven't sold as well, you know. Maybe, maybe this—

Richard Campbell [01:11:43]:
the investment— interesting. Yeah, having collected this data, now they say, well, how much did it cost us to implement for the PC, and what did we—

Paul Thurrott [01:11:48]:
what was the payoff? Yeah, maybe it's not enough. I look, I, I, I will never— like, my opinion can change with new evidence. I don't mean it that way, but I feel very strongly that from like a gamer's perspective, like from the human, the person playing the game, it's always better to have this thing be— the game be on as many platforms as possible. I agree. Every time. Like, there's no—

Mikah Sargent [01:12:10]:
there is no downside to that. I think part of— well, I mean, I guess it depends again, but, uh, part of The experience is often getting to then talk to other people about it or at least know—

Paul Thurrott [01:12:22]:
Well, to have a bigger audience out there that's doing the thing you're doing. And it's especially true of multiplayer games where I always use this example because it's such a classic one. Oh yeah, that's a good point. Call of Duty, if you flash back to 2005, 2010, whatever year, if you were playing on an Xbox 360 in that time, whatever version of Call of Duty, and you were online, you were playing against people with an Xbox 360. That was the audience. And it was millions of people. Potentially, but at some point they opened it up to cross-platform play where it was basically all consoles, which at that time was just PlayStation, Xbox. So the audience more than doubled, right? Because the PlayStation audience was actually bigger than the Xbox audience.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:01]:
So let's say it went up like whatever, 65% or I guess that would be 165% or whatever it is. Now when you play Call of Duty, the modern versions, you're playing against people on PC, console, Well, Xbox and PlayStation, right? And so that doubled it again. I mean, it's just, it's wonderful. So if that's what you want— what you don't want is to sign into a 2 or 3-year-old copy of Call of Duty in this case, or whatever game, and get online and there's no one there, you know, right? You want, you want the biggest, you want the biggest possible audience. So I don't know, but these get the games— they're talking about things like, um, well, that one was canceled. What's the big, uh, what's that? Not— yes, not Gears of War. So I got this stuck in my brain now. The something of war again, whatever those games are.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:48]:
Um, oh shoot, you remember, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, it was like one of the first big games they brought over to the PC side. I mean, I— maybe it's more of a single-player experience, maybe it doesn't, maybe that type of thing doesn't matter. God of War. God of War, thank you. That's, um, I don't know.

Richard Campbell [01:14:05]:
Um, I, I don't know, but yes, PS2 game.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:09]:
Yeah, I guess they'd It might literally just be the Xbox Windows thing. You know, we just don't want to see— we don't see that game on Xbox. You know, they're still that— they're still in that world where exclusives matter. I don't know, maybe, maybe. And then this just in, literally. Well, a bunch of stuff happened right as we started the show. Yeah, um, a couple months back, I think November, uh, Epic and Google Apple announced they agreed to settle their antitrust case. This was curious on a number of levels because Epic had gone into antitrust cases against Apple and Google.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:48]:
They destroyed Google. I mean, it was a rout. They fared less well against Apple, but Apple, through their belligerent behavior, kind of turned the tables on that. And now their behaviors have triggered this opening of that app platform. Them as well. And so they kind of came out of this in a very, you know, decidedly victorious state. So why on earth would Epic and Google agree to settle? It's kind of hard to explain. But again, from the perspective of, like, gamers in this case, but people on the outside, the requirements that Google would have faced legally in the United States are now going to be worldwide, and they're going to be for a longer period of time than was required by this court case.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:33]:
It's like, wait, what? It almost doesn't make sense. There were some complaints that part of this deal— these complaints were made in such a way as if this was illegal, but as part of this agreement, they're going to be more partners than enemies now, and Epic will promote Android as the open, safe, best place to play games on mobile.. And it's like, oh, that's not right. And it's like, no, that is right. That's what partners do. It's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. Um, but for this to work, it would have to be settled, or the settlement would have to be agreed to by the judge, uh, which is, uh, Donato— what's his name? Um, uh, James Donato.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:12]:
So I believe what just happened literally is the judge agreed that the settlement will occur. So I haven't had a chance to read through this, but Google has an announcement about it on their Android Developers blog that I did link to in the notes. And I'm going to go look at this, but basically what this amounts to is that developers can use Google Play's billing system or not. They're not going to get charged exorbitant fees if they do not. They will allow third-party stores like Epic's, right, to appear on Android, etc., etc. So this is, um, this is kind of the outcome you want. The fact that they settled after Google lost to me is still the weird bit. But, um, wasn't the judge saying all along, you guys need to settle this, you guys? Yeah, he literally said before he went to decide on the case, when the case closed or whatever, uh, he said, listen, you do not want me to rule, you need to settle with this company.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:11]:
And he required them to meet with a mediator. Um, they did not reach a settlement at that time, and so he issued his ruling, which was the most scathing. I mean, just brutal one-sided victory for Epic in this case, um, that I've ever seen.

Richard Campbell [01:17:24]:
It was crazy. At the same time, this is actually beneficial for the consumer. More stores, 100%. You know, yeah, you know the store that's going to win out of this? You got every—

Paul Thurrott [01:17:33]:
well, the Steam store, right? Right.

Richard Campbell [01:17:36]:
I— and yeah, they didn't even get in the fight. They stayed out of it entirely. This is not— if this is the new deal and you can— you know how quickly everyone's going to load a Steam store onto their phone?

Paul Thurrott [01:17:47]:
Are you kidding? I know, it's interesting. I mean, it's definitely consumer-friendly and, and the right thing for people and all that kind of stuff. Google, you got to remember, they fought this all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court told them to go screw themselves.

Richard Campbell [01:18:01]:
They were like, yeah, no, no, no, thank you.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:03]:
Supreme Court refused to hear it, right? Like, it didn't— yep. So they tried everything they could. They tried to get an emergency stay. There was all this stuff, and they were at every step of the way, it was like, no, "This is absolutely legally correct.

Richard Campbell [01:18:17]:
There's nothing. Sorry." [Speaker:BRYAN_LAWRENCE] And you could have settled this 2 years ago for much less than what's about to happen here.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:21]:
[Speaker:BRYAN_LAWRENCE] Which is the thing, as mobile has become a bigger and bigger thing and personal computing, which used to be all Microsoft and Windows, has become a bunch of things, like a heterogeneous world. I've often made this point, you need to learn from the past. And one of the things you'll learn from the past is you don't act belligerent to antitrust regulators and then governments, and then courts, you work with them and you can have some outcome or some say in the outcome. If you allow the court to come back to you, yeah, yeah, uh, you'll get what happened to Apple, which is they won, I know, two-thirds or three-quarters of that case and then lost it completely, like, by being dicks, you know. I mean, it's just ridiculous. Like, it's like you basically won and you screwed it up. Yeah, it's I, I don't know. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:07]:
There's no way in baseball to face the other direction at the plate and hit a home run for the other team, but it's like doing that. It's like, what are you doing? Like, what is that? It doesn't make any sense. You just won the game. Why? What are you doing? But that, you know, you, you need to work with these. You need to work together. And this is, this is the type of thing, you know, I, I don't— I'm not 100% sure why Google agreed to this, but, um, I don't know. Dramatically lower fees for developers way more openness. And then, you know, to me, what Android has been historically and should always be, which is that kind of open alternative to, um, you know, the Apple ecosystem.

Richard Campbell [01:19:43]:
Whatever, people can choose whichever one they like. Telling you, man, it's going to be a Steam store. I think you're right. Yeah, those guys are going to be the winners in this because people trust Steam.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:55]:
I want Bob's Rumor Store. I want that store.

Richard Campbell [01:19:58]:
Um, And then— I thought when you were talking about Bloomberg, it would've been Michael's rumor store, but okay.

Mikah Sargent [01:20:06]:
Yes.

Richard Campbell [01:20:06]:
Yep. Unbelievable. Yeah. What an outcome. Weirdly, outcome positive for the consumer.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:10]:
The last thing I would've expected. I have to really, I have to go through this. I need more information, but this, did I put this in the— No, I didn't. There are these tweets from Tim Sweeney, who's the CEO of Epic Games, where it's like, "Rah, rah, Android. Love Google Play." And you're like, "Yikes. What are you doing?" I guess what he's doing is he settled and he got what he wanted. So yeah, I'm gonna do— let me see. So he said, uh, yeah, Fortnite will return to Google Play worldwide soon.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:42]:
Epic Games Store continues supporting Android worldwide alongside Windows and Mac. Installation on Android will become much easier this year. And then the other one was, uh, oh, because Yeah, Samir Samat, this is— that's the guy from Google, wrote that, um, whatever he wrote. They were— we're in the forefront of how developers distribute apps and games on billions of devices globally. But, uh, Tim Sweeney's comment to this: Google is opening up Android all the way with robust support for competing stores, competing payments, and a better deal for all developers. So we've settled all of our disputes worldwide. So I mean, this is, um, Epic, you know It's not amusing. It's distressing to me that people complained about Epic doing what they did.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:26]:
Um, there are some people who believe like Epic is a big company, you know, which is like saying, yeah, like, uh, Germany is a big country, but they're still not going to attack the United States today. Like, I— they're, they're not the same size as Google. They're not even close. They are to Google what I am to Epic. Like, they're nothing. So the fact that these guys fought this fight, not just for themselves, which by the way they could have done, but to get this for all competing stores, not just their own, is what makes this amazing to me. And what makes what they did, no matter what anyone thinks of Tim Sweeney or his company, to me is a net positive literally for the world.

Richard Campbell [01:22:08]:
It's crazy. How did you get here from this? We want We don't want you to charge 30% on Fortnite.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:15]:
This is all dating back to any attempts at walled garden activity. When Microsoft came up with Windows 8, Tim Sweeney was a big critic of that because this thing was going to have a mobile-like app store, and this was going to be Microsoft's way to collect whatever percent vig on every transaction. This is what he's been against for basically since that time. I mean, he has a store that also charges fees, by the way. Yeah. It's just that they don't charge 30%. Anyway, look, I wish these companies had just worked together. I wish they had done this on their own.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:47]:
I wish this was the way the world evolved. It did not, but it required these very expensive antitrust cases, which most companies would just have said no to because they couldn't afford to do it. So he could afford to do it. And again, like I said, didn't just do it for himself. That's the amazing thing.

Richard Campbell [01:23:05]:
Because he could have very easily. Yeah. And Gabe Newell could have funded all of this out of Valve, but he's not, didn't need to.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:13]:
Somebody else did it for him. From his luxury yacht in the Mediterranean or wherever he is now. Exactly.

Richard Campbell [01:23:20]:
Yeah. Lifted one arm from his silken robe and said, "Make it so." But he didn't have to. He just waited.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:26]:
And now he's just going to say, "Deploy to the phone." I love that he's turned into like, oh God, Brian Wilson from the 1970s. He's just walking around a beach in a bathrobe. Billions of dollars, no idea what he's doing.

Richard Campbell [01:23:41]:
Well, he seems to be making his own console, but yeah, he's doing what he wants to do. Yeah, unbelievable.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:50]:
It's classic.

Mikah Sargent [01:23:50]:
This is astonishing. Yeah, right, folks. I do believe that we've got our tips and picks up next, or as Leo calls it, the back of the book. The back of the book is next. Before we get there though, let me remind remind you about Club Twit. twit.tv/clubtwit is where you go to join the club. When you join the club, $10 a month, $120 a year, you will help support the work we do here on the network. But that's not all.

Mikah Sargent [01:24:17]:
No, we also offer you ad-free content, all of our shows ad-free. We also offer access to some special feeds that you won't find anywhere else. We have a feed for behind the show, or before the show, after the show, behind the scenes. We have a feed that has our live coverage of tech news events, and we have a feed that has all of our club shows like My Crafting Corner, the recent D&D adventure I ran with some of the hosts, as well as Stacy's book club, our camera time— our photography time, I mean— our coffee time, and so much more. If that's not enough for you, well, I understand. Don't worry, I've also got your single invite and access to the Discord server, a fun place to go to chat with your fellow Club Twit members and those of us here at Twit. If all of that sounds good to you, well, head to twit.tv/clubtwit or use that little QR code in the top corner to join the club. And we look forward to seeing you there.

Mikah Sargent [01:25:15]:
All right, let's head back to the show for the tips and picks.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:21]:
I'm excited about this first app pick. I have to— a small interlude here. This just in, uh, open— another one. I know, I'm so sorry. This day has been kind of weird. Um, the Codex app is now available on Windows, finally. So they released that, I believe, originally only on the Mac, and this is their way to build and ship agents, of course. Um, so it's a first-class Windows experience, they tell me.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:47]:
Um, I guess I'll take a look at it. I don't know. So if you're waiting for that, man, I guess it's there. Okay, um, I, I swapped my tip and app order here because the app is really a game and it kind of ties into the Xbox stuff. But, um, I've been trying to, uh, wean myself off of just playing Call of Duty all the time, right? So over the past, I guess we call it several months now, I, I have pretty big game collections across Steam, Epic, Xbox, Windows, and GOG, and wherever else maybe. But I probably bought more games in the past, I don't know, 3 to 4 months than I have since 20 years plus ago. I mean, it's kind of hard to say. But the thing that really strikes me, because I'm lucky or unlucky enough to be part of the generation that was the first to get home video games, right? So we got arcade games and then we got the first, the Magnavox Odyssey, the Atari, well, the standalone Pong type games.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:46]:
Atari 2600 and television, et cetera, and then the first home computers. So I've been playing games my whole life. And I can tell you that games today look unbelievable compared to the boop, boop, boop, like Pong or something back from 50 years ago, I guess it is now. But I am also like, I'm kind of blown away that some of the game mechanics have not changed in the slightest. So if you play like, uh, I, I'm trying these like, like horror titles like, um, Silent Hill F, which is the latest one in that series, uh, the Silent Hill 2 remake, and then just last week, um, Resident Evil Requiem came out. I mean, the presentation on these games by and large is pretty incredible. Yeah, stories are pretty good, you know, whatever. Um, of those, I really, I think the Resident Evil game is probably the better one.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:37]:
I'm only, I'm not maybe a third of the way through or whatever, but it's good. But, um, one of my, one of my big memories in gaming was the shift from, you know, video game— we didn't call them consoles, but video game systems back in the '80s, or things like the Amiga or the Atari ST or whatever that were really good for games unless you were playing a flight simulator, in which case the PC was pretty much it. But the PC became like a first-class game system, um, when VGA occurred and when id Software occurred with John Carmack and all that. And so there was, uh, Wolfenstein 3D, of course, and then like a year later Doom. Like, really? And then Doom 2, and of course then Quake. And so with the span of like 3 to 5 years, so it just went like off the charts. But the one thing those games all have in common, which I always found to be very irritating, was you have to find things to get to some section, right? So you have— you're in a level there's like key cards or keys or something, and you gotta find them. And so, and then there are secrets you have to find.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:38]:
And it knows that— I, this is not going to be possible for me to imitate on camera accurately, but like, I had a friend who imitated what it would be like if the Doom guy was in real life, and he would like walk up to the side of a door and bump into it, and then you go like, and you hit it again, and then you come over, you know. And it was like really accurate. But people who played games, those games at that time, spent days and days and days running— like, they would run around a level, kill all the bad guys, and then just bump into walls trying to find like a secret door or something. It was just the— just the— it's basic play mechanic, and it was just so stupid, really. I mean, but, you know, we were trying to get to a more sophisticated place. But, you know, you play these games and it's like you go up to the door, you're like— and then it's stupid. It's always like the stupid UI. Like, it zooms in on the lock and it's like, you might need something to open the store.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:26]:
You're like, no, no, no kidding. You know, like, like seriously. And so you walk around this dark mansion or whatever you're in trying to find like a key or a screwdriver or whatever it is. And it's like the same. Or then you get to a thing where it's like a little— it looks like a slot machine and you have to like— it's like moon, sun, sun, moon. And you're like, am I seriously doing this? And I— for me at this stage and at this point, it's like I'm trying to wean myself off of this addictive, you know, knee-jerk game, and I just want to kind of enjoy the story and kind of step through it, and I don't really want the difficulty of fighting the bad guys and me making it really difficult, whatever. But then it's— the puzzles are still there. And so I like, I just find myself like, I just look for walkthroughs and I'm like, what's the moon, sun, sun, moon? Great.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:10]:
You know, like I don't, I don't want to find the clue behind a piece of paper that's in a dark room with a jump scare and like whatever. Like I just want to experience the game, you know. It's bizarre to me that this is still how these games are made. Like, they're beautiful. Like, they're completely different. Like, if you showed me a scene from any of these games, like, as a child, I— my head would have exploded. Like, I can't— you can't believe how good these things look, you know. Um, but we still, you know, we're not bump— you know, we're not doing that exactly, but it's still— it's still like, find the yellow card, now we can go to the yellow area, now find the red card, now you finish the level, now you go to the next level.

Mikah Sargent [01:30:44]:
It's like, come on. It's really funny that you bring that up because I was thinking about it watching, um, my significant other play Resident Evil Requiem.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:53]:
Okay, so you know what I'm talking about?

Mikah Sargent [01:30:55]:
Like, you've seen this? Yeah, I've seen it. And it made me think, I'm like, as the game designers, how they try to figure out when they're like, okay, in this one we're gonna do a security card puzzle.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:08]:
Like, how is this the—

Mikah Sargent [01:31:10]:
yeah, it's bizarre to me, right? And it's been that way because, uh, in leading up to it, I was watching some of the earlier Resident Evil games And yeah, as you said, it's very exactly the same. They just don't look as good. They just look much better these days.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:24]:
Yeah. Yeah. Kind of fun. I don't understand why I, there was a, I mentioned the indie game thing earlier. There was an indie game that came out, maybe this could be 5 or 8 years ago now called Firewatch, which is fantastic. It's made its way across platforms. The voice of the main character was a guy who was in Mad Men. It was one of those voices where like, I know this voice, but I can't place it.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:45]:
It's a great game. It's, it's one of the few games I've ever played where I thought to myself, like, my wife or someone who's a non-gamer might actually be interested in at least sitting there with me on the couch going through it, you know. But it also has those little puzzle things you have to solve, and there's a mystery you're trying to figure out, like, what's the story here. And the ending isn't necessarily great, but it's a fantastic game overall. And it is this type of thing where it's maybe, you know, it's not the a, you know, billions— or well, not billions, but millions of dollar blockbuster game, you know, with a team of hundreds working on it. It was probably a very small team, a local small company, but, um, but, you know, they said, you know, same sort of thing. It, it's— I just wish there was a different way. I just, I kind of just want like the interactive story part of it, right? I don't want to be— I— it's not fun for me to solve a puzzle or to Wander around in like Resident Evil 2 Remake, it's like a whole city that you have to wander around.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:44]:
Um, I'm almost 100% positive I have done this thing where I've gone through some building, the fire escape collapsed, but I didn't get the object they need, but now I can't get to it because it collapsed, and now I can't actually get to the next section. Like, I'm pretty sure I screwed it up. Like, it's just— and then that's bad game design. Like, I— or I'm missing the point. Maybe it's me, I don't know, but I worry about that kind of thing, but I just— it's like, if I— if I— I don't remember the wording of it. Each of these games is a little different, but it's like, no, I don't want to hack and slash. I don't want any difficulty. I just want to enjoy the story.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:15]:
Like, yep, that's what I want. And it's like, nope, here's a stupid puzzle. And you're like, okay. I, I, I— look, I do a crossword puzzle every day. I don't mind puzzles.

Mikah Sargent [01:33:25]:
Like, but right, kind of thing, puzzle thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:26]:
It's— I just— what I want is something that's a little more interactive than sitting in front of a TV and watching a TV show or movie. But not as— not me, you know, fighting a bad guy the whole time. Like, I, I wanna, I wanna see the story evolve or, you know, unfurl or whatever and enjoy it. And, and I do think Resident Evil Requiem is maybe the best of this group. I, I did finish— I think it was Resident Evil 7. Yeah, Biohazard. I actually did finish that one. I didn't finish the one that came after, and I'll try to finish this one.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:57]:
We'll see how it goes. I don't know., but it seems, it seems good. Uh, there's that. Okay.

Richard Campbell [01:34:04]:
Sorry.

Mikah Sargent [01:34:05]:
There's no, I go on and on. It's all good. No, I, I, I, I was curious to hear, especially for you, as I know you mostly play that for the first-person shooter game.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:15]:
Right.

Mikah Sargent [01:34:15]:
So it is interesting. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:16]:
There's the other stuff that you've been getting. Actually playing a game requires time and effort, right? Like the, the, one of the appeals of a Call of Duty type game is that in the middle of the day, it's like, I need a little break. I could play a couple of multiplayer levels, but it's something like during the show, all this stuff has happened, right? And I could be like, nope, putting that aside, I'm gonna work on this stuff, this is important, I can go back to this later. If you're invested in this single-player experience and you, you have to keep this stuff in your brain, you have to remember what's happening— true, yeah, it's— I can't, I don't have that attention span right now, I just, I can't, you know. So I have to really dedicate time to it. And, and I don't, you know, I don't mind trying, but I don't know, I'm trying, I guess, is what I'm saying.

Mikah Sargent [01:34:57]:
That's what matters. I guess so. Well, let's try and—

Paul Thurrott [01:35:00]:
oh no, no, Jim Moore, I was going to say. Yeah, sorry. So I usually do the tip first. Um, so I've been, you know, the book that I did, or I'm doing, the De-Insidify Windows 11 book is out. I finished the security chapter. As soon as I published it, one of my readers was like, I don't use BitLocker.

Mikah Sargent [01:35:22]:
Like, true, it's free. God help me. Listening, there were two hands placed onto Paul's face as he sort of rubbed them down in a face palm into, um, temple massage.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:33]:
It's hard to do like a face punch, but so, God help me, you know, I asked why, and, uh, I asked God why, and the answer was basically that he doesn't trust Microsoft, which begs the question, why are you using Windows? He's worried that some law enforcement agency in the United States will compel Microsoft to hand over the keys to BitLocker so that someone could then, I guess, physically take his laptop from him, access the hard drive, and get to his data. And to which my reply is, you don't have to store that with Microsoft. You could store it locally. You could print it out. You could print it and put it in the vault. You could put it in a little— a physical safe. You know, Microsoft doesn't have to have the other key. You know, this is a convenience for people signing with a Microsoft account.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:26]:
It's in your OneDrive and you can go get it if you ever get locked out of your computer. But the chance of some government agency or some malicious actor getting your PC and then getting the BitLocker key from Microsoft so they can break into that thing—

Richard Campbell [01:36:41]:
What he's doing now where he doesn't have the BitLocker key, which is wide open, and access the file just fine.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:48]:
Yeah, it's unbelievable. Yeah, so, um, that and other bits of advice are in that chapter. Hey, yikes. Uh, so I don't know. And then, uh, this is apropos of nothing, but, um, Audible, uh, thanks to Spotify, I believe, um, has a new cheaper plan that's more like a streaming type plan. So you don't get a credit for a book that you keep every month, you get a credit for a book you can access every month, and then that Book stays in your library until you don't have a membership anymore. So you never have that thing you keep and walk away with. But I think for a lot of people, you read, or in this case, listen to a book and you're done.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:25]:
You're not going to go read it again, right? I mean, I have multiple books I have read multiple times myself, but I think most people kind of read a book and you're like, "All right, I'm done. This is the book I'm reading and I'm moving on." And so I don't know, maybe it makes sense. But But it's out there. So Audible, I think it's called Premium, is $14.95 a month. And then this new Audible Standard plan is $8.99 a month in the US. And it's in, I don't know, UK, Germany, France probably, and maybe one other country, but it will expand soon. But if Audible, it was too expensive, that's something to consider if you like audiobooks.

Mikah Sargent [01:38:04]:
And I do. Me too. Awesome. All right, I do believe then it's time for Run As Radio.

Richard Campbell [01:38:13]:
What are we working with here, Rich? Uh, I was at the NDC conference in London in January and got a chance to sit down with Susie Edwards-Alexander, who does hiring for, um, gee, ThoughtWorks, the, uh, the, you know, the one of the best software development groups in the world, extraordinary group of people, and hiring for the— getting into that company is virtually impossible. And the hiring process, you know, is a, is a whole thing. And so with the infusion of AI and just sort of the craziness that's been around hiring, it just seemed like a great time to have this conversation about what is it, because it's, it's not only bad for people trying to find a job in tech right now, it is bad for folks trying to hire people in technology and, and, uh, Susie Edwards Alexander has been all over this for a while. So we had this really fun conversation about how do you, how do you make it better for hiring, and how is it better to get hired? Like, why do we get that sort of mutually constructive, mutually beneficial relationship? You know, not coming up with esoteric tests that have nothing to do with your job, more about how you're actually going to work with people, what, how are you with learning new and, you know, diving into the problem space, like getting away from the buzzwords concept. So she was compelling just to feel, you know, we can be better, we can do a better job on all of this sort of thing and talk through some really great ideas for tackling the problem.

Mikah Sargent [01:39:46]:
Very cool. And up next, everyone, get ready because it's time for the Brown Liquor Pick. Of the week. The brown liquor pick of the week is next.

Richard Campbell [01:40:00]:
Richard Campbell, I hear you've been roaming Florida for the brown liquor pick of the week. I got here on Monday and straight down to the bar, as one does. And very fortunately, they actually had some genuine Florida bourbon, which is relatively rare. This one comes from St. Augustine and literally not just the name, it's from the town. And if you don't know the story, St. Augustine is considered the oldest continuously occupied settlement of European origin in the continental US. It's a very precise description because there's clearly been people living in the area for 12,000 years.

Richard Campbell [01:40:39]:
You know, we talk about the Timucua peoples. So there's, you know, there's always folks around this area. But when the Spanish came out this way, arguably Ponce de León was the first in 1513 and claimed it for the Spanish crown. But the founding of St. Augustine is Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in 1565. So a couple of hundred years before the colonies and all of that stuff. Now, they weren't, the Spanish weren't the only ones. The French were around as well and also trying to colonize along the coast and had some conflicts there up more in the area around the Carolinas.

Richard Campbell [01:41:12]:
The English show up in the form of Francis Drake in 1586. Who raids and captures St. Augustine, sending the settlers into the wilderness, then realizes he doesn't have the resources to actually hold the fort, so he withdraws, heads north to the colony of Roanoke, and, you know, things go back to the way it was. The conflicts in this area go back and forth literally for another century or so. You don't really settle down until what they call the Treaty of Paris in 1863. This is the end of the Seven Years' War, with Spain ceding Florida and St. Augustine to the British. In exchange, the British give up control of Havana, Cuba, to the Spanish.

Richard Campbell [01:41:54]:
But then 20 years later, we have another treaty also called the Treaty of Paris, because that's not confusing at all, which is the treaty that was signed around the, the American Revolution. This is when the English grant the 13 colonies independence from the British. And at that point, they give Florida back to Spain because, nah. And Florida will actually stay under the Spanish rule until 1821, until the Adams-Onis Treaty, which actually turns the Spanish provinces of Florida over to what is now the United States. And Florida will actually become a state in 1845. So that's sort of setting the stage relative to where I am right now in Orlando. It's about a 2-hour drive north and towards the coast. Uh, the St.

Richard Campbell [01:42:40]:
Augustine Distillery is a much more recent thing. So this is, uh, the efforts of two people, Philip McDaniel and Mike Diaz, neither one of which had a background in, uh, booze in any way. McDaniel came from retail sales and marketing. He ran this company, CEO of USI Promotions, which primarily worked with convenience stores. And when he retired, he got heavily involved in St. Augustine's cultural and tourism, and he saw an opportunity. He thought that distillery be a good addition to, uh, St. Augustine, mostly to do with the building.

Richard Campbell [01:43:10]:
Uh, his co-founder Mike Diaz, who is more in the background of accounting and taxation, uh, so the Florida liquor laws are quite difficult to deal with, and so he was not a big fan. But they had this building, it's called the Ice Plant. So this was a building built in 1907 by Florida Power and Light, and this is back when they would ship ice to Florida for cooling. That's how refrigeration was done back then. So 15,000 square square foot concrete structure. And this would provide the ice for shrimping and farmers and residents and so forth. But of course, when modern refrigeration comes along, and by the '50s, it's basically the ice business is out, uh, out of business. It's no longer necessary.

Richard Campbell [01:43:49]:
And so the building sat empty for many, many years, controlled by FP&L. Uh, but it was an ideal— it was sort of a regeneration of the waterfront. It was an ideal location, the size for a distillery. And so they had to get through the legal process, took them about a year and a half, uh, to actually acquire the building and start a renovation on it in 2011. And this ties into some earlier shows that you weren't a part of, uh, um, Micah, so I'm sorry about this, but we talked about the craft distillery movement in the early 2010s. It started on the West Coast, largely California and so forth. And the group behind that was a group called the American Distilling Institute, ADI. And so McDaniel and Diaz went to an ADI conference in Portland, Oregon, and happened to connect with one Dave Pickerel, which we've mentioned before.

Richard Campbell [01:44:37]:
Pickerel had been the master distiller at Maker's Mark and was a big driving force behind the craft distilling movement. And so in 2012, McDaniel and Diaz got local funding from a bunch of local investors, acquired the ice plant, started renovations, took them a year and a half. They started distilling in 2013. They were only the third distillery ever in Florida. They also then pursued trying to improve the liquor laws because at the time in 2013, the only way to sell booze as a producer, as a distiller, was through distributors. You could not sell them yourself in any way. And so if you're going to do craft distilling, you know, the whole business of craft distilling is that tasting room effect. And legally at the time, you couldn't even do that.

Richard Campbell [01:45:18]:
And so by the time they opened the doors in 2016, 2014, they actually are now allowed to sell a bottle to individuals, but only one per year. So they're required to keep records of who buys any bottles directly from them. They gradually get those laws eased off. Now whiskey takes time to make, so even when they started production in 2013 and laid up their whiskey casks, so they didn't have to actually make some money, and so made some quick distill products like a product they call Florida Cane Vodka, which is vodka made sugarcane, not rum. Rum is made from molasses. This is vodka. They also made a gin called— they called New World Gin, where they use local Floridian botanicals, citrus and things like that. They were also pressured because of the part of the world they're in to make rum.

Richard Campbell [01:46:04]:
By 2015, they did start making rum, which they then aged in their bourbon casks. The first release of rum— the first release of bourbon was in 2016. It was called Florida Double Cask. And as they started to do some finishing ages, they had a tough time getting sherry casks. But as it turns out, the San Sebastian Winery, which is literally just down the road from them, makes a port. And so they started doing port cask finishes. By 2022, they finally got what we would expect as craft distilling laws, which are common on more on the West Coast. Now, often in the West Coast, when you talk about places like Portland or Oregon and Washington, they actually have serious breaks on their excise taxes.

Richard Campbell [01:46:41]:
So if they stay under certain production level, like 25,000 gallons, no excise tax. And as they scale up, the excise tax scales up with them. That never happened in Florida. No tax breaks at all. But they did finally got rid of the limits on bottle and by-the-glass sales, which now means that there's distilleries in Florida and there's now 80 of them 10 years later are allowed to actually have a bar on premises. The St. Augustine Distillery did not do this. They have a local bar right next to them that sells their product routinely.

Richard Campbell [01:47:09]:
Didn't want to step on their products. It's like, you want to— you want the bar? The bar's next door. By all accounts, these are very nice men. They won Distillery, ADI Distillery of the Year in 2024. They support their local community hugely. Their tours are— there's a massive variety of them. You can make your own bottle of whiskey. You can learn to make cocktails.

Richard Campbell [01:47:28]:
They're very much into the sort of great parts of what it takes to make a great distillery. And the bottle I got my hands on and had a chance to taste it, I don't have it with me because I'm in a conference center. Is the Florida Straight Bourbon. So it's a bourbon, which means it's at least 51% corn. In this case, it's 60% corn. And the normal bourbon mash bill is you'll always have 51% corn and then some amount of barley to provide the amylase that allows for the corn to be broken down into ethanol rather than methanol. And then a flavor grain in between, typically in bourbons, this would be a rye. On a few, it's wheat.

Richard Campbell [01:48:05]:
Not this whiskey. This is 60% corn and 22% malted barley, and then 18% wheat. So we would normally think of the wheat as a flavor grade, but it's actually more barley than wheat. So they're sort of doing a unique flavor combination. Now they do their own milling and mashing on site. They use their own yeast and the closed-top fermenters. They use Vendome stills. These are proper American stills, relatively small.

Richard Campbell [01:48:28]:
Their stripping still or the The first distillate is a 2,800-liter, it's about 750 gallons, and then the spirit still is 550 gallons or 2,000 liters. So those are not huge, but they're proper size stills. Their spent grain after that extraction is sent off for cattle. So they're doing their best to reuse water and not waste any materials. Very contemporary size distillery. And that product then is put into new oak barrels. So they are bourbon casks, so they've been fired, but they've not been previously used. They get it from the Alvin Cooperage in Louisville, and that's that connection through Pickerel to actually do that.

Richard Campbell [01:49:02]:
And then 3+ years aging, which is of course the rules. What did I get from drinking this? It's very warm here in Florida and very humid, and that combination means that they tend to lose alcohol quickly over water, right? If they were in low humidity, like typically happens in Kentucky— Kentucky actually has a problem where they will tend to lose water and the ABV will go up in the barrel. That's not a problem here. So they're not going to do long aging here. So you're talking 3 to maybe 5 years, not, not too long, just because it ages so quickly and they have so much contact in that way. Uh, so a lot of fruity, sort of tropical fruit and citrus flavors on their— in their whiskey. Drinks very nice at 43%, and, uh, uh, young. It's not a complicated whiskey.

Richard Campbell [01:49:45]:
This is very, very drinkable. The problem is only sold in Florida because they're a craft distillery. They don't have those big distribution connections, and they don't produce the quantity They're just not in the pipeline. So you've got to come to Florida to get it. But a bottle of Florida Straight will cost you $50. For just $50. That's very reasonable. But if you're in Florida, make an effort.

Richard Campbell [01:50:08]:
Now they have some high-end versions, especially like $200 bottles. They want to go that way. I got nothing bad to say about Florida Straight. This is legit bourbon. It drinks really nice. It's got its own character to it from a company you will like. And I— that to me, you know, I like the craftsmanship and I like good people, and these guys got them both.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:29]:
Nice.

Mikah Sargent [01:50:30]:
Well, folks, that is the end of this episode of Windows Weekly. Thank you for tuning in today. I told you about, uh, Club Twit, twitch.tv/clubtwit. Of course, you can head to twit.tv/ww to find the show notes and to subscribe if you're not currently subscribed to the show. Show publishes every Wednesday. We record it live on Wednesday, so you can tune in to watch it. Subscribe to audio and video formats, get it across YouTube, everywhere else, and be sure to check it out. All that's left is to thank our wonderful hosts.

Mikah Sargent [01:51:07]:
Richard Campbell, thank you for being here even when you're at a conference. Pleasure. And Paul Theriot, thank you for joining us all the way from Mexico City.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:18]:
I didn't do it.

Richard Campbell [01:51:21]:
Oh wait, yes I did.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:23]:
You're welcome.

Mikah Sargent [01:51:23]:
Thanks for hosting, Micah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Always a good time, always a pleasure. Uh, I— you can check out my other shows, to those of you listening, um, on the network. So just head to twit.tv to check it out. Uh, Leo will be back next week, and I think I'll be joining you all again near the end of the month if I'm not mistaken, but we'll see. Uh, in any case, uh, goodbye and have a wonderful rest of your week.