Windows Weekly 846 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, Mikah Sargent Am subbing in for Leo Laport this week. He'll be back next week, but this week I talked to Richard Campbell and Paul Throt about first and foremost Windows 11. The new preview builds and how honestly, not a whole lot is changing. Not many new features except for the beta channel. Then we talk about Patch Tuesday and Microsoft Paint adding a new feature. I quiz Paul and Rich on their Microsoft Paint usage. We talk about Intel announcing Thunderbolt five, the iPhone adding U S B C, the passing of Dennis Austin, the co-creator of PowerPoint and Round Things out. Of course, as always with the wonderful tips and picks of the week, including a great round liquor. Pick all that and more coming up on Windows Weekly

TWiT (00:00:51):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit.

Mikah Sargent (00:01:03):
This is Windows Weekly episode 846 with Paul Ott, Richard Campbell and Micah Sergeant Recorded Wednesday, September 13th, 2023. Purple is for jazz hands. This episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by Melissa. More than 10,000 clients worldwide rely on Melissa for full spectrum data quality and ID verification software. Make sure your customer contact data is up to date this holiday season. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free at melissa.com/twit and buy cash fly delivering content up to 10 times faster than traditional delivery methods and 30% faster than other major CDNs. Join Cash Fly the world's fastest CDN for a limited time Cash Fly is offering a free five terabyte tier plan for other plans. Learn how to get your first month free@cashfly.com. Alright, it is time for Windows Weekly, the show where we talk to two of the foremost Windows watchers in the world. I almost said winders watchers, but that's because of Leo.

(00:02:14):
I am not Leo, I am Micah Sergeant subbing in for Leo, who is currently in Rhode Island hanging out with his mom and we'll be back soon, but until then, it is my great pleasure to say hello to Thout dot com's own Paul Throt. Hello, Micah. Hello. You're in. Are you Macun? Yes, I'm I'm, yes. I'm Jewel of Pennsylvania, the true jewel hashtag macun life. Well, it is good to see you. It's been a while and I'm looking forward to today's show. We are also joined by Richard Campbell who I have to ask you where you're coming to us from because I know it changes all the,

Richard Campbell (00:02:59):
This is the last show from Coquitlam, so we've been slowly moving out of this house for the past few months up to our place in Madeira Park and this is the last day, so I've literally set aside a couple of hours to do this. Then I clear out of this office for the very last time. I'm actually on the portable rig, the one I used from the Netherlands last week in Copenhagen the week before that. So the fancy rig is inbox is still up in Med Park, so it's not set up yet.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:27):
And I hear you're going to be doing the show on a plane live from the plane?

Richard Campbell (00:03:34):
Not doing that, no.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:35):
Oh, okay.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:36):
You may as well.

Richard Campbell (00:03:38):
Once they get starlink on those planes, maybe I will, but now I'm going to have to take next week off, I'll literally be flying to New Zealand.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:47):
Ah, gotcha.

Richard Campbell (00:03:48):
I'll do a show. I got one from Sydney and one from Auckland and one from Perth, and then I'll be

Mikah Sargent (00:03:55):
Back. Yeah, you are a mover and a shaker. Very impressive.

Richard Campbell (00:04:00):
Some good news, some not so good

Mikah Sargent (00:04:02):
News. Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. Well, let us get into, oh, I'm coming from Petaluma, California for anyone you can

Richard Campbell (00:04:12):
Go to the studios.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:13):
Couldn't be bothered to come into

Mikah Sargent (00:04:14):
The studio. I could not be crawl crawled out

Paul Thurrott (00:04:16):
Of bed, throw a hat on too far.

Mikah Sargent (00:04:17):
Yep, yep, yep. Bed's right there. No. Yes. The beauty of podcasting is occasionally we can do it from other places. Yes. So let us go ahead and get the show rolling. First and foremost, we've got to talk about where Windows 11 stands right now with the new insider preview builds.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:42):
Just as a bit of a reminder background or whatever, we are expecting Microsoft to sort of finalize, I say that with air quotes because nothing has ever finalized these days, but what will become Windows 1123 H two anytime now. In fact, I expected that in August and it's getting down to the wire. Don't forget that Microsoft has a big special event next Thursday, a week from tomorrow. That is not a Windows event per se, but they will be discussing some of the AI stuff and Windows, and I assume this relates to Windows 1123 H two in particular. So we shall see, but man, there has been no movement on the insider preview as far as getting towards something that looks like it's about to ship. Right? Because even though they don't like to talk about stuff like this, you would typically see a release preview switchover where they're getting it prepped for the final release.

Richard Campbell (00:05:36):
It doesn't sound like they're going to be ready for next week.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:38):
That's what I'm starting to think. So I've been working on the theory that the schedule this year will be the same as it has been for the past two years for that to be true. Do I not have anything I do for that to be true? Week D September, which is two weeks from yesterday, the 26th would be the day that released the preview version of what is Windows 11 version 23 2, that enablement package for people who want to grab it. However, I mean it's Microsoft, so they could technically do it up to about the 19th, I guess in about a week, and that would be enough in their minds. They said they tend to do things.

Richard Campbell (00:06:16):
Time is relative delivery time doubly so.

Paul Thurrott (00:06:20):
Yeah, I mean had a hard, I just saw this again just randomly. I was going through all my archive stuff recently and in 2003, so literally 20 years ago, over 20 years ago, I interviewed a couple of people from the original Andt team. One was Mark Lukowski, he was one of the core members that came over with the Dave Cutler and he described the way they build windows with all the branches and everything. And that was confusing to me at the time and I look at it now and I would pray for that simplicity because I just have don't understand thought confused. Yeah, I'd give anything for that clarity. We just don't have that today. So what we have is an insider program that has four channels, one of which we believe, no one's ever said this, but this is just based on, I dunno, an informed opinion canary that it is probably going to at some point represent Windows 12, which they've never announced either. And then we have the dev, well I should, yeah, dev beta and release preview channels, each of which in the past used to map to some version of Windows and today kind of map to nothing. Microsoft has not said this, but in the build itself, you can see that the beta channel today represents 23 H two. So that's the channel above release preview, so when it gets to release preview, it's coming. That's the only thing I could say there. But we don't have a release preview build for the past eight days, so I

Richard Campbell (00:07:40):
Wonder if they will announce WIN 12 in this upcoming event. That wouldn't be a bad move.

Paul Thurrott (00:07:46):
I do think whatever they talk about has to be some combination of things that are shipping and things that are shipping long-term. Right? You want to do the right amount of PR for that stuff to keep the excitement going. It's been a big year for Microsoft and AI obviously.

Richard Campbell (00:08:02):
Well, it's clearly Windows copilot has captured everyone's attention being

Paul Thurrott (00:08:07):
Sar. Yeah. But yeah, I mean no, and so I would say Microsoft 365 copilot. Interesting. Right? There's some interesting stuff there. Yeah. The Windows one is a little tough. I don't think, this is not something, I think this is just a rumor, but one of the things they're rumored to talk about next week is I don't know what they're calling them, extensions or plugins or whatever for their Windows copilot, and my understanding of that is that all of the copilot extensibility is probably compatible. So maybe this is something where

Richard Campbell (00:08:42):
You can, I mean that would be wise and also shocking this early in the cycle to have standards between teams like this.

Paul Thurrott (00:08:50):
My

Richard Campbell (00:08:50):
Expectation this early into bringing a new set of tools like this is every team's running on their own,

Paul Thurrott (00:08:57):
And I can't remember what they said at Build about this, but is there any notion of cross compatibility between OpenAI or a chat G P T and Binging or Bing, Chatt Extens? Not really. Is that, no, but

Richard Campbell (00:09:11):
I everyth inside of Microsoft. If Kevin Scott's got more influence than I would expect him to have that he's actually persuaded multiple teams to stick to certain a I standards, like kudos to him like Holy man, we benefit

Paul Thurrott (00:09:24):
Everybody. Well, I mean look, you can't know today which of these will be the most popular, whatever that means, but adhering to whatever that standard is does make sense. It especially makes sense I think for Windows because I don't think this is going to be a good one otherwise.

Richard Campbell (00:09:40):
And the sad part is I think really it could be, right? I'm not disagreeing with you. I think it's got a tough road ahead, but this should be the hub. You should at the operating system level say, Hey, here's my goal today, and it could solicit into any piece of software to help you. That's very compelling. Imagine actually making operating systems relevant to again,

Paul Thurrott (00:10:02):
Right? No, that's dumb. Don't talk crazy talk now. I'm just kidding. I guess the only niggling thing in the back of my brain is because of Microsoft's crass cross platform focus today, Microsoft 365 might even be a better choice for that because then it would be everywhere, right? Because Microsoft 365 is part of Windows does. But yeah, no, you're right. I mean we'll see what the little Paine does on the side.

Richard Campbell (00:10:31):
Know you've got me thinking, Paul, when does M 365 have more customers than Windows?

Paul Thurrott (00:10:37):
Oh,

Richard Campbell (00:10:38):
I don't know that's true today.

Paul Thurrott (00:10:40):
I don't think it is and I don't think it,

Richard Campbell (00:10:42):
But it's possible.

Paul Thurrott (00:10:45):
Yes, it might even be inevitable

Richard Campbell (00:10:48):
And it would be a profound statement.

Paul Thurrott (00:10:52):
This is

Mikah Sargent (00:10:52):
Something that's odd to me because some of these announcements or potential announcements do seem kind of big and yet they're not streaming this event.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:01):
What? Why? Okay, so they are going to play it back right after it ends, right? So three hours after the start of it, I think they will make it available to everybody so everyone gets to see it that day. I guess I suppose from my perspective as a journalist, which I'll also put in Airquest that it gives me time to maybe well, to go see some demos and do some things and write something up maybe, I don't know, but I can't imagine that's why they're doing it. Things have always been streamed or have long been streamed and especially during the pandemic era, that was the only way things happen. So I don't know. Yep, it's an open question. I dunno.

Richard Campbell (00:11:39):
Yeah, I'm aware that there's been a battle inside of Microsoft over in person online streamed and the different teams approach this from different ways. I wonder if they looked at the price tag of streaming being the real time part

Paul Thurrott (00:11:54):
With Century upload it to YouTube

Richard Campbell (00:11:57):
Versus just record it and then we do an edit and push it up. If there was a major hitch, we'll delay it an hour while we fix the hitch.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:06):
This is like the delay. They put it into sports games in case anyone swears or in this case AI would be the one swearing. I was going to say, yeah, if they're doing real actual live demos of ai, then they could fix that was the February original February event, the Bing AI Bing Chat event, was that literally live or did they put that video at a few hours later too? I don't remember.

Richard Campbell (00:12:28):
Yeah, I don't remember either. I think it was live actually.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:30):
I think it might've been two and although Microsoft got a lot of credit for that at the time, that event and then Google was, I think unfairly criticized afterwards because of whatever mistakes occurred during their own event, you can go back and watch it for yourself. Not like there were plenty of mistakes, plenty of mistakes in the Bing demo was no different. So it could be, I think we're all a little sensitive to this, especially for the companies that are the platform providers. Maybe they want to make sure there isn't anything stupid that happens, although, got it. That makes much more sense. People like me are going to be like, Hey, do you want to know what really happened? I mean, so I don't know. We'll see. I don't know. The short answer is we dunno.

(00:13:10):
Anyhow, that's happening next week, so hopefully also next week, something in the line of Windows 1123 H two News, but nothing this week. So there have been since we last met 1, 2, 3, 4 or five builds two each to Dev and Canary, one to beta minor changes or nothing depending on what we're talking about, which is what makes this all the more mysterious. Interestingly, the only one that had any even kind of modicum of changes was the beta build, which you'll remember is the one I said is going to be 23 H two and you would expect that this late stage in the game, you wouldn't be seeing that. But those changes are minor. So focus session, which is a feature of the Clock app and also integrated with the I know is getting a widget in the widgets interface, so there's a three-way integration that is just bizarre via an update to the Clock app.

(00:14:03):
Of course, another way you can start and stop focus sessions, who cares? Microsoft, I don't remember how they announced it or revealed this, but at some point in the past few months did say that the chat icon in the Windows 11 task bar, which has been there for two years now and pops up a fairly unique UI that is not actually an app. It's a front end to the consumer teams app, and then if you do anything with it, the full teams app will run and then we'll always run because Microsoft loves Autostart, but they're getting rid of that and this is the first bill to show that, and so there'll be a shortcut to what is now called Microsoft Teams free. I don't think this name change is going to help. It will be easier to unpin. You can just right click it. So I think everyone will, I know I will and get rid of it because nobody wants to use Microsoft Teams free and then they're also adding more inbox apps, not email apps, but the apps that come with Windows to the list of apps that you can uninstall.

(00:15:05):
This has been something that's grown and slowly over the past few releases. So camera Cortana photos and people can all be uninstalled starting with this build. Cortana is an odd choice because Cortana doesn't work anymore. It's still in Windows, but if you run it, nothing will happen. You just get a black window. So that's fun. But anyway, you'll be able to remove that and presumably it will just not be part of some future Windows release and then a bunch of fixes for my favorite friend, the new file Explorer, which I went on an extended rant about last week, and the less said about that the better. So that's what we got. Not much, and that's kind of the only substantive updates of any of these things. Again, leading to that natural question, what's going on, you would think,

Richard Campbell (00:15:53):
Yeah, I almost wonder if we're seeing the end of summer vacation. This was work that was being done in August and there wasn't a lot of work being done then. And then it takes time to go through the pipeline for a while before now we're seeing it in mid-September and so it's the same with Patch Tuesday. It all seems so slow and I think it's just the lag from summer vacation.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:17):
Okay, somebody figured out to do their summer homework. I see something because we were going to finalize this thing jerks and that could be, I think the buiness of File Explorer in particular might be a problem. This is such a core app. I talked about that last week. Again, I promised I wouldn't talk about it again, but I do think that's an issue. So we'll see. And then the other thing that just happened was yesterday was Patch Tuesday, right? So now we talk about week B and week D, and so week B is patch Tuesday week, so the Tuesday of week B was yesterday. This is when Microsoft ships all the cumulative updates that update all the in support versions of Windows. The one for Windows 11, version 22 H two, which is the most recent version, right? The one we basically only care about very minor because we know the week D preview update that we got two weeks previous was very minor hover behavior on the search box and the task bar, some new alt default app behaviors that aren't going to impact anybody, and then a new policy for businesses. So nothing dramatic. The one before that, I think that was the week or the month we had none. I think we had no updates for the first time this year.

(00:17:28):
And again, normally I would think we're kind winding down this release, right? We're getting ready for 23 H two, but now I don't know. We'll see. Yeah, soon as it's going to happen eventually, I guess these things are liquid. What's the difference? I mean, I'm so old school, I not only wish for things to be named the way they used to be. Use release candidate branding and R T M and all that kind of stuff, the Gold Master and all that, even though those terms are out of date, but we use out of date terms all the time. Go to the tape or whatever. There's no tape. Yeah, yeah. I'm just old school like that. But I also sort of feel like when you're creating software, maybe there should be a formal adhere to schedule in communications and documentation and stuff like that. I don't know. It's just

Mikah Sargent (00:18:16):
Look, lemme just tell you, Paul, I'm with you. I agree. I just don't want you to feel alone in the universe. Thank you that you're the only one out there shouting the void. We're being a mature industry enough that it actually has standardized terminology.

Paul Thurrott (00:18:29):
I'm just saying ones and zeros. It's ones

Mikah Sargent (00:18:32):
And zeros. It's all ones and zeros. Why can't we just

Paul Thurrott (00:18:35):
Should be the most reliable humans?

Mikah Sargent (00:18:36):
Humans. Orange ones and zeros. Exactly. They're the problem. So let's get

Paul Thurrott (00:18:40):
Rid of sevens and one point twos.

Mikah Sargent (00:18:43):
Anyhow,

Paul Thurrott (00:18:44):
Okay, so this kind of came out of nowhere. In fact, there was no context to this whatsoever leading me to believe that this release was a mistake and was supposed to be held for this event next week. And interesting, they just ran with it because it's such a small thing. Who Caress, which is in the Windows Insider program, I believe in Canary and Dev, not in beta. There is now a new version of the Microsoft Pain app. Now I mentioned this app I think last week as well, if not the week before, because this is the app. They so thoroughly screwed up in Windows 11 two years ago and then spent two years not fixing, and then sometime over the past couple of months they actually fixed it. Thank you. And of course I'm thinking now they're going to leave it alone, right? No, no.

(00:19:24):
They're going to keep screwing it with it because that's what Microsoft does. So they added this feature just again out of the blue, which is like a background removal feature. We're all familiar with this, right? Obviously tools like Photoshop have this kind of thing where you can kind of select a color or whatever it is in an image in it, auto selects around something. Or we can do this on our phones. Google and Apple phones have this capability. I'm sure it's just except you touch it. Okay. There was no explanation of why a couple of questions come up out of this. Well, why, obviously, but this is a fairly advanced feature when you think about it. It's also something you would use for very specific purposes. It seems like something that should be in the Photos app, which has its own very involved editor for photos and not in paint.

(00:20:12):
I mean people don't typically use paint to edit photos. Also, when you think about the list of features, maybe paint could have, why would you start with this one? Wouldn't you make a list of 50 features like advanced image editing features and start at the top, like a tool that could make a line level or whatever. It seems like they should be other things. This is a weird one-off feature to come to a random app that I don't think very many people use, by the way, do you use paint? I use it every single day. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (00:20:46):
I thought I remembered you saying that. I make my

Paul Thurrott (00:20:47):
Christmas card with it. Oh wow. Yeah. No, I'm not kidding. I use it extensively regular. So now

Mikah Sargent (00:20:52):
You can cut out Christmas Trees, trees and drop them with this new background removal tool.

Paul Thurrott (00:20:56):
I'm not going to do that.

Mikah Sargent (00:20:58):
Well fine.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:00):
But anyway, it's weird to me and my guess is this is going to be one of several AI features that they announced for Windows and one of several that will probably be part of paint. This can't be the only one because think about it. I mean this kind of background removal is probably ai. It's certainly more AI than spell checking, which is also AI now, by the way, because everything is, so that's my guess. They had a really short blog post about it. They didn't really explain why they were doing this or if it was part of something bigger. They just said, oh, it's out there, you'll notice it, so we might as well write about it. So that's something they'll keep an eye on for next week. I wouldn't be surprised if this factors into next week in a small way, but as part of something bigger

Mikah Sargent (00:21:46):
Maybe they've got, what's it called for you folks? Telemetry of people going in.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:51):
What do you folks call for you folks?

Mikah Sargent (00:21:54):
I don't call it anything. Okay, good. I guess feedback. I don't know. Anyway. Oh, analytics, that's what I would call it.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:03):
Usage statistics. Usage

Mikah Sargent (00:22:04):
Statistics of somebody going around and doing this very difficult selection and they've seen so many people doing that that they thought, you know what? Let's save people time. Let's bring this in too.

Richard Campbell (00:22:16):
This felt almost turny to me, right? There was a summer,

Paul Thurrott (00:22:21):
Someone was like, but I did

Richard Campbell (00:22:23):
And you had access to that code base and just made a thing and you're like, eh, ship it.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:29):
I'm not going to be able to pull this out off the top of my head, but there are the newest version of the Photos app, which came to Windows 11 somewhere midstream. It doesn't matter. It's the one that supports iCloud photos if you want to do that, but not Google photos because God forbid, and it's always, this app has long had reasonable editing features. This one actually is, I can't think of the features unfortunately. I apologize, but there's actually some features missing that were in the previous version of the P app. From an editing perspective, it seems like this would've been a better choice for that. The photos app that is, but I dunno, I can't explain because they don't explain, and

Richard Campbell (00:23:12):
Honestly, this is where the intern idea came from. It's like there's a team that takes care of photos right now and they're going to do that their way. I don't know. There's anybody who's paying attention to paint. Somebody wanted to tinker with it. Codebase was available.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:26):
Oh, I'm sure they're passing it around like a cheap beer at a frat party. It's like just everyone can have a sip. Anyone want to touch? Hey, it's faint. Remember paint was a big deal. Want to screw with it? Here we go. Doesn

Richard Campbell (00:23:39):
Them feel special. They contributed to paint. Now what

Mikah Sargent (00:23:42):
Do you do with it when you use it every day, Paul? Is it for adjustments to

Paul Thurrott (00:23:45):
Images or prop? So I put a graphic on the top of every article that I do. So there's a couple of things that paint just does really well and I'm just used to, I know all the keyboard shortcuts and everything, which was why those changes they made in Windows 11 was so infuriating. They killed the keyboard shortcuts for about a year and a half. They work again now, thank God. But I do use Photoshop Elements in my case. But for the big stuff, and I would use it for this kind of background removal for sure if I needed that. But yeah, the final output often comes right out of paint. It's just not every time, but every day I use it mean literally. There is not a day I don't open pay, but anyhow

Mikah Sargent (00:24:28):
Know now I'm kind of looking forward to going to thout.com and seeing all these weird overweight

Paul Thurrott (00:24:32):
Images. If you look at my Christmas card, that's probably at one point at the TWIT card. Every year it's, or if I send it to you, I don't, don't know who I send it to exactly. But yeah,

Mikah Sargent (00:24:43):
We get it.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:43):
I hope you get it. Yeah, that's a hundred percent paint. The only thing I use Photoshop for in that case is I take the original photos and I shrink them down to some size where I can fit them within the blocks, but then I use paint for everything else. There you go. There's 1 20, 22. Yeah, so all paint. Almost all paint.

Mikah Sargent (00:25:04):
Richard, you said you use it too.

Richard Campbell (00:25:06):
Yeah, absolutely. Same thing. Cropping images, it's often grabbing screenshots and just wanting to trim a portion out for something. It's pretty normal. Just a quick way to grab a photo, grab an image from something, paste it somewhere where you can get it trimmed up and then drop it into a PowerPoint. Something along those

Mikah Sargent (00:25:24):
Lines. It doesn't have layers, does it, doesn't support layers. So it remains relatively basic.

Paul Thurrott (00:25:31):
The number of times more than adequate apps have appeared to replace paint cannot be counted, including apps that support layers like paint.net or Photoshop or Affinity photo or whatever. There's a million of, I don't know, paint

Richard Campbell (00:25:45):
Has that same position that Notepad has. There's ton

Paul Thurrott (00:25:49):
Of potential. It's another they use every single day. Yep, exactly. Yeah, do not screw with it. Actually one thing you can tell from the screenshot that somebody posted to the Discord at least, which is that this app, that's the, originally it was called PC paintbrush. Remember, this app has a humongous UI at the top that looks like a ribbon. It's not a ribbon, it's gigantic. It's just a gigantic toolbar. You can't collapse it. Kidding. A real ribbon. Are you kidding me? You could hide that thing. So when I edited the image you're looking at now to fit in my homepage, I needed to go with 16 by nine. I had to manually crop this thing down to 16 by nine to make it fit, which is, it's like the old word joke with all the toolbars open and the only thing left for text was this tiny little thing you could type in. That's exactly what pain is now.

Mikah Sargent (00:26:41):
Why can't you collapse? That's so good

Paul Thurrott (00:26:43):
Because it's not actually, that's the thing. The UI control exists. They did not use it. This to further his intern theory. I think there's something to this. Is it possible to

Mikah Sargent (00:26:54):
Hack these apps

Paul Thurrott (00:26:57):
Where you could I just choose the one from Windows 2000 or something

Mikah Sargent (00:27:00):
Where you could just hop in and turn on the little feature that lets you collapse things? Or does that not?

Paul Thurrott (00:27:05):
That's not possible. Not that. I know. I would love that. I would never have that thing on.

Mikah Sargent (00:27:10):
Yeah, why do I need all of the palette colors available at all times?

Paul Thurrott (00:27:14):
I know it's 1990 or something,

Mikah Sargent (00:27:17):
Or I think I'm actually painting with a palette in my hand.

Paul Thurrott (00:27:21):
Oh man. So I think we talked about one of these two things last week, but we should discuss the fact that a lot of the talk around Windows these days is about this kind of thing, like these little front end UI things that people notice. And honestly, I do feel like this Windows team very uniquely, I think in the history of Windows cares more about the superfluous front end stuff, the UI and the prettiness of it and whatever than it does about the technical stuff like the File Explorer stuff that I'm so concerned about or whatever. But there are two things that are kind of, I would say are low level ish that are happening in Windows 11 soon and they both need to be discussed. I think we touched on this last week that Microsoft is removing the legacy troubleshooters in Windows 11, and that's happening right now. In fact, most of them are already gone, and I haven't written about this one yet, but Microsoft is killing third party printer drivers, which seems kind of bizarre, but I love

Mikah Sargent (00:28:19):
That we're talking

Paul Thurrott (00:28:19):
About this. I have a theory about this one, but I want to know what's your explanation for this?

Richard Campbell (00:28:24):
Oh, I think this is a byproduct of the fallout of print nightmare, which is two years ago now, where a major vulnerability, the sort of point and shoot print capabilities that you had inside of offices required an elevated permission system that happened automatically and it was being attacked as a vector within a hack to elevate privileges for malware. And so they very rapidly, in July, it was July of 21, they slammed out this patch and it just broke printers all over the place and specifically class three or V three printer drivers. Now you needed individual elevations for each machine. You had to use U A C prompts for each of them. I think Jeremy Moscowitz made hay on this, put

Paul Thurrott (00:29:16):
On a T

Richard Campbell (00:29:17):
In policy PAC to do a workaround on it and they patched it. Again, it was one of those cascading, here's the fix for the fix and then a fix of the fix as they tried to figure this thing out. But printing the problem is that the class four drivers had none of these problems, but class four drivers live in high security context and the printer manufacturers, their developers just don't want to work that way. And so if they do make a Class four driver at all, it's a very minor subset of the features of the printer. And if you want all the features you want class three, which this is what's going to bring this to a head where class three printers drivers were just fine.

Paul Thurrott (00:29:54):
Windows in hell. Oh, I'm sorry. I was going to say, I thought that's where he was going. Okay. So to me, the interesting thing about this is no, actually there are two Achilles eels for windows and arm right now. One is the performance, which is an unsolved problem, and we keep pointing to this nuvia thing, hopefully, hopefully this year they'll finally have the next gen chip sets and we can solve that problem. But Microsoft has done a good job with the rest of it. And there's only one remaining compatibility niggle, and that is hardware drivers, right? Windows comes with a bunch of class drivers of whatever Stripe, and that's all that is supported on Windows and arm. Now for the most part, that's fine. So you have an all-in-one printer from HP or whatever company and you connect it to your Windows and arm computer, the three of you that own such a thing, and it works. It works fine. You'll be able to scan with it, you can print with it, but what you don't get is that utility that the printer maker supplied that maybe provides all those additional features that you were talking about. Right? The special features for that printer for

Richard Campbell (00:30:57):
Most people think constantly tries to sell you ink.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:00):
And that too, that's a different problem Microsoft can't solve, but yeah, but that's a problem.

Richard Campbell (00:31:04):
Oh, I beg to differ, Paul. I believe that's one of the problems they are solving right here. The drivers

Paul Thurrott (00:31:10):
They'res, a potential antitrust inquiry happening with that, by the way. Well,

Richard Campbell (00:31:14):
The bigger thing here is now all the Bing ads are going to show up in your printer drop.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:18):
Oh Lord. You're going to be printing out Bing ads. Yeah, exactly. Every other page will be like Bing. Okay. Well anyway, this will sort of level the playing field for printers for any Windows version, including arm windows. Most Windows users will see the same thing now, which is kind of interesting. So maybe it would behoove printer makers to make their class four drivers better or as good as they

Richard Campbell (00:31:45):
Can be. Yeah, I think you got a point there. I think the arm situation is an important one because I bet you there's a huge number of printer manufacturers going, we're not making arm drivers not enough machines,

Paul Thurrott (00:31:53):
No point by the time this thing is successful, paper won't even be a thing anymore. Yeah. Wow.

Richard Campbell (00:32:00):
Yeah, Microsoft essentially has taken over most other driver sets for PC related things. We look at it today,

Paul Thurrott (00:32:10):
We do live in a world where you plug something and it works, right?

Richard Campbell (00:32:13):
This is the

Paul Thurrott (00:32:14):
Promise of 1995.

Richard Campbell (00:32:15):
That's what, it doesn't just happen to be true. The only folks that have been able to hang onto their drivers, and that was a near miss thing. Going back to the Vista area are the video car manufacturers was, there's so few.

Paul Thurrott (00:32:27):
It was definitely display drivers. Yeah, there you go. Two, well, four if you include Intel and a md,

Richard Campbell (00:32:33):
I guess, right? So you mentioned that Microsoft can afford to put teams with each of those folks to actually make sure the drivers compli and half write them for them anyway. But way too many printer manufacturers, and they're all, listen, people are affectionate towards their Nvidia card. They don't care if Nvidia was unhappy. Nobody's unhappy if brother's unhappy or Cassio is unhappy or

Paul Thurrott (00:32:55):
Oh, Packard talked last week about this decluttering thing. I'm doing a big part of it. The thing I'm working on now is I have this remaining pile of paper I'm going through and scanning the stuff I need to scan. This is going back in time and I'm talking like medieval torture chamber times. It is the worst software ever made. And I don't want to embarrass the company hp, but it is unbelievably horrible and their software is modern, modern designed, recently modern. But it is horrible. And I've tried everything. I've done Windows imaging acquisition stuff and Photoshop, and I've tried different ways to like is there a better way to, I just want to get the image out of this thing, and it is the worst When this thing is over, I might do an office space on it. I might describe a baseball bat and go it back and there you go to town on this thing. I can't stand. How terrible.

Richard Campbell (00:33:49):
Well, in my creative childhood, I did learn how to make thermite so we could just turn into

Paul Thurrott (00:33:56):
A whole pile of black

Richard Campbell (00:33:58):
That's very therapeutic. It takes about an hour for it to fully burn down and do it in an enclosed area. We'll burn through sidewalks and stuff.

Paul Thurrott (00:34:05):
No big deal.

Richard Campbell (00:34:07):
But boy oh boy, we took out a really rec calci printer that way with several ounces that Thermite just burned it up until it was a puddle.

Paul Thurrott (00:34:18):
I would like this to be a puddle. I hate it. Yeah,

(00:34:21):
I can't remember. Did we talk about the legacy troubleshooters? Yeah, I was going to say we went into the printer stuff. So you only mentioned it. So if you want to talk about the trouble sheet. Yeah. So I believe in any supportive version of Windows 11 and insider versions too. If you go into, what word do you go into? If you go into setting systems is the top one, unless you're in the next version and you scroll down, you see a troubleshoot option, and then it says other troubleshooters. If you click any of those, except for Windows update, I think you will see the new troubleshooter, which is based on the get help app. If you click Windows Update. Yep. Still in the old one. So the old troubleshooters debuted in Windows seven. They were based on control panel. A lot of times people would just go to control panel and go to troubleshooters and get to it that way.

(00:35:03):
But now they've been automated since our semi automated. If you have a problem, like you can't get online and you say wherever you are in the interface, you say, help me get online, the troubleshooter will appear. But this past year they've been switching over to a more modern, I don't want to call it a framework, honestly. I think it's mostly just a front end ui, but a more modern presentation, at the very least. It could be a new framework, but a new set of troubleshooters that hopefully look better and work better and all that kind of stuff. But the funny thing is, if you actually remember what this used to look like before Windows seven, it used to be in something called help and support in Windows Vista, which back in the day, Richard will remember. This was a CH M based, right? The something help manage whatever it was. CH h M was like the help format back in Windows three, the help format 95, they went to HTML at some point. That was help and support. That was probably XP timeframe and then Vista as well. And this thing, this skil app, it's not HTML necessarily. It could be, but I don't know that it is, but it's actually very much like what used to be in Windows Vista. So I guess we Well, and to be

Mikah Sargent (00:36:08):
Clear,

Richard Campbell (00:36:09):
C H M means compressed. H T M L, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:36:12):
Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, I thought it was something. Had something else. Okay, gotcha. Compressed H TML form. I thought it predated H T ml? No, C H M. I thought it was Windows three. I don't know. I don't actually know. It doesn't matter. But the Windows help app. Back in those days when you would run html, the C H M files was the worst. It was horrible. It had that navigation frame on the side. It was really hard to, what

Richard Campbell (00:36:33):
Was that? Well, you didn't expect any help from Windows. How?

Paul Thurrott (00:36:36):
Yeah, and it definitely met that bar. It was not very good. So I haven't had a chance to actually use the new troubleshooting system, meaning I haven't run into a problem where I actually need troubleshooting. But anyway, if you do, you might've noticed it because it's already transitioning party. A

Mikah Sargent (00:36:54):
Nice little brag there. What's that? I'm advanced enough that I haven't had to use

Paul Thurrott (00:36:59):
Didn't. No,

Mikah Sargent (00:36:59):
I'm teas

Paul Thurrott (00:37:00):
You. I'm sorry. I did not, that's not what I meant.

Mikah Sargent (00:37:02):
I know you didn't. I know.

Paul Thurrott (00:37:03):
I just meant I haven't had a problem to, I'll tell you this, I've had blue green screens because it's an insider program PC on one particular computer file explorer related by the way. And when that comes back, I don't see get help popping up to tell me what went wrong. So I don't think the underlying system is actually any smarter than it ever was, but it certainly is better looking and everyone will hate it because people my age all like the old stuff and they'll see this newbie thing and be like, it won't be,

Mikah Sargent (00:37:32):
It's different. I hate it. I know.

Paul Thurrott (00:37:35):
Is that a proportional font? Screw that.

Mikah Sargent (00:37:41):
Okay. Anything else about legacy troubleshooters or the printer? The printer drivers

Paul Thurrott (00:37:45):
Are the legacy things. Time when I think about scanning and paper.

Mikah Sargent (00:37:51):
Alright, let's take a break then. I would love to tell you about our first sponsor of today's episode of Windows Weekly. It's Melissa, the contact data quality expert this holiday season. As you are gearing up to send out probably loads of mail and information, let Melissa help your business meet online shopping expectations. Increase R O I reduce waste and costs associated with lost and undeliverable packages and improve your customer's overall satisfaction. It's important that you prepare this now, not later. It's important that you get things figured out before you start sending off those shopping advertisements and that other information. Retailers are working to send out information about what they've got to offer, and you could end up spending a lot of money that you don't need to spend if you're sending it to people who aren't at the addresses where you expect them to be.

(00:38:50):
Here are some of Melissa's tips to help you get started. You can start by cleaning out your contact data with Melissa's data cleansing solutions. All of your stale, outdated data gets replaced with verified accurate information, such as replacing old addresses for people who have moved and adding new emails or phone numbers. Customers always want a seamless experience with efficient delivery. So make sure your business is meeting their expectations next day and two day delivery implementation is in high demand, and Melissa ensures that addresses are verified and standardized at checkout with their auto complete tool. Not only does having a verified address at checkout ensure the address is deliverable, but it also cuts down on keystrokes by up to 75%, which is going to make your customer's experience quicker and easier. They're not having to type in their full address, which may lead them to going, you know what?

(00:39:38):
I'll do this later and then maybe forgetting about it. Nope, it can all be taken care of right then. Offering bundles and cross-selling to existing customers is more cost efficient than finding new ones. So the holiday season is the perfect time to do this, since customers are most likely shopping for others. Profiling your data can give you a better understanding of your customer base and bestselling products, which can help you create more effective marketing strategies. And then matching and de-duping. Your data is going to clean your database, allowing you to see a complete 360 degree view of each customer. This will also help you better understand your customers, allowing for more personalized marketing and a better customer experience. Since 1985, Melissa has specialized in global intelligence solutions and contact data quality. Melissa continually undergoes independent security audits and is SOC two. HIPAA and G D P are compliant. Make sure your customer contact data is up to date. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free at melissa.com/twit. That's melissa.com/twit. And we thank Melissa for sponsoring this week's episode of Windows Weekly. Alright, let's head back to the show. I am here, Micah Sargent today in place of Leo LaPorte, who is currently visiting his mom in Rhode Island, who will be back soon. And we are ready to talk about mobile.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:07):
I'm reason when you say that I think of the word memaw. I've never called anyone that,

Mikah Sargent (00:41:12):
So I don't know why. Visit me ma Memaw. Yeah, we didn't do. Yeah, we did. I had ma and pa, I had grandpa, grandma. No, Memaw though.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:23):
We have Mimi here. Oh, we don't use that, but our relatives do. And I used Gram.

Mikah Sargent (00:41:29):
Oh gram, yeah, probably

Paul Thurrott (00:41:30):
Because I couldn't say multiple syllables or something. Anyway, so we didn't really talk about this, but I'm not even sure when this was announced. A month or so ago, Lenovo announced something called the think phone, which was a ThinkPad styled smartphone with a red button because think bad and it's an Android handset as you would imagine. But what they talked about at the time was some Microsoft partnership that was going to lead to some interesting Microsoft 365 slash Windows 365 experiences. And one of them, they've just kind of come clean on this. This is now available, it's got an awkward name. It's all caps enhanced Windows 365 app experience for Android. And what this is, is it's not an app. It's something that gets integrated into the operating system. It's only available on the Think phone for now, but it is coming to other Android phone makers.

(00:42:25):
And what this phone does is what a lot of phones have done in the past. The Samsung flagships do this. The Windows phones used to do this where you can connect it to a S B C doc or these days it would be like a display that has a U S B C doc in it and then a keyboard to mouse, and then you get this full screen experience and you can use it sort of like a computer. The way that Samsung does it is they have an environment called Dex that they've created that's separate from Android, that has nothing to do with Android. The way that Microsoft did it back in the day was actually pretty cool, although it didn't last, which was they also had their own desktop environment because U W P apps at the time would work between Windows eight or 10 or whatever it was, and Windows phone would be the same app.

(00:43:06):
So if you use the app on the phone, you get the phone app. If you used it on a big screen, you get the kind of full screen desktop style app. That lasted about two seconds, but it was a good idea. So for this thing, Microsoft 365 of course is that cloud PC concept. This is Microsoft's Windows desktop in the cloud as a service. And what that means is we're basically getting this kind of deck style expanded desktop experience over a wire, but you're connecting, what you're running is not on the phone. You're running something that's up in the cloud and it takes the screen. There are similarities between what Microsoft and Samsung and this in that you can keep using the phone as a phone, right? You've got all your phone stuff going on there. If you want to, you can use the phone as a track pad if you don't have a keyboard. You can also use the onscreen keyboard if you want, that kind of thing. But it's just a front end for Windows 365. So

Richard Campbell (00:44:01):
The bigger thing to me is that you're carrying your identity in the phone into a virtual and

Paul Thurrott (00:44:06):
Passing it through. Yeah,

Richard Campbell (00:44:09):
We've talked about this for ages, this idea of I want to use lots of different compute, but I don't want to have to go get my stuff.

Paul Thurrott (00:44:18):
So

Richard Campbell (00:44:19):
The idea that the phone becomes the proxy for your identity provides all that identity information to a virtual machine that it has access to the rest of your M 365 resources. That's a good idea to temporarily use a computer and then as soon as you take the phone away, that VM disappears.

Paul Thurrott (00:44:36):
Right? Years ago, and I don't remember what version of anything it was, it might have been actually Jerry Moskowitz, even interestingly you just mentioned this, but somebody showed me or somebody was doing something on a phone a million years ago and it was tiny, and it was like, what's going on here? And they were accessing via remote desktop, their window server somewhere. And I was like, because the screen, it is like this tiny little thing and you can zoom in on it

Richard Campbell (00:45:01):
Just because I can do this.

Paul Thurrott (00:45:02):
Well, that's why I said, whatcha are you doing? What is the point of this? It's like, look, obviously this is not the greatest way to do this, but at least I can do this and that's better than not being able to do it, right? If something goes wrong, whatever it might be, I want to reboot the server, whatever,

Richard Campbell (00:45:14):
Like R D P everywhere.

Paul Thurrott (00:45:16):
But this solution is actually much more interesting, right? Because it's going to be literal Windows 11 desktop experience, right? On a big screen.

Richard Campbell (00:45:25):
Also as much compute as you need, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:45:27):
Yep. Bandwidth limited, obviously, but we'll see. I always felt like there was a dream there that could be realized where you carried a phone around and you sat down on a plane, put the phone down, and the screen came on. It was your stuff and you did whatever you want, and you went to work and you put your phone down and the big screen came on, the keyboard mouse go to work. I always sort of believed in that idea, and then I've watched some kind of crash and burn for various reasons. But actually you could.

Richard Campbell (00:45:55):
You're totally right. And it's not so much a bandwidth problem as it's a latency problem, but it comes back to all the virtual desktop stuff you're typing on a machine that's nowhere near you. So how is that going to behave Still

Paul Thurrott (00:46:10):
Easier problem than gaming. Yeah, fair.

Richard Campbell (00:46:13):
But the fact that you have M 365 on your phone, which means you have M 365 console that's inherently in the cloud, and now you can harness a virtual machine, essentially a virtual desktop to provide additional access to that. It solves a ton of problems for doing that. Now, think of this from a hot desk office perspective. We used to have a bunch of other ways to pull your profile into different machines for hot desking. This is a way better way to go about this to the point where maybe you do have a rack of machines in your office that are actually hosting the virtual machines.

Paul Thurrott (00:46:51):
Even that latency. I don't know what happens here. I mean, I'm just inventing things now, but I, having worked in the education space, I mean, the notion of wiping out a classroom of PCs back in the day after a class left was a nightmare. And Chromebooks do a better job of that, obviously, but something where it's like kids are just walking in with their phone like, boop, you're in, you're out. And then you're not wiping anything. That thing is just a dumb terminal essentially. Right?

Richard Campbell (00:47:17):
Well, now you the, but you'd have this mean, Microsoft's been trying to find applications for WIN 365 really hard for a long time. The idea of having a larger compute resource, but the identities contextualize on the phone. You can run it in the cloud or you could run it maybe in a machine that's managed by Microsoft effectively. This might be exactly the product for the post pandemic office where everybody's hot desking.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:42):
Yeah, yeah. No, of course it has to. This is super early days. So who just asked me if I remembered Windows? Come on. What the book about this. Anyway, yeah, I remember it anyhow. I mentioned it. I didn't say the name of it, but yeah, this makes sense to me. The issue is it's only on one phone. I guess the way they've decided to deploy this is, I guess an app is not going to work, so they have to work with handset makers. We know that Microsoft has a big partnership with Samsung. I would expect it to come there as well, so we'll see. It's a good idea. We'll see. I don't even know what the uptick is on Microsoft or Windows 365 either. Right? I mean, this may be a good solution for a product. No one's using it, but it's early days

Richard Campbell (00:48:37):
And are you going to talk about the $2,200 iPhone?

Paul Thurrott (00:48:42):
No, I wasn't, but we can. What's the 22?

Richard Campbell (00:48:47):
That's the new iPhone 15.

Paul Thurrott (00:48:50):
Oh. If you get with the terabyte version, it's the

Richard Campbell (00:48:52):
Terabyte in your phone.

Paul Thurrott (00:48:56):
I don't even fill 128, so I'll never need that.

Richard Campbell (00:49:00):
Well, there's some people that are always complaining about not enough space, so

Paul Thurrott (00:49:03):
People are creating movies and things on an iPhone. I mean, I can see something. Yeah, that's really where that space comes in, because

Richard Campbell (00:49:11):
$2,200, you can buy a pretty nice camera for that.

Paul Thurrott (00:49:16):
Yeah, no, I don't. But you can't call on that camera, right? That's right. Guys call. I got a phone call. I got a phone call. No, I know, I hear you, obviously, but it's an interesting idea. Well, it's like not that we talk about the Mac Mini studio. Is that the right name? The Mac Studio. Mac Studio, yeah. Which is basically a tall mini. This satisfies the same part of the market. It's like they want something small, but it has to have a lot of stuff in it. It's kind of a neat little, they probably don't sell very many of 'em, but I'm sure the people that own them love them. I love mine. There you go. Do I can do so many things at once. It's the kind of tool I was talking about. Yeah, I'm the tool. It is me. I didn't want to name it.

(00:49:59):
No, it's a nice little machine. It's nice. Yeah. Well, we'll talk about Apple in a second, but first Qualcomm this week we're waiting on Qualcomm Nuvia, but Qualcomm this week extended their partnership with Apple to supply their five G modem cards, basically, which is all the time. We need to know that Apple has completely failed at doing this themselves. They bought the Intel modem business a few years back. I don't remember. Apple is always trying to get rid of their partners. They've been really hate Qualcomm for obvious reasons, and they can't do it. That's funny. So Qualcomm will be around for at least three more years. So all of

Richard Campbell (00:50:36):
The iPhones, I'm delighted that you're delighted.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:38):
I just think it's funny because they hate 'em so much and all of the iPhones released through at least twenty, twenty six. Now we'll have Qualcomm chip sets in them ensuring that the cancer spreads.

Richard Campbell (00:50:52):
And you're meaning that metaphorically, I presume?

Paul Thurrott (00:50:55):
Yeah, probably. Intel mentioned some time ago, some months ago, I think this notion of next generation Thunderbolt, but they've come clean. It's going to be called Thunderbolt five. Surprise.

Richard Campbell (00:51:09):
Hi, Thunderbolt. I thought we were done with that. Isn't this all just U S B?

Paul Thurrott (00:51:13):
No, we're not.

Richard Campbell (00:51:14):
Oh, please.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:14):
So obviously more bandwidth, more you can have three four K monitors at 144 hertz, multiple eight K monitors. What's the bandwidth on this thing? It must be 120 gigabits per second. But don't worry, all the U S B cables you buy for the thing will not be marked and you'll have no ideas which one, work with it, because that's what U S B is, and God, what is wrong with our planet? But

Richard Campbell (00:51:37):
You wanted a universal cable connector and you got your universal

Paul Thurrott (00:51:40):
Cable connector. No one said anything about the cable. No one talked cables. That was dumb. We didn't really think that went through.

Richard Campbell (00:51:45):
It wasn't about the cable part, just the connector.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:47):
You can't look at a cable most cables and have an idea what it even does. I mean, I don't know how you have to just test it, I guess stupid, but at least it plugs 'em both ways.

Mikah Sargent (00:51:57):
It is so frustrating how you can hold up any cable and go, so what is it? That's the other thing too that's frustrating is there is actually a set of symbols that they talk about. You put on the thing and

Paul Thurrott (00:52:10):
Then it tell you there are on some cable. Every once in a while

Mikah Sargent (00:52:11):
You'll see that every once in a while you get a cable that's like, you know what? We don't care about design. We're actually going to put the little icons on there. Oh God. Of course. Then I have to have a little laminated wallet card that has little icons on there so I can go, okay, put

Paul Thurrott (00:52:24):
Little tags in each one of 'em or something.

Mikah Sargent (00:52:25):
Yeah, it's right next to my card that has all of the laundry symbols, so I know what each of those means. Do not bleach can transfer speeds at 20 gigabit. Wait, that's my other card.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:35):
My problem is I would like to keep the cable that comes with some device. If I've got a Thunderball dock or whatever, I want to keep the cable that came with that thing. With that thing, except the

Richard Campbell (00:52:44):
Cable's usually a crappy cable. I like nice cables, but

Paul Thurrott (00:52:47):
I want to know what comes with what, and even that's really hard. I have all these U S B cables and I clean stuff up every once in a while. Sometimes I'm like, you know what? I can't figure it out. Throwing these all in. I don't care.

Mikah Sargent (00:52:56):
Got to get all labeler.

Richard Campbell (00:52:58):
I've done cable purging in this move. Let me tell you.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:02):
Oh, I bet. Well, let me give you a little hint. At your future history because if your wife is like mine, the day after you throw out those cables, she's going to walk up with a Kindle or something and say, Hey, what plugs into this thing? I just literally just threw all of those out.

Mikah Sargent (00:53:14):
I don't have any microb anymore.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:17):
Why do you have a micro U S B? Anything?

Richard Campbell (00:53:19):
I just like the laundry label type that explains why I have all those U S B cables hanging on the drying rack.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:26):
Misunderstood. Okay. And then Apple had their event yesterday. It was interesting on a number of levels I would say. I actually went, I did, I don't want to call it research, but I did a, looked up a lot of stuff and this event, they only event announced two product line products. It was very interesting. The past several years has been a lot more. And I was sort of thinking, I think the reason and people, it always boring, they can't innovate anymore. And it's like, guys, the iPhone has been around forever. It's super mature smartphone, the whole smartphone industry is super mature. Even services business, which is now its second biggest business, is really mature. I mean, there's not much they can do there to add to it that would excite anybody. They're in kind of a tough spot. I mean, they're the biggest company in the world.

(00:54:14):
They're fine, but this will be the first year that their revenues decrease year over year for the full year, which is, I don't think not has happened in the modern era anyway, and things are changing. So it reminded me of Microsoft and their transition to the cloud, which at one point they were describing as software plus services because they were kind of transitioning to services. And I sort of thought Apple is kind of a hardware plus services company now. Not kind of. They literally are and it is their business, but I think they're fine. They're huge. Obviously their leadership has done a great job. But the interesting thing about that comparison to me as a Microsoft guy is that Microsoft made this transition to the cloud, which was kind of an all new thing and has enabled them to be a big player in AI potentially if they get it right, which only a few companies can do. And so they're on a growth trajectory as well. I don't care about that part of the company almost at all. But for Microsoft, good stuff, I don't know where Apple goes from here. They pretty much are hardware and services. I don't know what else they could do.

Mikah Sargent (00:55:16):
It is tough, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:55:17):
To kind of expand on it. There's no iPhone coming down the pike, right? There's no next huge thing I think on either side of that fence for them. And so there's the iterative stuff like Apple Watch or AirPods or whatever, that kind of stuff, which is great. It's all great, but I don't know what the next era is for them.

Mikah Sargent (00:55:38):
That's why I almost think there's been so much push in their computing stuff because they're going to see that start to balance out where the iPhone has been so much the big seller and now they need more sales in max to as the iPhone drops. Yeah. Where else do you go from here? I don't know. The vision and all of that stuff. The Vision Pro exists in its own weird, strange space and it's just not, yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:56:05):
I looked at, because it's 2023, I looked at 5, 10, 20 years ago. So 20 2003 it, it's funny, if you go back and look at their final quarter of that year, their bestselling product at the time was the Mac. They sold some hundred thousand something units. It wasn't very many. The iPod not doing great, but was the second biggest business. And the thing that became services, I don't remember now what they called it, but contribute, it was app store stuff mostly. Probably it was like 127 million in revenue. It's like nothing. Today they make, I think it's over 20 billion in revenues per quarter from services. And it's all tied to the success story. That is the iPhone that it's an astonishing business. Well, I haven't done this in a while, but there are many quarters, I'm sure this has just happened, but where the iPhone is bigger than all of Microsoft from a revenue perspective, that's how big this is. So they're going to be okay. It's not like they fall away or anything, but I mean I sort of feel like they're in a maintenance phase.

Mikah Sargent (00:57:08):
Yeah. What else do you do? What else can you

Paul Thurrott (00:57:12):
Dot enough antitrust? Because that's going to be the other problem they're going to have.

Mikah Sargent (00:57:14):
Yeah. Oh man. The gatekeepers, that whole thing. That's why I

Paul Thurrott (00:57:19):
Mean Apple invented gatekeeping. They perfected it

Mikah Sargent (00:57:22):
When you were talking earlier. That's the name of their security. Of course, it's one of their security tools. When you mentioned Microsoft making changes to give people the ability to delete apps from the operating system, that's what the EU is requiring of them. And what I found interesting about that, and you and Leo and Richard probably talked about this earlier, but I did find it interesting how Microsoft was like, yeah, even though right now being, and there was one other thing that they had that wasn't included though, that

Paul Thurrott (00:57:59):
Meet the,

Mikah Sargent (00:58:00):
Yeah, what was the, it didn't meet the quota or whatever, but they're like, even though you aren't looking at those yet, but you're about to be, we welcome any and all. They're just like, let it happen. We're playing.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:11):
Well, they learned their lesson, and I've written about this a couple of times because we're going to move into some antitrust stuff soon, but Brad Smith is their well now president or whatever he is, or senior president, whatever he is, but he's chief counsel. He came on right at the end of the antitrust stuff 20 years ago and said, guys, settle and agree and just do what they want and stop fighting. And other companies take different approaches. I guess we'll talk about that in a moment, but we'll see how Apple handles it. I mean, apple tends to be passive aggressive. They'll disagree publicly and then just do it like they're doing that with U S B C. They're probably going to, they're doing it with right to repair. Apple just came out and supported. I mean, they supported a big California right to repair law after lobbying against it for years.

Richard Campbell (00:59:00):
Yeah. They'll never make hay about being compliant with that stuff. They'll just complain and then do

Paul Thurrott (00:59:05):
It well, and they'll also play that port cable game because they'll say, all right, you want USS bbc? Great. How do you feel about ussb two? Because that's what we're putting in the iPhone. Congratulations.

Mikah Sargent (00:59:18):
The malicious compliance has been kind of

Paul Thurrott (00:59:21):
The pettier the better. Can we hurt our customers while we do this? Yeah, yeah. Let's do that. So they love us anyway. Yep. They're not going to care. Anyway, Apple's doing great.

Mikah Sargent (00:59:38):
Is that the end of mobile?

Paul Thurrott (00:59:39):
Yes. It's

Mikah Sargent (00:59:40):
Okay. We'll take one more break and then we'll come back to talk about antitrust and Microsoft 3 6 5. I want to tell you about Cashflow, who is quite literally bringing you this episode of Windows Weekly great sponsor we've had on the network for many years. Cashflow is celebrating T C P, any cast's 20th anniversary since 1999. Cash Fly has held a track record for high performing, ultra reliable content delivery. Cash Fly pioneered the use of T CCP anycast in 2002 and innovation that CDNs continue to build upon to this day. So other CDNs are going, oh, we've, we've got to get into this game with more than 3,500 clients in over 80 countries. Organizations consistently choose cashflow for scalability, reliability, and unrivaled performance. Cashflow's, smart image optimization, it's a fast and secure image processing service that allows you to transform and optimize your images on the fly.

(01:00:37):
Large uncompressed images can significantly slow down your website resulting in poor user experience and lower search engine rankings. So get ready to deliver personalized and engaging visual content effortlessly. With CacheFly, you will get ultra low latency video streaming that will deliver video to more than a million concurrent users. Lightning fast gaming, which delivers downloads faster with zero lag glitches or outages. Mobile content optimization that offers automatic and simple image optimization so your site loads faster on any device. It's the only C D N built for Throughput. Delivers rich media content up to 10 times faster than traditional delivery methods and 30% faster than other Major CDNs. 30% faster flexible month-to-month billing is also available for as long as you need it, and discounts will come in once you kind of settle in and have these fixed terms that you are after. You can design your own contract when you switch to Cash Fly.

(01:01:36):
So join Cash, fly the world's fastest C D N for a limited time Cash Fly is offering a free five terabyte tier plan for other plans. Learn how you can can your first month free@cashfly.com. That's C A C H E F L y.com. Thank you. Cash Fly for sponsoring this week's episode of Windows Weekly. Alright, we are back from the break. I'm Micah Sargent filling in for Leo LaPorte. He'll be back next week, but we are joined as we always are by Paul Thora, Richard Campbell. And it's time to do the Microsoft 3 6 5 dance. Why did I say that? I have no idea. But that's

Paul Thurrott (01:02:18):
Just, is there a

Mikah Sargent (01:02:19):
Debt? The 3, 6, 5? No.

Paul Thurrott (01:02:24):
Well, Richard and I do have kind of a jazz hand things related to PowerPoints, so that probably makes sense. That'll work at least in that context. I don't remember where that happened, but I still think of it from time to time. I just laugh out loud and then my wife's like, what? And I'm like, Richard Jazz. Yeah, I don't remember the conversation exactly, but it was like, I said, well, you know why the Excel icon is green? And I was like, no, why money? I'm like, oh, that makes sense. It was like, why is the word icon blue? It's like, because writers are suicidal, they're always upset, they're always sad. And then we were like, why is PowerPoint purple? And then we were like, just is.

Mikah Sargent (01:03:06):
Wow,

Paul Thurrott (01:03:07):
That's great. Great. This is what we do in our free time. So Dennis Austin, who was a co-creator of that software, Microsoft PowerPoint, has passed away. So I've been writing a series, I would've read about this anyway, but I added this to a series of articles I'm writing about tech nostalgia. And this product came out of, was invented by someone named Robert Gaskins, who I actually heard from this past week in a very prickly way to correct a very minor mistake. But anyway, he's a genius, so that's fine. And he has also written a book, which you can get for free from his website or for 2 99 from Kindle called Sweating Bullets notes about inventing PowerPoint. Get it?

(01:03:47):
He created it or he invented it. He co cocreated it, if you will, with Dennis Austin, the person who just passed away originally on the Mac, right? But then Windows 1.0 was announced. So we got to put this in all G UIs, we're going to put it on Windows and the company, this was the mistake I'd made it. The company was called for, what is it called? What do I say? It Forethought, which I called Forefront twice by mistake. Forefront was notable for a couple of reasons. One was it was Apple's very first investment in 1987, and it was Microsoft's first major corporate acquisition, although they had acquired a very small company previously that year in April, 1987, Microsoft also bought the company for $14 million one week after they shipped the first version, which is kind of interesting. And they brought it into their graphics business unit, which is a funny thing to think about. But back in the day, I remember it was all Ms dos since we were just making that shift to DUIs and they were going to build a bunch of apps like this. And of course it was the beginning of Microsoft Office, which was released first on what? The Mac. Oh, that's right. Yeah. So in the early days it was word, Excel and PowerPoint. I feel like Excel might have also debuted first on the Mac. I could be wrong about that, but

Mikah Sargent (01:05:08):
There are a hundred Excel people who are ready to type something

Paul Thurrott (01:05:11):
To PowerPoint. Absolutely did. And PowerPoint is of course both loved and hated, right? I mean there were so many famous memes about it and it's been on SS n l as a joke, it's been in cartoons. But when I was in the same college environment, I referenced earlier with the networking stuff, and I remember our phrase was those who can't do PowerPoint. So that was easily, well, almost 30 years ago. So anyway, unfortunately he has passed away 76 years old, I think an important person in the history of our industry. So there you go. We already talked about U S B C ports on the new iPhones one, the little, in case it's not obvious, the iPhone pros, 15 pros have SB three ports, so they can do 10 gigabits per second data transfer. The non pros only have SB two, which is what Lightning was, 480 megabits per second. So it's about 20 times slower. So have fun with it. Hopefully you won't have any big four K videos to transfer or whatever. So it's just kind of a cheap way to differentiate the pro and the non-pro. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:06:29):
Do though Android phones does the latest Samsung phone. Yeah. What speed

Paul Thurrott (01:06:37):
Do they get? Yeah, USP three.

Mikah Sargent (01:06:39):
USP three. Got

Paul Thurrott (01:06:39):
It. Now, does that cable that comes within the box support, whatever? No, I don't know because I don't care. I only make fun of Apple, so who knows? I just,

Mikah Sargent (01:06:49):
You know who you are, Paul, and I appreciate that.

Paul Thurrott (01:06:52):
I am not hypocritical. I am ironic.

Mikah Sargent (01:06:57):
It's all satire here, folks.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:00):
I actually dunno. I just dunno. I don't care too much. I don't use a Samsung phone, whatever. But yeah, this is interesting, right? Because there's different ways you could approach antitrust and like I said, you can fight it. Google's fighting it. We'll talk about that in a second. Intel fought it in Europe 10 years ago, lost, and then eight years later won, which is a little weird, but Microsoft fought, it lost big and then it wasn't so bad in the end, but then they lost a decade. And here we are with Google, Amazon, apple, and Facebook. So that was part of the fallout from that. But this gatekeeper thing in the EU is really interesting and aside from some of the obvious questions, they make changes only in Europe like Microsoft is doing with teams and Microsoft 365. It is kind of interesting to think about what products and services might be the most affected by this and in our space, I think they're actually already going after the big one, which is Microsoft 365.

(01:07:58):
I think this is the one area where Microsoft is legitimately dominant, but I think the rest of the company, I'd have to really think through that through. But I mean the cloud, they're a distant second place. Big but distant second place operating systems. I mean Windows has a billion users, but compared to iPhone and Android, whatever, maybe it's something they could look at, I guess. But gaming obviously not, but office productivity, I think that's the big one. I do think that's the one we got to look at. I'm not saying slack's, right? In fact, I've said very explicitly Slack is wrong, but I do think that this should be looked at. And also nobody wants regulators or governments designing products per se. That's how we get things like the browser ballot. But then again, when you force Microsoft to, we're Microsoft, not we, but Microsoft is going to design integration between teams and the rest of office or Microsoft could design an integration point that would be between whatever and the rest of office and that would benefit everybody, right? I mean it wouldn't hurt teams per se, not technically. Maybe that is a better approach and I don't know who came up with that idea, but that is what they're doing. So that's not so horrible.

(01:09:21):
But that's the new Microsoft. That's the Microsoft that's like, yeah, yeah, whatever you want, we'll do it. As long as you have raised the issue, we will change as

Mikah Sargent (01:09:28):
Hands after you said that. Is that

Paul Thurrott (01:09:29):
What? Yeah, not exactly.

Mikah Sargent (01:09:32):
It's purple. We'll do it. Oh really?

Paul Thurrott (01:09:35):
Well, we'll see. But they're only doing it in Europe. Give Apple a little credit by the way, doing U S B C everywhere. Apple has a history of not always doing that. I mean the US iPhones only are eim, which I hate, but I think the rest of the world or certainly Europe is a combination of semi em, which is what they used to be. So they could have just done U S B C in Europe, right? To be jerks. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:10:00):
I'm glad they did

Paul Thurrott (01:10:01):
Not, but they didn't,

Mikah Sargent (01:10:04):
And this has been a fascinating thing too, is that the lightning change being its own internal, there was so much more purchasing that folks had to do and adjusting, whereas this time around anyone who's purchased a product in the past three, four years at least is going to have one U S B C cable surely. You know what I mean? So I think it's a little bit,

Paul Thurrott (01:10:27):
I mean it

Mikah Sargent (01:10:28):
Works all the way

Paul Thurrott (01:10:28):
Around. We're going to be buying lightning cable, whi whisk, what do you call 'em or chair? What do call them? What's the word I'm looking for? Whisk, not whisker.

Mikah Sargent (01:10:38):
Witcher chairs. Oh, wicker, wicker. Wicker

Paul Thurrott (01:10:40):
Chairs. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (01:10:41):
Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:10:41):
Exactly. They like a Vermont Barnes or something.

Mikah Sargent (01:10:47):
Hipster somewhere.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:48):
Those are going to happen. It'll be like a lighting fixture that has all lightning. Oh

Mikah Sargent (01:10:51):
Man, I'm going to have to do that now. Thanks.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:54):
People have millions of these or lots of these things out in the world. Yeah, but you know what? That's okay. You ever find, what was the old connector called? That big thick connector

Mikah Sargent (01:11:03):
That was the 30 pin dock connector. It even had a long name.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:06):
Yeah, I mean you find one of those, you're like, my god, I can't believe we ever used something like this.

Mikah Sargent (01:11:10):
I know. Isn't it wild? Yeah. So I've seen so many folks that it went to the iPhone event. They were posting photos from their hotels and they had those clock radios with the 30 pin dock connectors still. Yes. That are

Paul Thurrott (01:11:22):
Still in the hotel. Exactly. Yep.

Mikah Sargent (01:11:24):
You

Richard Campbell (01:11:25):
Can't get the device anymore, but you can find the dock.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:28):
No, and the funny thing is, so back then, so those things are in hotels all over the world. The gym equipment in my gym I go to my gym is from 1979, has those connectors as well. So I can't connect, no one can, one can connect the devices. It's stupid. But one of the things Apple is doing now and people are ripping on 'em for it because it's a $29 part is, but they're offering a lightning to U S B C connectors so they can use their phones and cars and whatever else has this connector. And it's supposed to work pretty universally. It's supposed to be great. That never occurred for these devices. It would've been kind of nice if there had been a dot connector to lightning adapter that you could just put in your travel bag and if you showed up at a hotel and wanted to listen to your music when you woke up or whatever, it's people doing with these things that it could work. I don't recall that being a thing.

Mikah Sargent (01:12:12):
Yeah, there were a few docs that kind of worked in the reverse. If you had a 30 pin, you pop pop

Paul Thurrott (01:12:20):
Apart and it would be the either one or whatever,

Mikah Sargent (01:12:22):
But not so much. Yeah, I think I saw one, but it was never by a Belkin or an anchor or something like that.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:30):
Just coming up with this off the top of my head. But honestly, I think that's the difference between Steve Jobs and Tim Cook. Tim Cook is super interested in the environment and universal fairness and all. He's just more of a touchy feely guy. And I think Steve Jobs is like, screw it, we aggressively move past things. That's what we're doing. I don't think he ever gave it a second thought.

Mikah Sargent (01:12:49):
I agree with you. And

Paul Thurrott (01:12:50):
He was like, what about landfills? What about landfills? We'll build an Apple store in the landfill. Don't worry about it.

Mikah Sargent (01:12:55):
It's fine. It's all good. I don't think you're wrong. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Even so I've heard, and I know this is not an Apple show, but I've heard between just yesterday and today, so many people complaining and I understand about the 20 minutes of environment stuff. Look, I get it. It wasn't super funny. It was 20 minutes. It took a long time. That's super

Paul Thurrott (01:13:18):
Funny. I want hear about the minor bits of humor that were in there, but go

Mikah Sargent (01:13:23):
On. But my point being that they clearly were, because the complaint is like this is one of your big events of the year and this is your time where you talk about what the Well, yeah, I think that they did take the time to talk about what the company is saying they find important to spend a full 20 minutes on that is saying that they have, that they want to appear at least to have that much concern for it. I think to call it a marketing oversight is incorrect. I'm not saying any of the rest of it, but to say that that was not intentional I think is something I call,

Paul Thurrott (01:14:00):
I think a lot of people found it very tedious and it was tedious. I mean to say it's not laudable, but we came here for you were literally making me wait to learn about the new iPhone. So you can talk about this self-serving nonsense. It was seriously, and you're talking about shipping iPhones on a boat. You're still shipping iPhones from Asia. Here's an idea. You want to save the environment, stop doing that.

Mikah Sargent (01:14:18):
Yes. Oh, I agree. That would

Paul Thurrott (01:14:19):
Solve it.

Mikah Sargent (01:14:20):
I 100% agree in this. You close

Paul Thurrott (01:14:21):
The own Stone Hall right now. Stop making iPhones. Yeah, this

Mikah Sargent (01:14:24):
Is true. This is true.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:26):
You're still a company that makes money. You don't pretend that you're some altruistic entity that is just, yeah, it did become the largest company in

Mikah Sargent (01:14:34):
The world because of your greenwashing.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:36):
Yeah, it was a little much. That's all.

Mikah Sargent (01:14:40):
Yeah. Again, I don't have any problem with any of that. I agree that it felt very tedious and it did feel very back Patty, but the argument seems to be that Apple, that it was a misstep for them to do so. And what was the marketing team thinking? They were thinking

Paul Thurrott (01:14:57):
Very clearly, I'm not an Apple expert. I guess I'm a closet apple, whatever I am. But the first thing he said, one of the first things he said was, we're going to talk about two products, the iPhone and Apple Watch. And I was like, oh, that's not good. That's not good. There have often been eight or 12 products at this event. This is very concerning. And I think they padded it a little bit with this. It really kind of highlighted how little they had

Mikah Sargent (01:15:24):
To, how little they had to talk about, which

Paul Thurrott (01:15:25):
Is the reason everyone is watching. No one is tuning in to find out about your environmental stance. No offense, I don't, again, it's laudable. I don't mean to downplay it, but no one on that stream was looking for this. Right. That was the problem.

Mikah Sargent (01:15:39):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:41):
Anyway, I don't like the direction their presentations have taken Post pandemic, they turned into these kind of swirly special effects video, like Hollywood guys, guy on stage. Come on, let's just

Mikah Sargent (01:15:57):
Show us. Get to the point.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:58):
Yeah, PowerPoint would solve this problem nicely. It can't do anything.

Mikah Sargent (01:16:01):
Oh wow. Shots fired.

Paul Thurrott (01:16:04):
Anyhow, Steve Jobs, by the way, infamous hater or PowerPoint later created, what was it called again? Keynote. Keynote, yeah. Ironic. And it's

Mikah Sargent (01:16:13):
Very swir too as well. It is very swirly.

Paul Thurrott (01:16:16):
Yeah, very swirly. Yep. Anyway, okay. Sorry, I didn't mean to,

Mikah Sargent (01:16:19):
And Paul wants to give Steve Jobs a swirly.

Paul Thurrott (01:16:23):
Exactly. I don't wish Ill on anybody except when I do

Mikah Sargent (01:16:29):
In the cold dead of night what I do. But no one knows about that.

Paul Thurrott (01:16:35):
25 years ago-ish, Microsoft went in front of a federal court against the D O J and got their butt handed to them over a series of wonderful, wonderful days. It was the greatest time of my life. And what I just learned this week is that I'm not the only one that longs for those days because the New York Times, which doesn't really care about anything that I can tell these days is treating this. It is 1998. They're literally doing live coverage every day. They've got a live feed. It's up at the top on a scroll thing, and they're pretending that anyone who reads this paper cares in the slightest about this. But I do, and I'm so excited because Google chose to fight, cannot wait to see what comes down on disclosure from this disclosure. Yeah. And we already got one. So day one, a lawyer for the government, for the D O J in this case, there are states involved too, so it's different lawyers, but I think it was a d OJ lawyer just said, yeah, yeah. Google pays Apple 10 billion a year to be the default search on iPhone. And that number goes up every single year. That's what it was last year. Wow. And And that confirms the rumors. We had sort of heard this vaguely, but now it's just a fact. It's out in the world. And I think that is so beautiful. What

Richard Campbell (01:17:46):
If they didn't pay that? Would they switch to brave or binging or go?

Paul Thurrott (01:17:51):
Yeah, well that's the problem. The problem is we're in a weird spot now. 10 billion bucks even to Apple is money. So if Google was like, yeah, we're not doing this anymore. We know everyone's going to choose Google search anyway. We don't care. Apple, they could go to Bing or to Brave or Duck or something. I don't know. They rumored to be working on their own search engine. I mean, they love to eliminate partners.

Richard Campbell (01:18:13):
They were always working on everything to get rid of all

Paul Thurrott (01:18:15):
Partners. What do you do with, I mean Microsoft. So they'd be like, Hey, so what do you think guys can maybe give it us 11 billion? What do you think? They're like, we could give you nothing. How does that sound? I just don't see anyone else paying for this. No payoff to it. When Microsoft sponsored the N F L with surface devices and they had to build those special padded nonsense things to put around players and coaches were chucking them everywhere. Everyone called it an iPad. So Microsoft paid billions of dollars their name, it's still there, it's everywhere. So you see Surface everywhere. It's an iPad. And by the way, don't get me wrong, the iPad would've smashed you if they didn't put a special case on it. I'm not complaining about that, but how awful would it be if Microsoft paid billions of dollars to get binging on the iPhone? And then the story was 78% of iPhone users switch it to Google immediately. Oh, that's a good point. That is the worst PR imaginable. Oh, so this is like a no-win situation for anybody? Holy

Mikah Sargent (01:19:11):
Cow. I hadn't even thought about that for the first time. Still doesn't explain Users learn how to

Paul Thurrott (01:19:16):
Switch. Exactly. I mean you could see

Richard Campbell (01:19:19):
Why does Google pay the money? It's bad for everybody except Google.

Paul Thurrott (01:19:23):
It's kind of a copay. So what they're doing is the phrase for this, not copay is not the right term. It's a term for this. It doesn't matter what it's called. Revenue share. So I mean the idea is that this audience is so valuable because remember, iPhone users tend to spend more money on stuff than Android use. It's a fact. I mean they are generally speaking richer and are more valuable to advertisers. That's why, because you can stick a search page up on the web, A Windows user who wants those guys? You want the iPhone guys. They have proven that they like spending money on nothing. It's perfect.

Richard Campbell (01:20:01):
You're going to get them one way or the other. Why pay

Paul Thurrott (01:20:04):
For it? Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, good point. What

Richard Campbell (01:20:06):
Are they getting for paying

Paul Thurrott (01:20:07):
For this? It will be interesting to see, right, right. Well, so I mean Google, it's not just Apple. So Google pays, in other cases, they pay others to not go with alternatives. There's all this stuff we remember from the

Mikah Sargent (01:20:20):
Early, they do earn money off of this, right?

Paul Thurrott (01:20:22):
This is pretty any competitive too. That means they earn in 10 billion from it basically, assuming it's a 50 50 split. Yeah. I dunno what the split is. They earn in billions as well

Mikah Sargent (01:20:30):
Because we're doing a search and so then they can serve as ads. That's the idea that in the search that we do,

Paul Thurrott (01:20:38):
And you learn something about this audience for all of the, what happens on your iPhone stays in your own phone nonsense.

Richard Campbell (01:20:46):
So maybe this got less to do with being default search and more to do with telemetry.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:50):
If

Richard Campbell (01:20:51):
You rephrases that

Mikah Sargent (01:20:52):
10 million

Paul Thurrott (01:20:52):
A year, demographics, iPhone telemetry, yeah, I think you might be right.

Richard Campbell (01:20:57):
That makes more sense to me.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:01):
Google is saying the same thing Microsoft said, which is people that use our products the best, Google search is the best. That's why people use Google search. And by the way, that is true. There's nothing wrong with that statement. The problem is it's only half of the fact because the other fact is Google is also actively working to discourage and destroy any competition that may rise to end its monopoly. And that's the problem with Monopoly, that it's what Apple's doing the maintenance thing, it's the illegal maintenance of a monopoly and it is the denying of innovation to an audience that might have a better product in a few years if Google just didn't run rough shot over this industry. So yeah, right now they absolutely are the best product. People argue with me sometimes over this for some reason. All you have to do is use Bing for a couple of minutes to understand why Google is the best. But I don't know. I think that's just common sense.

(01:21:58):
But we'll see. There's a disruption happening now with AI and it's possible that chat G P T or some other open AI service or something that uses open ai, if Microsoft gets really lucky, could still share from Google or even displace it someday in the future. But with these kinds of deals in place, it's going to be a lot harder. This is how they maintain it. So anyway, that's my soapbox and one last AI story. In the wake of Microsoft's being AI stuff from February, Adobe was one of about 1 million companies that announced they were doing AI stuff and they are putting their AI capabilities under the banner of Firefly and they're in viewing these capabilities across their creative cloud express experience, cloud offerings, everything. And it's already generally available. They just shipped it today actually. So this stuff is now available. There's a big Adobe event coming up in less than a month. It's going to be a lot more of it. This is going to be how they expand all these capabilities. But the interesting thing about the Adobe stuff, actually there's two I guess, right? Because they came out of the gate with images, you would expect Photoshop like background removal is that they added video support as well. So they're actually doing this in Premier too.

Mikah Sargent (01:23:21):
Really it's just

Paul Thurrott (01:23:22):
Audio, but video big. Very interesting. So it's just literally across the board for all the creative clause stuff and everything around it. So big stuff. Oh, I'm sorry. The second thing, sorry, sorry. The second big thing is they were the first of the big AI companies to offer indemnification. They are using their own internal wholly owned databases of image and video information to create their models. None of this comes from the public. So you can be sure as a creative professional when you pay Adobe the a hundred dollars a month or whatever it is, you're paying them for Creative Cloud these days that you are safe, that the stuff you use, the text prompts and everything you use in whatever product you're using in Adobe will be safe. It's not going to be stolen from somewhere. So good.

Mikah Sargent (01:24:10):
Yeah, I was just using this tool the other day still in preview and was quite impressed with its ability to generate stuff that actually is usable despite having all of these protections on it. One would think that you

Paul Thurrott (01:24:28):
Hear that'd be like, oh, this is going to make stick men. No, it's actually really good.

Mikah Sargent (01:24:32):
Yeah. Here's an image of a scale that was generated and then I've also got one, a

Paul Thurrott (01:24:43):
Tarot card

Mikah Sargent (01:24:43):
Or something, so I won't go into a whole lot of detail about it. I've been talking about it every, I've never heard heard this. I am raising money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, and so this Saturday I'm running a Dungeons and Dragons campaign and basically what people do is by donating, they can impact the game so they can give someone a potion or magic items and stuff. And these cards, there's a deck in Dungeons and Dragons called The Deck of Many Things and it's like a scary thing to draw from because you can get some really cool great stuff, but you can also get some bad stuff. And just for fun, I decided to also add in some random cards that I made, but I'm not that artistic and so

Paul Thurrott (01:25:30):
I had these generated is the exact right use for AI to do something that you don't usually have to do that you're not skilled at and then you move on with your life. Right. This is

Mikah Sargent (01:25:39):
Perfect. Exactly.

Paul Thurrott (01:25:40):
Also, I like that you're using magic to solve a science problem and we used to have the notion of something called the bag of infinite holding and holding in Dungeons and Dragons, which I assume was very interesting or related to what you just said.

Mikah Sargent (01:25:55):
Yeah, absolutely. You can still get the bag of holding. Glad to hear it. Yeah, it still has a lot. This was real quick. That's my favorite one with a ship for people who are listening. It's a ship in an ocean. But yeah, I used Adobe Firefly, I had to use it online and you have to use it

Paul Thurrott (01:26:14):
Express or whatever.

Mikah Sargent (01:26:16):
You have to use it in express. If you just use it on its own, then it'll put a huge whopping watermark on the side saying generated by Adobe ai. So if you use it with an express, it works. But yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:26:26):
Part of their announcement today was that people use Express, which is the free product if you don't know that is they get credit each month for this, so you'll get some use of AI and then you can pay if you want more or whatever. So you don't have to pay for Creative Suite or whatever it's called Creative Cloud,

Richard Campbell (01:26:42):
Which is smart because that's a gateway drug.

Mikah Sargent (01:26:46):
Indeed.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:47):
Yep, that's exactly what it's, yep.

Mikah Sargent (01:26:51):
Alright, well

Richard Campbell (01:26:52):
You can't argue with Adobe's credentials when it comes to graphics and I'm excited that they tackled the copyright problem. That

Mikah Sargent (01:27:00):
Is same.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:01):
Yeah, they were the first.

Mikah Sargent (01:27:04):
That's the other thing is I didn't feel comfortable necessarily. You wouldn't feel comfortable using some of the other tools to do this and walk away going and there's nothing I ever have to worry about. Exactly. Come back.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:16):
Especially for this charity.

Mikah Sargent (01:27:17):
Yeah, exactly. I hope you

Paul Thurrott (01:27:18):
Guys are okay.

Mikah Sargent (01:27:19):
Yeah, that's a hundred percent. So to know that they've got all that in place and are willing to back it up, that tells you

Richard Campbell (01:27:25):
They're indemnifying.

Mikah Sargent (01:27:26):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:27):
Yes.

Mikah Sargent (01:27:27):
Pretty cool. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:27:28):
It's good.

Mikah Sargent (01:27:29):
And you know what, maybe I'll be using or you'll be using that instead of paint.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:35):
Let's not get crazy.

Richard Campbell (01:27:37):
Also, Micah, it's really cool that you're doing this d d thing. That's really a neat way to raise some money and have some fun at the same on you, man.

Mikah Sargent (01:27:45):
Thanks. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, these are going to be very high level characters, so they're going to have all sorts of magic they could cast and stuff. It should be fun.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:54):
Thanks. Nice.

Mikah Sargent (01:27:56):
All right, let's move on to talk about Dev.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:59):
Yeah, randomly a couple of dev related topics this week, dotnet eight has been in developmental annual development cycle. Yep. We are two months away from its release, so we hit release candidate one, we will hit release candidate two in October and then they will release it in November probably at.net Kth, which is a virtual conference we're having, I want to say 14th to the 16th, something

Richard Campbell (01:28:24):
Like that. Right on top of Ignite.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:26):
Exciting. Yeah, there you go. Nice. So just the latest version of Microsoft's developed platform. There's a bunch of pieces to it that want to keep my eye on because of the client stuff is T net Maui, which is their kind of flutter alternative, which is the zarin based environment where you can create apps for iOS, Android, Mac or Windows.

Richard Campbell (01:28:48):
Oh yeah. Arguably this is the V three of Maui, which as we know in Microsoft world makes the good version.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:54):
Yeah, exactly. So fingers crossed, I got to tell you so far a little dicey, but it's

Richard Campbell (01:28:59):
A tough problem they're trying to solve. That's the way about it.

Paul Thurrott (01:29:02):
Yeah, I agree. And then finally this one came nowhere. You're

Richard Campbell (01:29:08):
Going for this. Sorry. Yeah, I'm impressed.

Paul Thurrott (01:29:10):
What's that? Oh boy. Yeah, this is, okay, so you guys know what this topic, so I'm just curious, I don't know what to think of this. So Unity announced the starting January one next year, they're going to have a runtime fee that is based on game installations and it's like, oh, it's almost like you don't know how games are used these days. So they have addressed, I guess, reinstalls, if I as a customer install a game that uses the Unity libraries and then blow away my computer and I guess they won't get double charged or whatever, but a lot of games are stream from the cloud or are part of a subscription service where you use it for a little while and then you're not really, maybe an hour played thing might be a better metric. It seems like kind of a weird, so they're either onto something or they are about to disappear because I don't know, Unity's huge. I mean it's been the damage huge. It's

Richard Campbell (01:30:06):
Huge. But at one point I think it was more than half of the indie market,

Paul Thurrott (01:30:11):
Right? Well, they didn't have this kind of a fee and there were a lot of developers who come out and said, Hey, I get bad news for you if you do this, I'm out of business. I can't afford to do this. I'm

Richard Campbell (01:30:20):
Done. Well, especially if you're in a distribution where you aren't collecting a fee for each install, so how the heck can you pay a fee for,

Paul Thurrott (01:30:28):
It's crazy. Yeah,

Richard Campbell (01:30:32):
Yeah. I feel like there's a subtext going on

Paul Thurrott (01:30:36):
Here

Richard Campbell (01:30:37):
And a subtext is there's a negotiation for an acquisition by somebody. That's the only thing that makes sense to me. And so as you're headed towards that, you're trying to pump up valuation and you need a revenue stream. So they're

Paul Thurrott (01:30:51):
How close closely comparable is something like the Unreal Engine or are these literal

Richard Campbell (01:30:59):
Different league? It's the difference between Unity is where is a group of folks at a local track rebuilding Minis to go racing? Okay, unreal is F one.

Paul Thurrott (01:31:13):
Okay.

Richard Campbell (01:31:14):
Right. Nobody goes onto Unreal casually. That's a serious team of developers, mostly c plus plus programmers. So

Paul Thurrott (01:31:21):
Alright, so a lot of the others, this is the easier bar to, this

Richard Campbell (01:31:24):
Is the entry path. That was the whole thing with Unity with C Easy way in simple tools, great library sets. You can get a side scroller working in an hour. You can get a basic 3D model in an afternoon. It's really approachable and creative ideas go deep in this,

Paul Thurrott (01:31:42):
Right? Without web locks. It's

Richard Campbell (01:31:45):
The challenge. Of course this is not ultra high performance. You can get pretty good results from it, but when you really want to press against the edges of a video card, this isn't for you. That's what Unreal's about, right, is okay, I want to take a video card and make it make funny noises like let's go. But I also have 200 people behind me that are going to build the art resources for the four K version and that sort of thing. Unity, you don't need any of that. It's a creative place to work, not a pressing against the edges place to work. And I don't have a big problem with people have made wildly successful Unity games.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:20):
True.

Richard Campbell (01:32:20):
Should Unity share in a part of that maybe

Paul Thurrott (01:32:24):
So perhaps the model they're really going after here is something that like Apple and Google did with the app store fees where what they're really targeting is the top 1% most lucrative games from the big, big publishers. Once you're

Richard Campbell (01:32:38):
Making millions, not

Paul Thurrott (01:32:39):
Enthusiast,

Richard Campbell (01:32:41):
I would hope they've just presented it terribly. The only, I mean there's a couple of things here. One is we're all trying to do new revenue models in this, but I, I've been having the itch that Unity's going to be acquired for a while and one of the things do

Paul Thurrott (01:32:58):
Try, do you have any ideas? Who buy? I'm so curious. Who might want Unity? What's the It's great question. Unreal. Yeah, like Steam or Epic.

Richard Campbell (01:33:11):
Steam Epic. Microsoft. Microsoft, even Sony. Anybody involved in the gaming industry, which is busy rolling up. You're talking about half the indie games. You want a clear channel for first dibs at games and game developers.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:29):
This is the mean. Indie games are huge on Xbox because anyone is so serious about gaming doesn't use an X one. No, because they have a big in game program. So I can see that. Sure.

Richard Campbell (01:33:40):
Yeah. And so yeah, I just wonder if there's some pressure going on there and so then the leadership comes out with, we need to work on revenue streams because our revenue's going to directly affect our valuation and we all get a big check. So let's go torture our customers for a quarter that gets us our sale.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:58):
This is dicey to me.

Richard Campbell (01:34:01):
I don't know that it's going to go well. I think they're probably back out of it and trying with another one. But there's also, there's a strategy here in negotiating anchoring high. So first set of price so high, there was like holy

Paul Thurrott (01:34:13):
Cow it then you answered feedback and you look like a hero.

Richard Campbell (01:34:17):
We've been listening, we understand

Paul Thurrott (01:34:19):
Goal. Oh, then you get to where you always wanted to go. There

Richard Campbell (01:34:21):
You go.

Mikah Sargent (01:34:23):
That's so cynical.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:24):
Well listen, we're two millions white guys kind of where we're at. It's our wheelhouse. No, but it makes sense, right? It makes more sense than what they're actually trying to do.

Mikah Sargent (01:34:37):
Yeah, no, I agree with you. I'm kind of disappointed. I'm disappointed in myself and being cynical and going, oh golly, that's exactly what

Paul Thurrott (01:34:45):
They're doing effectively.

Richard Campbell (01:34:46):
You thought you were cynical? Hang around with us for a while,

Paul Thurrott (01:34:50):
You'll just be in tears. Yeah, well we'll see. I guess I do think the feedback is going to be overwhelmingly negative and already

Richard Campbell (01:34:57):
Has that. Inevitably the question is, is it damaging Negative feedback is still feedback

Paul Thurrott (01:35:03):
All. Well the question is what's the alternative to Unity in the world? What's the other unity?

Richard Campbell (01:35:11):
There's a min full of small game platforms. I bet a lot of folks are getting real excited. If Unity's going to eat their own head, maybe we have a chance, but I don't think Unity's going to eat their own head. I think this is very strategic maneuvering going on right now. This is smart group of folks. There's a reason they're top of the business. They haven't lost their minds.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:32):
I said that about Windows eight, but you could be right. You could be right.

Richard Campbell (01:35:37):
Yeah. Well the difference is window eight, they perceived an existential threat and it made them crazy. There is no threat to Unity except themselves.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:45):
That's a good point. It's true. We have seen the enemy and it is us

Richard Campbell (01:35:51):
Philosophical Paul, I like that

Paul Thurrott (01:35:57):
It's time. I guess that kind of eases us into gaming. Gaming related and Xbox. Microsoft announced, when was this back in the summer sometime that they were going to retire Xbox Live Gold, which had been around since 2002 and replace it with another Xbox Game Pass subscription. Which actually kind of makes sense, right? Because in the world of Xbox subscriptions say that was kind of the outlier. It was really just about multiplayer games and whatever. So they introduced something called Xbox Game Pass Core, which is now the entry level literally as of tomorrow is the entry level Xbox subscription. And it's actually not just Xbox Live renamed. They're going to give the people who subscribe. The price is not going up. It's $59 a year, it's $9 a month if you want to pay that way. Some collection of games at the time when they announced it.

(01:36:48):
So yesterday, no actually I guess it was today they announced what those games are going to be and I will now slowly read the entire, no, there's a list of games. It's actually pretty good. I'll just call it some of the good ones. Dishonor to do Maternal standard edition, fable anniversary, follow out four N 76 Fire Watch, one of the best games ever. Four is a horizon. Four standard edition. I guess I am reading through this whole thing. Here's five Halo, five limbo, another fantastic indie game by the way. Speaking of indie games, Ori in the Will of the Wisps, another fantastic indie game. Oh yeah, there's a lot of good titles on this one stated the gay two, blah blah blah. So I'll just scrolls online. That was the game I couldn't think of last week, by the way when I was talking about MMOs. So actually this is kind of a nice offering. It's aspirational. I guess people who get this are going to maybe enjoy what they get and want more and they'll pay a little bit more for an Xbox console or PC subscription, which is 10 99 a month, which is, doesn't sound too bad, it's like a dollar more per month if you're paying that way. But when you pay annually it's actually an even better deal. So

Richard Campbell (01:37:57):
How this eventually makes Steam move.

Paul Thurrott (01:38:00):
Yeah,

Richard Campbell (01:38:02):
They're really making plays here to collect up an awful lot of games to give you that steam feel where the whole library is there

Paul Thurrott (01:38:08):
And it's real. You can all do this at home. A little exercise for Rudy if you're not a gamer, I never really thought about this. Open up the Xbox app on your Windows 11 or 10 PC and look at what's there. It's not bad. It's not as big of a collection as what we get on the Xbox console, but it's actually pretty good. And if Microsoft gets Activision Blizzard, come on, this thing's going to go right over the top. So yeah, I mean they're really positioning Xbox Game Pass for the future. So that transition happens tomorrow.

(01:38:43):
I hate even having to talk about this topic, but Microsoft has announced an Xbox MasterCard because something Apple envy. I don't know. I don't reasons, yeah, this worries me. I just think about all the young folks who I know. So the current system is that Microsoft across things like Bing and Xbox has and they have a Microsoft rewards program and the rewards program is kind of nice. If you wanted to earn Microsoft rewards by doing little puzzles and tasks on binging and you can use the points you accrue to get little Microsoft store gift cards or whatever it might be, there's nothing wrong with that. I guess it's a credit card. The a p R starts at 21% by the way, that's the lowest it could be no matter what your credit rating is. And it goes up to 32% depending on where you're at in that scale. And obviously it also has a kind of rewards program. And seriously, why are we making a credit card? I hate even talking about this. This is so awful.

Richard Campbell (01:39:51):
The only place I would say is when you talk about the serious gamer these days, which is like a 30 something, the idea that they all their DoorDash and stuff goes through a card that'll get them free games. Kind of makes sense.

Paul Thurrott (01:40:04):
Yeah. Okay. I mean I don't know what the statistics are, but if you look at adults and credit cards, I would imagine that the majority of them just use whatever credit cards. They don't think about it too much, but you can kind of play this game and pick the credit cards that are best for

Richard Campbell (01:40:19):
That matter. You there are point hoarders and some point hoarders are serious gamers and you've now given them a card that gives them free games. They were going to buy that other stuff anyway,

Paul Thurrott (01:40:29):
Just be careful people. Please be careful. It really makes me nervous. Okay, that just came up. How do you feel? How do you feel, Paul? I worry. Money is a horrible thing to get behind on. There are people using credit cards not to buy food. Oh my god. You know what I mean? And I don't mean paying for food and then paying it off. I mean they're paying for food and mortgaging their current dinner, which is just so scary. It's such an awful,

Mikah Sargent (01:40:57):
The grocery app that I use to get, and here I am being bougie, privileged person. The grocery app that I use to order groceries to my home so I don't have to go to the grocery store. It has this horrible thing now where at the end it tells you you can use this. This is why I pay for it in four payments. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:41:14):
My wife mentioned this to me the other day, which is the only reason I know about it and my sort of take on that was like, look, a lot of adults have mortgages. No, it's sort of an accepted thing. Hopefully an investment. People pay for phones over two or three years and it's 25 to 50 bucks a month or something. And the argument is, look, this is a device I use all day long every day and there's an argument to be made. I've used that process. Zero points, whatever, zero percentage point, whatever. It's zero interest to buy an iPhone and then pay it off within three months or something just to make it easy just to get through the process. I've done that. That's fine. God, food, I mean come on, just be careful, that's all. I just, I

Mikah Sargent (01:42:03):
Worry I'm with you.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:04):
Worry about it.

Mikah Sargent (01:42:06):
Alright, what else in Xbox?

Paul Thurrott (01:42:08):
Yeah, one more thing. So before the pandemic, Microsoft started a fun event called Minecraft Live. And I believe it happened exactly once in New York City. I think it was on the docks there on the west side of Manhattan. I was invited and didn't go and now I kind of regret it because the pandemic happened the next year and it never came back. And now they have something that's called Minecraft Live that's coming back. But it is live but it is not in person. So it will be a virtual event if I'm not mistaken. It's not in a place, I mean it's in a place, but you can't go there. So you can enjoy it on minecraft.net on October 15th. The reason that first one was going to be fun was because back then Minecraft Mojang or Microsoft, whatever, was talking about the augmented or slash virtual reality Minecraft that they demonstrated one time on stage where it looked like you could fall into the stage because the squares looked like a pit and it was going to be an opportunity for people to check that out live. I think that product no longer exists, but then neither does Minecraft live. So anyway, it's coming back. But virtual and I think it's next week, what did I say? Did I even say it's, oh no, next month. Sorry, October 15th. So we'll see. It's bigger and blockier than ever.

Mikah Sargent (01:43:25):
Well that's great.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:28):
Good for you.

Mikah Sargent (01:43:30):
Good work Microsoft. I think we've got our back of the book up next. It's time for the back of the book in mere moments. All right, here we are. I Micah Sargent, I'm subbing in for Leo LaPorte and I'm excited for us to get into the tips and

Paul Thurrott (01:43:50):
Picks of the week of first, it's a tip of the week. So Google, after threatening to do this for two years, has finally rolled out Privacy Sandbox after receiving tons of feedback and implementing none of it. And I think it is notable that all of the major chromium based browsers from Microsoft so far have also, they're not supporting it. So this is the new scheme for picking personalized ads. And Google's like, look, we are going to track you, but at least you can pick the ads. And so my tip is maybe if you haven't already, maybe start looking at other browsers please. There are lots. Almost every browser is safer and more private than Chrome. Brave especially would be my choice. But if you have to use Chrome, and sometimes you do, I use because maybe use multiple browsers, whatever for whatever reason, at least install some extensions that will help block this thing from haunting you around the internet. Like privacy Badger is my personal choice. Ad block plus actually helps a little bit too. Plus blocks ads. But better maybe start at least think about it. Think about it. There are huge advantages to other browsers and I can't think of really many advantages to Google Chrome that are unique to that browser. I really can't. You block origin someone mentions also. Yeah, very, very good. Yeah, that's true. I happen to use privacy Azure, but yep, you block Origin is also great.

(01:45:18):
Last week I went on a little bit about my, what I call digital decluttering. It's actually part of a broader decluttering thing I'm doing this year because we moved out of a house into a small apartment and we have a lot of stuff trying to get rid of it and I've done a bunch of it. I finished my documents, archive, photos, archive, all done. I've gone on and worked on working on still home videos, which I'm re-recording. Redi digitizing, I guess. Oh wow. Yeah, which is really fun. I found a tape first I found the camera and then inside of it was a tape and it was a Christmas 2005. The little kids we've never seen or digitized. And I was like, I am like Stephanie, come here please. And it was one of those weird moments. It was crazy. So that kind of thing makes it all worthwhile. Two

Richard Campbell (01:46:02):
V h s tapes in my purging. One of them is two different short videos we made. The last time I had a real job, which literally was 30 years ago, making fun of my boss. And the other one was a thousand foot dive. I took in a submersible.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:18):
Oh boy.

Richard Campbell (01:46:20):
Cayman Islands, when you could do such a

Paul Thurrott (01:46:21):
Thing.

Richard Campbell (01:46:21):
Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:46:23):
I hope you're going to bring 'em to a service or whatever. I'm

Richard Campbell (01:46:26):
Going to have to take 'em to a service. Service. I don't have a player that works.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:28):
Yeah, I have several, maybe a dozen DV tapes, which I have the camera for, but I also have a small number of eight millimeter tapes that I do not, so I will have to do that for those. But anyway, sorry, I didn't mean to talk about that at length, but it is a fun process. It's a tedious process, but it's those little moments where you do something like that where you're like, oh man, this made it all worthwhile. All the

Mikah Sargent (01:46:51):
Work is

Paul Thurrott (01:46:52):
Worth it. Yeah. Never seen this before. And I put it up in my private consumer YouTube channel associated with my Gmail account and then links to the wife and kids so they could watch it. Right. Amazing. Yep. That's so cool. My kids who are adults. Anyway, as part of that discussion last week I mentioned Wind Dare stat, which I love and I've used for a long, long time. But somebody mentioned another tool called Wizz Tree, which is very, very similar and I thought I should mention it because it's free, it's donate wear, so it gives you a little donate shake up of the corner. But it, it's exactly like wind, dare stat, but it's much faster and it has a much prettier ui, although basically the same ui, right? Big files or big blocks and all that kind of stuff. It does work great. I wish, I mean I pretty much done with that hard part of eliminating big file thing, but I've been using it for the past week on a few small things I've been doing related to this and actually it is very, very good. So it's worth knowing about and you might compare 'em I guess, but actually it is faster, so it's probably worth it for that reason only.

Richard Campbell (01:47:54):
Awesome,

Mikah Sargent (01:47:55):
Awesome. It's time then for, we're talking about what is on run as radio this week.

Richard Campbell (01:48:01):
Oh right, yeah. So this week's show with Sonya Cuff, who's a Microsoft IT advocate and ongoing theme for 2023 has been this doing more with less just this sort of reality of we're not getting more staff, our budgets are being pressed on what do you do? Where should your focus be? And Sonya is one of those great folks. She's done all the work before, she's been out in the field, she's talking to lots of different teams. She's able to carry a lot of information for folks to just say, Hey, this is about trading time, the stuff you always meant to get to. There's often places where you can apply your efforts there, but also getting smarter about talking about the costs of being assist admin with the organization, showing more of the value in what you're doing there. We've kind of had about a 20 year run since maybe the.com bust where there really has been minimal constraints financially on the tech side of businesses and the pandemic made it even crazier. And now that all of that is subsiding and we're being a little more economically responsible, I think folks have never experienced or out of practice with really the R O I of system administration. And so that's an angle we went into the conversation about how do I talk to my C F O about this or the IT director to get money spent because it's actually going to save money down the line.

Mikah Sargent (01:49:30):
Alright, and then I think that brings us to the Brown Liquor

Paul Thurrott (01:49:34):
Pick of the week.

Richard Campbell (01:49:35):
There you go. Your favorite, right?

Paul Thurrott (01:49:37):
Yeah. You always pick these esoteric brands. No one's ever heard of. Come on Richard. What's going

Richard Campbell (01:49:42):
On? Well, you called it out last week when I did the Perth 23. Nobody's ever going to have again, man. Yeah, a little cruel. So I swung the other way, although I have another motivation and I'll leave it for the end this week, is Shiva Regal your $30 blended whiskey, but it's got a great legacy. It's one of the oldest whiskeys out there. Really. James and John Shivas are from the early 18 hundreds. They were born in 1810 and 1814 and they were in the luxury good business as relatively young men by the 1830s, so that by the 1850 when they're about 40, not even 40 years old, they were the Royal Grocers to the Duchess of Kent, which you would know as the queen mother. That's like the lyrics to a Christmas sign. Yes. And of course the point being that once you become get a royal appointment like that, most of the well todo in the UK would then buy your products automatically.

(01:50:44):
And so that's how they ended up getting into whiskey because they had this amazing clientele who wanted a quality whiskey and in the mid 18 hundreds, whiskey was a very erratic product. The distillation processes weren't that refined. It was hard to get quality and so blending was the way to go that you had a blender who would combine whiskeys to get a consistent flavor that folks like. So in 1854 they launched a whiskey called the Royal Glen D, which is their original product, and that continued for another 40, 50 years. The last of the actual Shivas family, Alexander Shi has passed away in 1893 and by 1895 it was owned by a larger conglomerate of whiskey folks and no family members to remain, but they was always called the Shivas Brothers. So over a hundred years of SHIs, even though there were no SHIs anymore, the Shivas Regal, the name is first used for a whiskey that's a 25 year old blend.

(01:51:43):
So that's a combination of whiskeys where the youngest thing in the bottle was 25 years old from 1909. Now that was an expensive whiskey, relatively speaking. It would be costly today as well, but it was a breakthrough whiskey for a lot of folks. This was a high-end whiskey that wasn't single malt. Again, a very consistent product After prohibition, we sort of shut down a lot of business for it. They wanted to reduce the cost on whiskey to get it up and running again. And so the Shiva Regal 12 came out at 1939, and that's closer to the modern Shivas we have today, which does not have an age Appalachian on it, which means it has even younger stuff in it, including some pure green alcohol, which is normal for our blended whiskey. If you are into doing the tour of the distilleries and so forth, when you go to the Shivu Brothers like that whole place, you're actually going to the Strala distillery, which was, it's actually one of the oldest distilleries ever made.

(01:52:42):
It was originally known as the Milltown Distillery built in 1786, so it's one of the very few distilleries from the 17 hundreds. It still exists, and it was originally called the Milltown Distillery. It got named Strat Island for the first time in 1870, but then in 1892 changed back to Milltown, and then when the Shivu group bought it in 1950, they renamed it back to Strath Island again. Easily. I've done the tour. It's one of the prettiest distilleries you ever see. It has phenomenal gardens, but as distillery goes, it's small. It's a great place to start if you've never toured distilleries before, because it's just not that complicated. They've only got two sets of stills, sort of mid-size, relatively short necked. They use conventional. They still have the old malting floors, but they don't use 'em anymore. They use industrial maltings now and then they barrel and oak and cherry, they use both dunnage and rack warehouses, so all very conventional, and that is not for making ship regal directly.

(01:53:45):
That is meant for making strath a single malt, which is rarely bottled by them. You'll typically see Strath Isla bottlings by the third parties. The folks like Gordon McPhail is where you'll find a strath, and I've had the Strath Isla 12 lovely space side, straightforward whiskey, but this is a blend that we're talking about, the Shiva regal, and if you taste it, you'll notice that while it comes from Spain is fairly ish, it has a little smoke in it, little peat in it, which is not normal for the spay, and that's an effect of the blend. Now, they don't publish the different places that they buy whiskey from. They do say that Strath Isla is their primary component to making Shivas regal along with a certain amount of green alcohol that comes from the lowlands as again, normal usually about 50% for a blended whiskey.

(01:54:38):
That's how you get it down to $30. But the other distilleries that come up routinely are Strathclyde and Longhorn. And Longhorn does use pea in their whiskey. So there's a hint there that the flavor you get that makes Shi is regal itself is that Longhorn added in with the Stress Island. It became a part of the multinational industry of modern scotch in 2001 when it was bought by Perna Kar, and it has been since then, since it's been 20 plus years, and they've modernized their line and they make a bunch of older variants and so forth. You can spend as much on Sure, as Regal as you wish. Although what I would argue that the classic at 40% alcohol for $30 is an excellent representation of the product. It was also Hunter s Thompson's preferred breakfast meal.

(01:55:25):
Even better understanding that Hunter SS Thompson typically had breakfast at three o'clock in the afternoon. No, and usually he'd have a shot of it then he'd take an hour or so. We don't really talk about what he did for that hour and then he'd have several more and that's how he'd get his day started and just, I throw the extra layer on here. I brought up Chavis Regal today because it was my father's favorite whiskey and he passed away a few weeks ago and we had his memorial yesterday, and so I thought I'd call it out for him that I know this was your favorite pops and I'm sad you're gone.

Paul Thurrott (01:56:01):
Well, that

Mikah Sargent (01:56:01):
Is something that everybody should go and pick up, I guess if

Paul Thurrott (01:56:06):
You vibe Well, you've seen the story. The thing is, everyone recognizes this, right? It does give off a little bit of a,

Richard Campbell (01:56:12):
I don't like their website, website because they've kind of gotten pulled into, it's in a lot of rap music, it's shows up in all kinds of movies and things, and so they're kind of like

Paul Thurrott (01:56:22):
It's or whatever.

Richard Campbell (01:56:25):
And I would say that it's, when I talk about basic blended whiskeys, you're typically talking about famous grouse, right? I'd rather drink that any day of the week. Sure. Shivas is, I would argue is a nicer whiskey than that as a blend. Truly none of them are expensive

Paul Thurrott (01:56:45):
In that statement. Richard, you have shown us that you are not pretentious.

Richard Campbell (01:56:49):
You know what? I can't be if you'd like me to be

Paul Thurrott (01:56:51):
No, no, no. You know more about this than anybody, but you can still appreciate. Yeah, this is like someone being a food Sno, but they're like, I like Taco Bell

Richard Campbell (01:57:00):
Once in a while. Wrong with

Paul Thurrott (01:57:01):
That.

Richard Campbell (01:57:02):
Yeah. There's stuff on the shelf I'm not going to pick up, but if Chip is what's on the shelf, let's drink it. And they're not going to feel bad about dropping an ice cube in it. Coke. That's weird. You want Coke? Have some jack. Right? But if you're going to drink a famous grouse, shi Regal, drink 'em neat. Maybe with an ice cube, nobody's going to be mad at you and you're going to have a nice drink.

Paul Thurrott (01:57:24):
Right. I'm curious about the, there's a lot of Sherry cask whiskey bourbon these days. Seems to be the trendy.

Richard Campbell (01:57:32):
Well, the sherry industry is also grown, and they have now gotten into techniques for maturing barrels quickly, and it's become a business to make Sherry barrels.

Paul Thurrott (01:57:42):
Yeah, nice.

Richard Campbell (01:57:42):
Make the sherry barrels to do their initial run through the three-year-old Sherry's out of raw wood are not good, but they're good for other things, but the barrels are really valuable, so they make the barrels that way as an initial aging, then they'll move on from there, and that's provided a lot more barrels for the whiskey meat. Good. It's a funny shtick. It's an ecosystem.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:04):
Yeah. I actually like Cherry Cass whiskeys and bourbons, honestly. I mean, usually, I mean,

Richard Campbell (01:58:09):
Well, once upon a time, and I think I told this story back when we were doing the whole whiskey story, that the reason they started casting in Sherry is because they were buying Sherry and it came in barrels and you got to do something with the barrel anyway.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:19):
Yeah, ship it back with whiskey

Richard Campbell (01:58:21):
In it. Yeah, it doesn't happen. And so until Spain made it illegal to export those export sherry in barrels, you have to sell it in bottles. And so then the barrels became scarce and hence the business around selling barrels grew

Paul Thurrott (01:58:33):
Up. Right.

Mikah Sargent (01:58:37):
Well, folks, that brings us to the end of this week's episode of Windows Weekly, as I Leo LaPorte will be back next week. It was my pleasure to join you on this episode. First and foremost, I should mention that you can tune in every week to watch Windows Weekly at twit tv slash live. If you want to watch the show, record the show live every Wednesday round about 2:00 PM Eastern, 11:00 AM Pacific, that's 1800 utc. The best way to get the show, of course, is by going to twit tv slash ww and subscribing to the show and tell your friends, tell your family, tell your enemies and your loved ones about Windows Weekly so they too can subscribe. When you head tow tv slash ww, you'll see a couple of buttons or actually several buttons. You can click to subscribe to audio or subscribe to video.

(01:59:27):
We've got the Plano r s s feed, but also the ability to kind of jump right into your podcast, player of Choice, apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, et cetera. So head there. Now's my time to tell you also about Club Twit at twit tv slash club twit. Consider joining the club starting at $7 a month, $84 a year. When you join the club, you get access to a lot of great things. First and foremost, you get access to every single twit show with no ads, just the content, because you, in effect are supporting the show. You also get access to the Twit plus bonus feed that has extra stuff you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes before the show, after the show and Special Club TWIT events. So when you join the club, you're going to get access to a huge back catalog of a lot of great content that's just there waiting for you.

(02:00:15):
Then you'll also gain membership and access to the Club twit Discord server, a fun place to go to chat with your fellow club TWIT members, and also those of us here at twit, as Leo calls it, it is the best social media network around. So if you want to join the club twit Discord, again, that's at twit tv slash club twit. I said starting at $7 a month, not because it's a tiered subscription where you get more the more you pay, but because we've actually heard from folks who said, you keep adding more stuff to the club, we'd like to give you some more money. So we've made that a possibility. But if you pay that $7 a month, you're going to get everything. You will also, yes, it keeps going. Get access to Special club TWIT shows, including the Untitled Linux Show, which is, as you probably guessed, a show all about Linux.

(02:01:01):
Paul OTTs Hands on Windows program, you know him, you know Windows. It's a show that covers Windows, tips and tricks, and you will gain access to my Hands-on Mac program if you happen to be someone who watches Windows Weekly or listens to Windows Weekly and also wants to know what's going on on the Mac, you could check out that show. I don't just talk about the Mac, I talk about all of Apple's devices. So it's also a short format show covering Apple tips and tricks and the very awesome home theater geeks with Scott Wilkinson for all of your home theater needs and soon to be a show from Jason Howell that is all about artificial intelligence. If any of those topics or all of those topics, interest, you got to join the club again, twit TV slash club twit, $7 a month, $84 a year. Alright, it is time Richard Campbell of Run As Radio. Anything you want to plug and where should folks go to find your work?

Richard Campbell (02:01:57):
Hi, you find me@ezradio.com, and of course, I'm still on the social media, formerly known as Twitter at Rich Campbell, and we are in heavy planning right now in rotation for making our fall conference. Well, really first week of December, dev intersection.com. This I'll show at Azure and data component to that, but you can find 'em all at the same site and once in a while. In fact, every week a run, I make ANet Ross

Paul Thurrott (02:02:22):
Was going to say a regularly,

Richard Campbell (02:02:25):
In fact, I don't think we've missed a Thursday in 20 years. So

Mikah Sargent (02:02:30):
Pretty regularly,

Paul Thurrott (02:02:31):
Once in a week, somewhat

Mikah Sargent (02:02:32):
Regularly, somewhat regular. That's very impressive. And Paul OTT of, is it ot.com? Is that what it's I think so. T H U R R O T T ott.com. Where? Huh? Should folks go to find your

Paul Thurrott (02:02:49):
Work? Well right there also at OTT on the Social Network, formerly known as Twitter, a couple of books at Lean Pub, the Windows 11 Field Guide and Windows everywhere. I just started started. I just restarted the thro.com YouTube channel, which is, it's at thro dash com right now. I'm going to try to change it to something shorter soon, but I've uploaded almost 300 videos from my archives as part of that decluttering thing, so there's some good stuff there.

Mikah Sargent (02:03:23):
Awesome. You can find me at Micah Sargent on many a social media network, or you can check out any of my shows iOS Today, which I record on Tuesdays Tech News Weekly, which I record on Thursdays with Jason Howell iOS today, by the way, is with Rosemary Orchard. And then Sundays where Leo LaPorte and I do ask the tech guys, we take your questions live on air and do our best to answer them. Occasionally we get a stumper, but we do have fun doing that show. Again, Richard and Paul, thank you so much for your time today. I had a blast hanging out with you for Windows Weekly. Thank you all out there for tuning in every week. Leo will be back next week to see you all, and I heard, I've heard, I've been told that while his mom is getting settled, he may be going out there maybe once a month or so, so you might be seeing me again on an episode of Windows Weekly here in the not too distant future. But thank you all, sir.

Richard Campbell (02:04:23):
Thanks, Panka.

Ant Pruitt (02:04:26):
Hey folks. I'm Matt Pruitt. I have a question for you. How do you think your hardworking team with a Club Twit corporate subscription plan? Of course, show your appreciation and reward your tech with a subscription to Club Twitch. Keep everyone informed and entertained with podcasts covering the latest in tech with the Club Twitch subscription. They get access to all of our podcasts ad free, and they also get access to our members only Discord access to exclusive outtakes and behind the scenes footage and special content like the fireside chats that I enjoy hosting. Plus, they also get shows like HandsOn Mac, HandsOn Windows, and the Untitled Linux show. So go to twit tv slash club twit and look for corporate plans for complete details.