Windows Weekly 917 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show
00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thorat's here, richard Campbell's here Actually, paul's in Mexico City, richard Campbell's in London. Pay no attention to that. They're here for Windows Weekly. Microsoft's earnings are coming out. We'll have an early peek at what Microsoft said. We'll also take a look at the big DeepSeek reveal. Is this good for Microsoft? Maybe not, or maybe it is. Plus, did you know that Microsoft is now the biggest game publisher in the world? All that and more coming up next on Windows Weekly.
00:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit is to it.
00:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Therod and Richard Campbell, episode 917. Recorded Wednesday, january 29th 2025. There is no 10. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we cover the latest news from Microsoft, and we have two contestants on today's show pick me, pick me bachelor number one mr paul thorat raspberry from thoratcom, he is in mexico city. M mxc, mcx, cdmx, cdmx, queer dot, which, as I say that sounds M-X-C, m-c-x, c-d-m-x, c-d-m-x.
01:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Queer, queer, which, as I say that, sounds like a bike race thing.
01:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It does, doesn't it? It's not.
01:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it sounds like you're in the mud. Isn't that that new designer drug? Oh, look at that.
01:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's Richard Campbell and he's in London Back in London the show.
01:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
you're there for richard's ndc london, which I've done for many years and dc stands for the norwegian developers conference, which is why it's in london, obviously, of course.
01:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
How embarrassing for you.
01:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah wait a minute oh boy I'm sure there's a reason norwegian developers conferences in london. Well, they know their main show is in oslo, but they've expanded over the years, so now, like this, call it nbc and, yeah, I have a london show. Nice, so we're, and we're in the convention center. So I'm literally in view of westminster abbey and big. Oh, how fun well, you're down. You're down there by the elizabeth tower I mean I'd flip the camera, but it's so dark here, you just see just open the window.
02:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So when ben big ben tolls the chimes times, the trolls will know no, yeah, that's uh, you hear it during the day we don't hear it at night. Oh, that's no good. They turn it down at night. Just ring it gently, pnsmo. Um, good, well we're. We're good to see you both in your world travels. I'm back here in California hoping that we don't slide into the ocean, or burn up, sorry or burn up one or the other, or burn up.
03:01
Well, there's a sequence you burn up, then you slide into the ocean. There you go. It's kind of a. There's a sequence you know you burn up, then you slide into the ocean.
03:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There you go. It's a perfect storm, so to speak. Yeah, you burn, then you drown, yeah.
03:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So what do you want? To start with Windows 11, I think yes, yeah.
03:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All right, I mean yeah.
03:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, what's going on? It's not like anything else happen. Why not yeah?
03:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
well, uh, because january apparently has seven weeks in it. Yesterday was patch, not patches. Uh, the week d preview update day, which, come to think of it, we need a better name for, but the tuesday of week d, I guess, whatever, anyway. Uh, which means we're previewing the patch tuesday updates we're going to see next month right on Patch Tuesday in February. That's how the months work.
03:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, so we're Wait a minute. This is interesting. I didn't know they did this. They do a preview of the patches to the insider folk.
04:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, this is so well, they don't always do it in this order, folks. No, this is so um well, they don't always do it in this order. But the way this is supposed to work is and it did work this time is the week before uh these builds will go to the release preview channel. So if you're inside a program, you test them. Presumably you've tested these features in other right uh channels. I say presumably because I don't see any of these on my dev channel build box. But you know what?
04:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
let's not worry about that right now it's for enterprises, so that the it department can say well, is this a breaking patch, right?
04:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you know, I I mean I in a non-cynical way. I think it's also for consumers, because that way they'll get this in front of some eyeballs right and who who gets this? So you go into windows update and there's a checkbox you can click. This says give me first look at whatever updates, whatever it says, right um?
04:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I didn't realize, patch patch, tuesday patches went in there well, previews of patch tuesday.
04:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So so if you just went to windows update today and hadn't checked that box, you'll be presented with this update, so you could get it if you want to right now I apologize.
05:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I suppose everybody knew this and it's just I'm the first one to hear you say that, yeah, no, it's not, it's it's not a big deal.
05:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, it's. Yeah. I wrote a uh as part of my when I came here to Mexico. I have some computers here, I have an Apple TV and speakers and I build stuff and I, in going through the rigmarole of updating all that, it occurred to me that I have too many things I need to update all the time.
05:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it's crazy and the kind of theme of this is running your own update server at this point, paul, yeah if you could right now open up windows update.
05:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
In windows you will have an update, you will. There'll be like a security definition, like absolutely you will have one. You could open your android phone and go into you. You know, right-click, play my apps, whatever it is, you will have app updates. Same thing on iOS. I went into my Apple TV, sat down, turned it on you know general software updates and it said we checked for updates two days ago and I thought there's no update here. Check for updates. Oh, there's an update, because there's always an update. There's always an update, always an update. Paul, we should call this the Ratz law there's always an update, there's always an update.
06:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and if you thought your career was something else, it isn't. It's updating all your devices. It's always an update, yeah.
06:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's true, it's really true, every time you get something new in the mail.
06:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It has to be updated before you can use it.
06:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Don't get me wrong. The system we have now, in Windows specifically, is much better than it was years ago. Remember, we used to have service packs and then every once in a while it'd be too long between service packs, so they would do like a cumulative roll-up or whatever they called it. And it's better. There are cumulative updates now, but still, I have computers that have been sitting here since the beginning of November. They did get the November patch Tuesday update, so by the time I came here I'd have to look at the dates. But I want to say there were maybe two patch Tuesdays, but if not, there was one, but then there was a, you know. So all of these computers had firmware updates, driver updates, you know, like this it's, all of them had several updates and then all the app updates.
06:59
It's crazy. Anyhow, this Crazy, anyhow. This is one of those. So this one came out yesterday. Oh, it was actually two. So there's one for Windows 11, one for Windows 10. The Windows 10 version is pretty basic. This is just basically the new Outlook app that everybody loves so much, replacing the mail calendar and people apps, right? So that's happening. And then you know, I'll just wait for someone to say but you promised us no updates because because they did, but you know it's the rot's law there's always always another update, even when they promise, otherwise yeah yeah
07:38
so the windows 11 one, I would say in the scheme of patch two or well, this is a preview, but next month's patch tuesday, which will be the first Patch Tuesday with new features of this year, not particularly major. There are improvements to taskbar previews, meaning when you mouse over it it pops up that little preview box. If you're using an app that has a camera capability and can use Windows Studio Effects, you'll get an icon down in the system tray, an icon down in the system tray um the the one in here I I just this morning this was driving me insane because I reinstalled windows.
08:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ignore me, yeah. Um the mouse cursor disappears if there's an update.
08:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, there's an update, yeah, oh. I'll give you three ways to look for updates, um, all of which? Well, not all of which, um, both of which are three of which have some overlap, and you will have updates in all three of them well, and because I'm on parallels, I have parallels updates first.
08:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't win, can you?
08:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's just yep so if you use windows 11, there is one big weird update that would not big, but one weird problem that was introduced 24-h2, which is that the mouse cursor disappears. Oh, and it usually happens when it turns into the I beam cursor for text insertion, and I've run into this all the time. I don't know if I mentioned this, but I use power. Toys has a tool that's I think it's just called find my mouse, where you hit the control button twice. Yeah, I use that. Yeah, yeah, I use it every day now because apparently it makes me feel like I'm blind.
09:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Does it fix the disappearing cursor and brings it back.
09:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it just shows you where the cursor is. But the preview update we got yesterday does have a fix for this bug apparently, so we'll see.
09:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We will see Apple does the same thing, only you shake your mouse and the cursor gets big.
09:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, actually, that's not a horrible idea either. That's interesting. That might actually be a feature of Windows.
09:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm always losing my cursor right, so I shake it.
09:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm going to look at that now I wonder. I think that might be a.
09:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Does that happen in Windows?
09:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think there's a little control panel Windows Security Microsoft Defender. No, so they have a feature where you can turn on mouse tails hilarious. No, I stopped using that in the 1990s. If you press and hold on the control key, you can show the pointer as well.
09:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm actually yeah, I've done that, that that I use on uh on windows, that takes a little while though.
10:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, no, that's okay, I say yeah I like the uh, I like one better, but anyway, yeah, you got to find the Moskursa. That's how we get stuff done, I don't know, anyway. So I wouldn't call this a momentous month or anything for updates. Certainly not in the scope of some of the baloney we went through last year, but whatever.
10:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Looks like Therat's Law is not holding.
10:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm up. No, it's. Oh, it's holding. If you haven't, if you haven't looked, you definitely have updates. No, you, I mean, you do you just do like I must, right, you will, just must. So there are two other places you have to look, though, right, and we'll also have updates right, the app store too right.
10:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's always updates in the app store yeah the bottom left uh downloads or that are actually where it downloads like yep right there and then get updates okay but here's my favorite one.
10:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You could get these both up to date. Right, everything's done. There's no more updates? Yeah, and then open a terminal window and do wingate update. You will have updates. Oh, you're right.
10:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Updates there were updates available you're right every time, every time this is soate. So, okay, I understand. The store does apps from the store and Windows Update does system apps. What does Wingate do that's different, or is it additional apps?
11:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so Wingate can update apps from the store and from its own web-based repository, meaning they essentially download it from the web. But the weird thing I've seen seen I'm trying to document this is, uh, you could check for updates in the store and you're all done. And then you check in when get, when get sorry, and it still finds updates that are store-based apps. It's like come on, guys, like it's, it's it's kind of insidious, but yeah, that's whatever you know if you have a ocd or adhd, like I do.
11:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's the thing this is a nightmare what the advice should be just ignore it and let it update itself.
11:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, that should be the update when someone insults me. But you know, the thing is, I find it hard to let those things go.
11:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, I mean ideally. No, must we're ocd all of us? And uh, we do. That was lisa yells at me when, um, I say there's an update because she says why didn't you tell me? And I say there's an update because she says why didn't you tell me? She wants to know too.
12:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Everybody wants to know. My wife used to drag the little dialogue down to the corner so she wasn't in her way anymore. So one day she's complaining about something was wrong with the computer. I said, what's all these little windows in the corner? And she's like I don't know. They were popping up about something. I love it. Yeah, you have to update your computer.
12:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's good that we're married to normal people because it's a little balance. It's a little balance in our lives. If you're wondering, richard has fallen off the face of the earth because he is at a conference and everybody's using the internet. So I suspect, because he didn't dial right back, he is off to the hotel, so he'll be back. In one way or one form or another, he'll be back.
12:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, one of these things I'm actually curious. I'm really curious what he thinks about this, cause he just did a show about this, but we will get there in a moment. Yeah, since last week there were three insider builds, one each to dev beta, and now today canary. Not a lot of updates, but some cool ones.
13:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then but some cool ones, and then you know the, the. I think it's the dev build.
13:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh crap, now. Now edge wants me to know?
13:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh, that's the other thing. What made 2024 memorable?
13:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, so we're gonna have updates. You go, you gotta go on edge and update that too. Uh, that's another one the up the apps that have their own little update thing. You know, yep, yeah, edge is coming up and actually you might want to keep. Uh, you might want to update that right now, leo, because we're going to talk about edge in a second.
13:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, so uh, I do not need this, this powerpoint presentation on why edge is so great.
13:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I really don't stay inspired leo, just I don't want it uh, yeah, so update that thing, because, okay, I and in fact I have yet to see it says it's managed by my organization.
13:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sure it is the organization it's me, it's me.
13:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's always a great sign. Uh, let me see if this one's up to date.
13:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, this one. You know why it says that, I think is because I did that little hack to activate it. Uh, and I think that that's one of the side effects of that is that now it thinks I'm in an organization my own, of course Because I set up, basically, an effect that I have an activation server and I'm activating you. That was the hack.
14:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it means some guy in India can probably change the settings in your computer at any time.
14:18
Great, let's just send something down to the KLMs or whatever they're called. Okay, I don't know why we don't have a picture of this in my article, but the dev channel one is kind of fun because they're changing it. So the battery icon in the tray actually has colors. So when it's charging in a good state it'll be green, when it's in energy-saving mode it'll be yellow, and it makes you wonder why they didn't do this, like I don't know, years ago.
14:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You wonder why they didn't do this like I don't know.
14:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I like to go literally yeah, color in the yeah and well, and plus you can at a glance kind of tell how your battery's doing a little bit easier than you know. Um, if you, if you're familiar with windows 11 especially, probably tend to I guess the battery, that little battery icon you could look at it and say, yeah, that looks about what 33 and you mouse over to go 77, you're not even close. So actually having like a color thing is kind of nice.
15:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I don't know, so that's cool.
15:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then in the yeah, the beta channel. They are experimenting with some new UIs for that snap. It's actually not technically snap. Well, it's a feature of snap layout. When you mouse over the maximize restore button in a window it pops down like the possible layouts they're looking at. Maybe doing this in a different layout basically.
15:33
So that's kind of cool. And then, what was the one today is Canary Build? Oh, this is what we've already seen elsewhere. So there's so much information now in the default home screen In File Explorer. They've created tabs for the things that used to be just come down in like a single view, so you still have quick access at the top. Those are those folders that are over in the navigation pane and then you have different. Now they're tabs, but they used to be different sections, so things like recent items, favorites, shared, and so now those are actually on tabs. Um, they've been improving the shared one, um in particular. I don't remember the exact details, honestly, but I think it works. I think it makes more sense. If you're in a business um, you'll see more information there, but if someone, if you, do a lot of uh, file or folder sharing in OneDrive, those things should show up in there as well. Okay, not that exciting.
16:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But we can make it more exciting. I don't know, there it makes it more exciting.
16:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm of a mixed mind on this right, because the last year and a half I'm going to call it has been incredibly chaotic.
16:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So the fact that it's kind of calmed down for a little while.
16:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe that's not such a bad thing. I think it's going to churn up again, though, because there's a couple of things that just happened that are kind of interesting and, I think, point to something else. So Raphael, who we all know, tweeted the other day or whatever we're calling that now that Microsoft is removing DevHome for Windows. So DevHome has always been a little curious to me, but it's still in preview. I want to say, microsoft announced this two years ago at Build, and the idea was that Microsoft wanted to make Windows the best choice for developers. It never made sense to me that DevHome was installed by default on all Windows 11 installs. Yeah, no, actually.
17:30
I'm seeing a message now that says DevHome will be going away in May 2025 and a subset of its features will be moved to new places. So I got to be honest. That makes sense to me, because a lot of this stuff is about you setting up an environment as a developer and then you can clone it and put it on a different computer that kind of thing, but I feel like developers already have workflows for that. Like I don't know that they need this kind of handholding, but there are a couple of features in here that are actually really interesting and would be useful more broadly, broadly, and one of them is that ability to have an RFS drive, which is a much faster file access for your developer projects, and so it would help you set up this RFS developer drive. So I suspect that'll be one of the things. I think that's going to come just to Windows, but they haven't said anything about this yet, other than the little warning banner that we see today. So, yeah, may, may 2025, that's when build's going to be. So that makes sense.
18:30
I mentioned earlier, richard did a episode recently. They did an episode on dotnet rocks about dev home. So, like they just an episode or two ago, so that kind of stinks, I don't know if they knew about dev home.
18:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, isn't that funny. Is there going to be something else to replace the functionality?
18:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
they're not saying but yeah, given the timing, I think what they're going to do is just pull in, uh, or pull out, I guess, some of the features that were in dev home, and only in dev home, and just make them part of windows proper. Because you know, like I do, like I'm I guess I'm a technical user. I mean, I set up a wind get strip that does all my app installs. I think developers do that kind of thing Right. So I I don't know, I've never, when I sign into um get a, or sorry, a visual studio code, I sign in with my GitHub account and it syncs all my settings and then I don't it just installed all the extensions I use, for example. Like developers have these things, like they don't really need another thing and they certainly don't need it to be part of Windows.
19:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I get it. So it's basically a GUI to show you your Git status, your WinGit status.
19:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It does that kind of stuff. There's some utilities, there's that. Like I said, the RAFS developer drive thing was kind of a big deal.
19:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a different file system than NTFS, yeah kind of a big deal that.
19:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What is that? That's a different file system than ntfs. Yeah, this was developed, I want to say, during windows 8 um, back at a time when the windows team was busy trying to erase the past. Um, but, uh, but never. It never put out. Yeah, it never. Well, it never. They never, really they never replaced every single feature in ntfs, so they could never actually replace ntfs, but they did keep working on it and it is for resilient file system yeah, it is better for certain things and, uh, one of the things it does really well is quick file access, so it's good for developing projects.
20:12
Lots of small, small files yeah but the other thing that's in there that I'm kind of hoping will come just to winget is they had you could make what was called a yaml, meaning y-a-m-l as opposed to xaml, or, yeah, xaml x-a-m-l yeah, uh yaml.
20:28
Um, you could make a yaml configuration file for all of the stuff you wanted to install with winget, and when I saw that two years ago, I thought, okay, this is how winget's going to improve, because their winget is great, but it doesn't do anything around automatic updating of all the apps you install. That's why you have to go check, as we talked about earlier, and it doesn't do anything around automatic updating of all the apps you install. That's why you have to go check, as we talked about earlier, and it doesn't do anything around app configuration at all. So I was kind of hoping that that was what that was going to turn into. So when they say that some of these features are going to just appear in Windows, I'm wondering if that isn't going to be one of them.
21:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, that's a copy-on-write file system. Right, it's a resilient file system that data-based, um seems it's a modern file system. In other words, it seems like they should finish it.
21:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I I mean I'm with you, is that?
21:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
crazy am I, am I crazy talk? This is where, when this is where microsoft really suffers by this. Uh, being slavish to legacy? Yeah, as you can't. For instance, one of the big things that refs doesn't do is win 32, api support or complete support yeah, so it has to do everything the other one does first. Right, then you can replace it because it doesn't fully support legacy.
21:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's but it's better. Well, we suffered through. We had fat, fat well, fat 16, as we once called it fat 32 and ntfs, and one thing was good for another but not the other. And now today it's all ntfs, no problem. So we got there, but it took what? 30 years. Um, I feel like. I feel like rafs will happen. I think it will. Yeah, uh, but yeah, it's not quite there yet. Yeah, so, uh, this one came out of nowhere in a way.
22:04
But back at ignite mic, microsoft announced a bunch of features for Edge for business, right, so it's not really a unique product, but when you sign into Microsoft Edge with your work or school account, you get these additional features related to management and so forth and also separating personal and work-related stuff, right, okay, I don't think it's that interesting, but whatever.
22:23
But one of the several features they mentioned then was something called a scareware blocker, and this past, this week, they announced it's available now in preview, but it's for everybody. It's not actually just for Edge for Business, and it's one of those things where it's. Obviously they have the smart screen defender technology for protecting against these kind of scareware things, but that's good for known scareware threats. This will use heuristics and AI to kind of examine what's happening in the browser and if it looks suspicious, they'll pop up a thing and say hey, this looks suspicious. Things that make it look suspicious are it goes full screen and they start playing a lot of warning sounds and it starts asking you for your bank account information, that kind of thing. So if you go, where is this?
23:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm in the settings, yeah.
23:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So if you on the left side there is a privacy search and services yes, second item down Yep, scroll down to security the section services yes, second item down yep, scroll down to security the section and and if you have this, it will be the second item done is scareware microsoft defender scare, uh, scare.
23:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Smart screen no, that's smart which is scary by itself.
23:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it took me a couple of days actually.
23:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the first time I've actually it's not up to date, then in other words well, I updated by browsers and didn't see it immediately.
23:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So sometimes you actually actually have to, you know, quit the browser, come back or even reboot, whatever.
23:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I can do that. Let's try that. Let's just quit it.
23:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, edge is tricky because it's kind of always in the background.
23:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now.
23:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have to update. I'll be back when Richard returns. Before you go, before you reboot, though, you should make sure that edge is actually up to date. Did you do that? How do I do that?
24:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
all right, so go into edge. Okay, I closed edge. Let's reopen it. Okay, the dot dot dot menu up in the top, yeah yeah, uh, bottom, uh.
24:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Second one from the bottom settings. Second from the bottom yep, that one, and I can't really read it, but oh sorry. Third one from the bottom. It should say help and something, help and feedback.
24:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it should say something check for updates Report and send feedback report About Microsoft Edge. Maybe Do that one. Oh, maybe do that one. Checking for updates Wow, that's a long way to go. Presumably, this would do it automatically eventually. You're right, I would. Yeah, it will do it automatically eventually.
24:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, everything is eventually, yeah, yeah, everything. They don't want you to. They don't want you to be a seeker. In this case, they want to. They hit it pretty effectively. It's like three minutes, yeah, you wouldn't. You wouldn't just find it. But I think that's part of the, I think that's part of the point right there. It's brand new, they're testing it, they want to get feedback, they want to make sure it's working the way people think, etc.
24:56
Etc so as soon as my edge is fully updated, I will go to privacy, search and services under security well, actually, as soon as it's updated, you should reboot your computer and then anyway, then then go do that, okay and by then richard will be in oslo and we can continue with the show only because that will ensure that edge actually restarts fully, because sometimes you close edge, it's just parts of it still running.
25:19
It's right, a multi-hydro problem, yeah. And then, since this is a browser story, neither one of these are particularly huge news or anything like that, but it's a couple of well, browser company related things. So vivaldi put out a new version of their browser on the desktop, um, with even more personalization features, which is crazy, um, but okay, that's cool. And then a brave search did, or brave, who makes brave search on the brave web browser, um added a way to, or a feature called re-rank, which is a way for you to, as a user, customize how search rankings work, meaning you will see the sources you want the most toward the top of search results and or not see the results or the, I guess, the sites or whatever that you don't want to see. So you don't have to use it, obviously, but if you feel like you're searching for something in particular, like look, I only want to search from a certain whitelisted group of places, you can do that. So it's kind of interesting.
26:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice, yeah, nice.
26:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It also works with, or helps the answer with, ai feature that's built into brave search, because it will generate more concise answers based on your curated list of search or ranked search ranked search sources. I think that thing Okay All right?
26:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Which do you? Which do you use now? Are you still a brave guy browsing?
26:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean overall I am. I've been using edge a lot lately, um, not because I like it or and certainly not because I hate myself, although you could make that case. Um, I'm just trying. I have to update the book and I've been. Yeah, it's one of the things I don't like about edge is how much you have to customize it per pc. It doesn't remember so many settings, so it's kind of annoying. And then there's a whole tracking Microsoft force usage thing. But it's fine if you, you know, do your work. But yeah, I mean, brave is still to me the you know the way. It's just the simple. You just get it. It's super Spartan UI, super safe by default.
27:26
So just to reassure people, I have done all that you said updated edge. I did the update reboot. It's still not there.
27:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, this is. It's a slow rollout, or that's right. This is my experience as well. Yeah, yeah, uh, kev uh has it in our uh discord. Our club member kepper, who's a very wonderful fellow, says he just enabled it. That's probably something you should enable.
27:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It seems like a good thing yeah, I mean, I feel like this is mostly beneficial for people like our parents and our non-technical siblings and friends.
27:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, but still.
27:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, definitely still. But I mean like if, if that sort of thing popped up on our computers we'd know better.
27:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think we'd like we like to think you know, into giving credit card numbers because someone, like in a full page web screen, tells us there's something wrong with their computer.
28:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, I think we're probably. We're probably smarter than that I would one hopes right? Yeah, you can't. I mean there's no, there's no reason to complain about it. It's a good idea let us pause.
28:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We do have a nice ai section.
28:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I do want to talk about deep seek with you I might actually just skip over this till he's back, just to be sure.
28:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, he'll be back. We have an ad, so I'll do the ad and, with any luck, richard will be back, because we want to talk about AI a little bit. We will and I should mention this be talking about it also on Twig in an hour, but starting next week, twig is rebranded, we're renaming intelligent machines and AI will be the focus of the show, no longer this week in Google, but we are booking Ray Kurzweil for next month. He's the guy who coined the term Intelligent Machines. What we're going to try to do, besides covering what's going on, is get experts in the arena. We're trying really hard to find somebody who can talk about DeepSeek knowledgeably.
29:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have a tip at the end of the show that might be of interest. It's Microsoft-centric, yes, but he's Good, Good.
29:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we're making a list and checking it twice. We definitely want to get experts on. I'm not an expert. Jeff covers AI. He does a show on AI with Jason Howell. You know Paris is a smart woman and the information is very much connected with a lot of these stories. But we want to get some people we're actually working in the field on as well to help us understand it better. So that's going to start next week.
29:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think having an AI-focused podcast makes tons of sense.
29:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I think all of our shows these days have a lot of AI, as does this one, because it is the Mostly begrudgingly yeah, but that's part of why I want to do a show about it. Is this real, is it not? Is DeepSeek BSing us Likely? Yeah, but but is there some?
30:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
value there, but does that matter?
30:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, so we'll get to this we're going to talk about this because yeah, I have it on my phone and I've been using it and-.
30:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, me too, and it's like yikes, I know it's really good.
30:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We used it yesterday for show notes for one of our shows, I think. Security Now, nice, no-transcript. It's very interesting, but microsoft has a little bit of a complaint about it. We'll get to that in just a little ironic. Ironic, isn't it ironic? You're watching windows weekly with paul thurot and richard Richard Campbell. We will be back in just a moment.
30:47
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31:35
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32:26
And, by the way, melissa is not just a US or Canadian company. This app validates addresses in over 240 countries and territories that's pretty much everywhere, standardizing them according to the local postal regulations. That's really important. You know I just found this out they don't have street numbers in Venice, italy, so if your address validating and you need to know this is Venice, oh okay, we're going to do this the way they do it, and that makes a huge difference in deliverability. Even if Google auto-suggestion is enabled, melissa's app can correct and standardize addresses better than Google has enabled. Melissa's app can correct and standardize addresses better than Google, adding missing components like postal codes, ensuring compliance with local formatting rules, as in Venice. They're different in every country. It's CAS and SERP certified. The address engine is certified by the United States Postal Service, by Canada Post, so you're getting reliable validation, of course, for all your North american addresses, but, as I said, worldwide you also get. This is really cool.
33:28
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34:08
Now you may say, well, do I want to add another data place? But you should know Melissa treats this information as gold. It is securely encrypted for all file transfers. They have built their information security ecosystem on the ISO 27001 framework. They are GDPR compliant. They're SOC 2 compliant. I mean, they really take this seriously, so you don't have to worry. This is something absolutely safe, secure and powerful. You really want this. It's just one of many things Melissa does. Get started today with 1,000 records cleaned for free. You can try the API right there at the website. Melissacom slash twit. M-e-l-i-s-s-acom slash T-W-I-T. In the weeks and months to come, we'll be talking more about some of the new stuff that melissa can do with ai. It's really impressive, melissacom slash twit, and it works with the, your google and microsoft platforms too. Melissacom slash twit. Okay, yeah, let's talk about um. All right, let's talk about earnings. Uh, paul, as we wait, when richard gets back, we'll do the uh ai segment.
35:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so for now, four o'clock at uh eastern, when the markets close, which is about an hour and 15 so yeah, I would say before the end of the show we should have at least a quick peek at that and then next week some more.
35:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But um I any thoughts, yeah, right now their stock is down 0.68 percent, right, so that's part of the whole deep seek uh story.
35:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's the impact that it's had on stock prices, and I learned something, actually, as part of that, so I'm looking forward to talking about that. But their earnings are going to be gangbusters, right. But now there's going to be new scrutiny on the amount they're spending on AI infrastructure and I might argue it's a little overdue. This is a company that's been spending 20 ish billion dollars every quarter just building the infrastructure, um, which is, you know, again, a big part of that uh coming conversation about deep seek.
36:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But well, when we get to this, I'll mention this. But, uh, there, there is something to be. I think there is. You know, certainly nvidia's is tumbling because of, yes, but I think there's something to be. I think there is. You know, certainly NVIDIA is tumbling because of this, but I think there's something to be said for the fact that this is good news, because less expensive AI means more AI in more places and, in all likelihood, more use, which means it's actually, I mean, if well, I'm not, I don't, I'm not, I don't, I'm not allowed to, I don't allow myself to invest in uh text stocks, yeah, but I and I'm not giving anybody advice, but if I were, I think this would be time to buy, buy, buy, not sell, sell, sell. I think this is short-sighted on the markets.
36:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, well, I it's, it's the early days. Um, I, I this is part of the whole conversation. You know, steven snoffs get a really interesting thing on twitter x whatever about how this is how disruption happens. This was always going to happen. No one thought it was going to be the chinese per se, but, um, the whole business model of big tech is spend an incredible amount of money that no other companies can spend to build an infrastructure that no other companies can spend, to build out an infrastructure that no other companies could build out to maintain your dominance and continue into this new market.
37:28
And to my simple kind of eight brain, what that is saying is when you're a hammer, everything's a nail right. And so no one at Microsoft was like, hey, how could we do this a lot cheaper? You know, I mean, they were like this is their competitive advantage. They were going full bore. So maybe this causes a little bit of a reset, but it always not always, but many times usually takes a company from outside of that industry to disrupt it. You know Apple with the iPhone.
37:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Netscape, whatever, not necessarily a bad thing is all I'm saying. Well, yeah, obviously he's gonna as such a and the cfo will be asked about this in the analyst hall. Do you think they'll be cagey?
38:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
or or well, that's a good question. So I, um, again, I we're gonna talk through half of the steep sleek thing now, because cause it's hard not to. But, um, let me, let me just tell you the part of the story I didn't, the thing I learned in this, because I cover all these earnings, but I'm not like a stock or money guy, like I don't really understand these things. And, um, it was interesting to me like the more on Monday morning all the big tech ai companies, like the stock had all nosedived. So when I looked at that on monday morning, I went through, you know, three or four of the companies like, uh, google, microsoft, uh, well, open is not a public company, but whatever, like, but whatever they were. And oh, nvidia. And except for nvidia, the stock price drop for each was single digits, five, six percent, whatever. It wasn't that bad. Oh good, he's here, so we can just go right into it. But NVIDIA was 11%. I'm going to say something like that. And I thought you know what this company is worth, whatever the number is a kajillion dollars. They could weather this kind of hit easily, not a big deal.
39:21
So I wrote whatever I wrote and then the day happened and you know, I'm reading and researching throughout the day and at the end of the day there was a story somewhere where they were trying to explain that this historic stock market event that occurred that day and I'm like, okay, hold on a second Cause. When I looked at this, it was like 6%, 11% of the most. I'm like what are they talking about? So the history that was made Monday was that Nvidia, which at the time was one of the top three companies by market cap, right, their stock price dropped by, let's say it was 11%, because it is when I looked at it, but whatever it was for the day, it was 11% Because of the overall value of their stock. It was the single biggest drop in value in a single stock in one day in the history of money. It's never been that. In fact, by a factor of two, the second biggest drop by total value is less than half of what NVIDIA lost that day.
40:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But it has more to do with the value of nvidia that it has.
40:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right that's the job. So, um, we haven't really talked about deep seek yet, richard, but I we were kind of talking, walking into it sideways, but the but this is, by the way, the best way to walk in yes, probably with a blindfold on um. So yeah, like satchin, adela, sam, altman and nvidia all released statements of some sort or talked about this to some degree and and all of them were in their own way telling.
40:49
But the nvidia one which I thought was very interesting was they basically came out and said look, we just want to remind everybody that all of these reasoning services, these lms, require nvidia gpus. And, uh, these guys used nvidia gpus. Yes, they were prior that all of these reasoning services, these LLMs, require NVIDIA GPUs. And these guys used NVIDIA GPUs yes, they were prior gen, whatever stuff they could get from before.
41:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They were the H100s which are allowed in China around the chip block, but they did something very clever with them. Yes, and they wrote in fact their own low-level code to allow the inter-process architecture to be speedy. So they're very smart. They just were smart. But there's something in economics.
41:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, driven by necessity, right, and that's how this stuff happens. That's what's great. I love it. It's stress in park. Life will find a way when you are met with restrictions, whether they're artificial, like the export restrictions we have in the United States, are just natural.
41:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Whatever it is, or the syllabic kind of a haiku or a sonnet. It makes you more creative.
41:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right. No, but it does right. That's where the innovation is going to come from. It's not going to come from a company that's protecting its business model, right? This is why Google didn't release some of this stuff years ago, even though they could have, because they looked at the impact it would have on search and they're like we can't do that even though it would have been kind of.
42:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I also wonder you know their master espionage folks too. So what don't we?
42:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
know, and this is really important to point out, is you can't just take this that you know that you have deep seeks as assertions as on face value. Oh, it only cost us six million dollars. I think that's just $6 billion.
42:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, okay but in a Robin Hood sense. Maybe one of you guys remember this. This is a month or two ago and it's a little overly simplistic, but someone somewhere had said here's an idea these AI companies are all stealing content from everyone. If you can prove that they've stolen content to feed their engines and now they're making billions and billions of dollars on this, just open source them. Let's put that back in the public domain and have it benefit everyone. And there's a naive kind of part of me that's like yeah, that actually sounds like a pretty good idea. And so did the Chinese just do this. Maybe you know, maybe we certainly don't know the truth.
43:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I think we also need to be clear about definitions, because it's really open source, which is a phrase Meta started using is not an accurate description of this. In fact, the open source initiative says it's not open source. That means you could look at the source code, the training. There's two ways you can be more open about what you're doing. What did you train on which?
43:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
nobody at this point is admitting, okay, but neither is OpenAI.
43:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, very much, not In fact they were started with the notion that they were, and they quickly decided no, we're not going to tell anybody how we did this. They started with the notion that they were and they quickly decided no, we're not going to tell anybody how we did this. And then there's the second part of it, the tuning, which are the weights, and that is really what it should be open weight, not open source, I think. Open weight means you're saying here's what our weights are, and DeepSeek is open weights. Meta is open weights. Openai is not open weights. Okay, there's, you know, microsoft complained, as did open ai.
44:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, that it's pretty clear. As I said to brad this morning, let me get trained.
44:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You stole a tv, got home and someone stole it from you yes, and then you went to the cops and said you will not believe the injustice here they used a process is pretty clear, called distillation, where you train your ai by interacting with somebody else's ai, asking questions, looking at the answers, and you could do that a very rapid pace with ai is obviously much more rapid than you could which is what's how the original gpt's were made anywhere where they still had people reviewing the answers and ranking them to build up a better training.
44:34
It's perfectly fine, that's what is normally done with an ai is and that that's the tuning. In fact, I have a friend whose company does this and you tune it for the task. If it's coding or if it's generating protein folding, you tune it for that task and you could do it in a manual fashion Often you do, but you can now also do it in a mechanical fashion with distillation. I think this is it's fair game. As far as I'm concerned, it's fascinating, yeah.
45:04
But this is what you want which is everybody learning from everybody else, getting better and better.
45:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, well, it's what we want.
45:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, not what these closed source companies want.
45:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You do have to debate what was the motivation to release this thing. Because they don't care about the income. Front Right, this is not a money making.
45:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it's destabilizing. They got what they wanted. My position is destabilizing only in the short term. There's something in economics called Jayvon's paradox effect. Let me pull it up here so I don't misquote it. This is the Wikipedia article article and it says when technological resources, technological advances, make a resource more efficient to use, thereby reducing the amount needed for a single application exactly what's happened here, however, as the cost of using the resource drops, overall demand increases cost, causing total resource consumption to rise. Jevin noticed this in 1865 with coal efficiency. The increased efficiency of coal led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries. I submit that's exactly what's going to happen here, which is why I'm bullish.
46:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Same thing that happened with oil, right like yeah, you know, we continue to get to more and more oil.
46:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We use it dramatically more efficiently and we know this in california because our it's pretty funny, sad but funny. Our california utility uh says well, we have to raise rates because you guys are too efficient, right we're not making enough money, what?
46:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
are you doing like putting energy back into the grid? What is wrong with you?
46:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they got mad. They said you guys have cut down your consumption so they've had six rate increases in 2024 trying to make up for reduced consumption you know, there's a growing body of evidence to suggest that california might not be the greatest place to live I love it here and I'm not moving all right, unless it's to mexico city, or oslo or london I don't know a place where they back over with a garbage truck.
47:13
I'm sure that's super efficient anyway, I I think it maybe is a short-term market destabilizer. Clearly it is it was only a day. I'm already talking to people who, quote unquote, bought the dip, I think honestly and again, I said this before you came back but I don't invest in these stocks and you should never take stock advice from me. But I would buy NVIDIA right now because it's a bargain yeah, relatively speaking, it's already recovering's a bargain, yeah right, relatively speaking yeah, it's already on its way.
47:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's already recovering.
47:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, it's uh so this all comes out of the discussion about tonight.
47:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Uh, microsoft's gonna release its annual or quarterly report rather oh good, because then we'll know what to talk about next week I have to tell you it's a preview of earnings you know that that fbi like break into the room meme where they all storm. You know they just match FBI. I just had that happen to me at the convention center. What those guys were clearly on to me. Are you doing a podcast? Literally, you must clear the meeting building immediately, immediately.
48:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.
48:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Wow, all right, and the internet is off.
48:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And, by the way, it's a better connection here in your hotel, I think you're totally right.
48:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I mean I can't. I don't have as much room, I didn't have time to tune the rig, but at least I got the audio and Paul was, you should know, did not want to do the DeepSeek segment.
48:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was a lot of water treading.
48:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Probably you were gone. I think you can make your way through Windows there, fred, pretty sure.
48:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Have either of you used DeepSeek?
48:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yet. No, oh, I have Very impressive. I'm actually really impressed with it. So I've used it mostly for some of that programming stuff because it's something I can kind of compare fairly easily and it does a fantastic job with that, and I think the presentation is better too, if that means anything I love, and this is oh, one does this too, but I love watching the thing reason, yeah, yeah or appear to reason well, it seems to be talking to itself.
49:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I asked it, for instance. I wanted to.
49:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm sorry to interrupt. They should train it just on um, I almost said sub stack, not sub stack. Um, what's that stack overflow? So every time you ask it a question, it would just respond with I don't know why you want to do that. Why would you ever? It's like, could you do you have the answer? Because if you don't shut up, so it how do quantum computers work?
49:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It thought for 43 seconds, but instead of letting you sit there looking at a blank screen, it shows you the process as it's thinking yes, so it starts. Ok, so I need to explain how quantum computers work. Hmm, where do I start? By the way, it's English, it's excellent. I remember from my classes that regular computers use bits which are zeros and ones. Quantum computers use something called qubits instead. But what's a qubit exactly? Wait, I think qubits can be both one and zero at the same. Anyway, it asks. It's almost a Socratic dialogue with itself, right that it develops the answer and then at the end it gives me what I thought was a really good answer.
50:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Maybe this is related, you're supposed to down a quart of hemlock.
50:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like in the old days where you had to keep someone on the line so you could trace the call.
50:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's keeping you connected so it can find out.
50:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I could have just put up a spinning ball, but instead so what language did you give it and how did it do Paul?
50:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
C-sharp. So how did what? What language did you give it and how did it do paul c sharp? And specifically, you know, windows presentation foundation, because I'm looking at things that are related to certain ui objects that are in that particular framework, etc. Etc. I'm trying to automate some things and you know I've already asked these questions of I get well, gith is. I'm not even sure if it is opening. I guess it is Might be.
51:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it is, isn't it?
51:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is it not? I can't remember. Look, I've had, by the way, I finally I've been talking about how great that product is. I finally had one. This is pretty good for me too, because I'm not a professional developer. But I wanted Visual Studio will do this thing, where it says it'll give you a little flag and you click on. It says you know, you could write this line of code in a more efficient fashion. We could condense it down to something that's less readable but maybe more efficient, whatever. So I've in the past I would avoid that. These days I embrace it.
51:33
If you have github copilot installed, it's github copilot doing that, and it it took this giant line of code. It was like it's like it's done this little thing and I'm like that doesn't look right, and so I kind of ran through a couple loops with it. I'm like this is completely wrong. So I just stepped through it, you know, trying to parse what it was doing, and I'm like this is exactly the opposite of what I asked it to do. So I finally I finally found an example, a it just outright wrong, like just wrong. So that was interesting for me.
52:05
But the there were some key things I had tried previously in GitHub Copilot, because there's the stuff built into the editor which is kind of an extension of IntelliSense or whatever we're calling that. But there's also this thing on the side like a chat box right, and so you can say I need to create a, you know a class in c sharp that will hold these things and has these kind of construct. You spell it all out, it blurts out whatever it blurts out and, um, it's I honestly I, I really like the deep seek stuff so far I mean, so far it's been good.
52:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Scott hanselman was doing a presentation today and he pulled out the uh, the, the Google, uh, gemini live and basically ordered it. Hey, whatever I say, whatever I say, say it back to me in Spanish, except when I speak Spanish, and say it back to me in English, nice. And then basically it was both sides of an ordering a burrito and I realized, like that's not an unusual translation tool, those have been around for a while but normally have a ux to configure that you want to do this. The best described it to it. It went okay and then just started doing. It lends itself a sense of entity, that is, it's still software, but it yep, I know, believe it made all the difference.
53:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The thing rich or leo was just reading was like the little bit. It's like when I was in class and I remember this, it's like what are you? What are you talking about? You know you're not a person, but um, yeah, but I, I that's interesting because I I feel like the attempts to make like personal digital assistants, like uh, cortana or siri, whatever kind of fell flat. You know, it was just like you kind of understood, you. You weren't really fooled by it for the most part Maybe my grandmother was, I don't know, but mostly no Whereas I feel like we're starting to fall for a little bit here, like it's kind of it's getting better.
53:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That stochastic parrot is really kicking butt.
53:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, richard, real quick, because this was in the Windows segment and you weren't here. I know you just did an episode about DevHome on, I guess, net Rocks. Yes, and they've deprecated it and are removing it in April, in May, from Windows. Did you know anything about that? No, I didn't know anything about that, so based on the timing, I'm assuming well, they also mentioned that some of the key features are going to be they must be be somewhere else.
54:22
Yeah, right, so DevHome is a product to me never made a ton of sense, but there's a couple of things in there where it's like, yeah, actually this is very useful. So I bet those are the things that are, and it will probably be built, I would imagine.
54:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The big complaint that came from it is that it's expensive.
54:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, sorry, oh, I'm sorry. Sorry, sir, we're talking about two different things. You did a thing on dev box. Yes, I'm sorry, they did not. I'm talking about dev home. My apologies, sorry, sorry, okay.
54:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Not the same thing? Okay, never mind.
54:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, dev box is standing around going away, okay, yep, sorry okay, okay, uh, deep sink, yeah so if you'd like to go away and, um, do something else for a while and we can rewind and then we'll start over. I don't really whoops.
55:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I I do recommend, because I guess I just do this now with him. Uh, steven snafsky wrote a long piece on twitter, slash x about deep sync that I think is worth reading, regardless of how these things fall out along with his book, along with this book. I recommend both, um, but yeah, as far, but as far as deep sync specifically, I honestly his take I was like yeah, no, this, like this, actually makes sense to me. I think he's right. Can you, can you summarize? Yeah, it was well. I did.
55:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know he wrote 18 000000 words. Yeah, I did so.
55:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, my, my. I sort of said this earlier. It was like the, and I paraphrase and make it super simple for my own stupid brain. But you know, with big tech and AI and all the, the big infrastructure build outs and everything you, once you go down that path and you see it as a competitive advantage, you don't really think about doing it differently, because doing it this way benefits you so much. You only have a couple of companies that could possibly compete with you. You've put yourself in a rarefied tier away from the rest of the planet. It's the perfect business model. So it takes someone else to and he said look, no one.
56:15
I never knew it was going to be a Chinese company, but I always sort of figured that some company would come in under the radar and say we got to look at this a different way because we don't have those resources. How else could we solve the same problem? And basically this was kind of like a proof point for that kind of thinking like that. This was always going to happen. It was just a question of when and I guess who was going to be doing it. So it's interesting. I tweeted, or whatever this. I have no remorse whatsoever for Microsoft or OpenAI complaining that someone just stole their preciously stolen information. That's too bad.
56:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everybody's mocking them A little hypocritical, just a little bit.
56:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just give me a break. It's unbelievable.
57:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That is not the stone you wish to throw in this glass, glass, it's unbelievable but they're they're doing it so last.
57:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's funny because last week now feels like a million years ago in ai terms. Right, because the big story last week that leo was surprised wasn't kind of the main story was about how Microsoft allowed OpenAI to go off and court other cloud vendors for infrastructure, essentially whatever, as long as Microsoft said no, first right, and it was like, oh my God, does this mean anything? And so I ended up. I went back after the show and I kind of looked into it more and wrote more about, or wrote about it kind of formally, and I didn't really come away with a different opinion per se, but I sort of see this or certainly at the time saw this as an evolution of not just their relationship but the way that AI will kind of occur. You know, out in the world, and now this has happened and it's like, yep, it's happening again.
58:01
So when you think about, like, the relationship between Microsoft and open AI and how it's weird, you know, frankly, it's a little strange. They had their flare up last a year ago, november, and Microsoft spent much of the past year opening new divisions and organizations around AI and bringing in other things, and almost like they're trying to make all their AI sort of plug compatible with other models. Satya Nadella referred to LLMs as a commodity, and now you could make the argument that Microsoft may be able to use DeepSeek as leverage against OpenAI or as another option. You know, not not meaning literally use deep seek, but say, okay, well, we can do that. You know we can do what they did. Um, it might lessen their dependency on open AI.
58:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I mean, I don't know how dependent they are on open AI at this point. Anyway, they've been long before open AI was courting other cloud companies. They were happily working with Mistral and a whole variety of other LLM sources. When we talked about that being just from a point of view of an FTC threat showing, no, it's not that we have a special thing with OpenAI, we'll work with anybody. So you know, none of this is news.
59:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey should we get Steven Sinofsky on the AI show.
59:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I wonder, maybe let's baby step into that. Um, I feel like I'm, I'm, I'm probably going to reach out to him sometimes you're his, you're his biggest fan.
59:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, you get dibs he would.
59:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He would not describe it that way, but we'll. Well, I would like to talk to him, so let me see what happens first yeah, you get him first no, I don't like that. I mean I, but I feel like I have to do this kind of personally or separately.
59:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah and then if you, if you want to mention, there's this other show right after ours you could be on our show and stick around he should. You should definitely have him on that show, yeah well, this is a good, this is a really interesting take this. I wish it's very possible. Does he post this on a blog?
01:00:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
instead of. So usually he has a subsect blog, right. I don't know why he posted that to x instead of just putting it on his blog, but uh, I don't know why I don't know, yeah, oh well he felt there was a certain reach to it or something I don't know that definitely has a reach to it.
01:00:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah yeah, I'd be interesting to see if deep seek is open to like licensing through microsoft, much less whether microsoft would do that. Uh, you know we're busy trying to, you know busy.
01:00:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think the embargoes would prevent. That would be my problem more, more or less.
01:00:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, considering they kept huawei out of 5g, I suspect, yeah, yeah, we're not going to have a whole lot of movement on this thing.
01:00:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Does Microsoft have a China Microsoft China?
01:00:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They certainly do. Okay, well, that would be a way to do it. I mean, they have multiple entities there. They have dev teams that work within the larger part of Microsoft, and then they also have their sales offices and business with China.
01:00:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what the real wake-up call might be? Not so much an AI wake-up call as a reminder that China has some pretty good coders, that China has some pretty good technology, that China is not like some third world country that we're competing with here. This is a superpower.
01:01:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They still qualify as a developing nation by Economically yes, economic standards, but certainly they have a large pool of people to work from.
01:01:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and they're very smart.
01:01:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And they're largely controlled by a single individual who's decided that AI is important, right they can prioritize that way yeah. That's okay.
01:01:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're soon going to be in the same boat.
01:01:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We see this in their space program as well. Yeah, their rate of development on the space side has been extreme and it's because an individual was able to say, for an indefinite period of time, you will spend money on this and get a station going. They've built that station in four years. It's unbelievable.
01:01:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It turns out if you throw a giant pile, enough of money at it, you can get it well, and that's going to be the argument, by the way, for us having a kind of monoculture, as it were to compete.
01:02:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, that that is an advantage. It's just as long as once that person doesn't think it's a good idea, right, there's really nothing there's no recourse. It's not like you can say hey, wait a minute. Yeah, and they had to have a nasty habit of putting people in jail at this group. Yeah, yeah. And then apparently, the first thing everybody asked deep seek is to show them a picture of tm, and it's where.
01:02:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, which it?
01:02:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
doesn't do right. Right, unless you download it locally and run it locally, it does oh, it does.
01:02:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't run it locally, it's the app.
01:02:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's interesting.
01:02:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It has the censoring yeah, so you're like landed on on a raspberry pi just to show it was possible. It is good, but it will run on a pi 4 and it will tell you what happened on.
01:02:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah that's interesting yeah this, yeah, this, yeah, this factors into my my tip at the end of the show, but yes, as I remember it said uh, I am chat gpt at one point there is that I love it.
01:03:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's wearing like a. It's like norman bates with the wig on and the knife. It's like everything's fine. What's the matter? I'm chat gpt. What?
01:03:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
what very interesting very interesting.
01:03:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, this is man what.
01:03:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Very interesting. Very interesting.
01:03:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, this is man you know we knew this, would we live in interesting times, right? We knew that this was going to be.
01:03:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
this AI thing was going to be something You're talking about a company you know, trading at 50 times PE ratio and it's going to take a hit when anything threatens it. Gee, I wonder why. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, like it's it's NVIDIA's valuation is insane and uh and it's been riding high so long, yeah, and so uninterrupted.
01:03:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, it's interesting, but yeah.
01:03:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
At the end I'm sure it's going to come back because this was an overreaction and again I think a certain number of people that went oh, this is a useful over overreaction, let's buy the dip and you know, turn back back to stock trading as gambling rather than as investing in companies it's only a matter of time before I'm running this on my commodore 64. It's going to be great so and your commodore 64 is running in your Apple Watch. Right, yeah, exactly Right.
01:04:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I know now, according to Steven Sanofsky, why the Norwegian Developers Conference is in London, because, even though Norway doesn't need it, because it has considerable oil wealth, it raised its wealth tax to the highest in Europe and its capital gains to the second highest in Europe. So the influx of Norwegian millionaires continues. They're moving to the EU. Where did you find this? Weirdly, steven Sinofsky said it's happening. Twitter, that's happening.
01:05:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Twitter.
01:05:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's bizarre. Yeah, yeah, most of them moved to Switzerland, yeah.
01:05:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But you know, something is expensive when Switzerland is the cheaper option.
01:05:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, no kidding, that's a good point. Yeah, home of the $30 latte.
01:05:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Norway used to have the most expensive Big Mac in the world for a while.
01:05:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that?
01:05:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
part of your research Richard.
01:05:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like locally sourced beef. No, I keep an eye on the Big Mac prices. Tokyo's back in top again, which is normal, but for a while there. Norway's going to have a bit of a rough time. Yeah, three years ago, when you asked me what's it like going to norway, it's like I need, I I feel like a burger and a beer and it's going to be 50 bucks yeah, but it's uh. Now it's like 40 35.
01:05:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So they really took a hit um, I don't know where to go here, so would would you describe the weather in London as comparable to the weather in Mexico? Why?
01:06:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
no Much more comparable to back in Vancouver. It is gray and raining. Yeah, this is why we have a conference in January and why my wife does not come with me. It's like what are you doing in London in January? That's funny. I want a miserable weather'd stay home, and she did.
01:06:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, okay uh, blah, blah, blah blah. Okay, so just a couple of quick wrap-up stuff. Things on open ai or an ai. So open ai. Last week it's been kind of a flurry of small announcements out of open AI. This was before deep sync, but announced operator.
01:06:45
This is their agent based technology for chat GPT. Right now it's only an option in that really expensive $200 a month tier or whatever it's called, but they're going to bring it to everywhere. Obviously, they want to test it with a small group first, but this is the technology that will go off, you give it instructions and works on your behalf of the background and every once in a while pop up and say, hey, we booked a flight or did whatever. Whatever it was you asked us to do, I got you. I got your thing you wanted. Yeah, that's pretty, so that's cool. Um, and then I just, uh, I've not used it and I probably won't, but I and this isn't in the notes per se, but I got an email from Google about Android studio. Their latest version has whatever the features called Gemini something, something built in much like copilot and get a GitHub copilot in visual studio, right, and then right on the.
01:07:34
In the wake of the Samsung announcement, which I guess was last week and that also feels like a million years ago. I'm having trouble with time here, but, as they did last year, there were a couple of features that Samsung announced that came from Google for their phones, and then Google came out and said, yeah, don't worry, we're bringing a bunch of this stuff to our phones as well. And so there's a set of Gemini features that are coming to Android broadly and then a set of features that are going to come to Pixel handsets specifically, and those are all supported versions of Pixel. So Pixel 6 and newer and the big one I think there's a bunch of it. You know you mentioned Gemini Live. There's some improvements to that and deep research, integration and circle to search improvements.
01:08:16
But I think the big thing here is actually extensions, right, and these are the things that give you the ability to complete tasks across, in their case, first and third party services, right. So you could. They've had extensions, I think, for a little while, but now they're supporting multiple extensions, so you could have it. I don't know, I don't know what you would do this exactly, but, um, you know, uh, plug in spotify and youtube music and say I want, you know, whatever. It is a playlist of blah, blah, blah, whatever, so, um, I think this is the type of thing that's going to make, um, uh, this stuff just, I think, more broadly useful to people.
01:08:53
And then I also got an email from google, because I'm a workspace customer, that they're bringing notebook l to workspace, right, and I have the cheap workspace like the low end tier, the starter tier, I think. I have six accounts, whatever, so I don't usually get much, but actually the, the standard version of notebook LM is coming to basically all tiers, including mine, and then they have something called notebook LM plus, which is going to come to workplace standard and better, and I don't actually know the difference. You've used Notebook. Oh yeah, it's very cool. In fact, I made a podcast out of a Steven Snapski blog post, remember.
01:09:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was from quite a while.
01:09:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was pretty funny. Yeah, it's actually really impressive. So I don't know. It's actually really impressive, so I don't know. Yeah, I will say, the one thing that has not changed with all this stuff is that AI is just like an assault. It's just happening and happening, and happening. You just can't escape it.
01:09:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're trying to find the killer product.
01:09:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it's doing it in a way In the sense that no one would buy a particular word processor for their superior spell checker, necessarily, or whatever back in the day, but I do feel like it's just hitting everywhere.
01:10:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's this win by a thousand cuts, right.
01:10:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.
01:10:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's not any one thing. It's all these things. Eventually You're going to miss one of them.
01:10:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
enough You're going to hang around with a bunch of them yep, yep so if you're one of those guys and if you are, you're my age roughly, and you've been around a while and you're tired of this stuff and you're getting ready to retire you got to get over it, because ai is happening and I would just I'm not saying like embrace it fully, but you have to get past the. This is not real. It's a phase. No, this is it's who shall pass. It's not passing. It's going to be part of everything.
01:10:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're on a path of rationalization, right? Yep, this seems to be the year that we hit the bottom of the trough of disillusionment. There you go. That doesn't mean it's over. That's when you start to climb out. It's like I think the series of features that you're figuring out here is to find the value, because they I haven't seen anybody find value, that I can't find the case study Right, right, except for GitHub, copilot.
01:11:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I think the re, yeah, that one, they've actually come up with data, right, this is what you mean. Yes, which they?
01:11:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
have and data I could go. I can now talk to other product teams of other companies that have nothing to do with this industry.
01:11:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right about what their life is like post, github, co-pilot, and it's this 25 30 productivity boost the thing is you could yeah and look, you could go to anthropic or open ai or now DeepSeek or whatever, and it's it's feels so random Like you might assume that like a GitHub co-pilot product might be optimized for Microsoft technologies or something. It's not. It's. It's very broad, but I have I think Python really does Right, I could.
01:11:58
I could find out the answers for things about C-sharp from cloud with Anthropic or Mistral or OpenAI, or now DeepSync, which I have done, and yeah, it's just everywhere. It's incredible.
01:12:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, okay, everybody's trying, even the Chinese government.
01:12:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay, everybody's trying, even the Chinese government. That's right, that's right.
01:12:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I will say it's more believable that the Chinese were able to get this done than, say, the Russians.
01:12:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I agree.
01:12:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If that means anything, I agree, that's kind of interesting to me.
01:12:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We do need a Putin-seek, don't we, the Putin?
01:12:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Putin, ai, putin-seek, everything just goes like, like. It just turns around.
01:12:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
so he's the hero of whatever story and you know, and the answer is always a quote from dottavieschi right in 1968, when putin was leading the charge for wait what you're watching uh windows weekly with mr paul thurot, richard campbell, richard's in london, paul's in mexico city and you're wherever you are, we're glad you're listening.
01:13:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am in the Curio. That's a good name, is it the old Curiosity Hotel?
01:13:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We overlook MI6 here.
01:13:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, how fun is that. That's very legend. That's a little dicey, yeah, because it always blows up in James Bond movies.
01:13:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're right beside the explosion site here, and then he went offline again.
01:13:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That would be no, that wouldn't be funny. That wouldn't be funny.
01:13:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So the earnings one o'clock, it's only like a half an hour from now.
01:13:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We totally got this, we got this.
01:13:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So if we just slow down a little bit, guys, you have a shot.
01:13:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've got the Microsoft Investor site open, just in case I'll refresh from time to time do you?
01:13:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, you probably don't need to do this, but do you listen to the analyst call, don't you? Yes or no? I read the transcript now, but yeah, okay, yeah, that's a better way to do it.
01:13:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you don't have your agentic, ai read it for you I mean, I'm probably only a matter of time, but but just summarize this it's like they made a buttload of money. Yeah, they're good.
01:14:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What are the learnings here? Be Microsoft Make a lot of money.
01:14:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's fun to make a lot of money.
01:14:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think there'll be any surprises? Anything we should be watching for.
01:14:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I think it's going to be more of the same across the board. I think all the little weak areas like surface are going to continue to be weak. Uh, xbox hardware will continue to be weak. We've got some really good news about xbox software, though, by the way, which we'll be talking about. Okay, uh, that's probably going to be great. Um, but that was just been true with activision, blizzard right and then no, I think if you look at across the company I, I guess the things I would look for. A, I want to see the exact figure on AI, infrastructure build or CapEx, whatever. But I also want to see if they try to rationalize any profits or well, not profits, but revenues from AI and very explicitly, which they've done not really so far.
01:14:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I know they will probably. Will they address yeah?
01:15:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Go ahead, richard, until it's a three-comma number of revenue. They're not saying a thing, yeah.
01:15:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean listen. Having listened to and also read these post-earnings conference calls, people are maybe a little too polite and maybe that's why they get on the call. I don't know, but I feel like someone needs to be like hey, I don't mean to be the wrench in the gear here, but it looks like you're spending a lot of money. Could you talk about that a little bit and explain when that's going to, I don't know pay off?
01:15:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because you are a publicly held company.
01:15:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's reasonable to you know.
01:15:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess they know they're not going to get a straight answer if they ask no no, the argument on.
01:15:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
you know they were going to take this cash and do stock buybacks.
01:15:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, so I literally was just going to say there is a thoughtful response to that and that's exactly what you just said, which is there's risk to this, but it's also high return probability, whereas there's nothing lower return than stock buybacks.
01:16:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like we have a lot of money. I run out of ideas, I just have money.
01:16:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're doing nothing with your money like this is something you know. Investor like you can be too aggressive, but investors want to see but there's another.
01:16:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But investors like buybacks too, because it increases the revenue for the value of their show, but they don't actually need that revenue. They'd rather make more money later than you know, less money now. And the big thing is the AI hype has been useful for moving municipalities over. There's going to be a real pushback against new data centers and the AI hype that we're making our country competitive has gotten them able to get zoning through to get more data centers built. So even if the AI thing doesn't need them, they're still going to need these data centers eventually. This is a tiny thing.
01:16:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I live in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania, which is a nexus of shipping lanes, and now by truck.
01:16:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And several variations of Macungie.
01:16:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, that's right. Three, at least three, and our area is inundated by Amazon-type warehouses. It's just in trucks on the roads all the time. I would give anything for those facilities to be data centers, because there would be no trucks. Yeah, I, I listen, I, there are better. You know, I'm not saying it would be a better, better neighbors, yeah, yeah, they would. Well, they would be, I mean, unless there was a nuclear explosion, cause that's how they're paying for it. But what are powering it? But uh, I don't know. I would much rather have those be data centers. You need to come to my nuclear talk friend.
01:17:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's not what's going to happen. I'm just yeah, but I'm with you and I do think it's a really interesting point that they this is a physical investment, facilitated by the urgency around ai, that is valuable to the company regardless. Are they going to overspend a bit on it? You bet, bet. Would they be able to get all those locations more slowly? Possibly not.
01:17:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, yeah, right. Even if you think deep sink is the end of the earth or something, would you go back in a Monday morning quarterback sense and say they blew it by doing what they did? No, what they did was actually smart. It's the right thing for the company and for its shareholders.
01:18:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, no, the downside risks are low and the upside is significant. Yes, yep, and it really does beat the heck out of a stock buyback.
01:18:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh my God, yeah, not even close. Yep, that's exactly right, unless you're Apple.
01:18:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Not even close. Yep, that's exactly right, unless you're Apple.
01:18:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now we just need to do 30 more minutes of this and we can have the earnings. By the way, I didn't mention this, but I am wearing a number of devices which record. This is the plod note taking thing. This one, you have to explicitly tell it. Okay, I want to record this conversation, so it's probably legal. And it sends it. Sends it to uh, either claude or chat gpt. This thing is the b computer that's always recording, right? Uh, it doesn't have as good an ai on the other end. I applied and I we're gonna. I'm gonna try to talk to these guys because I'm curious what their plan is, because I think, at least in california, you can't just record everything, can you going on around you. It's a two-party state, which means you have to get the other party to agree. I mean alexis, right, yeah, but it's not recording it's always listening.
01:19:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, this is like the, like another. You see someone on the street and take a picture of them, like hey, what the hell are you doing? Like you're on the street, I can take a picture of you I guess I mean I, I love this, because that may vary by.
01:19:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right now it's dopey, it doesn't, yeah, but but as it gets smarter and I think that that's the whole idea I have seen the output of plot and it's quite good. It'll do mind maps of your conversation.
01:19:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, my God, my, my thing would be suicidal. They'd be like what are you doing with your life? Like what is this? You seem to talk to yourself a lot.
01:20:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want her, you know.
01:20:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm on.
01:20:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want an assistant that's always listening, always available, always talking, talking, I can say who's that guy. What do you think about this? You know, plan um, you know, and I think it would be great to have that, and I don't think we're too far off.
01:20:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
When I look at the outputs of things like deep seek right, I feel like deep seek is my little buddy well, I mean as far as like storage and stuff, like I mean, if they're just taking text of what you're saying, you could store an almost infinite amount of that in anything you know right?
01:20:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, it records, sends it off. You can save it or you can just get the transcript. Yeah, of course. Yeah, you're a little late. We know deep seek sends it all to china, right yeah?
01:20:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
look, I just want the question about c-sharp. I don't care where it goes. Could you just who cares, solve the problem?
01:20:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm not a spy I think that the tiktok nation made it very clear they do not care, nobody cares honestly, maybe the way you know somebody was a spy is if they didn't have any of that stuff.
01:21:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, what do you, what do you have to hide, sir?
01:21:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's like that's the giveaway.
01:21:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, I only carry a dumb phone because yeah, those people, like everyone, back away from this guy what's going on?
01:21:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
me and my star tack are very happy with each other I love it. I've every you know there are a lot of shows about spy crafted stuff.
01:21:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've just finished the agency, which is a wonderful show, and he's always buying burner phones. Everybody's buying burner phones all the time they don't I?
01:21:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
love when I love when that's in, like movies and tv shows, because I have never in my life even considered buying a like.
01:21:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm even well, that's what I'm saying if you're buying a burning burner phone, if you're not, wearing an ai pin.
01:21:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You must be a spy or a drug dealer, one of the other yeah, you're up to.
01:21:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're up to no good that's classic um, I think did you talk about microsoft closing the experience center?
01:21:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, so there's two minor microsoft stories. One is a story out of windows central zach. I believe, uh, that microsoft will come out with smaller surface pro laptop models with snap chips lower-end ones.
01:22:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hope they ask such about Snapdragon versus Intel. I think that's really interesting.
01:22:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So Intel, by the way, will also be releasing their earnings, if not today, any day now. Oh God, yeah, we'll see. I'm sure the new CEO is like well, they have an interim CEO. I guess I'm sure they're on the straight and narrow now. They got it. Hi, oh, an interim cdo, I guess. But I'm sure they're on the straight and narrow.
01:22:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now they got it hi. Oh yes, we're here to talk about the last quarter. Yeah, exactly, it's like is this a funeral? What's happening? I'm sorry, yeah, um, so it's all pat's fault.
01:22:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, it's all that's well. Um, anyway, I don't really care about smaller surface anything, so I don't know why they're doing that. But whatever, um, and then I'm interested in some more snapdragon yeah, I am too, but I I'm. But I'm also interested in more snapdragon awesome snapdragon yeah like how low can we go?
01:22:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so let's see how powerful.
01:22:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Can we do like a next gen with graphics and everything? Yeah, so we'll see you want an ultra 2 right yeah, yep, I want. I want the next one, not like crappier versions of the existing one.
01:23:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So we'll see. I said experience centers about a 20 minutes walk from me. I should probably calm down. It's going to be gone in another week or so Is this?
01:23:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
um, I've been to a Microsoft store in London. Is it Camden? What was the name of that place? I think that's the things. Yeah, so at the time it was I I thought of it just as a microsoft store, I guess. But when they closed all their stores, I guess they kept maybe two open as sort of marquee starts not technically a retail store, but it is a retail store, like you can you know. Yeah, so that one was one of them and now it won't be.
01:23:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're closing in february, so I said on january 29th there that is is that the last microsoft store?
01:23:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I I mean, they don't even call them that anymore, but yeah, pretty much I think I experience centers. Yeah, like the the old stuff there yeah, I think they did, which is what makes it the store, yeah, very good. Um, well, they use a little differently. Oh, okay, yeah, like the New York store location for a while.
01:24:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm here for the experience. I don't have money.
01:24:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they kept it. I'm not sure if they still have it today, but they kept it as a place where customers could come and have meetings and stuff and get hands-on with devices and whatever. But it wasn't a store you with devices and whatever, but it wasn't a store Like you couldn't buy stuff there after the closing.
01:24:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But that's not a store.
01:24:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's not a store.
01:24:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Somewhere you go to make it sound so obvious. You know, when you say it that way, it's kind of kind of obvious. All right, we're getting ready for the Xbox segment. How about that? That's going to be the excitement of the hour, ladies and gentlemen, and then, in 24 minutes, microsoft's earnings.
01:24:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so do it really slowly, paul well, actually, if you want, I, I this, this sort of impacts rich, or sort of impacted richard slightly. But one thing that happened, uh, to me over the weekend, which, uh, it's, no, it's grew into this incredible, just event was on friday I got up and we I was, I was with Richard and part of our I was going to fly back and, um, you know, we got our stuff ready to go blah, blah, blah, whatever and did a little bit of work and the guy who does our news, laurent, texted. He says hey, there's something up with the Tik TOK, not Tik TOK, uh, twitter account. Uh, you have to go in and agree to something, blah, blah, blah. But it's like the two of us still on Brad's phone, whatever. And I was like, okay, I was like this is not a big deal, I will handle it man.
01:25:40
So the four of us went down to wherever to have breakfast and we're standing in line and my phone buzzes and it's Brad and he says, hey, I can't post the video we just recorded to YouTube. I've been locked out for some reason, so could you go in and just re-add me as a manager or whatever? I'm like, yeah, sure, so we're standing there, I'm doing this on my phone and I can't get into my YouTube account, so I'm like, okay.
01:25:58
And I'm like, yeah, and I'm like I got to go. So I went back to the room and, without going, I ended up writing a 5,700 word article about this event, which involved YouTube not helping me in the slightest and locking me out of my corporate channel, which I also have a workspace account attached to with six accounts, and they reverted to the old owner of the thing and because that person was not responding to an email, they just turned it off one day. They didn't tell anybody, they just turned it off. The site was still there, the channel, but they wouldn't let anyone in. So they said all you got to do is go back to have whoever at Petricom okay, this, and I'm like I have been separate from that company for two years. I we made this switch may two years ago. I own it. I am literally the business owner. It is my name. Uh, they were not listening. So I had to go back and the short version is the. The old owner of the company, the cart, still owner of that company brought back an email address that hasn't existed for two years. Let me gave me the password.
01:27:14
I got in, but then I had to do a 2FA whatever, and that Brad had this. So the first one. It said go to your authenticator app and then give me the code. And I'm like great. And then. But there were other options and one of the other options was a phone number. But it only gave me the last two digits. I checked Brad's phone number it was those two digits. I'm like Brad, you're going to get a code. And he did. And I was like nice.
01:27:39
And then I got in and then I went to change the owner back to me, which again, almost two years ago, we had done, and I said you got to do a 2FA. I'm like no problem, but that time there was not an option, it was only Authenticator. So I went to Brad and I said listen to me, and this is like, depending on the answer of this question, I'm never going to get my YouTube channel back. I don't suppose somehow in Google Authenticator you still have this two-year-old account. And he like, let me check, let me tell you, the 10 seconds that took was a freaking eternity. And he came back with the code and I was like, oh my god, yeah, I only got into this thing through the grace of god, yeah.
01:28:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
so that didn't happen until the inertia of brad sam's updating stuff yeah, yeah.
01:28:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so I switched it all back and then I got an email from youtube and they were like we'd like you to fill out this feedback form, and I was like I'm going to fill the hell out of this.
01:28:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh yes, I will, Let me tell you.
01:28:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was unbelievable. It was just so horrific. And there was more going on. There was other things, but there was a moment where I had trouble also with my business PayPal account, where you're getting 1099s and stuff. Yeah, when we got, when we arrived in mexico from puerto vallarta it was a domestic flight, no problem, no customs. We made our way out quickest thing in the world. It was wonderful.
01:28:56
And I'm standing there on the curb and I'm calling uber and at first it was fine. And then it did this weird loopy thing and it was like canceled and then do it again. But now it won't show me a price and I was like am I? Am I under attack? I'm like what is this like? Is something going on? You know, I had a moment where I was like I don't, I'm not sure I'm okay here, like this is really possible. Yeah, so I, stephan, I was like stephanie, could you call the urban? She's like yeah, it's like he'll be here in two minutes. I'm like, oh man, like like what is going on? But anyway, it was not an identity attack, thank God, but it was just a bunch of weird coincidences. But, richard, if you were wondering if I was, I don't know overreacting or whatever. When I left for breakfast on Friday morning, I can assure you I spent the rest of the weekend freaking out trying to get my thing. Oh, I saw the calm version of you on Friday.
01:29:44
Yeah, it got worse and worse. I literally said this. I was on the plane and I was so strung up from this. I was like I don't know. It's going to take me hours to calm down from this. I am freaking out and, uh, it's you. Everything you think you own can be taken away from you in one second.
01:30:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know you know, one of the one of the requirements I had for myself to actually start moving all my stuff to N365 is a local backup of it. Yes, and so if I got locked out of the account for whatever reason, at least I have a snapshot that's no more than a day old.
01:30:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, right, yeah, so I mean separate from no, I guess tied to this. We were now in Mexico City, it must have been Sunday or something the two of us my I was. We were now in Mexico city, it must've been Sunday or something the two of us, my wife and I, were going to take an Uber and I was talking to her about this and I said, you know, if I get hit by a bus right now, which I honestly, at this point I would take, uh, I don't. I I feel bad that you, or maybe someday the kids will not be able to figure any of this out. Like yeah, like like I use a, um, a password manager, like you do, you know, and the thing is like I'll go just like with my business, especially there.
01:30:57
There are certain services I pay for and use or whatever, but I'm not on them every day, I don't think about them, whatever. So every once in a while someone deliver it or something will be like you got to do something, whatever. So I go to the site. I'm like okay, and I'm looking at it like I don't even know how to log into this thing. So, you know, you click in the box, you're like maybe the password manager comes up and it doesn't, you're like, all right, I guess I'll try google next, you know. So I try the google account and actually usually that does work. But I feel like I need to document this and I also I think I want to back out of the times where it's a I don't know how you would do this, but kind of unwind it, because it's such a convenience to sign in with a, an online account like google or microsoft especially, but you see it sometimes with facebook and apple and whatever but usually you have a, you have a locus point of, of failure yeah, and a random right.
01:31:46
So if I, if I have accounts at like 200 services sites whatever, 75 of them are going through my google account, which is a corporate workspace account, they could just flip a switch to that.
01:31:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'll never get back in any of that stuff and I yeah I've actively gotten rid of all of those, everything through the password manager I, I'm gonna.
01:32:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I I literally made a to-do to work on this. I'm not. It's not something I can finish this weekend or whatever. It's going to take time, but I think I think this is necessary.
01:32:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is a problem like and your wife's not on your password manager, right uh, what do you mean?
01:32:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
uh, like she's not using the same one and can't get into my stuff, that kind of right?
01:32:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
no, not right now, but that's going to change. I've been, we've, now I've got her using the family account on bit warden so that we have all the household accounts in a shared space so that we both have access to them there's also uh, in most password managers a feature where you can designate a um like a life, yeah, like a someone who's yes, yeah, so I die and they can request.
01:32:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The way it works I think for bit warden is that they can request access to bit warden and I'm informed if I don't respond so here's, here's a weird thought like in a day or five days or a week or whatever.
01:33:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah even given everything you guys know about security, right? Anyone would tell you a 2FA off of a phone number is insecure for some reason, right?
01:33:13
We all know this. But here's the thing. Let's say I'm out in the world and I'm in Mexico and I get robbed and someone steals my phone or I lose my phone, whatever it is. I could walk into a store, buy any phone 200 bucks doesn't matter. I'm using a Google Fi eSum downloaded to the phone. I use Google Authenticator for almost everything. I will get my phone number back and anything I do through Google Authenticator instantly, like getting my recovering my phone number, is easy. Recovering an online account might be impossible, you know. So I I get it, but I'm and I'm not. I'm literally not saying everyone go back to mm or sms or whatever it is mms sms, uh you know.
01:33:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's the point is it's easy for you and it's easy for a bad guy to to get your phone number I'm just look, I I nothing's perfect, I get it here's it's. That's really a rule in security. If it's convenient and easy, it's less secure.
01:34:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I understand, I don't mind a little bit of work on my part. Yeah, I'm more concerned with well a, I got locked out Right. So to this day I I've yet to get into my PayPal business account to get the 10 99 for my taxes, and I think it's because I'm in mexico.
01:34:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I spent 40 minutes on with the phone. It is because yeah, it probably is because you're in mexico that makes it it's unbelievable.
01:34:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so I mean I have vpns, I can make it look like I'm, you know, but they know you're on, I know, I know, yeah, but I, I, I went this is a separate but tied into all this I because I couldn't get in. They were like we have to go through this extra security thing scan your id, scan your face and then I did and they're like, yeah, we can't let you in. I'm like guys, the system is broken. I don't understand I. You know, how much do I have to prove? Give you to prove that it's me?
01:35:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
but the good news, though, is that that the method Elon used to make Twitter only barely break even, he's about to apply to the federal government, so this is going to be an exciting time.
01:35:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm glad you brought up Twitter, so I mentioned, for the first thing that happened on Friday was Laurent saying hey, by the way, we got to do something in Twitter and it's not my Twitter account, it's like the throwoutcom Twitter account, right.
01:35:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I, but that's yours.
01:35:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is it so? I haven't been able to get into it, so I went through. Have you tried to go to Twitter support, if you ever?
01:35:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There is no, it's an oxymoron. I sent you a poop emoji.
01:35:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is what I was told eventually they said you have to pay for Twitter premium or whatever trust.
01:35:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
even think about what you're asking us at least they're honest about it, because frankly that's probably true.
01:35:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Google got 20 bucks maybe I'll think, oh, I'm paying for six accounts at google, so they didn't help me in the slightest right. So I hear you, but that did not buy me anything, not a thing.
01:35:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So anyway, I'm sorry to rant there, but just but we always said google support is uh by via python script.
01:36:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Nice I'm stuck in a loop twitter support.
01:36:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It doesn't even have that.
01:36:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What a support is just go to 10 and there's no 10. You know it's like all this stuff is so convoluted it's unbelievable do you think? You could say this isn't shitification.
01:36:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I think maybe it is also that we have decided to really rely on technology like too much, a little too much well, I'm yeah.
01:36:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean yes, you just said it. You said it. Or you said you were talking about convenience versus scary. We all choose, right? Well, not all, but most people choose convenience. I think there's a happy medium, but I think my happy medium might be shifting to never. Where possible, or at least for things that matter, not use the account that could lock me out later. Like, have my own account, that's mine. You know that no one can lock me out of, and whatever that means.
01:37:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, well, that's why I have my own blog, and then that cross posts to the social and things.
01:37:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This was uh, richard. I don't know if you listen to scott hanselman's podcast, but this is literally his latest episode is about this exact uh topic. Uh, why you don't go to a medium or substack or whatever because you don't really you're. You're promoting their business you don't own your stuff, yeah the uh, of course.
01:37:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now both x? Uh and several others are becoming financial institutions.
01:37:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no that makes total sense to me so now your money.
01:37:42
They'll also have that I can't even trust you with my ideas. You want to put my money in your thing. No, it's the everything app. It's the everything is terrible app. Yeah, that's what it is. I really got to figure this out. This is going to be a thing for me this year. I got to. I really this was eye opening. We've all heard stories about people who are like oh, I just lost all my family's photos because Google or whoever arbitrarily decided not to let me into my account, and sometimes, like the person did something I don't know. But a lot of times it feels like it just kind of happens and you feel like- yeah, what are you going?
01:38:14
to do? Yeah, what are you going to do? I can tell you, it doesn't matter what you do, because-.
01:38:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If there's a human on the other side, at least you have a shot.
01:38:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But if it's a machine, see I I really, I tried to condense this down because, really, who cares about the whole thing? If you do care, it's on my site, it's. It's a brutally long story, but the the thing I went through in the hotel room before you guys got back from breakfast was me getting on a chat line with some idiot from google or whatever and she said can you send me a screenshot? I'm like, yeah, I can, but it's exactly what I just said was happening. She's like, well, if, well, if you don't mind. I'm like okay, now could you sign into the browser with an incognito window? And I'm like, I mean, I can, but-.
01:38:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She has a notebook that she's working her way through.
01:38:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That has absolutely nothing to do Well, the next one was I need you to record a screen recording of you signing into this account, and my response was no, and the reason is that will not show you anything, right? And she's like well, I'm sorry, we can't really go any further. We have support that they need this. And I'm like I'm at this page If you don't get me past this page. So I did, I made a screen recording like a jerk and then. And then I'm like how do I get this to you? She's like just put it in Google drive, drive, where it's going to take up space and cost me money. I can't just send this to you. Anyway, I did, because you know I'm stuck and wait, please wait. And blah, blah, blah. And then I think you guys had already come back by this time, but it took about an hour, and they were like yeah, we're going to have to get back to you.
01:39:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you notice?
01:39:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
when you saw him again. Uh, that he was a little frazzled, richard. Oh yeah, I was losing my. I felt so bad about the way we left on friday because I was out of my mind.
01:39:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sorry is this in the premium section or is this in the regular section? Yeah, I think it's um. I'm gonna log in. It's not the longest thing I've ever written but it's.
01:40:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is one of the longer post of recent memory, for sure worthy of a sanofsky uh post yep, yep, it is a. It's a long story and it's more to. Like I said, the more we talk about the story, I'm reminded of other parts of it. But yeah, I had a trauma so yeah, traumatized the entire weekend.
01:40:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's an important lesson that every. I mean I'm glad you wrote it up, because it's not. I mean there's one thing to say it happened to you, but this is something that could happen to everybody, yeah.
01:40:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And look, I kind of know what I'm doing. I mean compared to maybe the average person. So Richard will appreciate that the image that's at the top of this article is from Puerto Vallarta.
01:40:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a great sculpture. This is how I felt for three days straight, says Paul. That was not great, all right. Well, I uh, it's not. It's not done, right, it's still no, so it is done now.
01:41:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh good, and I? But it wouldn't have been done if Brad luckily did not somehow and I don't know why he does have this old account still in his Google Authenticator app. Thank God I would have been locked out of my entire channel forever. That would have been the end of it. They literally threatened me. I published most of what they wrote to me in the chat thing in that article so you can see it for yourself. But it's like. It's just like talking to me like I'm an idiot, like I didn't do anything. You something changed on your end. You know it's your fault. It could result in losing full access to your channel.
01:41:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't want that to happen like whoa whoa gone yeah, that's not good and, and, by the way I should point out, probably people think, oh well, paul's got connections. Paul could work this. You know this isn't. Uh, we could you know he could figure this out.
01:41:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nope, I, I'm just speaking logically. The way I look at it is like I'm a paying customer, I am a business, I, yeah, you're not even a free customer. That's the funny thing. Yeah, I'm not freeloading on anything. I mean I just no, nothing. Okay, interesting, because I had to prove to you that I was the owner of this business two years ago and I did, and I don't understand, I don't know Whatever. It's just so frustrating. Wow, you really have to get rid of that brad's authenticator thing. That's gone. Um, so that account.
01:42:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
now I am in control of that again. But but the thing is I was. I love this cj. Do you think cj is an ai? I love this. This is cj stepping in, so I made fun of that.
01:42:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was like first cj stepping in is meaningless to me. Who's cj like I should I be impressed by this. Are you someone I should know?
01:42:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this is the cj.
01:42:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know I'm like, oh the cj, finally I've, I be impressed by this.
01:42:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are you someone I should?
01:42:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
know, this is the cj. You know, I'm like oh the cj.
01:42:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Finally I've been waiting for you to step in the whole time now stuff's gonna happen like I, I could sense how important it is for you to have your channel back. Oh, this is because, clearly, in ai, paul, I just want you to know. Okay, this has all the earmarks of an ai, totally written.
01:43:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah email the way, the way that I wish I. The one thing I didn't save was the chat transcript from the original chat, which I sort of assumed I'd be able to get to. In fact, they told me I would get it via email, but it never arrived. Because the way, the way this chat started now is meant to say again I keep remembering things. The person whoever's got on said hey, exclamation point, how are you doing today? I said no, we are not doing. That Solved my problem.
01:43:33
I'm not even going to pretend to be nice to you. Stop you, shut me out of my account.
01:43:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like CJ Hi there.
01:43:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I hope all is well.
01:43:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
CJ.
01:43:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All is not well, and the reason you can tell that is because I'm chatting with you right now.
01:43:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Nobody chats with you when they're happy CJ, cj.
01:43:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah exactly, I don't just come to you when everything's going great.
01:43:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Idiot, idiot, idiot.
01:44:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was a miserable week, oh my God. Yeah, it was not good.
01:44:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But it's the mortality reminder right, yeah, that's right's. You don't own any of this crap.
01:44:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, we can end you anytime you don't own it, and then only that.
01:44:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right now I've even noticed that we have that's right.
01:44:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, you talked to me wrong a little bit. I'm gonna flip a switch, not tell anybody. We'll see how it goes. You know how's your account now.
01:44:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, yeah, I mean truthfully, I don't know, you can get screwed so many ways, I know.
01:44:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I guess I, I think I think this is a good uh reason to start looking at this stuff and to lower the exposure.
01:44:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Lower, lower, your. What's the phrase?
01:44:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
microsoft, the uh, lower your attack surface. Yeah, um, uh, and I, I think I, I think I have as much as I talk about this stuff. I'm not perfect, you know. I'm not an expert really in security, but yeah, I have I'm. I am perhaps relying a little too. I mean, I can't do anything with youtube right there. That's going to be a google account, of course, but I got a, I got a lesson, I, you know, I sometimes I'm not going to be able to get into the company that's hosting my website because it's tied to my Google. I'm not even sure if it is, but let's say it is. And now what? You know what I mean, like, if everything, everything's really going to go south, yeah, you know. Anyway, sorry, it's not just, oh god, so I'm gonna live in a cabin in the woods by myself. That's the only solution.
01:45:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, ted gizinski, obviously yeah that went great.
01:45:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now you know why he wrote that manifesto he's got a lot of writing done.
01:45:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean he used paper and pen, but whatever, or a typewriter probably. I don't know what he did.
01:45:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Just those few trips to the mailbox.
01:45:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, just remember, Battlestar Galactica survived because it was not hooked in to the corporate network. Yes yes, yes. Her phone still had wires.
01:46:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That was yes, thatfully. Uh, old-fashioned stuff inside the spaceship from the future? Yeah, that's right.
01:46:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm still trying to convince my wife to watch that, by the way says so much about ronald moore's mind, right, yeah, yeah, that's how he, that's how he took them out uh, you're watching a fabulous episode of windows weekly.
01:46:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Paul ferr is in. No, it is. It's a great episode. The more personal you are, the more I like it. Paul's in Mexico City suffering Well actually.
01:46:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean.
01:46:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I remade the show.
01:46:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The Torment of Paul.
01:46:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The Torment of Paul.
01:46:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's better now. But just thinking about it, I'm getting worked up. Just thinking about it, like how terrible it is. Torments of St paul, it's not good.
01:46:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Someday people will remember you. There'll probably be a parade down main street with your mutilated body as a yeah, yeah, I'll go out like mussolini.
01:46:58
Yeah, yeah, it's okay you're watching windows weekly paul thorat, richard campbell, leo laporte. We're glad you're here and we will even be more glad when you become a member of club twit. You are a member of club twit, aren't you? If not, I'd love to invite you to join there. A lot of benefits, one of which is ad free versions of all the shows. You wouldn't hear this. You wouldn't hear any of the other ads, including the inserted ads, for you know things you don't really care about. Just you know get rid of them all. You also and it's at both for audio and video you also get video for shows like hands on windows paul's great show that we only put out in public in audio. You also get special events that we do in the club. We've got some coming up. Chris marquardt'st's photo show is coming up in just a couple of weeks. We have Stacy's book club. I still haven't set a date for that, but the photo time is February 6th. Micah's Crafting Corner the next episode is February 19th. Yeah, we're in February already.
01:48:08
You get a lot of benefits, but the biggest benefit is the warm and fuzzy feeling knowing you're supporting this network and the shows we do and the programming we do. We do have advertising, but the ads do not cover the costs, and that's despite the fact that we shut down the studio. I just got some good news we won't have to pay the lease after that into well, in 2026. That's good, it's better than nothing. News, yeah, uh. So, um, we have paid for 2025, but we don't have to pay for 2026. So there you go. So shutting the studio saved us money. I say we did have to cancel some shows, lay off some staff, but I don't want to do that anymore.
01:48:54
I would like to add shows and you know I would like to. You know, do shows that really fit your interests. So join the club. That's the best way to support what we do and it's not expensive seven bucks a month. Please visit twittv slash club, twit for all the benefits and thank you in advance. We really appreciate our club members. The Discord's a great hang too. You'll have a social network of really smart, interesting people, and that is not nothing. That is not nothing.
01:49:23
Also, even if you're not a member of the club, we would love to get you to take our survey twittv slash survey. It is, I think, last day, today or tomorrow. Um, it is the one thing we do once a year to find out more about you so that we can a target our programming towards you and b let advertisers know what a great bunch you are. Nothing individual, just as a, as aggregate uh. That is one of the ways we uh. A best way, frankly, that we have to sell advertising on the network is just be able to say things like 75 percent are it decision makers, and things like that. So, if you would last chance, twittv slash survey. If you haven't done it yet, shouldn't take more than a few minutes, uh, and it's also a great way to help us out. Um, so there's two things you can do to help us out, and thank you very much for your support huh, is that patrick norton?
01:50:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
is that what that? What is that? A picture of who in the discord? Oh, I don't know, let me go look it looks like you're sneaking up behind somebody, but it was like it's probably patrick.
01:50:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's patrick norton blowing something up. Yeah, in a while. That's funny. Yeah, that's an old screensavers. Uh, promo, is what that? What that there is? Oh, there's a whole little thing there, yeah yeah yeah, it's the screensavers blowing.
01:50:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like you're blowing.
01:50:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're like you're putting the trigger right, that's pretty much the way it was, to be honest on the show, like hey, go open the door. My favorite moment patrick had a sled chammer. He was famous for his sledgehammer and his kilts, which really, if you think about it, they don't. That's probably two things that shouldn't go together. Anyway, they should never go together.
01:50:54
No, um get squeamish just thinking about we were doing a segment, uh showing you how this is 25 years ago, how to uh destroy your hard drive so that the data is not recoverable by, you know, federal agencies or whatever. And so he opened up a hard drive and he said one thing you could do is hit it with a hammer he did. What he didn't know is that some hard drives are not metal, they're glass, and in this case, oh boy, glass shards. I don't. I I'm very lucky to have both my eyes at this point. That was a that was very crazy moment lie on live tv, no less.
01:51:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But we learned something there sometimes they make them out of glass with a hammer like a home renovation show where they just attack the wall.
01:51:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like you want to see if there's electricity in there or plumbing. I mean, like you know that in a.
01:51:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In a nutshell, was was, uh, was patrick. He was great. That's why we love patrick. He's just like I don't know. Let's just see what happens it is all the time, still alive huh yeah the time kevin rose decided that the best way to destroy an old hard drive was to blow it up with thermite. That's a good one.
01:52:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I like that one so he put it in his backyard and and the whole pc and and put thermite.
01:52:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Can you even buy thermite?
01:52:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
nowadays, you just have to make it it's not you.
01:52:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just I got the recipe. What is it? Is it rust?
01:52:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
and it's a little bit of oxide, iron oxide, and a little bit of magnesium.
01:52:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's good it's in there with, like the blueberry muffin recipe and the uh apple pie recipe just ask deep seek, it'll tell you what we didn't tell you is don't do it in your backyard.
01:52:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He practically set the whole place on fire yeah it, uh.
01:52:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You can't put it out. I can't tell you how I know, but it does make lovely glassy jewelry artifacts out of hardware okay, oh lord, those were the days.
01:52:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's nothing like live tv. It really isn't funny. So let's talk xbox, mr t real, real quick, though.
01:52:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There is some breaking news not, uh, earnings related but microsoft has added deep, sick, deep seek. I have a hard time saying that word. By the way, deepq R1 is now available in the model catalog on Azure, ai Foundry and GitHub.
01:53:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's hysterical. So Hugging Face did that a couple of days ago as well. That's hysterical. Now, is that the local version?
01:53:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I believe. Let me see. Yes, yes, yep. Oh well, actually, no, not necessarily. So. Coming soon, customers will be able to use distilled flavors of Deep Seek R1 locally on Copilot Plus PCs.
01:53:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Distilled flavors actually are the name of the whiskey segment Distilled flavors.
01:53:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nice.
01:53:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I thought it was something weird from my closet.
01:53:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, how is this thing not here yet? I keep looking at the investor page.
01:53:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Of course they're going to be late. They're waiting until you finish the show. I know it's bastards, okay it's okay, all right.
01:53:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this is a rarity, but I have some good news this week for Xbox, and the first one is that Microsoft is now the biggest game publisher in the world. Wow, microsoft is now the biggest game publisher in the world. Wow, um, 465 million dollars was spent on microsoft games worldwide in december. Uh, second biggest company is a ea which is, I think was three. Where's the 300 and something million? So it's not even close. Three, three, three, six, yeah. So, uh, obviously, call of duty was a big chunk of that. Some interesting, there's not.
01:54:28
This is like a third-hand report because it's like amphere, it came over the data but was reported by a video game. Uh, publication, and no one else has access to this report. So I'm just going off what they said. But 64 of spending on microsoft games in december was for playstation. Wow, yep, mostly call of duty. Right, that complaint to fcc, I know, but you said you were in the den. I always knew that was nonsense, but anyway, that's beautiful, so that's good.
01:55:00
And then, semi tied to this, you know, obviously, the microsoft acquisition of activision blizzard, controversial, um, and.
01:55:07
And then the Microsoft strategy is still controversial in our little community here, people who believe that it should just be about the console and blah, blah blah. So Phil Spencer has been pretty vocal lately I mean, he's usually pretty vocal, but he's given a bunch of interviews where he said some interesting things. One is that, with this generation of consoles, microsoft made it a requirement for game makers to target the Xbox Series S but also target the unique capabilities of the Xbox Series X, whereas that's not the way they've ever done it in the past. They've never come up with two tiers at one time, right. So what he said this week one of the things he said was that be not forcing, but requiring developers to target the lower end specs of the S series S machine will actually benefit the company when they come up with a portable gaming device of whatever kind because now you've got this thing that has to run with, you know, reduced resources and be respectful of battery life and so forth.
01:56:03
So I thought that was kind of interesting. You know, like the, the scalability of the games is going to benefit a coming generation of portable video game machines, because it will probably. Maybe they add a tier, however they do it, but, um, it will be like it's just part of the system well, that's their xbox everywhere.
01:56:22
Right, that's the I mean it's part of it. Yeah, it's part of it, but I mean it's it's. You know, one of the arguments against this strategy is well, you have this higher-end device. I mean, don't you want them to take advantage of the unique capabilities there? But they actually do require that. But even Microsoft itself, some of their studios I think this happened with Starlink Starcraft. What was that game, starcraft? Starlink Starcraft what was that game? Starcraft, where it didn't support 60 frames a second at whatever resolution when it first came out. But it did later. Like they added it later on the Xbox Series X, I don't know Whatever.
01:56:58
He also was asked by a different interview I think it was on a different interview about hardware. It's like you guys are cross-platform and blah, blah, blah, like why would anyone buy an Xbox? Yada, yada, yada. And his answer is exactly what you thought it was or what you might imagine, which is like look, we still make hardware. It's critical for us. I made a crack about it on Twitter like critical condition, I think you mean. But you know, buy xbox hardware for a very specific reason. But he's like look, I don't want to lock out gamers like our we're. You know, we publish games like we want to. We want to reach the biggest possible audience, and so they'll. You know, again promising we're still going to make hardware, but, um, really it's, the platform is bigger than just that hardware.
01:57:42
And then, um, since I think it was, was it late last week, whenever, whenever they did the Xbox developer direct event, I was I the way I would describe this is no real surprises, but really well met, like this was an event that gamers I was looking at some of the stuff on YouTube about this Like I don't think I found anyone complaining about this.
01:58:00
Really, everyone's really excited about the games. It looks like a solid lineup. I'm mostly concerned with that doom game which is coming out in um may, trying to make it more like the original doom games, which I think is a big deal, because my initial reaction to the modern games like doom 2016, I think was just that it was like you were kind of sliding around, like you're on ice, like it didn't feel the same, and they've added some verticality to the more recent games, so now they're're going to kind of bring it back down to earth and go back to basics with this one. It looks to me it looks great, so we'll see. So, yeah, just something to look forward to a bunch of. It looks like a solid year for games especially if you're on PlayStation.
01:58:39
Own doom. Yes, Because doom was in software which was bought by Bethesda.
01:58:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, was id software, which was bought by bethesda oh, that's right, bought by microsoft, back? And that's how you become the biggest game publisher in the world. Get to the top of the roll-up, yep yeah.
01:58:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I, I don't know like. I feel like the activision blizzard thing has been kind of a net, not a net negative, but it hasn't had the, the boost I I expected, you know, like last year. Um, I often you probably don't remember, but I sometimes complain they don't bring the games on a game pass and I'm like you know what are they doing with this thing? But then you see something like this. You're like oh right, your goal is to be one of the biggest game makers in the world, and you are, in fact, the biggest game maker in the world. So that's that's why that's the, that's why that's the, that's why they spent the almost, you know the tens of billions of dollars, whatever the figure was, to buy that company.
01:59:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so so the old um adage in uh in investing is you buy on the rumor, you sell on the news, right, and so you stock maybe went up before the results, but the results are out, they're good.
01:59:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And yet there's no way we can do any analysis here. But so Microsoft revenue was up 12% year over year and net income cares 10% year over year.
02:00:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They exceeded expectations by 4% on their earnings per share. That's fine, well, but that's when you expect the stock to go up.
02:00:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But uh, yes so the growth stuff, blah blah, oh jeez. So more personal computing. There was no growth. I haven't seen that in a long, is that?
02:00:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
surface. What is that?
02:00:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
like windows? Uh well, windows from PC makers Devices, which is Surface, xbox, xbox, all up Xbox content and services revenue only increased by 2%.
02:00:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Interesting, I guess. I think it's a year of the PC.
02:00:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it this year? Oh, congratulations.
02:00:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know I feel like we're due. I'm just trying to see if there's anything in here real quick.
02:00:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, there's a little dead cat bounce. That's good uh commercial.
02:00:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Microsoft 365. Commercial growth 16 that's good. Server products and cloud sorry, azure. 31, it's been there for a little while. Windows, uh and pc maker revenues increase four percent, like I said. Xbox two percent. That's lower than I would have thought um. Go back to this. What do they got? Uh? Gaming revenue declined seven percent. Overall, uhware declined 29%. How low can that?
02:01:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
go, you also get a lot of hardware off the market too.
02:01:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's a tough one, though, all right. Well, next week we'll go into it. Yeah, we want a thoughtful earnings, but they did $70 billion in revenue.
02:01:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me go behind you, guys. I'm going gonna have to get over to the other side.
02:01:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There we go we're gonna weather, weather the storm the weather, the storm.
02:01:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, um, let's. Uh, I think we're ready for the back of the book. Yeah, I think we're ready for the back of the book. Yeah, I think we're ready for the back of the book. We got a little earnings learnings More to come next week. Windows Weekly Earnings fly by Paul Theriot's tip of the week, yeah.
02:02:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So tip and app pick are both very Microsoft-centric, which I guess makes a certain amount of sense.
02:02:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it is windows weekly yeah, um.
02:02:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So in the sense that I I do this with podcasts, like richard's podcast, for example. I don't listen to every single episode, but I what I look at the well, look at what the topic is and, like some of them are like, oh my god, I have to, you know, like I have right, right, um, and so I do that with a lot of things.
02:02:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, that's why, by the way, people often tell us my staff mostly you really ought to say what the show's about in the title of the show and I say, no, that's exactly what you don't want to do.
02:02:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I do not want. Somebody can go, I don't care about that and not listen.
02:02:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's funny. Um, I like to be obscure is the guy?
02:03:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
uh, dave plumber is a guy who was on the original and oh, I love dave's garage.
02:03:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that he's um.
02:03:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know he's, he's an ocd adhd guy and um you could tell yeah, I met him uh deep dive guy briefly and he was not particularly nice to me but I think it was like an adhd thing so I could hold it against him, but anyway, uh, but he's very, but he's knowledgeable um a lot of his uh. He has stories, some like you know a million years ago which are interesting Absolutely, but increasingly I find the stuff that he talks about now to be even more interesting. So he just did a video about deep sink seek and, like the Steven Sanofsky thing, I think you should listen to watch it or whatever His take on this is is very good and technical and and knowledgeable um, you know, I don't. Well, actually I find myself watching more and more of his videos. He's a guy like I would kind of cherry pick um, and now I find myself like he comes with a video and like, yeah, now I'm probably gonna watch this um. So if you haven't heard of him or you haven't watched he wasn't sure, whatever, I recommend it um. Just check it out.
02:04:03
D Dave's Garage on YouTube. And then the PowerToys thing is I already referenced this, I guess, earlier today, I think. But Mark Rezinovich and Scott Hanselman have a podcast now which is short, and I like those guys a lot, so I listen to it, it's good. And in an episode a month or two ago were talking about zoom it, which is a utility.
02:04:28
That mark wrote 30 years ago uh, one of the many cisternals utilities so good, so, so, and, and they were joking around about how at some show they, mark, gave scott access to the source code. He was like I thought this was going to be this awesome thing and it's like you know, complete garbage or whatever. But zoom in, it is an amazing. So it made me go back and look at it. I haven't looked at this in a long time and zoom in it is an amazing utility, but they mentioned it. It allows you to zoom into the screen, right. So, in other words, you're doing a stuff, but that's the primary thing. But they mentioned or he mentioned, mark did that it was coming to power toys. So this week they released a new version of power toys which has this utility built into it.
02:05:11
So I used power toys fairly extensively. After, I have to say, I I kind of ignored it for maybe longer than was healthy in my, in my case, because I use a bunch of these things all the time now. Um, I did, let me think when I don't remember, I did an episode on hands-on windows a while back, but then since then, I, I, I picked up more, more of them. I actually like the, the double control key thing for the mouse I use like every day, literally, yeah, power run. You know I use the, the screen timeout one that keeps the screen awake all the time. Uh and zoom, it's part of it now too. So, um, definitely check it out Like if you haven't power ties, is pretty amazing, yeah.
02:05:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's a great tool, yep.
02:05:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, Richard, you are up. It is time for run as radio.
02:06:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
See how this internet holds together Now that we're towards the end of this. So this last show of the month with uh, mark marosky uh, I called it querying for breaches because it's actually about kusto. Uh, and kusto or kql is this language for querying across the logs and telemetry and all of the data sources that you have inside your azure tenant, and he's actually put together a book with a few associates called the Definitive Guide to KQL, and it includes all kinds of working examples. So things like show me everybody that's logged in, in the order they've logged in and when the last time they logged in was Analyzing baseline behaviors. Like take this account and show me what resources they access on a weekly basis. It's really quite powerful stuff, and the point was you can run these queries and get to a place where you can see a breach in action. You can see that an account has been compromised and is exfiltrating data and so forth, because it's all in the logs, it's just that you tend not to look for them. So having these smart query sets means you can run them on demand, you can schedule them and have the results emailed to you if they're interesting.
02:07:12
So we've given away a few of the KQL books. If you go to the RunAS site, you can get a discount code and I got one for a buddy of mine that I gave to him for Christmas when we shot the show Nice. Yeah, mark's a great guy. Uh, for christmas when we shot the show nice, yeah, it's, mark's a great guy. He's actually moved over to the ghost team now, which is that the fighting the state actors. Oh how cool. You can't talk about his new work, but I'm like, please, please, please, like someday. But now he's part of the. He was part of the intro team when they were doing all this and it just was one of those things where uh custo like powershell. It's worth your time to learn. It'll make you a more effective administrator to have these tools in your pocket all right, I'm going to do an experiment.
02:07:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, on this next bit, the whiskey bit. Yeah, I am going to shut up and record with this plod note record, record your entire piece and see what the notes are that it comes up with.
02:08:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I'm in London, so of course I went to World of Whiskey, because this is one of the few places in the world that you can buy the Flora and Fauna Edition whiskeys. And so this week I grabbed Blair Atoll and I had just unwrapped it, so I haven't even tasted it yet. So Blair Atoll is actually a town and the distillery is outside of Blair Atoll, in a little area called Pitlochry. This is all north of Edinburgh, so this is in the highlands. In fact it's at the very southern edge of the Grampian Mountains, in a bit of a flatland moor area there, with a good water source, water source called Altbeben, which means the burn of the otter or the river of the otter.
02:08:58
This is one of the old, old distilleries. It was originally founded by John Stewart and Robert Robertson in 1798. Although at the time they called it Adur, which was the name of the waterway at the time, and didn't do well at all, shut down shortly thereafter. But in 1825, it was enlarged and reopened and called Blair Athol, likely because that was the name of the duke that owned all the land in the area and the town, and so they did a little better. In the early 1800s it was acquired by Peter McKenzie, who was one of the large whiskey barons at the time in 1886. And then of course it got into trouble during Prohibition, all those sorts of things. So Blair and Sons acquired them, that's, arthur Bell and Sons bought Blair Atoll. At the same time they acquired Dufftown and a few others, all in financial distress. Arthur Bell Sons makes a whiskey which they still do to this day, called Bell's Blend. So they were making blended whiskey in the 1850s, just like all the other big blenders that we've been talking about recently. And so the Bell's Blend which is still made today, is made with a variety of these whiskeys, including Blair Atoll is the primary whiskey that goes in that blend to this day, along with Dufftown and Inchgower and Glen Kinshia and Coway and a few others.
02:10:12
So shortly after those were all rolled up in 1933, with the war coming on, everything got shut down and then after the war they sort of recovered. And then we never really have talked about Arthur Valensons before. It's because they were acquired by Guinness in 85. And then of course Guinness merges in with Distillers Company becoming United Distillers in 1987. And it was Distillers Company that came up with that idea in 88, called the Masters of Malt, which was Glen Kinchy, dalwini, cragganmore, talisker, lagavulin all whiskeys we've talked about before and really was one of those moments that put whiskey on the map again. Uh, because people had moved away from it to highballs and things in the 70s, but uh, lagavulin being the big hit, it suddenly pete whiskey became cool and so that way that happened in 88 and then in 91 was when united distillers went past this masters of malt and created this flora and fauna series.
02:11:03
So these were all whiskeys that didn't have brands. We talked about this last year when I got, when United Distillers went past this Masters of Malt and created this Flora and Fauna series. So these were all whiskeys that didn't have brands. We talked about this last year when I got the Dahlia Wayne 16, and there was actually 26 of them. So these were all distilleries that tended to go into blends, some go into Johnny Walker, some go into Bells and a couple of others, and that includes things like Blair, atoll and a bunch of the others I mentioned Dallyway, mardlock, rosebank and so forth. But United Distillers, in trying to just make more of their whiskey approachable, would do specialty bottlings of this largely only for the local market. This bottle does not have an export license on it and that's one of the reasons I only tend to get them in the UK because they're just very hard to come by.
02:11:47
And so florists and florists, that was 91. That's a while ago. They've sort of come and gone. It's big with collectors. When they initially came out they were like 20 pounds. When I first ran into them in early aughts some of them were 40, 50 pounds. Today, the very popular ones like the Mortlock 16, if you can find one, 200, 300 pounds Really hard to come by. Now the United Distillers doesn't exist anymore because by 1997, they are acquired by Grand Metropolitan. That all pulls together to become what we know as Diageo. So this is now all Diageo, for better or worse. And again, the longer I get to know Diageo the less I dislike them.
02:12:29
The distillery itself is a classic partially automated distillery in the Highlands. So no peat. I did note that they use cream yeast because that seems to amuse you too. They do a short fermentation, about two days, for 50 hours or so. Their wort is cloudy. They use a mixed washback approach, so they have four wooden washbacks and two steel washbacks, which is unusual in their fermentation and preparation of the wort before they go into a pair of 13,000 liter wash stills and a pair of spirit stills. These stills are known to be pear shaped. You can see the pictures that you had of them there. Just to say they have no reflux bowls. Their lyre arms are fairly straight. It makes for a very mild whiskey.
02:13:14
Now, normally this whiskey is only used for blending, and so it typically is only aged in bourbon casks because they're the least expensive. But this flora and fauna bottling of Blair Atoll, which is a 12-year-old, is entirely barreled in first fill sherry casks. So this has spent 12 years in a sherry cask, and you can see it. Look at the color on that. For a 12-year-old it's unbelievable. So I am a very happy man. I haven't even tasted it yet because you know it's unbelievable. So I am a very happy man. I haven't even tasted it yet because you know it's rare most of the time when you, if you have sherry cast, finishes the last year or the blending point is the only time it's in sherry.
02:13:58
So this smells of sherry like strongly. It's only 40, not a lot of alcohol. Smell nice glasses at the at the Curio. Yeah, no kidding. Oh, lordy, yes, sir. Um, it's got a sharpness to it Like there's no peat in this but there's definitely a smokiness, like that's interesting to me, and it warms really well. Well, hello, you just had a nice drink of whiskey, but yeah, nice drink of whiskey, but yeah, a very potent cherry, uh, sherry flavor.
02:14:31
And these they just don't have a brand like. Look at this bottle, it's a very standardized bottle. This is literally we call the flora and fauna bottle. It looks like there's so many bottles that look like this and all the labels are yellow. You have to read them they don't distinctive on the shelf to understand what they are.
02:14:45
Now I picked this up today for 65 pounds so about $80 US at World of Whiskey Not particularly expensive. It is very hard to find in the US, it's not impossible but it is difficult which you'll probably pay twice that 150. And that's a bit much for a 12-year-old. But if you're in the uk, go get one, bring it home. A your friends will never had had it because they're very hard to find outside of the uk and they're fun they are. They're a nice, very drinkable whiskey from a brand you've never heard of because it's never marketed, except in these rare occasions in the florin panna bottles very nice, yeah, man one of these days I might have to take up drinking I wouldn't recommend it in paris judgment but it looks like you're having so much fun.
02:15:36
Yeah I am well, and you know it's a whole thing about telling a story. Can you tell that photograph was taken with the bottle laying on its side, because there's a big bubble there?
02:15:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh, look at that. Yeah, that's a giveaway. Wow, yes, is this one, though that's that right, yeah.
02:15:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So anyway, the fun part is I picked this up earlier today and I've been, you know, working at the conference doing all these things. They've been, and all my friends have been staring at the bottles like what do we do?
02:15:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's like I'm not opening it till windows weekly I would have opened it, but they turned off my internet.
02:16:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Sorry, yeah, Well, and I'm not coming home with this right. This is going to be shared amongst my friends this week before I head off to Stockholm for next week.
02:16:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very nice Very very nice.
02:16:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, every time we've done this in London I have gone to a world of whiskey and picked up a Florin Vana. It's just like add this to your list of things to do when you're in London or anywhere in the UK. Find a good whiskey shop, go get a Florin Vana bottling. Take their recommendation. I don't think any of them are bad, but some of them are really special and a 12 year Sherry aged whiskey is pretty rare, hmm.
02:16:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice. Yeah, I like the idea that was in the barrel for 12 years.
02:16:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
that's great yeah, and then and that also means that they very much intentionally made this right they took new make and barreled it differently. They knew it, they were yeah, they were up to something.
02:17:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They intended to make a flora and fauna from it. Yeah, very interesting. I like the name too, blair atoll. Yeah, very interesting. I like the name too, blair Atoll. Blair Atoll yeah, it's a less from the Gaelic, according to Matt, from Blair Atoll, which translates to the English the plane of the new Ireland. Well, we've all learned something today, I think. There you go. Yeah, richard Campbell is at run as radiocom. That's where you'll find his fabulous podcast run as radio andnet rocks with Carl Franklin, and he joins us here to do windows weekly every Wednesday, as does Paul Thurot from Thurotcom. Go join the join the Thurot premium club. That way you can read his rant about Google and CJ and the gang.
02:17:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm going to see Jay and your world going through an existential threat as I wrote in that article, I assume cj is a woman. I I, I don't actually know could be the guitarist from poison for all I know it doesn't matter.
02:18:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think west wing took over the name, that's right.
02:18:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Cj became a woman's name in West Wing. That's right. Cj was the press secretary, Absolutely. I worked with a DJ named CJ CJ Bronson.
02:18:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
A DJ named CJ. Pretty good A DJ named CJ.
02:18:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, ladies and gentlemen, if you want Paul's books, you're going to have to go to leanpubcom, but boy, it's worth it. Windows Everywhere and the Field Guide to Windows 11, both there set your own price. If you like this show, you can come listen to us. Do it live if you want. We have a live broadcast of the production of this program beginning at 11 am Pacific every Wednesday, that's 2 pm Eastern, 1900 UTC. The live streams are everywhere Should be pretty easy to find us. If you're a club member, of course, you can listen in the discord, but we're also on YouTube, twitch, xcom, facebook, linkedin, kick and, and did I mention tick tock? I didn't, and there's one more I'm missing.
02:19:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's eight of them, so I was thinking if you want to get something for your wife for her birthday, it's a little late. For that, today's the day, eagles jersey would be the right thing to do.
02:19:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not an Eagles fan. Fly, eagles fly. We're talking about sport ball. It's an idea. Are you an Eagles fan?
02:19:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I guess you would be mcungee closer to philly than pittsburgh so we were in a bar and I was talking blah blah and someone came in and said, hey, what happened? The eagles game was on tv. And I was like, oh, we did the blah blah blah and my wife leaned in, she goes. Did you just say we, yeah, that's that's. And I was like I am talking to the locals, shut up.
02:19:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're the 49ers, we are. And you are the Phillies and the Eagles, we're something yes, you are. And Richard, you're the Canucks, that's it. And the Lions, and the Lions. Yeah, you know, you got to really identify with your team if you're gonna watch. Our son, uh, is so disgusted. Michael has a big, uh, green bay packers fan, so disgusted by the playoffs. He says I'm giving up football. The refs are in the bag for the, for the kc, I going to take up baseball.
02:20:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He'll love that sport. Nothing will disappoint you there.
02:20:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I hope you like the slog of manipulating baseball at all.
02:20:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like a nine-month 162 game. It's going to be great. It's just like football, he says he wants to be a Milwaukee Brewers fan.
02:20:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't understand that at all. That's fascinating. At least be a Cubbies fan, I mean. If you really want pain and suffering, yeah, so watch the show live. But you don't have to, because we do make it available on demand. It's easy enough. Go to the website twittv slash www. You can download audio or video files there. You can also go to the youtube channel there's a link on the on the web page, uh and watch there or share clips. That's what we like you to do. And, of course, best way to get the show subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That way you'll get it automatically the minute it's available, minute kevin king puts the final polish on it, sprinkles it with kevin king dust and that's that's appealing, isn't it? And then wraps it up with a bow and puts it out on the internet. We'll be back next week with your analysis of the Microsoft earnings which are just coming out now, and, of course, all the usual fun and merriment and the rants, the rants, the rants. Where are you off to next, richard?
02:21:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I am off to stockholm on the on the weekend, so I will be streaming from stockholm and I literally delayed my return, so I could do that before I fly back on there nice, thank you.
02:22:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, a little extra time in stockholm ain the worst.
02:22:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no February.
02:22:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, you're right, actually enjoy the 15 seconds of sunlight, or whatever it is now. Yeah.
02:22:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I got. I got the heavy coat, and I'll probably pick up a bottle of Mac mirroring while I'm there.
02:22:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, we could do Aqua Vita if you wish. I don't think so, yikes. Thank you everybody for being here. A special thanks to our Club Twit members. We really appreciate you and we will see you all next week on Windows Weekly. Bye-bye.
