Windows Weekly 918 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 is here, richard's taking the day off, but we do have the latest information about Microsoft's earnings. We're going to break it all down. I'll give you a hint it was a pretty good quarter. We'll also talk a lot about AI. Week two, paul says of submitting to our new Chinese overlords, and then it's Xbox time and some really interesting new games coming from the Microsoft Studios. All that and more coming up next on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell, episode 918. Recorded Wednesday, february 5th 2025. Casa Chaos. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello dozers, hello winners. Hello Paul Theriot, hello you, ourat, our, our man in the of the moment. Uh, he is Paul's in Mexico city, but you can always find him at thoratcom and his books at lean pubcom. Richard is in Stockholm. Yep, notorious for its incredible bandwidth. Yep.

01:22
Apparently Richard not the hotel he's in right now. What is he staying in? A in the motel?

01:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I. One of the things I wanted to talk to him about is that his wife is back home and they had some incredible snowstorm and she was without without power for at least two days. Oh no, I'm just trying to see if anything, a snowstorm, holy cow, yeah, it's, uh, it's a, it's um. Well, the world to be fair, it's. We have similar problems here in mexico city. We're having lunch today in the shade. It was a little chilly, uh what was it 73?

01:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
71 leo but, you know, the point is oh god, I want to be there so bad I want I just Now that you told me they have the best hot dogs you've ever had. I'm because you live in Macungie.

02:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That was Puerto Vallarta, which Macungie has a famous, I almost said world famous. That's a bit of a stretch. Well, it's world famous now, but they have a. They do have a hot dog Mad Dog. Mad Dog which is fantastic. That's amazing that you know that.

02:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I told you it's world famous. It is okay, but now I want to go to PV and try those.

02:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That was a good dog. It's a reminder that hot dogs probably, as originally envisioned, were just straight up high quality sausages. Right, that were good, no.

02:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, they were no they were no, never.

02:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, they were no, they were no never.

02:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They were always leftovers, I know, but that's the best part of any animal.

02:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You've got to do something with the lips. We've completely misunderstood food for so long in this country.

02:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look, hot dogs are phenomenal. I don't care what's in them. Parts is parts, parts is parts. It's all part of the thing.

02:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This one's a little livery, okay, anyway delivery.

03:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, anyway, rich is not here, but that's okay, he may. He may show up, it depends. I don't know what he's up to, but that's okay, cause we got you and we have lots to do because Microsoft reported its earnings?

03:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and we. It happened as we were doing the show last week so I didn't have much of a chance to look at that, obviously for last week's show. But since then I've looked at it a lot. I've got to tell you I'm getting a little tired of it.

03:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the last time you'll have to talk about it for three months.

03:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, the ensuing week and it's not over yet has been difficult because of all the earnings. I just take my quarterly moment to complain about all the math I've been doing lately. It's not great Anywho. In Microsoft's case, 24.1 billion in net income and 69.6 billion in revenues. Those figures are both double-digit gains, year-over-year 10% and 12% respectively.

04:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they're doing okay, it's okay, it's good, it's a good thing.

04:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so every quarter I do this analysis of their earnings, based in part on the additional information they provide during the post earnings conference call. And of course, for the past year and a half ish it's. There's been a lot of AI. Until this quarter there was a lot of Activision Blizzard. They stopped talking about that, which is kind of weird. But I typically obviously focus on the consumer side, the client side of personal technology, which is personal technology. So as Microsoft has shifted more and more to the cloud, I find myself less and less interested in most of it. But in this case AI is interesting. And then, as I wrote this analysis piece, I don't want to oversell it, but as I wrote this I realized there's so much going on just with AI. I think I'm just going to focus on that Plus the consumer stuff. The client side stuff was kind of uneventful, except for a couple of bits of bad news. So anyway, long story short, I mentioned a few times that Microsoft has this invented business. They now call it Microsoft Cloud. That is little well, not little, but lots of bits and chunks from around the company that are cloud related. That non-business contributed about $ billion dollars in revenues in the quarter, so for 41 billion of 70 billion ish in revenues came from the cloud. So that's, if you were 16, that's 59, by the way. So if you're wondering, you know, wow, is the microsoft cloud story just a story? No like.

05:39
Actually, most of their revenues now are derived from the cloud, so more than half, yeah. So the two biggest business units and they're pretty close to each other are both cloud-centric productivity and business processes. This is the part of the company that is Microsoft 365. They used to be the second biggest business but Microsoft started putting I think correctly, by the way the Windows revenues attributed to Microsoft 365 into that business, where they belong. So now it's a little bit bigger than Intelligent Cloud, which is Azure, basically, and server $25.5 billion in revenues. So both of those businesses up double-digit growth revenue productivity and business processes. What we might call Microsoft 365 is actually 42% of Microsoft's earnings. Intelligent Crowd Azure mostly is 36, 37, we'll call it 37%, and then coming in third, a distant third. He's so cute. Look at him, try, is you gotta love him. Just the little engine that couldn't More personal computing 14.

06:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it Bowser driving that car?

06:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I wish it was. I hope you mean Bowser from Sha Na Na, by the way.

06:48
No, I get that right, of course 14.7 billion in revenues which, by the way, is 100% flat from a year ago. It's not up or minus some tiny percentage, it's literally exactly the same number 21.1% of Microsoft's earnings and, frankly, uh, falling right. Um, now that activision blizzard has been part of that for a while. So, um, just uh, top top level stuff, I guess. Um, it occurred to me in writing this that you know, with the steven sanofsky discussion we had last week in deep seek, and how disruption almost always comes from outside of that business or industry, uh, that disruption will come from a smaller outsider who has no, you know, skin in the game right now and and can do different things and has to be forced to work around the dominant players etc. That it's possible. That deep sync seek I have a really hard time saying that, by the way is to Microsoft AI at slash open AI, what Linux was and still is to Windows Server, right, in other words, in the beginning it's like, oh, the small thing who cares?

07:53
Acute, you know. But and of course AI is happening at an accelerated timescale. It took Linux. I had to kind of look this up. I want to say it was almost the better part of 20 years to become what it is today, meaning the primary infrastructure for computing. Windows was worried about Linux as a desktop thing and Windows Server was worried about it as a server issue, and I would say, ultimately, linux won out over Windows Server. There are more Linux workloads in Azure today than there are Windows workloads, for example, so it's possible that DeepSeq I don't know why, I can't say that will play a similar role in AI and we won't have to wait 20 years. We'll probably have to wait about 20 minutes, frankly, because these things happen so much.

08:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think a lot of people are doing it. Uh, not just on azure, but everywhere. Hugging face offers it yeah, it's.

08:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's interesting how quickly it's spread to everything. But I and we'll see how well we've already seen in some ways. You know, nadela, we'll get to this as address deep seek in the earnings call. Uh, sam altman, we'll get to this later in the show talked about it as well. Um, they're both pretty up front like this, you in fact changing things. They were both complimentary. I know there's a lot of doubts to me outside, a lot of questions, a lot of whatever, but I think it's fair to say, however they did it, they might have changed things a little bit, and that's interesting to me.

09:18
Microsoft, a couple of weeks ago, came out and said this publicly. I think it was already pretty obvious, but they were talking about spending $80 billion in the fiscal year which ends at the end of June on AI infrastructure. They had spent just under $20 billion in the first quarter of this year. They spent just over $20 billion in the next quarter and at this growth rate, if you look at the last three quarters, if they keep growing that amount every quarter, they'll actually spend about $95 billion on AI infrastructure before the end of the fiscal year, which is a lot closer to $100 billion than it is to $80 billion. I mean, we'll see what happens, but I think that's kind of interesting because that number has only gone up and that's that CapEx number that everyone talks about. So yeah, like I said, satya Nadella pretty complimentary to Deep Seek and I'm trying to find that part where he basically mentions this thing we were talking about. Is it Jevon's paradox?

10:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

10:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Because he well, let me get.

10:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
actually Did he say that Did he say that?

10:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, he didn't say the term, but the way he described it was he was describing this. So they had eight analysts ask questions at the end of the call. All eight of them asked about AI. The first one was AI in the context of Azure and whether this could somehow bring Azure back to the heady growth levels that it had, you know, before it started to slow down.

10:43
And to put this in perspective, azure growth, revenue growth in this quarter was 30% 31% if I remember correctly. It's been that way for a while. That's an incredible growth rate for a mature business. Yes, it was 70% for a long time, a while back, but you can't expect anything to grow. To me, it's crazy, but to Wall Street, this is a concern, right. So one of the people asked him about this and I'm just trying to see if I can find his exact quote, but he said that, as token, prices fall inference, inference, computing prices fall. That means people consume more. There will be more apps written. The type of optimizations we're seeing now means AI will be much more ubiquitous. Therefore, for a hyperscaler like us Microsoft, a PC platform provider like us this is all good news as far as I'm concerned. In other words- they can't lose.

11:34
Yeah, he just said it exactly. He just said that's Javon's paradox. Yeah, he didn't say the term, but that's actually absolutely what he said.

11:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As the price goes down and the efficiency goes up on any commodity, people use more of it, so they end up spending more and more revenue.

11:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and we've talked about this a bunch, but Microsoft is one of three to five companies that can even afford to have this kind of infrastructure, is incentivized to actually make it and is, in fact, building it out. We'll talk about Google briefly later, but they're spending a similar amount of money, by the way, this year uh doing.

12:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They just announced what 75 billion dollars they're going to spend.

12:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's very close to what microsoft is spending at the. The numbers are, as are, close to each other, as are the revenues of these two companies, by the way. Kind of interesting, yeah, uh, and. But that's the thing. Like there's, like's them, it's Amazon, it's Google and you know Apple to some degree, but Apple's not going to do it right. I think Apple's approach to this is slightly different.

12:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's where Microsoft's in the catbird seat, because Apple doesn't want to run those data centers. I mean, they do run some AI data centers, but ultimately they already do use ChatGPT and eventually Claude and Google Gemini. That's right. Yeah, so Microsoft is couldn't they're in the catbird seat. They couldn't possibly be in a better position.

12:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This was how I described Azure's impact on Xbox a year or two ago. It was like you know, microsoft could lose it all in video games. It doesn't matter, goes like you know. Microsoft could lose it all in video games, but does it matter? They could also still win in video games by being that kind of back-end provider. Right, and that's what's happening here with ai to an even greater degree. I think so. To me that's very interesting. Um, a lot of questions about copilot and who cares, but um, people.

13:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
People were very the analysts these are analysts, right, that are asking the question. They were very obviously very interested, yes. Did they, though, point out, well, that it's gonna that? It's that, in fact, one of the things that scared people about deep seek, yes, was that microsoft has committed, as of everybody else, this huge amount of money and a huge amount of hardware resources, and it looks like we don't know for sure, but it looks like this chinese company did it cheaply, right and that kind of, and that was the threat that it undermined this model where you have to scale this is, this is where the jevons paradoxing comes into play.

13:56
Right, the his, his, he's saying we'll still make money, but it still calls into question that you know why are they spending so much? Yeah, well, they need to. Is that the question?

14:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, they're still under capacity, that's the thing. So at some point that will have to slow down and then effectively stop. It never really stops, obviously, but you know, to the degree that it is today, it has to stop. We're always looking for that, right Analysts are obviously. They're not actually concerned about technology, right? They're concerned with earnings per share.

14:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's financial.

14:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's all financial stuff. So the very first question was actually about Azure growth, which, to me, is an old school question to ask right now. It's like hey, remember when everything was awesome and you were growing really fast, because Azure growth was so fast, like how come you can't do that anymore? And it's like because it's a humongous business and it's really well established. Now, what are you talking about? Like, of course, this thing that was tiny in the beginning grew fast. That stops at some point, right, like that's just common sense.

14:55
The fact that this was the first thing that came out of anyone's mouth was, to me, exactly what these people are like.

15:00
Like they just they're coming at it from a different perspective.

15:04
But the interesting thing to me isn't so much the questions, it's this is Microsoft's opportunity to do some positioning and talk about things which are interesting to me, right.

15:14
So there were two things that came out of this these questions at the end that were related semi specifically to Microsoft 365 slash, microsoft 365 commercial right and one was this notion that Microsoft and other companies have talked about two things lately. One is the second wave of AI being agentic right, where this software can go out on your behalf and do things for you and then kind of report back when something has occurred or whatever, if it has to ask a follow up, which is interesting. And then, more recently and inspired by DeepSeek, I'm going to really work on that one, this notion of reasoning models, where it kind of spells out in front of you it thinking through the problem. It doesn't actually have to do that to be effective, but OpenAI found this. Google, these other companies have all found that. It's kind of a weird way to put it, but if you let AI think about a thing before it actually delivers, the final… it's pretty incredible.

16:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can watch it. Think it's very incredible.

16:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's also an effect on users. When they see it doing that, that they end up trusting it more. Yeah.

16:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right. So you're like oh, I can see how you… they show their work, yeah, yeah.

16:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right.

16:24
So deep seek, seek, does that? Uh, I don't know that they're the first, but I think that might be. But, um, now, microsoft, uh, all the reason, open AI, google just today, and the same thing. They're all doing this now. So, um, it's, it's, it's not the major step forward that say, well, maybe it is actually. Maybe that's not fair. So, agents are a big step forward, but I think this is also a big step forward.

16:52
And someone had asked him about penetration of co-pilot in the enterprise, whatever it was and I think it was him or was it Amy.

16:56
He said that it's moving into a phase where people are expanding in businesses their use of this technology across the company and collaborating with others, and Microsoft thinks of this as thinking with AI and working with people, which to me, is kind of a fun little marketing bit, because people are afraid of this right, and so when you say it like that, you're like oh, that's fun, you're almost talking's, you're almost talking about a co-pilot right, this is the going back to the original term for this kind of stuff. So I thought that was pretty good. And then he reiterated that co-pilot is the UI for AI right, harkening back to I don't know some time ago when he was talking about in the future that you know, today we have the start menu and we launch apps from there, and that AI. It was kind of vague at the time, but he was like AI will be the UI of the future. Um, I don't think it's going to be a text prompt, but voice then right Voice.

17:57
Yeah, I think it's going to be the big one, and you see that across the board, like everyone's starting to do that.

18:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, so yeah okay, interesting, how 9000? What could possibly go wrong?

18:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, I think they should make a movie about that um, a lot of things could go wrong and for the rest of the company, just because I do care about this stuff, um, windows did not come up a lot kind of interesting windows did not see the giant bump we were kind of hoping for. Obviously the industry hasn't seen it either. Um, I did a little bit of math on that, based on the few bits that they gave us and if you factor in the windows 10, end of life of impacting the market and blah, blah, blah, whatever it's. 2.7 percent revenue growth like nothing like it was just not not great.

18:43
Um, this is an interesting like non-data point 15 percent of premium priced pcs in the us sold over the holidays. Talk about like taking up giant market and squishing it down to nothing.

18:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Narrowing it down a little bit.

18:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're co-pilot plus pcs, so 15 of nothing. Uh, that's nice. Um, they do expect I I think this is reasonable in the context of co-pilot plus PCs just becoming PCs will be the majority of PCs sold in the next several years. Okay, I don't know. Surface, never mentioned by name. Really they?

19:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
just announced new Surface devices this week.

19:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, they did, but the problem is that business is tanking. So, oh, uh they. The only mention was that, uh, the the revenue gains they saw from pc makers, which was tiny four percent a year over a year was partially offset by a decline in device revenues, meaning surface right ouch. So it just means it's still going down. And then I said, yeah, there was a surprise. They even said this. But Microsoft was surprised by how well the perpetual version of Office 2024 is selling, higher than expected. So that actually had a positive impact on their revenues. But they were not expecting that.

20:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They don't want it either. Right, they really would prefer not to sell you a one-time license.

20:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So if you're nervous about versions of Microsoft 365 subscriptions that don't include AI, right, they have the. I don't know what. They call them classic or whatever.

20:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Many people prefer that.

20:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, this Office 2024 thing maybe gives you a little bit of hope, because Microsoft always wants to move on to the next thing.

20:28
but its customers always show it not to do that. So maybe this is good news for you folks. If you're worried about it, we'll see. Yeah, and then the other one, of course, is Xbox. So Xbox there's some good little data points in there, like call of duty six or black ops six apparently is off to the best start of any call of duty game in history um and yeah, funny to hear that in a microsoft earnings I know well, yeah, I'm starting to get comfortable with it.

20:54
It's like doom and the other id software games fall under here. Now you know like I mean. A lot of gaming is inside of xbox.

21:01
They're a big player yeah, yep so, but the numbers are so bad on Xbox Overall gaming revenue. This is the business, the whole business was down 7% Xbox hardware revenue, not surprisingly, but still 29% down in the quarter. I don't know At what point does it go negative Like I don't understand how it can keep falling by those numbers. But Xbox content and services only up 2%, driven by growth in Xbox Game Pass All of which, by the way, I mean almost literally. They didn't say this, but just based on the few things they did say was because of Call of Duty being on Game Pass for the first time. So people are obviously looking at this subscription, saying, all right, so I could buy this game or I could pay for this subscription. And, ok, I think I'll bet. You know I get all these other things, I'll try it, you know I'll give it a shot. So, but still two percent, that's tough. So, and then they have all the soft numbers.

21:57
You know 140 million hours streamed on Xbox called Gaming, a record. Over four million people played Indiana Jones Fantastic. We don't know how someone bought it. Some of them got it through game pass, etc. So not a lot of good news, um, and it's going to keep going, but that's the thing. So, xbox there's no light at the end of the tunnel yet, and I think we talked about this last week, but Philil spencer has been very public about things that I would previously have called rumors. You know, like xbox is working on a portable gaming device. He's talked about this multiple times. Um, since last week's show, I did watch an almost hour-long interview with him and it was kind of shocking, like how much I haven't seen this kind of transparency out of microsoft in since jim alchin, maybe like 20 years ago. It's been a long time. It's very, it's very strange.

22:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, so, yeah, so that's I mean most of it top line for me maybe it's just because I don't know anything is that they made two billion dollars a week yeah, well, okay, so you have to look at things like well, net income, which is profits, right you? Have to look at right 24 billion in three months, it is.

23:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But so you have to look at things like well, net income, which is profits right, that's profit, right, $24 billion in three months, it is.

23:15
But you also have to look at free cash flow, right, which is this is bizarre, but Microsoft's free cash flow from operations right, $22.3 billion up 18% year over year. I'll take it Exactly, exactly the amount they spent on ai infrastructure. Oh, so, so they're spending all their profit. Yeah, we talked about this last week a little bit, but and and in prior quarters you know that, mike we we sort of said it like look, they can, they're paying cash for this, they can, they can afford it, right, and and last week we raised this issue where, from a shareholder perspective, you, you like to see Microsoft investing in the company, because this is future revenue growth, et cetera, et cetera. It's certainly it's more risk, but it's also a much higher reward than, like, buying back shares, et cetera. So I think, for now, it's OK, but again, this is where we're about to cross the line. We'll see what happens this quarter, but this quarter the profits, so to speak, and they're spending on AI were identical.

24:09
And before they always, the profits were always higher.

24:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there, what are they going to? What do they need it for? I think it's that's great. Now, as you said, it's a bit of a risk. You're assuming AI is going to have a big payout, right, and I think it's a fair chance to take right.

24:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't think anybody would be mad at that. I mean, I think spell checking has benefited Microsoft greatly from a revenue perspective. No, so yeah, I mean, yeah, it's a good bet.

24:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean that's. You know it is, but what else are you going to bet on?

24:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's two AIs right no-transcript.

24:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But maybe they don't want to buy it from somebody else. Maybe they'd like to build it themselves. Is that where that money is going?

24:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Or is it?

24:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
just going to data centers.

24:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I think they're kind of the same thing, right? So there's data centers.

25:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Data centers you can sell capacity to other companies, right.

25:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So there's and they talked about this actually in the call there's some, there's a math involved to this. You know where's the best place to put resources and where do we have to grow and what things are going to come offline and we can replace with something, whatever it is. And there's a balancing act here, because what makes money? Microsoft more money? Is it selling a thing, uh, I don't know ai, whatever they are, features in Microsoft 365 to existing customers? Is it providing that data center capacity to third parties that are going to then sell it to customers that are not Microsoft's direct customers in some cases? I think ultimately both will make money to whatever degree. We can know that, but I think the second one is the bigger opportunity.

25:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's my it's a good way to hedge it, though, because they're both making the picks and shovels and mining for gold, so exactly one way or the other, hey competing competing with your own micros or your own customers is a microsoft tradition.

26:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're good at it.

26:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a good point, um so many companies would see that as a bad thing, but they've done fine with it.

26:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Microsoft saw that as a bad thing for many years, until they started making their own computers right.

26:11
Well, that was one big example, but I would actually say the bigger one in many ways, which we don't think about a lot because it's not really a consumer thing, is they used to have a big partner ecosystem around server, and so you would have on-prem servers. You'd have these middle players that would support and provide added services. They would resell Microsoft things. But then Microsoft moved to the cloud right with Office 365, then Microsoft 365. And the story became well, yeah, I guess you could have this guy, joe, over here, support your exchange server, but who knows this thing better than Microsoft? We'll just do it for you directly. Server, but who knows this thing better than microsoft? We'll just do it for you directly. And instead of you having your own infrastructure that you have to pay for, you can take advantage of all the benefits of the cloud, where capacity can go up or down as you need it, it doesn't cost, you actually don't worry about it.

26:52
And um, for a little while, microsoft kind of threw those partners a bone. Um, in whatever ways they could, that they have a part. They still, to this day, actually have a partner show every midsummer, j July, whatever. But that situation today is very different. There are still Microsoft partners, obviously, but their ability to make money on anything other than pushing people at Microsoft is kind of limited to what it was before. So that was a big, big change for them. But yeah, they went after PC makers, which historically have been, as a group, their biggest set of partners. I'm not sure if that's true anymore, but it was true through 2012, 2015, for sure.

27:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I remember the shock when they released their own computers On this show. We were saying, wow, that's a brave thing to do. You're going to piss off all your OEMs. Yep, they got away with it, yeah well, by probably because it's not doing.

27:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I was gonna say the reason. It's okay, it became. At first it was infuriating and then it became cute yeah but uh yeah, yeah.

27:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Surely dell and lenovo would not have been so sanguine if, right suddenly, everybody was buying surfaces oh, if you go, uh, look, I'll just point to two things.

28:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
One, there were a bunch of public comments by CEOs of those companies at that time. They were not happy you couldn't find one. It was like I don't really care, it's fine, you will not find that comment. And two, every single one of those companies adopted Chrome OS immediately. So the few that had not, it was a little risky. So it was a little risky. All did so.

28:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now granted those things have not taken off in any meaningful way, but the point was like yeah, okay, well, we can do other things too. Fascinating. Yeah, we will talk more about AI this afternoon because we are rebranding this week in Google as Intelligent Machines and it's going to be about AI. In fact, our first guest is the former go-to-market leader from OpenAI, so I think we'll have some good questions for him about the history of OpenAI. He's just written a book about it and I'm excited about the idea of covering this stuff. But I am still in a huge mystery about what is going to happen industry, about whether you know what is going to happen. You know, on the one hand, there's some real risks and dangers that are genuine. Steve and I were talking yesterday.

29:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He was very worried about. You know AI hacking, you know using, you know hacking the safety Like an injection type thing basically, yeah, yeah, hacking the safety.

29:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I said, well, what, come on, what could possibly go wrong?

29:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He said everything could go wrong. What do you mean?

29:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this is like you're asking to generate a new toxin that's never been created before it creates it.

29:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that could be a problem and I thought, oh so I really thought of it, that microsoft especially, and I would imagine these other companies, have sold this fiction where you don't have to worry about that stuff, leo, because there's going to be a guy. He's probably wearing a white lab coat right and he's standing, but between the ai doing those things and it actually happening out in the world except he's not, he's eating a sandwich it's not working well, this is the whole topic of security.

29:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now, yesterday was ai jailbreaking, and the fact is there's not a single ai that hasn't been jailbroken. So, you, what you really have to say is you know, the, the notion of ai safety is, uh, an illusion, yeah, farcical, yep, which then now, because I mock the whole existential threat to humanity, come on, what's it going to do? I know well, now I'm starting, and it's not, by the way, ai, it's humanity, right right humanity is ultimately the to humanity, but using AI to be a threat might make them very powerful.

30:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, hopefully it'll be like everything else in life and it lands somewhere in the middle between this is nothing and this is the end of the world. But yeah, it's a matter of degrees, I guess. Yeah.

30:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, there's certainly a lot to talk about. All of our shows now are talking about AI. I mean it's the hot topic, yeah.

30:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is your Google show that's changing name and focus. Is there still going to be a Google kind of component You're just going away from?

30:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it. Do you care about Google? I know you really don't care about it. You've hated Google for years.

30:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I mean, it's like everything else in big tech. The truth is, like a lot of people, I rely on Google for a lot of things. They'll still be Google, believe me. I mean, I told that long story whenever that was last week or whatever. Oh God, yeah, we'll talk about this later in the show, but in writing, about something else related to that, I had forgotten this. I had another problem with Google Workspace support, which I had forgotten about. They never solved this problem and just drifted off and yeah, so they're not great on that level. I mean, I'd pave them, you know whatever. But look, google Maps, google Photos, gmail, there's nobody alive who'll?

31:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
search Google every day in some way.

31:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this is the deal with the devil that we all make right really most so.

31:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Google's still relevant, but I felt like a show we hadn't been exclusively about google for years well, see my problem.

31:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like you have, you have apple content. Obviously apple has built this ecosystem right, where they've done a lot of things right. They don't get everything right, that's not my point, but they, they, they tend to fill it out.

32:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Google does these little things where they're like oh we're gonna do this and they kind of drift off and it's like yeah if you compare like the pixel or nest. Whatever it is, you go getting on the wall.

32:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's just. Uh, yeah, I would.

32:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They don't seem to have a lot of follow-through no, they don't, and I think that's a structural problem it's like a teenager that never grows out of it. It's like could you finish something or you know yeah, uh, I mean, it's worth having a microsoft show, which we do, obviously this one. Uh, it's worth having an apple show, which we do. We started this, we can google.

32:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's fascinating to me that google is going to be the third leg of the, of course, right, why wouldn't? It's the biggest, probably going to be the biggest platform of all of them, and yet it's not that interesting and maybe that's the real problem.

32:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We also had an android show which we ended up canceling because it just that's amazing there wasn't that much to say about it.

32:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know what do you mean. There was a security update today.

32:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I mean, and to his credit, jason and ron and the gang, they've, they've gone and they continue to do it uh.

33:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, they're doing their own thing.

33:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, but we just didn't have much of an. We only canceled because there was no audience for it. I mean, if there's an audience for a show, we'll keep doing it.

33:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's amazing to me that was they need to look inside on this one, because that's seizing defeat from the jaws of victory. It doesn't make sense that that android specifically is not, despite the fact that part of it is.

33:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just kind of there. I mean it's uh right, it's the number one phone operating system globally, I know. But so people use it, but they don't they're not so interested.

33:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They want to listen to a show about exactly it's just, apple got something right there. It's kind of interesting apple's.

33:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think Apple stuff is more than a utility for a lot of people. They identify with it. There's some stuff going on anyway. Yeah, I'm hoping that this week we were going to call it this week an intelligent machines and it was such a mouthful. We just said how about intelligent machines? By the way, the guy who coined the term intelligent machines, ray Kurzweil, will be our guest next month. Awesome, we have some great guests planned.

34:08
So every show we're gonna have an expert in an area of ai, because I I don't know about you, but I feel like I there's a lot to learn here um and it's changing, so rapidly, yeah, yeah, and then we'll do ai news and then you know, it's still going to be jeff paris and me, so there'll be a lot of tomfoolery.

34:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sure, it's not going to change that much.

34:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, coming up. Let's take a little break and then we'll get to Windows. We have a little bit more AI news, including Google's new AI model, believe it or not. Xbox Microsoft 365. Xbox Microsoft 365. I do have the official word that, unfortunately, richard is not getting online in Sweden. Oh, you heard this? Yes, he says he messaged us and said let me I'll read it to you.

34:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think I got to see it.

35:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So far, no luck. It's Wednesday night in Stockholm and where there is internet, it is noisy. I think I'm out, and you know what. More power to him. I'm sure he's enjoying some luscious Schlivovitz or something. He does have a brown liquor pick that he put in, but we don't have to do it, or I could just mention it, or what do you want to do? Oh, he already said he's saving his pick for next week. There you go. So if you want to get Stephanie to make a cocktail, or we could just forget about it and I'll talk about a kombucha I really like, or something.

35:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Kombucha is a perfect cocktail substitute. The kombucha of the week.

35:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually, for a while I subscribed to what was I think they thought of it as a mixer yeah and non-alcoholic and it was all different. It was more like a shrub. You know what a shrub is. It was like herbal fizzy. I didn't like it kombucha more, more, my, my speed I like kombucha. I like kombucha. You know what I love horchata and jamaica how about, um uh, the pulque pulque?

36:13
is amazing. When I was in oaxaca with mike elgin and a bunch of people, we, we, we had a pulque party they have I have pulcharias here yeah, we went to a pulcharia yeah so it's a precursor to tequila, anything you need to drink can be an area you know, like a place that just does this one thing, you know we'll continue with microsoft area in just a moment.

36:38
Just both the rot, uh, a little bit of it myself. Yeah, get some pulque. I wouldn't mind a pulque of the week. Oh, they are so good anyway, this episode of windows weekly brought to you by zscaler. Now this is something you want to live with. This is this is zero trust, done right with the help of ai. So here's the problem.

37:02
Enterprises have spent billions of dollars over the years on firewalls, perimeter defenses, right, and then, of course, you need VPNs so your employees can get through the firewall and come to work virtually. Has all of this worked? No, breaches continue to rise. It was an 18% year over year increase in ransomware attacks and a record payout of 75 million dollars in 2024, although I did see a story today that said that record payout was lower because people had just decided not to pay the bad guys. You know, the problem with that is they still have your data. What are we going to do? These traditional security tools? They don't. Not only don't help, they expand your tax attack surface with public facing ips. That's how the vpn gets in. Bad actors see that they can hang their hat on that, and they do it more easily now than ever with ai tools. Plus, once they're in the network, uh, the they can.

38:05
Vpns and firewalls don't do anything about lateral movement. They just assume well, you're in the network, you can do whatever you want. So they connect the bad guys to the entire network. And what do the bad guys do? Well, the first thing they do nowadays is they look for data. They go through your emails, they go through your emails, they go through your customer information and then they leak it out via encrypted traffic, which the firewall struggles because they can't inspect encrypted traffic at scale. So you've got holes in both directions. You are leaky. I mean I don't want to. I'm not saying you like you, I mean we all are. This is why perimeter defenses are not enough.

38:46
Hackers exploit traditional security infrastructure to and they use AI to outpace your defenses. We got to rethink what we're doing. We can't let the bad guys win. They're innovating at speed, exploiting your defenses. That's why you need Zscaler zero trust plus AI. It stops attackers by one hiding your attack surface. You no longer have public IPs, which makes apps and IPs invisible.

39:12
That lateral movement problem. No, because Zero Trust does not assume that just because you're in the network, you're a good guy. Zscaler eliminates lateral movement by connecting users only to specific apps that they've been explicitly permitted to do so, not the entire network. And and it's zscaler continuously verifies every request based on identity and context. And it simplifies security management with ai powered automation. In fact, they use ai to analyze over half a trillion daily transactions to find the threats, the needle in those haystacks.

39:48
Hackers can't. This is the bottom line. Hackers can't attack what they can't see. Protect your organization with Zscaler. Zero trust in AI. You can learn more at zscalercom security. For our Canadian friends, zscalercom security, we thank them so much for supporting Windows Weekly and you support us, of course, when you use that address. For our Canadian friends, zscalercom slash security, we thank him so much for supporting Windows Weekly and you support us, of course, when you use that address zscalercom slash security. Did you go get some pulque, paul? No, I got some water. You can't get pulque here. As far far as I know, nobody uh exports it from mexico, but it is. It is kind of a mildly fermented on its way to being mezcal. Mildly fermented uh, it's the same. You know, it's the same agave stuff and all that or whatever they.

40:37
Whatever it is the, I wish richard were here to explain. Anyway, it's delicious, it's, it's lightly alcoholic, fruity flavored and wonderful, uh, and I wish I had some right now, but you can't get it all right, let's talk more. What do you want ai? You want to talk more about ai? Are you done, or do you?

40:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
oh, no, let's do windows, yeah, so yeah let's do windows. That would be fun for a change yeah, a little light this week but um late last week we had a new uh dev build which I'm actually running on my surface laptop so I can gain access to these new copilot plus pc features they're starting to release they?

41:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
did they not give you access to? Uh oh, one now for free, like this is the yeah this is the high end.

41:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't want to jump ahead, but yeah, in in copilot, right, but this is so in windows. Specifically, though, they're um, they're now testing a thing which I don't have because they roll things out, you know, over time, so I can't even talk to this one, but they're they're bringing ai powered search to windows search, right. So what used to be. I got to be careful with this. No, no this is so on.

41:47
If you're running a normal pc, not a problem. Today it's windows key plus q or windows key plus s. Both bring up that search highlights box or whatever. Um with a co-pilot plus pc and I assume all windows pc. Assume that's going to change. Oh, and I'm trying to. Maybe. I just opened this up and look that's interesting. Yeah, so it. Oh, and I'm trying to. Maybe I just opened this up.

42:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's interesting. Yeah, so it won't just be a search of an index.

42:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so I don't have it yet. But so Windows Key oh, because Windows Key plus Q is turning into what's it called? These features have such stupid names. It's the recall related feature. Click to do Sorry, because Q is like click. I guess Q quick-to-do, quick-to-do, quick-to-do Like the king in yeah, mowage.

42:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mowage.

42:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So Windows Key plus S will do search they're going to be doing, yes, like AI-powered search. I don't have it. I've just looked again but I don't have it. So, power search, I don't have it. I've just looked again but I don't have it.

42:44
So, yes, this is the Microsoft 20 years later, maybe finally solving the problem they were trying to solve in Longhorn and before that in Cairo, which was that, you know, people search for things and they can't find them Right. And so, you know, search is kind of dumb, it's index based, it's metadata based, but there's not a lot of metadata. And I, you know there's a lot of talk about it 20 years ago and then it kind of went away and we still have these problems. Right, and I find my.

43:08
Even myself, I find I could go through OneDrive, which is not synced fully to my computer, but it has, you know, the basic file data, and I searched for things, can't find it, and I go to OneDrive on the web and I find it instantaneously. Yeah, you know. So, yeah, I'm actually very eager to try this. I've been wondering about some version of I feed AI my OneDrive archive or something, and it uses that as the you know, the backend, and I ask it questions and it can say, oh yeah, here's this thing. And cause I find it hard to find things? I wrote a long time ago, you know.

43:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I probably won't have it in my VM of windows on R.

43:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's. This is super early on. So right now it's it's dev channel, which is um, going to quickly move to whatever the next version of windows is called, so probably 25 H two or, if they go, windows 12 or whatever. It is Um, but right now it's still 24H2. So we're in this window where dev and beta are the same and then that will change. So actually I'm not even sure. So it's kind of hard to say. If they're testing it in dev now, does that mean we're going to see it in Windows 11 in the coming months or it will be the second half of the year? It's kind of hard to say. But this one's brand new and it is rolling out slowly and it's only Qualcomm-powered PCs right now. It will go to Intel or AMD-powered co-pilot plus PCs.

44:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What the hell Was that?

44:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
me. I don't know what that was.

44:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was like the hand of God there. Hello Windows, I just wanted to.

44:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is Satya Nadella. I have a couple of questions. I don't it had already startedlla.

44:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have a couple of questions. It had already started up. I don't know why it made that sound, but okay.

44:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's funny. Yeah, so anyway. So that was last week.

44:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe it was Richard teleporting?

44:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I tried to tie to this. Last Thursday I recorded some episodes of Hands on Windows.

45:05
Thank you, by the way. Thank you, I mean whatever, but it's one of the things I wanted to record was something about all these new features. So it's recall and click to do, and there's new AI things all of it. Like notepad is AI now, actually that one I did record separately. But there's different AIs things happening all over windows, right. Ai's things happening all over Windows right.

45:26
And there's something weird about that podcast to me where I spend a good chunk of that day kind of preparing for it and everything's great, and I sit down in front of the computer, in front of where I'm going to record it, and it all goes south. The demo gods Benino probably has to go to therapy now because of me. It's very strange, but I've never seen this happen. But this co-pilot plus this Surface laptop that I have has been fantastic, right, but I put it into the dev channel. I've been using it with recall, so it has all this data, you know, yada, yada, yada, whatever. And then that day and this was before the build I just talked about, I think or maybe it was that same day, maybe that was it, maybe that build had just come up, I think, or maybe it was that same day Maybe that was it, maybe that build had just come up. I I was like oh, I should install the new build, and I did and it was quick and Nothing worked.

46:11
After that, like I know no recall, disappeared. Click to do was gone. I tried to roll it back, I tried all this different side and then the show was starting and I was freaking out and you know, he's like how many, how many shows you gonna do? I'm like two, he's like two, I'm like two and he's like two and I'm like don't, I don't, I can't, I can't, I'll lose my mind here. So I will now do it again or do it for the first time, actually tomorrow.

46:31
Okay so, and and I've been you I've been doing like sister I, I reset it, I find out what was wrong. No, no, I have no idea. I can tell you I'm using system restore again for the first time in 20 years and I'm just trying to make sure this thing's okay. But I it's hard to tell, you know, I don't know everything anyway. So hopefully tomorrow that will go good. But Long story short, I don't have this feature.

46:55
It's brand new, it's only Snapdragon, but it's still. You know, it's. It's what they call a CFR, so it's going on slowly. Yeah, kebbers asking if recall, still in preview. Yeah, yeah, so if you have any co-pilot plus PC and you put it into the dev channel, that's where it's at Interesting point, actually, because I just said, dev is going to move soon to 25 H two or whatever they call that. That suggests that the stable release of that may in fact be 25 h2. Maybe that's how that happens. You know, we'll see, um. You know I can do his guess, we'll see, I don't know. But then there are the some features, like the um ai powered search, which is going back to just snapdragon. So amd and intel will get in on that, uh, sometime in the next couple of months or whatever.

47:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Always changing.

47:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then today I haven't looked at this in too much depth, but Lauren unfortunately did write about it right before we started the show but there is a new Canary build as well. Canary is not tied to anything. That makes it kind of fun. There is something called Windows MIDI Services 2.0. Midi has been around for I don't know 40 years, 45 years, I don't know um. The fact that they have moved their services to from one point something to 2.0 is hilarious, um, but they're improving midi and windows 11. If you could believe that. I guess they've run out of things to think about um well, it's about time, it's hysterical.

48:27
You wait until you see the 8-track tape support in the next build. It's really funny, it's very strange. Wow, yep, so that's one. They've been talking a lot about this OneDrive resume feature. This is their attempt at a little bit of that Apple inter-device stuff where you're on your phone or tablet, you're doing something in OneDrive and the next time you sign into your computer it says, hey, we're working on this document over here. Do you want to open it here, like a continuity type feature? So okay.

48:56
I mean that's fine, I don't see this as being a big big deal, but good. And then File Explorer is getting a folder resume feature. So, and then File Explorer is getting a folder resume feature. So you've got File Explorer open. Maybe you've got tabs or maybe it's multiple windows, whatever it is, and you reboot or sign out, sign in and it comes back and it will optionally come back to the way it was. Yeah, session state Nice, yeah.

49:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I'm working on that kind of thing for my stupid NET Pet app, so I hope it's as painful for them as it is for me.

49:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not a built-in feature of the SDK or anything. No, I mean, the thing I run into with this app a lot is that WPF is 20 years old and they've updated it twice, I don't know, and they really don't really give it a lot of attention. So, yeah, it's just not built for this stuff and I'm trying to work within the capabilities of the tool set and it's uh, it's humorous. Well, I'm like deep seek, did you know? You know? Confronted by the fact that I don't have all these capabilities, like what can I do? So you know anyway? Uh, so this one is kind of interesting.

50:01
So this was years ago but Microsoft announced that they were going to bring the Edge text rendering technologies to Chromium so that it could benefit all Chromium-based browsers. So that was like three or four years ago. And then the Chromium project announced that they were accepting these changes in commit form right in March of last year nice. But now they're actually finally rolling it out. So I don't know what took so long, but I think most people would agree. Honestly, the picture I attached, which is the one Microsoft provided, doesn't to me show anything but okay, but I do find the text rendering in edge to be wonderful, and it's one of those things they actually really got right. It's only going to benefit windows-based browsers, by the way, I should say. Obviously it's a windows technology, but uh, chrome is doing it. You know, chromium's doing it, everyone's gonna so if you brave vivaldi opera, whatever.

50:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they've contributed it back to the chromium project. That's, that's right, that's nice.

51:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.

51:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's nice.

51:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and that means that, if you not that anyone uses this. Now it's 2025, not 2005,. But you can find it in Windows still. There's something called the ClearType Text Tuner.

51:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it's ClearType yeah.

51:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, if you want to. I know it's like going back in time, but If you want to optimize how text looks on your computer for your eyes, you can do it, and when you do that, it will benefit the browser as well, because it's not a separate thing.

51:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's funny because I thought well, maybe it's because Paul clipped this from the Edge blog, so I went directly to the Edge blog. It's exactly the same. It's terrible and honestly I never could tell the improvements from clear text anyway.

51:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I go to the eye doctor like anyone else, and you're in that. Get that machine up against your face, excuse me. And she says is it better here or here? Those are exactly the same. And then she moves some things around. She goes here or here those are just exactly a or b, yeah, and this. That to me, that's what this is. It looks like it's just a little darker, maybe A little bit better crime.

52:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It still looks fuzzy. Maybe it's because it's a highly compressed JPEG.

52:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think this is a terrible image to have used.

52:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, I think that's part of it.

52:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Thank you, it's very strange. Yeah, here we're trying to show the clarity of something.

52:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's like a 50 reduced quality image jpeg format. You know that's lossy. This is ridiculous. I do like it that they're contributing back to the open source uh project oh yes yeah, and it's cool that that that google's uh incorporating it into all the windows chromium web browsers yeah right, there's no equivalent thing on on the mac they. They probably say well, we don't know.

52:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I I think on other platforms, google, I don't. Maybe someone knows this, I don't know. There's a google text render. It has a name, I think. If someone said it I'd know it, but it's uh it.

52:56
They have their own. It might be skia based or something, I don't remember, but they have their own thing. It's fine, like it's. You know it looks good. Yeah, um, but I've always thought that the you know what you say, what you want about edge, and I, I do say a lot about edge almost every day, but, um, the text rendering is fantastic like that's always been true, so yeah yeah, that's actually really important.

53:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's probably the most important thing a browser does, really. Yeah, exactly right. Right, you spend a lot of time reading text it's about reading exactly yeah and um.

53:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This one's just kind of interesting to me because, well, for two reasons. So microsoft has been using this word for over 20 years now and um, just coincidentally, the other day we talked about this. Last week microsoft um didn't well, I guess they sort of announced. They just revealed that they were getting rid of dev home right, they're removing it from windows 11, and I don't remember what it was. My wife and I sit here in the morning and we read the news, you know, on our devices, whatever, and I I don't I'm trying to remember why, but it was tied to that and I said something to her against you know, which is stupid. She doesn't care about the stuff. But I said something like about microsoft deprecating something, and she, she said what does that mean? I said what does what mean? She says deprecation. I was like, oh, she's a writer.

54:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She doesn't know what. Well, I guess it's kind of a computer-y thing.

54:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I was like, well, I don't think about it because it's just been such a thing for me, right? So, coincidentally to this, microsoft, within a day of that, put up a blog post explaining what deprecation means, and it's what I always sort of understood it to mean, which was when they announced that a feature is deprecated in Windows, for example, that means they're no longer updating it and they will remove it from a future version of Windows. Now, that could happen in six months. It could happen in three years, five years, whatever it is. But the reason for the blog post was to explain what deprecation meant in the context of support lifecycle.

54:49
So if Microsoft deprecates a feature in Windows, like they did with WordPad, for example, about a year and a half ago, whatever that was, it's still supported, right? So if you have users, you're a customer and you're using WordPad, for some reason, it's supported. They're not going to add features to it or anything, but they will support it. But once it's taken out of the product, it's out of support, obviously. But I think I don't know I guess customers started asking about it. Finally, they have a whole website about deprecation. They talk about this all the time.

55:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's I don't know well, it might be kind of a specific technical meaning for them. I mean there it is a standard english word.

55:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean it's not yeah, and not to be confused with deprecated, oh, or depreciated, sorry, oh, it's not depreciation.

55:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not depreciation. No, I understand that. It's that. No, I know you understand it.

55:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And deprecated yeah so people might hear it and who are not in the industry maybe.

55:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And did they? I mean, did they say anything other than what I think, which is we're not going to be using this much longer, so you might want to think of uh, another, you know, use another tool because it's deprecated, like it's about to be canceled. They literally said that, yeah yeah, and okay, they well.

56:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, because, depending on the feature, you might have some like they're speaking to the enterprise, right? So you might have some people who are using this. You should tell them. So it's the warning that we're going to. Yes, that's exactly right. It's time to start thinking about moving on from this thing. I think in most cases, no one's really using this stuff.

56:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You use an example. Uh, microsoft, in september 2023, deprecated wordpad, right, but it wasn't until a year later that they removed it.

56:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right and then so. But so what I deal with fairly regularly are people who say hey, what happened to? And I actually got an email, a nasty gram, from someone about wordpad. In fact I should find this it was fairly funny and literally Microsoft getting rid of WordPad, which they had telegraphed a year and a half. Like I said, it was the impetus for this guy. He says hey, what happened? I said well, it was removed, it's gone.

57:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where'd it?

57:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
go. Is there any reason for this? And I'm like well, well, yeah, it's a security problem.

57:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No one's you know it's not, it was deprecated, it's deprecated.

57:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He's like well, I'm gonna move to mint linux like oh okay, oh really, because of that.

57:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean I okay, I mean I'm sure there are some good choices on windows to replace wordpad. Yeah, actually wordpad was cool because it read Word documents.

57:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so that was the big thing. So back in the day, microsoft had Write and it had Works, remember, and those two products were not document compatible with Word, which was really bizarre. But once Office switched over to these open Office documents, which are open source, they were able to do that in WordPad, but they didn't. That was like the last time they updated the app, so it really wasn't ever updated.

57:53
And, of course, these things that you mentioned, I think, during the ad, this notion of attack service. You know it's part of the attack surface of Windows. So you have this thing sitting on people's computers that most people aren't using. That is an attack vector. You could send an attachment that opens, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So getting rid of it to me makes sense. It's bizarre to me to find out in 2025 that anyone is actually still was using this app and was confused by it being removed. But you know, some things I sort of understand, like mail calendar. It's like I don't get it. What is it? These apps are fine. It's like, well, they really weren't fine, but but I understand, like I get it, it's okay. But wordpad, I mean, come on, I that's a, that's an old, that's an old tool. I think yeah I think about.

58:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, as microsoft says, deprecation isn't the end, it's an opportunity yeah, like for example, I have been deprecated, but I have not yet been. I have not been deceased the life cycle is no one is limited. There's no positive updates happening here end of life is coming feature shedding.

58:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now, you know yeah once available.

59:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is actually. This would make a great film strip. Yeah, the beginning of a life cycle is often described with the terms launch and availability once available, the product side of the bell curve when it's all downhill. It's most vigorous and productive period called support right it's like hi, honey, I'm home.

59:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And he comes home with his like briefcase, with his hat you sure?

59:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
are vigorous you've got a good life.

59:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Five or ten more years to go buddy.

59:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's most clearly marked with the terms end of life.

59:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, that's how I see that's how I see my career right there I have time, five or ten more years to go.

59:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Exactly, it's gonna be one of those things you know, oh lord, it's so funny that they wrote this, but I guess you do kind of need to.

59:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, I'm sure everybody intuitively understands what they're saying, except for stephanie, but well, listen, I, I sort of, I almost respect her for not knowing, or even caring, in a way, what she doesn't care.

01:00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the real, yeah like it's good.

01:00:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it's healthy, but I I think the point of the microsoft thing was mostly around support, because, um, you know, microsoft support policy used to be super obvious and very consistent, and now it's not obvious or consistent, depending on the product. So, um, explaining that in the context of support, like yeah, okay yeah, that's fine yeah okay, okay, buddy.

01:00:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, we haven't talked about ai for a whole 10 minutes, so, uh, we're gonna have a chance to talk more about ai, you know in a moment in our chinese overlords and our new chinese overlords we. But first a word from our sponsor. You're watching Windows Weekly If you just tuned in. Paul is here. Yes, of course, in Mexico City. Richard was in Stockholm and was unable to get a decent connection, so he's on his way home.

01:00:58
I think I'm just going to get like a picture of his face on a stick and I'll just hold it up. I can always do that. You know what they used to do on the news shows. They don't do it anymore. They'd have a picture of him holding a phone.

01:01:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, just a still picture of him holding a phone like he's like out in the field yeah, work or something you know uh, this episode of windows weekly brought to you my friends, my dear friends, by one password.

01:01:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now I got a a rhetorical question for you, because I think I know the answer. But but you know, you tell me, do your end users always work on company owned devices? Do they stick to it approved apps? Are you kidding? This is the real world. How do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all those unmanaged apps and devices? Well, 1password has an answer to this question Extended access management. 1password extended access management helps you secure every sign-in for every app on every device, because it solves the problems traditional IAM and MDM cannot touch.

01:02:02
I would like to draw a word picture for you. Okay, imagine your company's security like the quad of a college campus. You remember that right? Nice brick paths between the ivy covered buildings, the lawn, perfect and green. Those are the company-owned devices, the IT-approved apps, the managed employee identities. But think back, carved into that beautiful green lawn were paths, muddy little paths. The ones people actually use, the shortcuts that are the actual straightest distance between point A and point B. The ones people use. Those are the unmanaged devices, the shadow IT apps, the non-employee identities like contractors.

01:02:50
But the problem is most security tools. They're designed to work on those happy little perfect brick paths, right. And where do all the security problems occur? On the shortcuts, on the little muddy paths. That's why you need 1Password Extended Access Management. It's the first security solution that takes all those unmanaged devices and apps and identities and puts them under your control. It ensures that every user credential is strong and protected, every device is known and healthy and every app is visible.

01:03:21
1password is ISO 27001 certified. They do regular third-party security audits. It exceeds the standards set by almost every authority and it's a leader in security. 1password's extended access management is security for the way we work today. Now generally available to companies with Okta and Microsoft Entra in beta for Google Workspace customers Secure every app, every device, every identity, even the unmanaged ones. At 1Passwordcom slash Windows Weekly it's all lowercase 1, the number 1, p-a-s-s-w-o-r-d dot com slash windows weekly. We thank them so much for their support of windows weekly and we thank you for supporting us right back by going to that address. So they know you saw it here onepasswordcom slash windows weekly, weekly. Now on with the show. Just a few more ai notes.

01:04:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just a few more actually yeah this is breaking news this morning, I think yeah, I this probably isn't even in the right order anymore, but, um, I I mentioned this up front that these companies that are supplying AI models are starting to move to reasoning models for a variety of reasons. Right, deepseek was the first one I was aware of and you mentioned this. It's since propagated everywhere. So if you're a developer, you use Hugging Face or whatever, or if you're an Azure GitHub, it's everywhere. It's coming soon. The local version is coming soon to Copilot plus PCs, right, so you can run it against the MPU on your computer. So interesting. Openai last week I'm going to do this out of order, I guess, yeah Decided to release the reasoning model of their latest model family, like O3, free on ChatGPT.

01:05:19
So no matter what tier you're on, you have access to this. It's interesting to ask you questions and kind of watch it go through the thing. Microsoft, previous to that, had added it under the coverage to Copilot, right, and so if you are using Copilot in Windows on mobile, the web, whatever you'll see, I think it says think deeper or something. You kind of flip the switch and you can see it do its thing. So between a week ago and today, we've all moved to reasoning, so now we're reasoning. I guess that's what we're doing. And so today, google announced that Gemini 2.0, their family of models, is now generally available to all of their customers Asterix Asterix, because actually Workspace customers don't have the latest yet, but they will soon. So, whether you're a consumer, whether using it through apps, whether using the Gemini app, whether you subscribe to Gemini Advanced or not, soon Workspace developers, whatever there's several of them, gemini 2.0 models are all available. So reasoning is a capability.

01:06:20
Uh, they're agentic, right? So we're doing the agent stuff like we were talking about earlier. Um, they a little something for everybody, right? So there's a bunch of that stuff. Um, so that's happening. And, uh, you know, sachin dell was asked, as expected, you had to think. Microsoft pr and the uh ceo were sitting around for about two weeks, or well, actually, since the day of deep seeks, for about a week and a half, figuring out what they were going to say, because they would inevitably be asked, and they were. It AMA which is worth going through. I wish there was a way to, you know, maybe I could do this, you know, summarize an AMA where you only show me the questions that they answered. So I could just read that part of it, you know, but what I did was like you know, I could probably do this too, if you get. You want to see what people said in the name AMA?

01:07:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you just search for their names, right, so they come up, you know it's like looking when you get a new book, uh about I don't know podcasts. Uh, you look in the index.

01:07:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah I think that's why I like the steven stanovsky book, uh so much because I actually I come up in it and and not always complimentary, but um, but for some reason it's always a little bit of surprise to me, even though I've read it before. So I'm rereading it, rereading it, reread it. I'm like, oh, what's this? You've read this like eight times. Why is this still surprising you? It's so, um, I'll make the guy from memento anyway.

01:07:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, so it's nice if you can't remember, because every time it's new.

01:07:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I want that. I want to watch star wars the first time again, for example. I wish I could erase that part of my brain. Um, yeah, so anyway, he was actually pretty complimentary to Deep Seek, yeah.

01:07:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was kind of surprised. This AMA was fascinating because he even said we got it wrong.

01:08:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, he said we're in the wrong set of history, which is an interesting way to put it. So, and he also this is sort of like a Phil Spencer thing he talked about how there have been disagreements inside the company about whether or not we need a different open source strategy, meaning an actual open source strategy, and not everyone in the company shares this view they will be eradicated. No, I didn't say that, but it's currently not the big thing. But I, you know, maybe because deep seek is open, open to some, um, you know, maybe open AI needs to do something like that, and I, I would.

01:08:42
I'm not sure if I'm really arguing this, but you could make the argument that the reasoning display, which is something they didn't want to do before, right, when they first came up with oh three, they actually hide that from you. So you see the end result, but you don't see it thinking. But now they've switched this, this on, so you can actually see it thinking because of deep seek and and we found that people tend to trust it more. So, um, maybe that level of openness, at the very least, is a yeah, a step.

01:09:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, look one thing we can agree competition is good yes, and you can't you know right right yeah, yeah, and actually I mean, uh, lisa khan.

01:09:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know everyone's a big fan of that woman, but she had a um, an editorial wherever I think new york times yeah, she's out of work, you know right yeah, yeah, she said, well, she's got time to write, so, um, but but she, I look, I don't.

01:09:32
It's weird. I have a weird visceral reaction to her myself, so I'm trying not to be like stupid about it, but you know, she said something to the tune of you know, deep seek shows that this business model that a big tech has of closing the fence and making sure they're the only ones who can uh, play in a certain arena or whatever, is fundamentally flawed and, honestly, it's a good um, it's a good point. So she's right, and I guess I said Lisa Khan before Lena.

01:10:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Khan.

01:10:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, lena, sorry. Yeah, I mean. So this is interesting. Whatever the outcome is with how they did what they did, this has already changed things up. We just talked about all these reasoning things that are happening, and yeah, you let in a little bit of light from the outside and all of a sudden things are different. I mean, it's a fair. You know, when you just shut the market down, so it's only you, this type of thing doesn't happen, right? This is an example of when you're not a hammer, not everything is a nail. So it's a fair point. I don't I'm not sure she's made too many in her professional career, but that's a good one. You hate her so much I do. I can't stand her um I like her.

01:10:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought she did a lot of good uh, listen, I'm I am 100 behind antitrust.

01:10:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I it's important, it's it's it's proven, it needs to happen. I think she went in a complete wrong direction and it's just too bad, okay. The other thing that is, if you think about this as maybe an extension of the agentic stuff, is, openai has started testing really because they're doing this with their $200 a month customers in a very limited form this notion of using AI as a research assistant, and actually Google, the Gemini stuff, has a little bit of this as well, and this is, you know, it's kind of domain specific right now. I think it's like finance, certain sciences, engineering, that kind of stuff, where you have a body of work to work on that is not just finite but is actually really well defined and it's, you know, intensive, because there's a lot of, you know, relatively speaking, a lot of data, but it's fine tuned to this stuff. Yeah, I mean, I think. Yeah, I mean this is where it's going, of course, right, and so this is we're going to be debating this for the rest of our lives, right, we're not going to see the end of this ourselves, but this is the type of thing I think in the future, people are going to look back and say I'm sorry, you're telling me that you used to pull a giant book off of a shelf, flip through it and then find some whatever is legal precedent, some, uh, engineering, uh, you know, data, whatever it is, to make a point in that and you call that research. It's going to seem silly, right? Um, but that's what we do, right? Not you and I, maybe I don't do that, but I mean that's what researchers do.

01:12:34
A lot of this stuff is not, you know, obviously computerization helps, but, um, you know, having an ai, as long as it's grounded properly and working properly and reasoning, and whatever it is, um, you know, it's not there now, right? But I mean, I think this is, yeah, this is what's going to happen. Um, I, this came up I don't remember before the show, when it was, but I mentioned that we were eating lunch and it was a TV on. There was no sound, but it was the president of Mexico giving an address in front of the Mexican Congress tied to the anniversary of the Mexican Constitution, which I believe is 107 or 108 years old this year. And I'm looking at the.

01:13:16
You know, it's like CNN, where they put a little text scroll at the bottom. Can you know they're? It's like cnn, where they put a little text scrawl at the bottom, yeah, kind of saying this is what's happening right now, right, and there was something up there about the popular vote and I wasn't 100 sure what it meant. Right, I got the popular vote part but I was like so I don't know. I didn't actually know. I do know, but I didn't know at the time, 10 minutes ago uh, how Mexico elects their president, like I know it's every six years and you can't run again, but I didn't know.

01:13:46
Is it popular vote? Is it kind of electrical knowledge, whatever, like we have, whatever, so I, I, I said to my wife cause again, I'm gonna ask Gemini, and I asked Gemini, actually, my pillow, bring it, but it's, I bet it's still there it says I can't help with responses on elections and political figures right now. Oh, wow, and I gotta tell you I feel like 50% of the time I ask AI to do something, I get a response like this. It's like Okay. So it literally says and it goes on a little bit, but it says, while I work on improving, you should try Google search. So I did that. All came up in Spanish, despite the fact that I've configured it for English and it took me a little while.

01:14:32
But the net story, the net answer here is across the board, up and down the political spectrum. Mexico elects using the popular vote, including with the president. So I found that out. I have no idea what she was talking about, because when I went to CNN, when I went to Google News, I went to Mexico News Daily, she talked today there must be a news story about this. There was not, so maybe later I'll find out, maybe it'll be in a weekly digest next week. I don't know. Things move slowly here, so, um, anyway, I I tried to. I wouldn't call this deep research, but I try. I was like okay, this is this is this is. This is something ai should be able to handle. This is a very specific question that has a single answer yeah let's do it and nope.

01:15:22
Well, I didn't try others. I you know we were eating lunch but I, I I tried gemini and I was like, all right, I'm just gonna google this stupid and and.

01:15:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did that work? Uh, I mean, I have so many ais. I feel like one of them should know.

01:15:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean I. They're reluctant to talk about elections. I hate to open Copilot on my computer because it's like a little cancer that keeps coming back. But we'll see. If I can, I'll give it a shot. Sure could say they already regret it. As soon as I turn it on. I'm like, oh, you suck. Okay, let's see what copoly has to say on this topic, what you know. Let's see if they say anything. Think deeper. I'm gonna have it. Think deeper too.

01:16:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, think as deep as you can.

01:16:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Baby, yeah, baby. What system does mexico use to elect their president? Right, it's a simple question. All I got is making little curly cues. That's fun I have.

01:16:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Deep Seek says okay, let's tackle this question Exactly.

01:16:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Has.

01:16:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
President Scheinbaum suggested changing how we vote. Yes, by the way, her predecessor suggested it, but he didn't have enough votes in the Congress to do it. President Claudia Scheinbaum has proposed significant changes to Mexico's electoral system, primarily through constitutional reforms that would alter legislative representation and weaken independent institutions. This builds on her predecessor's agenda. Yeah, that's not good. Yeah, they're going to abolish plurinomial representatives. I don't know, I don't know. It's complicated.

01:17:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's complicated is the answer. That sounds like object-oriented programming to me. Yeah, it's like polymorphism.

01:17:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, plurinomial, so seats allocated to parties based on their national vote share, which helps ensure minority votes in voices in congress, this would remove 200 proportional representation seats. They have a 500 member chamber of deputies. Wow, centralizing power around the majority parties like her, marina. Yeah, it's a power grab. Critics argue this risks one-party dominance. See, and this is from China, by the way. This is from China, yeah, oh there you go.

01:17:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've gotten a whole lot of nothing from Copilot. I'm going to try one more time.

01:17:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got a really elaborate result. She supports AMLO's judicial reform to replace appointed Supreme.

01:18:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Court justices.

01:18:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was one of the first things and lower court justices with those with a popular vote. Reforms to dissolve autonomous bodies like the National Electoral Institute oh my God.

01:18:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So Copilot says elections are fascinating and I'd love to help, but but I'm probably not the best source for something so important.

01:18:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, what about this? What?

01:18:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
about the black mole on my arm. Can you tell me about that? Oh yeah, you got cancer. Oh, you're dead.

01:18:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I can't tell you about the elections. No, shine bomb has pledged to pass all 18 constitutional amendments proposed by amlo, including wow, they're, they're. She's talking about big reforms, big changes yeah, okay, so that happened to I.

01:18:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I could see something was happening, something's happening yeah, we've. They're saying we have constitution, it's old, we need to fix it so the next headline I'm almost going to get this in Spanish was it was activados Torinos protesting outside of the capital or something, and I'm like, oh, that must be some political thing. No, these are the people that don't want bulls to be sacrificed in arenas, and I'm pretty sure bullfighting ended in Mexico.

01:19:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know, 10 years ago.

01:19:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's been a while, so I'm not really sure what that was all about.

01:19:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so, um, I have a lot of questions, so the thing I love about latin america, and actually the the, you know, latin community worldwide, is there's always a protest. Oh my god, so there's always a protest.

01:19:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You you actually it's true in greece too.

01:19:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Come to think of it, I I haven't traveled to a a country, yet there isn't a protest going on every day the uh I.

01:19:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So. We've seen multiple protests in mexico city. There's always something and, by the way, a lot of it's. You know it's warranted, right? Um, but I always launch into my rick steves impersonation when this happens. You know, like like I, we're standing there in the zocalo, whatever these people marching by looking for, like women's rights, maybe, or ending violence against women, or whatever. It's perfectly yes. And then I'll be like, uh, the mexican people take to the streets too. You know like I, just like launch into this. It's like a, it's like a cultural bouillabaisse.

01:20:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just uh, oh boy, yeah, you're witnessing history isn't it interesting that, at least in this regard, the chinese ai is much less censored than the yeah. So it's right, very skittish is this.

01:20:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're going to continue. We're going to consider that ironic. Everyone was jumping all over deep seek a week ago asking about tiananmen square. Am I right? I, I asked it about an election in another country and it wouldn't do it. Yeah, I. So I'm explaining to me which one of us is censored more. I mean, I don't even know what the point of it is anyway, welcome back to our cultural bouillabaisse.

01:20:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, that's what we are. So it wasn't just microsoft that had earnings. I mentioned apple. Apple did very well. They had a big, big quarter. Who else? What else happened? How did intel do?

01:21:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, they did great. Leo, everything you know, oh boy, oh the pain, the honestly. I'm just gonna say this right, I think most of this is probably gonna be uninteresting to everybody, but I had to write up every one of these and you, you're going to suffer with me, so no, Thank you, Paul.

01:21:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, it's a light Well we'll go through this quickly.

01:21:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So obviously Intel and AMD, the two primary chip makers in the PC market, qualcomm, by the way, their earnings are either I think they're today, so sometime during the show or after the show we'll hear from Qualcomm. Amazon has to be happening any day now, so probably today, tomorrow, friday, whatever. But Intel, AMD, you know Intel's kind of continuing their streak. I wouldn't call it a total disaster, frankly. In fact they beat expectations by only declining their revenues by 7%. But they also warned on the current quarter, which means it's going to get worse next quarter again.

01:21:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And so you know a lot of means.

01:21:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's going to get worse next quarter, and so you know a lot of their stuff just amounts to more of the same.

01:22:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
there it's a slow motion collision.

01:22:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah. So you know, I wish them the best. I guess AMD's doing fantastic. In the context of AMD, I mean, there's still half the size of Intel when it comes to revenues, but by the way, they used to be like a third. So they're doing good. Their primary business now is data center.

01:22:28
It's fascinating to me how often they're compared negatively to Nvidia, like they're not making a lot of headway there, but that part of their business is growing dramatically. That's, like I said, biggest business unit 69% revenue growth year over year. It's crazy. Client business, which is the PC stuff, is a distant second place 2.3 billion in revenue, but that's up almost 60% as well. They're taking share away from Intel, as they should be, because their current generation chips are in order. Well, that's not fair, but they are dramatically better than what Intel has out in the market, so that's good.

01:23:01
And then they have a gaming and a gaming business and embedded business. Those are both down. Gaming is revenues from console makers like Microsoft and Sony, but also from video game you know video cards right which is not going great, and so that stuff's down. But overall, amd is doing fantastic. And then, uh yeah, apple, like you said, you know just what are you going to say about this company? Iphone was 69.1 billion dollars in revenues. I will go back to the tape to read the exact number, but if I'm not, mistaken, that's.

01:23:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's about the same as microsoft.

01:23:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what I was gonna say total uh 69.6 billion in total revenues for microsoft, 69.1 billion just for iphone. Yeah, so the iphone is as big as all of microsoft combined, which is astonishing that is astonishing wow, um, it is 56 ish of apple's direct revenues.

01:23:52
If you factor in services which wouldn't exist because of that, it's's, you know, 70, 80%. It's a lot, 80%, probably somewhere in there. Whatever, mac and iPad sales both saw solid growth, 15%-ish growth year over year, because both those products, right, they revved toward the end of the year. So that's, you know, good stuff. So Apple's doing fine, they'll be okay. Also, asked about AI, right, and they don't care.

01:24:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're like yeah, we're good. You know their ai is the worst, but apparently that. But they're like, yeah, we don't care the, the big downturn.

01:24:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, so iphone revenues, if I'm not mistaken, were flat. Yeah, they were flat. Um, they're technically down, but we'll call it flat. Uh, with the year ago quarter, and a lot of that was because of china, um, the chinese revenues were down.

01:24:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
11 yeah, issues there.

01:24:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But tim cook, god bless him. Marketer at heart, you know he's like. Look, one thing we found this quarter was that iphones that had apple intelligence so a lot better than those that did not, and china's one of those markets that does not, and so they announced plans to bring apple intelligence to china.

01:24:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In simplified chinese, in apr right, we were talking about this yesterday on Mac break weekly, and this might be one of the benefits of deep seeks success, because Apple could use deep seek in China.

01:25:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Exactly, they can, exactly, yeah, you have to know. They stood up and cheered when this happened. Oh yeah, no kidding, this is how we do it.

01:25:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And what a, what a wonderful nationalistic story to tell in China, you know, no I do it, and what a what a wonderful nationalistic story to tell in china.

01:25:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, no, I'm serious like it's.

01:25:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, we beat all the american ais, yep, and now we're working with the biggest american company, biggest company it is, that's true, that's a good uh, so that doesn't seem.

01:25:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is right. Okay, so uh, alphabet, google, google, we'll call it 96 billion in revenues. I mean, let me find the exact number. I think it's 70. You're printing money. Where is it? 75%, excuse me, of their revenue, 75% from advertising, yeah.

01:25:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's actually way down from. It used to be 90. I know.

01:25:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, by the way, it's been down a little bit, since this is actually up again a little bit, which is kind of interesting. Apple Cloud is actually doing pretty good as a business 12 billion of revenues, up 23 percent year over year. That's you mean google cloud, google cloud, what I call it apple cloud.

01:26:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apple cloud, sorry, which is not, not existent. I just saw myself immediately sorry, apple cloud does not exist. Google cloud is doing pretty good.

01:26:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean honestly, you know that that was kind of an.

01:26:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Also ran for a long time yeah, um, and then definitely in third place after aws, oh yeah, but but still, you know, yeah, okay, it's profitable it's a business.

01:26:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, um, so they're doing great samsung. I don't really care too much about samsung, but um, revenues they're up 12, but that's. Samsung is a business. That's a lot of things, right. So I, the phone part of of samsung is almost 18 billion in revenues of the 52, so it's not the impact on samsung that you know, the iphone is on um apple because samsung has like an insurance company and they sell refrigerators and they do weird stuff, so they have all this other stuff, but, um, that's whatever. So we'll see what happens there. Obviously, they just launched the new phones uh, that stuff has supposedly gone pretty good, but we'll see. And then foldables. They just launched the new phones uh, that stuff has supposedly gone pretty good, but we'll see. And then foldables later in the year, yeah, yeah I don't.

01:27:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It does work better with windows, doesn't it this s25? Yeah, yeah, it does yeah I find that more than vaguely irritating they even have features that you don't get anywhere with anything else uh well, microsoft doesn't really make too many devices anymore, but yeah, google or Microsoft devices.

01:27:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, I know it, I meant so let me.

01:27:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's no future in podcasting. I can just tell you that right now. Let me try that sentence again.

01:27:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So Spotify is interesting to me only because it is super transparent about where the revenues come from and they spell it out. So there's, for example so right now they have 675 million users overall, up 12%. It's great, right's free, big, big numbers, mostly free, but let me see if I can find the numbers they get ads, so they make money they have uh, but where is it uh? I don't have it. Why don't I have it?

01:28:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they added 35 million new users in the quarter 11 million of which were premium paying subscribers so premium users, the ones who pay, are not.

01:28:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not as bad as it used to be of a gap, but I believe it's. I'm going to call it one third versus two thirds roughly in that. Yeah, I think trajectory. Yeah, the the one third that are paying customers generate like 85 or 90 percent of the revenue, so something like that 425 million ad supported users yeah, out of the 675, 200 and something.

01:28:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so it's yeah so it's roughly 250 million paying users. Yeah.

01:28:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Which is amazing, right? Yeah, yeah, but their revenues from the man? This is really. I think I was writing too much. I usually spell this out very explicitly and I did not do it this time. I apologize, yeah, because I'm always fascinated by this, but this is why things like Club Twit exist. This is why Thra Premium exists. You could have a much smaller base of people who are paying versus some base that's supported.

01:29:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I would love it if a third of our user base were members of Club Twit. We wouldn't bother with advertising if that were the case.

01:29:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Exactly, it's 100% the same Right I would give anything to get rid of ads.

01:29:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the way we've always wanted to operate right. So the listeners or the readers support what we do and then you don't have to worry about advertisers. That's not the way the world works At least Spotify. It's funny. I mean, their operating income was $1.4 billion euros on revenues of 15 billion euros.

01:29:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They they give a lot back, yeah you know, and and they don't get credit for that, and so just the other day they had a separate announcement about how look. Just to be clear, we paid the record recording industry and artists 10 billion dollars last year a record and higher than any other company, right?

01:29:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, because more people are streaming on spotify. Yeah, they don't pay as much per stream as apple or or even amazon, but more people use it well, but that's the, the law of size, right?

01:30:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, that's that's, they're right, that's fine. But you know, a lot of people kind of point at spotify and say, well, you know, they're destroying the recording industry, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And actually I think there's a case to be made that the recording industry would have disappeared by now, essentially if it wasn't for this stuff. Because if you go back and look at that $10 billion announcement that they made last week or whenever, that was $10 billion yes, $10 billion, sorry, 10 years ago. They look at what the industry was when they just started and it was the revenues. The entire industry were $13 billion. Really, today they are paying almost as much to the industry as it made in themselves before they existed.

01:30:48
So, yes, our artists will go. Oh, look at making as much. Yeah, neither am I as a writer. I used to, you know, I used to be able to charge, you know, dollars a word. I used to, you know I used to be able to charge, you know, dollars a word. I couldn't get that now if I sold a kidney. That's the nature of things. And I I honestly, if this type of thing hadn't come along, I think it would have cratered. Yeah, I'm not saying they're like Jesus or anything and they get everything right.

01:31:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm just saying, you know if, if, if there weren't any way to stream music, you know, pay a subscription fee and have access to all music and stream it people would still have to buy CDs or buy digital copies. That would change the equation.

01:31:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, except that we live in a world where, yeah, well, right, hopefully it's a net gain for everybody, but it's never that clean.

01:31:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, look, the real problem in the music industry is the labels get all the money, then they decide how much the artists yeah, the problem with the music industry is the music industry.

01:31:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's the music exactly.

01:31:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is an industry. Um, we're actually, I think we are on spotify. A lot of people say spotify has been bad for podcasting and I I wouldn't necessarily disagree, maybe, but so I agree.

01:31:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, look joe rogan, and yeah they, they sucked a lot of the money out of the industry, I think, which is a big problem for you guys and for well for us or whatever. Um, on the other hand, like as an independent, if you were, I'm not, but if you were an independent podcast or whatever, they will host your podcast for free.

01:32:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They right the services they're pretty good, I mean, you know, and I think we are moving it, some of our stuff, to spotify, and it's not to only spotify. Yeah, that's. What I don't like is that. You know well, like joe rogan, you have to use spotify to listen, right, and I don't. I don't like. No, I thought I'd ever do that. I don't like that at all. But I think that we are moving a lot of stuff to Spotify and we have a lot of stuff. A lot of people listen to us on Spotify. Oh, I know we're thinking about using their Spotify ad network.

01:32:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, yeah, why not? Yeah, why not? Why not yeah? So yeah, spotify is a force to be reckoned with.

01:32:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I have very mixed feelings about it, to be honest.

01:32:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it wasn't too long ago. I'm not going to get the date right, but 2010, 12, somewhere in there. If you were to go back and look, Microsoft Office would have told you that they had 500 million, maybe 550 million users. Spotify today has 675 million users. That's amazing. That's astonishing.

01:33:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the thing I mean, regardless of how I feel about how they've affected the music industry and the podcasting industry. Users love it, People love Spotify and they're very happy with it.

01:33:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Spotify is far and away the largest music, spotify advertises in Mexico using rolled up like paper rolled onto a wall like they like yeah, yeah, like posters. There were spot, if no, I mean, they're not even that big, they're like this, but they, they put like 20 of them side by side yeah like in in my neighborhood up the street there's always some spotify ads on a wall. Right, you know it's, uh, it's really it's. It's bizarrely local. I don't know it's very interesting. Yeah, well, they're, they're I'm. You know it's, uh, it's really it's. It's bizarrely local, I don't know it's very interesting.

01:34:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, well, they're. They're, I'm, you know, I'm sure they're a big marketing company. I think they have hundreds of sales people, marketing people, maybe thousands. Oh, my god, it's probably.

01:34:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, I mean, yeah, right right, I mean the guys that used to market microsoft office have to do something now. So they're probably all young people, you know, they're probably all like 25 years old, um just like doge they'll just speak in emoticons or something I don't know paul, the world is passing us by I know I'm okay with it. I'm okay, I am too.

01:34:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sometimes, you know, sometimes you just gotta say I'm a silverback, let the gorillas run free or something I don't know. All right, hang on for a sec. I want to take a break. When we come back, uh, microsoft 365 and the world famous xbox segment stay right here. Of course, the back of the book as well.

01:34:57
Our show today brought to you by us cloud, the number one microsoft unified support replacement. We've been talking for some time now about us cloud I I remember the first time I I'd never heard of them. I talked to him on the phone. I was like wow, more people ought to know about this and they said well, we're hoping you'll, you'll tell them, leo. It turns out they are the global leader in third-party microsoft support for enterprises. They now support 10 of the fortune 550 companies.

01:35:27
But there's three reasons I think that us cloud is better. First of all, it's going to save you a lot of money switching to us cloud to save your business 30 to 50 percent over microsoft unified or premier support. Now that wouldn't be any good if they weren't also better support faster, with a remarkable response time twice as fast on average time to resolution versus microsoft. That's amazing and they're better their engineers have, on average, 16 years experience. They are just the best, all US-based. I said how do you get these guys? I said we give them great benefits, great salaries. We recruit hard to get the best engineers and that benefits you because of course, they're helping you. They're the cavalry that comes when you've got a problem Faster, better and less. That's a pretty good offer. They also do other that comes when you've got a problem Faster, better and less. That's a pretty good offer. They also do other things to save you. For instance, us Cloud is excited to tell you about a new offering their Azure Cost Optimization Service is completely independent of the support service.

01:36:34
So here's the question when was the last time you evaluated your Azure usage? I think it's been a while. You probably have some what we call Azure sprawl, a little spend creep going on right. You spin up some virtual machines, you forget about them or you're using them less and less. It's hard to keep track. Is it's hard to keep track? Well, this is the good news Saving on Azure is easier than ever with US Cloud. They offer an eight-week Azure engagement powered by VBox that identifies key opportunities to reduce costs across your entire Azure environment. You'll get expert guidance, access to US Cloud's senior engineers those guys with over 16 years on average with Microsoft products. At the end of those eight weeks, you're going to get a beautiful interactive dashboard that will identify, rebuild and downscale opportunities and unused resources so you can reallocate your precious IT dollars towards the needed resources or I don't know. Here's a suggestion invest all those azure savings in us clouds. Microsoft support save even more. That's what a lot of us cloud customers do completely eliminate your unified spend. That feels real good.

01:37:48
Sam, the technical operations manager at bead gaming, gave us a little review. He gave us cloud five stars out of five, saying quote we found some things that have been running for three years which no one was checking. These vms were, I don't know, 10 grand a month not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spend on azure, but once you get to 40 or 50 000 a month, it really starts to add up. Yeah, I guess it would. Huh, it's simple Stop overpaying for Azure. Identify and eliminate Azure creep. Boost your performance and you can do it all in just eight weeks with US Cloud.

01:38:26
Us Cloud you've got to get to know these guys. They are fantastic. They're there to save you money and give you better Microsoft support. Visit uscloudcom Just book a call. Find out how much your team can save uscloudcom dot com. Just book a call. Find out how much your team can save us cloud dot com. Book a call today and get faster, better microsoft support for less and maybe save a pretty penny on all those unused azure resources. Us cloud dot com. We thank them so much for supporting windows weekly and you support us when you, if they ask you, say yeah, I heard about it on Windows Weekly. Uscloudcom Okie dokie, paul, on, we go with Microsoft 365.

01:39:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I saw this story on the tech community blog that Microsoft has about Microsoft Designer being integrated into. It's so vague the way they said this, like photos and the Microsoft 365 co-pilot app, and I was like, really, what does that mean? Right? So if you open the, the, the photos app in Windows 11 and probably Windows 10 has been adding these AI editing features for some time now. So if you open a, I gotta jeez every time I open my, open this on a new computer. It's like I've never opened photos in my entire life.

01:39:44
Anyway, if I open a photo in photos, for example, and you go to edit, you will see these little icons up in the toolbar that are ai related, right, so they have like background, like geniture of a race. They have background removal and background blur and all that kind of stuff and, okay, like cool. So I'm like what is? I'm like okay. So obviously these are the, you know designer as sort of the, the newish brand, if you will, for microsoft's generative ai. Um, you know image, uh capabilities, right, what used to be bing image creator, although it's actually still Bing image creator too, for some reason, but whatever, but actually they have integrated designer into photos. So if you haven't done this and I don't know if you have to. Let me see if it's on this computer. Yeah, so if you go to edit an image, one of the buttons now at the top is edit with the designer, and that actually loads a version of the Microsoft designer web app inside of Photos and lets you access actually some of the same features, but a bunch of other new features, including things like selective edit, you know, like auto enhance, etc. Background removal and replace they don't call it that, but basically you're replacing the background with some other image or with a color. There's a bunch of stuff like that. You can use generative AI capabilities to create images or stickers or icons or whatever and add them to an image, and it's part of a whole design process. So, huh, like I actually didn't. I mean, I sort of knew the button was there, but I never even saw that before. So that actually is a thing. I sort of knew the button was there, but I never even saw that before. So that actually is the thing.

01:41:21
As for the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, I think yeah, last week I did an episode about that for hands-on Windows that will be out next week or the week after, I don't know what the schedule is, but it is interesting to me that right now there are two Copilot apps in Windows. Interesting to me that right now there are two co-pilot apps in windows and one of them is co-pilot, obviously, the basic chat bot, you know, ai, assistant, blah, blah, whatever. But the other one is what used to be the microsoft 365 app. So if you open that up as a consumer, god help you, because you'll never get rid of it, it will keep coming up. It will will auto start with Windows. I'm actually sorry, I just did it myself.

01:42:01
It's the Microsoft 365 app with two changes. There's a co-pilot button in the sidebar which, as a consumer, doesn't do anything. Yet it will. It says co-pilot chat is coming soon. There's a create tab now which is just a front end to all of the individual apps Word, powerpoint, excel, et cetera and they've added Designer and, by the way, clipchamp to that list, also Sway, interestingly you might have thought that went away and some other things. So instead of having the apps in the sidebar, which you can actually still see, you can just. This is like a Microsoft Works type thing, like just you know, there's a front end for all this stuff. It will launch the appropriate app. If you have the app on your computer, it launches that up pretty good. If you sign in with a Microsoft Work or School account, this app actually is kind of transformed. They got rid of all the app shortcuts. They use Create as the front end for all that stuff, and that Copilot tab does something. It actually gives you a co-pilot chat experience very much like the co-pilot app, the standalone app, except that your company could, if they wanted to well, turn it off or limit its knowledge base to corporate information, right, and so this is the reason they have the two apps. This app can be locked down and I don't have it on in front of me, but when you sign in with a work or school account, it actually has a little green icon in the corner that tells you that everything that's happening here is data protected by Microsoft. You know, support the commercial customers.

01:43:33
Why did I just tell you this? Well, the designer integration with the Copilot 365 app, which used to be the Microsoft 365 app, which used to be the microsoft 365 app, which used to be the office app, does not apply to the version of windows. That's the one on mobile. So if you have designer on android, not designer, sorry. If you have, uh, the microsoft 365 copilot app on your phone which you might, because it used to be called something that made sense to you you should go look. By the way, they changed the name. So Designer is actually integrated into that, in the same way that it is on Windows in the Photos app. So when you click the Designer tab which is actually at the bottom, not on the side on the phone, or actually the Create tab rather and then go to Designer from there, you actually get the designer experience inside of the app.

01:44:19
So if you're familiar with how the Office app used to be or the Microsoft 365 app, you know that Microsoft still does, but used to only have individual apps for, like Word, excel, powerpoint, right, but then they had the Office app that had all of that stuff inside of it.

01:44:33
That's what they're doing with designer as well. So if, for some reason, you use designer, I shouldn't say that I use it for image creation for my web articles, but it's really supposed to be a standalone competitor to like Canva or Adobe Express, where it boggles my mind that there might be professional designers that use tools like this, but I guess there are. You want to make a pamphlet it's kind of a stretch in 2025, but you're trying to make logos, maybe, or things that will appear over social media posts, whatever it might be. All of these solutions are for that reason. So I guess, if you're out in the world, on your phone, there is, I should say, a standalone designer app. But if you wanted all of those Microsoft capabilities across Word Excel, wanted all of those Microsoft capabilities across Word Excel, et cetera, but just in one app, that's what the Microsoft 365.

01:45:28
Copilot app is now, and yes, I threw up in my mouth a little bit there just saying that, but that's what it is. I know it's weird. Okay, the number one response to this next story is I didn't even know they made this product. I got to tell you. I'm getting a little tired of hearing that. But okay, so you had a microsoft 360 or have a microsoft 365 personal or family subscription. One of the perks or one of the parts of that subscription was a vpn uh, that people keep calling. In fact, we call it this too. It's like the free vpn that comes inside of microsoft defender as part of microsoft 365. Um, you actually pay for it, you pick, actually pay for it.

01:46:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's not free.

01:46:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not free, but it's free when you pay.

01:46:03
Is it good? I have no idea. Like most everyone else, I never used it. That's probably why they killed it. I have to say so.

01:46:11
Microsoft this is another tie to this sort of. If you go into Microsoft Edge and you click on the little dot dot dot menu or you might have this in your toolbar. Even there's something called Browser Essentials, right, this is a fairly recent Edge feature. It's where you will be notified of app updates now for whatever reason, but it kind of gives you an overall look at the performance and efficiency of the browser. It's like a little dashboard, but at the bottom there's something called Microsoft Edge Secured Network Preview.

01:46:38
It's a VPN, it's free, there are limits on a monthly basis and it only works with edge. So when you enable this, you're you're getting a VPN, but not for your entire system, like you would have got with the Microsoft defender product or any other VPN, right. But this thing actually works just within the browser and, honestly, that's pretty useful right. Like sometimes you just want to do, like you want to do one thing, like I'm here in mexico, I got to do some banking thing or whatever it is. I got to get into this account. I want them to think I'm in bought, you know, or pennsylvania, where I live now, and I turn on the vpn, say I'm there actually I probably don't even have pennsylvania in the free one, but whatever, whatever I know Proton has Pennsylvania and do my banking thing and then turn it off right. So actually kind of having a per-app VPN is actually not such a horrible idea Anyhow.

01:47:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, that's probably how people really want to use it, right?

01:47:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think so yeah, I mean, I think VPNs are confusing to people.

01:47:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they don't want to leave it on all the time. They want to do it when they need to be secure or they need to be somewhere else.

01:47:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like I've been experimenting with VPNs on this trip, I've been trying to leave my iPad with a VPN on the whole time. That's not going great. And then Apple.

01:47:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
TV. I have to say I use our sponsor, expressvpn, and I turned it on on the iPad and forgot that. I turned it on and left it on for like six months and never noticed. Oh, that's fantastic so so I mean if you, if they have the right resources devoted to it.

01:48:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I guess you know well, okay, but you're, you're home, right, so like yeah, I had.

01:48:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes you're right, that was true like I turned it on when I was in mexico because I wanted to watch a football game.

01:48:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I forgot, yeah yeah, so like I, um, uh, I was tooling around apple tv the other day and they have like shutter. Shutter is a like a service for like horror movies and stuff and they had a shutter channel and I was like, well, I don't pay for shutter, what does that look like? So I clicked on and I I can't tell, but it looks like you just get this now on apple tv pluses. I have no idea, but every time I clicked on a thing just to try it. You are not in America, dude. Yeah, it knew I wasn't here and I'm like, well, I'm using a VPN, like why?

01:48:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't have other ways. Yeah, I know, Of course.

01:48:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Of course they have other means so useless, anyway, yeah, anyway. This product no one knew existed is going away, so sorry. Now I will hear from everyone who used it, Except that's actually not what's happened this time. I've heard from everyone who was confused. It existed in the first place and I've been told since this that this was something that Apple actually has in the calendar app in macOS. But the Mac version of Microsoft Outlook is getting an email recall feature. So if you send something by mistake, or maybe you hit send, you're like, oh, I forgot something, or whatever you can get it back. I feel like this has been a feature of email since email. I don't know what's going on here, but anyway they're adding that that's a feature of Outlook today in Windows, including in the new version. So welcome to the 21st century Mac users who are using an Outlook product for some reason so there you go, there you go.

01:49:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know there you go alright, do you want to talk Xbox? Yeah, let's do a little gaming.

01:49:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I do. If you are a fan of Microsoft bringing Xbox games to other platforms, this is going to be a big week for you, because they've announced three new games that are coming to the PlayStation 5. Well, actually, one of them isn't new Forza Horizon 5. If you're not familiar with the Forza series, there's the Forza games, forza Motorsport, etc. Which are the realistic simulation type games. And then there's Forza Horizon 5, which is like the arcade style, like fun, the good ones. Forza Horizon 5 is an awesome game, by the way. It takes place in Mexico. So that's coming to PS5 in the near future. So that's coming to PS5 in the near future.

01:50:38
And then I don't remember when this was exactly, but late last year sometime, microsoft started talking up these new games, or, in some cases, remastered games, in the Age of Empires series, right? So Age of Empires, I don't know, whatever the name is the latest, whatever the version is, whatever definitive version, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And then there's Age of Mythology. They are bringing these games to the PlayStation 5 as well this year. In fact, I think one of the two is coming within a month. So that's happening. So maybe your next Xbox will be a PlayStation. Anyway, starfield is going to come to Game Pass Standard. Game Pass Standard is the thing that used to be xbox live gold, right, essentially so. This is the low-end one that gets um some number of games at 50 or 25 games in a kind of a curated catalog. It's the. Oh no, I'm sorry, I'm mixing this up. Game pass standard is the one that used to just be Game Pass. I don't understand why you're confused about this, paul, I know there's only 13 things called Game Pass.

01:51:45
I apologize, I'm a little frazzled. Anyway, so Starfield, I want to say, was part of the other Game Pass tiers before, like Ultimate. Probably is it on PC, actually I can't keep track of anything. Probably is it on PC, actually I can't keep track of anything, who cares? But it is coming. And they also announced some other Game Pass titles coming across all the different platforms. Madden 25 is huge, but to me, the one I'm really looking forward to is something called Avowed. Have you seen this? Have you seen?

01:52:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
any. What is it?

01:52:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
called. It's called Avowed, Avowed no.

01:52:18
Yeah, so you should look this thing up. So this is a, it's like a. It's a role-playing game but it's an action game. It's an Xbox Studio game, like, literally, xbox Studio is not some third party something, something that they bought. It looks amazing and you know, we'll see, but this is. I'm hoping I might be able to test this someone. I think I might be testing this soon. I'm really curious to see this one. I'm looking for anything, frankly, that can get me off of uh call of duty, but I'm struggling to the living.

01:52:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It looks pretty good that wild frontier, so you play what a guy running around?

01:52:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yes, you play a guy running around. That's exactly right. I got it so far. That makes it completely.

01:53:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You got nice boots, oh, and a fancy face.

01:53:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So you know, fantasy setting.

01:53:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's kind of world of Warcraft Maybe.

01:53:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And it's not like. Microsoft, it's World of Warcraft. So wait what, huh? Yes, they lands so that those who remain, and it's not like microsoft's world of aircraft. So wait what huh?

01:53:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yes, they do. Oh well, yeah, it's got a little bit of ori style graphics. Yeah, it looks pretty. Oh yeah, a little ori there yeah, you loved ori.

01:53:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, ori was I. Dory is like. I listened to the music from ori. Like it's, like it's did you ever play balder's gate?

01:53:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, I know I don't like turn-based stuff, I think exactly the straight up.

01:53:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I would call them like dnd type games, like I. Just I don't know.

01:53:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's a real d dnd yeah yeah, you can choose your side be a, be a goon or a go to a goal looks like some cool little things which, oh, you, you can, yeah, do some magic.

01:54:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This looks really pretty to me, Like this is just yeah, it looks nice.

01:54:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, it's so challenging these days to do something original, so I think this looks like a lot of other games, but maybe the unique part is that it's different, right, or?

01:54:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it looks. Yeah, I mean, it's um a lot of. It's not just games, but entertainment, but also computer. Personal computing is like hey, that thing over there's uh popular, let's make one of those movies, right, you know yeah it's everything right like, so this is kind of a dragon age, or yeah, and it's I.

01:54:39
I think the. So this is kind of a Dragon Age or yeah, and it's, I think, the big, well, not the big. I think part of the rationale is that it is literally Xbox Studios and they probably you know this, probably the development of this probably predates Activision Blizzard, which owns Warcraft, world of Warcraft and you know, but yeah, it looks it's got a little skyrim to it, a little 100, yep, yep I like doing that. I like elder what's it like elder rings or whatever.

01:55:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, the elder scrolls, elder scrolls. Thank you, yeah, yeah yeah, I mean.

01:55:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just, we've seen this a million times, but so it's bioware yeah.

01:55:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Which is a microsoft studio?

01:55:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah literally it like, actually like predates. It's not even a broader microsite, it's like an xbox studios, uh studio, if you will. Yeah, wow, so yep uh.

01:55:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Pc gamer says if starfield felt cold and sterile, playing avowed is like putting on a lovely old jumper. Is it fashionable? No, does it have some moth holes in it? Sure, but as the nights get chilly it's warm and comforting and smells of happy memories. I don't know how a game can smell of happy memories, but okay.

01:55:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That sounds like it was written by AI.

01:55:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was written by somebody named Robin Valentine.

01:55:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
When I was learning to write. You're AI. What are you talking about?

01:55:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what I love, about the, about you don't have memories of this the dialogue. These reasoning models like deep sea cap with each with themselves remember the first website I scraped. It was so interesting it seems as if he's asking one contradicted it completely.

01:56:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm so messed up right now, anyway, to answer your question. Seven, seven.

01:56:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is, I don't know, 42.

01:56:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, this one also would be met with confusion, much like the VPN that no one knew existed in Microsoft 365, which is at Microsoft and something called startgg have severed their relationship. Well, it's a bad time, whatever that was um anything withgg.

01:56:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm literally not gonna even. I just feels like it's malware.

01:56:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't I like when I read something and I'm convinced like I'll get through this, and be like, oh, okay, yeah, I remember that. And then I got to the end and I was like, is this an alternate? We on a different timeline? Now I don't remember this at all to the tune of I actually I'm not sure this is true, but uh, yeah, anyway, um, we're or, as they put it, we're excited to announce that today we can start. Gg will be returning to its roots. That's like saying, uh, like I've been laid off from my job.

01:57:22
Yeah, I'm excited to announce I'm returning to my roots as an unemployed young person with no future whatsoever.

01:57:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know yeah, god, uh, I guess it's something with gaming, because gg is usually, it's some competitive game, you know, an eSports something something.

01:57:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Microsoft. When that stuff started taking off, a lot of the companies that were making games that would kind of fall into this category, like sports games, obviously, but games like Call of Duty, when they did their Warzone-type game, a lot of this was like oh, we're going to turn this into an esports competition, and Activision was heavily involved in esports for many years, probably still is right, as Microsoft, I'm sure it's still a big thing, but Microsoft didn't own Activision then, so I'm sure this was their attempt, like Google just bought DoubleClick, all right, find something else that no one's ever heard of and buy that, and that, buy that. And that's exactly what they did. It was called a quantif and they wrote it off a year later. Right, and and this to me is like a minor version of that it's like let's get into this thing that we hear people are doing for some reason and I don't know.

01:58:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, there you go.

01:58:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All the kids are doing it yep, except they're not doing it on microsoft. So congratulations. So there, yep, good job, uh. And then, finally, nintendo announced their earnings. This is the second, maybe third, but at least second quarter in a row where they've had to revise their prediction. For swifts, uh, swift sales, yes. For uh, switch sales, um, and what this means is that when nintendo's fiscal year ends at the end of march, they're actually not going to hit the number they need for the switch to be the best-selling video game console of all time. They're going to fall just short of that, but the year has nine more months left. After that. There's no doubt that, before this year is out, the Switch will unseat DS.

01:59:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, they've Osborne'd it because they've announced Switch 2.

01:59:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but the good news is the Switch 2 will be mostly backwards compatible. It's called backwards compatible. You don't know the full story, but probably backwards compatible. I bet they keep some version of the original switch in market right For a little while yeah, so they have a chance A low-end offering.

01:59:26
Right, yeah, the less expensive. So yeah, there's no doubt that they're going to keep going. I mean, this came up earlier I think, but one of the many difficulties I face just in my day-to-day life is the financial earning stuff. A lot of math, right? A couple companies I cover nintendo's, a good version, japanese yen, samsung, korean one. They report their earnings in different currencies. Even spotify does the euro, you know whatever. Um, so these numbers are weird to me and I it takes me a long time to get through them. They, they don't do the conversion for me. Why would they? And then some companies don't do the year-over-year quarter-of-quarter, whatever. It is growth and I have to calculate that. It's a lot of fun. Anyway, I do a lot of math.

02:00:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You should use an AI for this. That's what AI is good at.

02:00:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're probably right I'm resisting. Here's the struggle with nintendo. Uh, as the year progresses, they report their earnings in terms of the fiscal year. So this is a, this is a report of for the previous nine months. It's not the quarter. So I had to go back to the previous two months, find out those numbers, subtract, do the. You know a lot of stuff. It was a lot of fun anyway. Yeah, it's not great. Um, it's no wonder I'm a psychotic.

02:00:35
So in the nine months leading up to now, which which is leading up to December 31st, right, the three quarters of their fiscal year that ends in March Nintendo sold I just said all that and all that kind of the number yeah, 13.74 million Switch consoles, right, wow, which is the decline of 31% almost year over year. So yikes. So, if my math is correct, in the holiday quarter ending December 31st, they sold almost 7 million, or almost half, or roughly half of all those, which makes sense, right, because of the holidays, et cetera. But, like I said, they've been cutting their forecast, et cetera, et cetera. So if they hit their numbers now, which they've revised twice, but if they hit their numbers now, which they've revised twice, but if they do? They're going to fall just short of the 154 million units that it sold of the nintendo ds and they will land at about 151.

02:01:30
So all they have to do is sell 3 million or 3.1 million, whatever, in the ensuing nine months and or whatever amount of time, it doesn't matter. Until they kill it, um and they'll, the switch will be the number. There's no doubt like it's just not gonna happen as quick as we thought it doesn't really matter.

02:01:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I mean, yeah, it's a success. I just feel bad for the poor fathers who went out at christmas, right, and we're real excited to buy their kids a nintendo switch, wrapped it up, wrapped it up. The kid opens it up and says there's a new one coming out in a month.

02:02:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
When this was invented, the world was in black and white. What are you doing?

02:02:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What are you doing?

02:02:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I was going to say if dad bought one of these over Christmas, I hope he knew what he was getting into.

02:02:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He didn't know that the new one was coming out.

02:02:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's why that the new one was coming out.

02:02:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why we're in year, but we're in year eight. Yeah, come on man. Well, that's why I'm amazed they sold what did you say? Seven million, that's mind-boggling.

02:02:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know it's incredible they have those. The numbers are really kind of incredible that over 50 of their sales are digital now, which is great, right? Yeah, I don't. I I never buy a cartridge anymore. No, I haven't bought one since they have a switch. No, a Switch no, but I mean for video games, like In general, on Xbox or whatever. Like I haven't bought a disc since, no, 360 days. I mean somewhere in there.

02:02:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's no point. No, because they'd still have to download the 400 gigabytes for the game.

02:02:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then on. I don't know how it works everywhere else but on Xbox, but at the time you had to have the disc in the thing. Yeah, it was copy protection and you know I was just like guys, come on Stupid. But yeah, no, and the Switch is a phenomenon, I mean I love my Switch. Yeah, it's amazing.

02:03:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I still buy a game every once in a while. It saved me doing COVID. I mean, oh God, yeah.

02:03:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I played Animal Planet, obsess planet obsessively. I'm surprised I never pulled the switch on the switch, the trigger or whatever on the switch, but like my kids both own one, like independently, we had nothing to do with it, right? Um, they both just got them on their own. Well, I mean probably with our money, but whatever, um, we didn't make those purchases explicitly anyway, and I I thought about it a million times and, depending on what they come up with, I think it it's in April, right, the beginning of April, when they start talking about the next version. We know a bunch of Xbox games are going to go there. Microsoft has already explicitly said they're putting Call of Duty on this thing. Oh, interesting, kind of interesting, right, because I want to see where they land. If you just Call of Duty just to keep it to that, because it's the only thing I know about is, you obviously have the versions on PC and consoles, xbox and Sony.

02:04:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And there's mobile versions as well.

02:04:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then there's mobile, which is Android, and then iPhone and iPad right, so I played. Well, I haven't played PlayStation, but other than that, I've played all those versions, right? So, on the PC PlayStation and Xbox you can play online against all of that, right, yeah, it's cross-play support. Playstation and Xbox, you can play online against all of that, right.

02:04:20
So you can play a game, yeah it's cross-play support, which is kind of amazing. Now, I don't know on mobile, but I have to assume that if I go into Call of Duty mobile and compete online against other human beings, which you can do, that those people aren't all on an iPad or iPhone or whatever I'm using. It must be across mobile, right? So where is the Switch going to go? Like, where does the switch land in that little equation, right?

02:04:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've never felt like it's fair. I mean, there's certain plans. Don't you have an advantage if you're on a PC over a mobile device?

02:04:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so what I do is I play it on the PC, but with a controller.

02:04:53
Oh Right no-transcript, because that would level the playing field because there is a twitchy response time thing. You can do with a mouse, right, and a keyboard, you cannot do with a controller. It's just impossible, right. But I guess I'm curious about the switch version and it will be based on a couple things like, obviously, the power of the console, etc. Etc. But I'm thinking it's, you know, the existing one's, 1080p. I mean, most people playing on pcs are probably 1080p and, um, if it's I.

02:05:37
I'm assuming it's going to be all the consoles together. Right, so you're going to be playing with a Joy-Con? You look like an idiot, like what's the Charlie Brown guy over there doing? Hop up and like, oh, he's on the Switch. You know what I mean, or it's me.

02:05:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
One or the other. He's like what is he doing? Shoot something.

02:05:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Anything, shoot yourself. I play these games. I get to like jump on up and like do you, what is he doing? Shoot something, anything shoot yourself.

02:06:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Play these games, just do it.

02:06:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, stuck in a corner, yeah, my favorite is always like you're trying to do this fast action movement thing. You like you know bombs are blown up, stuff flying through the air and like you do this flying thing, like you slide to the side but there's like a, like a one pixel rock sticking out of the corner of the fence and then you stop. You like you don't actually move forward. You're like super soldier can't get by the bump in the road, like I. I can call in a drone strike and a nuclear bomb, but I can't get over this rock it's a rock.

02:06:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the stupidest it's just oh, the struggle is real, folks, that's right yeah, it's mostly mental, um, but yeah, oh.

02:06:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Qualcomm, by the way, reported their earnings oh, what do we?

02:06:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what do we see? I'm sure it was good yeah, it's doing great.

02:06:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, up 17 to almost 12 billion dollars versus 11 billion estimated. So they're doing great. And yeah, set revenue up 13 to 7.6 billion. They didn't get a profit. 3.1 billion strong q2 guidance. It's all co-pilot plus pc baby it is.

02:07:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not phones doing that it's not co-pilot plus pcs either, actually.

02:07:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, I know I don't think so, but I'll maybe it's it's just licensing?

02:07:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sure yeah, it's always.

02:07:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's always their license back to arm. That's their new business.

02:07:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, we do have a back of the book. We do not have Richard Campbell, as you probably noticed. So no brown liquor pick. I will do, though, richard'snet show, because I want to give that a plug, and we'll get your tips and apps of the week in just a little bit. I also would like at this point to invite you all you heard paul talk about hands on windows, which is the wonderful show that he does for us.

02:07:46
Uh, available, uh in in a variety of ways, but really the best way to consume it is in the club. In fact, the club is what pays for it. We don't try to sell advertising on it. Uh, it's something for the club members. In fact, there's quite a bit that we do for the club members. Uh, we have stacy's book club coming up end of the month. Uh, tomorrow we're going to do chris marquart's uh photo segment. We're going to review photos submitted uh for the uh. This photo, I can't remember. Was it luminous? Was that the uh? Was that the term? And then we'll talk a little bit about photography news.

02:08:21
We do a lot of stuff in the club, often using the Club Twit Discord so that you can interact with us. It's just one of the many benefits. The club is very affordable. We keep it as low as we possibly can seven bucks a month. For that you get ad free versions of every show with your own unique URL. You get access to the Club Twit Discord Some great people in there, lots of fun going on almost all the time. You get special shows that we don't put out anywhere else on the TwitPlus feed, but mostly you get the warm and fuzzy feeling knowing you're supporting people like Paul and the shows that we do.

02:08:57
It really makes a big difference to our bottom line. Yes, we're ad supported and ads ads, you know, pay a the largest portion of our costs, um, but we couldn't do it without the club. It wouldn't cover all the costs. The club makes up the difference and, uh, we'd just like to get you in it. So, twittv slash, club twit. If you're interested, learn more there. Uh, and for those of you who are in the club watching live, thank you, thank you for you for your support. The other club members who are not watching live are not going to hear this, because they get the ad free versions, uh, paul thurot. Back to the matter at hand, which is, of course, just a real quick though, before we get to the back.

02:09:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, I was just looking at the qualcomm earnings and, like I do, I search for key terms. One does yes, so I search for the term pc, and it does come up once it's in the word upcoming so not a big part of not a big amount of support there. Um, but yeah, the the the uh estimates for the current quarter.

02:10:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The growth they expect is actually based on a rebound in smartphone sales, so yeah something good's happening there yeah, I mean that's really and it's all android, it's that's that's their business.

02:10:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah sorry, anyway.

02:10:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tip of the week time.

02:10:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Mr t yes, so I'm trying to remember how much of this has come up before, but I had the episode with youtube. Obviously we talked about this, um, anytime something like that happens, um, you know, you sort of reassess things, right, like is what could I do differently here? Like, what do I need to do to protect myself against whatever? So, in the past, like a lot of people, I would say this you might equate this to like a data loss scenario. People get the backup religion after they lose something important, right? So in this case, I almost got locked out of my YouTube account, which is a channel or a they have a term for this I'm forgetting the brand or something that's associated with my Google account, which is a paid workspace account. It's a business account, right. It's not a personal account. It's like something I pay for. In fact, I pay for six of them, so I didn't get a lot of support, so that was kind of tough.

02:11:12
So, tied to this, I would just say about a year and a half ago, I did this big digital decluttering thing.

02:11:17
Now, the biggest part of that and, honestly, the most important part to me, was taking all the digital photos that I have, and these include things that are scanned photos, analog photos or paper photos, getting them all in one place, organizing them, getting all the metadata correct as much as I can and then replicating that collection to multiple places so that if there's some disaster, everything's good right. But I did a lot more than that at the time. I also did some similar work with, like my, what I think of as my personal and work archives, right. So I've 30 years of documents, mostly work-related home videos. I did other things. It was a bunch of it. So I'm I've decided I went through a bunch of different stuff in thinking through this um, and I'm going to do uh, something similar to I'm not going to call it decluttering, because although actually that's not a bad term for this but sort of like uh online. I'm thinking of it as online accounts, but honestly it's like online identity.

02:12:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It means like an online colonoscopy. Yes, that, because a digital enema I don't know, yeah, no, the parallels there are perfect.

02:12:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is, it's the same discomfort, but you know it's necessary. Yeah, it's like when you give a dog a pill. It's looking at you like I trust you, but I don't want to do this, yeah, so there's a bunch to this is good.

02:12:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, when there were the wildfires here a few years ago, yeah, I, we had a go bag, but I was amazed at how little of like the photo albums I was. I didn't need them, I digitized them all. Yeah, that stuff's huge, right like so. And you know people in los angeles, thousands of people lost everything and including their photos.

02:12:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I hope they had them it's a horrible thing in 2025 to do for that to happen. I yeah this. I can't remember why this came up recently, but in 1987 I was living in Albuquerque, new Mexico, with my real, my paternal father and the house burned down my dad stupidly took the tip of the Christmas tree, threw it in the fire.

02:13:21
I don't know if you know this, but pine trees explode and the whole house went down right. When the firemen showed up they asked my father and the house is burning, it's sitting there in fire and they said is there anything important in there you have to have? And he says if you could grab my photos, that would be great. And he did. Yeah, I have a photo of these burned out photo albums on the ground on the driveway. We still have these photos. They're fine. I have pictures where some of them have like the burn curl at the top.

02:13:49
You know, like my grandfather in ireland, yeah, but they saved, yeah, and most of them are actually fine, right. So that was, you know, 40 years or 30, whatever, that is, 30, almost 40 years ago, 35, 40 years ago, whatever it was. Um, so I, it took me 30 years, but I, I finally took all my paper photos, digitized them and did what I did. So I described it, but I did that work. It's hard, you know, it takes a long time it's a real pain, but here's the thing.

02:14:14
So we I again I don't remember if I mentioned this last week, but with google in particular, but also microsoft and, to a much lesser degree, apple and sort of Amazon you can sign into sites online with that account. It's easy, right? My Google account's pretty secure in the sense that I have a passkey. It's seamless. It is the perfect combination of the best security and the best convenience you could possibly have for this kind of thing.

02:14:40
But it's still Google and if Google takes this thing away, which they just pretty much did and I got it back. But we've all heard these stories, so I'm going to try to decouple my sign-ins.

02:14:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's kind of like a fire right. That's worse than a fire Gone in seconds.

02:14:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so this is the thing I want people to think about a little bit. My primary google account, like I said, is a workspace account, which means I have a private, like a my own domain, throtcom. So if google when, if I wake up one day and nothing works and google's like sorry, you did something wrong or it doesn't matter, but you're gone, uh, I can redirect that domain and all my email based stuff will still still happen. Right, like you know, I might lose data and stuff, but I can get that back. If you have a Gmail account or a Microsoft whatever account, like Outlookcom, hotmailcom, whatever and they take that thing away from you, I get bad news for you.

02:15:32
You're not getting it back. It's not your name, it's not you, you don't own it. You may own the content in there, but you can have a fun time going to court to try to get that stuff back. But, um, as far as sign-ins go, if you're doing that single sign-on thing, uh, you want to be a little careful of that. Right back up everything. Yes, so someone says don't store the only backup of those photos in your home, right? I, of course no, I mean it's in right.

02:15:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so although I have a synology nest in my home that has a lot of that stuff, of course I? No, I mean it's in right, so you're getting Although I have a Synology NAS in my home that has a lot of that stuff.

02:16:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Of course I'm going to get to that. Actually, this is my end game. So I've had NASs over time. I'm on. My current NAS is way out of date and I'm going to get to that in a moment. But I went to Google to find I'm going to do a Google takeout of my YouTube content. This is something I've never backed up. I have thousands of videos up there.

02:16:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're not alone Paul. I would guess most people have never backed up.

02:16:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I never even thought about it. I thought about it now, so I'm going to back that up. I'm going to decouple all my signing with Google so that I can sign in with only the account. Good, like that. I'm going to start working. This is this is what I'm just going to be honest, I'm never going to finish this one, but ideally, what you could also use is a an email alias service like Mozilla office, one simple login. I'm a proton customer, so I get super login as part of that where you can create email aliases to. You know, sign it to do anything online, right? So I've done it for a few newsletter type things. I don't really think about it enough. This is something I'm going to try. I'm never going to get there, but I'm going to try to see if I can't move online accounts to an account that can be redirected at any time. So in that case, if you think about that, gmailcom, hotmailcom, whatever it is account if you're using an alias and you lose your gmail account, you'll be okay.

02:17:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You still have the email you may address. You may not have the email, but you have the address, but you'll be able to redirect it to another account, get it get. Oh, I do that all of my uh, all of my emails. I use fast mail but I own the domain. I own all those domains. So if I decided I don't want, to be fast.

02:17:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I want to be super, super clear. This is not like a.

02:17:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not going back to like physical media or you know whatever, but but but I print out every email I get and I have a stack of boxes in the garage. Does he? Did he do that? Well, this is a lot of time ago.

02:17:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
A lot of executives, a lot of paper.

02:17:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Will Hurst used to. Yeah, he'd have his secretary print out his email and then bring it to him. Yeah, and then he'd write the response on the email and give it back to the secretary and send it back and she'd type it yeah, yeah, Jeez okay. Well, that's pretty old school.

02:18:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
AI is doing that in about 10 seconds, so that's going to be nicely automated no-transcript one. The one thing I think most of us never thought to do, at least sometimes, was get rid of the context of the old thing. And they're sitting out there half protected not protected, I mean whatever so you want to be careful with that. That's a whole another story, but semi-related. I'm going to do something like that and this is like the consolidation thing, where I'm going to have one contacts list that I will back up and replicate and whatever, and as I switch between phones I will on. I'm talking like this is. But I believe the way I'm going to do this is I will, you know, import everything into iCloud and I will only use iCloud on the iPhone and then when I move over to Android again, I will delete that all and I will go over to Android and I will put it all in Google Contacts.

02:19:10
I'm going to. It's going to do this. So I'm going to see that's a. This is one it's kind of off to the side but it's related because it's you know, know, online identity stuff. But the big one for me is the nas. So I'm lucky in that I have a home in pennsylvania and a home here. Yeah, what I want to do is get a nas that will for both places, that will replicate with each other synologies will do that.

02:19:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so I have. I used to have a duplicate synology at the studio. Now I don't. I'm kind of thinking I don't have an off-site.

02:19:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah copy of that I mentioned I. This wasn't a complete list, but I have my personal and work archives. I have my photo collection for my entire life and beyond, cause it has some stuff from my parents, grandparents, whatever. I, the, the I don't know what to call this the master, whatever copy of those things is different for each one. But if this goes accordingly, I want that. The I don't this is not a good term but the, the main copy, the, the primary source, the canonical, non deprecated, penultimate, nice, okay, yep um I always love the word penultimate.

02:20:13
I know uh, because no one understands it and it's so wonderful, um, to be those ns, right? I will still have a copy of my photos in Google Photos.

02:20:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, but that's a perfect way to do it, because in fact the way I have my Synology set up is it copies but does not delete. So it will copy everything because it's huge right. So there's no reason to delete anything, so everything is copied over to it, and if I delete something somewhere, it doesn't matter, it's still on the Synology. I do have to get that replication set up, though with a second Synology somewhere.

02:20:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and this is where you know. Look, you're talking about geographical separation. You're also talking like I don't think it's smart to have two copies in Google or something.

02:21:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, depending on what it is. If I had a second home, that would be the perfect way to do it.

02:21:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I understand what that sounds like, but I'm lucky.

02:21:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You may not have a second home forever, though. Right, Listen, this is a small place. What are you going to do if you move to Mexico? Yeah, I don't know. I mean I don't know, I mean I, I would um, I don't know you know, you set up a thing with maybe me, a friend, and you my brother-in-law.

02:21:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah right, yep, something like that. It will be something like that. You know, back in the. So the old, the old school version of this was this I mean, I'm not going to get the time right, but you'll understand the age when I say this. I had I something happened. It was a data, was a data lesson. We get religion when we lose something, right? Yes, so I lost some data, whatever it was, and I remember going to my wife and saying listen, this is going to sound crazy, but bear with me FireWire based backup external drives which were, I think at the time, one terabyte, which in that day was maybe it wasn't even, but I think it is. I can almost come up with the name of the company, but it's like a. They were primary Mac based, but I actually got a FireWire card from my. I had a Windows server, but it was a blue circuit. Lecie, lecie, there were a thousand bucks a piece. A firewire card from my. I had a windows server, but it was a blue circuit. Let's see, no, we're blue.

02:22:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I think it was.

02:22:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let's see let's see, there were a thousand bucks a piece yeah, I had, I was I was explaining it to her like a child coming like I want to buy something, you know, and she literally cut me off and said just get it, just do it. I could tell you we need this. No, it was not great, that's supportive. It wasn't for fun stuff, it was like this is for our lives, like we have to get this, and what I would do is not every month Well, probably in the beginning every month, but after time it'd be like every three months, every whatever it was, I would just run a backup, bring it over to my parents' house I live in the same town back that they had, plug that in, run a backup, you know, and then I would just do this, I would just make, I would physically carry a disc it was, they were big and a heavy metal thing, right.

02:23:06
So it's sort of the modern version of that, you know, except now it's going to be automated and it will just happen automatically. But what, ideally? What I want is this thing to have an app on the phone that will download the photos, just like you know, google does and microsoft does whatever, and that will download the photos just like you know, google does and Microsoft does whatever, and that will be the primary place right.

02:23:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is such a common use case that Synology and, I imagine, all the other NAS companies also have apps that do exactly that. They will suck all the photos out of every device, including your mobile devices. They will, you know, back it up to the Synology, and then they have a program called hyper backup that will replicate your synology to the second synology. Oh yeah it's, just it's what it's, what it's set up to do. I mean, that's the number one reason people use a nas. Yep yeah, no it's so necessary.

02:23:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So look what it's a lot easier than it used to be.

02:23:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't have to buy that for a thousand bucks. I know well, that's just gonna this analogy. I'm not sure the nas will be? Yeah, it'll be expensive but it's okay, you know, drives in it.

02:24:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's okay. Whatever it's worth, it's gonna do it. So the next next wednesday, when I have completed all this work, no, um, this is gonna take the better part of the area bet in some cases. So this is gonna be. You know it's a big thing, but, like I, this, you know this is what happens. Something bad happens and you kind of sit back and think about it. I tried to. I threw the article about online accounts and signing with go. I just wanted to see what people said and I got some really good feedback from that and, um, that's the good thing is, because of who you are, you can document all this, write it up and people can see it well, that was the thing.

02:24:39
I actually wrote something to that effect. I said, look, in a lot of cases when I write something, I'm like, look, I, I know about this topic, like I'm, you know, whatever. And then there are other topics where I'm not the subject expert. So there were things I got into, like about a year ago or whatever were because microsoft added a feature about pass keys to windows 11. It caused me to go back. Right, I go down this rabbit hole and pretty soon I'm like this is how you protect your microsoft account, this is how you, you know, whatever. And so you, you kind of what you do you walk into it?

02:25:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah so in this case I'm like this is why people loved jerry purnell, yeah, why they love steve gibson. This is why they love you. It's because you're a real user and then, when you start learning something, you share it.

02:25:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I try not to put myself in that kind of rarefied company, but yes, I do. Well, I did for you. Jerry Purnell used to say I make these mistakes so you don't have to, and my response to that is, hey, that's beautiful, but I just make mistakes. And look, maybe if you can learn from me I'm a mess. Look at that idiot over there.

02:25:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't do that like that. You know I cut my teeth on jerry prinell. He was a columnist in bite magazine and, of course, a regular on twit when he was still alive great science fiction author, but that was why I loved him and a lot of what I ended up doing on tech tv, on the radio show and now on twit was inspired by that. Every man, I'm gonna do it and let's see what happens and i'll'll tell you about it.

02:25:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, this is what Jerry Purnell, before he passed, sadly made the case. I think, effectively he was kind of the first blogger.

02:26:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it was. I mean it was a magazine but yeah. Yeah, but that's the name of the column. Was Chaos Manor?

02:26:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
which will give you an idea I have.

02:26:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, this is, I don't know what you would call this place chaos, hovel, I don't know. Chaos, casa, chaos, casa, chaos. I love it. That's pretty good actually.

02:26:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Anyway, this is what I'm going to do, so we'll see what happens, but in the meantime, first thing I got to do is download this freaking videos and see what that looks like. What a nightmare, thanks.

02:26:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Google. As Jerry would say, you'll do that real soon.

02:26:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
now I'm going to start it. The second we stop recording the show actually. So, literally, I just got the email that I set it up already. I just haven't done it. Okay so, yeah, like 100 and something, two gigabyte files. Do the math, anyway. Okay, so there's that. Yeah, so that actually is all of that. So this is something I think it's going to come up throughout the year, so you can look forward or regret it or whatever I don't know or hate it or whatever it is. No, I can't wait.

02:27:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, I'll be following along with interest. Do you want to do an app of the week? I do.

02:27:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I wish I had a good one, but I don't of the week I do. I wish I had a good one but I don't. Um, someone says you would. Or brooke says you would never put the stylus of a galaxy note in backward.

02:27:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, I do it so you don't have to right, I used to have a tape deck.

02:27:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know tape decks like a tape which is rectangular. Cassette would go in the short version. The hole was the right they have a little ejector, right. So this one. It was the very strange it was, it was the width of the cassette. So I had this girlfriend she's trying to stick it in the wrong way and I said, no, you got to put it in backwards. And she put it in with the tape side out and pushed it in. Oh, and that was the last day we ever used that stereo. Oh, no, yeah.

02:27:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So Didn't marry that girl.

02:28:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Didn't work out, anyway, okay, yeah, epic. So actually I don't have an Epic, but there were three big browser updates this week.

02:28:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually, they're all pretty big in their own way. You and your browsers. You're making me crazy here, Paul, I know.

02:28:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm sorry. So last week Vilvaldi came out with 7.1 on desktop and it was a big update, big changes. They have their whole kind of front-end UI stuff. This week they did the Android, iOS versions. They're both, oddly, completely different. This is something I was confused by. There's a couple of features that are the same between the two mobile versions, but they're actually quite different. The one thing they do share with the desktop too, is the seamless sharing feature send tab to device feature. So now, between all of the Vivaldi versions, if you use multiple devices, you'll be able to share to yourself more easily, because you have no friends, you use Vivaldi.

02:28:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
At least you have Vivaldi At least you'll always have Vivaldi.

02:28:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We'll always have Vivaldi Firefox. They update every four weeks. It's hard to keep track of this, but 135 is kind of a big one, especially on desktop, so the mobile versions are small, especially in Android. It's nothing, it's bug fixes, whatever. There's a couple of actual functional improvements on iOS, but on desktop we're getting the previously announced AI chatbot in the sidebar feature which was available in Firefox Labs and beta et cetera, but now it's rolling out to everybody and this is that kind of.

02:29:25
they're not the only ones doing this, but they're giving you the opportunity to plug into different AIs, right. So they support Anthropic Cloud ChatGPT, gemini Hugging Chat, and I love this name it's the Mistral, it's called Le Chat.

02:29:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Le Chat Mistral. It's called Le Chat Le Chat Mistral. I love it. It's better because it's French. I think that means cat Anyway.

02:29:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're right.

02:29:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It does, doesn't it? I thought it Do the French call chat the Chat Noir.

02:29:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The Chat. My AI has taken the chat.

02:29:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you have to have an account with this to use it, or do they give you some free credits?

02:30:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, that I don't know. Actually, it probably varies by AI actually. So I assume these are the public-facing, you know, like the free versions of each I would think, and then you could sign, like if you have chat, gpt, you could sign in and get whatever benefits you get from that, because I pay for almost all of these at some point. I expect you this year to not do that at some point, right, like at some point it's gonna.

02:30:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, they all have different capabilities, so it's like I can't. I can't, just you know it's, that's like, like, like.

02:30:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Imagine a person because I'm gonna keep going back to the well, on the same exact example like you're, you're a writer, so you're like all right, so I'm going to write it in microsoft word, right, and it's going to do whatever corrections, I'm going to save it. I'm going to open it word perfect, because word perfect has a really good whatever grammar tree, like okay, and now I'm going to bring it over to like apple pages, be like all right, so that's well, it would be insane, but you're kind of doing it that's insane.

02:30:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, I have a folder full of ais and then I'm wearing a bracelet.

02:31:01
Well, this is another ai, this is b ai. I don't even know who this is and I have the plod note which, oh my god, I just can't. It's but it's kind of an occupational hazard, I mean. I no, I don't think, even if I didn't have to cover this. I like chat gpt for some things, I I like Claude for other things. Deep seek is fascinating. Perplexity I use for search, right. The funny thing about perplexity is I can choose within perplexity those models. So I mean, it's hard to narrow.

02:31:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like you have a meta AI inside of perplexity.

02:31:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, in fact, when I did the deep seek search about the Mexican voting changes, I did it in perplexity but I used deep seek okay I don't know, it's just crazy man.

02:31:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I hope by next wednesday I have a definitive answer on what this woman said today, but I right now have no idea well, if you had deep seek, the chinese know I will okay. Well, I do so, I'll get. I'll get to that anyway. Ask, there's a bike, there's a bunch of other stuff in uh, firefox 135 for desktop, so it's worth, you know, obviously, if you have it you're just gonna get firefox user.

02:32:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everybody should support firefox. We need yeah, uh, to have them. We don't want a monoculture. We need to have some competition among browsers, yeah so maybe you know this.

02:32:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This would be the type of thing you probably would know. I didn't write about this because it was I think it's Mac only in the beginning, but there's actually a new kind of open source, new browser thing where they're actually going to do a rendering engine from scratch. Have you heard about this? Oh no, all right, so maybe by next week I'll try to find this. I didn't. Okay, I was like, oh, this is really interesting. And I went through the whole thing and then at the very end it's like, well, are you going to do a windows version?

02:32:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
like yeah, eventually we the the problem is I, they're actually going to write it in swift for one thing which is kind of interesting, which is becoming more and more of a thing.

02:32:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, okay, so that was a useless story. I couldn't even tell you it was. So whatever, but that's how my brain I'll ask uh yeah, yeah, it's not, it's not arc and those guys. It's something completely different, um, oh, anyway. So, ladybird, that I think that's it. Yeah, that is it. Yeah, that's worth looking at, that's interesting.

02:33:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I asked ai and it told me so, ladybird, because I'll try it. Yeah, that's interesting, just what I need. You kill me, I can't. Every time I listen to the show, I'm start using a new browser. I mean, I want to stick with arc for as long as, as long as my intent is not for you to switch browsers, but I.

02:33:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But this is one of those things I actually do think about a lot and I don't know. I just I care about it. I can't explain it, I just kind of into this um, I just want one browser to rule them. I know, I know there's not well, it's like you, you said it. With AI, I mean, each one of them does something a little better.

02:33:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah it's kind of like the same, isn't it?

02:33:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I feel like browsers like that too. I always have at least three browsers on my computer. Really Well, I do, no, I do have, I do.

02:33:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, because I always use the default browser and then Firefox and usually arc you gotta yeah, I have this.

02:33:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
One is chrome edge opera.

02:34:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but I don't use them all because the because the tabs and the bookmarks are specific to that browser, so I don't want to jump around a lot. I know, I guess, if you think about all the apps I use that have browsers built in, don't, don't don't, even don't I have many, many browsers especially on a phone like the in-app browser thing, is so irritating to me.

02:34:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just commented on some again to my wife because I I can't bore anyone else when I'm alone with her.

02:34:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But and I'm sure she loves it.

02:34:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, this, it's tied to the story. From lunchtime I I was getting results in google in spanish and I was like, look, I can handle this, but I really want them in English and I've already configured this. Why is that not happening? And it's because I wasn't signed in, because it was an in-app browser, which means there's probably like 117 versions of Google.

02:34:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Chrome on this phone. That's true.

02:34:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Or whatever browser, probably Safari, or whatever it doesn't matter.

02:34:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, if you're on a iphone, the good news is it's all the same, it's all safari.

02:35:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, except that it's. It's the same rendering engine, it's not the same instance. Oh no, I think they just call no.

02:35:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I don't think they have a.

02:35:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not like electron, where they have built in the entire browser no, no, I right, but I mean as far as permissions go, and me being so that's true.

02:35:14
All the settings are unique, they're completely separate, yeah, which is freaking stupid. Anyhow, the third and most interesting of these browsers is a new browser from Opera called Opera Air, which many will immediately scoff at, but give it a second. So this is a. They describe it as a mindful browser. It's very peaceful, okay, and yes, and, and fair enough, there's a lot of features in here that have to do with mental health and mindfulness and stuff and whatever. Okay, so take a break and you know, you can meditate, and they have a binaural beats thing. That's soothing, whatever. Okay, but hold on one second.

02:35:56
The thing, the thing that makes this interesting to me, is that this browser is actually like the anti-opera browser, because it's also extremely minimalist. Yeah, so there's a lot I like about opera. I mentioned this a couple weeks ago. Like opera actually is kind of nice, and so this is like you might call. You might think of this as kind of like a light version of opera from a heavy ux perspective. So I'm actually kind of interested in this one. Like this looks, looks, it's pretty, it looks, it looks nice like it's.

02:36:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm downloading it right now and installing it. Thanks a bunch important your bookmarks, the rot. You'll be fine it's okay, let me see.

02:36:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Did my wife ever send me anything? Oh, my wife did send me a margarita recipe, if you would like oh, isn't that sweet of her.

02:36:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, let me, let me just give Richard his due, even though he has abandoned us. I know, let me give him a little pluggy wug for net or sorry, run as Radio, which is the show that he does at runasradiocom. And he would tell you oh, this week can I do it in a Richard style? I don't know if I can. Can you imitate Richard? No, this week we're going to interview In the news my good personal friend, carissa Koopmans, to talk about microsoft entra id protection, episode 970 run his radiocom what's messed up for me is I listen to well both of his podcasts, but I listen to run his radio probably more than I'm sorry.

02:37:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh dot net rocks more than run as radio.

02:37:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So literally, because you're done that developer.

02:37:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right yeah, so I'm literally listening to this podcast right now. It's like my current you know episode and it's about app migration. Um, it's, it's you know, it's something I actually really care about. That's the show.

02:37:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richard is with Carl Frank. The show Richard does with Carl Franklin Very good, and both are available at runnysradiocom. Now we're going to defer Richard's brown liquor pick. He did very kindly put it in here but we don't want to preempt it because he says he's going to use it next week. So let's talk margaritas, which is my wife's favorite beverage.

02:38:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, so I'm starting to run into a weird problem in mexico city with margaritas, because I don't typically like salt like, if you think about, just like actual salt.

02:38:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they really sometimes it's like the big salt crystals it's where they put pepper salt, so it's red yeah I don't like that but I've also.

02:38:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But I I go to some places where they actually have what I call it fancy salt, but it's like fine grain salt, it's multicolored salt and it's less I don't know what that flavor, but whatever that's less salty, I guess, less sharp tasting, and I actually kind of enjoy that quite a bit. But the bigger issue is that Mezcal has taken Mexico by storm in recent years. I was talking to a guy who owns a bar Well, actually it's a guy you know of because of the Salmon Cedar right, that guy. So he was saying five years ago you almost couldn't find Mezcal in Mexico City.

02:39:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Really. Yeah, it was not a lot of it.

02:39:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's all tequila.

02:39:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep.

02:39:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Which is a version of case. Mezcal is smoky because of the right. That's how they make it. They they burn the leaves on top of the right, the core of the plant. So I don't like smoky things. I've had more smoky drinks in the past two weeks that I've had in my entire life and it's making me crazy.

02:39:38
Yeah, and I just, we went out with friends last Friday or Saturday, I don't remember, it doesn't matter. But um, to a this bar that they love, that my wife and I were it's on our to-do list and um, they only have mezcal. They didn't. I'm like you must have some. No, it was all mezcal. So I was like I had a glass of water that we left and they all had drinks. You know, like I didn't get a drink. It was all mezcal. So I was like I had a glass of water and then we left and they all had drinks. You know, like I didn't get a drink there. It was weird.

02:40:04
So mezcal has become like it's a big thing. So, um, in Mexico city at least, uh, you actually have to ask. You want to be. I have to, cause I've found if I'll order a margarita and I'll get mezcal in it, not tequila, that doesn't make any sense to me, but um, and we make I've. I was never a big tequila fan, but since we've been coming here it's become kind of a thing I saw you a couple weeks ago in puerto vallarta sipping that I've had a few tequila.

02:40:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, yeah, yeah, tequila is yeah but you, you know, I'm looking at this recipe. This is how lisa likes it too. She likes the uh, the silver tequila. She doesn't want the riposado or the older, exactly yeah, it's better for this.

02:40:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It really is. And plus it's a clean looking drink, like it's. You know, clear drink, yeah, um, it's like a lot of uh cocktails where it's super simple. It's just three things. The measurements are very easy, you know two ounces of white or silver tequila, 1.5 ounces of triple sec and then some one ounce of lime juice.

02:41:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, so, uh, classic, um I'm not a big fan of salt. Like I said, don't use margarita mix, kids. Get yourself some. I can't margarita mix. Get some lime. It's a reconstituted margarita. No, no, but that's mostly how people make it yeah, my wife points.

02:41:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
She says that, yeah, mescalita is a drink. Mescalita is just a margarita with mezcal. But I often get mezcal when I order margaritas. Now I have to. This has become the latte of the tequila world, the margarita world, like a latte is a very specific thing, but no, it's like a margarita is yeah and then I get it and it's full of sugar.

02:41:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm like what the fuck, is this coffee please?

02:41:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yes, I so yeah, there you go.

02:41:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, uh, one thing lisa likes to do with her margaritas is get something called a top shelf margarita where they float a little bit of grand marnier on the top nice it's just more alcohol?

02:42:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think so I don't drink, so I don't go near it. But one drink you would love, by the way, if you get like a um, uh, what's that rough, god, I forgot the name of it the? Um shit, that's my wife, I can't know. I, I was my wife would know this instantaneously. Uh, a pina colada, right? Yes, so sugary, sweet, it's wonderful. Um, yes, if you you'll love it so much, you'll drink it a lot, and then your teeth will start hurting and you'll wonder what's going on. Um, one of the ways you can kind of gussy that up is to drip some aged rum on top of that thing, and then you know it's kind of a that sounds good.

02:42:46
Yeah, very similar to what you just described.

02:42:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who knew, liquor will float on liquor it's yeah. Paul, this has been fun. It's like the good old days. We'll get Richard back next week. He'll be back in British Columbia where the snow is settling.

02:43:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know you'll be in Mexico City his wife's photos were horrifying to me, but it was pretty too yeah, you know a lot of snow well, I'm sure there's snow in Macungie yeah, actually there is. So we got, we all got texted like trash delivery is going to be delayed a day aren't you glad? My wife walked in. She's something must have happened. And I'm like, yeah, who cares? Aren't you glad, Whatever?

02:43:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Paul Thurott is at thurottcom T-H-U-R-R-O-T-Tcom. He become a premium member and there's additional content. That's superb. Some of it makes its way into his books the Field Guide. Some of it makes it his its way into his books the field guide to windows 11, for instance, which is available leanpubcom, and windows everywhere, which is a an interesting kind of unique history of microsoft through the lens of its development frameworks, both available at leanpubcom. Richard campbell is at run as radiocom and we are right here here every Wednesday, 11 am pacific, 2 pm eastern, 1900 UTC. If you want to watch us, do it live. Obviously, you can download it at any time and listen whenever you want, but if you want to watch live, we're in discord for the club members. Also, youtube, twitch, xcom, tiktok, kick, linkedin and facebook eight different live streams that you can watch every wednesday. Uh, if you want to get the freshest version, yeah, I could not have rattled it's in my head.

02:44:29
It's burned in there now. They better not change anything, uh. After the fact, go to twittv slash ww. That's the windows weekly page. There's a link there to their youtube channel. A great way to share clips of the show with friends, which helps us because you promote the show a little bit and maybe helps your friend with something useful. After the fact, you can also subscribe in your favorite podcast client and get it automatically audio or video the minute it's ready, which will be a couple hours after the show ends. Thank you, paul. Have a great week. Enjoy a little pulque, a little taco. I'm very jealous. I see your pictures on instagram and go.

02:45:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're making me so hungry I'm like I pretty much just take pictures of sunsets and tequilas at this point.

02:45:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, which, in fact, I think you just invented the tequila sunrise, but I might be mistaken.

02:45:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This was not the future I saw for myself.

02:45:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Next week I will be actually in Tucson for the International Gem and Mineral Show. Lisa and I are going down for fun, but Mike Isard is going to fill in, so he'll be here next week.

02:45:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't even know what the event place is there. Where would this be?

02:45:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh, this thing is so big, it's not just in one place, it's, it takes over tucson. It's in dozens of venues. Oh, that's cool. Okay, that makes sense.

02:45:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, oh, this is the largest gem and mineral show of the year, um yeah, well, I would definitely try to find some good mexican food, whatever I think there are some good places.

02:46:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's where the chimichanga was born. I'm told yes, that's right. Yes, the chimichanga. So, I would make this better.

02:46:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have an idea Deep fry it and then put it in some huge sauce. Sure, Take a burrito, fry it. Deep fry it. I'm worried there's not enough calories in this. Is there some way we?

02:46:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
could. This is the 70th anniversary gem and mineral show. It's magic, so we're gonna have a lot of fun. It starts at the tucson convention center, but their venues all over town, so it's gonna be quite, quite fun. Thank you, paulie, have a great week, enjoy your life in mexico city and all of we. Will see you next week right here on Windows Weekly. Bye-bye.