Windows Weekly Episode 808 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word.
Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for Windows Weekly. The last show of 2022. Paul Farrat is here and his special guest, Richard Campbell, from Run As Radio and.net Rocks. Richard has lots to say about the year gone by and Microsoft and history. And of course, he's gonna have some brown liquor recommendations towards the end of the show. Paul's got a cocktail too. It's gonna be a Great Windows Weekly to wrap up the year. Stay here. Windows Weekly is next. Podcasts you love

TWiT Intro (00:00:31):
From people you trust, this is,

Leo Laporte (00:00:41):
They Ask is Windows Weekly with Paul Thro. Episode 8 0 8 recorded Wednesday, December 21st, 2022. Nuclear Conservation Windows Weekly is brought to you by MIMO Monitors and their award-winning small format displays, touchscreens and tablets. And don't forget to try unify for all your video conferencing needs. Visit unify meeting.com and enter the code WW 50 for 50% off a year's subscription. Or use the code ww by itself to get 25% off any of me mo's displays limited time offer. Thanks for listening to this show. As an ad supported network, we are always looking for new partners with products and services that will benefit our qualified audience. Are you ready to grow your business? Reach out to advertise at twit tv and launch your campaign. Now it's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, dozers and winners. The last show of 2022. And we are gonna celebrate. Paul Thurrott is here. Thro.Com. Hello Polly. Hello Leo. Little Polly Walnuts. Wouldn't wear the sweater.

Paul Thurrott (00:01:55):
I look at it. You can tell that's not gonna fit on my body. What do want, what am I a sausage? Well, I can't put that thing on.

Leo Laporte (00:02:00):
I stuffed myself into mine.

Paul Thurrott (00:02:03):
Look, I I'm sorry. I'm uncomfortable as it is. I gotta, you know, I gotta pick my battles.

Leo Laporte (00:02:08):
All right. Well, I I spent $82 on the son of a bitch, so I'm gonna wear it. <Laugh>, you got yours for free. You could burn it for all. Like here. Yep. Mike had bought one too. Micah Sergeant bought one. That's how much of a Windows Fanny is. And then he said he was disappointed cuz it's acrylic.

Paul Thurrott (00:02:25):
Wow. Wow. That sucks. I mean, the good news is it Burns Spectacular. Who's

Leo Laporte (00:02:30):
That? Who's that? That's a voice. I hear that. I know. That sounds so much like the guy on, on Runners Radio and.net. Is that Richard Campbell? Well, hello, hello to the, it's the DT tones of Mr. Richard Campbell from Runner's Radio. Hi. We're so glad to, to have you. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:02:47):
Really.

Leo Laporte (00:02:48):
I

Paul Thurrott (00:02:49):
Mean, last time I saw you I think we were on a cruise ship.

Leo Laporte (00:02:51):
Oh. And I had Covid <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:02:53):
Yeah. Lucky you.

Leo Laporte (00:02:55):
<Laugh>. I had to stay memory well away from everybody of

Paul Thurrott (00:02:59):
The way we used to be.

Leo Laporte (00:03:01):
I didn't, I don't know when I got Covid and I didn't know for sure it was Covid till later because we didn't have any tests. And I, the

Paul Thurrott (00:03:08):
Last thing we found out when I got home

Leo Laporte (00:03:09):
Yeah. I didn't want to go to the ship's doctor cuz I thought he's gonna, he's gonna throw

Paul Thurrott (00:03:12):
Me over. Oh. I wasn't order, I wasn't sick. My wife asked me to get tested cuz of our, our daughter. Oh. And I was like, okay. Cuz she had to go back to school. And I'm like, I feel fine. She's like, just do it. And I was like, oh, I'm, I'm positive. Well,

Leo Laporte (00:03:24):
Somehow I feel bad. I hope nobody got sick on that cruise. You didn't Right, Reggie? I

Paul Thurrott (00:03:29):
Wasn't, I wasn't sick.

Leo Laporte (00:03:30):
No.

Rich Campbell (00:03:30):
My, my wife got it. Oh, she did. You know, and I shared a bed, but I never tested positive through the whole thing. I

Leo Laporte (00:03:36):
I heard that somebody told me about 60 people on that entire ship of three or 4,000.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:43):
But I don't think it was, it wasn't really bad for most people. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:03:46):
And it was very mild. Cause everybody was vaccinated. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, fortunately it was. Yeah. I only had a sore throat. Lisa was sicker. She she, she's, she lost her sense of taste and smell, which is pretty

Paul Thurrott (00:03:57):
Bad. Oh, that's not good.

Leo Laporte (00:03:58):
And it didn't come back first like three months. No. And she's still tired, but I think she's mostly tired of me, to be honest.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:06):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:04:06):
To be frank. Maybe if I were frank, she wouldn't be tired of me. <Laugh>. but no, I'm Leo and we are gonna talk about Windows. It's the year ender.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:16):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:04:17):
Do you have planned anything, Paul, like a summary of all the best Microsoft stories of the year?

Paul Thurrott (00:04:25):
I don't know best, but these are the, I I I'm gonna call them from my perspective, the kind of, some of the top stories top Microsoft stories of good, bad indifference.

Leo Laporte (00:04:35):
Richard, I'm gonna make special lower third that incorporates both of you. Cuz it's a double box. Where is, I like to put the location. Where are you located? Are you in Vancouver, British Columbia? That is correct. All right. So I'm going to add that you guys talk amongst yourselves. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, this takes a little bit of effort.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:56):
Okay. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:04:57):
No, that's, that's clever stuff.

Leo Laporte (00:04:59):
<Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:01):
Yes. Obviously. Yes,

Leo Laporte (00:05:02):
It is. <Laugh> first

Paul Thurrott (00:05:04):
The top story. Yes. What's the, from my perspective,

Leo Laporte (00:05:07):
Windows 11 Yes.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:08):
Was Microsoft's incredibly successful acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which oh man. Went off without a hitch. And I'm so glad to finally have Call of Duty on Game Pass. Somebody please kill me. What do

Leo Laporte (00:05:19):
You think, what do you think the over, under is on this actually ever happening at this point?

Paul Thurrott (00:05:25):
Look, I I, I, the thing, this is what the news feed's like, now you read a story that says, oh, it's doomed. It's never gonna happen. The next one says, FTC has no case whatsoever. This thing's gonna get thrown out immediately. So, I don't know. I mean, I I've always felt that they should be able to acquire this company. I don't feel that it changes the competitive landscape and the slightest, especially when you consider the concessions they will have to make and now literally will have to make to Sony in particular. So, is it

Rich Campbell (00:05:53):
An incredibly good job of making it look like a big deal?

Paul Thurrott (00:05:57):
Yes. I know.

Rich Campbell (00:05:58):
It's like, without actually being a big deal,

Paul Thurrott (00:06:00):
It's like, Hey, Microsoft's like, Hey, we're buying a Activision blizzard. Here's why. And, and somebody says, yeah, but what about this other thing over here that we're, we care about? Yeah. Don't worry. We're not gonna do anything about that. Well, you know, and every regulatory body in the world is listening to them. It's yeah, it's very interesting. So, well,

Leo Laporte (00:06:14):
In Europe it does seem to always be the whiny Party is the one that gets the, the Winer, the Whiney Party. The whiny Party is the one that gets the legislation.

Paul Thurrott (00:06:25):
Well, now that you've outed my political affiliation, let me just say <laugh> you No,

Leo Laporte (00:06:28):
No. You're in the wino party. <Laugh>. It's a different party. <Laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (00:06:31):
You're in the party. No, it's the party. It's the same party. Leo <laugh>. Anyway yeah. I don't, I don't, I I, I think it was Leo who brought up maybe a week or two ago that the way this will fall apart if it does, is because it just takes too long. And that it's, it's gonna be a buyer's remorse issue. A year will go by 18 months, whatever the timeframe. And Microsoft's gonna say, you know what, 69 billion is not looking so good anymore. 

Rich Campbell (00:07:00):
No. That, you know, they could, they could push back on that. And it's also about how much money's around. Cuz the Amy Hood's been really tight with cash this year. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:07:08):
Like Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:07:09):
It was a big case for pushing back on that. Yeah. And Bobby Kotex gone nowhere.

Leo Laporte (00:07:13):
Like he's, well, this whole thing was his, this was all his idea. This he's mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, he said, I'm gonna get the hell outta Dodge before I Yeah. You know, get sued.

Paul Thurrott (00:07:22):
That's

Leo Laporte (00:07:23):
Right. He's, he's, he was dumping it. But Yeah. I wonder. So yeah, maybe they, they could lower the price. This could be a material adverse event in the sense that Microsoft might have to shed some, using big words might have to shed some of the assets of sure. Of Activision in order to do the acquisition. I, the only I see this happen, you know, like if you wanted to buy a TV station in a mid-size market, let's say lower JI Township, Pennsylvania. Yep.

Paul Thurrott (00:07:50):
Well's have a big market. Yes. I go on.

Leo Laporte (00:07:53):
You might have to divest yourself of a newspaper or tour or a radio station there. Yes.

Paul Thurrott (00:07:58):
All let's, what is, what century is this story from the oil Barrons of the 1920s? Whatcha are you talking about radio stations?

Leo Laporte (00:08:06):
I

Paul Thurrott (00:08:06):
Don't know. TV stations, newspapers. What the hell

Leo Laporte (00:08:09):
Is this? It used to be in the old days. In the old days, they would do that. <Laugh>. Yeah. This case, it's a question. It is it, the FTCs complaint, which I did finally read, seems to be entirely about the idea that Microsoft might keep not just call of Duty, but things like World of Warcraft from as exclusives. That's right. And

Rich Campbell (00:08:29):
That's, that's Microsoft Never does. Only Sony does that. That's

Leo Laporte (00:08:33):
Sony. Does it like

Paul Thurrott (00:08:34):
Crazy. Sony Sony, the, the company with the richest history of keeping their games off of other platforms and Yeah. Denying cross play between platforms Yes. Is complaining at Microsoft. Yeah. They might do something bad. You know, you never know. You never, you never know. So if Fresh

Rich Campbell (00:08:49):
Were the, we're doing our best to try and teach 'em how to,

Paul Thurrott (00:08:51):
What

Leo Laporte (00:08:51):
Exactly the media impact, of course is it delays this at least till August of next year. That's when the administrative judge well will rule. He could throw it out. He could the administrative judge. Sure. It's unlikely. Cuz they usually just go along with the ftc. But he could throw it out. And, and if he doesn't throw it out, then they'll appeal to the, the actual courts. But that's gonna take months again. I mean, it could be years. How much

Paul Thurrott (00:09:18):
Don't think it goes years? Don't,

Leo Laporte (00:09:19):
I don't How much appetite for delayed is Microsoft

Paul Thurrott (00:09:21):
Hack? I don't think it does. I don't think it exists. So

Leo Laporte (00:09:25):
We'll, you just turn around and buy ea instead.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:28):
<Laugh>. Geez. Well, okay, by the way, this precedent for that, because remember, Microsoft wanted to buy DoubleClick, and then they picked up a company no one had ever heard of. Instead <laugh>, you know, what's the distant number two in this market? Yeah. You know

Leo Laporte (00:09:40):
Which they wrote off as a 6 billion lost later. Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:44):
What was that company? It wasn't Overture. It was, it

Leo Laporte (00:09:46):
Wasn't. Oh, okay.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:48):
I can't

Leo Laporte (00:09:49):
Remember the name of it wasn't a buy. It also reminds me of when they bid 21 billion for Yahoo <laugh>. Sure, sure. And and lost that bit and then went, whew. That was a close one.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:59):
Whew. Well, yeah, so I, right. I mean, I, well in Activision's favor, they are coming off of a blockbuster year with the new Call of Duty, which is done incredibly well. You know, maybe I'm not saying it's gonna be worth more in a year, but I don't know. I don't know that it's, I don't know. I, I just don't know.

Leo Laporte (00:10:18):
So is it, but over is the question, I guess

Paul Thurrott (00:10:20):
We don't know. Can't, you know, that's the thing. Microsoft wanted to conclude this within its fiscal year that ends at the end of June next year. August is only a couple of extra months. And by the way the FTC or their United States is not the only regulatory mm-hmm. <Affirmative> agency. They need to aqu Patrick Delante says it was the the ad company. Aqu Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:10:41):
Quant. Yeah. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:10:42):
Yeah, yeah. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Thank you. You know, they have to deal with Europe. They have to deal with South Korea. They have to deal with China, by the way. We know, by the way. But, you know, Brazil said yes. And I, I don't understand how that's not the President, but don't we always do what Brazil says?

Rich Campbell (00:10:58):
Obviously nothing <laugh>. And, you know, and there's win points for all of this for Microsoft too. Right. Because Yeah. All of these game games, especially things like World, the Warcraft, there's various complaints by different government entities about how they lock in children, how they do upselling and so forth. Sure. There's these, there's a concession game play to be

Leo Laporte (00:11:19):
Made. Oh, interesting. Get them on board. You could say no more loot boxes. Yeah. Dipo IOR is the most appallingly. That's their mobile version of Dilo. You

Paul Thurrott (00:11:29):
Should just call it Loot Box 2022. You

Leo Laporte (00:11:32):
Can't, you know, I mean, people can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Rich Campbell (00:11:36):
Well, and their fans booed the game when they announced it. Yeah. Right. Like, that's at, at their conference. That's impressive. Like you, how

Paul Thurrott (00:11:44):
Much you're gonna try hard your own market.

Leo Laporte (00:11:46):
<Laugh>, you know what? I play it. I love it. Because I don't care if I don't get, you know, the Silver Armor and all that crap. It's still the, the Game Diablo, and then of course Diablo four's coming out. And that is gonna be a hot title. I think. So there's a lot, there's money ahead. Is, does Poppy, is Bobby Kotick gone? Or was he waiting for this? No, he's

Paul Thurrott (00:12:07):
Still there. Yes. No, he's waiting for this. God, that's, he's

Rich Campbell (00:12:10):
Waiting for his golden parachute. Right. What's my That's

Leo Laporte (00:12:13):
Right. Look like. That's right.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:14):
Yep. He's waiting for immunity is what he's waiting for. Right. <laugh> probably. Yeah. This is, this is like, yeah. I mean, it's crazy.

Leo Laporte (00:12:20):
Well, his lawsuit, the lawsuits will continue a a pace.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:25):
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:12:26):
It's a, you know, I, I kind of applaud Lena Khan, her notion that we shouldn't let these companies get so big. So, but this is, this to me seems like the, the wrong case to pursue. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:38):
Right. That, that was my sense.

Rich Campbell (00:12:40):
The argument is that Microsoft is the kinder, gentle, or tech giant. Like Right. When you've got a toxic culture. Microsoft's worked really hard at being the positive culture. And so it's like, Hey, we can inoculate this toxic bro culture with our goodness, and maybe everything will be better. I mean,

Leo Laporte (00:12:58):
Well, but Richard, we know that's a lie. Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:01):
I was gonna say the, the other, the, well, so one of the other stories involves, you know, bill Gates and yeah. Alex Kipman. And you could you know, it's, it's like the old Daily show joke. They, there was a joke interview with Cole, who at the time was the chancellor of Germany and has said, you know, you're, you're going after a religious group again, which was Scientology. I mean, isn't that a little weird? Giving your history? And he said, you know, Greg, it's like riding a bike. <Laugh>. And, you know, and I, I, you know, the idea was like, who has more experience?

Leo Laporte (00:13:29):
Holy cow. Persecuting religious minorities. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:32):
Who

Leo Laporte (00:13:33):
Would've I? Holy cow.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:34):
Well, I mean, Microsoft could say, look, we have a rich history here, and we are right now literally doing the right thing about this. That's true. So that's true. You know, maybe they,

Leo Laporte (00:13:41):
You could say, spin it that way. We know how to take care of this now, now is the time. You know, we're just gonna sweep it all clean.

Rich Campbell (00:13:48):
Well, and, and Kipman is gone. And Gates has been That's right. Put in a box by all accounts. Like That's right. Microsoft's is

Paul Thurrott (00:13:54):
Trying to do Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:13:55):
Again, they're trying to do the right thing in theory. Yeah. Right. And Bobby Kotick is still there.

Leo Laporte (00:14:01):
Yes. That's

Paul Thurrott (00:14:02):
Like a note, like a tick,

Leo Laporte (00:14:03):
Like a tick. <Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:14:05):
You know,

Leo Laporte (00:14:06):
The other thing we spent a lot of time talking about in 2022 was Microsoft Teams. Microsoft was very good at keeping teams in the headlines by dribbling out features. No one wanted every company. Well,

Paul Thurrott (00:14:18):
Well, and team. And, and also features that people did want. But I, I, I think the central thing about Teams is that when you look at Microsoft's history and the, the creation of platforms, you know, windows, obviously Windows Server, obviously Azure now office back in the day, these are platforms. I mean, teams is Microsoft's most recent platform, and it's hugely successful. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's a, it, it, it has an app engine and an app store and an app economy. And

Rich Campbell (00:14:43):
Well, I would argue the best measure of teams is successful. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, there's now a phishing strike based on teams links. So <laugh>, the best bad guys are now making emails that look like teams. They're forgotten how

Paul Thurrott (00:14:55):
You did it. Hackers are targeting teams. Oh,

Rich Campbell (00:14:57):
We win. Yeah. You know, you've made it right. Yeah, exactly. So now you're now an attack vector for, for malware. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:15:04):
So yeah, it's Teams is unwieldy. I I wish I'd liked it more only because it would be an infinite supply of things to write about it. It is every month there are dozens and dozens now of new features that are added to teams. It's insane. And you know, it's five years old. It started with, you know, very humbly Right. As, and actually Bill Gates played a role in this. Remember there was a debate internally, do we just buy Slack or do we create our own try that we have, we have everything we need here. Just do it. Yeah. You know,

Rich Campbell (00:15:38):
And what I really appreciate about our teams is I have eight cores, and I'd like to have at least one of them occupied all the time. <Laugh>. It's does that,

Paul Thurrott (00:15:45):
It's nice when you see that. Well, so if thermometer

Rich Campbell (00:15:48):
All the way up to the top every once

Paul Thurrott (00:15:49):
In a while, Richard, obviously a Microsoft guy you, you're on camera like this all the time. So you use Zoom, you use teams, use whatever else,

Rich Campbell (00:15:58):
Lots of teams.

Paul Thurrott (00:15:58):
How do you feel about teams?

Rich Campbell (00:16:01):
You know,

Paul Thurrott (00:16:02):
<Laugh> that, that pause was

Rich Campbell (00:16:04):
The fun part is so that the term I use these days is tenant iis.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:09):
Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:16:09):
It's not that just that the software is bad, it's that the authentication strategy is horrifying. So the biggest question you have when I'm running teams is who am I

Paul Thurrott (00:16:19):
<Laugh>? Yep. That's

Rich Campbell (00:16:20):
Right. It's hard to tell. What does that mean? Who am I, what do you mean?

Paul Thurrott (00:16:22):
What am I, what is this existential crisis?

Rich Campbell (00:16:26):
It's like an sometimes I get invites to teams that the only way to actually access that invite Yeah. Is the web client. Okay. Like if I actually look,

Paul Thurrott (00:16:35):
Is that way you can sign in with something else or whatever. Yeah. Right.

Rich Campbell (00:16:38):
Or, but although it just automatically signs in, like it doesn't tell me anything. It just goes, oh, this'll work. The, the client won't work at all. But they, but yeah, sometimes if you open up in a browser, maybe I have to force it to brave or force it to Chrome to do that. Yeah. But that will work. But

Paul Thurrott (00:16:51):
I think there was a, a little bit of a rush to get this thing out the door where if they were a little more thoughtful about it, they could have more easily pulled in things like your Skype history and contacts and kind of just made that just work. And that's the way software should be. Right. It should just be seamless and just kind of work. 

Rich Campbell (00:17:09):
They, that history of abandoning VoIP stacks that Microsoft is Oh, storied and diverse <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:17:15):
Yes. Yep. That's right. That's right. No, that's absolutely right.

Rich Campbell (00:17:19):
And I miss you link. Actually, I don't, <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:17:22):
I don't even remember. I miss you. MSN Messenger. I mean, listen I or Windows Messenger back in the day, then Windows Live Messenger and whatever. But I, we, Brad and I do a teams call every morning at nine. So five days a week, and I would say at least three days every week, one of us has a teams induced problem that is some audio video device not correctly configured despite the fact that no one has changed anything on their computers. We use this stuff every day. And I, it just, I'm, you know, not an expert, but I don't understand why there isn't a software control that says, listen, if this device is connected, always use it. Always, always, always. And that's one thing, by the way, that Zoom does very, very well. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And, you know, people in the Microsoft space are freaked out a little bit because the pandemic happened at the time when Microsoft had basically ignored and abandoned Skype. Right. In favor of teams pushing it forward. And oh, you know, zoom got ahead because Microsoft was, you know, not on the ball. Not, no, I think, I think Zoom did a good job. They allowed people to create meetings without just, you know, setting up an account. You know, they let people just get on and use it. And

Rich Campbell (00:18:30):
Microsoft and it went, it ran amuck, but if it hadn't run am Muck, it never would've succeeded. Like you, you, that's right. You gotta let the puppy run. But sometimes the puppy barbs like just sort of

Leo Laporte (00:18:39):
Reality

Paul Thurrott (00:18:39):
<Laugh>. Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:18:40):
Yep. Is there a puppy pad for a wipe Solutions <laugh>? You should be. Do you do, so you're saying you do ring zero on teams? Not on, not on something else. You and Brad, what is, what is

Paul Thurrott (00:18:55):
This? Oh, I'm sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. First Ring Daily. I'm sorry. First ring Daily. Yeah. Ring Zero. Yeah. We, we use, yeah, we use Teams. Okay. Which is why the quality is so terrible. But

Leo Laporte (00:19:02):
They said that, oh, Paul always has trouble with his audio. And I thought, oh, you know, it must be a normal thing with Zoom Paul, but it's not it's teams. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (00:19:10):
No, the big thing is my video quality. In fact, I just got a detailed email from someone who says, I don't know why you look blue and Brad looks normal. And I said, it's because Brad's recording it with Teams <laugh>, you know, and I, I, and I sent him

Leo Laporte (00:19:19):
You here

Paul Thurrott (00:19:20):
Actually too. Well, okay. But the, but the video quality you see here is a hundred times better than what it looks like on that show. Yeah. And you know, and I'm not, I'm dumbing down this thing, this is a 4K camera. I'm probably just doing seven 20 p or whatever here, but

Leo Laporte (00:19:33):
But to be fair, teams isn't designed to do podcasts. I mean, it's,

Paul Thurrott (00:19:37):
No, no. Why would it be able to record two people talking for 10 minutes? Well,

Leo Laporte (00:19:40):
I have to say's Zoom. We've, we've tried 'em all. Zoom ends up being the best choice for uss Right. For

Paul Thurrott (00:19:45):
Video. I think that's the important. Do

Leo Laporte (00:19:46):
You, do you use Zoom, Richard, for your shows?

Rich Campbell (00:19:49):
Sometimes we use Teams, but I don't record video. Ah, you know, there, and there was the Skype NDI version right at the moment. We Skype,

Leo Laporte (00:19:55):
We used that for a while. Relevant. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:19:58):
Right. And that was pretty cool until the biggest issue is the guests. Right. And so, yeah. You can't tell what they, when I said Skype and the guy and the folks are like, what? Skype? Okay, then you gotta move on.

Leo Laporte (00:20:08):
That's why Zoom has been good, actually. And, you know, everybody knows what it is. With, with all due respect to teams. Everybody knows what Zoom is. And even if you're a big Microsoft, you know, house, you're gonna have Zoom on the machine as well.

Rich Campbell (00:20:23):
Yeah. I generally use Teams cuz I'm talking to Microsoft people and that's just the lowest friction That's right. For everybody else's Zoom

Leo Laporte (00:20:31):
I use. The only thing I used teams for was talking to the radio people, the, the iHeart people. And I quit that job. So yeah, <laugh>, I don't have to worry about that anymore. I had a hole, you know, I had the, I had Okta and I had the Microsoft Authenticator and I had Outlook email, and I had, you know, the whole Outlook work, you know, I don't workday and what, what was that weird thing you used to talk about, which is the HR happy Viva or

Paul Thurrott (00:20:58):
Whatever. Yeah. Viva, Microsoft, Viva,

Leo Laporte (00:20:59):
Yeah. All of that. And I just shed that. Like, it just came Sure. Sloughed off me.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:04):
Well, aside from the fact that you're saving yourself $192 a month, I mean, that must feel Well,

Leo Laporte (00:21:09):
They paid for it. I didn't pay for it. Oh,

Paul Thurrott (00:21:10):
They did? Okay. Well, someone was paying a lot of money for that

Leo Laporte (00:21:12):
Stuff. Yeah. They were a big Microsoft task by Heart Radio still is, I presume. But yeah, which is funny because the training we always had to do was in Flash. So <laugh> should have been Silver Light Could have been, but no.

Rich Campbell (00:21:29):
Yeah, probably not.

Leo Laporte (00:21:30):
Probably not so much. Games in Teams. Is that something that we're all excited about? No. Okay. No,

Paul Thurrott (00:21:38):
I don't understand.

Rich Campbell (00:21:39):
I'm not even excited about emojis in teams for

Leo Laporte (00:21:42):
Crying

Paul Thurrott (00:21:42):
<Laugh>. I know. I don't understand emojis.

Leo Laporte (00:21:43):
I understand. But why games? Why, why would they put that in there?

Rich Campbell (00:21:47):
Well, it's part of the normal cycle of a social media product evolving. Right, right. You have to go down the various layers of hell. Yeah. And one of those layers ring is social, right? Yeah. Until you go through that tier, you're not really gonna evolve.

Leo Laporte (00:22:01):
Wow. Wow. Is next. Is it email is next. Isn't that what the Zinski's

Paul Thurrott (00:22:07):
Law is? Email is the final frontier, right? Yeah. If you could get your Outlook email inside of teams, outlook usage would probably drop by like 75%. Right, right. That day. Right? Yeah. And by the way, I I, you know, I think there's an imperative at Microsoft to have people live in teams as much as they can.

Leo Laporte (00:22:24):
Well, there, there you, there you go. Oh, you could do it.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:27):
I don't understand. I'm surprised they haven't. To me that was the low hanging fruit.

Leo Laporte (00:22:30):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:30):
You know

Leo Laporte (00:22:32):
What, who is, who is, is the enemy? Is its, at first I thought it was Slack, right? Slack was the right kind of dominant. Now I'm thinking they're go, they're aiming more like a Discord. They're Discord teachers.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:43):
No, there's, well, there's no, right. I mean, there's no one solution that maps to teams. I think they go after different companies in different spaces.

Leo Laporte (00:22:50):
So that's the way to do it though, right? Make yourself unique, the unique collection of features.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:55):
Well, in the beginning, clearly it was Slack. That was the point. We're gonna do chat based collaboration.

Leo Laporte (00:22:59):
That's what the Slack folks thought. They were very upset.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:02):
Yeah. Well that's, I mean, that seemed like, yeah, okay. But I, I, you know, but Microsoft under, you know what one kind of byproduct of the whole Microsoft experience is that there's so many users, they're so diverse, they all have different needs and wants. They do things in different ways. There's gonna, there's a generation of people who just aren't comfortable. Although I think it's starting to change, you know, with chat. They want, they wanna do email. That's how they want to collaborate. That's just what they're used to is a new, is a younger group of people coming up with the world who expect this kind of a tool. Although honestly, they'd probably be more familiar with Slack or some other sort of millennial type solution. But Microsoft is, isn't this what meeting,

Rich Campbell (00:23:37):
This is what the loop was about, right? Like Loop was That's right. Trying to say, Hey, you love your email team

Paul Thurrott (00:23:41):
Email. That's exactly what,

Rich Campbell (00:23:42):
Here's a way to hook it to email Hook in our collaboration and email. Do you, do you use Loop? Richard? Nobody uses Loop. Nobody use Mythical for Profit. Ok. Okay. Yeah. I, I've, I've done the run as about it. Stephen Rose was fairly eloquent. It's kind of a mythical product. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:57):
Well, I think the, I think this is a hard computer science problem, right? So in other words, the, the promise of Loop is so multifold, it's hard to even describe, but you can have loop components in other compatible apps, including teams. But you could also have a Loop app where you create, where you have, you could create content in it, like a sort of an Ocean style app. And that is, that's interesting to me because it, it allows Microsoft to move forward with something more modern, but it also respects the past. I kind of feel like

Rich Campbell (00:24:24):
Reminds me of object linking and embedding. This is Olay.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:27):
Exactly. Baby <laugh>. It's exactly that. It's exactly that. And, but I think, you know, where it, but it's a modern Olay and

Leo Laporte (00:24:34):
I look, I was excited about it. I I think it's a great idea. I, in fact,

Paul Thurrott (00:24:38):
That's assuming they can pull it off. It's, that's my

Rich Campbell (00:24:40):
Disappointment is that it's not out yet. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:42):
Right. So I think, I think Loop Maps to the traditional office suite where you have these traditional apps that are, you know, worded PowerPoint, Excel, et cetera, where that's how people created, we say creating content today, it's not what we said in the nineties, but, you know, whatever, they create documents and spread whatever it's, and loop is kind of a more modern take on that, but it still respects that past. And I feel like teams does that for collaboration. It's it, it doesn't have email yet, but it, but it's a, you know, it's a more modern approach to two or more people on a team collaborating together, having meetings, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, loop and if Loop Works Loop, there's no reason why Loop shouldn't be as big as teams. And those two things together are kind of hand in hand how that part of the business goes forward.

Rich Campbell (00:25:24):
Yeah. I don't even know if the product's important than the thinking is the idea of stop trying to get people to give up the, the sovereign app they're comfortable in. Just make sure that app interfaces where, where you want them to help.

Paul Thurrott (00:25:35):
Yeah. But that's how you do it. In other words, you say, look, we, we do have this new thing. I don't like new things, but No, no, no, no. You're, your thing works <laugh>. You know, you're, you're, you're an Excel guy. You, you're, you're PowerPoint, it's still there. And you're like, oh, okay, that's cool. I, I think that's,

Rich Campbell (00:25:47):
That was the argument. I'm not even gonna tell you about the new thing. I'm just gonna show you this spreadsheet that's in your email, <laugh>, the fact that it happens to tie to the team stuff, whatever,

Paul Thurrott (00:25:56):
Or, look, you never use Loop, but you use Outlook and you get an Excel thing in this, in, in an email, and it's a loop component. And suddenly you're collaborating with people. Yeah. As far as you're concerned. You just got a new feature for Outlook, or except, or however you

Rich Campbell (00:26:08):
Wanna look at it. You didn't change. Nothing changed for you really.

Paul Thurrott (00:26:10):
Yeah, that's right.

Rich Campbell (00:26:11):
And that's smart. I really,

Paul Thurrott (00:26:12):
It's very, it's smart. Exactly. That That's exactly right.

Rich Campbell (00:26:15):
Except for that part where it doesn't work. It's awesome.

Paul Thurrott (00:26:17):
If it could just work, it would be a great idea. I <laugh>

Rich Campbell (00:26:20):
Bar is too high.

Paul Thurrott (00:26:22):
<Laugh>. It's like, if we took away this list of bugs, would our product be perfect? Yeah, no, I would totally <laugh>. Yeah. Yep. I don't know why we haven't done that yet, but yeah, we're getting there. So hopefully 2023 will be the, the year of Loop. We thought 2022 was gonna be the year of Loop,

Leo Laporte (00:26:40):
But let's

Rich Campbell (00:26:41):
Let's talk Windows.

Paul Thurrott (00:26:42):
What do you say? Yeah, I have a lot to say about Windows. Leo, we haven't talked about Windows yet. So I'm writing a book, <laugh>, I know I haven't talked about this too much, but you're always writing a book, Paul, always, this requires me to use multiple computers and repeat things and make sure things are correct and on and on it goes. And I've seen something really disturbing since the release of Windows 10, version 20 22, 22 H two. Sorry, because that was the version I was targeting for the book. And, and the first thing Microsoft did was say, so yeah, we're gonna release that in October, but then we're gonna release this other thing in November. Then that will be all of it. Like, that will be the complete set. That those two things together will be 22 H two. You're like, okay, fine. Oh, and by the way, we're also going to have these things that we call moments internally, which even though we just said we're only gonna have one feature up to a year, <laugh>, just bear with me for a second.

(00:27:32):
We're actually gonna have a thousand features of a year. It's, it's, we we're just gonna put 'em out whenever we want. It's gonna be hilarious. You're gonna really enjoy it. And you're like, okay, that's depressing. But for purposes of keeping the book up to date, I thought this was gonna be an interesting test of how I kind of componentize the book down a little bit more, make it easier on myself. Let's see if I can make this work. But here's how it's really gone down. Microsoft has this Windows Insider, a program, which we might talk about a little bit more later, that no longer maps to versions of Windows. They test features in ways that don't make sense. Sometimes features appear first in the beta channel, which should be the second stage. Sometimes it's first in Dev. Those two things don't map to a version of Windows.

(00:28:10):
You never know where something's gonna appear. So when the 22 H two update occurred, the second update, the one in November, the November update, they added new features like they promised. They also added new features they didn't tell anybody about, like, for example, the right, well, I'm sorry, they, they were testing this in the program, but they never said, Hey, this is gonna be in the release. So right click on the task bar and get to task manager. They added that. But what I noticed over the past two months was, I don't have that on every one of my computers, even though they're all in the same build number. There's a weird inconsistency to it. Then suddenly one day, this new version of the search icon appeared on the, on the task bar, but not on all my computers. In fact, I think I was one of the first people to mention this.

(00:28:51):
If you go back into the show notes, which you can't access Leo. So you have to take my word for that. Some month or two ago, I, I put a screenshot of it and I said, Hey, on one of my computers, I've got this kind of horri, you know, like a rectangular search pill thing. Like it's not an icon anymore. It's a search on it. And they lost the mouse over capability. And then it's a kind of rolled out sl. They've still never talked about it. They, they are literally testing this feature right now in the insider program. They're still testing it. It's out in stable I, what's going on. It's not on every one. My computers,

Rich Campbell (00:29:25):
Somebody read a book on feature switches and they, and just started putting in the pipeline without telling any

Paul Thurrott (00:29:31):
Of the management. And I think they're literally beta testing with the public, which I have a huge problem with. But the latest one is last week, I think it was all of a, a sudden out of nowhere, and this was never tested in the insider program as a new version of the, one of the OneDrive app on Windows 11. Once again, I don't have it on all my computers. It has two new features, both of which are excellent. So the def, the existing version of OneDrive will allow you to back up your documents, desktop and pictures folders to the cloud. And then every computer you have, those folders are redirected. You get your content everywhere. It's a, it's a good idea. You could turn it off if you don't want it. You know, blah, blah, blah, whatever. The new version lets you also do that with the music and picture music and videos folders.

(00:30:12):
Okay, cool. Also, there's a notifications setting interface where you can choose which types of notifications to get from OneDrive. Previously it was all and nothing. Okay, that's cool. I have three different versions of this app on my computers now. So I have some compu all in the same build. Some computers have the old version, 100%. Some versions have the new version, 100%. And some, and some have the new version. But when you click on that folder backup thing I was talking about, you get the old interface with only three choices, not five. So here we are, 2022 is come coming crashing to an end. We're only two months since 22 H two supposedly released. And this is what Windows is right now. And I gotta tell you, it not just because I'm writing a book, but because I have O C D or whatever, and I can't stand this kind of inconsistency, this kind of thing is unacceptable in what I'll call stable. Cause we don't really have a name for it. Like my mother, my sister, my brother, my friends who aren't technical or whatever, should not have different versions of things. And, and they don't know any better. But the problem is when something goes wrong and they have to talk to someone from help, whether it's official or just a family member or friend, the, the, the, the notion that we have different things, I, I, I don't understand. I don't understand how that even happens. But that's where we are.

Rich Campbell (00:31:31):
It's definitely gonna keep an IT person away from a Windows 11 for enterprise if they don't, aren't certain what they're gonna need to support.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:39):
That's right. And there's no documentation anywhere that says, Hey, this is what happens when you do this. This is the KB that makes this happen 100% of the time. Oh, and by the way, that OneDrive thing, they've never even announced it. They've never even discussed it publicly. It just appeared there was a one leak, I think, I dunno if it was a screenshot or something, like over the summer, someone had a photo of what it was gonna look like, but they never tested it with anybody not outside of Microsoft. And it just appeared. There was no one, like I said, no announcement. It's just one day someone clicked on it and said, what the, what is this? This looks different. Why <laugh>? You know,

Leo Laporte (00:32:14):
We never did explain it, did we? <Laugh> never figured it out. No. It's just a mystery. Crazy. It's a mystery. I don't have that search pill anymore. I turned it off. So. Right. I don't participate in the mystery any longer, although I

Paul Thurrott (00:32:32):
Have to. Cause I'm working on this book and it's

Leo Laporte (00:32:34):
Freaking me up. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:32:36):
Yeah. I had to switch. I I had one laptop I used for most screenshots, and I had to switch to a different one because that one, there are two of those three things. It doesn't have the, what I consider to be the latest version. And I, I just like, I need things to be up to date. Like, I, it's just my life, so.

Leo Laporte (00:32:53):
Yep. Yep. You, you know, you're gonna redo all the screenshots before this is over. That's true, isn't it? That's

Paul Thurrott (00:32:59):
Actually, well, if this, if this search thing is what they go with, yes. I'm gonna have to redo a, a ton of screenshots. I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about how, what's the most efficient way to do that. Like, I'll just do a, like a copy replace thing for that part of the shot, you know? But it's gonna be a lot of work, you know? I mean, I knew what I was doing when I started, but

Leo Laporte (00:33:20):
You knew what you were getting into. Has that, that's happened before. I've heard every, everybody who's ever written a computer book has had to redo

Paul Thurrott (00:33:26):
Screenshots. Well, last week, last weekend, my deal was, okay, this OneDrive thing happened. I'm gonna show how agile I can be. I'm gonna update the book to support this new version of OneDrive. I spent the entire two days working on this because of those three different version problems trying to figure out, I don't even know where this update comes from. That's the other problem. There's no indication what makes, like, what makes the change. I have one computer that has the beginning of the interface in one window. And then you click beyond that and it's just the old one again, actually. So there's a fourth one. There's a, that's a different case. I, it's the

Leo Laporte (00:33:59):
Whole,

Paul Thurrott (00:33:59):
This, this stuff makes me nuts. And I, I, it's hard for people like me who are insane to <laugh> just to deal with this rationally. It makes no sense. And I it's one look the inside, we'll talk about the insider program. Maybe there's a whole set of problems going on there. At least you can say, look, these are technical people. They know what they're do, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But this is just out in the world, and I don't think it's fair to do this to people.

Leo Laporte (00:34:24):
So, yeah. Yeah. All right. What else? Be fine. What else? You need a drink? Stay on Windows 10. You'll be fine. Yeah, you'll

Paul Thurrott (00:34:34):
Be fine. Oh, except I just went, I just, so for the first time since July, 2021, I brought up a Windows 10 machine. I gotta say I hated it. <Laugh>, right? Oh, really? Windows. Oh, that's funny. Yeah. Windows 10 looks dated. Do

Leo Laporte (00:34:49):
You think people can tell, though, besides you, I mean, not

Paul Thurrott (00:34:51):
I can. Yes. I really do. So there, there's an aesthetic to Windows 10 that was predicated on this notion that those apps are gonna run on phones. They're gonna run on xboxs, they're gonna run on HoloLens. So they have this kind of flat look, and they're, they're designed to be resized. If you take a, a Windows, they're in Windows 11 still. But you take a Windows app, don, you stretch it to like a phone shape. It looks like a phone app. That, that's, that was the point of those apps. And and look, I I, that's been the dream, you know, forever. I, I get it. But today, bec the phone. I mean sat and Nadella killed Windows phone the same year Windows 10 came out. So this thing was obsolete the second it came out the door, and then they ran with it for seven or eight more years.

(00:35:35):
I mean, and we'll do so again for another two or three, whatever. It's five, right? Yeah. So yeah, that is a, that's a very dated look. And you know, windows 11 Yes. Is sort of the Windows Mobile 6.5 of Windows. It's, it's a spit shine right on the front. You scratch the surface, you can see the ugliness underneath. But honestly, every really do like the look for all my complaints. And I can go to town on Windows 11, obviously, but I really do prefer it. And I do like, I like the look, it looks modern and, I don't know, friendly professional. I don't know what to say. It, it doesn't, it's not as, it doesn't look, windows 10 looks dated to me. That's the only way I can say it.

Rich Campbell (00:36:14):
Well, and and you're not even pointing at individual features. Like, that's what an average person would do, is just say, this looks wrong. Yeah. Right. The same way you're opening up a, a win three, one screenshot. You're like, that looks ridiculous.

Paul Thurrott (00:36:26):
The thing about Windows, it doesn't matter what version you're using, and it doesn't matter how far back in time you go, windows has always been a bulia base of different versions. And in Windows 11, today we have Windows 10 ui, windows eight ui. We have Windows Vista ui. We have some u like little font things and stupid things that date back to the nineties. You sure? It's not

Leo Laporte (00:36:45):
A little, it's not a you're sure it's Abuja Bass <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:36:49):
It's it's a rich tapestry. <Laugh> of it's a, it's an archeological dig. I don't know how you wanna say it,

Leo Laporte (00:36:55):
But it's Midden. Yes. All right. Moving on. <Laugh>. Yes, please. Actually, we, we don't have to move on from Windows though, cuz mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, let's, let's talk about,

Paul Thurrott (00:37:08):
This

Leo Laporte (00:37:08):
Was the design. The design,

Paul Thurrott (00:37:11):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:37:12):
Should I play this video?

Paul Thurrott (00:37:14):
Yeah. yeah. Is cringeworthy worthy is, to me, this was the, the nadier for Windows 11 this year. It was the, we got to meet the people who designed it and we realized instantly, <laugh>, they've never, they've never used this product and couldn't care less about the, the history of those people who have,

Leo Laporte (00:37:30):
I'm sure you've seen this, Richard. Let me just, lemme just, yeah. This is, lemme just play insane.

Designer 1 (00:37:34):
The process of designing is informed by research. There's a challenge of making sense of it.

 Designer 2 (00:37:39):
You come into a design problem, there's always a blind spot

Designer 3 (00:37:43):
There. It's really easy to design something that you like, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it will work well for everyone.

Designer 4 (00:37:49):
For us, we need to listen

Leo Laporte (00:37:51):
More. We're TV and books, then

Designer 4 (00:37:52):
Just do <laugh>. There are a lot of questions that we were asking should start be left aligned or a center line. Should there be a search box that start? Could be an all apps list is start gonna feel familiar.

Leo Laporte (00:38:03):
<Laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (00:38:03):
Let's, let's, he's like, I'm having

Leo Laporte (00:38:05):
Kfc. That's what he was just thinking about. Here's a search again, the TV has been stolen. Your

Designer 5 (00:38:10):
Documents, here's your apps.

Designer 4 (00:38:11):
We laid those on the table and it was really cool to see what all these different people were. Both, you

Leo Laporte (00:38:16):
Think they went to Pens House, said pens, can we take the TV and the books

Designer 5 (00:38:20):
Out? Other people

Designer 4 (00:38:20):
Wavered on that. And they were all,

Paul Thurrott (00:38:22):
I think what they said was, Hey, we all use Max

Leo Laporte (00:38:25):
Menu

Designer 5 (00:38:26):
Files and applications

Leo Laporte (00:38:28):
To, I like how they pretend they're cutting out design pieces of paper and sticking in line and moving.

Designer 4 (00:38:32):
So that gave us a lot of confidence that

Rich Campbell (00:38:34):
Why would you use technology design technology?

Leo Laporte (00:38:37):
Yeah. Yeah. Don't use technology.

Paul Thurrott (00:38:39):
I think that one woman was blinking to send us a code <laugh>, you know, she's like, she's like, please get me outta here. Outta here, <laugh>. And there's

Rich Campbell (00:38:47):
A part of that. It makes me, I immediately thought, wow, I'm holding it wrong. <Laugh>. You know, like, just right back

Paul Thurrott (00:38:54):
To, I mean,

Leo Laporte (00:38:55):
Although

Paul Thurrott (00:38:55):
Paper please everyone. So we thought we would upset everyone. I'd

Leo Laporte (00:38:59):
Like a cut paper version of Windows. They ended up using cut paper for the wallpaper. But let's do the whole thing that way.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:04):
Yep,

Leo Laporte (00:39:05):
Yep.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:05):
That's cuz that's how you design. Is this

Leo Laporte (00:39:07):
Well this is real though. These are designers, right? These are probably the,

Paul Thurrott (00:39:10):
Obviously those are designers. Of course they are.

Leo Laporte (00:39:13):
I didn't pick them for their good

Paul Thurrott (00:39:14):
Looks. That's, listen, the one thing I believe from o came out of Microsoft this year is that video. That's exactly what they did. <Laugh>. You know, like they walk around, they're like, I wonder about things like, what are you doing it? There's

Rich Campbell (00:39:28):
Get my left-handed scissors. I need to cut paper

Paul Thurrott (00:39:31):
It'ss like Hitler walking around with his arm behind his back. So you don't see it's shaking <laugh>. Yeah. I'm trying to figure out what the next start menu is gonna look like. Eh, you know, like what, what,

Leo Laporte (00:39:39):
Have you ever, have you guys ever done a corporate offsite with the folks from ido or any design thinking group? I have I was on a board and actually one of the board members was an ido principal. And so they come out, there's a person's doing drawings, sketching. There's this whole process of design thinking. Sure. And yes, Paul, there is a little <laugh> hand waving and oh,

Paul Thurrott (00:40:09):
You know, I'm sorry. I did do, I did want, I did a thing like this where they asked us, we sat down at the meeting Yeah. And the woman said, all right, now I want everyone to take out a piece of paper and draw a pig. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:40:19):
Yeah, yeah. That's the

Paul Thurrott (00:40:20):
Beginning. We all looked at each other like, what? And I still have this picture of the pig on my refrigerator that Brad. Brad, because it looks like a <laugh> looks like an elemental hell beast or something. It doesn't look anything like a pig. But it, Paul

Leo Laporte (00:40:30):
Design thinking is a non-linear iterative process.

Paul Thurrott (00:40:32):
I've never seen anyone so incapable of drawing a simple object <laugh>, but

Leo Laporte (00:40:37):
Used to understand pigs.

Paul Thurrott (00:40:39):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:40:41):
Emphasis, I dunno what we learned that day. That other, that Brad can't draw a pig. Yeah. Yeah. I idea eight. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:40:45):
I idea eight.

Paul Thurrott (00:40:47):
No idea is dumb. Oh, I disagree. This pig idea is really dumb.

Rich Campbell (00:40:51):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:40:53):
Yep. I'm, you know, it's a, I'm sure it's a useful process in a lot of regards, but it's, it's kind of like agile in the, in programming where process suddenly becomes so elaborate and important.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:06):
This is okay, but this is the move fast break things nonsense. Like Microsoft showed Windows 11 to the world in July and shipped it in October. There was no time to get feedback on anything that start menu of they shipped in the beginning that needed a year of feedback. That would've been a very different looking thing if they'd actually

Rich Campbell (00:41:23):
Using another year of development. Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:25):
I just like, yeah, sure. Yep. They just coughed that thing out like a hairball, you know, like it's just, and it then, then they're like, oh yeah, sure you are. I I just <laugh>. I, I don't know. Whatever. Yeah. Stay, stay in the white room, honey. You're, you're fine. <Laugh>. It's just, it's it's crazy.

Leo Laporte (00:41:42):
Yeah. I don't know. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:45):
We thought we can't please everyone, so we said screw

Leo Laporte (00:41:47):
It. We're not please anyone please ourselves.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:50):
There's no reason to please anybody. You know,

Leo Laporte (00:41:54):
That's the whole is it Daniel Kahneman? That's the whole premise of so-called rational thinking is you, you, you decide to do something cuz of your gut, cuz your emotion. And then the whole process of rational thinking is rationalizing. Like, let me let up why I'm gonna do what I'm gonna do anyway.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:13):
That's fine. When you do it for yourself. Yeah. You're doing this for a product that billions of people are gonna use. And by the way, they have decades of expectations. Yeah. You know, there's certain things you just can't do. Like remove the start button from Windows idiot or you know, and that they did in Windows eight. Or you know, like think like put this in front of people to see what they say.

Leo Laporte (00:42:36):
But I, it's, I mean there it's kind of a no win. I'm, I don't know. I'm trying to come up with justifications. I mean, I, people are gonna be unhappy with anything you change. Change

Paul Thurrott (00:42:47):
Is always bad, bad. Look, I look abstractly. You can say, look, windows is con I just said it's an archeological dig of, you know, decades of blah, blah, blah, whatever. Okay, fine. So one of the goals we might have for the UI is we're gonna simplify this thing. Yes. Okay, good. The problem is everyone has an expectation for this one feature that they use. And as you simplify, you have to take things away. Yeah. So yes, you're, you're gonna break things, you're gonna hurt people's feelings. You're gonna, you know, yes. That's gonna happen. I still think there needs to be a feedback loop, right. You have to have an understanding of what the most important features are, the ones that are used by the most people. And also I think you have to have an understanding of the types of users because there are different, like, there may be a small number of people who do something like, I'll just make up something, put the task bar on a different part of the screen. But who are those people? Are they admins remote, remote into a remote server somewhere? And it's very important that that thing works and there's only like six of 'em. But you know what? They really need that feature. You need to pay attention to that kind of stuff. Yeah, that's a good one. Context matters, right? Yeah. so I just, I feel like this thing was just vomited out and I like we said, you know, I think another year would've been nice across the board.

Rich Campbell (00:43:52):
Well the, I mean the, the product contradicts their statements, right? It's like we, we wanted to leave it flexible and so forth, except that we took all these things the way that lots of people counted on. So clearly made design decisions. Yeah. Well, saying we didn't make design

Paul Thurrott (00:44:06):
Decisions because we are so bad at what we do. We created this new layout that has two major sections with pinned icons and recommended. And if you get, if you would delete all of the icons and pinned because you only wanna have recommended what are you left with a giant apti space where pinned used to be, that's not used by recommended. Cuz our software is so inept that it doesn't auto layout a, a, a technology that Microsoft invented in Longhorn 20 years ago. Like this is, it's just insane. And you know, it's a year later. So I've gotten kind of used to it <laugh>. So I forget about my or my original rage over this thing, but thank you for reminding me, you know, the

Rich Campbell (00:44:46):
Restrained version is

Paul Thurrott (00:44:47):
What I'm hearing. Yeah. The, the, the, the star menu is pretty, whether it's functional or not, that's up to the, you know, subjective. But objectively it is functionally regressive because there's all kinds of problems with it. And it's not just they took stuff away. It's the new stuff doesn't work. Right. It doesn't work well and, you know, okay. I'm, I'm sorry. I could <laugh> I could do this all day. I'm just a, I'm a, I'm a pest dispenser of complaints. Anyway,

Leo Laporte (00:45:16):
<Laugh>. And now you know why J what? Chris Capella's not on this show this week. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:45:21):
<Laugh>. Yes. What you don't know is why my wife is still around

Leo Laporte (00:45:24):
32 years ago. <Laugh> she's staying for the liquor, I think. Yeah. all right. Let's see. That was, how about Monarch Project Monarch? This was one of Mary Jo's favorite topics

Paul Thurrott (00:45:37):
This year. Yeah. This, this was, I'm curious what Richard thinks about this, because I think the dream, well, my dream would be Outlook. This disappears. I think it's a cancer, but I do un I know, I know <laugh>, I understand there were millions and millions of people love it and rely on it and whatever. And it, the, the problem with Outlook is that it was born right before internet, email, email mattered <laugh>, right? It was, yeah. And it still kind of suffers from that weirdness. It's still got that kind mappy infused flavor to it or whatever. It's grown like teams has into a a gigantic thing. But yeah,

Rich Campbell (00:46:10):
My concern is that the underlying D L L s the interface to Windows, especially on the networking. Yeah. Like that guy has not only retired, he's died and nobody knows how to work on

Paul Thurrott (00:46:18):
Yeah. And nobody anymore. Exactly. Right.

Rich Campbell (00:46:20):
And it's, and it's fundamental.

Paul Thurrott (00:46:21):
It may literally be it's P code or something and no one knows how to use it. And it's if and all you look if you're a Microsoft guy and you're using Microsoft email, it's probably fantastic. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But I would do the plan for a weekend. If you're gonna do this try to connect Gmail to it. Just just have fun doing that. It it takes a long time and

Rich Campbell (00:46:40):
Nothing, a re recording a machine can't fix really.

Paul Thurrott (00:46:43):
<Laugh>. Yes. Well, the

Rich Campbell (00:46:45):
Way I described Outlook on the way I described Outlook on Nell Rocks was 6 64 threads. None of them are for you,

Leo Laporte (00:46:52):
<Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:46:53):
Yes. Right. That's right.

Leo Laporte (00:46:55):
Why is, why is by CBU at zero and all the other ones are Red Hot

Paul Thurrott (00:47:00):
<Laugh>. That's good. That's, that's,

Leo Laporte (00:47:02):
We're sorting somebody else's

Paul Thurrott (00:47:03):
Email now. Oh, you thought now you thought your browser was taking up all your resources. Let me give you an idea. Fire Republic.

Leo Laporte (00:47:09):
I'm gonna miss doing the radio show. One of the things I love telling people was never look at your activity monitor. Never, never.

Rich Campbell (00:47:16):
It'll just make you sad.

Leo Laporte (00:47:17):
It's just gonna make you sad. You don't need to know unless your computer is,

Paul Thurrott (00:47:20):
When I would say to people

Leo Laporte (00:47:21):
Burning hot, you don't need to know.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:23):
I would just say look, your computer has resources like RAM and processor. Yeah. And

Leo Laporte (00:47:28):
Should you use them?

Paul Thurrott (00:47:29):
You should. They should be used. Yes. You know, you don't hold onto it. It, it, it's, it's, it's, you don't, longest

Leo Laporte (00:47:33):
Time it's getting calls saying, you know, my, my RAM is a hundred percent used. It's like, yeah, that's good. You bought it. You wanna use it <laugh>. Mm-Hmm. But, but my CCP use it a hundred percent.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:44):
Yeah. I used to play, I used to play Call of Duty with Mark, and he would like, he would get the nuke or something, some huge weapon that would end the game <laugh>. And I'd be like, why aren't you using it? He's like, I'm, I'm saving it. Saving it for what? You could win the war right now. <Laugh>, <laugh>. Whatcha are you doing? Whatcha is saving it?

Leo Laporte (00:47:59):
<Laugh>. Okay. So I just wanna write this down. Is your advice for life. Do not save your nukes. Do

Paul Thurrott (00:48:06):
Not save do not save Paul. Yeah, exactly. Follow, follow my, my advice. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, the dream for Outlook is that, well, my, like I said, my dream is something else, but the dream for Outlook is that they replace it with a you know, a modern product, right? And so, single modern

Leo Laporte (00:48:22):
Product, right? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:48:24):
No, like a new Outlook. A newly architected, it's everywhere. Something. Yeah. So this, so for a couple years, almost right, a year, year, year and a half, we had this, we heard about this thing one Outlook or Project Monarch, you know? Yeah. Here it comes. Right? There were little leaks and that we got a little nervous about the leaks, and then it kind of arrived and we realized this is just Outlook on the web, but can, like an app, like it's literally Outlook on the web, which is fine, <laugh>, right? But I, I think we thought this was gonna be like a new architecture. We're gonna build everything off of this new thing. We're gonna have new clients everywhere. It will be more efficient, it will be beautiful and modern, and we are not getting that thing. So I think also this is the 117th product to be named Outlook, which is gonna make things a little confusing. 

Leo Laporte (00:49:14):
This is the King of Outlooks. The

Paul Thurrott (00:49:16):
Model. Yeah. This is the, the outlook. We're gonna call it Outlook 2023. So yeah, I mean, it's fine. I, it doesn't solve the problem of how do we get the old school guys off of Outlook who rely on that one feature that they need. 

Rich Campbell (00:49:32):
This is taking the Outlook online version, making an ex an, an electron app out of it. Yeah. So that it looks like it has an icon and you have a unified code base. I mean, the upside of this is now Outlook is also contributing to all of your processes and threads be consumed by Electron. And as opposed to the old outlook that did it itself,

Paul Thurrott (00:49:50):
<Laugh>, we, we've figured out a way <laugh> to make it just as inefficient. You thought it couldn't be done.

Rich Campbell (00:49:56):
No. But is it a common stack now? Now, you know, now when your browser engine crashes, it's gonna take Outlook with it too.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:03):
I do. I you probably know more about this than I do, but I, I, there there was a point where Microsoft Office add-in development was kind of up in the air, which direction they were gonna go. And they went with web technology, basically. And I do, and this, so you can write a, an add-in for Outlook that works on the the desktop client, the web. I think that might be it. Maybe on MO mobile. I'm not sure about mobile. Probably on mobile. And and that's, you know, that's actually an understandable goal. It's a good idea. And maybe this was part of that, you know that thinking like we just sped this thing on the web and

Rich Campbell (00:50:34):
Sure. But this is all of Office, right. Office was trying to wait yeah. Trying to find a way to get away from V B A and the solution was JavaScript

Paul Thurrott (00:50:44):
<Laugh>. Yep. Let's, we'll solve that problem. Ooh, <laugh>. Yikes. JavaScript a band-aid for all of our problems. If all the

Rich Campbell (00:50:53):
Assembly language of the web

Paul Thurrott (00:50:55):
<Laugh>. Yes. Well, except assembly language makes sense. And Well,

Leo Laporte (00:50:59):
And there is a web assembly language, ironically. Sure. But yeah, sure. Javascript is the lingua franca of the

Rich Campbell (00:51:06):
Web. Yes.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:07):
Right,

Rich Campbell (00:51:07):
Right. Well, and, and, and in the end, it's because Office felt they needed to compete with Google Docs. Right. And, and did. So, like it's, I'm not saying necessarily it was a bad thing either. It's a funny thing, <laugh>, but mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you know, cuz we still can't get away from VBA hid al al Alt F 12. Watch it reappear.

Leo Laporte (00:51:22):
Is it really? Wow. Still

Paul Thurrott (00:51:24):
There? So I still, yeah, it is still there, but I feel like it doesn't, didn't it, I think it was this year, they, they turned off automatic V b a macro,

Leo Laporte (00:51:34):
But they did turn that off. But isn't,

Paul Thurrott (00:51:36):
I think,

Leo Laporte (00:51:37):
Isn't it deprecated by now? <Laugh>? I'm just,

Paul Thurrott (00:51:39):
Oh my God. Of course.

Leo Laporte (00:51:40):
Ask guys for a friend.

Rich Campbell (00:51:41):
It's off by default.

Leo Laporte (00:51:43):
Okay.

Rich Campbell (00:51:43):
Right. It's

Paul Thurrott (00:51:44):
Good.

Leo Laporte (00:51:44):
Turn it on. Yeah, you could turn it on. Oh, no. And I, you there's a lot of there

Rich Campbell (00:51:48):
Organizations Yeah. They're utterly

Paul Thurrott (00:51:49):
Rely on it.

Leo Laporte (00:51:50):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's law offices and all sorts of Yeah, it's, yeah. It's the same reason a can.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:55):
I liked Visual Basic. I thought, you know, visual, the VB script, I thought was at the, I loved it a million years ago. But you know, you could do a s p and V with Phoebe's script. I thought it was fantastic.

Leo Laporte (00:52:05):
It, I

Rich Campbell (00:52:06):
Mean, for the time,

Leo Laporte (00:52:07):
I will defend you, you have a script. It kind of makes sense that Microsoft would choose something that's cross-platform and web centric. Mm-Hmm. And ultimately, I would think Microsoft's figuring everything's gonna be a web app, right?

Rich Campbell (00:52:20):
Yeah. I think it's just the office team so far.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:23):
Yeah. It is interesting. There was that little brief period of time, this is over 20 years ago, where Microsoft was gonna turn the UI in Windows over to web technology. That did not go over well,

Leo Laporte (00:52:36):
It's fast enough, isn't it? Or No,

Paul Thurrott (00:52:39):
I think it might be today. 

Leo Laporte (00:52:42):
Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:52:42):
I don't think it was in 1998. No. You know

Leo Laporte (00:52:45):
And there were also, you know, because of, you know, like x there were issues mm-hmm. <Affirmative> with security with X.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:51):
What are you think? Again, I think ActiveX ActiveX.

Leo Laporte (00:52:53):
Activex. Not ActiveX. Activex.

Rich Campbell (00:52:55):
And in the nineties the web solution was ActiveX. Yeah. Which is, let's not use JavaScript. Let's just make stuff run on the web. Well,

Paul Thurrott (00:53:01):
Let's, let's, let's, we have this, we have this thing called com. It's too big and heavy for the web. So what do we do? Take away all the security controls. Oh, yeah. No, that did it. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:53:09):
Any rando in on the internet run programs on your computer?

Paul Thurrott (00:53:12):
Why not? Let me tell you though, you know what though? Really powerful, right? <Laugh>? Well,

Leo Laporte (00:53:17):
Yeah. Yeah. Some of the best malware was made of it. But it is JavaScript more secure inherently

Rich Campbell (00:53:24):
I would presume there's a, at least a

Paul Thurrott (00:53:26):
Security column. Well, there's a, there's a type script in there for cleaner. It's great for functional code. It's kind of type safe yeah. Javascript.

Rich Campbell (00:53:34):
And when you're running Electron or any of the, or web assembly or so forth, you're running the Java Java contacts. Yeah. Which means you're protected. Yeah. Right. You're running Oh, it's Sandbox because it's a con in a context. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that brings us to Maui.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:48):
Yay. Yeah. So I, I was curious about Richard's I, I should just say, so Richard co-hosts dot net Rocks, which I love mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And one, one of my favorite episodes every year, well, you probably might do it more than once a year, but I feel like at the end of the year you talk to Billy Hollis about UX and that kind of stuff. And this year you guys touched on Maui, which I thought was really interesting. And I, yeah, I, I've been following Maui very closely because as you know, better than anybody, there, there are these classic Windows app platforms like WinForms and W P F that are, are actually being updated again in some way, but they're not obviously top mind in the Microsoft space. But they are still, in many ways the best way to create kind of classic desktop apps. But you don't really get that modern stuff right. You're not getting win UI at all or easily anyway. And that stuff's all on top of the WIN app sdk, which is the new version of uwp, basically. So now we have mo Well, and they're,

Rich Campbell (00:54:40):
And they're not cross client, right? Like, that's the Right, the big issue mm-hmm. If you're gonna build a desktop app, and let's face it, lots of people aren't. Right? Like yeah, your typical enterprise is building web apps for a reason. It's going to run on all the devices, and you're always gonna

Paul Thurrott (00:54:57):
Actually's current. That's a really interesting point. So in other words, if you, you said, look, I want something that's gonna be a desktop class app. I do want it to be cross-platform. Cause I'm not an idiot. I want people to access it on a Mac or whatever. Linux. maybe the web is a better approach and we have Blazer and whatever else to, well,

Rich Campbell (00:55:14):
You also don't have an install, right? You're the browser's already on the machine. So you have a security context. You are always fetching the latest version. Like all of the things you hated about desktop apps are result well enough by the web app. Yeah. And, and specifically the Progressive web app,

Paul Thurrott (00:55:31):
If you go back to Windows eight, and then follow the progression through today with Windows 11, you have this you know, metro originally, whatever it is, UW P win app SDK kind of thing. And the idea was these are mobile apps. These are bringing the best of mobile to this desktop platform. And by nature, those apps aren't, you know, they're not fully featured desktop apps with lot, lots of command commands everywhere in the form of icons and blah, blah, blah. They're, they're lighter by design. You know, they go to sleep automatically in the background if you're not using 'em, all that kind of stuff, which is all completely laudable. But the problem was, it wasn't not originally cross-platform. Right. And then they, they went cross platform within the Microsoft stack, right. With uwp. But now we have Maui, and Maui is a way to reach, you know, Mac and Android and iOS. But I mean, is that forever going to be, they're just gonna be mobile? Like we're not, I'm no one's gonna write like a, I don't know a word, a Microsoft Word type app in Maui, right? Like, these are by nature always gonna be mobile apps, right? Like, or how

Rich Campbell (00:56:34):
Do you see Well, basically, because that is the subset. Well, the T Yeah. Maui is the manifestation of SAML reunification, right? I mean Yep. The reality is the za I thought

Paul Thurrott (00:56:44):
You were gonna say Zamarin. I'm sorry. Zamarin. Zael not Zamarin. So you should explain what that means.

Rich Campbell (00:56:49):
So, you know, going Z Zael comes out into the wild as W P F Windows Presentation Foundation in 2006. Right? Right. Having been cut loose from what would become Vista, you'd now get stuffed into.net. Right. And nobody at Microsoft uses it. It's basically an abandon <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:10):
Which, which is terrible because WFF was, you know, complicated,

Rich Campbell (00:57:15):
Pretty powerful. And our, and our friend Billy Hollis was the one guy who jumped in and actually made apps with a, pretty much right away to the point where I remember being called by team members of W P F saying, Hey, we're looking for some case studies, and like, you guys don't know who Billy is. Billy knows your product better than you do. You should go talk to, to him. That's the fir and the first product that Microsoft actually implemented with

Paul Thurrott (00:57:38):
Say, visual, don't you care, don't say Visual Studio

Rich Campbell (00:57:41):
20.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:43):
I was gonna say, because that that was like 10 years later. Well,

Rich Campbell (00:57:48):
No, four. It was four

Paul Thurrott (00:57:49):
Also. Well, 10 after they announced it or whatever, you know. Yeah. Okay. But anyway, but, but is still, to this day, the only major Microsoft app based, at least partially on W P F. Yeah. In

Rich Campbell (00:57:59):
San, it probably should have been. I mean, if Bill had been in charge back then, and he wasn't, they, he would've ordered office to use it the same way he That's right. Ordered office to use Active Acts and calm.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:09):
Yep. And you would've had apps that could scale well with the D D P I or the resolution, whatever it is, of the screen. And, and as you resize them, it would've done all that stuff. This was the, the dream of the Longhorn era was this set of app capabilities that were frankly were like incredibly exciting, you know? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and then never went anywhere.

Rich Campbell (00:58:32):
No. And, and the reality of course, is that it fragmented when, when we get to win eight, they, now, there's a big push to get SAML back into the operating system where it was supposed to be in the first place. But we

Paul Thurrott (00:58:43):
Don't with Net.

Rich Campbell (00:58:44):
Not with net. And so they implement a version of SAML that is.net free. And then you also have W P F, you also have Silver Light, which is different again. That's right. And you also have wind phone, which is different again.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:59):
That's right.

Rich Campbell (00:59:00):
So there's four or five flavors of SAML running outside of Microsoft. Now, this is also true, the.net framework,

Paul Thurrott (00:59:05):
Well then this is out in the world, is Samin third party is using zael right from the beginning,

Rich Campbell (00:59:10):
Eventually gets to Samin forms and, and is now trying Build standard. That's right. Right. But understand that the.net standard with.net framework was about aligning Microsoft to a common version of.net. They had fragmented.net internally.

Paul Thurrott (00:59:24):
And do you remember when.net standard appeared

Rich Campbell (00:59:29):
Maybe in, in, in the post win eight timeframe?

Paul Thurrott (00:59:33):
Okay. Yep. Okay. I,

Rich Campbell (00:59:35):
I don't remember. So as, as.net standards started to succeed and actually unify the versions, they said we should do a SAML standard. That's how they originally announced it was, you know, how we did.net standard? Well, now we're gonna do SAML standard.

Paul Thurrott (00:59:47):
So now we should just explain what ZL is. Right? So <laugh>, saml, the XML like language for describing a user interface, sort of the sort of as HTML is used on the web, it's kind of the building block of a ui. Right?

Rich Campbell (01:00:02):
Well, and, and to be clear, and was developed by the IE team, right? They ship i e six in 2001 with a, and it comes out round XP timeframe. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And then they don't make another browser for a long time. Right. Not until like 2007. Yeah. And where, where'd those guys go? They were building SAML under bill's orders. Right. I mean, that became, that's right. The code named Avalon.

Paul Thurrott (01:00:27):
Right. Right. And why So Bill wanted this. Why

Rich Campbell (01:00:31):
He wanted a, he wanted a better language than than html. And he thought he believed in xml.

Paul Thurrott (01:00:35):
It would, yeah. This was, yeah. Classic embrace and extend. You've got this thing on the web where you have HTML that describes the, the layout of a, a web app or a website, and you have c s s, which can style it. Right. And they, they have that sense of ST themes and styles or whatever in, in saml. And yeah, they wanted, it just wasn't powerful enough. I think that, I think they had fall fallen on their face with Windows 98 when they were gonna do H TML for the ui and realized we need to do something in-house that's more powerful than this. We ha mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, we can't just stick with this thing. That's a, a big standard out in the world.

Rich Campbell (01:01:08):
Well, and they've gotten hooped by CSS one, right. Because they pushed out, ie. Cuz they needed to, to get it ready for Windows. The CSS one had not been ratified, which then meant that I E six used a different c s s from everything in the world. And very, you

Paul Thurrott (01:01:24):
Didn't any compatibility issues at all.

Rich Campbell (01:01:26):
<Laugh>. Yeah. You started, everybody built a webpage for the rest of the world, and then IE. Six. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:32):
Yeah. <laugh>, remember this, this site little looks best on IE. Six. This site looks best.

Rich Campbell (01:01:37):
I didn't know that's why it was though.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:39):
Yeah. That was part of it.

Rich Campbell (01:01:40):
I mean, and that's when d h h, you know David Heineman Hansen said, listen, I'm not building for i e six anymore. It's costing me a fortune. And you've got that wave of folks that if you loaded the webpage in IE six, it popped up a little dialogue that said, you need a real,

Paul Thurrott (01:01:53):
Get a browser. Browser. Yeah. Exactly. Get a real browser. That's sad. Alright, so flash forward to mau. So Maui you're saying is the, my

Rich Campbell (01:02:01):
Maui is

Paul Thurrott (01:02:02):
Results of the, the Z

Rich Campbell (01:02:04):
Standard. Okay. Because when Zamarin came into Microsoft in 2016 and they knew they needed a common version of aml, they were trying to unify it. The problem was that the Zamarin guys A, are in Boston and b are the new guys on the block. And they've got the subset, like they, they've got the base set that everybody should build in. But you're gonna talk the Windows team and the W P F team into complying. Like, it just,

Paul Thurrott (01:02:27):
Well, it's something that is by nature a subset. That's the problem. Yeah. it's not, and that's, you know, that's at a very high level. That's kind of what I'm talking about. Because it's very limited compared to what you can do with the True Desktop app. So they just don't have, just from a list, a list of controls. You just don't have the same level of depth. Yeah. They're close. That you get close. No, no, it's not, it's a different, but

Rich Campbell (01:02:48):
It was also the mismatching on the naming. Like you can figured all that out. The, but the reality is, you, you just weren't going to succeed to persuade these teams to unify. And they have, but it took years.

Paul Thurrott (01:02:59):
It's

Leo Laporte (01:03:00):
Kind of interest interesting that Microsoft has chewed the open standards cuz they got burned with CSS one. So they made their own standard and then tried to push that to the, to the rest of the end. They didn't.

Rich Campbell (01:03:10):
Right. They didn't really push it out to the rest of the world. They just tried to push it out internally. Yeah. And Frank, the

Paul Thurrott (01:03:15):
Snot on it, it didn't. Yeah. Right. But

Leo Laporte (01:03:16):
Thanks to mc, Miguel deca it.

Paul Thurrott (01:03:19):
That's right. It

Leo Laporte (01:03:19):
Did become kind of a,

Paul Thurrott (01:03:21):
A state. Well, but that's, but that's what I'm wondering though, is, you know, so we have this, so now it's out. So Maui is probably, I don't know where they're at, 1.1 or something. And

Rich Campbell (01:03:28):
Yeah. Really one, they, I mean, they don't worry about the version numbers. It's

Paul Thurrott (01:03:32):
A Yeah. In another words, yeah, I don't remember when they released it, but now it, you know, dot net seven's out. So it's been updated yet again, blah, blah, blah, whatever.

Rich Campbell (01:03:39):
But we was supposed to be in.net six. They pushed it out in the spring of 2022. They kind of got the feature pulled by August. In theory, it's right now.

Paul Thurrott (01:03:49):
But the thing is, all right, so, but look, there is no future Windows desktop app platform, you know, sdk, whatever. Yeah. It, it's,

Rich Campbell (01:03:58):
But when you UI is part of Maui.

Paul Thurrott (01:04:01):
Yes. Okay. Right. But it's, yeah. But,

Rich Campbell (01:04:06):
But that, you know,

Paul Thurrott (01:04:07):
It's such a mess.

Rich Campbell (01:04:09):
When Microsoft was trying to iterate Windows rapidly, part of that was for WIN ui. Cuz when UI was part of Windows. And so when UI

Paul Thurrott (01:04:17):
It's so hard, it's Oh yeah. When UI apps can look great, you know, I was talking about the, like the one, the OneDrive UI or whatever, like what I would call like a Windows 11 style app can be very, pretty and nice looking. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But getting there, especially from, no, actually, it doesn't matter how you get there, existing code based, new code base, whatever. It's hard. Like, it's hard to get there

Rich Campbell (01:04:39):
Built by c plus plus developers.

Paul Thurrott (01:04:41):
Yeah. It shows. And, you know and so I, yeah, I guess I'm, I'm kind of wondering if there's a future where.net Maui becomes, or if it just stays what it is, you know, it becomes like a more powerful, not quite desktop class, but you know, something more than just a mobile, a cross platform, mobile app platform.

Rich Campbell (01:05:02):
My expectation would be that they will, because Microsoft fundamentally is a tooling company, not a platform company. They have to build platforms for the tools to do things. But what they're actually good is building tools. They just have to do it later. So, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:05:14):
Okay.

Rich Campbell (01:05:15):
Which your, your real question is where's the WinForms to Maui converter and the Wpf F to Maui converter?

Paul Thurrott (01:05:20):
Yeah. Or, and those things. Better yet, I would, I'd rather have Win UI on top of wpf f you know well,

Rich Campbell (01:05:27):
Which Win UI is deeply integrated into Maui. Even Wpf F is gonna get pulled into this eventually. But that's, that's an inevitability. Yeah. We need three versions of Maui to come along. Then they'll have the energy for all the converters. I mean, there's, there's basic rules here to still apply to Microsoft and and then it will consume anything desktop related.

Paul Thurrott (01:05:48):
Wonder if far

Rich Campbell (01:05:49):
Bigger debate is, do you care about desktop? I mean, do you?

Paul Thurrott (01:05:55):
Yeah, I do, but I'm not a real developer because I think anyone, well, okay. But I can think what maybe what you're saying is if you care about Desktop Cloud, like you said, web earlier. Right? I mean, to me that does make sense. 

Rich Campbell (01:06:07):
Well, and it's why it's winning, right? Like it's, yeah. Yeah. Microsoft spent a lot of money to unify a stack to do desktop development. How many people care?

Paul Thurrott (01:06:16):
Yeah. Right. Yeah, that's true.

Rich Campbell (01:06:20):
You know, it is, boy, for better or worse, I like desktop development, but there's one

Paul Thurrott (01:06:25):
Of me, but Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So Right

Leo Laporte (01:06:27):
Is so interesting. Does that mean it's over for the desktop? Is that what you're saying?

Rich Campbell (01:06:33):
Well, it's, it's Essent essentially been true Leo, that it's least on the enterprise side of things. We, you know, why would you really have to fight hard to justify a desktop app? The deployment problem

Paul Thurrott (01:06:44):
Is nobody, Microsoft's

Leo Laporte (01:06:46):
Still in the desktop business though. They have a desktop operating

Paul Thurrott (01:06:48):
System, but apps, but that's, so the other side of this coin is that Microsoft or Windows works with multiple kinds of apps, including web apps, right? And so mm-hmm. They don't care. They'll bring us your Linux apps, bring us your Android apps, spring us here, whatever. They don't care. It makes it a little messy on the developer side because it's like, well, what I wanna target Windows is one of the things, how do I do it? It's like, well, you know, you have 15 different ways to do it. There's no one way that back in the day when Windows was everything, we was like, this is how you do it. It,

Leo Laporte (01:07:15):
It makes sense though that that's their transition strategy. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, if they are a company that's legacy business is completely dependent on desktop, but they see the future is not, is is network mobile, then what do you do? It seems like this strategy is exactly what you would do,

Paul Thurrott (01:07:32):
Or No, but they never say this. The, the problem is, Microsoft can't come out and say, look, this is dead. It's not because people don't use Windows. It's because that's not where all the action is with new apps. Right. You would be insane as a developer to say, I got it. I've got the great, the best new idea. I'm gonna put it on Windows first. So what do I have for Windows? You know, like, nobody thinks like that. A

Leo Laporte (01:07:52):
Lot of have moved to mobile entirely, right? I mean,

Paul Thurrott (01:07:55):
Yeah, but it depends on the app, right? And so, if I think if desktop is important, you mean that broadly? You mean across Mac windows and Linux. Right. And it, and that's where web, web works everywhere. So that does make sense. I, I will say, and maybe this is a cottage thing, and maybe I'm putting too much into this, but if you look at the Mac side of the fence, there is an incredible amount of native app development occurring only on Mac mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And it's lots of note-taking apps and writing apps and creative apps. And it, it, there's a weird little cottage market for this that really doesn't appear as often on Windows for some reason, even though there's far more of us on Windows.

Rich Campbell (01:08:34):
Yeah. Except, but I just, I think, I think the market in Mac space is a little more coherent. So, you know, it may be a smaller market, but you're gonna land more of them. I, I'll throw two other things at you, Paul, and that you'll contemplate. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> one is power apps.

Paul Thurrott (01:08:50):
Yeah. So

Rich Campbell (01:08:51):
Generation tool for making multi-platform clients that plugs into cloud.

Leo Laporte (01:08:56):
No low code, no code.

Rich Campbell (01:08:57):
Yeah. And specifically for

Paul Thurrott (01:08:59):
Internal access and an incredible extensibility model. Yeah. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:09:01):
That's true. Yeah. But, and, and, but the way it's licensed, you're not gonna put it out in the public. It's only for internal. It's enterprise

Paul Thurrott (01:09:07):
Businesses. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Rich Campbell (01:09:08):
The other one to take a long look at that, I just think it's so obvious they'll ultimately do something with, is Azure Form Recognizer?

Paul Thurrott (01:09:17):
I don't even know what that is. <Laugh> with a name like

Leo Laporte (01:09:20):
Azure Form Recognizer.

Paul Thurrott (01:09:22):
It's got to be, I mean, you lost me at Azure, but please continue <laugh>. Yeah. Well

Rich Campbell (01:09:25):
It's a, so it's a machine learning library Yeah. For parsing a form and recognizing what are forms, what is data and so forth. Now, normally you think about this in the context of scanning a piece of paper and pulling the data out and automatically populating, which is cool. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, but there's absolutely no reason that engine couldn't be used to generate new power apps pages for you and

Leo Laporte (01:09:46):
Business rules and all of that stuff.

Rich Campbell (01:09:48):
Right. All of that. Yeah. Because you can read in such detail, right? So, and then it's now stop thinking Paper and start thinking an old WinForms app.

Paul Thurrott (01:09:57):
Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:09:57):
So I take these, I take screenshots of each a page of a WinForms app, and I feed it through the recognizer and it essentially assembles an app for me in a modern spat.

Leo Laporte (01:10:04):
That's nice. That's nice. It's

Paul Thurrott (01:10:06):
Good. How far away are we from saying, Hey, GitHub, I have this WIN format app and I would like it to be updated to a WIN app sdk, app <laugh>, you know, that kind of thing. Actually, I'm sure they like, they do it now with power. I mean, co co-pilot 2.0. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure they

Rich Campbell (01:10:21):
Can do it now. No, I think you're, you're exactly right. We were on this path Yeah. Of how are we gonna retire all of this legacy software. We're gonna build tools that automate that process.

Leo Laporte (01:10:32):
So this is historically the issue with Microsoft is they have to support Legacy.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:36):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Well, that's a lot. Do you think though, like,

Leo Laporte (01:10:40):
There are a lot of of businesses out there that think that they have to support Legacy, right?

Paul Thurrott (01:10:45):
But what's their, what if Microsoft says no? Where are they going? <Laugh>? What are you talking about? Like, just, I, I don't know. I, I, Microsoft

Rich Campbell (01:10:53):
Says, says no, Microsoft says pay. Just ask the US Navy how much they're spending XP up.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:58):
No, that's absolutely right. But that's what leads to this situation where you have a hundred different ways to do things and no clear strategy and you're kind of on your, it's nice to have choice, but this, you know, when there's too much choice, obviously, you know, we all know how that works. So, but

Leo Laporte (01:11:11):
That's Microsoft's business model, Richard, is that what you're saying? Their business business model is keeping its, it is. And charging for <laugh> all this old crap. Yeah. And the price they pay is that they have multiple platforms in a kind of tower of babble. Right.

Rich Campbell (01:11:26):
And you're trading off being a thought leader, right. For just making bucket loads of money.

Leo Laporte (01:11:31):
Well that's, I, you know, that's what IBM does. That's what all legacy technology companies end up doing.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:38):
And God knows, I wish this was an IBM podcast, cuz that would be fantastic.

Leo Laporte (01:11:42):
<Laugh> just wait a few years. Paul. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:46):
Leo, I'm think I got an idea for a new podcast.

Leo Laporte (01:11:49):
<Laugh>. so that's an interesting question though. When does Microsoft say, okay, we're gonna take off the legacy hat and

Paul Thurrott (01:11:58):
Start Microsoft almost never says that

Leo Laporte (01:12:00):
They're not gonna Right. No,

Rich Campbell (01:12:02):
That's not true. I mean, they say it all the time, they just don't do

Leo Laporte (01:12:04):
It. Right. Okay. Historically, has that been, is that you think the number one issue for Microsoft with security reliability?

Paul Thurrott (01:12:13):
In January you are, Microsoft is allegedly going to cancel support for Windows seven. Finally, windows seven came out in 2009.

Leo Laporte (01:12:23):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:23):
Right. So it ca went out. It, they extended the support for it, just like they did for xp. They have paid support for the past three years for those customers. They're still on it. You don't have to go into too many dentist office optometrists subway systems still see ex windows seven out in the world. Right. It's still there. And I mean, they have hard time

Rich Campbell (01:12:42):
Say supports. Yeah. Win eight one support, support to end in January as

Paul Thurrott (01:12:46):
Well. That's right. I will bet that came out four years later.

Leo Laporte (01:12:49):
Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:12:50):
I will bet you easily win seven will be extended and win eight one will be happily retired.

Leo Laporte (01:12:55):
But that's what a lot of users, not just businesses, but a lot of users want. Yeah. Mostly. I mean, it's business that makes money, but,

Rich Campbell (01:13:00):
And it, you know, some of these times be a long time ago, the trick with Bill Gates is he figures out which way the crowd is going and he runs in front of it. Right. You can call it leading the parade

Paul Thurrott (01:13:08):
If you want. <Laugh>. It's innovation.

Leo Laporte (01:13:11):
Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:13:12):
But you know, the bottom line is if enough people still want to keep using seven and they're gonna pay for that, they'll put, they'll go into extended support and they'll stretch it out and Yeah. I not a lot of people are using WIN eight and the few that are, we are looking for an excuse to get rid of it. You know, one of the reasons you make this announcement is so an IT guy can go to his C F O and say, we have to do this.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:32):
That's right. Right.

Rich Campbell (01:13:33):
That's right. Like, it's a service that Microsoft provides to give me as ammunition as the IT pro to be able to argue with management, we have to spend money and do the

Paul Thurrott (01:13:41):
Upgrade. So cigar chomping CEO can be like, get me Bill Gates on the phone. What do you mean he doesn't work there anymore?

Leo Laporte (01:13:48):
<Laugh>.

Rich Campbell (01:13:50):
Yeah. I mean, the bottom line is he's gonna bet with money and, and push on those things then Yeah. They're gonna keep going. But if you're not, now you have the ammo to do the migration. Most it folks I've talked to do want to retire these old platforms. They just don't have the budget to do it.

Leo Laporte (01:14:06):
Right. Right, right.

Rich Campbell (01:14:10):
Mm. All right. Anyway Maui's awesome. Both guys that are using it. Think it's great.

Leo Laporte (01:14:17):
<Laugh> does. Is is there any impact to Miguel Deca leaving? Is that, I mean, that's one of the things that happened this year, right? He faded out. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:14:24):
Yeah. Faded flight. I mean, he moved, he was on different teams at that point anyway. Oh, okay.

Leo Laporte (01:14:27):
And so,

Paul Thurrott (01:14:28):
Oh, that's right. He was by the end of the road ride there he was. Where was he? He was, it was sort of like snow over working on the Microsoft graph. Like what <laugh> Yeah. You know, like, where was Miguel? I can't remember where Miguel was. It just didn't seem to make sense. Like I was like you're, you're a certain guy. Like you should be that guy.

Rich Campbell (01:14:46):
Well, and, and most people at Microsoft cannot just stay in role. Like, there's very few exceptions to this. Like yeah, Madson runs C Sharp and arguably has crippled his career. And I've said this to him personally because he'll never move off of that's the only thing he wants to do. And they're gonna let him do that. And they value him in that role. But almost everybody else is like, you're expected to move around and to, to learn other aspects of the business. And even Miguel was, was in that situation, except you can choose to vote with your feet. And Miguel has plenty of choices.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:20):
I mean, he was a hard sell coming to Microsoft to begin with, but

Rich Campbell (01:15:24):
You know, he, he, he wasn't only beholden to himself. There were investors. Yeah. And they, they, there was plenty of pressure to go around for giving what is a very capable of technology. You know, this is again, another.net rock's history moment, right. Where I sit in 2011. I said, you know, it seems like Microsoft is done. Doesn't love C Sharp all that much, but Miguel de sure does. Cause he's making it run on the iPhone in the Android mm-hmm. <Affirmative> when nobody else is mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So, you know, landing that safely inside the central repository was a service to us all ultimately.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:58):
Yeah, I agree.

Leo Laporte (01:16:01):
I guess we can wrap up this discussion.

Paul Thurrott (01:16:05):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:16:06):
Well, no, I guess we can't <laugh>. I just got too, nevermind. Let take a break then. We'll, we'll get to page two of this year in Microsoft. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> Paul Thurrott.

Paul Thurrott (01:16:20):
Sorry, it's a long list.

Leo Laporte (01:16:21):
No, no. This is the show and Richard Campbell great to have Richard from RANEZ radio.net Rocks. I think if you've been listening, you kind of get an idea of what Richard focuses on. Tell us about Ranez Radio and and, and the other things you do.

Rich Campbell (01:16:36):
Runners Radio is a podcast that started back in 2007 because making an IT podcast about Windows when Windows A set when Vista shipped was such a good idea. <Laugh>. I mostly, I was frustrated that the few IT podcasts that existed that far backwards, very vehemently anti Microsoft. Yeah. And yet we were all using the technology anyway.

Leo Laporte (01:16:56):
That's why they, they were anti Microsoft. They had to use it.

Paul Thurrott (01:16:59):
Yep. <laugh>. Yeah. That's where that comes from.

Leo Laporte (01:17:01):
Like, there are no happy, we're all change server admins in the world.

Rich Campbell (01:17:05):
And so it's, you know, once a week every week for, you know, know since April of 20, 2007. Yeah. And, and it's enjoyable. I mean, I, it's fun to be, to look, have that broad landscape to get all that feedback, you know? Yeah. I get a lot of email from folks that are just trying to keep their companies operational and, and work it through the regular, the problems. And if you can give 'em some insight, that's awesome. Rocks was started by my friend Carl Franklin back in 2002, which is well before the Word podcast existed. I was a guest in 2004, came on to the, as the co-host on episode 100, which was February, 2005. And we're in, I just recorded 1826. Wow.

Leo Laporte (01:17:47):
Yeah. Nice job. A pioneer run as radio.com is that if you go there, you'll probably get everything.

Rich Campbell (01:17:55):
Yeah. And it's all in the Vista colors, by the way. When I had to design a re we

Leo Laporte (01:18:00):
Refused to change. It works. Why change things,

Rich Campbell (01:18:02):
You know. No, I, we gra he liked the Metro Palette and buy gallery. Who's gonna build it? That actually, that website is so full assisted men gags, like all the underscores. Those are alt keys that work. Oh my. Because every webpage you have alt keys That work.

Leo Laporte (01:18:15):
Oh my.

Rich Campbell (01:18:16):
You think that website's funny? This show's probably for you,

Leo Laporte (01:18:19):
<Laugh>. That's good. All right. We're gonna take a little time out, give you guys a chance to to take a break and come back with My key is, yeah. Get more tea. Yeah. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, as I spill the T on mimo monitors our sponsor for the show, the entire show. We love mimo. We were talking earlier about using Teams or Zoom or Google Meet. We use all three. And it is a nightmare, to be honest. It's confusing as heck. So I was really pla pr pleased to see a Unify meeting, which is a one, one user interface for all three. But then, then I discovered MIMO Monitors, which is the best way to use Unify meeting. And actually, if you buy a MIMO monitor, and I'll give you a great deal in just a second you get Unify meeting for free.

(01:19:09):
It's part of the deal. MIMO Monitors, M I M o a leader globally in industry, expert in award-winning small format displays, touchscreens, tablets, kind of purpose-built. You'll see 'em all over the place. Conference rooms, kiosks, point of sale, digital signage. You'll see 'em in healthcare. You'll see 'em in schools. Museums love MIMO monitors. They come anywhere from seven inches to 21 inches. And they're just kind of built to be flexible to suit your needs, to bring your vision to life and to be durable. And, you know, you can imagine if they're in a a school or a museum, they're outdoors in many cases at a kiosk. They've gotta be pretty tough. But they're also beautiful, sleek, premium, easy to use, intuitive, easy to deploy. They're designed with durability in mind, created with maximum reliability to stand the test of time, even when they're in use 24 7.

(01:20:07):
You'll also see 'em in many of the Fortune 500 companies all over the world. Google uses em, Sonos, Granger, John Deere in tougher environments, you know, industrial environments. Herz uses 'em. In fact, if you've ever done a Hertz rental and used the kiosk, you probably used a MIMO monitor at mimo. Their touchscreens are designed with human touch. Isn't that cute? Touchscreens designed with human touch. What does that mean? It means customer services is at the forefront. Their US-based customer service team will ensure that when you give 'em a call, a team member will get back to you promptly deliver a premium customer experience with a goal of exceeding your expectations. I think that's really an important part of the decision, right? Is, is am I gonna get good service in this company with MIMO monitors? You are. And then when you use Unify meeting, you really can, it really sings with Unify meeting.

(01:20:59):
If you have a MIMO monitor, maybe one of the little Seven Inches Me Unify meeting occupies that full-time. It's your calendar all the time. And if you ever wanna start a meeting, you don't have to know if it's Zoom Meet teams, you just tap it on the little mimo monitor the, the meeting launches with the unified interface. That's why Unify Meeting simplifies your life. It combines all your favorite video conferencing solutions into one reliable user interface. Says 2008. MIMO Monitors has been the global expert and industry leader in small touchscreen monitors, displays, tablets designed for businesses and individuals, MI o's high value displays, drive innovation and provide a seamless experience. All that combined with their superior customer service, their flexibility. That's what makes MIMO Monitors the most trusted touchscreen monitor provider around the world. I want you to try MIMO monitors, but I maybe even more want you to try unify meeting, try it for yourself.

(01:21:57):
 If you want it for your team, you, if you're hybrid remote, you've got everybody. These days we're meeting all the time on Zoom and, and meeting teams. Go to unify meeting.com, U N I F Y M E E T I N G unify meeting.com and enter the code WW 50 for Windows Weekly, WW five zero. That's 50% off a year subscription of meos. Unify meeting. Personally, if I were you, I would look at getting a MIMO monitor. We're gonna get you 25% off any of MI MO'S displays when you use the code ww. And along with them comes your subscription to Unify meeting and the display, I'm telling you, is the best way to use it. Anyway, software's great. Try it. 50% off, use the code WW 50 hardware's great. 25% off, use the offer code WW Okay. No 50 just WW Limited time offer.

(01:22:54):
And all of that said unify meeting.com. We thank Unify meeting so much and me, my monitors so much for supporting windows Weekly, all year long. And we look forward to working with him again in the new year. Simplify with Unify. You're watching the very last episode of 2022 and we're so glad we could get Richard Campbell to join us on today's show. Paul Thurrott and Richard are kind of running down the stories of the year and I guess we can't continue on without mentioning ARM hasn't been a huge success for Microsoft, but they're trying

Paul Thurrott (01:23:34):
<Laugh> it's going, it's going gangbusters for Apple. I mean it yeah, this is another one I'm curious about. Richard's take on this. So Microsoft has been pushing Windows in arm, you know, for several years. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> hall com has gone through several generations of chip sets. That's the first one was literally the same chip they put in a phone. I think that was the Snap Dragon 8 35. Performance has been black luster to say the least. Compatibility has gotten better. You know, obviously they have 6 64 bit emulation. They have I'm getting the name of it now, but that technology lets you mix and match X 64 in arm code in a single project, which is interesting. Yeah. but now we're all waiting for that. John, what is it? Project Nuvia Terra. Oh, well, the, the the NewCom acquisition. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:24:22):
The new's gonna bring. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, I, I have to wonder if their mistake Microsoft made here wasn't being exclusive to Qualcomm, could they have done better? Maybe

Paul Thurrott (01:24:32):
They needed. So the way they described it to me at the time, the way Terry Morrison talked about it, was that the impetus to this was actually Intel. They wanted someone some company big enough to challenge Intel. Cuz Intel wasn't delivering what they needed with regards to efficiency. They were just going after performance, and they wanted to create these smaller, lighter, earth thinner devices. And so Qualcom's the biggest player in this market. I mean well, at the time was certainly maybe Apple might be today, but they're not partnering with Apple, obviously, so, no. They were, it'd be nice to

Leo Laporte (01:25:06):
Have license. The M one though, though, would be cr amazing.

Paul Thurrott (01:25:09):
Oh my God. I, listen, I I've said this so many times. You could run windows on arm, on a Mac, an M based M one, two, whatever, Mac, and it runs faster on, on that than it does on real hardware. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, which is the problem. So Microsoft this year put out this project volera, which is a Mac mini looking developer box, right. Running the latest version of COCOMs chip set, which is, you know, is the best yet for sure. It, it's, it's, you know, the problem has always been, oh, we're gonna get to Core I five, and it's like, eh, it's not quite there, but this thing's actually pretty specked out. I think, you know, it's, it's interesting. I, I still feel that developers who are gonna target Arm, who want that to be part of the, what they do are not gonna run Visual Studio on arm and, and develop there.

(01:25:58):
They, they develop on whatever box they have and they push it out to these ARM devices. Plus part of the point of arm really is these you know, touchscreens pens ultra mobile form factors, you know 5G connectivity, blah, blah, blah. None of that stuff's happening in the little box <laugh>. Like, you, you want to, you know, you wanna take advantage of the, the platform and that's, you know, so, but, but I'm curious. So there's, there's my take. My take is we we're, we've been in a holding pattern for years waiting for Arm to be a thing. Catching up to Apple is like a dream at this point, but just have it be a viable platform for Windows. I mean, do you, we've been playing this game for years, right? Windows eight in rt. Yep. I mean, what do you mean? Do you think it's gonna happen or what do you

Rich Campbell (01:26:43):
Well, I, what happened with WIN eight and R N R T, Intel got a clue and built, Adam made a better chip set and it, and that was less expensive for Microsoft to just go keep working in, in Intel with a more efficient processor than it was to actually make their whole stack run well on Arm. And I, you know, I would argue the core premise, which is there's no developer that wants to develop on arm, right? Right. It's, this is opening.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:08):
Exactly.

Rich Campbell (01:27:08):
Yeah. Yeah. Yep. But what, what ad dev cares about is his boss not yelling at him, and that, and then, and that comes purely from the boss showing up with a device that the app doesn't run on.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:21):
Yeah. Right. That's not gonna happen in the Windows space.

Rich Campbell (01:27:25):
Well, therein lies is the, the core problem. Now, if you want to create a market for something, and that's a possibility getting, nobody's asking for this. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> is that you have to make that reference device, you have to make an arm, you have to make the MacBook error of Microsoft Arm. Right. You have to

Paul Thurrott (01:27:42):
Make a, well, Microsoft tried that, didn't they? Right. It was not the prox. I,

Rich Campbell (01:27:46):
Well, and arguably all of the Surface devices are, are along that same path. Right. Panos has his belief system and he builds his devices his way. But until you have a device so compelling that it then lags the dog properly, where now you have CTOs, CIOs, CEOs with saying, I want to use that device, make sure all my stuff runs, you're, you're not gonna get the energy for it. It,

Paul Thurrott (01:28:11):
It, I feel like Definitely. Go ahead. I'm sorry.

Rich Campbell (01:28:14):
I mean, it's definitely, you know, who, this is something Microsoft feels they need head to exist, right? This is not something that customers are demanding.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:24):
Yeah, right. There you

Rich Campbell (01:28:26):
Go. It usually be a blocker for a sale. Like once in a while a customer can say, well, you don't run an arm. So, no, but I think that's just an excuse this Yeah. There's nobody pounding at the door saying, I can't do this unless you give me an arm device. That's just not true.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:40):
And Intel has responded. I mean, I'm not sure that the first gen of this hybrid architecture with Intel Core 12th chan is quite there, but but they've responded. They're, they're, they're going after an arm style architecture. And I, I also think that no matter how good Arm gets, no matter how good Qualcomm is able to make a chip at the, the end of the day, you have this thing that performs less well than equivalent a MD or Intel Hardware. Or May, let's pretend it's just as good, but there's still, there's still that little sliver of compatibility. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, you have a, I was just playing around with a, a, a printer all in one printer scanner thing. It has custom software that does not run an arm. So you, you can't install that. It doesn't matter how compatible things are. That doesn't, that's never gonna work. And Intel and a MD are safe. Like they're w they're gonna work a hundred percent of the time, you know? Yeah. So if Intel can approach the efficiency of ARM and offer, you know, we can offer a little tablet thing that gets 12 to 24 hours of battery life, whatever the number is. Well,

Rich Campbell (01:29:46):
I don't know that they can Right. Like that

Paul Thurrott (01:29:48):
Bottom line, but just, you know, again, theoretically

Rich Campbell (01:29:50):
Yeah. The amount of the amount of electrons you have to move around per cycle in the X 86 at X 64 chip set is far more than what needs to move around in an M one. It is less efficient because it is archaic. It's been kept around for a long time. Those original 60 something instructions from the MS Do from the 80, 88 days are still in there. Yeah. Right. That, that's,

Paul Thurrott (01:30:12):
They're in the, by the way, they're in the M one. We found out <laugh>. Yeah. If I'm not mistaken. But yes. Oh yeah, no, fair enough. I mean, I, it's, you know, real world, I, I, we, I don't know that there's a lot of difference between any intel chip set today and whatever Apple's doing with the M one, like real world. I know that. Whatever, I mean, I, I,

Rich Campbell (01:30:34):
Whatever you'll, you'll see it in battery life, right? Like that's the sort of thing where it begins that up. Okay. But you know what fixes that More battery

Paul Thurrott (01:30:42):
<Laugh>. Right? Right. Yeah. We also fixed, they

Leo Laporte (01:30:45):
Also, that machine would last all day.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:47):
<Laugh>, this what

Rich Campbell (01:30:48):
I'm

Paul Thurrott (01:30:48):
Saying. Right. The pandemic fixed it too. Cuz we're all at home next to a power supply, so

Rich Campbell (01:30:52):
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. 

Paul Thurrott (01:30:53):
But

Leo Laporte (01:30:53):
You gotta think there's a lot of apple envy as, I mean, people are looking

Paul Thurrott (01:30:56):
Oh, there absolutely. Oh, absolutely is a lot of Apple.

Rich Campbell (01:30:59):
Of course. I think Apple envy's the A thing and also hooking your, your ship to Intel is scary. Yeah. Because they are struggling with their manufacturing teas. They, they, they mm-hmm. <Affirmative> the price of their maintaining of compatibility has been a level of complexity. Even they are struggling to

Leo Laporte (01:31:15):
Overcome. Watch though as Taiwan has problems with TSMC has problems, watch apples already struggling though

Paul Thurrott (01:31:23):
The, the apple's struggling. They just, well, they don't, they killed the Mac Pro killed. Yeah, yeah. An ultra chip. Yeah. They, yeah. Well they, I they may not be able to make this chip set. Exactly. Right. Exactly. They've suddenly run into a wall.

Leo Laporte (01:31:33):
Exactly. so there are other, other

Paul Thurrott (01:31:35):
Things. We've got them right where we want them <laugh>. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:31:39):
And you see the iPhone 14 being made in India Exactly. Know they, they're doing the things and you see the Biden administration leaning on a sml, the manufacturer of the right, of the al the, the five nanometer process machines saying, we're gonna tell you where you're gonna get sell those things. Which is a tricky thing to do to a Dutch company, but they're pulling it off

Leo Laporte (01:31:59):
<Laugh>. You can't, you know, you can't sell E U V to the Chinese, which means they can't, they can't be any smaller productions. So yeah. It, I mean, it won. I feel like it's a matter of time before they figure out how to do it. But

Paul Thurrott (01:32:13):
I, I will say, going back to the original part of this discussion, when I was talking to Terry Morrison, I, you know, his whole thing at the time was he didn't care what won. If, if the end game was, we kick Intel's ass and they, it gets them in gear and, and to where they need to be, Intel could win. Who cares? We just, yeah. We just wanna be in that space. Well, there's, and I

Leo Laporte (01:32:33):
Can re going way back. There's always been animosity between Microsoft and Intel

Rich Campbell (01:32:39):
To some degree. Yeah. I mean, while also having to take care of each other.

Leo Laporte (01:32:42):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Their Wintel, it wasn't like a recent love affair. I mean, I remember Annie

Paul Thurrott (01:32:46):
Gross, that's what Surface Gate was. Remember that? Yeah. They'll go to recent times whatever, 2015, I think it was when the Surface Pro Four and original Surface book came out. Microsoft went with whatever, the Silver Lake, whatever the latest version of the Intel chip set, where they were the first out the door ran into all kinds of problems, blamed Intel. You and I had that. I talked to, I talked to other PC makers at the time, and I said, Hey, was this generation particularly bugging? And they said, no. They said Microsoft has no idea what they're doing. <Laugh>. They think that the, this is Intel's responsibility. It's not. We fixed those problems. That's what, yeah. We had no unusual problems. No one knew they had all kinds of

Leo Laporte (01:33:22):
Problems. Lenovo, Intel and HP had been doing all that

Paul Thurrott (01:33:24):
Behind the scenes. Exactly. And, and Microsoft was so mad, they cut support in Windows 10 for some older Intel chip sets Yeah. In retaliation for Intel's not fixing the problems. And you know, as Intel told them, no, that's your responsibility. That's your job. That's what you

Rich Campbell (01:33:41):
Do. That's how this works.

Leo Laporte (01:33:42):
But it is a hereditary animosity. I remember Andy Grove telling me he was mad because Bill Gates wouldn't do 32 bid. And he said, we've got the hardware. But there's, I mean, this was how long ago that was, but there's still 16

Paul Thurrott (01:33:55):
Bit from Billy

Leo Laporte (01:33:55):
Nineties. Yeah. Yep. So it's, it seems like there's always been a little bit of tension, I guess, there. That makes sense.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:02):
You know, that's actually an interesting way that the world has changed because there, there was a period of time where like windows was too big for the hardware. That was a, there was a period of time, like Windows, the hardware has to catch up the windows. Right. You know? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. We live in a, an age where limitless capacity. I, it's, you know, yeah. We, you couldn't make windows. Well, you could, you could add outlook in teams, but nor and Chrome front teams. But normally <laugh> normally you know, you could run Windows on anything. Now it's, it's al it's almost like the new doom, you know, it's gonna be running on a Christmas ornament <laugh>. No, that's,

Leo Laporte (01:34:33):
This runs great. True hardware is so good now.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:36):
Yeah. Yep. But,

Rich Campbell (01:34:37):
So by the token, Microsoft needs to pursue ARM to maintain an option even where to put pressure on Intel. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> to have an alternative. If they do stumble, it doesn't mean it's important. You know, if I'm wearing the director of IT hat and I have a team that wants to work on this, I'd probably push back on that. Like, you know, we're in cost cutting times right now, and this project is unlikely to be

Paul Thurrott (01:35:01):
As meaningful results. Yeah. And I think, I I, what you said upfront is true. I I, you're not gonna get anyone in a c c level position coming to it saying, you need to support this. Yeah. because those people don't exist. There. There's, there is no, well, ultra

Rich Campbell (01:35:14):
D exist.

Leo Laporte (01:35:16):
It's not driven by demand, it's driven by business strategy,

Rich Campbell (01:35:19):
Fair to say. And it's, the thing is, like Apple's good at creating demand. They make a device that everybody wants. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:25):
Yeah. It's sexy. They, they wanna make sure they don't, that Apple doesn't run away with this kind of, I call it performance per wat kind of thing. Because at some point it just gets silly. Yeah. And, but to be fair to Microsoft, Microsoft had been badgering Intel about this for years. It, it had nothing to do with the M one. This, that, this predates that. I mean, Microsoft, this has been the issue forever. This was the issue 10 years, well, we call it 12 years ago when Microsoft was getting ready to release Windows eight and went to Intel and said, guys, <laugh>, you know, we need, we need no, we need no fans, lots of battery life, blah, blah, blah. And at the time, Intel was like, yeah, we're not doing that. Here's a Caleb, here's a K series processor with four chorus. You know, have fun, <laugh>. That's

Rich Campbell (01:36:11):
What we're doing. And you can cook food on it.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:13):
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You can fry an egg on the thing. Yep. Yeah. Okay. I just, I feel, I've always kind of felt this, you know, I, I like, I like the push, I think the end game is gonna be Intel slash amd, figure it out, and it just becomes unnecessary. Mm-Hmm. But it, but it was a li a lever to push those companies in that

Rich Campbell (01:36:38):
Interaction. You've gotta know that there's a lightweight chip set in a lab inside of Intel somewhere where they're trying to emulate the instruction sets of X 64, because that's where the M one's at. Right. The M one s at a point now where it's able to emulate the intel chip instruction set almost faster than Intel can run it. So we're, we're at that bubble where this legacy now will just be an emulation problem. But you'll have a modern chip set available to you. This

Paul Thurrott (01:37:02):
Is, you

Rich Campbell (01:37:03):
Build for the new platform,

Paul Thurrott (01:37:03):
You can go ahead. It's literally the hard, the hardware version of Loop. Yep. We will support the past <laugh> because you need it, but we're moving forward with this new thing.

Rich Campbell (01:37:12):
Right. We're making a new thing and because the horse really

Paul Thurrott (01:37:15):
Interesting. Yeah. Okay.

Rich Campbell (01:37:17):
Well, and their CPUs are so fast these days. Most of the time they're smoking cigarettes and playing poker anyway, waiting for us to click a heat. Right.

Paul Thurrott (01:37:24):
That's really true. Exactly. That's

Rich Campbell (01:37:25):
Not what's holding us up. It's rights, not the

Paul Thurrott (01:37:27):
Cpu. No, that's true. That's,

Leo Laporte (01:37:29):
That's kind of a delusion. Consumers have. They still look for the fastest machine

Paul Thurrott (01:37:33):
As it Well, that's the where the mentality of I'm holding. I don't, I don't want it to use all the rent. What are you talking about now? Yeah. Why did you buy it? It's like a, yeah, I bought a, like a 12 cylinder Mercedes, but I only wanna use four of the cylinders. Cause you know, don't worry. I might need that power label. What are you talking about? It's the guess <laugh>.

Rich Campbell (01:37:48):
That's also how PCs were marketed for years. Well, the megahertz sold on their bigger,

Paul Thurrott (01:37:52):
Right? Yeah. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:37:54):
Sure. You know, then you go, if you ever get a chance to lay your hands, I'm not on like the Rolls Royce pamphlet. When you get to the specs page on a Rolls Royce, it doesn't have horsepower on it. What it says is sufficient

Paul Thurrott (01:38:08):
<Laugh>. Yeah. I would hope it was more like,

Leo Laporte (01:38:11):
Don't. I just saw a stat that, I don't know if it's true, but I think it is that 80% of all RO Rolls Royces ever made are still operational.

Rich Campbell (01:38:19):
That's crazy. Oh wow.

Leo Laporte (01:38:20):
So it is sufficient.

Paul Thurrott (01:38:22):
The Windows seven, you

Leo Laporte (01:38:23):
Can't say that about PCs

Paul Thurrott (01:38:25):
<Laugh>,

Rich Campbell (01:38:25):
But Apples

Paul Thurrott (01:38:26):
Market seven. But know what

Rich Campbell (01:38:27):
About the,

Leo Laporte (01:38:28):
It's sufficient. It'll do what you want all day. Battery life. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:38:32):
Pcs have gotten, this is a hard thing to say. Like, okay, I'm gonna say PCs have gotten so good. Bear with me that Microsoft has had to artificially limit which generations of Chip Setss can upgrade to Windows 11. Because the truth is, it would work fine on, we're fine, whatever, you know, I just pulled a third generation Intel core PC out of a box. I've not booted it up. It is a, it actually a quad core chip. That old is pretty amazing. I bet it runs Windows 11 fine. I bet it does. You know, I'm not supported, but I bet it's fine.

Rich Campbell (01:39:08):
As long as you put a decent video card on it, it'll be fine. Cuz it's pretty GPU dependent.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:13):
Yeah. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:39:15):
And do by decent, I mean a hundred dollars, right?

Paul Thurrott (01:39:18):
Like Yeah. This was the era of this, it's literally 10 years old, so lemme go back in time. Think about that. Well, okay. Actually it probably has a new enough Intel Integrated graphics that could run Arrow. But remember that used to be a problem. You would get Aero basic because the intel, you know, the integrated graphics were so terrible. Yeah,

Rich Campbell (01:39:37):
No, no. Put a card in, please.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:39):
Yeah, no, there is, there is actually a card

Rich Campbell (01:39:41):
For a hun for a hundred dollars.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:42):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. You could probably get one for free now for that thing.

Rich Campbell (01:39:45):
Yeah. Pretty much,

Paul Thurrott (01:39:47):
Right? Yeah. Okay. I feel like we touched on something.

Leo Laporte (01:39:51):
Duck Doco. We did Project Volera. I mean,

Paul Thurrott (01:39:54):
Yeah. So Duck Doco is just is not a Microsoft topic except that it is. Right? So Tuck, tuck Go is blocking trackers and doing all this stuff. And then somebody noticed a researcher, we'll call him that. He just did an audit and he says, this can't be right. It says, it looks like you're not blocking Microsoft data flows, is what he called it for LinkedIn or Bing. And Duck Deco had to come out and say, yeah, you're right. We have a secret agreement with Microsoft that prevents us from blocking their stuff. We're working with Microsoft to change that. And then some number of months later, I don't know if I put the timeframe I said didn't. But some number of months later, they updated and now they block Microsoft Trackers, just like they blocked trackers from, you know, meta Facebook Google, Amazon, whatever.

(01:40:44):
So it took 'em a little while and a little bit of public embarrassment. But that finally happened. And kind of an interesting thing. I mean, I, I think the deal here was they were, were probably relying on Microsoft Bing because duck Deco also is working on their own search engine. And that's one of the sources they use. You know, they're setting themselves up as kind of an alternative to to Google and Chrome and all that kind of stuff. So, but it was an interesting news item to me because it kind of put, you know, Microsoft in this role was kind of the villain, which is kind of weird. You didn't see a lot. Yeah. You didn't see a lot of that.

Rich Campbell (01:41:20):
Anyway, it's fiction fact, the idea that you, there's a data stream going to Bing. Is that true?

Paul Thurrott (01:41:25):
<Laugh>? Well, it's not being answered. It's like the SETI program. I mean, they're sending it. Yeah. But yeah. Well, you know, actually, I mean <laugh> not like Apple Exactly, but I will say Microsoft's ad business is growing as one of the fastest growing parts of the company. It's still very small, you know? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But once you get past the big three, big three probably what? Google Meta slash Facebook and probably then Amazon. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft was next. I mean, I bet it's somewhere in there, but you know, that's like saying you know, Carl's Jr. Is one of the biggest, you know, hamburger chains in the world. Like yeah, they exist, but they <laugh>, you know, they're just not, it's not the same thing.

Rich Campbell (01:42:05):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:07):
Hmm. Yeah. Well, we kind of touched on Alex Kitman slash Bill Gates, but did we, I guess we didn't, didn't, but Microsoft had their kind of comeuppance with that stuff this year. I think anyone who appeared in a virtual aquarium like he did, should have been fired, frankly. But there was some nastiness there. And then Bill Gates. Bill Gates, you know, the Bill Gates legacy is, I think it's fair to say it's gonna be mixed. There's some good and some bad, but I don't know. Not as bad as the old days. There used to be horrible stories. Remember, like mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, Brian Valentine, and there were all these guys. There was a lot of this garbage back in the day. But I, I will say you know, when we think about Satcha Nadela as a C E O and whether or not he's doing a great job or whatever, I, it's disappointing to me that this part of Microsoft didn't improve under him, although it looks like now it finally will,

Rich Campbell (01:43:04):
If that makes sense. Well, the fact that they're being let go and we know they are because of that, that's like often that's these folks were able to just retire. Oh,

Paul Thurrott (01:43:11):
And then re that's exactly somewhere else. Yep. Right? Yep.

Rich Campbell (01:43:13):
The fact that

Paul Thurrott (01:43:14):
Yeah. Complains went unheated. Yep.

Rich Campbell (01:43:16):
Yeah. Verbal abuse, sexual harassment, like they're saying the words now and that I'm gonna have to call that

Paul Thurrott (01:43:22):
Program. That's different. No, no, you're right. That's absolutely right. Yeah. yeah. So let's move on from that. That's an ugly topic, <laugh>. But anyway, it's just, well, yeah, it's a little, you know, it

Rich Campbell (01:43:32):
Is, it's terrible. Agree. It's terrible.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:36):
We did kind of talk about GitHub co-pilot colo a little bit. The what, what's that? G P T thing. The chat g pt chat. G p d chat. Gbt. So the chat G B T of programmers. Programmers, yeah. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. It's the, it's

Rich Campbell (01:43:48):
The lesser known ai I've been calling, I've been calling them Dunning Krueger amplifiers for a

Leo Laporte (01:43:55):
Reason. <Laugh>,

Rich Campbell (01:43:57):
As long as you know nothing about the subject, what it generates is awesome

Leo Laporte (01:44:02):
<Laugh>.

Rich Campbell (01:44:02):
Sure. But if you do

Paul Thurrott (01:44:03):
Know, is it that hard to Google this? I mean, you

Leo Laporte (01:44:05):
Well, that's what you're, it's spa replacing stack exchange. Right? You just, it's the same as a stack exchange search.

Rich Campbell (01:44:11):
Yeah. Yeah. Stack overflow.

Leo Laporte (01:44:13):
Stack overflow. I always stack stack overflow.

Rich Campbell (01:44:15):
Yeah. I'm sorry. To the point where Stack Overflow said, please don't put chat G P T answers in the, in, in the system. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:44:21):
They don't want to junk up their system.

Rich Campbell (01:44:23):
Co co-pilot does great. Hello. Worlds and languages, programming languages. You don't know. Mm-Hmm. If you ask you to do in languages, you do know you're shocked at the code

Leo Laporte (01:44:32):
That a judge, is it that bad? Really?

Rich Campbell (01:44:34):
Sometimes it is. Yeah. You know, this the thing is like, it's just like news stories. If you know the subject well, you see the errors in the news stories, and that makes you make the question all of them.

Paul Thurrott (01:44:45):
It's more if you know the language well, and you realize this is like not English as a second language. This is like English. It was generated by a computer, right? You, but it was like auto translated or something. 

Leo Laporte (01:44:56):
There is one useful feature. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you can put a long, complex, regular expression in there and it'll tell you what it, what it's doing. <Laugh>.

Rich Campbell (01:45:04):
Yeah. Yeah. That's, that, that's, there's a bunch of useful That's pretty good

Leo Laporte (01:45:06):
There. I think there's things you could do with it. Yeah. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, as long as you didn't let it write your program for you, <laugh>

Rich Campbell (01:45:13):
Well, you can try. You're just gonna have problems. Right? Like that's the, the, this idea that you would generate code you that you don't understand. That's a bad, it's been a going. Yeah. But it's been a going theme in development for, for a long time. Right. I

Leo Laporte (01:45:26):
Mean, I think stack over years, people cutting past all the time's.

Paul Thurrott (01:45:29):
All, I mean, that's, how else are you gonna learn,

Rich Campbell (01:45:32):
Grabbing it from GitHub? Like it's all the same mistake. Well, this, it's gonna burn you the same way. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:45:39):
In fact, there are a number of security flaws we talked about on security now, which arose because people used Intel's reference code as the code, and it had no, you know, safety checks. It had no sanity checks. It was just, you know, it was a demo. It wasn't intended to be used. But, but programmers, I don't wanna say programmers are lazy, but there are, you know, they're trying

Paul Thurrott (01:46:01):
To, people are lazy. You

Leo Laporte (01:46:02):
Got got bosses saying, how many pages of code have you committed this?

Rich Campbell (01:46:05):
Get it done,

Leo Laporte (01:46:06):
Get it done. And here's, here's it came from Intel. How bad could it be?

Rich Campbell (01:46:10):
It could be interesting if they would rerun the machine learning model that generated co-pilot, but now, you know, filter the data set, make sure the code that you're looking at is secure code.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:22):
Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:46:23):
You know, by

Paul Thurrott (01:46:24):
The way, they, they have that technical problem they already have that this is something they could do.

Leo Laporte (01:46:28):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:28):
Actually, yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:46:29):
That's

Paul Thurrott (01:46:30):
Probably should. I think that's gonna, I think that's gonna happen.

Leo Laporte (01:46:31):
Sure. This is early, early days. I mean, this is, yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:46:35):
I feel the exact same way about chat. G B T I bet I, I see these as experiments that are now revealing a new class of problem, which chat GBTs did a great job of showing, Hey, we are actually using copyrighted art as a training problem. That's why you keep seeing artist signatures on it. So now fix that, stop training on stuff you shouldn't train on.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:56):
My plan is by the end of next year, every graphic I put on an article will be auto-generated by ai. I'm just gonna say, this is what the article's about and it's gonna spit out some nonsense. And people are gonna be like, what the hell is that? It's what it said.

Rich Campbell (01:47:09):
You know, and make sure you're like, have a mangled signature of Charles Petzel in the corner every time you'll be good.

Paul Thurrott (01:47:15):
Exactly. <laugh> <laugh>. Yep.

Rich Campbell (01:47:18):
Yeah. That's beautiful. I mean, the, we're continuing to experiment and there are consequences to the experiment, and, but I think they're good ones. This idea of the qual, you know, this is the original com sci complaint. Garbage in, garbage out. You train a model on crappy data, you get crappy results.

Paul Thurrott (01:47:38):
This is, well, my God, it just keeps going on and on the you know, Microsoft stopped selling facial recognition to law enforcement because it was racist showing a bias from the middle-aged white guys that programmed it. Late Lisa Leo's wife last week used, what was the thing? She used

Leo Laporte (01:47:55):
<Laugh> lens, which is an AI uses stable diffusion on the backend, but it's an app for iOS. Yeah. They, I think they fixed it, but

Paul Thurrott (01:48:04):
I know, but they, the fact that they had to fix it

Leo Laporte (01:48:06):
Was horrific know about it. It was her generat woman. My, it generated my image you know, reasonably well

Paul Thurrott (01:48:12):
Heroic, you know, whatever. Yeah, good looking. And then it generated her, and it was like busty naked women, you know? She was like, just, yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:48:20):
She was,

Paul Thurrott (01:48:21):
I mean, this is like, this is the, so the, I, I think when you wanna save

Leo Laporte (01:48:25):
Those pictures, by

Paul Thurrott (01:48:26):
The way, I, of course you did. <Laugh> the, I'm, I hope they're like hanging in your house. But I, the you know that

Leo Laporte (01:48:32):
It was very sexy when

Paul Thurrott (01:48:34):
You tried to explain,

Leo Laporte (01:48:34):
Like, it's terrible.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:35):
Well, the a the, the AI bias is a hard thing to explain to normal people, because AI is hard to explain period.

Rich Campbell (01:48:43):
Until you look at a, at a Marvel superhero collection, I think it's rendering exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:48:47):
Well, and that's where it was trained on, obviously, you know, and obviously there is a setting in stable diffusion to eliminate NSFW results. And they obviously figured out to turn that, to turn that on.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:58):
I think, I believe Lisa said she did that when she did it. And

Leo Laporte (01:49:02):
It's No, no, you don't get the, you don't really get the choice in the lens. I think it's,

Paul Thurrott (01:49:05):
Oh, I'm

Leo Laporte (01:49:06):
Sorry. She, they, one of the things that asks you, which is probably telling is are you male or female? And although I think that's what she did. She tried it as a male and didn't she? It was still, it was still just a sexist. So <laugh>, I don't know. Sure. There is, there, there are a few pictures of me with no shirt on, so maybe, you know.

Paul Thurrott (01:49:25):
Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Like a, like a romance novel cover Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:49:27):
With flowing hair. Yeah. It's not, yeah. It's not too revealing.

Paul Thurrott (01:49:30):
But this is, this is a problem. I mean when did what was it called? The connect come out, right? Whatever that

Leo Laporte (01:49:39):
Was. I mean, had the same Microsoft's Connect have the same problem?

Paul Thurrott (01:49:41):
Well, it had different, a different pro. It was the a racist problem, so Oh, yeah. We set, set it up in our living room with a little black girl from across the street, come over and they wouldn't recognize you. They couldn't see, she couldn't play this thing. It was the most awful moment. Like, that's terrible. It was just awful. It was

Leo Laporte (01:49:52):
Awful. Yeah. That's terrible. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:49:55):
But this is, you know, this is the the limitations of things that are, you know, it's not, it's not done maliciously. No, but that, that, but that's what the bias is. It's like a

Leo Laporte (01:50:06):
When you only have a bunch of white guys testing it, there you go.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:08):
Yeah. I, I mean, it's

Rich Campbell (01:50:10):
In the data set.

Leo Laporte (01:50:11):
The data set. And you would notice it in the dataset if you didn't, you know, <laugh>, if you were paying attention.

Rich Campbell (01:50:19):
I mean, I would say chat. G B T writes hilarious. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:50:22):
It's good. I think it's great. I love chat G P

Paul Thurrott (01:50:24):
T. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, Patrick in the discard is saying he generates great short stories for his four year old son. Like that's, oh, perfect. That's actually kind of interesting. So that, I mean, that, that shows kind of a level where it's at maybe <laugh> then, and then it gets better over time. Right? Yeah. Good. Even that use, honestly, that use alone is very interesting. It's almost like the you know, hey assistant tell me a story or something. Like, something you might have, like, as a children's story sounds kinda similar. It's interesting.

Leo Laporte (01:50:52):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Rich Campbell (01:50:54):
Yeah. There, there are worse things. I just suspect that they're gonna go back and retrain again. It's also not a learning model, right? Like it's set, if you ask it anything past 2021, it doesn't know. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:51:05):
Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:51:06):
In April tell you, it's like, Hey, I made this, this model made at this point, it's going to become less relevant over time. That's a, and in some ways, that's an issue. It gives you confidence. It's not gonna destroy the world because it's not continuing to

Leo Laporte (01:51:16):
Learn. Well, I think it was more an issue of expense, because it would certainly be possible to have an AI that was constantly scrape, just like Google constantly scrapes the web, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, if you're willing to pay for it. Open ai Sam Altman said, I think it cost 3 million a day for chat G B T just to take the queries. It's about 10 times more expensive than a standard Google query. So if we're also doing new training all the time, imagine, you know.

Rich Campbell (01:51:41):
Hmm. Well, and maybe this is the future. This is the new Google query.

Leo Laporte (01:51:43):
Oh, it is the future. Absolutely. I have no doubt about it. I'm actually blown away that it's got, it's as, as good as it is. I mean, we can't figure out how to drive a car down a street,

Rich Campbell (01:51:56):
<Laugh>. Right? That's, that is complicated.

Leo Laporte (01:51:58):
Yeah. Turns out, you know. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:52:00):
The, the problem is that when chat G p t hits the, the curb, you don't notice it

Leo Laporte (01:52:04):
Near as much. Exactly.

Rich Campbell (01:52:05):
Right's not hitting the curb

Leo Laporte (01:52:07):
Doesn't

Rich Campbell (01:52:08):
Have as much

Leo Laporte (01:52:08):
Impact. Chat. G P T does not kill yet.

Rich Campbell (01:52:11):
Yet,

Leo Laporte (01:52:12):
Yet. All right. Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna now generate more nudes of my wife. So if you guys want to continue to talk

Paul Thurrott (01:52:21):
Yep. Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:52:22):
Go ahead. PC sales started all right at the beginning of the year. Yeah. Tanked.

Paul Thurrott (01:52:29):
This is to me as a big story, because there was that moment in time during the pandemic where PCs were back, baby. Yep. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And it was exciting. You couldn't buy 'em, you know, the, the whole component shortage thing happened, and I think this is, this year is the fallback to reality moment, but it's kind of brutal how it's happening. I it should have been easy to see coming, given all the gains we had over those tier, but now we're seeing double digit losses and PC makers and Intel have all predicted double digit, I mean, like 20 something percent downturns for this quarter holiday quarter which is kind of unprecedented. So it's gonna be, it's, I'm, I'm, I'm hopeful that we bought 'em out, but the question's gonna be when

Rich Campbell (01:53:14):
Yep. Yeah. And I don't know how much this has to do with PCs. It has to do with this inflation, right? Like it is a discretionary buy, and everybody's hauling back on discretionary buys. And I would argue PC's one of the most expensive buys you make in a household.

Paul Thurrott (01:53:28):
Yeah. And they last, I mean, that's the thing we were just talking about. They actually last a long time. I haven't turned it on, but I, I really feel like I'll bring up this tower. It's an I or an I seven, but third gen, we're, we're literally on 13th gen on the desktop now, which is what this is. So we're 10 generations newer, but I bet it's, I bet it's fine, you know? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> I'm, that doesn't mean I'm gonna use it for the podcast or anything, but I mean, it's, it's probably fine.

Rich Campbell (01:53:54):
It's probably gonna well, and and the biggest competitor of the iPad is your old iPad, right? Like the, the,

Paul Thurrott (01:54:00):
Right. So they're, they're hitting the same problem Windows Hadd, right? Mm-Hmm. The biggest competitor to Windows was always the previous version of

Rich Campbell (01:54:06):
Windows when you're currently running. And so now that hardware's kind of topped out and we just, you're not getting a lot for buying your new machine anymore.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:13):
Yeah. A lot of times when the advice for any new device just use iPad as a great reason, is like, well, you're not gonna buy the new one unless they dramatically change it, which they kind of did this year. But the performance benefits year over year are minor, but most people have had these things now for four or five years. So if you go back and look at what that thing was like, yeah. Actually, this is a pretty good upgrade for you. And the you'll, you'll notice this.

Rich Campbell (01:54:35):
Yeah. Right, right. That's right. The battery stops starts to

Paul Thurrott (01:54:38):
Fail. You're really displaying a battery. Exactly. <laugh>. It's what's sweat better battery life.

Rich Campbell (01:54:42):
Exactly. Time for a new battery.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:43):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:54:44):
So, I mean, I'm, yeah. It's not like PCs are actually going away. It's that they over projected because they took, they, they took a grade line off of an unreasonable number, and we have external economic forces. And I tho that term annoys me, seems like an excuse for all kinds of things. Just like the Pandemic was a co a year ago.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:03):
Oh, they love it. It's act of God is what that is. That that's what, basically Apple's been using the word headwinds. Yeah. We have headwinds. Headwinds. We have headwinds. Yeah. It's like they're sailing <laugh>.

Rich Campbell (01:55:15):
Yeah. It, it, it seems like excuses. It really does.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:18):
Yep. It is. But no, that's what happens. Let's talk about, we could have boarded these better. Yeah. I mean, we were talking about departures, but Joe B is another one and Yeah. It should be missed, right? Yeah. Joe B doesn't have the problems Alex Kitman has, other than the fact that they look alike <laugh>. But Joe B's both, they're both longhaired hippies, clearly. That's true. Yeah, exactly. I'm, I'm actually pretty sure Joie is Alice Kidman's kid <laugh>, but

Rich Campbell (01:55:46):
He's about that size. He, I was nervous around him. I felt like if I fell one.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:50):
He's a tiny, is he tiny? He, small guy. He's a very small yeah. Person. Yeah. That's cute. He is the the Davy Jones of our group. Oh, he is, he's got the hair too. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I he's interesting to me because he, he parallels my career and I, in the mid nineties Microsoft bef, you know, before the internet was a big, our broadband was bigger. You know, I wasn't really going to too many industry events. They would have developer events or just events, and they would broadcast them over satellite. And the way you would see them locally is you would go to a movie theater. And I watched a presentation that he gave about the future of Internet Explorer, probably in 95 or so. And they were talking about I e two N three, and Richard earlier mentioned some things they did that were incompatible and all that stuff.

(01:56:36):
They, I almost blurted out something about this, because at that time, they were doing things with frames that would eventually not make its way into the spec <laugh>. So, you know, i, e two or three, I don't remember which one I think it was. I e two had like colored frames and did all this stuff that have never happened. It just something, you know, they were kind of hoping was gonna happen. But that Joe B was the, the presenter. And I, I found him to be very dynamic and exciting and interesting, and he was not what I sort of thought Microsoft was. And so that was very interesting to me. And then I got to meet him a few years later, and I knew him for a long time, and he's, he's a great guy. But he was you know, he played a key role in a lot of interesting products.

(01:57:14):
 Windows. Windows and ie. Windows Media Center, windows phone, loved it. And the media Center guys got in trouble with Jim Achin because they came up with a Z Home brand and promoted it at CES or Context or whatever it was. And they were, they came down and said, yeah, you're not doing that <laugh>. This is Windows you idiot. You know, they got in a lot of trouble. And, you know, he went on his little hiatus, came back, he tried to do some stuff with windows 10, unfortunately, announced a bunch of things that never came out, like sets which is basically tabs on all apps. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, and then later kind of said he never made those promises when you could go back to the video and say yeah, you did <laugh>. You know, which was unfortunate. Let's, let's roll the film.

(01:57:56):
Jim <laugh>. Yeah. Which is an article I wrote. And that's too bad cuz I love the guy. But, you know, it's like, dude, I'm sorry, but you pro you did promise this. Like, and and like we mentioned Snow and like Miguel Deza, it's interesting that at the end of his tenure at Microsoft, he was in some part of the company where you're like, what? And he was basically in the Office 365 group working on like, user experiences related to broader, I guess Microsoft 365 stuff that he wasn't really in Windows anymore. And it was kinda like, what are you, you know, what are you doing? But then he left and I'm, you know, I'm sure he is fine. <Laugh> I'm

Rich Campbell (01:58:29):
Sure he's a Siberia effect, right? It's like you sort of get pushed off into a kind of Siberia mm-hmm. <Affirmative> as a hint, but they're never gonna fire you. It's

Paul Thurrott (01:58:37):
Too expensive. Yeah. Cause you're too, but you don't really Yeah. Like, let's, it's fair to say that like the things that you worked on back in the day that were important aren't as important anymore. Where else could we use you? You know, that kind

Rich Campbell (01:58:49):
Thing. And, and nobody at that level needs the money, right? Like, you're kind of a no.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:53):
Like, and that creates its own problem, right? You get this guy coming in every day who just, you know, does he give a crap? I mean, yeah. You know, and,

Rich Campbell (01:59:01):
And once he gets to that point, it's like, what am I doing?

Paul Thurrott (01:59:04):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I'm surprised he lasted as long as he did. I would've left much longer ago, but Yeah. Yeah. They

Rich Campbell (01:59:11):
Also surround themselves in their own bubble. I'm like, they they see in their own way.

Paul Thurrott (01:59:15):
Yeah. Yeah. He's a good guy. He is a good guy. Yeah. I'll always remember it was a good guy. It,

Rich Campbell (01:59:18):
It'll be interesting to see if he, if and when he resurfaces too. Cause often these folks reappear somewhere else,

Paul Thurrott (01:59:23):
Like, which I don't, astonish don't ever understand Google, which I know, I know. What are you doing? You know, I'm dying to talk. He's living in Boston now. I moved like an idiot and I could have been hanging out with snow in Boston, but I'll go see him at some point. I can't wait to talk to him about this. I don't know why he's working <laugh>. I, I guess because he would be bored. I, you

Rich Campbell (01:59:39):
Know. Yeah. And yeah, that mind, not, not an awful lot to do. That could be very

Paul Thurrott (01:59:43):
Deceptive. I know. Just, yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:59:45):
Yeah. So SRE at Google, which arguably is their most solved problem.

Paul Thurrott (01:59:51):
Yeah. It's weird. It's a weird mix. Yeah. I don't get it. But you'll, you'll probably talk to 'em before. I do. I'm curious about this one. I, I, well,

Leo Laporte (02:00:02):
I wanted

Rich Campbell (02:00:03):
To show I do that show in a second.

Paul Thurrott (02:00:04):
Yeah. There, there you

Leo Laporte (02:00:06):
Go. I wanna show you what chat G p t wrote about this show. Queried by our own engineer, Patrick Dhani. Write a script for Leola Port to introduce this week's episode of Windows Weekly with Paul Thout and guest Richard Campbell. Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Windows Weekly. I'm Leola Port, and with me, as always, is the one and only Paul Thurrott. This week we have a special guest joining us, none other than Richard Campbell, co-host of.net rocks and co-founder of Strange Loop Networks. We have a lot to discuss this week, including the latest up updates to Windows 10 and Microsoft's news surface devices. We'll also be taking a deep dive into the world of.net and discussing the latest developments in the tech industry. So, sit back, relax, and get ready. I would ne Okay. I'm never ever gonna say that phrase for an informative and entertaining update episode of Windows Weekly. Let's get started. Thank you. Chat. G P T. So now go

Paul Thurrott (02:00:58):
Home mostly. Well, it's, we found stuff today. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (02:01:03):
It all the correct and

Paul Thurrott (02:01:05):
Barely have mentioned surface that

Leo Laporte (02:01:06):
Part. Yeah. Well, this,

Paul Thurrott (02:01:07):
No, that I don't, that's

Leo Laporte (02:01:08):
Impressive. This comes from remember April 21 is the last time it was trained. So yeah. It doesn't know about a lot of other things.

Paul Thurrott (02:01:16):
But I would never

Leo Laporte (02:01:17):
Say probably the pilot phrase, sit back, relax, and anything. You will never hear that come as quick as we can. That's the worst cliche. Sure. Ever.

Paul Thurrott (02:01:28):
I usually just break it down. Like, if someone's freaking out, you're just like, relax, <laugh>. You know, they usually does it.

Leo Laporte (02:01:33):
Chill, dude. Chill. Relax.

Paul Thurrott (02:01:37):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:01:38):
Alright. Right? Yes. Have we covered, have we done the One

Paul Thurrott (02:01:42):
More? There's

Leo Laporte (02:01:43):
One more. One more. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (02:01:44):
I just, I wrote, I finally wrote this up today. I've had this thing sitting mostly complete in my, in a folder somewhere for months, which is the problem you would have experienced, Leo, which is that the Windows Insider program is broken. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:01:57):
Somebody sent me a long email telling me what to do to fix it. Okay. And I think eventually it ended up wipe your hard drive and reinstall. Oh,

Paul Thurrott (02:02:06):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, there, there is that way, there is the nuke from Orbit option that's always available. Oh, by the way, unless you're on Windows on arm. The, the worst part of this story, actually, lemme explain the story first. So, back in the day, the dev beta and release preview channels mapped to some version of Windows today. They do not Microsoft actually, in their official documentation, claims that the beta and release preview channels do map to a version of Windows that is not true <laugh>, but whatever. The issue here is that you can't get out. And so what Leo did was at some point early in the year against my advice, by the way, <laugh>, I was

Leo Laporte (02:02:43):
Curious to see, oh, yeah. Oh yeah, you told me not to. Huh?

Paul Thurrott (02:02:46):
I think so. That's how I,

Leo Laporte (02:02:47):
I'm gonna throw the, the challenge bag here on that one. Well, fortunately, lets can go to the tape.

Paul Thurrott (02:02:54):
Yeah. Let's put it this way. If I did advise you, or Okay. It in some way, it was only because the way the system is supposed to work is when a version of Windows comes out. You can option in Windows settings, say, when that version comes out,

Leo Laporte (02:03:06):
Slam the window, unstable, slam the window. And, and, and, well, here's the thing. You and I both assume that that would be possible.

Paul Thurrott (02:03:13):
Well, because it, that's the, the, that's

Leo Laporte (02:03:15):
How it works. So I don't blame you, except that's not how, I don't blame you at all, Paul. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (02:03:18):
Well, thank

Leo Laporte (02:03:18):
You. And, and I don't remember. You might well have told me that

Paul Thurrott (02:03:20):
If you could, I, I if you could just sign some paperwork to that <laugh>. So the the issue is that you have people who are in the, the Dev or beta channel or whatever channel, and they've clicked that box in settings that says, look, when this version of Windows comes out, I'm out. But this version of Windows never coming out because this thing is not tied to a version of Windows. So this is system in place. Microsoft has done this from time to time. They've had these little windows where they say, okay, guys, you can move between channels. Right. Or you can just, you know, move out and th those, they're not available now. So that's bad. Now, if you're on an X 86 machine, like everyone in the world, it's, you know, you can blow it away and, and go from scratch. Right. The problem is, if you're on Windows in Arm, there is no ISO for you.

(02:04:06):
You can't Right. There's not, there's no way out. You can't get out. This is literally a dead end one way street. Mm-Hmm. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative> like it is, there's no way out. Now there are unofficial builds. If you can Google it, you, you'll, you might be able to find an unofficial Windows in arm build, but Microsoft does not make those ISOs available publicly. And I'm sorry, but they, this <laugh> you, you can't do that to people. Like, there has to be a way out. And they've just been silent on this. Like, I I mentioned up front, you know, 22 H two shipped over two months ago. Mm-Hmm. people who wanted to get out of that program when nothing ship should have been able to do so. And I remember saying to Leo at the time, I was like, well, you know, 22 H two ain't complete until the November update comes up. Maybe then we'll, you know, Nope. Nope. And those guys have all gone home for the holidays, by the way. So it's not gonna happen this month, that's for sure. I don't think it's gonna happen at all. That's the scary thing. I really, I just feel like there's no I feel like nobody really cares.

Rich Campbell (02:05:05):
Yeah. I, I mean, the state of the Windows team is an interesting thought all by itself. Right. It's just to where, where it's at. It's used to being the most important thing at Microsoft, and that's stopping true for a while now. And so, you know, who's leading what and how are things getting done and

Paul Thurrott (02:05:22):
Inside the program,

Rich Campbell (02:05:23):
I mean, one hand you say the wiping hardware should be the way it goes. That's what beta testers do.

Paul Thurrott (02:05:30):
Yeah. And by the way, I Right. That's fair enough. The thing is, I don't remember the numbers anymore, but when Donna Sakara was running the insider program, she, at one point they published numbers, like there was 17 million people or something like that. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. The problem is once you get up to these numbers, like not all these people are technical, right? No. you, you, you need to offer some way technical people can wipe it out unless they're an arm. Right. Right. You know the most technical people in the world are the MO ones most likely to have some arm hardware, which they might want to test the Insider program. You can download insider builds of arm, so you could go to a different, I think you can get dev beta builds, you could do that <laugh>, you know mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. but you can't download like a stable is o of Windows and Arm. And I, I, I, it just doesn't make sense to me. Yeah. So anyway, that's, it's my, it's

Rich Campbell (02:06:18):
Also the problem with the ARM initiative too, right? It's like they're

Paul Thurrott (02:06:21):
Not Oh, yeah.

Rich Campbell (02:06:22):
All

Paul Thurrott (02:06:23):
The way back. But actually to your point, Richard, like you know, ba when I came into, into the industry, windows was personal computing. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> windows, was it at Microsoft? It all the, the best of the brightest that was the, the world. And over time, that changed <laugh>, right? So the Windows Insider program began as an engineering, as part of engineering, right. Today it's more, I would call it kind of a sub pr kind of a thing. Community outreach maybe is the right way to put it. It's more community-based. 

Rich Campbell (02:06:56):
Well, and, and if it's really supposed to be an insiders program, we shouldn't be open to everyone. Like, there should be a qualification level and, and it should be hard there, right. If we're actually testing, I think the reality is most people sign up for it because they think it's gonna be cool. They put it on a machine, it isn't important to them, and then they stop using that machine.

Paul Thurrott (02:07:13):
That's right. And they turn it on months later, and it's outta date, and they have to go to the latest build, blah, blah, blah. And, and there's a whole nother story to the insider program. I don't wanna bore you with Richard, but you haven't been around to hear me rant about that. But basically the, the dev beta re release preview channels, it was kind of a, an this is a contract of a sort. Right? I'm joining this thing, I'm gonna join at, at this level, and this is what I'm gonna get. And Microsoft, after the fact changed that to be this meaningless void of whatever, we're just gonna test new features of whatever kind. Sometimes they appear first in beta, sometimes it's in dev. You know, we're, we're all over the place. And okay, that's cute, but can I just get out of this? No, there's no way out of it. <Laugh>, you know, and it's, you're in, it's, you're in, yeah. You're in a, except for white kids, big Ben, you're

Rich Campbell (02:07:59):
Way out.

Paul Thurrott (02:08:00):
Right? Yep. It's just, it's too bad. And you know, someone had asked me last week, they said, you know, you used to know all these people in Windows. Like you don't really seem to know anyone in Windows, you know? Right. I don't. Because all of the best in the brightest at Microsoft today are not in Windows. They're in the parts of the company that are growing, or that might be new business up and coming things. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, windows is a, is a kind of a stable whatever, but it's a legacy business now. And it's just not where, if you wanna advance your career at Microsoft, you're not going to Windows like we do that.

Rich Campbell (02:08:35):
Right. That's your, your most choices are in Azure. Right. and so you, you have a group of folks that are in Windows, because they've always been in Windows. The, the, I would argue they're all volunteers. Like if you've got,

Paul Thurrott (02:08:45):
If you've been in Windows, if you've been in

Rich Campbell (02:08:47):
Windows for 30 years, unless you have eight wives, do you think there

Paul Thurrott (02:08:50):
Are people, do you think there are people who've been in Windows for 30 years? Do you think there's anybody there there

Rich Campbell (02:08:54):
For that long? Yeah. Wow. Absolutely. because

Paul Thurrott (02:08:56):
They're, they're keeping the nose down. You, you don't hear from those people. Those are people.

Rich Campbell (02:09:00):
Well, or they moved, I think of a guy like Larry Osterman, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> like he did 30 plus years in the Windows team, and he finally got uncomfortable enough that he moved to a different team. But, you know, and he said as much himself. It's like, it got to a place where I wasn't working on stuff I wanted to work on, and I wanted to work on more stuff. So I went somewhere I could work on stuff I wanted to

Paul Thurrott (02:09:16):
Work on. Yeah, there you go. So that's is the

Rich Campbell (02:09:18):
Attitude of someone whose bills are paid and just wants

Paul Thurrott (02:09:21):
To work. Yeah. So, so the part of the windows that he would've worked in was like, windows the Insider program is this thing over on the side. It's, it's like it's like watching a community play. Like, it's cute, it's funny, but like, it's not, you know, it's not a high quality production, it's just, you know. Yeah. It is what it is. And that's too bad because the, the initial promise and the initial reality of the insider program, when they created it back in, you know, October, whatever that was, 2014 it was part of the engineering process. And that was the fun bit. We, we got to see how they made the sausage. We, it was interesting. We could be part of the, you know, feel like you're part of the process, your feedback matters. Mm-Hmm. It will go into the product. At the time it was rings, not channels, but you had specific jobs that you could do. It's a role. You chose that and Yeah, exactly. And you felt like you were part of something today. It's just, you can go and look at the feedback

Rich Campbell (02:10:15):
Personality. Like, Jonna Sacar was great at building community is still great at building community. She's doing it all work now, and it, and so it had a community vibe. But I don't know that the leadership on the window side will ever look at it like that. Like, is this a beta test crew? Is this not an alternative to MVPs?

Paul Thurrott (02:10:33):
Versus, yeah, I mean, so the, that marketing arm, the, the cynical view is that Microsoft allegedly and infamously fired all of their internal testers. And we're gonna bring in people from the outside the Insider program to do that testing first for free. Haha. Right. You know, we save millions of dollars a year, you know I don't know. That might be apocryphal. I don't

Leo Laporte (02:10:52):
Know. Hey everybody. Leo LaPorte here. I'm the founder and one of the hosts at the TWIT Podcast Network. I wanna talk to you a little bit about what we do here at twit because I think it's unique. And I think for anybody who is bringing a product or a service to a tech audience, you need to know about what we do Here at twit, we've built an amazing audience of engaged, intelligent, affluent listeners who listen to us and trust us when we recommend a product. Our mission statement is twit, is to build a highly engaged community of tech enthusiasts. Well already you should be, your ears should be perking up at that because highly engaged is good for you. Tech enthusiasts, if that's who you're looking for, this is the place we do it by offering 'em the knowledge they need to understand and use technology in today's world.

(02:11:45):
And I hear from our audience all the time, part of that knowledge comes from our advertisers. We are very careful. We pick advertisers with great products, great services with integrity, and introduce them to our audience with authenticity and genuine enthusiasm. And that makes our host Red Ads different from anything else you can buy. We are literally bringing you to the attention of our audience and giving you a big fat endorsement. We like to create partnerships with trusted brands, brands who are in it for the long run, long-term partners that want to grow with us. And we have so many great success stories. Tim Broom, who founded it Pro TV in 2013, started advertising with us on day one, has been with us ever since. He said, quote, we would not be where we are today without the Twit network. I think the proof is in the pudding.

(02:12:43):
Advertisers like it Pro TV and Audible that have been with us for more than 10 years, they stick around because their ads work. And honestly, isn't that why you're buying advertising? You get a lot with Twit. We have a very full service attitude. We almost think of it as kind of artisanal advertising, boutique advertising. You'll get a full service continuity team, people who are on the phone with you, who are in touch with you, who support you from, with everything from copywriting to graphic design. So you are not alone in this. We embed our ads into the shows. They're not, they're not added later. They're part of the shows. In fact, often they're such a part of our shows that our other hosts will chime in on the ads saying, yeah, I love that. Or just the other day, <laugh>, one of our hosts said, man, I really gotta buy that <laugh>.

(02:13:35):
That's an additional benefit to you because you're hearing people, our audience trusts saying, yeah, that sounds great. We deliver always overdeliver on impressions. So you know, you're gonna get the impressions you expect. The ads are unique every time. We don't pre-record them and roll them in. We are genuinely doing those ads in the middle of the show. We'll give you great onboarding services, ad tech with pod sites that's free for direct clients, gives you a lot of reporting, gives you a great idea of how well your ads are working. You'll get courtesy commercials. You actually can take our ads and share them across social media and landing pages. That really extends the reach. There are other free goodies too, including mentions in our weekly newsletter that sent to thousands of fans, engaged fans who really wanna see this stuff. We give you bonus ads and social media promotion too.

(02:14:27):
So if you want to be a long-term partner, introduce your product to a savvy engaged tech audience, visit twit tv slash advertise. Check out those testimonials. Mark McCreary is the c e o of authentic. You probably know him one of the biggest original podcast advertising companies. We've been with him for 16 years. Mark said the feedback for many advertisers over 16 years, across a range of product categories, everything from razors to computers, is that if ads and podcasts are gonna work for a brand, they're gonna work on Twitch shows. I'm very proud of what we do because it's honest. It's got integrity, it's authentic, and it really is a great introduction to our audience of your brand. Our listeners are smart, they're engaged, they're tech savvy. They're dedicated to our network. And that's one of the reasons we only work with high integrity partners that we've personally and thoroughly vetted. I have absolute approval on everybody. If you've got a great product, I want to hear from you. Elevate your brand by reaching out today@advertisetwit.tv. Break out of the advertising norm. Grow your brand with host Red ads on twit. Do TV visit twit.tv/advertise for more details. Or you can email us, advertise@twit.tv if you're ready to launch your campaign. Now. I can't wait to see your product, so give us a ring. We have only about 20 minutes left

Paul Thurrott (02:15:56):
In the show. Yeah, we can skip. Oh yeah. So by the way, I should say when I, when I first did the notes

Leo Laporte (02:16:00):
As I enjoy you two

Paul Thurrott (02:16:01):
No, we, we could just jump right to the back. So there's a lot I put in, I put it, yeah. I put in news from this week. Honestly, none of it is important. Let me just make sure

Leo Laporte (02:16:09):
We could, we can get up the highlights from the week, you

Paul Thurrott (02:16:12):
Know? Yeah. That's what I'm looking for. I mean, I would say most of this is not super important. I, I, I I did this part first and I said, this is kind of weak. And then I said, wait, it's the end of the year. Let's do an end of the year recap. And that was more

Leo Laporte (02:16:24):
Interesting. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:16:25):
So let's go through some of the highlights, especially since Richard here. We should let him touch on some of these things. I think I'm just curious cuz I, you know, you have your experience and perspective. I have mine and I, you know, I'm just curious where you are with certain things. So for example I got a, a surprise email from Microsoft in the past week that was literally in the title. Said this is about HoloLens two momentum. Now momentum is a word for me that goes back in time. And Microsoft back in the day when they were on a three year re release cycle, would release a new version of Windows or office or whatever it was, was big. And that was all they talked about. And then next year and they would talk about momentum and the year after that they would talk about the one that was coming next.

(02:17:03):
I always hated that momentum year cuz momentum is nonsense. Right. And so I had a, I was walking, I was with a coworker and we were going between meetings at some Microsoft trade show. I don't remember what, so we had all these back-to-back meetings. So we're getting tired. It's the end of the day. And I showed, I'm sitting there with our laptops and I leaned into 'em and I said, if this guy says momentum, I'm gonna close my laptop and I'm gonna beat him to death with it. <Laugh>. And so we went into the meeting, the guy said, oh Paul, I'm really glad to see you. I said, we're here today to talk about Windows Surfer Mo momentum. And Keith, this guy and I both just looked at each other, dispersed the <laugh>. This guy is like, what the hell's going on? And it was just like, I just couldn't take it. So anyway, here we are. It's 2022 L This is literally probably 20 years later and yeah, HoloLens two momentum. So I just Laron the guy who writes I News wrote about it. But the thing that was interesting about it is they addressed an issue which has come up again and again, which is HoloLens two came in a long time ago and HOS two was significant update. Yeah. was it that recently? It was it 2019? Okay. Okay. It it

Rich Campbell (02:18:08):
Was, it was the before times.

Paul Thurrott (02:18:11):
That's right. That's right. Yeah, you're right. You're right. Cuz I actually, I was there, they announced it in Barcelona, so mm-hmm. <Affirmative> it was a significant update, but it was also, it had been, there was gonna be an another HoloLens too. And this was, this was gonna be HoloLens. They kind of pushed it back to get a better HoloLens too. And it looks like they're doing the same thing with HoloLens three. And what they said about it was, we're still thinking about this, but we're not gonna just release something. We're not gonna do a half step, like for there to be a new hall lens. It has to be meaningful. I think they're doing a little bit of treading water here because I believe that most of the Hall Ends team at one point just left. A lot of it went to meta Right. To work on that stuff. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, Alex Gitman, of course we know left this year. What's your thoughts on ho does Hos have a future? I mean, what do you think is the, the story here for

Rich Campbell (02:18:56):
Hos? I got a couple of things to think about. First is mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, your cadence is based on hardware. Ultimately you're pushing the limits of what hardware is possible to do so mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, the Moore's law matters, which means realistically you sh could build a new device roughly every two years cause you have a But the hardware

Paul Thurrott (02:19:13):
Yeah, I know, but I mean, do you really want a bunch of different versions of this hardware in the world, different capabilities, and now developers have to deal with that. I mean, what's the Oh, sure. That's, that's, and

Rich Campbell (02:19:22):
Hopefully the code just moves forward, but you know, that mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, that's part of the problem. Right. I think the bigger one, and they hinted this but don't say it outright, is the US Army derailed them.

Paul Thurrott (02:19:33):
Right. Right.

Rich Campbell (02:19:34):
That they got enamored of that US Army future shoulder contract. Right. The Army made a huge raft of demands. They hijacked the HoloLens three development plan to fulfill that. Yep. And then it, it got canceled. That's

Paul Thurrott (02:19:48):
Right. Yeah. I I wonder if some, I, I wonder if there wasn't such a huge emphasis. I'd have to look at the timing. I'm not sure about this, but it wouldn't be surprising to me if this coincided with what was happening with Jedi, where they thought, man, we're gonna lose big here. We need this win. Like, we need some Yeah. To show somehow we're still involved with government. This is big. I know Army is military, but you know, it's a like a federal thing and sure.

Rich Campbell (02:20:12):
I don't know. And the more importantly, I don't want Amazon to win this or anybody else.

Paul Thurrott (02:20:17):
Yeah. Right.

Rich Campbell (02:20:17):
Exactly. And the military demands for a device like that have a lot less to do with new features and more to do with things like durability mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Right. It's got exactly Right. Survive a soldier. So, right.

Paul Thurrott (02:20:28):
This is like medical equipment. It has to just work <laugh>, you know,

Rich Campbell (02:20:31):
This is done, this work and, and be bombproof. Right? Yep. And the rule is, you know, you're at, they, the line that surgeons use is, I left a private in a room with two steel balls and he lost one and broke the other. Right. So you've gotta be able to make it robust enough to function those conditions and they do that. Like, you look at how durable military equipment is this extraordinary, but I do think if you, if you haven't worked in that space before, and I did some contracting and stuff with a few different, their focus is very different. The mission is very powerful. So I think a, a person like Alex Kipman was deeply affected by that and, and pushed hard to pour all the,

Paul Thurrott (02:21:09):
The guy who, as I said was standing in aquarium is now making a special built item for the military, which is not exactly the same thing. I I almost feel like the company that wants to make the what they should have done is like gone to a sub subcontractor. Something to just, just do this. Like this is,

Rich Campbell (02:21:26):
It's this

Paul Thurrott (02:21:27):
That company's business. Right, exactly.

Rich Campbell (02:21:29):
Yeah. To solve, to solve that particular problem. Yeah. And that being said, like what I'm looking for is who replaces Alex Kipman? Who's the

Paul Thurrott (02:21:35):
News? Yeah. And there's been nothing right on that front. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (02:21:39):
Well,

Paul Thurrott (02:21:39):
How long ago did Alex Kipman leave it

Rich Campbell (02:21:42):
This summer? Don't remember. It was only this past summer. It's only been a few months. Okay. In the end, Microsoft does not reward those to pick up the pieces. They reward the heroes that make new things. And it's, that would be shocking for HoloLens, but certainly not unprecedented.

Paul Thurrott (02:21:59):
Because what you just said, by the way, if you don't mind if I just pause on them for a second mm-hmm. <Affirmative> super important because you're absolutely correct. And this is how I, you know, we talk about Windows 11 fit and finish and the archeological dig of new feature of UIs and all that stuff. No one is gonna get rewarded for making Windows 11 UIs consistent across the board. Like keep or get rid of control panel. But if you keep it, make it look like a modern app or, you know Right. Dig into those UIs, no one gets rewarded for that. That there's no, that work doesn't occur because Right. What you said a hundred percent. That's exactly right. Anyway, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to but that Yes. Across the board

Rich Campbell (02:22:34):
Except that HoloLens is such a leading edge device, is in an innovative space. Like you're gonna anger some important customers that you worked very hard to cultivate for, to experiment with this technology, you have to continue the care and feeding on it. I

Paul Thurrott (02:22:49):
Think at some point though, you need processor upgrade. Just, I mean, forget about features. Just just from a perform general performance, whatever standpoint, I mean, use

Rich Campbell (02:22:57):
Make the new set of chips, which is stunningly expensive. Like that was part of the problem is it did have to do custom chips cuz it was leading edge. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you have to make the, the new set of chips and the moment there is a chip available and you start down that process, you then have that sense the next chip's just around the corner. Like if we just hold on, we can skip a generation, which is clearly where they are right now. Yeah. So I do like the term industrial metaverse because I really want a metaverse that has nothing to do with Zuckerberg. You know,

Paul Thurrott (02:23:28):
<Laugh>, he definitely isn't doing that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I the No, this gonna be, yeah, he might be doing the steampunk universe Metaverse, but it's not, they'll do that thing where they, they kind of re, they reach into the commercial space a little bit, but the primary focus here is gonna be consumer. And doing the reverse is possible, but I don't think you're gonna see like a hall lens three with a bunch of you know, video games or casual apps or whatever. It's, you know, it's, it's purpose-built. It's, it's, it's gonna be like a vertical business solution.

Rich Campbell (02:23:59):
Yeah. You, you first you need a place to work, then you get a place to play. Right. Like Yeah. New platforms are not built on, on the play part. They're built on the work part.

Paul Thurrott (02:24:09):
Yeah. Especially Microsoft, but Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

Rich Campbell (02:24:14):
But it's one of the reasons you tend to see these platforms succeed is when an enterprise embraces 'em and makes a 10 year plus commitment to it.

Paul Thurrott (02:24:22):
Yeah.

Rich Campbell (02:24:22):
Once that line gets crossed, it's gonna keep going along one way or the other. And you know, HoloLens talk, you know, Microsoft talk about 300,000 HoloLens. I mean, that's not as digable as some other stacks. That's a fair number of customers. The question is who owns them and how much are they spending, and what else do they buy from you? Because the other part, they don't talk about it all.

Paul Thurrott (02:24:43):
Yeah, I was gonna say

Rich Campbell (02:24:44):
The Azure iott cost of HoloLens

Paul Thurrott (02:24:46):
Exactly. Per, per month, per user. So That's exactly right. A lot of people here are 300,000 and think, what are you talking about? That's not a billion dollar business. Like, hold on a second, <laugh>, they, they, no one picks up. A HoloLens is done and is done. There's the custom software development that goes on top of it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and those monthly fees per user that go on top of that. Yeah. And that's where,

Rich Campbell (02:25:03):
That's where they, they say an eight hour day use of HoloLens, a thousand bucks a month. Yeah. And Azure Iott.

Paul Thurrott (02:25:09):
See, and you thought Netflix was getting expensive, you know, <laugh>, <laugh>, that's, you know. Yeah. Okay. So speaking of meta, so John, I'm sorry. No,

Rich Campbell (02:25:20):
It's, until I see a leader for the HoloLens team that's, that's gonna do with the keynote's

Paul Thurrott (02:25:24):
Gonna talk about that. It's,

Rich Campbell (02:25:25):
It's

Paul Thurrott (02:25:26):
Nothing. It's standing still. It's

Leo Laporte (02:25:27):
Stuck. But you don't think that the, the rumor that they had killed HoloLens three and that everybody was getting moved off the, the team,

Paul Thurrott (02:25:34):
Well, there were, well, there were rumors about this for the previous two gens. Right? So the HoloLens two that came out is what internally would've been like Hall Lens three initially. They, they kind of killed the mid midterm one. I think they're just, they were, look, I, I, there's all kinds of reasons to do things. We could blame the headwinds, you know, like Raspberry Pie just came out today or this week and said, look we're not gonna have a product next year. Next year's gonna be building back. We're not doing Raspberry PI five until 2024. I was like, yikes. But, you know, Microsoft, you could make the same ar the, well, it's not the same argument, but you could see that Microsoft doing the same thing with hos because the existing product does work for what's out there in the world, and they, to do something new, it has to be significant. Right. It can't just, well,

Rich Campbell (02:26:19):
They have and they have missed the window. Like, another way to read this announcement is we're waiting for the next chip set. Rev. Right. Really? That's right. Because we've already missed the window. If we were gonna hit the previous chip set, rev, we'd, it'd be in your hands right now, and it's not. So we gotta wait for the next chip set.

Paul Thurrott (02:26:35):
Yeah. Yep. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:26:37):
I could tell Paul wants to talk about John Carmack. You read that? Oh,

Paul Thurrott (02:26:40):
I just wanna mention, you read that

Leo Laporte (02:26:41):
Great book all about the early

Paul Thurrott (02:26:43):
Days. So John Carmack is a God. Yes. I just wanna be clear. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, he's the he's a God. And this was a guy, I think, when I think about him and like what he accomplished, right? This is a guy who took like the most pathetic PC hardware in the world in the early 1990s, and let it run realtime games in 3D in ways that were better than AGA's could even dream of. You know? It's impossible. And so this guy does what he does over the many years, all the game engines and everything builds a career out of being like the best programmer in the world, and then gets to meta and runs into our brick wall. And it's fascinating eight years after the fact for him to finally kind of lash out at these people and say, look, you may still come out on top, but my God, like he, what did he, he said it was oh shit, I forgot the word. Sorry. he said, I find it offensive. I, when efficient this company is, it offends

Leo Laporte (02:27:31):
Me. Oh, yeah. And he claimed he was quoted outta context, but then I read the original post on Facebook. No, no. He wasn't quoted outta not,

Paul Thurrott (02:27:37):
I think he tried to

Leo Laporte (02:27:38):
That's exactly right. <Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (02:27:40):
Yeah. Yeah. The context is, I didn't want you to know what I really meant. I was, you know, he

Leo Laporte (02:27:45):
Sounded pretty unhappy. He says, I'm still bullish in vr, I'm just not happy about how it's run at Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott (02:27:52):
You know, he left Bethesda.

Leo Laporte (02:27:54):
I'm sorry, did I say Microsoft at Meta? Yeah, sorry.

Paul Thurrott (02:27:56):
Yeah. He, he worked at, well, he, you know, co-founded its software. They sold the company, the Bethesda Bethesda. He said, look, vrs the next big thing we need to, this is where we're going. And I don't know mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, look, I actually, I'm not sure I would've agreed with that either. But then again, <laugh> this guy who was right about everything, I I maybe you've put some resources behind this, like maybe do this too, you know? They just said no, he left. Yeah. I would take him serious. Exactly. he's not chicken little, you know, he's, he knows what he is talking about. And you know he might have been ahead of the game so to speak. And, but I, I feel like meta, if they had also listened to him, might be in a better place today with VR than they are, you know?

(02:28:39):
So it's just kind of interesting. There is a, I I don't, there's a, a fascinating interview with John Carmack that came out this year on YouTube. I don't really like the guy who interviewed him, per se, but it's a multi-hour thing. It's crazy. It's, it's amazing to listen to. And one of the, and I've listened to it twice, and one of the things that he says that I love, and I would love to happen, cuz I know right now, right now he's gonna go work on ai. This is his new big thing. But I, I think the guy asked him some question along the lines of you know, what do you wanna do next? Or What do you see in the future? Or, or have you ever considered this? And one of the things he said was, he goes, you know, one of the things I've never done is general purpose operating system development. He goes, I, I gotta tell you, I'm really interested in it. And I might look at that sometime in the future. It would be fascinating to see a guy like Jar Mar Carmack, who has done so much to make woefully inadequate chips outperform what anyone could have thought was possible. Apply that knowledge and learning to, you know, makos or Windows or whatever might be Linnux, probably my God. Like what could he do <laugh>, you know? Yeah. he's not done.

Leo Laporte (02:29:45):
It's, it's also possible, Paul, and I know you're in love with Mr. Carmack, that he's a little over,

Paul Thurrott (02:29:50):
I'm, I'm not listening. I'm not listening. I'm

Leo Laporte (02:29:51):
Not listening. And that all of the amazing and you know, frankly, very clever tricks. He used to get incredible performance out of low end hardware. Were in his youth. And

Paul Thurrott (02:30:03):
So if you're trying to suggest that he is the

Leo Laporte (02:30:06):
<Laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (02:30:07):
Let see if I can pull this out on that one. <Laugh> damnit Steve Wazniak of gaming. I, I will say, no sir, he is

Leo Laporte (02:30:15):
Not, well, remember, of course, Waz was famous for Yeah. His low level optimiz. Yep, yep. So was Bill Gates

Paul Thurrott (02:30:21):
On the Apple two on the Apple toy.

Leo Laporte (02:30:22):
On the apple too. So was

Paul Thurrott (02:30:23):
Games once he That's right. But yes, no,

Leo Laporte (02:30:27):
For sure. When you're a young, when you're a youngin, you're, you know, maybe have more energy for that kind of stuff.

Paul Thurrott (02:30:33):
But he did it so consistently over such a long, he

Leo Laporte (02:30:36):
Was brilliant at the time. No, he's a brilliant programmer. I don't know how good he is still. I mean, there are plenty of guys my age who are very, very good. But did you ever look at Armadillo Aerospace? I did not. Yeah. Is that, was him, is that a game? Okay, <laugh>? No,

Paul Thurrott (02:30:49):
No, no, no. That's his space program. Oh, his,

Leo Laporte (02:30:51):
That's his program. Yeah. Is he launching armadillos into space?

Paul Thurrott (02:30:55):
So he misunderstand <laugh>, he lives in Texas, thus the name. Yes. I

Leo Laporte (02:31:01):
Imagined as much. Yeah, no, that, no, which is not to say he's not vigorous smart and creative, it just means mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, he may not, the thing that you cherish him for his amazing ability to code deep to the hardware to get it to do crazy 3D stuff. It

Paul Thurrott (02:31:16):
Wasn't, I tell you

Leo Laporte (02:31:17):
May not be even what he doing these days,

Paul Thurrott (02:31:19):
Virtual gloves and challenge you to a DOL

Leo Laporte (02:31:22):
<Laugh>, and it's certainly not needed, I would imagine. I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. You know, I, I, the, the Quest Pro runs on doesn't have a tether. It runs on battery, it runs in the processor built in, and it's quite fast. And no,

Paul Thurrott (02:31:37):
The way he described that was, he said, this was the product we all always envisioned we should have gotten here years earlier. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. That, that was his,

Leo Laporte (02:31:44):
That was his issue. Could be. Could be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (02:31:48):
Okay. My question, I think we've had this sitting right over there. My problem is, you know, I I, I went back after reading CarMax thing, I went and put my Quest two back on, and like, the only thing you actually want to do with that is beat laser saber. Right? Like,

Leo Laporte (02:32:02):
This is kind of the problem. That's the game, to be honest, game. And by the way, note, he was talking about VR in this post, not ar mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And somebody on,

Paul Thurrott (02:32:12):
I couldn't tell you though, on

Leo Laporte (02:32:14):
Mac Break Weekly, I think, or maybe on Twitter. No, it was on Twitter. I think it was. Maybe Jason Heiner said, you know, it might be that he wants to go far ahead in vr and that Microsoft quite, I think rightly is committed to ar Yeah. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, and that may be,

Paul Thurrott (02:32:30):
I think ar makes more sense for Microsoft than what they're trying to do. Right? Yeah. I mean, I think that does

Leo Laporte (02:32:35):
Make sense. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:32:35):
I just think I, look, I, years ago, remember when Google Cardboard was a thing? Remember that little vr Oh yes. Headset thing was made outta cardboard. Yes. Well, I got this thing, and you put your phone in it, it would heat up and burn out, and you'd have to take it out. But you would do this for a little while. And at the time, what you could do is actually, this is like the Google Maps version of before Doom, or before Wolfenstein of you would have like a dungeon crawler, and the way it would work is you would go down a hallway, but it wouldn't be like the smooth animation like, you know, karma I created, it would be like a Glu glu, you know, you'd go down the little steps, so you would get on street view with this thing. And I put it in a position in Paris, I know Paris really well, and I spent hours on the couch walking around Paris one little, you know, step at a time now mm-hmm. <Affirmative>

(02:33:19):
Now it's not totally immersive and it's not, you know, whatever. But it was, it was semi magical. It was kind of incredible, even in that really kind of basic state. And I do feel like there's a vr, I'll call it a vr, but maybe a VR ar solution where you are home and get to experience a travel situation or a situation where imagine like you're, I always use the cafe experience. You're sitting in the cafe, you've got that 360 degree sound through the thing. Glasses are clinking, people are talking, music is playing, rain is falling, whatever it is, it's like an as s m R type of experience. And so if someone handed you a cup of coffee, you would almost be there <laugh>. Like you would almost be there. And there were all kinds of those experiences. You can, you can have minor versions of these on YouTube.

(02:34:02):
You can ride a, a train through Siberia or wa someone just walks through the streets of some city and it's like, you're there. I do feel like there are armchair travelers who could benefit from this technology in ways that I think are really compelling. Or even people who are actual travelers, where it's not just a pandemic. You just can't travel all the time. And you're like, I wish I was in Paris tonight. I could be using that example. And you have this experience. And I, I, I do feel like that's something that can happen, you know? And that it's, yeah, I'm not, is it worth a 300 or a $500 headset or what, you know, I don't know. But I did, I still, everybody who

Rich Campbell (02:34:41):
Something there, a top tier game developer who's now retired, and we, and he did work on VR games at the time, and his, the whole point he came to was, look, there's a big difference between the three inch experience and the three foot experience when you were running in Call of Duty, you're running at about 30 miles an hour, because otherwise the game would be boring. If I put that up to three inches away from your face, you are instantly nauseated. That's exactly why does, why does beat laser work? Because you don't move in beat laser. Your feet are stuck in place. Like all of the movement systems in VR are problematic, and it's, you

Paul Thurrott (02:35:16):
Need

Rich Campbell (02:35:17):
Very different games.

Paul Thurrott (02:35:18):
Your brain can't loses it because you can't see your feet or something and whatever that

Rich Campbell (02:35:23):
You, you're missing your references and, and, and your equilibrium system gets annoyed with you from the motion that it's seeing. And you kick in to see sickness mode, and it's like, all right. Yep. First step everyone out of the pool.

Paul Thurrott (02:35:36):
Yeah. I experienced this on an, I don't, what was it? Some, whatever. One of the, maybe it was an early Oculus, it was an early VR system of this era, you know? And it was probably like an unreal engine type of thing, but it was, you know, you just walked around the landscape. You weren't even shooting anything. You just were, it was like you were in a Call of Duty or a quake type game, and I had to pull it off. It made me sick to my stomach. It was it was amazing on the one for one second, like, holy, oh, <laugh>, you know, like, it was excellent but terrible. Right. Which is so many things of life, I

Rich Campbell (02:36:07):
Guess. It's, it's very challenging. And until you have enough hardware, you're never, you know, you've got the old problem. Right. I'm, the amount of money's gonna take to build that game to make it good. You're never gonna make back with the number of headsets that exist. And you're never gonna sell a headset. So you have a game that good.

Paul Thurrott (02:36:23):
Yeah.

Rich Campbell (02:36:24):
You go, you're, you're stuck in the trap.

Paul Thurrott (02:36:26):
Yep. Interesting. Well, I'm gonna let Mudda, you know, throw billions of dollars at it and

Rich Campbell (02:36:32):
<Laugh>, well, they already have. And now it looks like Zucks gonna lose his job over it. You know, we thought Elon burned a lot of money with, with 50 billion on Twitter, but Yep. Facebook was a trillion dollar company. 18. Amazing,

Paul Thurrott (02:36:48):
Isn't it? The thing I don't get about that

Rich Campbell (02:36:50):
Is billion. That's

Paul Thurrott (02:36:52):
Amazing. It's, it's gotta be one of the most profitable companies in the world. Why just do that <laugh>? Yeah. Why, why do you have to do, has idea, make the service better? <Laugh>, you know, like, I mean, it's weird. Like, it's weird to me that that wasn't enough.

Rich Campbell (02:37:06):
Well, when Apple started doing the ID block and so forth, like their num their their days are clearly numbered. Their business of doing ultra targeted advertising was already numbered. Right. And rather than find new ways to pursue that business, which ultimately was never Z's interest in the first place, this was Sandberg. Sandberg invented the ad business, and she left. So he decided to pivot and burn through a tremendous amount of value. Such it is like, I

Paul Thurrott (02:37:34):
Think he's shareholders.

Rich Campbell (02:37:34):
You're not a happy person.

Paul Thurrott (02:37:36):
I feel like that guy feels like he doesn't, I feel like he is trying to prove something. Like, in other words, there are, there's all these doubters that think I didn't create this thing and I'm not smart and I didn't do this, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna show them. And it like, I feel like this is what comes out of something like that. It's just mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I don't know that they've moved the needle forward enough for this. Well, they definitely haven't, to me have this matter in the mainstream way. It's just not, he's positive. The folks, the future,

Rich Campbell (02:38:03):
The folks I know that are senior dev types who got it recruited into meta weren't going there to help Zuckerberg's succeed, they said this metaverse thing's gonna be something someday. This guy's spending the bucket load of money on it. I'll put my year in and then go make something else.

Paul Thurrott (02:38:18):
Interesting. How do you feel about Don Box, by the way?

Rich Campbell (02:38:21):
Well, I mean, I would put him in that in that group. Yeah. That guy's worked on a lot of product. He is not an an unintelligent person. He's potential opportunity space.

Paul Thurrott (02:38:31):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So,

Rich Campbell (02:38:32):
You know, he's going to, he's gonna pursue that, but he also knows when to move, right? Like mm-hmm.

Paul Thurrott (02:38:39):
<Affirmative>.

Rich Campbell (02:38:39):
Yeah. You know, wait, wait till you see him pop back out again, then you'll know more. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:38:44):
Yep. That's what I'm curious about. Yeah. How long he lasts.

Leo Laporte (02:38:47):
Let's do the back of the book, what do you

Paul Thurrott (02:38:49):
See? Yeah, yeah. Yes. So we've been talking a lot about Master On Lately. I think they picked up What about a couple million people since this Twitter, Elon Musk stuff started happening. Somebody on Mastodon. I should just find it. I'd link to it. So Will Ormo

Leo Laporte (02:39:05):
Will a Remus? Yes. His He's good. Is

Paul Thurrott (02:39:08):
Yes. Yeah. So he has a, so I would, I, I was just writing something about Mastodon. It was kinda like the pros and cons I haven't published yet, but one of the, one of the cons is compared to Twitter by default, anyway, it's a little quiet, right? So I've been on Twitter for God, I dunno, 15 years, a long, long time, whatever it is. And of course, you build up, you follow more people, more people follow you, like turns into this big conversation space. And when you start on Masteron, it's kind of like, well, you know, this five or six or 20 or a hundred people, it's like, it's smaller, you know? And so there's a, a site and a service called Move to don.org. Right. which helps you find your Twitter friends on Mastodon, and it helps you follow more people. So I followed a bunch of people. I I am following on Twitter and just in the, the day since I've done it Mastodon went from being a very sleepy kind of a thing, which is super civil and nice, nice people and all that, but to more of what I was looking for, right? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:40:04):
A lot of these people moved over. Unfortunately, Elon now is blocking people linking their Mastodon account. But this, this gives you a good list. And these are all people I follow on Twitter that I don't yet follow on ma on. So I'm gonna click that Follow That's right. All button. Cuz that's a, that's a great

Paul Thurrott (02:40:18):
Thing. Yeah, no, I, I, it, it made a huge difference for me. Yeah. Huge difference. And I went down the list and just looked at like, I'm like, yeah, yeah. I'm like, yep, everybody's

Leo Laporte (02:40:25):
Here. Everything. So everybody's here now. Yeah. Great.

Paul Thurrott (02:40:27):
Yeah. Yeah. It's excellent. So that, that's, that's a neat little tip that I didn't make, but that, you know makes Macedon more usable and more of a, a, a better experience when you are trying to lead Twitter. There

Leo Laporte (02:40:38):
Are quite a few of these, but this is a good one. Move to don.org mostly cuz it ranks it by activ by activity. So the, yeah. The more active, so

Paul Thurrott (02:40:47):
There's two, so you can, yeah, you can rank it two different ways. You can rank it by activity, but you can also rank it by the amount of time they've been on Macedon. Yeah. And one of the people I <laugh> I follow has been on Macedon for, for years. I didn't even, it was around. Yeah, like how long has it been a thing? Like, I don't remember the number, but it was a really long time.

Leo Laporte (02:41:04):
14. Something like that. We've had a Macon since.

Paul Thurrott (02:41:05):
Yeah. So like,

Leo Laporte (02:41:06):
Yeah, you never asked. But we've had one since 2019. But it's okay.

Paul Thurrott (02:41:10):
No, you've, you've mentioned Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:41:12):
Okay. I've mentioned it. No, I've mentioned it. I'm

Paul Thurrott (02:41:14):
Haven't mentioned it a

Leo Laporte (02:41:15):
Lot. Nobody wanted to go to Twitter. I mean, leave Twitter.

Paul Thurrott (02:41:17):
Oh, you would say Masson. Well, listen, I, I, you in some ways we're ahead of the game on this and I think you have a, I'm, we're not gonna call it contrary, and I don't mean it that way, but you have like an open perspective. Like, like there's this thing over here that's proprietary, but here's this thing that's open. Yeah. I prefer let's go in that direction always. No, but you're on the right side of history.

Leo Laporte (02:41:36):
I think you're open and is a case if you go to an instance that there are a lot of people following stuff, your federated timeline should be moving pretty quick. And this is the advanced interface. So yeah, we're twit social. You can't join unless you listen to twit because I don't want it to be overrun by refugees. So twit.social, and just say

Paul Thurrott (02:41:58):
Something like, so you've got, you actually have stuff happening in real time.

Leo Laporte (02:42:01):
Yeah, yeah. I want, I want

Paul Thurrott (02:42:02):
So I wasn't, I wasn't getting this before.

Leo Laporte (02:42:04):
Yeah, well the first piece of advice is to open your settings and go to the advanced web interface, cuz that that right there will make a big difference. That's when you get the the, in fact, okay. They have a slow mode if it's too much for you. And the other thing I would suggest is follow hashtags. So if you're curious about, you know, windows 11, you can, you can actually follow ha oops, sorry, I keep going back to the Cenex. You can actually follow hashtags. This is kind of like a tweet deck style setup. But you can see I have a number of hashtags over here on the right that I'm following, including, sorry, clicking the wrong button again. Including breaking news. And that's when you will, you know, you start to get a lot of information. Oh, there's Richard Campbell I see in my notifications. So it's okay. I must be clicking the right click or something like that. There he is. He followed me. Oh, there you go. Richard Campbell. He's at Masted Ondo social as Rich Campbell at Rich Campbell. So I've been following you, unbeknownst to you <laugh>, all this time.

Paul Thurrott (02:43:07):
I'm gonna boost the hell outta you.

Leo Laporte (02:43:09):
<Laugh> I like boosting and tooting myself instead of retweeting and tweeting. Yep. I like the boosting and the tooting <laugh>. What else? What else do you wanna

Paul Thurrott (02:43:19):
Pick to, yeah, so I usually do, I often do an app pick. I would just say looking back over the year, the, the top app picks of the year, and these are all based on behavioral changes for me, which I think are important, right? So moving to the Brave Browser was a big deal for me and reinforced nicely by the two month period where I went back to using Microsoft Edge for the purposes of the book. What a great reminder. <Laugh>, why, why Brave is so great notion which we replaced one dry sorry, one note. We did have some problems today, <laugh>. I'm hoping these first time first. I mean, it's been pretty, the only, literally the only problem. Yeah. But it, yeah, it just kind of happened. There's an app called Image Glass which is dramatically better than the thing that's built into Windows. I love it. I put it on

Leo Laporte (02:44:04):
The thing that does what image glass. What is it?

Paul Thurrott (02:44:06):
This is image viewing and here's the thing. So it does two things. So I, the way I have it set up is I have it always run full screen. You hit escape just to, to get rid of it. So now if you double click on an image, it comes up full screen, you press t i I have it with toolbar off. So it's just literally image view and then escape to get rid of it. But one of the great things it does is I use Photoshop Elements, which doesn't support a lot of these like web-based image formats, like WebP. So image glass opens it and you can do like alt f, save As and just save it as a ping and then bring it into Photoshop. It's great. It's, it's just a, it's become part of my workflow. Like it's a wonderful application free.

(02:44:43):
 And then call of Duty Modern Warfare for two, which I know sounds a little goofy, but you gotta remember, I was stuck on a, I think a four year old version of Call of Duty because I found the last two games to be completely unplayable cuz of latency lag issues. And they fixed all that with this latest game. And I'm finally on a modern version I call of duty. That's actually a big deal for me. So that's a good one too. So nice. Those those are the four. Yeah, the four biggest ones I would say of the year. Yes. we, so this was not as good of a term as the one we had last week. We talked, remember we had conom as the the word last week this Yeah, yeah. This week. It's more of a term or a phrase overwhelm freeze.

(02:45:19):
It's when you have too much to do and you freak out or stress out so much, you can't get anything done. The only thing that's inter, I don't like the term, I think, I wish there was a better term for it, but the thing that's interesting about this to me, I love this kind of human behavior thing, is that this is actually based on the way that we're wired. So back in the day, if you were running through the woods or something and some sabertooth tiger jumped out in front of you, you're only, there was nothing, you, you didn't have a weapon. There was not you. That's what your senses got overloaded and you rolled up into a ball and you hoped that it didn't kill you. <Laugh> like, that's literally what that comes out of. It's literally the same exact thing happening in your body.

(02:45:54):
You're so stressed because you have so much work to do or whatever it is going on in your life that you literally stop functioning. So instead of you, you've be, it's become impossible for you to chip away at little parts of the things you're gonna do. You're just so overwhelmed that you just stop. And I, I find myself doing that a lot, but of course I have OCD and ADHD issues, <laugh>. But anyway, that's, I thought that was kind of interesting <laugh>. And then finally, so last week we did the, the twit holiday special, which was excellent. And I asked my wife if she would make a holiday cocktail pick, which I had a couple of during the show. And this is it's called a winter warmer. So this is kind of a cocktail pick, I guess. So it's equal parts, apple whiskey and cranberry juice. A few shakes of ginger bitters. And the interesting part about this drink is that you warm it on the stove top or in a microwave. She's a stove top. But just to above room temperature, you don't make it hot like to your coffee because if you do, it burns off the alcohol and you just, and you serve it warm with like a cinnamon stick or

Leo Laporte (02:46:57):
Actually it's mold cider, but it's really mold apple whiskey. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (02:46:59):
Yeah. It's, it's mold cider with alcohol.

Leo Laporte (02:47:02):
<Laugh> <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (02:47:03):
Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte (02:47:04):
Nice.

Paul Thurrott (02:47:05):
It's fantastic. And there's a neat little, you can see it on screen, but you can make a batch of this and keep it in a crockpot. So if you're at a party Ah, yes, you can kind of lale it out and it will always be Keep

Leo Laporte (02:47:15):
The lid on though. Well actually, if the alcohol evaporates the lid, it's not gonna help you.

Paul Thurrott (02:47:19):
Yeah, that's true. No, but you just make sure it's unload enough of a temp then

Leo Laporte (02:47:22):
Don't boil off the

Paul Thurrott (02:47:24):
Yeah, so the key here is you get a practice with the temperature, which means you have to make a lot of it, then you have to keep testing it. So that's what Richard

Leo Laporte (02:47:30):
Does. The the idea of apple whiskey make you throw up in your mouth a little bit is

Rich Campbell (02:47:34):
Funny. I was, I was laughing because the, this is almost a ringer for the cocktail my wife made for our holiday party, which was Calvados and Whiskey. Yeah, there you go. There you go. Maple syrup

Paul Thurrott (02:47:46):
In Apple Calvados.

Leo Laporte (02:47:47):
That's the original from

Paul Thurrott (02:47:50):
Northern, nobody called it the northern part of France. Well it's from the northern part of Normandy, whatever, but Galinos is huge up there. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:47:57):
They got a lot of apples up there.

Paul Thurrott (02:47:59):
Yeah, yeah. But they also have calvados like drinks that are liquors made from other, like from Pear

Leo Laporte (02:48:04):
Or Great cider actually. Yeah. Iny. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (02:48:07):
It's Apple,

Paul Thurrott (02:48:08):
Aldos <affirmative>. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yep. Calvados is fantastic.

Leo Laporte (02:48:11):
Richard, why don't you recommend your favorite brown liquor for the the season, right.

Paul Thurrott (02:48:16):
You

Rich Campbell (02:48:17):
Know, these days cuz you're being a little more cost conservative. It's, I I point folks at Angels Envy.

Leo Laporte (02:48:22):
Yeah, I just mentioned that. That's my favorite. Cheap, cheap brown liquor. It's not that cheap. Yeah, but it's not, it's not what is it's not a hundred bucks. [inaudible] That you were recommended <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (02:48:33):
Yeah. Close

Rich Campbell (02:48:34):
Aara, aa

Leo Laporte (02:48:35):
Aor Bunda baby. Yeah. When

Rich Campbell (02:48:37):
Not drink Con Air

Leo Laporte (02:48:39):
When Aunt Pruit joined us. Yeah. Cuz it's Cas strength. Right. When Aunt Fruit joined us, I got her a, I got him a bottle of Avalara

Paul Thurrott (02:48:46):
Abundez. Oh, speaking of which. Nice. There's a new container. Aara is the packaging is completely different now. So the, that cylinder comes in, they've completely restyled it. I almost didn't recognize it,

Leo Laporte (02:48:55):
But, but you turned me on to Cas strength.

Rich Campbell (02:48:58):
Yeah, Ben. And once you know, you know,

Leo Laporte (02:49:01):
Baby <laugh>, well, all you had somebody's gotta tell you is they water everything else down. It's like, well, I don't want that. What's the un watered version?

Paul Thurrott (02:49:10):
You're, you're probably gonna water it down <laugh>, right?

Leo Laporte (02:49:13):
I mean, no, the sun. I'm gonna put a drop, a drop of water to open. Oh, you gotta, you gotta to open up the aroma. Yeah. And then I'm gonna toss. You

Paul Thurrott (02:49:21):
Have do. Alright. So if you're a diehard, do you actually have a, does anyone have an eyedropper that use specifically for

Leo Laporte (02:49:26):
This purpose? <Laugh>. Oh, that's pretty, that's hardcore, right? I do have the round ice balls. So that's another way to go.

Rich Campbell (02:49:32):
Right? That's always fun. Yeah. I like this. I had somebody did give me the kit with the little glass rod to put a couple of drops. You,

Leo Laporte (02:49:40):
You go like this and the There you

Paul Thurrott (02:49:41):
Go. That works too. Yeah, you, yep. Yep. That

Leo Laporte (02:49:43):
Works. We, this, this is the best lore ever and we've gotta get Richard on sometime and just talk about brown liquors for a while. Yeah. But I think you gave

Rich Campbell (02:49:52):
Us, that's for a very long time.

Leo Laporte (02:49:53):
Two of the, two of the biggest tips that I, I remember from the last time I talked to you, angels envy Amazing. And and Ablo Abbu or whatever that is, and

Rich Campbell (02:50:05):
Cast, I, I do sort my whiskeys into tears. So if you're a novice drinker and you're not sure you like whiskey, I have a few that are very drinkable.

Leo Laporte (02:50:12):
Give us one that's very drinkable.

Paul Thurrott (02:50:13):
Well, by the way, you have to go down one level from that because there are the whiskeys you buy to put in cocktails. Yeah. And then we go up

Leo Laporte (02:50:20):
And then there's peanut butter whiskey at the very bottom.

Rich Campbell (02:50:26):
Somebody gave me a bottle of Butter Tart vodka.

Leo Laporte (02:50:29):
Oh God, no.

Rich Campbell (02:50:30):
This is not a good idea.

Paul Thurrott (02:50:32):
Was this someone who did not like you or

Rich Campbell (02:50:35):
Apparently

Leo Laporte (02:50:36):
Butter Tart Tart

Rich Campbell (02:50:38):
Vodka. Butter Tart vodka. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:50:40):
Yeah. What is your starter? What is your starter? Not that we want to encourage people to drink or anything, but it is the holidays per se.

Paul Thurrott (02:50:46):
Wait.

Rich Campbell (02:50:46):
And, and so really you're talking about a whiskey that doesn't have a whole lot of heat that just sort of is, is smooth and easy to drink. So something like a Damar 12, DAMAR 12 ver or the, the Macallan 12, both very, very drinkable space sides. Yes. Aged and sherry cast. So they take a lot of their rough spots off.

Leo Laporte (02:51:02):
My brother-in-law, Lisa's Lisa's brother-in-law, Lisa's sister's husband loves Irish whiskeys and he's gotten me the Irish whiskeys. They're very good.

Rich Campbell (02:51:12):
The Red Breast Green

Leo Laporte (02:51:14):
Spa. Red Breast is awesome. Lovely.

Paul Thurrott (02:51:16):
I just went to a, an Irish whiskey tasting, actually. Nice.

Leo Laporte (02:51:19):
Yeah, yeah. Red Breast has a holiday festive holiday bottle that, that turns into a bird feeder after you've consumed it. <Laugh>.

Rich Campbell (02:51:27):
So nice.

Leo Laporte (02:51:28):
Just a little tip

Paul Thurrott (02:51:29):
<Laugh>. Just leave, leave a little, a little bit in the bottom for 'em. You know, they, they, they deserve the holidays too.

Rich Campbell (02:51:35):
I have a little Irish Ireland story for you. So we were doing a Donna Rocks tour in Ireland, and we, Carl was meeting up with some musician and friends of us. So we brought some Angels Envy with us as his typical. And so we meet this fellow in an Irish bar, and we are drinking Red Breast 12 and enjoying it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And we give him the bottle of Angels Envy. And he's sipping a Guinness. He's very grateful for the whiskey. He puts it away, but he's sipping the Guinness. And when Carl and I are starting to drink, really drinking whiskey, we'd drink a fair bit of whiskey. And so at some point in the night he looked at us, it's like, God bless you boys. I don't know how you drink the brown stuff like that, <laugh>. I'm like, what are you talking about? He goes, oh, I can't drink it when I'm in a bar. Makes me fight

Leo Laporte (02:52:16):
<Laugh>. Yes.

Paul Thurrott (02:52:17):
Wow.

Leo Laporte (02:52:18):
That's

Paul Thurrott (02:52:19):
Yes. Oh, I, well, there are different kinds of drunks, you know. Yes. I'm more of the fall asleep in the corner kind. I'm a, I'm a, I'm a I love

Leo Laporte (02:52:26):
You guys drunk

Paul Thurrott (02:52:28):
<Laugh>. Yeah, exactly. I just think you, I love you guys. Leo, maybe you should sit down over here about <laugh>. I love you Paul. Hey, I love

Leo Laporte (02:52:36):
Doing this show with you, Paul. Thank you, Richard. It was so great to have you. Great

Rich Campbell (02:52:40):
To be

Leo Laporte (02:52:40):
Here. Have a wonderful holiday, both of you. Me too. And we are, next week we'll have a best of episode. So Paul gets the week off. And then we'll be back January 4th for a whole new season of Windows Weekly, 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern 1900 UTC on Wednesday, January 4th. You can watch Live at Live. Do twi do TV chat with us@irctwi.tv. Of course. If you're a club member, and by the way, not too late to get a somebody in your La Geek in your life, a membership in the club, seven bucks a month, 84 bucks a year, you can you, is that right? Did I do my math right? You can, you can, you can get a ad free versions of all the shows get Paul's very special. The Club Only Hands On Windows Show. There's a hands-on Mac Un Untitled Linux show. There's a lot of other extra stuff in the club, access to the Discord, all of that. Seven bucks a month. But most importantly, it really helps us keep the lights on and as we head into recession, and as you saw early, if you missed the beginning of the show before we began the show, we were talking about how podcasters are extraordinarily short-lived. This would be, that's probably due to their ICU ways.

Paul Thurrott (02:53:51):
I mean, I think between the three of us we're hitting like a couple centuries, you know, <laugh> Yeah. It

Leo Laporte (02:53:56):
Doesn't, it doesn't work that way. You don't add 'em together. But anyway,

Paul Thurrott (02:54:00):
I'm not, I'm not really math good at math, but I mean, it seems to me

Leo Laporte (02:54:06):
You got, you're gonna family gonna gather Paul for the holidays.

Paul Thurrott (02:54:10):
Yes, yes, yes. My my daughter's home son's coming home soon. Awesome. And then awesome. Yeah, we got

Leo Laporte (02:54:15):
A bunch of parents four days left. Richard, what are your plans? You're in Vancouver, one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

Rich Campbell (02:54:20):
Sure. We got hit hard with snow this year would be very unusual.

Leo Laporte (02:54:23):
You don't have to go to Whistler. You can stay

Rich Campbell (02:54:25):
Home. Half, half a meter of the stuff. So

Paul Thurrott (02:54:27):
I don't think they can leave the house. They have like Wow much.

Leo Laporte (02:54:30):
Yeah. Wow.

Rich Campbell (02:54:31):
So the, but yeah, my girls are coming in. Oh, they, they've, they've bought, they've got their own homes now, but they're not up for cooking Christmas dinner yet. So coming back here for

Leo Laporte (02:54:40):
Christmas dinner, we're doing I'm doing a, an 18 pound brisket for the family on Christmas. Wow.

Rich Campbell (02:54:45):
Good call.

Leo Laporte (02:54:45):
Yeah's gonna be delicious. Yeah. Well, I hope you all have a wonderful holiday. All of our thank you Wonderful club members, all of our listeners and viewers. And we'll see you right? Be back here in 2023. Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah. Happy Festivus. Have a great Kwanza. I will <laugh>. Have a happy New Year and we'll see you all next year. Bye-Bye. Sit down and relax and enjoy. Sit down, relax and enjoy Santa his underpants. Oh, is that my cue? Oh wait, <laugh>