Windows Weekly Episode 812 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. Paul Thurrott here. Richard Campbell is here. Some sad news and Redmond, some big layoffs ahead for Microsoft. We'll also talk about ai, Microsoft's investment in openai.org and what it's going to mean for Windows. And 12 years after Windows eight and Surface. Apple might be adding touchscreens to the Mac Paul Thurrott, why it's all coming up. Next on Windows Weekly podcasts you love from

 

TWiT Intro (00:00:32):

People you trust. This is twi.

 

Leo Laporte (00:00:42):

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell. Episode 812 recorded Wednesday, January 18th, 2023. Pessimism Pays. Windows Weekly is brought to you by Lenovo, orchestrated by the experts at C D W to help transform your organization with Lenovo ThinkPads. Equipped with the Intel EVO platform for effortless connectivity and collaboration from anywhere. Learn more at cdw.com/lenovo client and by Tanium Tanium Unites operations and security teams with a single platform that identifies where all your IT data is. Patches every device you own in seconds and implements critical security controls all from a single pane of glass. Are you ready to protect your organization from cyber threats? Learn more at tanium.com/twiz. 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. Get ready winners and dozers. Time to talk about Microsoft with these handsome fellas right here. <Laugh>. Thank you for that.

 

Rich Campbell (00:02:11):

Pause.

 

Leo Laporte (00:02:12):

I was thinking of an appropriate description. Whatever they are these lovely gentlemen on your left. Legend humans, Paul Thurrott, the rot.com, lean pub.com. Longtime host of the show, 801st time caller, 12 episodes. On your right. Our newest member of the team, the wonderful Richard Campbell from Runners Radio and.net rocks from beautiful Coquitlam in British Columbia.

 

Rich Campbell (00:02:41):

Oh, well, good to be here. I appreciate Mexican search for the superlative.

 

Leo Laporte (00:02:46):

<Laugh>. Well Quilum go from the ancient one. It is Indian, right? That's an Indian yeah. It's

 

Rich Campbell (00:02:51):

From the another quake Whitlam band where quake whitlam, literally strain translated means stinky

 

Leo Laporte (00:02:56):

Mud. Stinky mud from stinky mud bc There

 

Paul Thurrott (00:03:00):

You go. I can see why you kept it in the original <laugh>

 

Rich Campbell (00:03:03):

<Laugh>

 

Leo Laporte (00:03:04):

Petaluma means the back of the mountain, I think. Yeah. Did we talk about this last week? I think we did. The idea that place names last a long, longer pet toots and it was part of the way, part of the valuable information that helped them decode the Rosetta Stone was that place. Names rarely change. Yeah.

 

Rich Campbell (00:03:23):

I should make a run by the British Museum. See all the stuff they stole.

 

Leo Laporte (00:03:27):

They stole next

 

Paul Thurrott (00:03:27):

Week. Well, well you can <laugh>. So some of it's going back.

 

Leo Laporte (00:03:30):

Yeah. Yeah. Those Elgin marbles, I think,

 

Rich Campbell (00:03:34):

I think the Egyptians have requested the Rosetta Stone back,

 

Paul Thurrott (00:03:36):

Isn't I? That's right. Oh, I dunno.

 

Leo Laporte (00:03:38):

That's interesting.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:03:39):

Oh, there is the next big thing's gonna be that the marble

 

Leo Laporte (00:03:44):

The Elgin

 

Paul Thurrott (00:03:44):

Marbles the front piece from the yeah, the,

 

Leo Laporte (00:03:47):

It's really, we went to we went to the Athens has a beautiful museum now. Yeah. And we went there and they have,

 

Paul Thurrott (00:03:54):

They actually have a place for it. Yeah. Literally we

 

Leo Laporte (00:03:58):

Have the, you know, cause it's the, it's the EDI on top of the the Parthenon. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And they have a few, and then they have an outline for the ones the Brits have <laugh>.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:04:06):

That's great. And it's, it's like, it's a good move.

 

Leo Laporte (00:04:10):

We want these back. We want these

 

Paul Thurrott (00:04:12):

Back. Well, the argument used to be the Greeks can't take care of this stuff. And since then they've mock true, like you said, built this beautiful museum, not true. And have these wonderful facilities.

 

Leo Laporte (00:04:21):

Although we can thank, you know, the various in invaders and marauders

 

Paul Thurrott (00:04:27):

As we should

 

Leo Laporte (00:04:28):

For preserving some of it. Although the Acropolis was, shell bombarded was in Napoleon. Somebody bombarded it and destroyed it. And so, you know, but way back in the 19th century or

 

Paul Thurrott (00:04:41):

Something. Well, the Germans put ammunition in the Parthenon during World Wari.

 

Leo Laporte (00:04:44):

So it wasn't maybe, maybe it wasn't World War ii. Yeah,

 

Paul Thurrott (00:04:46):

Yeah. So it wouldn't get destroyed. Right,

 

Leo Laporte (00:04:49):

Right.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:04:50):

It's a clever trick.

 

Leo Laporte (00:04:52):

And that's your history lesson for the week. That's, thanks for joining us.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:04:55):

There's some random facts we know about history.

 

Leo Laporte (00:04:57):

We know some things. Yes, we do.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:04:59):

70% of it's probably true.

 

Leo Laporte (00:05:01):

Yeah.

 

Rich Campbell (00:05:02):

I, I guarantee a close on the history of brown liquor by the end of the

 

Leo Laporte (00:05:05):

Day too. Ooh, that will be fun. Be prepared. That will be fun. What do aficionados call it? Cuz there's whiskey, there's bourbon, there's Irish whiskey, there's Canadian whiskey. Yeah,

 

Rich Campbell (00:05:15):

I think whiskey sort of the generic term whiskey. It's the stock. And if it's in North America then it has an E and if it isn't in North America, it doesn't,

 

Leo Laporte (00:05:23):

We had a little debate cuz I think we used the word whiskey in one of our titles. And I was asked, are you gonna use an E or not? And I said, you know, I don't think so. I think I'll not use an E,

 

Rich Campbell (00:05:33):

But if you're talking Scottish, then yeah, I'd leave off the E. But

 

Paul Thurrott (00:05:36):

You going with the Bourn spelling bourbon, you must be a Yale man. <Laugh>. Oh my god. A Yale man. Yeah.

 

Rich Campbell (00:05:43):

Ease are for the colonies.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:05:44):

Yes.

 

Leo Laporte (00:05:45):

Yeah. Ease are for the colonies. Oh, that's easy to remember. Thank you. I appreciate it. Alright, let us talk about Windows, because there's a big story that broke this morning.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:05:58):

Yeah.

 

Leo Laporte (00:05:59):

Big layoffs coming to Microsoft.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:06:02):

Yep. As rumored, you know, 24 hours ago by an incredible, like, first it was Bloomberg, then it was everybody <laugh>, you know? I, not that, I don't know why I'm laughing. Yeah. So unfortunately Microsoft is going to lay off 10,000 people between now and the end of March, which is the end of their fiscal third quarter. They're gonna take a 1.2 billion charge related to this kind of belated in a sense because this is happening all across big tech. Right. see if I can rattle off some of the company names. It's, you know, meta Amazon can't that Salesforce, you know, a bunch of companies are doing this. Amazon mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. the thing that strikes is most striking about this, well, actually I say there's two things. One thing is that they specified engineering, which is kind of interesting. And Microsoft has 221,000 employees right now. They're That's insane. This

 

Leo Laporte (00:07:00):

Is only 5%.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:07:02):

And

 

Rich Campbell (00:07:02):

They also hired 40,000 last year alone.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:07:05):

Exactly. Which was itself a 22% increase over the prior year.

 

Leo Laporte (00:07:09):

Some of this is just, in other words, laying off the, the extra staff hired during pandemic.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:07:14):

Right. And then I guess to put this in perspective, one of the bad things that happened right when SAT and Nadela took over is they basically laid off almost everyone involved with Windows phone from Nokia. And that was 18,000 people right. Back in 2014,

 

Rich Campbell (00:07:28):

Including letting go of Steven Elop. Like by all accounts, it was, you know, from the

 

Paul Thurrott (00:07:33):

Headphone. Yeah. Wow. It was like, Hey, welcome to Microsoft. If you'll continue through the room, you can get your exit package. And thanks for coming.

 

Leo Laporte (00:07:40):

But laying off EOP was also a little bit like, screw you Nokia. Right? Like we, this was a bad idea. We're sorry we did it and we're gonna get rid of all.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:07:50):

Yeah. It's

 

Leo Laporte (00:07:51):

It's erasing the remnants of, of the ugly history. That's right.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:07:55):

Did not want to buy. Right. That's exactly right. Yeah.

 

Rich Campbell (00:07:59):

But also, I think EOP was very much a bomber. Right. And and an aggressive personality. So I Oh,

 

Leo Laporte (00:08:05):

I didn't know that.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:08:06):

Oh, well, he wanted to be CEO e o and he was seen as a, a lot of people unfairly, I think, but sorry, I'm sort of a Trojan horse. Like he had gone to Nokia specifically because this was gonna happen at some point. I, the truth is, Steve and EOP wanted to run a company <laugh>, you know, and Got it. And whatever, we can debate what he did at Nokia. I I think he I think he did the best for the bad hand.

 

Rich Campbell (00:08:29):

They were in a tough situation. No choice about it. I've read the books, like they building an operating system for a phone, especially for, for

 

Paul Thurrott (00:08:37):

On scratch third parties to develop against. Yeah.

 

Rich Campbell (00:08:39):

Very hard problem. Like, it's difficult to do. Well. That's right. And and, and you know, ask the Blackberry folks, they had a tough time too. I, I did some,

 

Paul Thurrott (00:08:48):

Some development folks,

 

Rich Campbell (00:08:49):

Blackberry and I remember one point we had to do custom builds per version of the ROMs. Yeah. Like, that's how unobstructed it was. And Nokia had had similar problems with their stuff.

 

Leo Laporte (00:09:02):

That's right. Why did it, why Microsoft? Why doesn't matter what ROMs version,

 

Rich Campbell (00:09:06):

Just the way that POS

 

Leo Laporte (00:09:08):

Out they compatible APIs.

 

Rich Campbell (00:09:10):

Yeah. That kind of thing. The way they loaded things into memory. It just means if you weren't running the exact version, it wouldn't run

 

Leo Laporte (00:09:17):

Directly. That's no fun for a developer.

 

Rich Campbell (00:09:19):

Nope. To have

 

Leo Laporte (00:09:20):

To

 

Rich Campbell (00:09:20):

Query, develop on the

 

Leo Laporte (00:09:21):

Stack what rom version and all that. That's really

 

Paul Thurrott (00:09:24):

All. Well, this was the issue with Windows Mobile before Windows phone. Right. The, not the ROM version necessarily, but just the number of different configurations made developing for that platform. Very difficult.

 

Leo Laporte (00:09:33):

I guess that happens only

 

Paul Thurrott (00:09:34):

Less. They were afraid to do whatever they

 

Leo Laporte (00:09:36):

Wanted. I, you gotta know which version of Android you're running on and Windows two. So I guess it's not so weird, but I do remember the early

 

Rich Campbell (00:09:44):

Version of you want more compatibility, right?

 

Leo Laporte (00:09:45):

Yeah. Most, the most would be best <laugh>. Yes.

 

Rich Campbell (00:09:48):

And most of the time, just to recompile is enough. I mean, we certainly running this issue with iPhone native apps, where every time there's a UOS release minimum, you have to recompile and read.

 

Leo Laporte (00:09:57):

Right. There's always new APIs, new new features and old ones deprecated and so forth. I do remember the early days of Windows phone. It didn't handle SD cards. Well at all. <Laugh> at all,

 

Paul Thurrott (00:10:11):

Actually, at all. <Laugh> didn't have copy and paste. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the first version was rush to market, which makes sense. I mean, honestly. But anyway, whatever windows to phone is ancient history. But yeah, I, you know, I'm, I I have, I've not heard from anyone that I know yet from Microsoft about these layoffs. I'm curious if I will. Mm. If I do, it's usually bad news. <Laugh>, you know,

 

Rich Campbell (00:10:37):

I mean, I've, I've, there were certainly hints, there was also a lot of push when I was talking to folks, you know, a few weeks ago they were saying, Hey, we're, we're minimizing expenses and things so that we don't have to have layoffs. Right. You know, they, they keep their travel budget very tight. That's sort of thing. But clearly that it wasn't enough. That's

 

Paul Thurrott (00:10:52):

Actually right. That's part of this story. Right. They went into this kind of late because they were trying to avoid it

 

Rich Campbell (00:10:58):

Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative> and, and you said it's a small number. It's a, it's a 25% of what they hired last year. So <laugh>. Right. That's for the most part. Yeah. Yep. I did talk to a friend of mine who has been caught in the layoffs, and he'd only been involved for about a year and a half. Right. And they, you know, they're pretty generous. So he'll, he's working through to the end of the week, and then he'll have till the end of March to find a new role. That's the way to do both reaching

 

Leo Laporte (00:11:23):

Out to him. That's really the way to do it,

 

Rich Campbell (00:11:25):

Which is Well, and I think this is what we're actually seeing here. Yeah. Not only just a generous severance, but also this is a, a cheaper and simpler way to do a reorg. Yeah, yeah. Yep. They need to change some realignment, so they lay off areas that need realigning, and then those folks who want to stay in and find new roles, find new roles and work continues. And those that don't go onto other things but are fairly generously compensated.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:11:48):

Right. They're actually very generous. Right. So they're gonna continue healthcare coverage for six months. They're get to continue vesting in stock awards for six months. They're gonna offer career transfer services, 60 days notice prior determination, et cetera, et cetera. In the US I should say. It's, you know, they're, they're trying to do this with, well, as he said not such anelli, I believe used the term dignity and respect. Right? Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>,

 

Leo Laporte (00:12:11):

Bravo, bravo

 

Paul Thurrott (00:12:15):

As by the way he flies back from Davos on his private jet and probably makes about 1.5 million a year. But Yeah. You know, for sure. Sure. Well, yeah. And

 

Leo Laporte (00:12:23):

Do you think they overhired in pandemic? I mean, this is really

 

Rich Campbell (00:12:27):

Absolutely, all

 

Leo Laporte (00:12:27):

Of all of these companies are doing this. Well,

 

Rich Campbell (00:12:29):

There was also a period where you couldn't hire anybody at Microsoft, too, right. Because the other tech giants had bumped up all the wages a bunch. So there was like a window there where they were running cold and resisting raising wages. And then the dam broke, you know, when it stopped. And suddenly they had a huge block of hiring happen all at once. Yeah. to the point where, again, folks that I've talked to were like, oh, hey, you know, it's a big company. And you're like, we haven't been able to hire anybody for a couple of months. And suddenly it all came through and it was thousands of people, and like the onboarding process was overwhelmed and it was too many people. Yeah. Like, they, they'd overfilled the role. So there was a, there was a shakeup there as well. So I think there was some anxiety around hiring that they grabbed what they could because it felt like there was a, a rush going on. And now that's subsided. Yeah.

 

Leo Laporte (00:13:17):

Which is bad news for the people getting laid off.

 

Rich Campbell (00:13:20):

Yeah.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:13:20):

Well, this is the story to Amazon. You know, and probably all the rest of the big tech as well. There was a big hiring boom during the pandemic. I, I, I think before Richard joined, I, I think we had this conversation where it kind of bothered me how unsophisticated it was. These companies thought that or didn't understand this was temporary, you know? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> that, you know, Amy Hood had come out at one point and said, wow. You know, we, we kind of forgot how important windows was. <Laugh>. I, I, you know, we're gonna start investing in that. Oh my God. Kidding. Are you, are you kidding? What's windows? You know, holy cow. Yeah. Windows. People use Windows. I, I mean, who knew? Well, I feel like you should know <laugh>, you know sea-level executive at Microsoft. I thought that was kind of clueless. And then of course, on the flip side, you get the well, you get the flip side <laugh>, which is, you know, now we have too many employees. We have too many costs. We need to tighten our belts. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's, it's, it's a classic story told many times.

 

Rich Campbell (00:14:16):

I, I would also say that the numbers are low enough here, and relative to the number of employees, like there's a normal two or 3% turnover. Like that's kind of normal in a company this size anyway. It's just 5%. Like, part of me wonders if this is just an announcement because they have to say, yeah, we're doing it too. <Laugh>,

 

Paul Thurrott (00:14:33):

This is a good segue for me to bring in the notion of personality. So last week Richard and I chatted before the show, and I asked him how he was doing, and Richard said, I have nothing to complain about. And I said, those words have never crossed my mind or my lips. I <laugh>, I, I always have something to complain about. And I guess what I'm trying to say is, I worry that this is the, not the only set round of layoffs, right. That you know, that may, you know, three months ago will go by and they'll say, you know, we, we tried, we did what we did before. We tried to do the best we could, and we're still a little top heavy. You know, that's kind of, that's kind of where I come from. I'm just, that's my, the thing I'm worried about. I agree with you. This is 10,000 people is a lot of people. It's also a very small number in the context of their, you know, their overall employee ranks. So, you know, and

 

Rich Campbell (00:15:22):

They're 180 billion a year income. Like, it's not like they're

 

Leo Laporte (00:15:27):

Struggling to pay the rent.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:15:28):

Well, they, they're, they're looking to spend 70 billion almost on Activision blizzard. They are. They have spent, or, well, they have spent somewhere around 3 billion so far in open ai, and they're looking to spend another 10. But you guys, no. Oh, no. Sorry. <laugh>. I turned the No, no, sorry. You gotta go <laugh>. You know, whatever you're doing, it's, that's

 

Leo Laporte (00:15:48):

Over. It's not like they're Twitter selling off the furniture.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:15:53):

No, no, no. The leadership at Microsoft is considerably better than that at Twitter. I think that's something

 

Leo Laporte (00:15:58):

That's not saying much. That's a very low bar.

 

Rich Campbell (00:16:00):

That being said, I

 

Leo Laporte (00:16:01):

Do plan to bid on a couple of pieces. I think it's too late. <Laugh>. it's over. It was over an hour and 20 minutes ago. Oh, it's a, it over, it was just a 24 hour auction. I

 

Paul Thurrott (00:16:10):

Think the leadership at the local Hardee's is better than that at Twitter right now. <Laugh>, but Hmm. That's too bad.

 

Leo Laporte (00:16:18):

Yeah. I would, you know, there's some things I I, you know, all of the OB objects were like $5 to start before they got any bidding. Sure. Right. Before they were band or whatever. Yeah. But they ended up being fairly I think some deals fair. I mean, do you need 20 whiteboards? Because <laugh>, I can get you.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:16:40):

Well, hopefully if this happens to Microsoft's, we could buy like the source code of Visual Basic three or something. And

 

Leo Laporte (00:16:45):

<Laugh>,

 

Paul Thurrott (00:16:45):

Wouldn't that be nice? Source it and bring it back.

 

Leo Laporte (00:16:47):

Yeah. Wouldn't that be nice? The bird. But some of the things, like the bird statue went for like $15,000. Wow. Some of the stuff went for a lot of money.

 

Rich Campbell (00:16:57):

You know, there's a few of these that are over in just a few more minutes. You know, the auctions

 

Leo Laporte (00:17:02):

Will end. Oh, I thought it all ended at 10:00 AM Pacific. Okay. Oh, okay. Well, that's a relief. Quickly, do you want to get in there and, well, there's a couple of big

 

Rich Campbell (00:17:11):

Mixers here that are

 

Leo Laporte (00:17:12):

Very excited. There was the whole kitchen, like Elon said we're not

 

Paul Thurrott (00:17:16):

Gonna give you food. This, will this save Twitter? Is that what's happening? Well,

 

Leo Laporte (00:17:19):

It funny is what this takes everything. The the spokesman,

 

Paul Thurrott (00:17:22):

You're having a yard sale.

 

Leo Laporte (00:17:23):

The spokesman from the auction house Global heritage partner said anybody who thinks that this is gonna help a $44 billion. Yeah. Yeah. Bottom

 

Paul Thurrott (00:17:32):

Line. It's like having a bake sell at a church. He said is,

 

Leo Laporte (00:17:35):

Is a moron. He said, we

 

Paul Thurrott (00:17:37):

$110. It was amazing.

 

Leo Laporte (00:17:39):

You're a moron. Which I thought was kind of impolitic for a marketing guy, but, you know, you know, whatever. Let's see. Let me see what we can get still. I'm just, oops, that's the wrong. Oh,

 

Rich Campbell (00:17:51):

They still got a few screens for sale. You got like a minute. It was an hour left. A

 

Leo Laporte (00:17:55):

Bit on these. Oh, good. Went on Twitter. Online auction sale featuring surplus corporate offered assets of Twitter. Oh,

 

Rich Campbell (00:18:05):

It definitely looks like a building's worth of

 

Leo Laporte (00:18:07):

Stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Huh? Oh, I have to register to bid. Oh, forget about it.

 

Rich Campbell (00:18:15):

<Laugh>.

 

Leo Laporte (00:18:16):

Forget about it.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:18:17):

You can't just use ibid.com. It

 

Leo Laporte (00:18:19):

Should just be Yeah. Apple Pay, man. Apple Pay. Well,

 

Rich Campbell (00:18:24):

Somebody's bid 6,000 bucks on a chair.

 

Leo Laporte (00:18:26):

Four minutes left to get a blodget BCX double full size com oven it

 

Paul Thurrott (00:18:32):

Double full size com of it.

 

Leo Laporte (00:18:33):

29,000. But this is a deal. The steam jacketed tilting kettle, currently <laugh> only 3,900 bucks. That's how many steam jacketed tilting kettles do you need?

 

Rich Campbell (00:18:49):

I think one, I'm

 

Paul Thurrott (00:18:50):

Pretty sure. Yeah. Yeah. Or

 

Leo Laporte (00:18:52):

Zero. But one will do. Well if you're making a lot of soup, I guess. I don't know what

 

Paul Thurrott (00:18:57):

It is. If you're making a lot of soup <laugh>. So the kitchen stuff is, that was the rationalization.

 

Leo Laporte (00:19:04):

Yeah. The kitchen stuff is the last to go. But I bet you there's some people got some deals here. Hey, there's, here's pages and pages. Here's a 20 gallon vegetable dryer for just $850. Yeah. Did you know Electrolux besides making vacuums makes vegetable dryers?

 

Paul Thurrott (00:19:20):

I did not. Is it attach for vacuum cleaner? That'd be kind of interesting. <Laugh> dry your vegetables while you clean your home.

 

Leo Laporte (00:19:28):

Here's, oh, you know, you ever wanted to make your own heroes at home? Here's ala a gas hero broiler 2200.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:19:36):

Is that like a, like a spit for a

 

Leo Laporte (00:19:38):

Yeah. You've seen those in the windows, right? In the,

 

Paul Thurrott (00:19:40):

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

 

Rich Campbell (00:19:41):

Making your euroes

 

Leo Laporte (00:19:43):

Heroes. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-Hmm.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:19:46):

Oh God. That is labor intensive. I think all the office stuff is, you'd be better off just buying one at the

 

Leo Laporte (00:19:50):

Store. Here's an Epi fan video. Pearl two live production system. Bunch of projectors. Is that good auction? I hope it saves Twitter. That's all I can say.

 

Rich Campbell (00:20:05):

It's gonna fix everything.

 

Leo Laporte (00:20:07):

Lot of Polycoms.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:20:08):

We are able to bring on one more moderator. <Laugh>. Everything's fine

 

Leo Laporte (00:20:13):

For one minute. Some of some people are stupid. And Overbidding the 27 inch iMac for 1300 bucks. Uhuh.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:20:19):

Yeah. Well, has a, has the Twitter sticker.

 

Leo Laporte (00:20:21):

Oh. Has a Twitter sticker that makes it valuable. Yep. Half an hour left. Oh, wow. I thought I'd missed out the complete multifunction entertainment system. Audio and video.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:20:33):

Wow. You know, the people buying this stuff are the same people paying Twitter now to get a little blue logo on their stupid profile or whatever? Oh

 

Leo Laporte (00:20:41):

My God, this is a mess.

 

Rich Campbell (00:20:43):

<Laugh>. Oh, if I can get a tilting kettle for eight bucks, I'm

 

Leo Laporte (00:20:45):

Excited. Eight bucks. Yes. <laugh>. Oh God. No wonder Twitter's fail whale. Look at the wiring on this thing. <Laugh>. Come on, man. That's pathetic. Their AV squad was subpar. Clearly. Big TV 600 bucks. You, yeah. Yeah. Okay.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:21:08):

All right. I think it's time for the gong.

 

Leo Laporte (00:21:10):

Where's Mary Jam Enough? You've had enough <laugh>. No more Twitter. This is no more Twitter crap. Not get a bunch of jam Google Jam boards. Not in target. All right. All right. I'm just, I'm just telling you, you're missing out. All right. What's next in the agenda? Actually, I'll tell you what's next in the agenda. I'm gonna do an ad so that Richard can quickly jump on that tilting steam kettle. Thanks. Okay. Oh, none <laugh>. This episode of Windows Weekly brought to you by Yay Lenovo. Orchestrated by the experts at C D W, the helpful people at C D W. Understand as the world changes, your organization needs to adapt quickly to be successful. You don't need any more tilting, steaming kettles. You need some Lenovo from C D W. C D W can keep your business ahead of the curve. With Lenovo Think pads like this, baby I got right here.

 

(00:22:04):

These powerful devices deliver the business class performance You're looking for thanks to Windows 10 and the Intel Evo platform. With your remote teams working across the country and around the world, collaboration isn't a problem because Lenovo ThinkPads keep your organization productive and connected from anywhere. Plus C D W knows your workforce has different work styles needs flexibility. That's why Lenovo think pads are equipped with responsive tools and built-in features that let your team work seamlessly across their favorite tools. Think about that for a second. Let's not forget about security. Of course. These high performing machines protect at the highest level with built-in hardware to guard against modern threats without slowing your team down. When you need to get more out of your technology, Lenovo makes seamless productivity possible. CDW makes it powerful. Learn more at cdw.com/lenovo client. Thank you, CDW, for supporting Windows Weekly. Cdw.Com/Lenovo. Client actually kind of intrigued by, they showed it at ces, the Lenovo phone that goes with Leno Lenovo laptops and does that seamless connectivity thing that Samsung and Windows do. Should I buy one of those? It looks like a pretty nice phone. Are they gonna send you one phone? Think phone? The think phone. I

 

Paul Thurrott (00:23:26):

Am gonna look in. Yeah. I'm gonna see if I, I get a lot of Lenovo stuff review, so I'd love to take a

 

Leo Laporte (00:23:32):

Look at that. Yeah, it's, I repl, I don't know if you noticed, but I replaced that Dell with my nice think Padd. Cuz the Dell was, did I know that's Yeah. Was Oh, no, you talked about that. Yeah. Yeah. Second, this is the the old, the old X one extreme, which I, you know, has extreme. That's right. It may be old. It's like a eighth gen. Oh, it's

 

Paul Thurrott (00:23:47):

Got like an eighth series processor.

 

Leo Laporte (00:23:48):

Yeah. Eighth gen I seven, but it's a nine. I, I forgot how much I like Lenovos

 

Rich Campbell (00:23:53):

Phone is made by Motorola.

 

Leo Laporte (00:23:55):

Yeah. That's the whole, which is owned by, which is owned by Lenovo. So it's like, it makes sense. Yeah.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:23:59):

It's, it's weird that haven't done that before.

 

Rich Campbell (00:24:02):

Well, maybe it's taken that long to line the teams up, right? Yeah. You get to that point where they're

 

Leo Laporte (00:24:06):

Collaborating from initially, and this was my concern when Google sold Motorola to Lenova, was that they wouldn't Yeah, because I loved those old Moro Motorola phones. 

 

Paul Thurrott (00:24:17):

I remember the ones you could customize and have like a wood back or a baby back. And they had this, it

 

Leo Laporte (00:24:22):

Was really nice. You could also customize. It's the only phone I ever had, the wake word. So you didn't have to say, Hey, goog. Right. I, I had mine say, I said, help me ob one Kenobi.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:24:32):

If you say, Hey, goog, Steve Gogan, Amber pops up on the bottom

 

Leo Laporte (00:24:35):

Screen. That's what you don't want <laugh>. So, so

 

Rich Campbell (00:24:39):

Like Clippy only different. Yeah.

 

Leo Laporte (00:24:41):

What was it the Motorola, was it called the X? I remember going to Google.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:24:45):

I had the Motorola X for sure. I think that was the one with the, the They could customize the bag. Yeah. And the materials. They

 

Leo Laporte (00:24:50):

Had a whole Motorola customization website where you could do all Yeah. Beautiful. And then Lenovo bought 'em, and for a long time they did keep it kind of like traditional. The Moto Gs were very much like the old Moto X's. But I think it's time maybe that they, and this looks a lot like a think pad. It has that same design.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:25:08):

Yeah. Look and feel is beautiful. And you have to think if Windows phone had, you know, succeeded somehow there would've been a Think pad phone based on Windows phone. Don't

 

Leo Laporte (00:25:17):

Get me started.

 

Rich Campbell (00:25:19):

I do think that Lenovo dual screen PCs really laptops kind of fun. Really? I think that's fun. Right? It's

 

Leo Laporte (00:25:25):

Fun. It's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. They're trying to do something different. 

 

Paul Thurrott (00:25:30):

Everyone is, I mean, it's, that one's really out there. <Laugh>. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, but, well, Richard is a guy, if you don't mind me saying, is who travels with an external display, right. So I do, he uses his laptop with an external display. I find that

 

Leo Laporte (00:25:42):

Very interesting. You have like a 14 inch shirt bigger.

 

Rich Campbell (00:25:44):

Yeah. Fif a 15. It is a 4K as well, which is really nice. It's a great screen to look at.

 

Leo Laporte (00:25:49):

Yeah. But I I, I have one of those kind of like, it's U usb, it's not a fan, it's, it's of course. Yeah. You Carrie it around

 

Rich Campbell (00:25:58):

For a while. There're at carry two. But it made people angry.

 

Leo Laporte (00:26:00):

<Laugh>,

 

Rich Campbell (00:26:01):

I have a

 

Leo Laporte (00:26:02):

Lot of room. I'm angry just hearing about it.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:26:04):

Like, Hey, you're not in an airline cockpit buddy. Yeah. Would

 

Leo Laporte (00:26:08):

You, would you end up playing? Would you set the two up?

 

Rich Campbell (00:26:11):

No no. In the speaker's lounge. Right. But even that plane,

 

Paul Thurrott (00:26:14):

I, you know, like, just like, yeah, exactly. You're in a room with other, what

 

Leo Laporte (00:26:17):

You people day

 

Paul Thurrott (00:26:18):

Trading and they're all like, you're like, dude, I'm on a laptop. What are you doing?

 

Leo Laporte (00:26:21):

<Laugh>?

 

Rich Campbell (00:26:23):

The corrective amount of screen space is more

 

Leo Laporte (00:26:26):

<Laugh>. I agree.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:26:28):

Yep.

 

Leo Laporte (00:26:29):

Although it does bring to mind the word nerd <laugh>. Of course. Let's talk about did, did you, you talked about Amazon's 18,000 layoffs, right? In this Yeah. Just,

 

Paul Thurrott (00:26:39):

You know, just because it's also,

 

Leo Laporte (00:26:41):

Everybody's doing it. Everybody's doing it. It

 

Paul Thurrott (00:26:43):

Everybody's

 

Leo Laporte (00:26:43):

Doing it. Everybody's doing it. Let's talk ai. We talked last week about Yeah, the rumor that Microsoft was gonna put another 10 billion into open ai,

 

Paul Thurrott (00:26:52):

Right? Yeah. So, sat Nadela destroyed the ecosystem and fluent his private jet to Davos. And then he admitted that Microsoft was doing all those things who speculated about last week. But it was really interesting to hear him kind of spell it out. Cuz it's kind of like a three point kind of a, a, a thing, right? Or a strategy, right? So obviously Azure is the place to go for ai. They open, you know, they announced some services there. They wanna make the foundational models that resulted in chat G B T into platforms that anyone can build on top of. And they announced specifically they will make APIs for chat, G B T. And then of course they're gonna integrate AI across the stack. And this is the thing that to me is the most meaningful thing in the world. And it, it, it speaks to this frustration I've had with Microsoft over the past at least 10 years, which is that as the focus at the company has turned to the cloud, because that's what got them to the market cap they're at now, that's what reinvigorated their stock price after literally 15 years of it, flatlining at $35.

 

(00:27:54):

 You, you, they just, that's all they pay attention to. So every quarter they announce all their earnings. They don't wanna talk about Legacy, they don't talk about office, they don't, well, they talk about the office a little bit. They don't talk about Windows, they don't talk about Xbox. And what I mean by that is, of course they talk about those things, but there's no numbers. There's no hard numbers. All the, it's all cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud. They invent this non-existent business that used to be commercial cloud. I forget the new name for that, but it's sort of this aggregation of things from across microphone that's all Microsoft, that's all cloud related. And they can say, huh, look at this. Yeah's bigger than aws. Yeah, we're huge, we're big, we're cloud. You know, and that kind of over-emphasis on the cloud took away an emphasis that used to exist for the part of the company that I care about, which is the client, you know, PR primarily Windows, but also all the things that kind of surround Windows in that ecosystem.

 

(00:28:40):

And the thing that's exciting about AI to me is that it infuses across the stack. It's client and server. So if you're kind of an Azure guy and that's where you're at and that's all you care about, you know what? AI is gonna transform Azure, there is no doubt about it. But for people like me who have been kind of sitting in the corner in the dark <laugh>, you know, for many years now all of a sudden there's something exciting happening on the client and I like something truly exciting. Right? I can't off the top of my head, like, what was the last thing that was anything even close to this? I, Longhorn <laugh>, you know, it's been a long time. And Longhorn worked out great. So there's no reason to think this isn't gonna work out great there kind of, anyway, I, this is the thing. I'm, this is, this is the reason I think this AI stuff is so exciting because it's something that can energize basically all of Microsoft. This will impact the entire company.

 

Rich Campbell (00:29:34):

But, but specifically cuz of the consumer client side. Like Microsoft's not great with consumers in general. You one would argue the last time they've really pushed on anything for consumers, it was the surface devices.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:29:46):

Yeah, you're right. That, or maybe, yeah, I guess maybe Windows phone, I guess mm-hmm. <Affirmative> maybe. Mm-Hmm. You know, but yes, that those were basic

 

Rich Campbell (00:29:52):

Also timeframe also, you know, had to set of problems. I mean,

 

Paul Thurrott (00:29:55):

Yeah,

 

Rich Campbell (00:29:56):

Microsoft is all in on the cloud, has been in for a decade and this is a product that needs cloud. So it, it sells into the modern mission very, very well. But I appreciate, you know, that your angle is, it's the consumer client that, that is, they

 

Paul Thurrott (00:30:11):

My angle, it's everything. And that includes the consumer client, right? So, you know, back in the day, Microsoft used to have this message when on-prem server and Windows were a thing, it was better together, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> this notion that, you know, windows is great by itself, whatever version we're talking xp, whatever. But if you put it out there with server it's even better. You know, and this kind of speaks to that. It's this virtuous cycle where it can kind of float all the boats at Microsoft. So the last time Microsoft made what I would call an all out effort on consumers was 20 years ago, you know this was back in the age of Windows Media mattered and plays for sure. And Media Center and all of that. So there was a huge push to reach consumers

 

Rich Campbell (00:30:53):

Home. Remember Home Server too. I mean, that's all in

 

Paul Thurrott (00:30:55):

That scene. Home Server was absolutely. Yep. Of course. Yep. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and yeah. Yeah, for sure. And then Zoom and, you know, you can kind of follow the downward trajectory on this thing, but this is cool to me because it's going to, and, and by the way, as, as fun as that stuff might have been at the time, as fun as anything entertainment related is, I mean, honestly, I, I care a lot more about productivity. I care about kind of the, I don't know, the grunt work of what a PC is all about. And I just feel like this has gotten short thrift in recent years that the stuff we've been talking about since Windows 11 has come out, for example, is all about like grounded corners and surface level kind of nonsense. What does an icon look like? And oh my God, there's scroll down with the surge pill again. And it's like, okay, you know, it's interesting on some level, but this is not what I would call deep computer science <laugh>. You know? And

 

Rich Campbell (00:31:46):

Does the consumer want that

 

Paul Thurrott (00:31:49):

<Laugh>? Well, yeah, I actually, I think they do. And I, I, and I think this speaks to the thing that got normal people excited about computers in the first place. Like, there were always people like us, all three of us who were technical and adopted computers at a very early age. Cuz we had this vision of something we could do with these things. You know, I, as a child walking around Sears saw our commod of 64 and imagined creating video games. You know, I had this very specific idea of this thing that I could possibly do with this machine. I was really excited by that. But then I have these friends who I consider normal people <laugh>, right? They're into things like sports and you know what, they're just normal people. And I, I, I have very distinct memories of the times when those people came to me and said, I'm gonna get a computer <laugh>, you know, where something had happened that made computers valuable to them.

 

(00:32:34):

Right? And, you know, for me it was in 1980 for them it was in 1999 or 2005 even, or whatever year. And I feel like this is going to enhance those people's lives in the same way that internet access did or whatever those capabilities might be. Meaning you can open up something like PowerPoint or Word or Excel and not be an expert in those things and have it help you create something meaningful and good, which I know a lot of people are super afraid of. And it's right to question all the stuff. But the, the, yeah, I think we talked about this. The basic capabilities you get in whatever that PowerPoint, PowerPoint designer or whatever is like, I'm not very good at designing PowerPoints. I have this message mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I have to deliver a presentation. I don't do this a lot. Like how do I, how do I make something that people will wanna look at? That's interesting. I'm not a graphic designer. I'm not good with words. Whatever it might be

 

Rich Campbell (00:33:23):

Now. And if you stuck the chat G P T interface over top of that so that that literal verbal expression was the thing, you know, and now it fires up the right so far.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:33:33):

That's right. Like,

 

Rich Campbell (00:33:34):

This is what's I, what I love about this is just in the past, in this past few months when both Google and Amazon have said, you know, this voice thing's a waste of time. I know it's cost done that thing. Amazing. That's a great, yeah. And Microsoft saying, you know, the rebirth of Cortana, I hope they don't use the name, but what if device,

 

Paul Thurrott (00:33:54):

You know, I am, I'm fascinated you just said that because I literally was working on an editorial about, actually, lemme just look it up, about voice assistance and how they were, they were going to be the, in fact, it's, this is probably not what, I probably wouldn't have gone with this, but I'm calling, I called it at the time, a diminished voice. And the idea was that voice assistance, smart assistance, whatever you wanna call those things, would be the next platform, the next wave, like Microsoft said. Yeah. And how that didn't happen and how one of the things that came out of this past year that's causing all these layoffs is Google and Amazon, the two big players in this market, two biggest players basically are cutting a lot of the resources to those parts of the company because those things are just siphoned billions of, of dollars away.

 

(00:34:36):

Yeah. And it's one of those, they're, they're like Washington Post or New York Times when someone wrote an article about what do people actually use these devices where they've echoes or whatever, and they use 'em for like playing a, you know, a certain kind of playlist or they wanna play a little stupid game or they, you know, maybe it's an older person they'd like just to have interactions. They talk about what's the weather, you know, this is, it's not, when Microsoft started out in Cortana to Windows, it was like, guys, what are you doing? No one is gonna sit down at not, I mean, not literally no one, cuz there are people who have accessibility needs and so forth around that of course. But I mean mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, most people are not, are just more efficient mouse, keyboard, touch whatever to get to go from A to B. You know, it just didn't, it's like this isn't, this

 

Rich Campbell (00:35:19):

Strikes me more as a discoverability solution. This is tool tips on steroids instead of hovering your mouse to try and figure out what to click on. The fact that you can, using very conversational interfaces, say, I'm trying to do X and have that tool say, well here's what I've got to help you do X

 

Paul Thurrott (00:35:35):

I bet everyone listening to the show or watching it has at some point. And I will tell you, I, this has happened to me probably a thousand times or more set up a Windows computer of some kind. Well, it would be Windows 10 or Windows 11. It, this happens with the Mac too. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And you it takes a long time. So you leave it, you go do something else in the house and then all of a sudden you hear something talking somewhere else in the house, <laugh>, hi, it looks like you're trying to sit up windows you can use it just starts blurring out some whatever discussion it is about whatever. And it's like, I I get it. <Laugh>, I, I get what you're trying to do. This was never gonna become the primary way that we interacted with almost anything. It, no, there are absolute use case for it.

 

(00:36:18):

Use cases for it. There are very interesting scenarios around driving a car and you want to, you know, say something, whatever. Again, people with accessibility, older people, whatever it might be. But as far as it like being the next wave of computing, I think this last year was the comeuppance for that. It's fascinating. And this is what you just said, and this is what I, I just, I love this cuz this was in my brain. It is absolutely fascinating how this open AI stuff, Dolly chat, G p t et cetera just happened right as that happened. Like, it was like, oh, remember, we all thought that was a future that was dumb and then this other thing happened. You're like, holy crap, this is amazing. And I, and this, this

 

Rich Campbell (00:36:55):

Is a new, this is a Newton versus iPhone play, right? This is, yeah. Okay. You built this thing. It hasn't done what you wanted it to do. You know, you couldn't find a market to it. PE people are frustrated by it. And now here's another incarnation that on the surface of the base description, it's just a voice interface seems the same <laugh> the interaction is so different.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:37:14):

I mean, there are AI voice things that are very interesting. You have a Pixel. I know Richard, I do too. And Leo has certainly used him if he's not using one full-time, but they have these incredible voice interaction things they can do with holding a call or mm-hmm. <Affirmative> you know, call, you know, say, hey, the, the lines or, or navigating through a, a menu you normally have to type numbers and stuff like that stuff, right? That stuff is, is that an extension of like a Google assistant kind of feature? Or is this in fact a an early version of what is really an AI type of situation, which Google, Amazon, Microsoft are just right there in, in place to make that kind of stuff happen.

 

Rich Campbell (00:37:51):

And then, and I'm just, again, for the record, I hate the AI term because it's always associated with how trying to kill everybody. These are better, you know? Yeah. These are better conversational engines for interfacing with a machine, right? We have a Discovery Pro problem in these systems. They have too many capabilities. You know, you're over, you go look at what you get for M 365 for home. What do I do with all this stuff? And the funny thing is, we talked about this earlier, how Bill Gates wanted one app because he was trying to address that problem too. That it's like people don't know where to go. But what if you simply started with, what would you like to do? Well, I need to make a presentation for work.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:38:30):

Are you saying, Richard, where would you like to go today? Is that what you just said? Yeah.

 

Rich Campbell (00:38:34):

<Laugh>. I thought it was Microsoft mom. Where do you think you're going today?

 

Paul Thurrott (00:38:38):

<Laugh>? Yeah, exactly. It's a slightly different tone than that one. Yeah.

 

Leo Laporte (00:38:43):

I, I don't, I don't wanna be the naysayer, but I'm starting to think May, may, are we overexcited about what Chat g p t can do and

 

Paul Thurrott (00:38:53):

I don't think so. 

 

Leo Laporte (00:38:54):

We've seen, we've been through a few AI winners in the past mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, where we've been overexcited about AI going back to the

 

Paul Thurrott (00:39:01):

Seventies. No, I know I sixties. I know. I, I, no, I feel like it's really come together and, and I think, you know, just from the perspective of us, you know, certainly me and Richard and the show and everything, this is an interesting thing for Microsoft because they are the second biggest company in the world by market cap. They are just not thought of in the same breath as these other companies. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> for some reason, even Facebook or Meta and Google and Amazon and Apple, whatever, even though Microsoft is bigger than all but one of those companies. And this is an interesting return to form. I, you know, as Microsoft became less dominant overall, although a much bigger company, right. I, you know, you used to have to kind of rationalize it and say, guys, listen. Yeah. We, I, we understand that as a, a percentage of all personal computing Windows is only 30% or 25% or whatever the number is.

 

(00:39:55):

It's not 90% anymore. That sounds bad, but it makes more money now than it ever did. Microsoft is a bigger company than it ever was. And you know, Microsoft is a more important company than it ever was or whatever. But you know, you, you see in this shift now that mi there's a chance that Microsoft could emerge on the other side of this is a much more overtly powerful company that if they get this right, we can just start abusing everyone again. I can't wait. I I'm so excited to finally have the dictatorship back. That's all I'm saying. We

 

Rich Campbell (00:40:25):

Just started

 

Paul Thurrott (00:40:26):

Using the, to your point about and half,

 

Rich Campbell (00:40:29):

That's how much should that 70%, that's not Windows work. Like how much the 30% Windows work, maybe the productive work, because the other 70% is doom scrolling and, and you know, social media manipulation, sharing inappropriate information with Mar with advertisers.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:40:45):

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

Rich Campbell (00:40:48):

So, you know, what if they do useful work in computing was that stuff, and you do it with Windows,

 

Paul Thurrott (00:40:53):

I I assume cuz all those people who've been defending Apple and Google over the past several years. I want you to understand that when Microsoft institutes a 30% fee on all chat G P T transactions you got exactly what you were asking for. So <laugh>, but is it still sound fair?

 

Rich Campbell (00:41:09):

I I would also argue like the intent of open ai, this whole idea of, you know, with this was formed because a lot of this a these ML models were being developed in secret, so now we're gonna have an open thing. Right. Has been radically changed, you know, and I'm resisting saying being has been perverted. This is, I mean, to Leo's, this is not what we talked about. Really.

 

Leo Laporte (00:41:32):

You think not? I mean at least it's happening in the open, isn't it?

 

Paul Thurrott (00:41:35):

Mm. I think the more, no, this is gonna be like the app store, right? You have this idea of a platform, whatever it is, in this case, an iPhone or whatever, people are gonna start making apps for you. You're like, cool and you know, there's gonna be fart apps and stupid stuff. But ultimately where this, when this platform succeeds, the way it succeeds is by people coming up with things that you didn't anticipate. The desktop publishing that saved the original macin publish.

 

Leo Laporte (00:41:56):

That's what we're Whatever I'm afraid of <laugh>.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:41:58):

Well, no, but that's, but that's, I I know it is what we're afraid. No, we should and we definitely should discuss that part of it, but it's, it's that potential. You've already seen what it can do in limited ways. It's gonna be fascinating to unleash this on the world mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and 

 

Leo Laporte (00:42:16):

Yeah. And I don't want be scaremongering or anything and I don't think

 

Paul Thurrott (00:42:19):

Happens.

 

Leo Laporte (00:42:20):

I don't think AGI I is just around the corner at

 

Rich Campbell (00:42:23):

All. No, not at all. Not even. Yeah.

 

Leo Laporte (00:42:25):

And, and I have said a couple of times in our, our shows that we are at an inflection point that we might be, this might be the Camian explosion of AI and all that, but I also think maybe it's easy to get overhyped on this stuff and mm-hmm. <Affirmative> just like we did with self-driving cars, where we really thought that was gonna be the next big thing. And it's turned out harder to do than we thought.

 

Rich Campbell (00:42:46):

Well, and, and arguably this will be, this has already gone through harder to do. Yeah. Right. One would argue the trough of disillusionment is shown in the form of the Google device and the Amazon device. Yeah. There is your trough of dis disillusionment they lost and coming out of that is this different model,

 

Leo Laporte (00:43:01):

Right? They lost so much money.

 

Rich Campbell (00:43:04):

Well, they didn't lose it. They know where it is. They spent it on things that didn't make them any money. <Laugh>.

 

Leo Laporte (00:43:08):

They know I love that. Right. They didn't lose it. They know exactly where it is.

 

Rich Campbell (00:43:12):

It's like, I didn't lose my girlfriend and I know where she is.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:43:16):

Yeah. Yeah. I just know she's not with me. <Laugh>. yeah. So I I this is, you know, again, to bring it back to the kind of Microsoft terminology, a lot of talk about the next wave. I think this has a much bigger chance of being the next wave for Microsoft specifically mm-hmm. <Affirmative> than has been the case then was the case for anything that might have, you might have thrown in that bucket. Whether it's ar, Mr. Hololens, you know voice assistance, you know, whatever. Those things to me, were always kind of add-ons to the platforms that we already had. This one AI will make the existing platforms better. AI is not the platform in many ways, but it will become the basis of so many things and it will enhance the existing platforms we're already using, whether it's phone or PC or whatever. And we'll see, you know, we'll see, we'll see where it

 

Rich Campbell (00:44:03):

Ends up. What what'll be un unusual if this is true, is it means, well, on one hand, Microsoft has, which tends to go second on a lot of stuff we'll have succeeded because they, we, you know, they backed off a cor and here they are back with a potential voice interface again. But also that they'll have picked Right. They got on board with open AI ahead of everyone else. And now they may be holding a linchpin on this. And that's unusual for Microsoft. They're remarkably good. It's at building a, a, you know, an assembled B team. Right. And that they pack, you know, that's the MTH three C 65 model. It doesn't have to be number one, but it's in the

 

Paul Thurrott (00:44:43):

Box. This was always the promise of Microsoft research that these guys were gonna come up with the next big thing. Like it was, you know, it was gonna come out of that group or whatever. This is I, you know, the story on this will be written someday. I mean, how this all came about. Who, who was the visionary that saw that this was the future? That kind of thing. Well, I guess we'll see. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>,

 

Rich Campbell (00:45:02):

I think it was a hedged bet. I think they've got enough money to buy into a lot of things. You, and you only remember the wins. You keep forgetting the fails.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:45:11):

Also, we live in a world that is overly fixated on bobbles, you know, the, the Apple iPhones, the whatevers, you know, and when you look at a company like Apple who has had success in a certain way, and I mean, has had success, has been the most successful company ever invented doing a certain thing. And you look at the types of things they invest in that we know about ar, mr headsets Dr self-driving cars, you know mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, they're things because that's where their brain is. Like, that's how they think. That's, that's in, in many ways kind of a limitation of their success. It's, you know, when you're a hammer, everything's Anil. Right. Microsoft who has seen great success in the cloud, they're not the number one player. You know, by far of course we know that. But they've, they've, they've made a successful transition to the cloud. I think Windows is kind of a weird outlier when it comes to the cloud, where, you know, office was able to transition to the cloud. My office or Xbox presumably will be able to transition to the cloud windows. It's like, eh, it's a little tougher. They didn't really fit in, but, but you know, that's the business. Whatever they've been successful at it, it, it's so backend. We talked about this. It's plumbing, it's infrastructure. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's not very exciting. 

 

Rich Campbell (00:46:21):

At the same time, Amazon has a limitation. They don't have endpoint devices. You know, nobody's excited about a fire tablet, so you know, they <laugh>.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:46:29):

Right. Especially those people who haveve used one. You know, the poor bastards. Yes, for sure. So all these companies are kind of positioning themselves as they will, you know, based on their experience, et cetera, et cetera. But it's interesting to me that Microsoft, which has made this transition to the cloud, which to me is not very exciting, not very interesting. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> is now entering this new era where that there had to be the first step to get 'em to where they are today. Without that happening. This AI stuff is happening somewhere else.

 

Rich Campbell (00:47:00):

And he, but bouncing act, apple has the shiny Bob on the front end has a heck of a time with the back end. Amazon has the number one back end, no useful front ends Google. Okay. <laugh>. I know. I mean, Google, Google Theory has ingredients, you know, their clouds only they're, any Android devices are offered their own place. Are you judging it, it by success or actual technology? You, or then how do you measure

 

Leo Laporte (00:47:28):

Success? Like what's the market share? Well, yeah, but that's okay. So that's what I'm asking. That's Google, that's reasonable. Say success wise you know, Amazon's completely dominant. Whether they have the best technology, I don't know, but they're, you know. Yeah. Because best is very subjective.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:47:43):

It's the most used technology. I mean, that's mm-hmm. <Affirmative> that says

 

Leo Laporte (00:47:46):

Something does the market, the market does have some, yeah.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:47:49):

Yeah. But you don't, you don't see a lot of people complaining about aws. Right. I, I think just to be fair, right? No, I'm not saying

 

Leo Laporte (00:47:54):

Cory quiz your Cory Quinns, but complains about it every day. I mean, I would defend, I don't look, you guys are experts. I'm not, but I would, I would say that Azure probably has equally good technology to aws.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:48:06):

Nobody's taking this humble nonsense of yours. You are an no expert.

 

Leo Laporte (00:48:09):

I'm not an expert. You technology I'll defer to, I don't defer to you, Paul, but I do defer to Bri <laugh> all.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:48:18):

Listen, I'm, I'm ready to take the third chair in this one. I'm just saying the, the best product doesn't always win.

 

Leo Laporte (00:48:26):

No, that's, that's right. I mean, McDonald's does not have the best beef in America. Right. However, however, they've sold billions. So okay. But that's, that's why I was asking the question. And that's fine if you say, well, what we're judging it on is, is success. That's completely legit. I mean, that may be the only way we,

 

Paul Thurrott (00:48:43):

Well, but I think the technical capabilities there too, I'm, I'm not a, I'm not an expert, but I mean, I know that Amazon or AWS has revved continually. They add new services just like Microsoft does. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> dev, it's the go-to service for

 

Leo Laporte (00:48:56):

Most. And again, I'm not technical. And we run on aws, by the way. Yeah. But my, my general impression somehow is that Microsoft is cleaner. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> better implemented. AWS was kind of built like top, grew like top C and was built upon this, upon this, upon this and this. And then Azure was built a little bit more from scratch. But that's completely my impression

 

Paul Thurrott (00:49:20):

Actually. Richard might, will probably, well, he'll at least appreciate where I'm coming from. <Laugh>. I think he will agree. But we will see Amazon is one of the, or AWS is one of those classic products that was made because the company needed it. And then they said, Hey, we might be able to sell this thing. It's kind of an, it's an interesting approach. Microsoft is a platforms company, right? Yeah. It's very telling to me that they said in this AI thing, or it's actually, Elli said, when discussing it, we will make this into platforms. Not a platform, but platforms. Right. And Microsoft is still a platforms company. I feel like Azure, which in the beginning was Windows. Azure didn't come out of a, a place where Microsoft said, we need this. Maybe other people will use it. It was more like, we're a platforms company, let's make a platform, and we will license this to other customers who will use it and do whatever they do with it. And I, I, does that mean that the resulting products are completely different or whatever? But I don't know. But I, I, I feel like they just came out of different places in that Microsoft's strength, Microsoft's true being or whatever, is as a platform company. I mean, in

 

Leo Laporte (00:50:24):

PDC 2008, when Ray

 

Rich Campbell (00:50:27):

Ozi announced Windows Azure mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, he presented it as, we have all these gigantic platforms, right. That are our internal assets. The MSN site, the Microsoft site, the Xbox site, so forth. They all run on completely separate hardware. And this is dumb. We should be able to consolidate it on common infrastructure. Now. I mean, he said those words, I just don't know that we believed him.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:50:49):

Right. Well, cuz this was so alien to what we had at the time.

 

Rich Campbell (00:50:52):

Yeah. And then what Abha and his crew made at that time, the web roll appro in a lot of ways was describing serverless in 2009 and 2000 in 2010. Sure. When nobody wanted it. Because what a, what was AW, l selling Amazon is a warehousing company. They sold virtual machines. Right. They at the, at the lowest price possible.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:51:15):

I wish Ozzy had stuck around at Microsoft a little longer in some ways. But I feel like just because, well, I feel like what he wrote his kind of papers, you know, his Hmm. Big thinking subjects. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> would be very prescient Fred today. You know, I think if we went back and looked at them to, like you said, with that one example, I think if we go back and saw and looked at what he said and wrote at the time, I bet <laugh> he foresaw the world that we lived in today. 

 

Rich Campbell (00:51:44):

I don't disagree. And I think they were trying to build it, and they were well ahead of the market when Yeah. When Scott Guthrie took over Azure. I mean, one of the, what was the, the first three things they released was virtual machines app server. Well, now is called App servers, which is basically is in the cloud, right? I mean, no, and, and all of the sort of ingredients for devs and IT folks to move workloads.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:52:07):

Right. Right. There you go. Yep. Yeah. So, okay. I mean, I, anyway, I, Microsoft, I, I think because of this worldview, Microsoft is in a good place to become the platform maker that others use to create AI-based solutions of whatever Stripe, you know? And so again, I, I do <laugh>, there's absolutely a discussion to be had around the pros and cons and dangers and not dangers of this. But

 

Rich Campbell (00:52:37):

Oh, no, we're on, we have a slippery slope issue, but there's only, I only look at two companies as catering effectively to developers. Microsoft, by far, number one, and I'm totally biased, they bought me this house. Ultimately, I built a lot of opera outta the micro

 

Leo Laporte (00:52:50):

Stack. Let's, let's, okay, let's explain. They did not actually buy him the house.

 

Rich Campbell (00:52:54):

They didn't actually buy, there

 

Leo Laporte (00:52:55):

Was no black bag of cash.

 

Rich Campbell (00:52:57):

No. Many, many years ago. Somebody told me, you know, if you follow, listen to what Bill Gates says and do some of the things that he's doing, they will put money in your, you know, money will appear in your pocket. Like, good things will happen to

 

Leo Laporte (00:53:07):

You. Yep. Would you say that's still true there, Richard? If you were young just starting out today, would you say follow Microsoft?

 

Rich Campbell (00:53:13):

Yeah, I absolutely, but I would tackle it from a different perspective of, you know, look at the technologies that have the largest opportunities. I do those talks, right? I am going into colleges and university and high schools. The things, it's like, what is the opportunity space? And there's a lot of choice there.

 

Leo Laporte (00:53:29):

What

 

Paul Thurrott (00:53:29):

Do you think, though? This is, that's an interesting as infrastructure, right? In other words, people are choosing technology stacks of whatever kinds, you know, we, the, the things that I care about, which is so pointless. Like, is there ever gonna be a another native windows, you know, API thing? You know, no <laugh> that, that world has moved on, right? But mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. But where Microsoft is important is on the backend, you know, it was like the car discussion we had. Microsoft is gonna be all over these automated vehicles. You'll never see a Microsoft logo anywhere, but they're gonna be on the backend powering all this experiences that you have on these crazy screens. A span, the whole dashboard, and, you know, whatever front end stuff you're doing just like they're on the back end of, or, or can be on the back end of whatever solution you're creating, whatever it might be in whatev, wherever market. So even though you might be running an iPhone app and you think of it as like, these guys wrote this thing probably in Swift and used Xcode and blah, blah, blah, but they're using some backend services and mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, a lot of times that stuff's on Azure.

 

Rich Campbell (00:54:29):

Yeah. And, and, and can, should be, when I, when I'm students always wanna make games, I point 'em at Unity, it's happen. That's right. Right. That's smart. Yeah. And everything's available to them. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, if you're talking about getting, getting education, getting successful in technology right now it's data analytics.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:54:44):

Yeah.

 

Rich Campbell (00:54:45):

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Because the shortage is Titanic. Yeah. The, the work only needs so much information. It's a great area to grow and

 

Leo Laporte (00:54:53):

Bring PS and Python and and do data. Yeah.

 

Rich Campbell (00:54:56):

It's huge opportunity there. Yeah.

 

Leo Laporte (00:54:59):

Am I crazy why I would tell 'em follow open source <laugh>? Maybe I'm crazy. 

 

Paul Thurrott (00:55:06):

I, no, it depends on what you're

 

Leo Laporte (00:55:07):

Talking about. I honestly feel like that's in the long run, that's, that's the future

 

Paul Thurrott (00:55:11):

We're headed towards. Yeah. Is non proprietary. Yeah, I agree with that.

 

Rich Campbell (00:55:15):

But, you know, and that's essentially happened, right?

 

Paul Thurrott (00:55:18):

I'm just, I'm bringing this, this is very interesting to me. So when you bring up visual Studio installer mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you're like, I wanna install the workloads, right? I kind of look at the bottom of the list, right? I'm looking@thingslikemaui.net desktop development universal Windows, platform development, that kind of stuff. But, you know, what's at the top is two Microsoft things. Asp.Net and web development, and then Azure development. Okay. But the other two are Python development, which you guys just brought up, and no js Right? Which is the most popular, probably JavaScript, runtime, non web runtime, right? So mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, those are not Microsoft Technologies, but they're still top of mind for people using Microsoft Tools Sure. To create whatever software services

 

Rich Campbell (00:55:58):

They remember with the exception of C Sharp. Microsoft does not vent programming languages. They implement tools against other programming.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:56:07):

Yeah. Type

 

Leo Laporte (00:56:07):

Script.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:56:08):

F Sharp and types are not a language type script's. Really just a type script's a language. It's a front end.

 

Leo Laporte (00:56:13):

Okay.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:56:13):

It'ss a front end, but it's a front end for J JavaScript. Okay. F sharp. We fall into the list. I

 

Rich Campbell (00:56:18):

Would say it's a, you know, if you ask Don Seim, the guy who led it, it's a dot edified version of OCaml.

 

Leo Laporte (00:56:25):

But

 

Rich Campbell (00:56:25):

That's fair. It's, it's a derivative that then had to be commercialized.

 

Leo Laporte (00:56:29):

That's fair. But there's plenty of Deriv languages that are derivatives of others. I,

 

Rich Campbell (00:56:33):

I do, I don't disagree.

 

Leo Laporte (00:56:35):

And closure is just a front end for Java and Java, but I would still call it, look at the world a language that,

 

Paul Thurrott (00:56:41):

That the world we live in today. Right. All everything was written in Sea <laugh> in the beginning Yeah. And through today. And and now you have things like, you know, we're adding rust everywhere on the back end. Right. Very exciting. Yeah. And then the front end is mostly JavaScript.

 

Leo Laporte (00:56:55):

It's exciting. Unless you've written Rust and then you realize it's less exciting.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:56:58):

I, I, I just looked into rust over the past week or two and I, I think Rust is pretty

 

Leo Laporte (00:57:03):

Cool. I, you know, who likes Rust? Java programmers? Cuz they're already Mark. Yeah. Well, no, and, and Rust is great. I'm not, I'm not

 

Paul Thurrott (00:57:10):

Knocking. I say people who are, this is, this is the next thing for people who are doing C Yeah. Oh

 

Leo Laporte (00:57:15):

God, help. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I, you know, I hate to deprecate c plus plus now. I don't, I I depre in my

 

Paul Thurrott (00:57:22):

Life. I love to do it. Let's

 

Leo Laporte (00:57:24):

<Laugh> I, you know I would never, I've tried and I can't, and I was a C programmer, but it, there's a lot of production code and c plus plus and it's still very effective and efficient. And

 

Paul Thurrott (00:57:37):

Is it

 

Leo Laporte (00:57:38):

Terrible until it's gone from a, is it a terrible language? Is it a bad news? No, it's

 

Paul Thurrott (00:57:41):

A terrible language.

 

Rich Campbell (00:57:42):

Well, it's also evolved, right? It has a sync and a weighted and so forth. Like Oh yeah. People don't play with pointers anymore and that, that language is not static. And it's still the majority developers of Microsoft are c plus plus

 

Paul Thurrott (00:57:53):

Developers. Yeah. It's based on this 1990s view of Oops, which was the great white hope of the 1990s or whatever the next big paradigm and was kind of shown to be really top heavy. And

 

Leo Laporte (00:58:08):

I think though, and I think you're in this camp, a lot of people judge c plus plus by earlier versions that, I mean, I, I think modern c plus plus is probably a lot better than, you know, version 11

 

Paul Thurrott (00:58:21):

Is necessary. I just

 

Leo Laporte (00:58:22):

Really, all right.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:58:24):

Yeah. I

 

Leo Laporte (00:58:25):

Mean, look, I'm not writing in it. I'm not, but you know, I'm, well, I know I'm not an expert, but

 

Paul Thurrott (00:58:32):

Sharp is better or whatever that means. But those are managed languages essentially. Like they require run times. They don't target native code,

 

Leo Laporte (00:58:40):

Et cetera, but they're designed for teams also, right? This is, I mean, that's the other

 

Rich Campbell (00:58:44):

Lights that's more of a tooling problem. It's just,

 

Leo Laporte (00:58:48):

Well, and the tooling's there for c plus plus cuz of it's mm-hmm. <Affirmative> cuz of its age, if nothing else.

 

Rich Campbell (00:58:53):

Well, and depending on whose tool stack you use, and this is where, you know, Microsoft's original business and sort of at their s

 

Leo Laporte (00:58:59):

Studio baby

 

Rich Campbell (00:59:00):

We build

 

Paul Thurrott (00:59:00):

Great, I feel like there's gotta be way more c in the world than c plus plus. There has

 

Leo Laporte (00:59:05):

To be, well, just for legacy

 

Rich Campbell (00:59:06):

Reason, I wouldn't disagree.

 

Leo Laporte (00:59:07):

There might even be more Fortran than c plus plus. It's

 

Paul Thurrott (00:59:10):

Not just legacy, it's more like

 

Leo Laporte (00:59:11):

Go Ball. It's been around for a long time.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:59:12):

You're writing drivers or kernels or, you know, that kind of stuff. Like this is like the deep level,

 

Leo Laporte (00:59:17):

Right?

 

Paul Thurrott (00:59:19):

That's the language. And everybody, that's one. That's the, I mean, really

 

Leo Laporte (00:59:22):

The people who are run running to rust are people running from c plus

 

Paul Thurrott (00:59:25):

Plus. Right? That's what I mean. I I think that's the role. Rust. no one's gonna, we're not gonna replace the body of sea work that's out there with rust, but we are gonna start adding to it and we're adding to it with rust and not with sea bylaw. You know, or if

 

Leo Laporte (00:59:38):

You look at the B poles or the stack exchange stack overflow poles, c plus plus is almost always still close to the top. Not mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, not maybe number one, but,

 

Rich Campbell (00:59:49):

Well, I I would also argue how many people normally say I'm in, I'm using c plus plus and they're actually writing in C. There is only one.

 

Paul Thurrott (00:59:56):

Yeah.

 

Rich Campbell (00:59:57):

You know, when you're in Visual Studio and you're working in the C components That's right. You can do

 

Paul Thurrott (01:00:02):

Either's. It's c plus plus.

 

Leo Laporte (01:00:03):

Yeah. That's, but that's a good point. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm no expert. I I'm,

 

Paul Thurrott (01:00:10):

I'm,

 

Leo Laporte (01:00:10):

You keep saying that. I'm a big list fan.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:00:12):

You spend a lot, you spend a lot of time programming.

 

Leo Laporte (01:00:15):

I spend almost all my free time these days programming.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:00:17):

So you are actually not for any purpose, quite a bit of experience with

 

Leo Laporte (01:00:21):

This. It's like doing crossword puzzles for play

 

Paul Thurrott (01:00:23):

That you're, you're very well versed on this. 

 

Leo Laporte (01:00:25):

Yeah. In a kind of a retro way. That's funny. I'm like that eight bit guy.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:00:30):

This is, we're not, we are not a programming podcast. You are <laugh>. Yeah, you're right there.

 

Leo Laporte (01:00:35):

I'm really late of late. I've been doing a lot of catching up on algorithms and stuff like that. Co comp size stuff. Nice. Which I never studied, you know, I was a Chinese,

 

Paul Thurrott (01:00:46):

It's a year of des you doing like a year of design patterns in various languages.

 

Leo Laporte (01:00:51):

Yeah. No, it's fascinating. Yeah. And and I actually, algorithms I find really, it's more, for me, it's just a, it's a game. It's

 

Paul Thurrott (01:00:59):

A mental, it's no, this is, this is your version of a

 

Leo Laporte (01:01:01):

Cross Republican. I don't, I haven't no idea what a real programmer in production deals with or <laugh> any, any of that. Yeah. Except, you know, reading anecdotally from people who are moaning and groaning. Yeah. And I wrote a lot of Pascal, some, but Danielle's, same mentioning Pascal in the early days of Apple. That's, that was the language. Yeah. Apple

 

Paul Thurrott (01:01:19):

Pascal. Yep. That was one of my,

 

Leo Laporte (01:01:20):

Wrote a lot of Pascal.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:01:22):

I had Apple Pascal in a two Gs in the late 1980s.

 

Leo Laporte (01:01:25):

Yeah, for sure. Yep. I don't know how we got off on this tangent. It's my favorite subject. Maybe it's my fault. I,

 

Paul Thurrott (01:01:32):

Well, we're talking about ai. So in other words, the, the, all these people who are today using whatever, they're using JavaScript or C or c plus plus or Rust or whatever well probably not Rust, but our, I I think this is, we had this generation of, you know what it is, it's like I talked about desktop publishing. We used, we started getting these ransom note looking documents. Right? Or VV happens vi we visual discovered <laugh> right before Visual Basic went, went to net. Anyone could create a visual basic application. And God did it show that kind of thing. <Laugh>. So there's gonna be, you

 

Rich Campbell (01:02:09):

Know, the, the, all of that VBA living behind Excel spreadsheets. Oh God. Out there. I still haunted. Never

 

Paul Thurrott (01:02:15):

Gone away. Yep. Never went away. No. In fact, to this day, I don't know what the version number is on VB right now, but it's gotta be 19 something. It's, it's up there. It's like people thought VB start stopped at version six. Oh, no, no, no. You know, VBS script happened. VBA A kept going, and then VB did net happened, and it's, this thing has been revved. It's still around. It's crazy. But anyway, after vba, I would say the next big thing like that was the app store. Right? And the app store is fascinating because unlike desktop publishing and vb, those tools are hard <laugh>. Right. And that shows you how impressive that thing was as a platform that despite the difficulty, so many people jumped on board that, and there are so many mom and pop apps in the app store now just made by individuals who learned online or bought a book or went to a, a bootcamp or whatever it is. So I, I feel like AI has the possibility, the strong possibility of being the next of those things, right. That it's transformative because it's not just gonna be professional developers or whatever that tackle this. It's so exciting. It's gonna attract normal.

 

Rich Campbell (01:03:22):

Well, and and even today with chat gb t in its current form, which is a temporary form, you can take a chunk of EBA a code, paste it in and say, what does this do

 

Leo Laporte (01:03:31):

<Laugh>? It's amazing, isn't it? Yeah.

 

Rich Campbell (01:03:33):

It's amazing. Now, I'm not saying it's right. It does take a guess. Right?

 

Paul Thurrott (01:03:37):

Right. Turn this into something that doesn't suck. <Laugh> <laugh>. Yeah. It's like, you know, that's a tough spin up G Sharp version of it or whatever.

 

Leo Laporte (01:03:45):

Yeah. I mentioned Steve Gibson asked people to write a, a tool to look at their last pass vaults to understand how much of your stuff was done in b c or CBC and what your iterations, your P bkd F two iterations were and stuff. And the one that he ended up picking was written in PowerShell by chat G P

 

Paul Thurrott (01:04:03):

T.

 

Rich Campbell (01:04:04):

Nice guy. Which really means it was written by somebody else in chat g PT

 

Leo Laporte (01:04:08):

Fashion. Yeah. Somebody it, yeah. But and it used forms to do the gooey and all that stuff. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, but I mean, I think it did a, it did enough of a good job that it got a, a framework to start with. And then of course it had to be polished. But I think that's

 

Paul Thurrott (01:04:20):

Really interesting. Richard probably knows a lot more about this stuff. I was looking into a way to I use a specific set of commands to do some get stuff, you know, in the command line mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And I was like, you know, obviously I could write a script to automate this in one whack. And I did that, and I was like, oh, you know, this is sort of convenient, but it'd be kind of cool if I could just write like a simple little application and click a button and have a go. And I was like, I looked into that and I, and you can do that, but actually, there's a world of services online that do that for you. And they, it's like an online form creator. You tell it what you want to do, you kind of go through it and it spits out what is basically a little exc, which is just a front end to PowerShell. And th that stuff is like the 1.0 version of what we're talking, you know, this chat or a co-pilot or chat g p or whatever.

 

Rich Campbell (01:05:03):

And you, you're back to what this front end really is, is a finder for all of those tools, right? Yeah. The, arguably the talent you end up with when you work in Right. Gi up spaces, the ability to search for libraries to say, use the right phrases to find what's already already been written.

 

Leo Laporte (01:05:17):

I would grant you co-pilot is that, I mean, you even see copyright and stuff. Yeah, yeah. But Jet G P T is a little more generative. It feels like It's not exactly copying.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:05:27):

It's, it's so important because, and again, I I <laugh> there's a weird history at Microsoft where it's a, it's a developer organization to make platforms. You know, they got into the enterprise through first small businesses and work what do they call 'em? Work groups and, you know, got up to the enterprise. Well, now they, they, they approached a lot of administrative stuff, a as if they were programming tools. I mean, ProSal itself, it's like a, it's a.net programming language and runtime essentially for administrators. And it's, you know, I, I would have made the argument 20 years ago, like, I don't know that there's a lot of crossover between these two audiences, you know? And I feel like there's always gonna be that programming angle, which is a co-pilot for programmers. And then there's gonna be this other thing where it just, normal people say administrators who aren't necessarily good at programming, but they know they need something to automate something. They're not gonna write the power shell themselves, but they can speak it or type it <laugh> and have something generated and they can make sure it works. And I, I, that is very exciting. I, I think, I think bringing that power to people who wouldn't be able to code it, who are not programmers, right. Not just not capable of coding it, but just not, are never gonna be programmers. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> is part of the reason this is so exciting.

 

Rich Campbell (01:06:40):

Well, and now this is where the architecture of Microsoft as a company comes into play. Because as that interface gets put on top of Windows, every product team will need to implement it, or nobody will use their product because it becomes the discoverability interface.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:06:54):

This is the dot edification of Windows, but it's the.ai application of Windows. Right? Or of every, I shouldn't say Windows of Microsoft, in other words. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, the plan for.net was that it was gonna infuse everything Microsoft did. That didn't work out. But I feel like AI has the chance to be that thing. The, if your product or service at Microsoft isn't somehow wrapped around or infused by ai, you're,

 

Rich Campbell (01:07:17):

You're gonna have a problem if you're in that jet. If you're not in that generative interface, you're not gonna be one of the choices. The problem is, it'll be too many choices, right. You're gonna say, Hey, I need you to do acc it as well. Well, here's a Python implementation and here's That's right. A power

 

Paul Thurrott (01:07:29):

Shell. No, it's gonna be power automated. It's gonna be in Visual Studio, it's gonna be an office.

 

Rich Campbell (01:07:33):

Would you like me to write that as a VBA script inside of Excel for you? Like, it, it can do all of those things. Doesn't make it good, just that it can.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:07:42):

Yes. Yep. Yeah, we're gonna be dealing with that. There's no doubt about it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So we'll see how it kind of eeks out over time. I mean, he, they, well, they kind of said, I mean, well, they already announced the open AI stuff, and, and Che as

 

Rich Campbell (01:07:55):

An ap, they're on the path. I mean, they've, yeah. They ever

 

Leo Laporte (01:07:57):

Confirm the 10 billion. That was just the rumor, right?

 

Paul Thurrott (01:08:00):

No, they did not confirm

 

Leo Laporte (01:08:01):

That. Okay. They said 1 billion. No, that was the original in investment.

 

Rich Campbell (01:08:04):

Yeah. They were

 

Paul Thurrott (01:08:06):

Supposedly, there's been another 2 billion that's been quiet that no one really, they've not confirmed that. And supposedly they've gone and said, we want 10 billion Oh. And we want to own 49% of the company when we're done. And they have not confirmed that either. So, okay. Tho those are rumors. It's not like rumors from Bob up the street. They're, I I, I, I wanna say this came out of Bloomberg or something. It was, yeah, I think you're right. Pretty, pretty accurate, you know, publications. Yeah. 

 

Leo Laporte (01:08:30):

Well, anyway, it's clear Microsoft is all in on this. Do you think this violates though the original conception of open development Richard? Is that what you were kind of

 

Rich Campbell (01:08:40):

Saying? Well, I, I mean, open AI was supposed to be open for everything. And then when G P T three came along and it's like, Hey, this can be used for quite nefarious purposes, so we're not gonna publish the code on it. We, we are going to provide an API to it so that we can effectively gate keep what you do with it. And everybody seems on board with that because it ha because what they were saying was true. Once you have something with that good of a natural language interface, you can do some very horrible things. And you're still seeing that model followed. But the fact that the money matters, and then I'll talk about maybe a public offering and and valuations and so forth, we're in an interesting place. Like what is this thing exactly? But I think Microsoft and all of us clearly receiving it as a competitive advantage for Microsoft. And that makes it straight up capitalistic. This is, there's no Altru. Yeah. Here, folks.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:09:35):

It also, well, this is something that's come up a lot on this show too, is this notion of Microsoft as a steward of some technology, like we talked about, like Minecraft or whatever, or GitHub is a good example. If you look at Big Tech today and you say, well, which of these companies would you trust with this? You know? Yes. I'm not saying any of them are completely trustworthy, but I, I mean, honestly not just because of the type of company they but just the, well, the type of company, I guess they are, yes. Actually it is because of the type of company. They're, I don't mean like, they're, they're a platforms company, as we said. That's one way that they're a type of company, but they're also, I think a more, again, it breaks down so quickly, but there, they're more ethical company than their competitors. And I know the bar is super low. I mean, I don't, don't mis interpret what I just said to mean

 

Rich Campbell (01:10:21):

When the leak about GitHub being acquired happened. Like it was on the Friday, the announce supposed to be on Monday. Then as I remember, if I remember correctly, it was the choices were it's gonna be acquired, it's gonna be Microsoft, or it's gonna be Google, or it's gonna be 10 cent. Which one do you want

 

Leo Laporte (01:10:38):

That Tencent didn't get it. That would be the

 

Paul Thurrott (01:10:40):

End of it. Yeah. So that's like a double. Yeah.

 

Rich Campbell (01:10:42):

Yeah. And by the end of the weekend, everybody's kind of like, eh, not a bad place for it to be. No, it's go

 

Paul Thurrott (01:10:48):

Microsoft. But it turned out to

 

Leo Laporte (01:10:49):

Be even better than

 

Paul Thurrott (01:10:50):

I was guessing. Right. The follow to that is actually Microsoft was the best steward for GitHub. Like, this is worked out incredibly well. Mm-Hmm. And I think that's the way we need to approach this as well. I mean, again, it's, none of this is necessarily ideal. But

 

Rich Campbell (01:11:06):

If we have, and part of this is Microsoft went through the, you have been declared a expeditious monopoly, like, and, and negotiated their way to a consent decree, you know, and spent 10 years in that purgatory dealing with it. And that ended in 2011. Like, and I don't think 11 years later

 

Leo Laporte (01:11:23):

That Nadella is paying lip service to this.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:11:25):

I No, no, no, no. I don't think was Cancer under his predecessor? That was

 

Leo Laporte (01:11:29):

His predecessor

 

Paul Thurrott (01:11:30):

Is embraced today. It's a different, it's a different company.

 

Rich Campbell (01:11:33):

Yeah. And, and I think Bomber realized that was the right direction to go in, and that he was an impediment to going there. That's, and so getting outta the way was the right thing to do. That's right.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:11:42):

Yep. I'm glad you said that, because people don't give him credit for a lot of the things. They, I would say a lot of things happen under,

 

Rich Campbell (01:11:48):

If, you know, Satche Net's big rollout was Build of 2014, and he had, and that's dot net is being opensourced and all of these great things. It's like he didn't get all that

 

Paul Thurrott (01:11:58):

Done anymore. It's not like he invented that. Yeah, exactly. No, exactly. I Office on the I iPhone was not something he invented, but it's, it's the, you know, only Richard Nixon could have gone to <laugh> China. Gone to China. Yeah. it's kinda like that. I guess <laugh> kind of very vaguely

 

Rich Campbell (01:12:14):

<Laugh>. No, no,

 

Leo Laporte (01:12:15):

That's a good direction. That's a really apt way to put it.

 

Rich Campbell (01:12:18):

Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But they, yeah. The direction was apparent and they committed to it, including changing leadership to commit to

 

Paul Thurrott (01:12:25):

It, because I think otherwise it wouldn't have been taken seriously. Right. It, it's,

 

Rich Campbell (01:12:29):

No, I I think it was a good play.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:12:31):

Yeah, I do too.

 

Rich Campbell (01:12:33):

It is. And here we

 

Leo Laporte (01:12:34):

Are. It's absolutely the case. And of course, you're close observers. So this is just from the outside looking in that Microsoft is a different company than it was under bomber. And, and I think a, a much kinder, you don't think of embracing golf anymore. You don't. No.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:12:50):

You, you, I think of I always compare them to Germany. You know, world War II happened, that was terrible. It's a different place now. And it's not fair to hold that country to what happened in the 1930s and 1940s in the same way that it's not fair to hold the Microsoft of today to what they did in the 1990s. Cuz it's not the same company. It just is not Yeah. As the same name. You know, I get that. A lot of the same products. I get that too. It's a completely different company.

 

Rich Campbell (01:13:18):

I would also say the company, this is, it's 220,000 people. It, well, 210,000

 

Paul Thurrott (01:13:23):

People, 211 <laugh>.

 

Rich Campbell (01:13:26):

And so it's not uniform. There are big chunks of the company that are the kinder, gentler deck giant. It's pro open source and, and at all those things, and there are pieces that are not or that are struggling to live in the, the, in the current conditions. Not everybody got the memo. And some of them burnt it. So, you know, they're, they're still trying to figure out. That's

 

Paul Thurrott (01:13:48):

True Germany too, by the way. But absolutely. But yes. But there any

 

Leo Laporte (01:13:51):

Big leaders still around from the Balmer days? Are there any hangover

 

Paul Thurrott (01:13:56):

Actually, the, the biggest, well, yes. I mean, you know, Brad, Brad Smith is still around. I mean yeah, Amy Hood Brad Smith is made the best example. The longest. Yeah. And he, but he was the one who was hired literally to solve their antitrust problems and did mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. so that's very interesting. I,

 

Rich Campbell (01:14:12):

And arguably that's, bomber got c e o as that the, you know as the pernicious monopoly had been declared. Right. His first job was to consent that, get that consent decree and yeah. Bill

 

Paul Thurrott (01:14:23):

Gates was like, I'm out <laugh>,

 

Rich Campbell (01:14:25):

I'm good. You know, I'm going to Africa for three months. See ya.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:14:30):

Yep. I sat in a chair for 18 hours. I'm not doing this anymore. <Laugh>. Yeah. You know? Yeah.

 

Rich Campbell (01:14:37):

But again, they, that change was because it was, he was the leader. When this thing has happened, he's not the best person to clean it up. So he steps aside and let's his,

 

Paul Thurrott (01:14:47):

I mean, from a, from a product perspective, like high level leadership, I would say it is telling that a lot of the guys who are left from previous regimes, so to speak were kind of at the cloud level or came outta server, you know, that kind of thing. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I think that's interesting. You know, Panos Pane is interesting to me because he's the single last leftover from Ovra mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. he was busy making mic and keyboards until he convinced Sinofsky convinced Bomber to make computers. And he runs windows now Right. As well as Surface. So it's fascinating to me that that guy is on the senior leadership team. But I mean I'm just trying to think about, I mean, honestly, a lot of Microsoft senior leadership is newish, I guess I would say.

 

Rich Campbell (01:15:38):

Mm-Hmm. New, I mean, yeah. Yeah. Definitely.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:15:41):

Yeah.

 

Leo Laporte (01:15:43):

All right. Moving on.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:15:45):

Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>,

 

Rich Campbell (01:15:46):

Speaking of Windows,

 

Leo Laporte (01:15:48):

I can tell what we've exhausted a subject, and I think we've done that. Windows 11, you'll never run out of Windows 11 News

 

Paul Thurrott (01:15:57):

<Laugh>. Is that true? I don't know. <Laugh>.

 

Leo Laporte (01:16:01):

I

 

Paul Thurrott (01:16:01):

Don't know. Geez. Look at the wrong.

 

Leo Laporte (01:16:04):

Damn you. His head's going up and down on this thing. I love it. <Laugh>. Do that somewhere. That's really good. So on the notion it shows where Paul's cursor is,

 

Paul Thurrott (01:16:13):

I guess. Yeah. And oh, there's Richard, what happens? <Laugh>. Yeah, because I clicked on it. It's the wrong link cuz that was a mistake. I so follow

 

Leo Laporte (01:16:21):

The bouncing ball.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:16:22):

<Laugh>. Yeah. So since last, the last show, there have been two builds released to the Windows Insider Program last week, late last week, probably Thursday they released a new bill to the dev channel. And this brings some changes to task managers specifically for developers, right. This ability to do like a live kernel dump from the, from task manager, which is kind of a fascinating, complicated or high end, I dunno, what do you call it? Low end, low <laugh>. What am I looking for here? Like a, just a developer oriented feature. It's kind of, it's not something normal people will ever need. And then some nonsense around the accounts page with quota and OneDrive, who cares? So nothing, nothing super, super exciting. Today or yesterday they released a new bill to the release preview channel. We don't actually see a lot of release preview builds these days because mm-hmm. <Affirmative>,

 

(01:17:17):

We're not on the cusp of another release <laugh>, you know, so Well, although that stuff has gotten kind of, you know, weird. The interesting thing here, and this is actually something that will benefit all people is let's say you and I did this all the time, <laugh> you bring up a new computer or you reset an existing computer and you're on Windows 11 22 H two. So what you have to do is go to Windows update and you install a bunch of updates, and that will install, that will include the latest cumulative update for just for the system itself, which is a you know, well, like I said, it's a cumulative update. So it includes everything between then and 22 H two. There's gonna be a.net update, there's gonna be a bunch of other updates, and they're, they're actually gonna roll these things into a single update so that you can get it all at one time, reboot once, and then be completely up to date. So it, like, no matter when you install Windows or bring up a new computer, you'll have one set of updates to do. And that's it. And that's, I mean, yeah. There you go. That's great. <Laugh>. Like that's actually really, that's, that's good. That's the way it should always be. So, yeah. Yeah. I think this was kind of the vision, you know, for Windows 10, but certainly for Windows 11. And I think this change will make it a reality. So that's good.

 

Rich Campbell (01:18:25):

Yeah. And it's interesting to see them pushing against features that we wish we had in 10. Like, this is how we ultimately get everyone over to 11. It's like, oh, I, that's right. It's not the new interface, it's gonna get me to move. It's the, this longer list of features.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:18:39):

Yeah. Well that's, I mean, moving from seven to eight, moving from eight to 10, and now moving from 10 to 11, that's been the case for a while. Like the Yeah. They've significantly improved that process at every step. Let us not for, forget the Baton death match March that was installing updates on a Windows seven s sp one system. If you started that thing now, you'd still be doing it when we recorded next week's show. It's just

 

Rich Campbell (01:19:01):

No, no. Did Mr. Kovski ban an s SP two? That was the whole thing. Was you, you didn't get an S SP two now it's just a Yes. Endless stream of fixes.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:19:09):

Well, but they did do, I don't remember what they called it, but they did do a they had to do something. It was SB two, it was like a, I think they just called it a cumulative update because Yeah, the problem in window seven was those updates were all granular. They were, there were no cumulative updates. So you had to install every, you got this list, it was 167 things, whatever, you'd check 'em all off. Most of them would install, you'd reboot, you'd get more, you'd get, oh, you'd come back. Oh, there's more again. And then, you know, it would just, it just never ended. It was horrible. Yeah. And

 

Rich Campbell (01:19:37):

You think it was, you just stop keeping track of them. It's just like, just keep turn on auto reboot.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:19:41):

Just keep, just go until it's done and check, go

 

Rich Campbell (01:19:43):

Until

 

Paul Thurrott (01:19:43):

Checking, please. Yeah, exactly. And then you retired because you're done. <Laugh>, it just took a long time. So I think we, eight probably was the first big step to solving that problem. And then, you know, obviously got better again in 10 and 11. The other thing is, last week we talked about PC sales, and at the time we only had data from idc. Now we have Gartner as well. And every year for 10 years plus, I don't remember. I, I write a report where I combine the, the data and I look at it, I make my own chart and everything, you know, like an analyst. And the PC market is in a horrific state of free fall right now. I don't know how else to say it. And the problem is year over year doesn't sound too bad. You're like, PC sales in 2022 fell 16%. And you're like, oh, come on. That's, that's, that's great. <Laugh> mm-hmm. <Affirmative> like, I thought it was gonna be way worse than that. Yeah. It doesn't work that way. So if you actually break it down by quarter it was 6% in the first quarter, minus I should say minus 6%, minus 14% in the second quarter, minus 17% in the third quarter. And then the holiday quarter minus 28.3%

 

Rich Campbell (01:20:52):

Normally should be the best quarter.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:20:54):

Exactly. So this is, it's not over the, the point of that is it's, we've not concluded. So

 

Rich Campbell (01:20:59):

Are you pro proposing that first quarter of 2023 is gonna be bigger than minus 28?

 

Paul Thurrott (01:21:05):

Yeah.

 

Rich Campbell (01:21:06):

Is that Seems unlikely.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:21:08):

Well, you gotta understand, it's kind of a, it's a weak, comparable, so mm-hmm. <Affirmative> it well, I guess we'll see. So I, I would say, I

 

Rich Campbell (01:21:17):

Would also argue that 2021 was the anomaly, right? Yeah. Like, this is all pandemic effects that if you go pre pandemic, we're still above pre pandemic left.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:21:27):

No, that's by the way, that is true. That's absolutely true. And, and the thing you wanna look at is like what is, or you want to think about is what is this curve gonna look like? Are we gonna go back to pre pandemic? Is it gonna actually get worse than that? You know, we don't, that we don't know. So Yeah. Are we really

 

Rich Campbell (01:21:40):

Gonna go below 250 million units? I mean, that seems to be the magic number when the Yeah. Off the peak of 20 10, 20 11. Yeah. You sort of flattened out at around two 50 and it stayed like that for a while.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:21:53):

2021. I, it was like a magical return. The four, it was 344 million computers were sold up here.

 

Rich Campbell (01:22:00):

Like, that's insane. But it's, it's also, it just, you know, it's a delusion, right? Like

 

Paul Thurrott (01:22:05):

It's, it is a delusion, but you have to go back to 2012 to find a year where PC sells were that strong, right? Oh, sure. But

 

Rich Campbell (01:22:12):

All the more reason to recognize that's the outlier not getting back down under 300.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:22:20):

Yep. Yep. Yeah. So we'll see. I there's no way to predict, right? There's no way to predict. But I to

 

Rich Campbell (01:22:25):

If, to me it felt like in the 20 teens we were at two 50 cuz that was replacement rate.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:22:30):

Yep. Like that. Like in other words, that's the natural floor. Yeah. Or the natural, you know, plus or minus some percentage. It's gonna, that's where it,

 

Rich Campbell (01:22:39):

You have minor amounts of growth. You have a turnover rate that's, that's, you know, four year, five year machine turns, that's where you level off.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:22:46):

Yeah. So when you have rapid growth like we had in 2021, you're that is known to be temporary and will be reversed. It follows that you will probably have rapid decline for briefly as well. And, and maybe that's what we're experiencing. Yeah. So anyway, that's where, that's where that sit. So that's the Yeah. Whatever, that's where the PC market is. I'm, I'm gonna be very interested to see how things go. This year, you know, every quarter. And Microsoft, by the way, is releasing the earnings next week, I think on Tuesday. Which is why they announced the layoffs this week. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I think it was Dina Bass

 

Rich Campbell (01:23:24):

And, and a write down on hardware and like they're shuffle all the bad news though. Yep, yep.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:23:28):

Because it's all, and it's all that is. Right. The also I should say the, the 1.2 was, is that the right number? The 1.2 billion I think it was mm-hmm. <Affirmative> in associated cost with this with the layoffs. And the writedowns is gonna be applied to the, the quarter that the reporting next week, right? Right. The, the fourth calendar quarter of the second fiscal quarter for Microsoft. We'll see <laugh>, we'll see what that looks like, right. I mean, they're gonna take a, they're gonna take a hit. So that's gonna be kind of interesting. But you

 

Rich Campbell (01:23:57):

You mean you're still talking about, you know, it's a 1.2. Okay. It's a few percentage points, but it's single digits. The company makes 20 billion a quarter, right. Net

 

Paul Thurrott (01:24:11):

I think Dina Bass said revenues were gonna be down something like 6%, which is also single digits not bad. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But also the worst since, I don't know what that was, maybe 2017 as a a drop off. Not the worst number, but the worst decline.

 

Rich Campbell (01:24:25):

It's like, oh no, we are not immune to economic realities either.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:24:31):

Right,

 

Rich Campbell (01:24:31):

Right. While sitting on our giant stacks of money from running chunk of civilization.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:24:36):

Well, off Olympus. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

 

Rich Campbell (01:24:39):

<Laugh>.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:24:39):

Yep.

 

Rich Campbell (01:24:40):

And will give you 6% <laugh>.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:24:44):

Yep. Yeah. And actually, I, I would, you know, my Microsoft and other companies too, apple, whoever as they announced their earnings, what you were gonna look for too is talk about the future. Like, one of the things that stopped last year was companies stopped predicting what the future quarters were gonna look like because mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, it was too volatile, you know? Sure.

 

Rich Campbell (01:25:03):

And, and you've, they're good this year. This year they can say, we don't know.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:25:07):

That's, that's, it's gonna be interesting. So if Microsoft kind of comes in, and even if it's down a little bit, if they say, look, we expect this is what it's gonna look like, that's actually a big improvement from last year. Right? So Sure.

 

Rich Campbell (01:25:17):

The pandemic was the ultimate excuse. In theory they should be able to estimate pre economic downturns, you know, even though inflation numbers seem to be coming down and so forth. Like, I'm glad I don't have that job. A plague is like the Spanish Inquisition. Oh, nobody, nobody expects it, expects it. As long as, you know, Monty Python jokes <laugh>

 

Paul Thurrott (01:25:37):

Given the euphoria of the pandemic, which is a weird thing to say for these companies. Someone, someone in the CFO F O type area should have been saying, Hey guys you know, there's gonna be a backside to this. Right? I mean, I, I feel like these companies should have been able to predict to some degree, maybe not. Well,

 

Rich Campbell (01:25:55):

Maybe they did. How do you know they didn't? I mean,

 

Paul Thurrott (01:25:59):

I, yeah, I don't, okay. Well, certainly

 

Rich Campbell (01:26:00):

There

 

Paul Thurrott (01:26:01):

Was, if they thought it and didn't say it, then they didn't <laugh>. Well,

 

Leo Laporte (01:26:03):

Who would they? You mean they, why they should have told you.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:26:06):

Yeah, they should have told they certainly had a publicly owned company. Yeah. I think that would be something share.

 

Leo Laporte (01:26:11):

Oh, yeah. That's actually a good question. Yeah. I don't mean

 

Paul Thurrott (01:26:13):

They, me, I just <laugh> I feel

 

Rich Campbell (01:26:15):

Internally they were putting lots of pressure on their staff, right? Like Yeah. Right. This past fiscal Microsofts, their budgets have been very odd by anyone I've ever talked to. Like, clearly they's been tight with the purse strings internally. Yeah. Okay. Even if they weren't talking about an inter quarterly

 

Paul Thurrott (01:26:31):

Record, they knew, I mean, not saying something that, you know, it could be a material. No,

 

Leo Laporte (01:26:35):

It's material. No, no, that's exactly, I'm with you. That's,

 

Paul Thurrott (01:26:37):

Yeah. Sorry.

 

Rich Campbell (01:26:38):

Well, it also was sort of bundled up in the whole pandemic thing too, of we are not, we are, we're being careful about how we work with our people. We don't wanna put them in

 

Paul Thurrott (01:26:46):

Danger. I don't know how, I don't know how the finances work at companies. I don't know how my finances work, so why would I know <laugh>? But

 

Leo Laporte (01:26:52):

The,

 

Paul Thurrott (01:26:52):

But it seems like,

 

(01:26:55):

But I, it, it does seem to me that maybe one of the prudent things that companies like Microsoft or Google or Apple or Amazon could have done is said, Hey this has been an unprecedented year. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, we're gonna defer some revenues here. We're gonna, we're gonna even this out <laugh>, you know, we're just gonna do the right thing. Because we know that when there's an upside like this, there's gonna be a downside. Like, no one, no one ever talked like that. I don't even know if, by the way, what I just described is possible or legal. I'm just Yeah.

 

Rich Campbell (01:27:21):

For illegal. Yeah.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:27:21):

Yeah. I, I really don't know him. But it, it's interesting to me that you just ride the waves, you know, you go, it goes up. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it goes down, it goes up, it goes down.

 

Rich Campbell (01:27:31):

And, and you be sort of forthright on the whole Yeah. We're we're, it's an unusual time and we're not sure. And that's Yeah.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:27:38):

You know? Right, right. Or i, I, and if there were some way to just kind of stretch this out, it's so I don't, I I feel like that would've been greeted with well, who knows? Maybe

 

Leo Laporte (01:27:49):

I pay attention to apple's statements in their quarterly reports, and they very much said headwinds, headwinds. You know, we're gonna, oh, this is, you know, they were ver they warned people like crazy interesting. So I don't PEs

 

Rich Campbell (01:28:02):

Pessimism pays off, it seems.

 

Leo Laporte (01:28:04):

Right. Well, and you have obligation. I mean, I know these companies have kind, they go to the right to the edge. Paul, I was

 

Paul Thurrott (01:28:10):

Gonna say, some people would've use that term to describe my career.

 

Leo Laporte (01:28:14):

<Laugh>,

 

Rich Campbell (01:28:15):

The best thing about pessimism is you're usually right. And occasionally pleasantly surprised.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:28:18):

They're very rarely disappointed. Yeah, no, that's true.

 

Leo Laporte (01:28:21):

It's the defor act principle. Aren't I completely Yeah. Agree with it.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:28:25):

I mean, in the sense that I want to make myself sound better. I would call it realism, but Yeah. I, I see what you're saying. I, you

 

Leo Laporte (01:28:31):

Know, <laugh> pessimists always think they're realistic.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:28:34):

Yeah. You're,

 

Leo Laporte (01:28:35):

You know, the old joke, you know, the, the pessimist thinks the glass is empty. The optimist thinks the glass is is half is half full. And the engineer says the glass is just poorly designed.

 

Rich Campbell (01:28:45):

Yes. Well, you

 

Paul Thurrott (01:28:46):

And

 

Rich Campbell (01:28:47):

The, and the surrealist says a fish

 

Leo Laporte (01:28:49):

<Laugh>.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:28:49):

Oh, I literally like

 

Leo Laporte (01:28:51):

It. This

 

Paul Thurrott (01:28:52):

Sori Leo's heard this many times. I, I'm sorry for boring you with this, but Richard perhaps has not. One time my wife said to me, you know, your, you really, your glass is really half empty, isn't it? And I said, half empty. I said, there's a crack in the bottom of the glass

 

Leo Laporte (01:29:05):

That I just

 

Paul Thurrott (01:29:06):

Saw <laugh>, and I'm, I'm waiting for the internal bleeding to start what you thought. Half, half empty <laugh>. I wish it was half empty,

 

Leo Laporte (01:29:13):

You know? All right. Let's talk about this six gigahertz cpu. Yeah. Because Intel, I really thought Intel hit a wall with five. Yeah. Ground four. Yeah. Four really technically. But they got to close to five. Wasn't the itanium gonna be faster? And that, and it was so hot that they, they really,

 

Paul Thurrott (01:29:31):

So how long ago was it, remember when Apple wanted the mo? Well it what power PC to hit one gigahertz. Yeah. And it couldn't, right. And that's what trans, that's what caused them to switch to Intel. There you go. We live in an era though of performance per wat <laugh>, don't we? Yeah. I mean, it's different can of worms. It is fascinating that the value that Intel can still add is to just Thurrotttle this thing and make it go

 

Leo Laporte (01:29:56):

<Laugh>. What's the TPU on on a six gigahertz,

 

Paul Thurrott (01:29:59):

Right? I think it's 150

 

Leo Laporte (01:30:03):

<Laugh>. It's like,

 

Paul Thurrott (01:30:04):

I think

 

Leo Laporte (01:30:04):

You could heat the house,

 

Paul Thurrott (01:30:05):

Actually don't is what you're saying. It's, yeah. When you, first of all, you need the same plug that you use for your dryer or

 

Leo Laporte (01:30:11):

<Laugh>. You need 241

 

Paul Thurrott (01:30:14):

When you, when when you boot up your computer, it's like that scene in Christmas vacation where all the lights in the town go

 

Leo Laporte (01:30:19):

On down.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:30:22):

I remember

 

Rich Campbell (01:30:23):

Tom's hardware demonstrated getting a processor to five gigahertz by cooling it with liquid

 

Leo Laporte (01:30:28):

Nitrogen. Yeah. Remember those days?

 

Rich Campbell (01:30:30):

2003 or 2004 with the P four s? Like,

 

Leo Laporte (01:30:33):

Yeah. So this thing is 24 cores, eight performance. 16 efficiency. Wow.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:30:38):

So this is the 13th Gen desktop class chips. So they announced the

 

Leo Laporte (01:30:43):

Original 10. No, the TDP is the TDP is 150 watts.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:30:46):

It's

 

Leo Laporte (01:30:46):

150. That's a base. That's the base tdp.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:30:49):

Yeah. This is a cor Yeah, exactly. Cor, yeah. Cor Koi nine, right? Like you said, 24 Chos. Yeah. Six gigahertz without Overclocking. And it can be overclocked, by the way. <Laugh>. wow. I think it must be a K Ks series

 

Leo Laporte (01:31:04):

Processor. So that means it's it's over clockable.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:31:08):

Yep. Yep.

 

Leo Laporte (01:31:09):

Hmm.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:31:09):

Man, there you go. Crazy

 

Leo Laporte (01:31:11):

Unlocked in core Unlocked. This is a 30 chin. Yeah. <laugh>. Wow. Well, obviously they're doing that. You know, clearly they're doing that because in response to what Apple and and Arm and Qualcomm are doing, it's like, that's right. Okay, well throw some power at it. We can beat the pants off of you.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:31:31):

Yeah. But the thing is <laugh> like an m whatever, an M two Ultra, just from a die size Right. Has gotta be like comparing a Volkswagen bug to

 

Leo Laporte (01:31:40):

A Yeah. They're very different

 

Paul Thurrott (01:31:41):

Cadillac from the

 

Leo Laporte (01:31:42):

19, but also unified memory. There's a whole, it's a big system on it's ship. It's a whole different animal. Yep.

 

Rich Campbell (01:31:47):

Yep. Well, the point being, I wasn't being held up by my CPU in the first

 

Leo Laporte (01:31:53):

Place. Yeah. So there, right.

 

Rich Campbell (01:31:54):

That's not the cpu for the most part, smoked cigarettes in place poker

 

Leo Laporte (01:31:58):

Waiting for memory. Right. And network to

 

Paul Thurrott (01:32:01):

Catch up. Right? That's right. That's

 

Leo Laporte (01:32:02):

Right. But they can do it and that's good. Did, did they say what the process is? Is it, is it 11 nanometer process? Right?

 

Paul Thurrott (01:32:09):

That's a good question. No, it's gotta, I, well, it could be 11 actually. I mean, what's, how small could it be seven at the, the,

 

Leo Laporte (01:32:17):

I don't think Intel's doing anything less than 10. Are

 

Paul Thurrott (01:32:19):

They? Yeah, I was gonna say it's it's desktop class, so it's gonna be bigger. 

 

Leo Laporte (01:32:24):

Well have to be desktop. You'd have five minutes of battery life on a laptop. Exactly. <laugh>. Exactly.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:32:30):

I'm just gonna plug this into the plane. Oh,

 

Leo Laporte (01:32:33):

<Laugh>. But you know, there's bragging rights there. Six gigahertz. Wow. You know. I

 

Paul Thurrott (01:32:39):

Know. It's crazy. And well, it's

 

Rich Campbell (01:32:40):

Raptor Lake, so that is, yeah. That is

 

Paul Thurrott (01:32:44):

10.

 

Rich Campbell (01:32:45):

Raptor Lake is

 

Paul Thurrott (01:32:46):

10. 10, 10 meter. Okay, there you go. Yeah. So this will be the only system that's capable of displaying a Windows 11 contact venue in real time. <Laugh>. So you know it. And once again, he spent hours on that one.

 

Leo Laporte (01:33:00):

Windows is ahead,

 

Paul Thurrott (01:33:02):

Windows is ahead of the hardware. I'm just saying, you know, some days look how responsive my search pill is. Yeah. It's like you write click and you're like one, two, there's two.

 

Leo Laporte (01:33:11):

It's, you know, the, the list price is 6 99, which seems to be not that expensive. I was

 

Paul Thurrott (01:33:17):

Gonna say that's not that bad for what it is, is, right. No.

 

Rich Campbell (01:33:20):

Yeah.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:33:20):

Cause

 

Leo Laporte (01:33:21):

You spent a thousand on

 

Paul Thurrott (01:33:22):

A Xen. I

 

Leo Laporte (01:33:23):

Think this is right.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:33:24):

Yeah, this is right. This is kind of a workstation class thing I would think. I know it's not a xenon, but it, it's Zion seems like this is a X Zion Xenon. Yeah.

 

Leo Laporte (01:33:33):

Xenon Zon be a Noble Glass

 

Paul Thurrott (01:33:36):

Was also the code name for the first Xbox, if I'm not

 

Leo Laporte (01:33:39):

Mistaken. Oh, that's right. Project Xena. Yeah.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:33:42):

Yeah. Zion, sorry. 

 

Leo Laporte (01:33:44):

This

 

Paul Thurrott (01:33:44):

Is cool. I, I think this is literally about bragging rights. It is. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> It is. That's all.

 

Leo Laporte (01:33:49):

It's Yeah, it is. And Apple, you know, it, it's gonna be easier because Apple gained so much going to the M one, but they're not now it's gonna be very much incremental. We've already seen it.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:34:00):

We saw by the way. Yeah. So one of my annoyances with this Apple video, it wasn't really an event, I guess was they compared the speed of every one of the chips they announced to its predecessor. Oh. And also to the last generation intel that we used, which by the way was like three or four years ago. And something it's like, like, it's like, yeah, of course

 

Leo Laporte (01:34:20):

There's double, there's a reason for that. They were still selling Intel Mac Minis. They were still selling Intel imax. Well, but they had

 

Paul Thurrott (01:34:27):

It. They were, but they also had M one version of

 

Leo Laporte (01:34:31):

These. Yeah. But this was, this stuff is, they're no longer selling that stuff. So I think Okay. That, I think the idea is, well, you know, this is

 

Paul Thurrott (01:34:38):

Why I guess, but if you look at, but to your point, when you look at the performance advantage of each of those chips over its direct predecessor, it was low, maybe low double 11.

 

Leo Laporte (01:34:48):

Yeah. It's like 20 maybe not

 

Paul Thurrott (01:34:49):

Even. Maybe. Yeah, maybe. I mean, so yeah, we're starting to see that kind of curve even out. Which makes sense. This thing you

 

Leo Laporte (01:34:56):

And to Richard's point, doesn't matter, cuz most of the time I've not, I haven't felt like any laptop I've ever I've used in the last five years has been slow

 

Rich Campbell (01:35:04):

CPU

 

Paul Thurrott (01:35:04):

Bounce. Well, except when you right click on the desktop. But yeah, I mean, for the most part,

 

Leo Laporte (01:35:09):

You almost always know it's software though, when it's, when that things like that happen itself. Oh yeah.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:35:13):

You can, you can, you can feel when you UI reving you could actually hear it. It's like a little a wind sound, <laugh> here it comes and it comes up. You're like, oh look, a Volkswagen beautiful

 

Leo Laporte (01:35:24):

Bug engine <laugh>.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:35:26):

Yeah, exactly.

 

Leo Laporte (01:35:27):

Right. Strains for 72 miles.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:35:29):

Exactly. We're not going up a hill, are we? What's

 

Leo Laporte (01:35:31):

Going on? Yeah. Yeah. AMD's doing some cool stuff too. Yeah. Let's give them credit. And they're doing some very low power chips. High, high battery life chips. So this is good. The competition is all good,

 

Paul Thurrott (01:35:46):

<Laugh>. It's all good.

 

Rich Campbell (01:35:47):

Well, they can, in the area they can compete in, which is larger numbers.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:35:52):

That's the thing. And that, that actually is kind of my point, like this is, this is where Intel can innovate right now. The, it's sort of like with the eighth gen, remember they went from dual core to quad core on the on the U series. It was like, this is where we can provide <laugh>, you know, value add. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> it, we don't have that super efficient power per wa thing that Apple's talking about. It's gonna be a while. We're working on that. But we can do this. Oh, you want, you, you want like a 12 cylinder engine? Well, yeah, we can do that. <Laugh>, you know, that's the, they're big block, you know, that's, that's kind of where they're at still. So they'll get there or they'll disappear. You know, either way. We'll, we'll, we'll survive.

 

Leo Laporte (01:36:30):

We live in I think great times for computer users.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:36:35):

I do too. Yeah. Computers have never been better. I will. For all the nonsense. We can complain about PCs and whatever. I review a lot of computers. Computers today are terrific <laugh>. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> though. They really are.

 

Leo Laporte (01:36:45):

They

 

Paul Thurrott (01:36:46):

Really are. They're just terrific. Yeah.

 

Rich Campbell (01:36:48):

I have parts on order for two new scratch belt machines. One for the wife who's doing a lot of 3D rendering stuff and one for me. Nice. So I, I will report over the next few years. Tell

 

Leo Laporte (01:36:58):

Us, tell us what you decided to buy. Yeah, I'm very interested.

 

Rich Campbell (01:37:01):

Nine 70 mega board. 13, 900 processors, but not I nines, there's just no excuse. Right. I

 

Paul Thurrott (01:37:07):

Sevens. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

Leo Laporte (01:37:08):

Even, even I seven s

 

Rich Campbell (01:37:11):

Are a lot. Yeah. And I, and I'm, but I'm very much figure out where the peak is. Take a couple of steps back. There you go. You paid a lot. Yeah. Big premium for that.

 

Leo Laporte (01:37:20):

Yeah. Cuz that's where the curve suddenly. Yeah. Right.

 

Rich Campbell (01:37:23):

Yeah. And you're gonna have cooling problems and you know, and da

 

Leo Laporte (01:37:26):

Da. Are you just air cooled? You're not doing a liquid?

 

Rich Campbell (01:37:30):

No. Well, realizing that most what you think are air coolers, those heat pipes have liquid. They are using phase change. Cool. Right. I did water cooling back in the day when it was a stupid thing to do. <Laugh>. and, and, but, but it was quiet. Right. Like that,

 

Leo Laporte (01:37:45):

That's the advantage. You don't have those big fans.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:37:47):

Yeah. We did liquid. Cool. Mark and I built a gaming PC several years ago. We did liquid cooling.

 

Leo Laporte (01:37:52):

I have a, I have my gaming machine is a a alien wear aurora with liquid cooling and it still sounds like a jet taking off

 

Paul Thurrott (01:38:02):

<Laugh>. Yeah. Yeah.

 

Rich Campbell (01:38:03):

Because you still have fans on the radio

 

Paul Thurrott (01:38:05):

First turns on, right? The the initial power on Yeah. Is like a light dim moment.

 

Leo Laporte (01:38:10):

But you know what, for sure it doesn't matter. Just turn the game up. I'm happy. I

 

Rich Campbell (01:38:14):

Don't care. I I got big external radiators so that I could stay passive

 

Leo Laporte (01:38:18):

And, and, and big fans too, right? If you get the big Yeah.

 

Rich Campbell (01:38:21):

Yeah. I didn't need fans cause they were, they were large enough that they radiated.

 

Leo Laporte (01:38:24):

Wow. Nice. When

 

Paul Thurrott (01:38:26):

I was when we first started the show a million years ago, I was working on finalizing what?

 

Leo Laporte (01:38:31):

It wasn't a million. It was a, it was an hour and a half ago. Come on,

 

Paul Thurrott (01:38:35):

17

 

Leo Laporte (01:38:35):

Years ago. Oh, beginning of that.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:38:37):

Yes. I was finalizing the book that became Windows Vista Secrets. And I was co-writing this with Brian Livingston, who was a curious guy. But he, he used to have, his computers were behind a wall and he had those cutouts in the wall that you would have for like golden theater equipment and he would string the wires for his keyboard and mice and stuff through that, cuz he didn't wanna listen to the, how loud the computers were.

 

Leo Laporte (01:38:58):

<Laugh>. We had a server, a server rack, secondhand server rack a friend gave me.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:39:01):

He had like a, yeah, it was like an alcove, you

 

Leo Laporte (01:39:03):

Know, that's got soundproofing in it. So you can, you could put the thing in the server rack, have it in your sound studio. I was really tempted on that Twitter auction, just to bring it back to my favorite subject. They were selling booths for, for phone calls, soundproof boots. And they had a soundproof conference room,

 

Paul Thurrott (01:39:19):

Sort of like a WeWork thing where you can sit like, not a room, but a,

 

Leo Laporte (01:39:22):

Like a booth. No, they're tiny little booths. Yeah. And I was think that'd be great for podcasting. I put a little sound booth in my office.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:39:29):

It would be easy to soundproof it for

 

Leo Laporte (01:39:31):

Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's designed for that. It's, and it's ventilated and everything. I didn't buy it, but

 

Rich Campbell (01:39:36):

Carl, Carl Franklin had bought, has a three of them, I think. Really? His studio.

 

Leo Laporte (01:39:41):

My

 

Paul Thurrott (01:39:41):

Three. Why? Well,

 

Rich Campbell (01:39:42):

Cause we were me group, back in the day, we were making a lot of podcasts and they were multi-person. So there was a, there was standalone booth and there was a paired booth, so you could see each other.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:39:50):

But yeah, you don't wanna be breathing on each other. That's

 

Leo Laporte (01:39:52):

Pretty serious. That's serious podcaster. That's

 

Rich Campbell (01:39:56):

Funny. They worked. Wow. They were good. Yeah. They're, they're oddly dead. Like you're un you're slightly, it's a little too quiet in those direct

 

Leo Laporte (01:40:01):

Yeah. It's weird. Yeah. Yeah. I actually like a little bit of ambient. Yeah. Not too much too. I

 

Paul Thurrott (01:40:07):

Don't wanna amplify my tinnitus, you know? Yeah. I

 

Leo Laporte (01:40:10):

Don't need that story entirely.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:40:11):

Yeah. Yeah.

 

Leo Laporte (01:40:13):

Apple is rumored to be adding touch screens or you can take a little victory lap now.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:40:19):

No, I don't understand what they're, no, not really

 

Leo Laporte (01:40:22):

<Laugh>. And it's by the way, not if, even if it's true, which it might not be 20, 25.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:40:26):

Well, it's Right. So I

 

Leo Laporte (01:40:28):

Would say Yeah. Pretty accurate. So, but when you say Apple's gonna do something two years from now, they could very well just say, well, nevermind. We thought about it. Yeah.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:40:35):

Well, they apparently just canceled all their ar headset plans. We've been babbling about for the past 20, you know, 20 months, whatever. Really? What Yeah. They're gonna just go with a lower cost VR VR

 

Leo Laporte (01:40:44):

Headset instead. And they're not gonna do AR at all.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:40:47):

At least not right away. They, they were supposed to just, they were gonna announce this

 

Rich Campbell (01:40:50):

March.

 

Leo Laporte (01:40:51):

Yeah.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:40:52):

You know, this was, this was happening. Anyway, so I don't know how to view this. Right. Aside from all the normal Apple nonsense, we never do that. We, it doesn't make sense. Two Eagles don't make it, or two turkeys don't make an eagle or whatever the mm-hmm. <Affirmative> commentary was, I don't know. I, the, I, we talked about this months ago. I, I kind of made the point, like, one of the thing I, like I said, I review a lot of laptops and I gotta be honest, like on a traditional laptop form factor, I don't think I want touch. I don't use it. I don't want it.

 

Leo Laporte (01:41:20):

I have it right here on this think pad. I don't ever use it. It's just, I will say it's just out of reach. It's like, but the, but I just, our Mac guys said, oh no, we want it because occasionally you want to hit okay.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:41:31):

Yes. Come on. So, yeah, here's the thing. Here's one thing I really, so PC makers have actually stopped shipping all Multitouch displays. That used to be a big problem. So now you have choices. That's good. I I sometimes there's like a hair on the screen, you want to hit it and you don't want like, an application to go flying off the screen

 

Leo Laporte (01:41:50):

Or whatever.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:41:51):

<Laugh>, there's that. There's also just the

 

Leo Laporte (01:41:54):

Old hair and a screen problem of course,

 

Paul Thurrott (01:41:56):

With you just being, you know, whatever does dust, whatever.

 

Rich Campbell (01:42:00):

So is that a dead pixel or some snot <laugh>? I don't know. But something's

 

Paul Thurrott (01:42:04):

On the screen. I would like, I would like it to be a choice. I will say when I, years ago, like when I think about Apple and their platforms and what they're doing, and they force iOS and iPad developers to use Mac to create those apps, it would've been not one thing advantage to the Windows platform is if you are making touch apps on whatever platform, if you have a touch screen, you can interact with them very naturally as you create them in the emulator

 

Rich Campbell (01:42:28):

Yeah. Iphone apps. That was

 

Paul Thurrott (01:42:31):

The big, that's what I mean. Like, I, I feel like that should have been that would've benefited developers. So I feel like it should be an option. But the thing is, like Tim Cook has been very critical of Microsoft Surface products in particular. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. He's not, it's not as hypocritical as it sounds because he's not really doing the same thing as we're doing on Windows. Like the point of touch and on Windows was to make Surface, to make a tablet. It's a tablet. You can detach the keyboard and use it as a tablet. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. What the, what Apple is supposedly gonna do is just add touch to d to laptops, and that's a different animal. It's still a keyboard touchpad first product. Touch would be like the third you ui, you know, the third interaction type or whatever. So it's not really, it's not exactly the same thing. They still have a very distinct product in the iPad or, well, multiple iPad products. They still have a very distinct Mac. I think, like I said, I think you can make a case for developers and I guess they're, you know, you want to click Okay. Whatever. I mean, I, I guess <laugh> iPad,

 

Rich Campbell (01:43:36):

I definitely have a machine, like a Surface Pro set up Yeah. To be used as touch because, and it's set closer. It's at a different stand. Okay. But, but, but

 

Paul Thurrott (01:43:45):

I, but Apple's not doing that. Last time I,

 

Rich Campbell (01:43:47):

The only time I ever separated my surface book into two pieces is to annoy iPad people on a plane. Cuz you can disconnect it, turn it over the other way and stand it up tent style. That's right. To watch on a plane or hang it on the back of a seat. This

 

Paul Thurrott (01:43:59):

Is really neat. Yeah.

 

Rich Campbell (01:44:00):

Yeah. Oh yeah. And the iPad,

 

Paul Thurrott (01:44:01):

Although I I, that connection was the, it can be the source of reliability issues too. I mean Oh, sure. Some on the early ones especially, it would kind of ro kind of rotate out of the, you know, kind of misclick or whatever.

 

Rich Campbell (01:44:13):

Yeah. It didn't set Right. You've got a problem if you get a little red icon on the, on that you

 

Paul Thurrott (01:44:17):

Issue. No, here we go. <Laugh>, here we go. Exactly. obviously Apple has this catalyst technology that allows developers to bring iPhone and iPad apps to the Mac. And I suppose this will make those interactions more natural and easier because I, I suspect that the process for making those apps kind of keyboard and, and touchpad friendly maybe was not as easy as Apple kind of advertised. And if you just support touch, that becomes less of a problem and maybe more of those apps will come, the Mac becomes more valuable because you have more of those apps you can run. So, and

 

Rich Campbell (01:44:50):

Also as a way to get new versions out, right. Because oh, now we have to make them all touch savvy.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:44:54):

So Yeah. Yeah. So we'll see what happens there. But I, no, I don't, I don't actually, I, I'm not a hundred percent convinced that adding touch to Windows was like a genius stroke or whatever. I, I, it's, it's that right tool for the job thing. I mean, I use What

 

Rich Campbell (01:45:13):

Did you end up using most of the time, right? Like that's the reality

 

Paul Thurrott (01:45:16):

Is used. Well, certain things are good for certain things. Like I I, the iPad that I have, I use for reading every day. It's great for that. I, when I travel, I will occasionally watch a video on it. It's good for that. Yeah.

 

Rich Campbell (01:45:27):

And I never ever hold my Surface book screen in my hand. It scares me. It just feels fresh.

 

Leo Laporte (01:45:32):

That's interesting. Really, huh? Yeah.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:45:34):

Yeah. No, it's no good. Yeah. And I, I feel like a, like a laptop form factor, macro pc, whatever, I prefer Windows, but I is, is really good for that kind of work that I, that I do every day writing essentially, you know, using a keyboard. And then, you know, phone is good for what phone's Good. So I, to me, those are three distinct devices. They make sense. I know like cynically, you can be like, of course Apple wants extra devices that told they ever do, you know, they want you to buy an iPad in Mac and like, yeah. Yeah, they do. But maybe those devices are different enough that that does make sense. He says, knowing that probably millions of people are using iPads with keyboards and Touchpads right now. And I don't, you know, there's a weird, there is a weird crossover there, but

 

Rich Campbell (01:46:14):

Yeah.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:46:16):

Yeah.

 

Rich Campbell (01:46:17):

Okay.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:46:19):

What to think of

 

Leo Laporte (01:46:20):

It, cooler heads have prevailed

 

Paul Thurrott (01:46:23):

<Laugh>. That's cooler heads. I

 

Leo Laporte (01:46:24):

Didn't think I'd ever say that about Congress. You to Congress. Yeah. I know that seems a little odd, but I think the Army, because of this one guy just couldn't say no to Hulen.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:46:35):

I know <laugh>,

 

Leo Laporte (01:46:36):

And

 

Paul Thurrott (01:46:37):

This was a 1.75 trillion government funding. It

 

Leo Laporte (01:46:41):

Was a boondoggle. It was a, it was not gonna work. Soldiers didn't want it.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:46:46):

Yeah. So the US Congress has rejected the US Army's request to spend an additional $400 million to buy 6,900 new custom hauls headsets for Microsoft this year.

 

Leo Laporte (01:46:57):

I have to think there are some people in the Army going, oh, thank God.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:46:59):

Oh, we didn't talk about this. But the so back in the layoff bit, there was some language that was it. There was a Satche Adela email to employees that was leaked to GeekWire that, I'm just gonna read this part of it cuz it said, among the other things that were going on, they said Microsoft will be divesting in other areas, including taking a 1.2 billion charge in Q2 related to three different things. One of which was changes to our hardware portfolio. And I thought, man, is that, is that about Surface? Is something going on with Surface? I talked to Mary Jo about it, I talked to Richard about it, and actually it's related to HoloLens.

 

Leo Laporte (01:47:37):

Yeah, that makes sense. Very clearly, right? Yep.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:47:39):

Yep. We lost Richard.

 

Leo Laporte (01:47:42):

He's a tiny, tiny little Richard.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:47:44):

Tiny little Richard. Tiny little what to Richard. Oh, we lost to

 

Leo Laporte (01:47:47):

Richard. Well, it's just you now, Paul, you and me buddy.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:47:50):

<Laugh>. I knew it would come down to this eventually <laugh>. So anyhow I guess what's gonna happen now is that the Army's gonna go, has gone back to Microsoft and said, okay, let's, let's see if we can't do something about a better version of this. And we'll see what happens here. But I, I feel like this thing is kind of wound. Its chorus. You know, I don't, not that we're not gonna see Terminator headset, you know, something, something in the future, but I, I just, I just never felt right to me. I

 

Leo Laporte (01:48:18):

Wouldn't have wanted to go into battle

 

Paul Thurrott (01:48:21):

Wearing. No. You see the picture of the guy wearing the headset and you're like, you know, I've worn a hall of lens and I gotta tell you Yeah. I'm not jumping over fences and firing a rifle. I'm just walking into walls and stuff. And like, it's not very, you know, mission affecting physical impairments. I'm like, yeah, no, I can see that. Yeah. Like I've used in the all ends. Like I, yeah, that makes sense to me. So I just don't, this doesn't seem right.

 

Leo Laporte (01:48:43):

Yeah.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:48:44):

So I look, there's always gonna be room for some kind of a heads up display on some kind of a glasses.

 

Leo Laporte (01:48:50):

Yeah. I mean, soldiers use night vision goggles, but there's a specific u use purpose for

 

Paul Thurrott (01:48:55):

It. I think there's a, there's a gap. We need acro or there's a, a gulf between that and these things. Yeah. Which is this giant, you know, thing. Well,

 

Leo Laporte (01:49:04):

I think the intent was kind of like a heads up display in combat, which Yeah. That information's useful. That

 

Paul Thurrott (01:49:10):

Make sense? Yep.

 

Leo Laporte (01:49:11):

I don't know.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:49:13):

Even, look, even playing video games, like if you pretend you're playing Call of Duty, it's, it's fake war, right? Yeah. You hear gunfire and listen, if you're a, if you're an expert in the field, you may know that the, that sound that that thing made is this particular kind of bullet fired from this kind of machine. And it must be the enemy. And maybe if you're really good at it, but having something that says, Hey, that thing happening over there, that's the bad guys <laugh>. You know? Yeah. Like, that's absolutely useful. That will never fail us. It will always work great. But, you know, this giant headset, I mean, <laugh> like the guy, you know, it's like picking off the guy, sticking his head up from the ditch. The headset comes up like two seconds before the rest. It's like I think there's a guy over there. He is got a pumpkin on his head. You know, like, it's just, it just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. But, we'll, I don't know. We'll see.

 

Leo Laporte (01:50:05):

Fast

 

Rich Campbell (01:50:06):

That sense to me. I I do feel like HoloLens got derailed by the US Army

 

Paul Thurrott (01:50:11):

That I do. So, you know. Yeah. Yeah. That

 

Rich Campbell (01:50:14):

It was, these contracts were so big. I think it was tied into Yep. We're doing some of this, this other ones that they, it just, it distracted Alex Kipman who's, you know, no, no longer involved. I

 

Paul Thurrott (01:50:24):

Completely agree. And, but to be fair to Microsoft, the trick with HoloLens was always like, this thing made sense in very specific vertical markets. None of which were gonna be the next, you know, huge business for Microsoft. And then the US Army comes calling and they're like, oh my God, here is the biggest vertical market of all, obviously. Right. We're gonna pour all our resources. It it, it was the right thing from Microsoft to do. I guess what I'm, I I think the way I look at it is like, I, this was not gonna work. Like, it's just

 

Rich Campbell (01:50:54):

No. And, and it use your research dollars to innovate and hopefully be able to roll that back into, you know, the product. Like if I'm Trimble, the guys who did the hard hat version of the, of the HoloLens and, and was pushing on this should be on every construction site. I'm pretty upset with Microsoft right now because there hasn't been a new headset.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:51:13):

They're not investing in that at all. Yeah. Yep.

 

Rich Campbell (01:51:15):

Well, and who knows who they are, but like, apparently HoloLens, I suspect if I'm Trimble, I saw the HoloLens three, cuz it was very close to completion and then it went away.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:51:24):

Yeah. Yeah.

 

Leo Laporte (01:51:25):

Trimble was one of the demo things they did with the early

 

Paul Thurrott (01:51:31):

Hololens mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, the original HoloLens two disappeared and they did do a HoloLens two, the original HoloLens three disappeared. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And they may still do one. Right. Yeah. And, and the internal take on this was, it just wasn't a big enough leap, I guess. Yeah. I I will say, I mean, two over one actually is a, is a big leap. It's a, it is a big leap.

 

Rich Campbell (01:51:50):

Yeah. Substantial

 

Paul Thurrott (01:51:51):

For a long time.

 

Rich Campbell (01:51:53):

I mean, it's just, well, we've had two tos now. Like the hardware has advanced enough now that we should be able to have a large feel of view, a longer battery life and lighter, smaller

 

Paul Thurrott (01:52:03):

Device, you know mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, all that stuff. Yep. And we just don't have it. And yeah. Anyway. I agree. I a hundred percent they were definitely distracted by this army thing. Understood.

 

Rich Campbell (01:52:14):

My concern right now is I can't tell you who's leading the project and that to me, you know, if there's not somebody at the CVP level who, this is one of the things they're hanging on, it's, it's got a tough time getting anywhere.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:52:26):

Yeah. For sure.

 

Leo Laporte (01:52:29):

I wanna take a little break. We'll come back. We've got Xbox news tips. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> tricks, apps and whiskey

 

Paul Thurrott (01:52:37):

<Laugh> all, all news. For some reason. That makes a lot of sense to me. It

 

Leo Laporte (01:52:41):

Does it all, it all goes together in some interesting way. Our show today brought to you by Tanium, we used to call Tanium talk about Tanium as the the emerging disruptors in the in the security area. I don't think they're emerging anymore, but they're definitely have disrupted. Titanium's approach is so different. The industry's approach to cybersecurity is Tanium says fundamentally flawed. Tanium does it different the way it has been. IT management and security point tools offer a small piece of the solution you need to protect your environment. Many of them promise they can stop all breaches. They can't. And a lot of the problem comes because you're trying to figure this out with bad data or old data trying to defend your critical assets from cyber attacks with tools that don't work together, that don't talk to each other. This is, this is no way for IT teams to navigate today's very challenging attack surface.

 

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Paul Thurrott (01:56:15):

It's more of a Activision blizzard segment these days, isn't it?

 

Leo Laporte (01:56:18):

Yes, it is, isn't it? <Laugh>? What's up?

 

Paul Thurrott (01:56:22):

Well, we found someone other than Sony to complain about Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition, and those two companies are Google and Nvidia <laugh> two comp two other competitors. Although Google has left cloud gaming, which is kind of interesting. And Nvidia, of course has their GForce now service, which is supposed to be really good these days. So yeah, they don't want it to happen. So yeah, that's it. I don't think they have much more to say about that stupid companies

 

Leo Laporte (01:56:53):

<Laugh>,

 

Rich Campbell (01:56:54):

But this still all seems like posturing, right? I mean, NVIDIA's thing was all of the we want equal and open access to games. Like if you're gonna point at someone for that pointed Sony.

 

Paul Thurrott (01:57:04):

Exactly. Are you hitting? Exactly. Yeah. A couple of shows ago I had like that chart that kind of showed like how many ex platform exclusives there were, and Sony was like most of it. And then Nintendo and Microsoft were almost none of it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing, the gaming business, like I, we don't want other people to do what we are doing. Could someone put a stop to this <laugh>? It's just like this crazy kind of outrage. 

 

Rich Campbell (01:57:29):

You're gonna put Microsoft in third place in gaming. Oh

 

Paul Thurrott (01:57:32):

My God. Yeah. Although it was sat described in fourth place <laugh>. It's like, like what? You know, I mean, come on. You know? Yeah. I, it's crazy. Anyway, actually, the other thing, you know, Richard and I talked about offline which is this notion that speaking of posturing, there's also what I would call regulatory po posturing occurring here, which is mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you know regulators in the eu, which is the second story are expected to file complaints about this acquisition, a warning, I guess statement of objections the ftc et cetera. I, you know, these organizations kind of have to justify their existence, right? They can't just, they can't just green light everything that happens anymore. We're, we're standing up to big tech here, you know? But as we've said so many times the concessions that Microsoft can make to satisfy all concerns are obvious and are have already been put on the table.

 

(01:58:28):

I I, I think everyone's gonna get what they want, unless of course what you want is, I just don't want Microsoft to have this company, you know? Yeah. there's a guy in my comments section who argues against this repeatedly. He keeps saying, I just, just don't want Microsoft to have even more dominance in the you know, video game industry. It's like they <laugh> don't have any, what are you talking about? They're in third place or fourth place. I don't, I don't where fourth place I'm from, but but at least third, I would call it third place.

 

Rich Campbell (01:58:55):

But you can't have these organizations looking like they're rubber standing trillion dollar companies. Like Right. You have to, you, I, I remember do working with Acquisi, being on the side of selling something to a government entity, where literally the acquisition offices says, now you have to give something to me. I'm not saying a bribe. I'm saying, yep. I need to be able to say to my boss, no, no, we

 

Paul Thurrott (01:59:14):

Can't. We literally can't call it a bribe, but you are gonna give me something. And when it's done, you will have the thing that you want. Yeah. Yeah. 

 

Rich Campbell (01:59:21):

There has to be a concession of some kind, whatever

 

Paul Thurrott (01:59:23):

It means. Yeah. I don't know if you guys read Foss Patents which I think is a great website, so Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. They've done a great job of covering this stuff. And he Florian Mueller has talked a lot written about other regulators from around the world. So he, he has some interesting that he, he really goes through in great detail all of these rulings and, and, you know, kind of makes what, what are the points they're trying to make? There have been some kind of lesser regulators, so to speak, like, you know, Brazil and Chile and the uk, which is not really lesser, but who have just come out in support of this, right. The UK has not, I'm sorry, but the Brazil and, and Chile have, and it's interesting because a lot of what this involves is basically a kind of a public survey.

 

(02:00:07):

Like what, what do the people think of this? You know? And there's been some interesting data that has come out of this. The <laugh>, I think it was the uk, which actually will probably issue some form of will try to block this in some way. 75% of Reon respondents to one of their surveys supported this acquisition. Nice. And that included twice as many PlayStation users as it did Xbox users, <laugh>. There was also I, the f and e I must be, I think it's Chilean yeah. The Chilean regulatory body basically basically wrote a report on what the FTC complaint was about, and said this in no way dissuades or discourages us from reaching our own conclusion, which is unconditional clearance <laugh>. Like, they were just like, their complaint is nonsense. I, I I thought that was classic. Well,

 

Rich Campbell (02:00:59):

And everybody takes their cues from the Chileans.

 

Paul Thurrott (02:01:02):

Well, that, that's the the thing, but the, but Right. Of course they don't. But I think, was it, I dunno if it was Brazil or, or Chile, but one of the, you knows similar surveys, 61% of gamers said that they would simply, if, if, if Call of Duty disappeared from the PlayStation, they would stick with PlayStation and just play other games. <Laugh>. Right. Only 20% of them say they would cause them to switch consoles.

 

Rich Campbell (02:01:27):

Yeah. There are other first person shooter, world War II semi unrealistic games out there where you still run at 30 miles an hour <laugh> and can jump long

 

Paul Thurrott (02:01:36):

Distance. All right. So I'm gonna take great exception to that cuz No, there are not, not <laugh> and there's only one No <laugh>. I mean, technically I think there are, but I am not aware of them because there's only one game that why would anyone ever wanna play Logical PlayStation either, right. So who cares? It works fine on next Xbox.

 

Rich Campbell (02:01:52):

We're all PC master race anyway, if we have any sense. There you go.

 

Paul Thurrott (02:01:55):

Which is probably the best way to play. I

 

Rich Campbell (02:01:57):

Like the idea of making a play to the regulators say, why don't you put in a regulatory rule about, about game restrictions that they can only be restricted for 18 months or something like that. But let's make so Sony cringe and say maybe this deal's okay

 

Paul Thurrott (02:02:10):

As it is. Right. You know? Yeah. It's like, Sony, we're really glad you brought up this issue of exclusivity. Right. We actually agree with you a hundred percent and we've, we therefore decree that you will have to bring all of your games to Xbox. Hey, well thank you for bringing that up, <laugh>, really appreciate it. Whatever this Yeah. Stupid. and then this is just semi-related, but I, I think this is kind of nice. So Google, as everyone knows, cancel Stadia. I believe today is the day, I think today is the day it disappears. But one of their last acts was to enable a an update for the Stadia controller that turns it into a normal Bluetooth controller. So you can use it elsewhere, you can use PC on other platforms, whatever. And that's, that's nice. I mean, honestly, the Stadia controller's pretty good, by the way. Everyone who bought one got it for free. They give you your money back and now you have a nice Bluetooth controller you can use anywhere you want. Actually, I'm mobile as well, so. Nice. Yeah, that was the right thing to do. I like to see that. Good

 

Leo Laporte (02:03:04):

Job, Google. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good job. Yeah. Before we go on, I just wanna mention there's about a week and a half left to take our survey. We do like you to do that if you can, just so we get to know you better. It helps us sell advertising on the show and helps us decide what shows to do. If you would just go to twit tv slash survey 23 should only take you a few minutes, completely optional any question you don't like, ignore. But it really is helpful for us. And we, we thank all the people who've done it. It's been great. But we're gonna wrap it up at the end of the month. So get on over to twit tv slash survey 23, A little public service announcement from your friends at twit. All right, nice. And now the back of the book, starting with a tip from Paul Thurrott.

 

Paul Thurrott (02:03:56):

Yeah, I think last week we talked about this new offering. I just new-ish offering from Microsoft Microsoft 365 basic right? Which is this way to, you don't get the office apps right, but you get a hundred gigabytes of OneDrive storage. You actually get ad ad free inbox, like on outlook.com. So it's, you know, a little, little different from the, the previous OneDrive extra storage option. And okay, that's fine. Whatever. They rebranded this thing, they added a feature. Cool. somebody posted this picture and I went and looked at it and there is a way to buy more OneDrive storage. Now, as it turns out, this is not actually brand new. And I, I, to me it was brand new. And the weird thing is, I just wrote about this in the Windows 11 field guide, and I actually alluded to this in the book, so I actually knew this wasn't new at the time, but I, I just kind of zoned on it.

 

(02:04:48):

But here's how this works. Sorry, I should say in the past, before this Microsoft 365 basic subscription existed, the only way you could add OneDrive storage to your Microsoft account was to buy that 100 gig tier, which was 1 99 a month. That was it. That was the only option. They, you couldn't stack 'em, you couldn't add more, you couldn't buy a terabyte, whatever. If you wanted more storage, you had to buy Microsoft 365 family or personal, right? And in both cases, you get one terabyte of storage per user. Obviously if you're an individual and you wanna buy family, you get six terabyte accounts, you could, you know, there's different ways to tie those things together. You could use one for, you know, videos or one for mo, you know, however you want to do it. You can do that if you want. But as it turns out, once you do that, you can in fact, in fact buy additional storage.

 

(02:05:36):

You can't just keep stacking them. You can't go and go and go, but you can f once you have any version of Microsoft 365, a paid version, consumer version, you can buy 200 gigabytes, 400 gigabytes, 600 gigabytes, 800 gigabytes, or one terabyte of additional storage. So up to you can have up to two terabytes of storage in total per account. Hmm. pricing is okay, you know, it's 200 gigabytes is a dollar 99 a month. It goes up by two do, or yeah, $2 for each one. So by the time you get to a terabyte, it's 9 99 a month. There's no way to pay in a year. So you can't save money. So that one terabyte is gonna cost you 120 bucks. That's not fantastic. I, I, I don't know this, but I feel like off the top of my head, I think Google, if you have like a Gmail account, you wanna buy like two terabytes.

 

(02:06:23):

I think that's probably 120 bucks a year. I think it's, it's probably a better deal. But, but if you're in the Microsoft space and you thought you were stuck at one terabyte, there is this way you can go above that. So it's available. At least it's better than nothing. I kind of wish these things were just available, a standalone offerings, you know, if you didn't want Microsoft 365 but had a Microsoft account, but I believe they're not, I think you have to have a, a Microsoft account first and to check on that just go to the OneDrive site on the web and they'll be like a managed storage button somewhere down on the bottom left. And then you can, you'll see the plans and upgrades in there. So if you have, I have, do I have a way to do this? I don't have a way to do this right now, but I bet if you don't pay for Microsoft 365 that either isn't there or it just, you know, says there is nothing.

 

(02:07:10):

But if you do pay for Microsoft 365, you'll see the five additional storage options. So that's pretty cool. Was in also Semi Listener that sent you that or you just discovered it? This, someone sent me a picture of it on Twitter. Yeah. And then I was like, oh, good. They finally added extra storage jobs. I didn't realize. But then what, then I realized written, actually this is not yet. Yeah. Not only is it not new, I knew about it cuz I actually alluded to it in the book book. It's Your Can Be Forgiven For Not Remembering that I've wrote about this like three months ago. It's embarrassing. Like I know <laugh>, my brain overfloweth. Yes. I haven't talked about this in a while, but one of the things I am gonna be adding to the book is sections in relevant chapters to kind of work arounds, right?

 

(02:07:52):

So for example if you are confounded by the limitations of the Windows 11 start menu or task bar or desktop you might consider something like start 11. So I'm gonna start adding those things to the book. One of the things I'm the thing I'm most eager to add to the book, however, is this thing called Ms. Edge Redirect. And this is a project on GitHub where you run an XC and it prevents Windows 10 or 11 from using Edge when you specify a different browser as your default browser. So for example, you click on a story in the widgets board, you click on a search result in search, highlight searches and search or any of the, any of the other times where the OS says, yeah, we don't really care what you chose, we're gonna load Edge. It redirects it and uses your browser.

 

(02:08:36):

So I've been trying that on a couple different computers. It works great. I don't actually click on these things a lot, honestly, I don't use widgets and I don't use search. But I've been testing it because I want to write about it and it's free obviously. So I guess the best thing to do, just Google Ms. Edge redirect is the name of this. So it's something that's probably gonna have to be updated a lot over time because Microsoft has, in the past at least, I don't know recently, but back when Windows 11 was new, about 15 months ago, was actively working to thwart these kind of workarounds, <laugh> we talked a lot about it, I remember. Yeah, we sure did. The other app the other set of apps I wanted to mention, and this may surprise some people <laugh> is cuz I actually think they're pretty good, is Apple has finally belatedly started to replace iTunes on Windows with three new apps apple tv, which is for videos, obviously Apple Music and Apple devices and Apple devices is that you know, manage your iPod or your iPhone kind of thing, or you, you wanna use your computer to transfer data back and forth.

 

(02:09:33):

It's that thing that was built into iTunes that you kind of had to have iTunes. I don't, I use Apple TV plus I don't use Apple Music and I don't, I would never connect my phone to my computer for this kind of thing. But I did as part of a, my most recent examination of Windows 11 on arm on a, I think it was a, yeah, Lenovo think pad X 11 s, something like that, X 13 s look at iTunes, which is a steaming pile of garbage. And in fact, it was so bad, I put it on a really fast computer, just Intel computer, just to see. And it's horrible. It's like iTunes today. Itunes 10 years ago is, is and was one of the worst written applic applications of all day. Oh, it was horrible. Terrible. Yeah, these apps are wasn't even so great on the Mac, to be honest with you. <Laugh>

 

(02:10:19):

Okay. I thought I'm not as familiar with, but iTunes was a piece of garbage. Apple tv, apple Music and Apple devices are in preview for the Windows on Windows 11 only, I believe. I don't think they're going to Windows 10, which is a little questionable, but at least they're on preview now. You need the exact u URLs to get them. You can't just search 'em in the store yet. But if when you find them, install them, if you use any of those apps, so the services give it, honestly, they're really nice. The only weird thing about them, let me bring up, I think I did it on this. Yeah. The only weird thing about it was I have a big music library that I sync. I don't use Apple Music, but I, I do use iTunes match. So I have my CD ripped libraries up in the cloud or whatever, and I <laugh> the first time I use this, you know, I, I went, I brought up my library.

 

(02:11:04):

You bring up an album, like, okay, click the song and play and it says, oh, you have to authorize this computer before you can, you know, play here. I'm like, yeah, okay, obviously, of course. So you click okay, and then the authorization box goes away and there's no way to authorize Wait a what? So you kind of click around like, where is this thing? Like where is I? Just so you know, it's not in settings, <laugh>, it's, you can't find it that way. In the bottom left of the UI is your profile name and author. In my case, when you click on that, it will say, authorized machine and you, there is no indication in the UI where you have to find this thing. Yes. So it's, I know, but honest, but okay. That aside these apps they probably look a lot like they do on the Mac, honestly, but they support light dark mode. They, they're very they look like Windows apps, like, like modern Windows apps, you know, like a uwp or a windows app, SDK app. Like, they look nice. Like they're nice. There's

 

Leo Laporte (02:11:55):

No reason not to just hire somebody who writes Windows software. How

 

Paul Thurrott (02:11:59):

Hard is that? They probably, they probably did exactly that, honestly. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But I guess the point is, like I I, I would pre, based on my previous experience with Apple Apps and Windows, I would be predisposed to think this would be terrible. And honestly, these are, they're, I don't know what took so long, but

 

Leo Laporte (02:12:13):

The, the remnants of Steve Jobs are slowly walking into the fading away. Yeah. The real question is, where does podcasts show up?

 

Paul Thurrott (02:12:23):

They don't to my knowledge, I don't believe there is a way on Windows to access Apple

 

Leo Laporte (02:12:29):

Apple Podcasts. There's plenty of ways to do

 

Paul Thurrott (02:12:30):

It in Windows. Is there an Apple podcast clients on Mac? Yeah, there is. Okay.

 

Leo Laporte (02:12:35):

But who

 

Paul Thurrott (02:12:36):

Cares? Yeah. So if you're an I, right? If you're an iPhone, nobody

 

Leo Laporte (02:12:38):

Listens to podcasts. Goodness. Nobody <laugh>. Well,

 

Paul Thurrott (02:12:42):

Yes. I don't believe,

 

Leo Laporte (02:12:44):

Fortunately we do networks, so we're

 

Paul Thurrott (02:12:46):

All right. There you go. For the people you love,

 

Leo Laporte (02:12:48):

People from people you loves for podcasts, you love from people you trust. There it is. Lisa says, she says, I, because we, for a long time, I foolishly ke Quixotically said, we are, we're a net cast. We're not a podcast. Right. Couldn't convince anybody. And a couple of years ago I was at a podcast expo, I finally got convinced, all right, we're to change it all to podcasts now Lisa says, I wish you'd kept it net cast cuz it's a lot harder to sell podcasts these days. <Laugh> fact. If we could say, oh, we're not a podcast. We're a net cast. Oh,

 

Paul Thurrott (02:13:21):

Net cast different. Wasn't there a, what was that Netscape Communicator feature that was about, wasn't there a net casting thing or

 

Leo Laporte (02:13:27):

Wasn't there a feature that Oh, maybe I don't remember that. Maybe. Oh, you're thinking of that program that would Yeah,

 

Paul Thurrott (02:13:35):

The woman who left Escape and started the thing and it was something cast. What was the, what was that called? Do you

 

Leo Laporte (02:13:39):

Remember? Oh god, it was awful. I remember everybody would come into work at the site back in the mid nineties and turn on point cast. It

 

Paul Thurrott (02:13:46):

Was a big deal for both of minutes.

 

Leo Laporte (02:13:47):

Yeah. They'd cast point cast, they'd turn on their machine and there'd be no internet access for about 45 minutes while it, every machine downloaded the latest news. Cuz it wasn't, it was Pull and <laugh>, it was terrible. I'm not sure if that, is that not what you're thinking? It might not be.

 

Paul Thurrott (02:14:03):

That's, I don't think it's something, but it's something like this.

 

Leo Laporte (02:14:06):

There was pointcast, I remember it

 

Paul Thurrott (02:14:07):

Was a person left that company. It was a woman though who ran it?

 

Leo Laporte (02:14:12):

I don't know. Boy interweb.

 

Paul Thurrott (02:14:16):

No, but

 

Leo Laporte (02:14:16):

We're just, you're just making up

 

Paul Thurrott (02:14:18):

Words. It'll come to me when I'm, I'm taking a shower, walking I'll,

 

Leo Laporte (02:14:21):

You know, Hey, I saw a recent study, I think it's wrong, that says, the reason you have brilliant thoughts while you shower is because you're doing something so trivial that your mind can wander. So you kind of go on automatic. I don't think that's true because I do trivial things all the time. Like wash the dishes, make the bed, and I don't get great thoughts. You never say, oh, I got a great making the bed thought. But I think it's the combination. There's

 

Paul Thurrott (02:14:46):

Something to

 

Leo Laporte (02:14:46):

This. Oh yeah, I don't think

 

Paul Thurrott (02:14:47):

You's wrong. This is why, actually why I play video games. So during the day I'll play like a 10 minute badge. Yeah. And as, so I kept my mind off the thing I'm writing and I'm focusing on not really focusing, but I'm mindlessly playing this. And then it's like, oh, that's the, I have a what I was looking for the, you know,

 

Leo Laporte (02:15:01):

A completely unscientific theory, which is Yes, it's that mm-hmm. <Affirmative> plus the steam dilates the capillaries and more blood's getting in your brain. Same reason you do it when you walk or you, you know, when you're walking you do better things. So

 

Paul Thurrott (02:15:13):

There is a stimulation in other

 

Leo Laporte (02:15:14):

Words. Yeah, it's too, it's too,

 

Paul Thurrott (02:15:16):

There's definitely something to walking outside that is absolutely. Just

 

Leo Laporte (02:15:20):

Because you're zoning out. Your mind is getting to think, but you're also getting some blood going.

 

Paul Thurrott (02:15:24):

You know how, you know when you're in the zone is when you're walking and maybe you're listening to like an audiobook or something and you like, no, you're like, just turn this thing off. Like, I, I have to think I need to. Yeah. Like, yeah, I just wanted think focus. I think this is something we're losing as a Oh

 

Leo Laporte (02:15:36):

God. Yeah. Generation. We're constant quietly. It's weird. We're constantly stimulated. Constant. I think there's also a frame of referencing, you know, how you think, oh, I need to go get that thing. Then you walk into the room Yeah. And now you can't remember context. Yes. When, yeah.

 

Paul Thurrott (02:15:48):

These room, those things are absolutely related and are in many ways like the opposite. But it's probably the same. The same, it's the same mechanism trigger or something. Yeah. The same mechanism. Yeah. Change

 

Leo Laporte (02:15:59):

The frame of reference. Basically. We have no idea how the brain works. No. And we're, we're just making things up,

 

Paul Thurrott (02:16:04):

But we will opine on it endlessly

 

Leo Laporte (02:16:06):

<Laugh>. It is gonna be good to have some enterprise picks of the week. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and I believe Mr. Richard Campbell's going to do the honors. 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.

 

(02:16:59):

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(02:17:58):

He said quote, we would not be where we are today without the Twit network. I think the proof is in the pudding. 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 are other hosts will chime in on the ad saying, yeah, I love that.

 

(02:18:53):

Or just the other day, <laugh>, one of our hosts said, man, I really gotta buy that <laugh>. 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 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.

 

(02:19:46):

We give you bonus ads and social media promotion too. So if you want to be a long-term partner, introduce your product to a savvy engaged tech audience. Visit twit.tv/advertise. Check out those testimonials. Mark McCreary, who's the c o of authentic, you probably know 'em, one of the biggest original podcast advertising companies. We've been with him for 16 years. Mark said the feedback from 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.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.

 

Rich Campbell (02:21:17):

This week's run as radio I did with April Edwards where we talked a lot about sort of the state of the DevOps practices in organizations. And so as your DevOps came up as part of that conversation and I thought it's a, it's a great enterprise product. It's usable for a lot of things. It's actually the, the cloudification version of Team Foundation server, but greatly expanded into more of the sort of classic set of agile practices. Having pinboard

 

Leo Laporte (02:21:44):

What it is, dev ops, you hear this term all the time. What does that I

 

Rich Campbell (02:21:49):

We, back in the old days, we used to call 'em high functioning teams. Oh, you know, where

 

Leo Laporte (02:21:54):

You high functioning like,

 

Rich Campbell (02:21:55):

Like a

 

Leo Laporte (02:21:56):

High functioning alcoholic. What do you <laugh>?

 

Rich Campbell (02:21:59):

Yeah, I I would know anything about that. Paul, I don't know what

 

Leo Laporte (02:22:01):

You're talking about <laugh>.

 

Rich Campbell (02:22:03):

The, but it was sort the reality of are we're all pulling in the same direction. You know, that, that yeah. You are often in any of these silos in organizations where the developers are, are high hurling code over the wall for the, for the ops guys to deploy and so forth. And the, the, this is just humble and a bunch of other great folks that, that started this DevOps movement where they said, Hey, let's all, all work work closely together. Because actually our goal is to provide customer value. And as long as we can focus on the overall customer value all of that gets better.

 

Leo Laporte (02:22:35):

I always got the sensation that was also had something to do with automation.

 

Rich Campbell (02:22:40):

Well, you

 

Leo Laporte (02:22:41):

Like, you write, write code, you, I don't know. That's what I'm asking. So

 

Rich Campbell (02:22:47):

I don't know. And so, and this is where the tooling piece comes into it, right? So there's sort of this idea of, you know, culture and process and then ultimately tooling. So that yeah, that's the fact that we will have get together and have these meetings and talk about overall value and how we contribute. Yeah. And, and Azure DevOps is ultimately a set of tools for facilitating that. And the big one from the develop perspective is this the C I C D pipeline, this idea that when I check in code, an automated process kicks off that now runs all the tests and does the build and pushes it into a position where it can be taken over by QA or even as far as rolled into production.

 

Leo Laporte (02:23:23):

So C I C D is related in a way and,

 

Rich Campbell (02:23:27):

And continuous integration, continuous delivery is a portion of that. Okay. The, the Azure DevOps suite. Right. But I've also seen the tooling in Azure. Devops used for just project management. Yeah. For just, here are a set of tasks, here are the different people working on me, here are our current blockers. Like that all of that mechanism works the same. So, and, and I bring it up more than anything because often organizations own it already. It's part of a package they've bought, whether through their volume license agreement or through their Azure agreements. They're just not using it. They don't know they have it. They're like, oh, well that's for people making SASS offers. Like, well SASS folks definitely use it, but so do many others. So I mean, it's a powerful set of tools one way or the other. It's often driven by existing organizations who moved off the on-prem source control systems and and C I C D pipelines.

 

(02:24:19):

They're custom-built ones to go use the cloud cuz it's cheaper and somewhat easier to use. A little more reliable. And it has all the pieces in place. You're no longer fighting setting stuff up and configuring it and, and, and all of those issues. Not that any of it's easy to set up. Like all of these things take effort and there are many different sets of solutions here. What what's appealing about Azure DevOps and the enterprise level is that you already own it. It's all of the pieces. So you're doing a lot less role your own and it's easier to hire people that already understand those bits and can pull the pieces together and, and can get people involved. The biggest thing that I think April and I talked about over the course of 40 minutes or so was making sure everyone's involved there. There's a place for business stakeholders, certainly a place for security in this. Like everyone has a contribution to make to that customer value that's important. And so the making sure the in tooling is inclusive of will makes you all the more successful with

 

Leo Laporte (02:25:13):

It. I'm a big one for tooling. That's why I use emax. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But that's a story for another day. It's also why I wanna know more about Whiskey <laugh>. Oh man. Yes. Could you

 

Paul Thurrott (02:25:25):

Describe emax as an ide?

 

Leo Laporte (02:25:27):

<Laugh>? No. It has ide like components. If you're using a language like the language of my choice lisp emax is, is the only way really to do it right? Because you've, it's just so integrated. Beautiful. I

 

Paul Thurrott (02:25:39):

Just wanted to see where, where you were on the I spectrum.

 

Leo Laporte (02:25:42):

It's not an i, it, well, well I have auto completion, so that's one. Yeah. I can hover over you know, a, a function and see the other function. You know, there's lots of hover over capabilities. So there's, it's, it's very similar. You have project based capabilities, so you can open a project. You, you, you have if you stay on a, a, a, a keyword word, it will give you a definition of the keyword if you've set up your EMAX to do that. Yeah. And there's, you know, things like that. So it's, but the mo mostly it's that you have two frames of new

 

Paul Thurrott (02:26:16):

Computer and you had emax. Is there a way to automate the bringing in of everything?

 

Leo Laporte (02:26:19):

Yeah, I have my emax, so all my EAX dot files are stored on GitHub. So I just clone that repository and my EMAX is set up. It's very quick to set up. And then because I

 

Paul Thurrott (02:26:30):

Like that you use GitHub as OneDrive that's good.

 

Leo Laporte (02:26:33):

<Laugh> <laugh>. Well, it's good because I can commit from different machines if I update it and stuff. So it's very, it's kind of similar to having a code base.

 

Rich Campbell (02:26:40):

I like having all that automation around there. Cause that ain't the comments, I can say this machine configured by a tool.

 

Leo Laporte (02:26:44):

Yeah, yeah. And I'm the tool I get. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. and

 

Rich Campbell (02:26:50):

Then I wasn't talking about Yuli. That's what it says. My machine

 

Leo Laporte (02:26:53):

About me, because LIS development is very interactive. Cause you have a rep going all the time. And Yeah. Lisp is unique. And this is the best thing about it in the you if, if you have a bug in your coat, it drops into debugger. You can modify the code while it's still running and then finish the execution. Or you can, you know, you can, you can develop in this interactive way. That is remarkable. It's really great.

 

Rich Campbell (02:27:15):

Yeah. Very powerful. And it, it's certainly something they do in.net for exactly that same reason.

 

Leo Laporte (02:27:19):

Yeah. Yeah. I mean a lot of people have, you know, LIS it's interesting because as much as it's mocked has influenced most modern languages. Oh, without

 

Rich Campbell (02:27:26):

A doubt. To one. I wasn't list tagline. It was hard to write, so it should be hard to read

 

Leo Laporte (02:27:30):

<Laugh>. I think you're thinking Pearl, but, okay. <Laugh>. <laugh>. That's pretty good. I think actually list code is very clear because it doesn't

 

Rich Campbell (02:27:40):

Go right. Lists list tagline was, some brackets are good, so more brackets

 

Leo Laporte (02:27:45):

Are better. Yeah. But they're all the same bracket. You don't have curly brace bracket square ones. No square ones. There's no semi-colons. It's pretty, it's a little simpler in that regard. I, and, and, and EMAX does very well with having the two frames open in your ripple in one frame and the other. And it's very, it's an, I like it. It's just, I, I'm used to it, but it's, what it reminds me of is how important tooling is. You know, choosing a language is one thing, but honestly you've gotta think about the tooling available. Because that makes a huge difference. It really does. Let's talk, I'm excited about this one, although it looks like Glen Levitt's page for this is 4 0 4.

 

Rich Campbell (02:28:22):

Yeah, it's a little broken right now, which is unfortunate. But I, and I picked Glen Levitt naura because it fits in my repertoire of different classes of whiskey that I keep around for different sorts of folks. So it's a very

 

Leo Laporte (02:28:36):

Interesting look how light and pa pale it is. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. It's very interesting. And,

 

Rich Campbell (02:28:40):

And its typically, I will pour this for someone who likes whiskey. That's not a good picture of that, by the way. No, well it's all I got. It is actually a very pale whiskey. It's pale. Yeah. But let me tell you the story behind this cuz it goes back a fair ways. It actually goes back to the Shackleton expedition of 1906.

 

Leo Laporte (02:28:58):

What? Oh geez. What?

 

Rich Campbell (02:29:01):

So when Shackleton did his ex, his explorations of Antarctica, which did not go particularly well they, a bunch of the things that he left behind, there was a bunch of stuff he left behind. And in 2006, fast forward a hundred years a group of explorers were inspecting the, the shack that was still there, been there for a hundred years. And they were concerned because there was more ice melt and so forth that was gonna damage it. So they were actually underneath it trying to put in dams to protect the structure, to keep it healthy. And while they were under there, they found a case of whiskey. They'd been under there for a hundred years. Wow.

 

Leo Laporte (02:29:39):

And it was this

 

Rich Campbell (02:29:41):

And no, it was not, remember I'm telling a story here, so Oh, okay. <Laugh>. It's gonna be lengthy. Okay. and so th this whiskey was actually a white McKay whiskey that was made specifically for Shackleton at the time. It had a higher alcohol level cuz he was concerned it was going to freeze, which it did anyway. But that's a separate problem. And it was a full case. It was a dozen bottles, although a couple of 'em were damaged, a few of them were not. And so there was an auction and the white and McKay folks got those bottles and they pulled some of the whiskey out of it and then recreated it in an addition called Shackleton, oddly enough for $250 a bottle.

 

Leo Laporte (02:30:20):

How interesting.

 

Rich Campbell (02:30:22):

Yeah. It was a great marketing story. Yeah.

 

Leo Laporte (02:30:25):

Cuz it really isn't the same,

 

Rich Campbell (02:30:27):

Obviously. No, it it, and, but the funny part is Glen Levitt's, like the oldest distiller going, so when you actually look at what the makeup of the Shackleton whiskey was, what it was was an old school whiskey, the way whiskey used to be made, which was very normal to be blended. It typically wasn't colored with Cara. It didn't get colored with caramel, which is why it was lighter colored. It was typically aged in oak barrels is before international trade made it easy to buy barrels from lots of different locations. So it tended to be paler and color and it also wasn't chill filtered. Ah, now chill filtration became very hip in the seventies when they were trying to make whiskey popular because old school whiskeys when you put ice in them, go cloudy. And that was considered an inferior product. And so chill filtration was an approach where you sh rapidly chill down the undiluted dist distillate that's come out of the barrels and certain particulates freeze and fall to the bottom of

 

Leo Laporte (02:31:25):

The cask, the things that make it cloudy,

 

Rich Campbell (02:31:27):

The things that make it cloudy. And now it's clear. And so what Livet did when they saw the hit that was shacklet is said, you guys just want an old school whiskey. Geez, we've only been doing that for 200 years. Let's see, let's make one again. What Nura is, is a, a Glen Livet without any color treatment and without any chill filtration and it tastes different. So it's one of the reasons I keep it around for folks, it's also

 

Leo Laporte (02:31:53):

Cast strength. Right.

 

Rich Campbell (02:31:55):

They, no it's not because cast strength is too variable. Right. They want to people like, like what Livet figured out why they became one of the most successful whiskey makers very early on was how to make consistent whiskey. How do you make the, the, the extraordinary thing about a Mc Macallan 12 is that it tastes like Macallan 12 Yeah. Every year

 

Leo Laporte (02:32:13):

So good too.

 

Rich Campbell (02:32:14):

Like how do you do that? Yeah. And it, and it's incredibly complicated. It's about a lot of different barrels go into making a given addition blend of Macallan 12.

 

Leo Laporte (02:32:23):

Yeah. That's actually what here in Napa County or next door in Napa County, that's what they do to get a consistent wine is you, you know, you have to taste it and blend it and till you get it consistent, if you're making it from the same grape, it's gonna change year to year every year. Sure.

 

Rich Campbell (02:32:37):

Yeah. It's just the nature of growing. Right. That's what natural things look like. So what I enjoy about Naura for people who like whiskey and are just getting into it in a big way, is I've taken away all of the common things. It doesn't have that robust color you equate with quality. Hmm. It doesn't, it it is not particularly long aged. And it has that lack of chill filtration introduces a bunch of flavors that were always there. They're just typically removed that you, we you, it's oilier. It's got more texture to it and so not so it's more the po for someone who doesn't know anything about whiskey, it's

 

Leo Laporte (02:33:11):

A more authentic, huh. You think kind of more

 

Rich Campbell (02:33:13):

Of a, well one would argue old school. Old school is, is it old school more authentic? It's more of the original flavor.

 

Leo Laporte (02:33:20):

It's how it used to be. Yes. Richard. It is <laugh>.

 

Rich Campbell (02:33:24):

Well, and for me, the big thing is saying how much, you know, always the question when you're talking about anybody who's becoming an Afic artist is how much is brand affecting you? Yeah. How much is appearance affecting you? Yeah. Yeah. And, and Nura is one of the few examples where a bunch of that has been stripped away

 

Leo Laporte (02:33:40):

Is, you know, doesn't naura mean I'm making this up in my head? Natural.

 

Rich Campbell (02:33:44):

I think that's the implication, but I think they just made the word

 

Leo Laporte (02:33:48):

Up. Oh, okay. Cuz it sounds very Celtic

 

Rich Campbell (02:33:50):

<Laugh>. Yes.

 

Leo Laporte (02:33:51):

Yeah. It almost sounds like it could be like an Eskimo name or something like a Yeah,

 

Rich Campbell (02:33:56):

No, apparently it does mean natural and Gaelic, but with Word.

 

Leo Laporte (02:33:59):

That's what I, it feels like it's a, the camera

 

Rich Campbell (02:34:00):

Sure. We're mispronouncing it.

 

Leo Laporte (02:34:01):

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. [inaudible]

 

Rich Campbell (02:34:04):

Yeah. Ah, it's gonna be Scottish. You're gonna have the Hakai.

 

Leo Laporte (02:34:08):

Oh, it's unavoidable. It's completely Nara. I want some now. I can't find it unfortunately. I think it's one of those that they,

 

Rich Campbell (02:34:17):

They're not the least expensive bottle depending on where you're looking. They, last time I bought it in Canada, I think it was a hundred Canadian dollars. So that's like

 

Leo Laporte (02:34:25):

A million dollars in

 

Rich Campbell (02:34:26):

US dollar 50 Canadian American. It's a 50, $60 bottle if

 

Leo Laporte (02:34:31):

You can find one. I see a lot of reviews. I don't see anybody selling it. I just went and looked at k and l which is our local kinda it's 16 years old. That's interesting too. Yeah. A hundred bucks. A

 

Rich Campbell (02:34:45):

Hundred bucks. Yeah. And remember that the year Appalachian is always the youngest thing that's in the bottle. That's

 

Leo Laporte (02:34:50):

The Oh, interesting. So

 

Rich Campbell (02:34:52):

There's often there's some older blended in to get to a particular flavor profile, but they have to put the youngest that's in the

 

Leo Laporte (02:34:59):

Bottle. I'm gonna have to go down to Visalia to get it. <Laugh>. They have 59 bucks in Visalia. I guess Rossi's market doesn't know what they've got. This liquor's too clear. We're gonna have to sell it cheaper. Yeah. <laugh>, it's less expensive. Very not. I'm loving this education and I'm not even drinking this stuff. I'm just loving learning about it. Especially that Shackling story. That's so cool.

 

Rich Campbell (02:35:22):

The Shackling story is great. Yeah. And, and then there's a modern version of Shackling that I'm making, which is remarkably unimpressive. Yeah. But a lot less expensive. Yeah.

 

Leo Laporte (02:35:30):

You want an impressive that I'll give you this whiskey that's made by a San Francisco startup that's not aged. It's chemically altered to taste like it's been here.

 

Rich Campbell (02:35:39):

That wouldn't be worth a taste. It

 

Leo Laporte (02:35:40):

Tastes like rubber. Well, the next time you harmed in the creation whiskey the bottle, you can have it. <Laugh>. Amy Webb, our futurist sent it to me. The future of whiskey. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the future of Windows Weekly. Except next week you're gonna be in London. Won't be here, right Richard?

 

Rich Campbell (02:35:54):

No, I

 

Leo Laporte (02:35:55):

Won't be around. We'll miss you. But we will do the show, of course, as we always do on a Wednesday morning, 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern for the East Coasters. That is 1900 utc. So in London time it'll be about 7:00 PM you can watch us do it live@live.twit.tv. There's live audio and video at that address. If you're watching live, you can participate live, which is kind of fun. In fact, I've been thinking Paul, maybe next week when Richard's not here, we can take some calls from the and questions from the chat room and from the Discord with the club members to fill in for Richard. They can, they can pitch in with their favorite booze or something. Hmm. Hmm. He says, Hmm. Well, if that's your idea, I guess now we'll have some fun with that.

 

(02:36:45):

 Irc.Twit.Tv. That's the place to ask and talk amongst yourselves. Of course, club Twit members have their own special place, our Discord, which is so much fun. Club Twit is well worth the $7 a month. What do you get? You get well ad free versions of all of our shows, which I think is pretty special. You get access to the creepy animated gifts in the club. Twi discord, <laugh>. And you also get the TWITplus feed with, with things like Paul's unique to the club, hands on windows just for the club, some really good stuff in there. We also have some events coming up. I know I love the animated gifts.

 

Paul Thurrott (02:37:28):

I literally just closed discards so I didn't have to see that

 

Leo Laporte (02:37:31):

<Laugh>. I know. I don't blame you tomorrow. Lisa and I, 4:00 PM Pacific, 7:00 PM Eastern right about midnight UTC will be talking about Inside Twit. We haven't done one of those in a couple of years, so that should be fun. You can join us, ask questions. Win two down next in a couple of weeks. The host of all about Android, she's a developer loves her Kotlin. She's a Kotlin developer on Android and Daniel Suarez whose new book is just our critical mass. We'll be doing a triangulation and Questions from the Club on February 10th. We just got the book in. So club members get access to some special events like that ad free versions of all the shows. The Trip plus feed seven bucks a month. We should charge more. We're not gonna though twit tv slash club twit. If you want to join, we'd sure appreciate that. Yeah, I just got Daniel's new book. I'm very excited. Critical Mass. Can't wait to talk to him on February 10th.

 

Paul Thurrott (02:38:29):

Guys had the same person re narrating his books I think since the very beginning.

 

Leo Laporte (02:38:34):

He has, he's good too. Do you like his narrator? I think he's really good. I do. Yeah. I think that's kind of important. 

 

Paul Thurrott (02:38:40):

Jeff Gerner,

 

Leo Laporte (02:38:41):

He's really, he's got a, he's just got a great style. Yeah. Remember Demonn the first passages of Demonn and Gerner reading it and it just explodes.

 

Paul Thurrott (02:38:49):

I would say yeah, like those first maybe three books or

 

Leo Laporte (02:38:52):

Incredible.

 

Paul Thurrott (02:38:53):

The best. Yeah. Or Freedom. What was Freedom

 

Leo Laporte (02:38:56):

Demonn? Freedom tm. Tmm. and then he did Kill What Is Kill Decision, which was Kill Decision. Yeah. Influx Change Agent. Delta V he wrote a couple of years ago, and this is the follow up to this, and this is about space exploration, which is something he's very excited about. An asteroid re you know, a reclamation and stuff. So great stuff. Thank you, Richard. How long are you gonna be in London? You Lucky dog? Just a week. Oh, just a week.

 

Rich Campbell (02:39:25):

London for a week, then home for a week, then Stockholm for a week.

 

Leo Laporte (02:39:29):

Wow. Wow. And these, you're speaking at conferences. You wanna plug these conferences?

 

Rich Campbell (02:39:36):

At the, at London it's the NDC London Conference. We'll be at the Queen Elizabeth two Center. Nice. And in Stockholm we'll be at the conference center in Stockholm. And that is a conference called Spit Dog,

 

Leo Laporte (02:39:48):

Which means Sweat Dog, something like that. Something like that. Richard is the host of Run Ass Radio. Renis radio.com.net Rocks as well. Rich Campbell on the Twitter and the Mastodon, Paul Thurrott is thro.com. That's his website, his blog Join and become a, as you can see, I'm a premium member. The best stuff there. Well worth joining. And don't forget his field guide to, to Windows 11, which is out now and includes the field guide to Windows 10. So it's downward compatible as all good Windows products should be. Sure is@leanpub.com. Choose your own price. Lean pub dot come. Gentlemen, have a wonderful week. Have fun in London. Richard, we'll see you in a couple of weeks. We'll see you next week on Windows Weekly, bbye.