Windows Weekly Episode 819 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 T's here, actually he's in Mexico City. Richard Campbell's in New Zealand, but you're here, and I'm glad you are because it's time to talk about the Windows Insider Program. It ain't what it used to be. Is it Windows 12? You're getting your first taste. If you are a Windows insider, edge brings along something. It calls video super resolution. Then we'll talk about ai. Maybe it's time to resurrect Cortana. Hold that in a lot more. Coming up next on Windows Weekly podcasts you love

TWiT Intro (00:00:31):
From people you trust. This is twi.

Leo Laporte (00:00:42):
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Throt and Richard Campbell. Episode 819. Recorded March 8th, 2020 360 4 Threads but none for you.

(00:00:55):
Windows Weekly is brought to you by Collide. Collide is a device trust solution that ensures that if a device isn't secure, it can't access your apps, it's zero trust for Okta. Visit collide.com/ww and book a demo today. And by Lenovo, orchestrated by the experts at CDW to help transform your organization with Lenovo Think Pads. Equipped with the Intel Evo platform for effortless connectivity and collaboration from anywhere. Learn more at cdw.com/lenovo. Clients. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show we talk about the latest news from Microsoft, and we are truly an international program. Today I'm coming to you from the United States of America. Joining us from the hot zone of Mexico City, Mr. Paul Throt, Roman Norte. Hello Paul.

Paul Thurrott (00:01:51):
Hello,

Leo Laporte (00:01:52):
Leo. It's what's the, what's the weather like today,

Paul Thurrott (00:01:55):
Leo? The temperature here never changes. It's, well, actually, it's, it's, this is the hottest time of the year, so it's plus or minus five degrees from 70 degrees and then plus or minus five degrees from 50 degrees.

Leo Laporte (00:02:05):
So that's perfect. It's like, that's perfection.

Paul Thurrott (00:02:08):
Every, so a million years ago, I was at a Microsoft show in LA and I stepped outside of a restaurant with a friend from Microsoft and I said, what's the temperature? And he says, I have no idea. I said, well, whatever this is, it's

Leo Laporte (00:02:16):
Perfect. Perfect. Was probably 72. And this is,

Paul Thurrott (00:02:19):
Yeah. Yeah. It's, this is what it is every

Leo Laporte (00:02:21):
Day or as they call it in New Zealand. 20.

Paul Thurrott (00:02:25):
Yes. Join

Leo Laporte (00:02:26):
<Laugh> joining us from New Zealand. From Teranga. Yes. In on, on the south island at his family farm.

Rich Campbell (00:02:34):
North Island.

Leo Laporte (00:02:34):
North Island. Mr. Yeah. Richard Campbell is the North island. So the north island is the rural area in the South Islands where Auckland and, and, and, and all of that. Is

Rich Campbell (00:02:45):
That other way around? Other

Leo Laporte (00:02:46):
Way around, yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:02:47):
North Island. Yeah. North Island is somewhat Hawaii ish. A little more jungley, a little hot. Oh, nice. And you have big cities there. It's even

Paul Thurrott (00:02:55):
Cheap

Rich Campbell (00:02:55):
By way

Paul Thurrott (00:02:55):
Is, it's sort of the big island style.

Rich Campbell (00:02:58):
Yeah. South Island is mountains down the west side. Sheep farms on the east side.

Leo Laporte (00:03:05):
Nice. And that's where Queenstown is. That's where that's where all the billionaires are coming from the United States when the all

Paul Thurrott (00:03:14):
The drone shots. The Lord of the Rings movies. Yeah. You know, and

Rich Campbell (00:03:17):
When we did the last show, I was in Auckland waiting to fly to Queenstown to do a wedding. And then since then I've hopped over to Melbourne, Australia for a reception and then came

Leo Laporte (00:03:25):
Back. Good Lord, farmer. Good Lord. You are a tra. So how did the wedding go? How'd the wedding go?

Rich Campbell (00:03:31):
The wedding was great. Nice. And it was lit. It was not in view of Mount Ju it was a view of Iraqi, which is actually the mountain studio or the Lonely mountain.

Leo Laporte (00:03:40):
Ah, the lonely Mountain Mountain. The Misty Mountains. Yeah. So, yeah, cuz Jason Snell from Mac Break Weekly just got back and he visited, actually

Paul Thurrott (00:03:48):
The Lonely Mountain is from The Hobbit and it is nowhere near the Misty

Leo Laporte (00:03:51):
<Laugh>. I'm so sorry. Missed you. I'm so sorry. Hey, I

Paul Thurrott (00:03:55):
Nobody knows geography anymore. I, I don't know what's happening,

Rich Campbell (00:03:59):
<Laugh>. It's not real. It's,

Leo Laporte (00:04:02):
I confuse, I confuse all the, all the cannons. I am confused by <laugh>, all of them at once.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:07):
I am such a loser. Anyway,

Leo Laporte (00:04:09):
<Laugh>, what is happening in Windows? So I thought Microsoft, I thought the whole thing about Windows 12 was just a, a kymera a mirage on the horizon, but apparently I'm wrong.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:24):
Well, let's, so let's, before we get, so there was a major change to the Windows Insider program this past week. Before we get that, I, there, I, I just wanna step back for one second and think again about what just happened last week, right? Which was they released this thing that they call internally a moment update moment two. We don't, that's not the public name. In fact, the public name is ludicrous. It's like a KB article number basically. But this is part of Microsoft, what Microsoft calls continuous innovation, right? We're only gonna issue one feature update Capital F, capital U, which is beautiful <laugh> every year. And we're gonna update it though from time to time in between, right? With new features. Small f small u I guess. So the Windows Insider program at some point last year switched from each channel being tied to a specific Windows version to most of them not being tied to a specific Windows version.

(00:05:19):
It wasn't until we got down to the release preview channel that that thing mapped to either what was out now or is out coming out soon. And so the addition of these small feature updates has thrown a little bit of a, I think might explain what they're doing, right? Like the, we don't just have, we don't have a next version of Windows to think about. We have a next set of features to think about. And that's basically what they're testing in the Windows Insider program. It's part of the confusion about these changes. Cause I I, you know, historically we've always thought about Windows as versions. You know, there's typically a version. Some, you know, version will come out with Windows 10. It was twice a year with Windows 11. Now it's once a year, but we have this other thing or these other things, right?

(00:06:03):
We don't know how many moments there'll be this year, but obviously somewhere between two and whatever number four or five, whatever. We'll see. So that's the first big thing. Just to kind of put that, just to, to level set this next conversation, because Microsoft just announced that they're adding a new channel to the Windows Insider program, because I think when anyone looked at the Windows Insider program and thought, what's wrong with this thing? Everyone said, not enough channels, <laugh>, you know? Right. Which is such a weird thing. In the notes, i I, I copy pasted something that Raphael gave me this, this where it says, here's a cheat sheet because this is not how Microsoft announced it, <laugh>, you know but the, there's some changes here, right? So the, the release preview channel hasn't really changed. These are still features that are gonna ship imminently in the next release.

(00:06:57):
 The beta channel previously was not tied to a release of Windows. This one actually is targeting the next release of Windows, even though Microsoft does not say this. All right? This is according to sources that Raphael has at Microsoft. The dev channel, which also did not target a specific release of Windows, has not changed actually, this, this part of it, this is the one part that hasn't changed at all. It's the same as it was before. So these are far out features may or may not make it into any version of Windows. They're testing them now. And if, if everything goes correctly, and let's be clear, nothing ever goes correctly. Things would st new features would start in Dev work their way through the channels hit beta. If a feature ends up in beta, it is a bigger chance it's gonna end up in the next version or some version of Windows.

(00:07:44):
If it ends up in release preview, it's pretty much gonna happen in the next version of Windows. Like that's a, that's a very logical approach. That's not what Microsoft has done, honestly, for much of the features that it is released through this chan these channels. But that's the theory anyway. What they've added is a Canary channel, right? Which is a familiar name. If you test web browsers like Chrome and Edge and so forth. Microsoft did not say this, but my understanding now based on multiple sources telling me this, is that the Canary Channel is where they're testing Windows 12. It doesn't mean literally Windows 12, but these features are so far out that they will almost certainly arrive in Windows 12. And as we get further into show, what you'll discover is that new features will appear in Devon Canary at the same time sometimes.

(00:08:35):
So that might indicate who knows what that indicates. I mean, it might indicate they're coming to Windows 11, but of course they'll move forward to Windows 12. Of course they will. You know, they need to keep the next thing up to date with the current thing. Like that makes sense. So the things we're gonna be looking at are the features that go to Canary and then kind of stay in Canary <laugh>, at least this year, you know, at least until the next version of Windows 11 is released. And I think it, it's those different fe you know, those unique features that might indicate things that Windows 12, you know, so we'll see.

Rich Campbell (00:09:07):
I mean, they presumption of calling it Canary is going to break.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:11):
Yes. Oh, and they were, they were explicit about that. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. So Microsoft,

Rich Campbell (00:09:20):
You, you're in your notes, you mentioned like kernel changes, which is an interesting thing to think of. Like, what are they gonna do there?

Paul Thurrott (00:09:26):
Yep. Yeah. So they in, in the announcement post, said like, this thing could break. It could be so bad. You might have to reinstall Windows. They were talking about little or no documentation. You know, normally with these releases, they'll issue a blog post. Isn't that

Leo Laporte (00:09:40):
Normal though? Ironic? I mean, don't they always say that?

Paul Thurrott (00:09:43):
Yeah. Well, you know, <laugh>, so I mean, I they just released a new build the first ever Canary Build today. And of course there was a blog post <laugh>, so they're already off on a great start there. But you know, <laugh>,

Rich Campbell (00:09:56):
I think we said we definitely wouldn't do. Yeah, we do. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:58):
I think you just said you weren't gonna do this, but <laugh>. So I, I don't know what to, I don't know what to think about this. I, I, like I said up front, I, I don't think most people would've thought, you know, we need another channel. If you sort of think of it as in terms of Windows 12, okay. I mean, I guess so, you know, at least, you know, as a tester today, going into that thing, what it is. And if you don't, if that's not what you want you know, stay out of it, right? I mean, that's easy enough. Obviously the hope is that anyone enrolling PCs in the windows and insider channels are technical enough to know how to do a clean install of Windows if they have to, and they can get out of this stuff. I mean, obviously there's still that lingering problem with Windows in Arm, but that's a very small audience today. And I can't imagine this year goes by without public ISOs happening. So that's almost

Rich Campbell (00:10:54):
Wonder if it's a mistake if they're just like, had some problem with deployment and that page hasn't lit up yet.

Paul Thurrott (00:10:59):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Yeah. I,

Rich Campbell (00:11:02):
So

Leo Laporte (00:11:02):
It gives you some confidence in their abilities.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:04):
<Laugh>, I actually, you know what? Okay, we're gonna get to this cuz we're gonna talk about ai, but later, but I will say Microsoft, like any other company, if you're, you're an up and comer, you are career advancing, whatever you want to go to the parts of the company that give you the biggest headroom to do that kind of stuff. You want to have new projects approved, you know, release new things. You know, you wanna be on the, the leading edge. I mean, that's not where, what Windows is, right? Windows is not the courier advancement part of Microsoft. So Yeah. Did somebody forget to flip a switch and make the windows and arm iso? Yeah. You know what? <Laugh>, that's very ible. And I don't mean that necessarily.

Rich Campbell (00:11:38):
It's somewhat of a different team and they may not actually know the workflow, right? That's right. To go onto that particular side of, I

Leo Laporte (00:11:44):
Bet Donna Sakar would, I bet she'd know what button to push.

Rich Campbell (00:11:47):
Donna knows every

Paul Thurrott (00:11:48):
Well, she would know exactly who to talk to for sure. To make that happen. Yes, yes, yes. So I, yeah, I don't know. I thi this year is gonna be very interesting for Windows. It's gonna be very interesting just in tech in general because of all the yay I stuff we've been beaten to death. But, but with regards to Windows and the Windows Insider program, I, it is very clear. And I've, I think Richard has heard this too. I've heard from many people. You know, speaking of Donna Sarkar, she used to talk about how many millions of people were in it and it was getting close to, I wanna say 20 million at one point it was 17 or something like that. Holy cow. It is, it is. Well, it's very clear that the insider program today is a shadow of its former self.

Leo Laporte (00:12:27):
You think it's smaller mean that,

Paul Thurrott (00:12:28):
Yeah. From share numbers and more important from an engagement perspective, because one of the things that's been kind of beaten out of these people is the notion that they're gonna contribute in any meaningful way. And I think it's tough. They, they've changed the terms of what they signed up to. Do. You know, when you signed into the beta channel in the past, or the dev channel, you were testing something very specific. Now you're not, I think that turned some people off. They started doing all that AB testing. I think that turned people off cuz they were there again for a specific reason. And they clearly, they meaning Microsoft value telemetry data much more over actual feedback. There's, there are far too many instances of feedback hub items just being totally ignored. And a new release of Windows comes out and something breaks like the Kindle thing, crashing windows or whatever. And then, oh, look, someone reported this to the feedback hub feedback hub seven months ago. It, it's, it's deflating, I think for people who, you know, who want to be engaged. Yeah. Like you want

Leo Laporte (00:13:23):
To, these are your biggest fans difference. These are your biggest fans.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:27):
Microsofts Yes. They're Windows fans. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:13:28):
Yeah. Not your No, they're not Paul. No,

Paul Thurrott (00:13:30):
No. Well, they could, could

Leo Laporte (00:13:32):
Be both, but they're all

Paul Thurrott (00:13:35):
No, that's exactly right. Yeah, that's

Leo Laporte (00:13:37):
Exactly, and those

Rich Campbell (00:13:37):
Admittedly, the credit program got outta control, right? Yeah. Like they just let so many people in and Yeah. I think it's gonna be a while to rehabilitate it. The ones that stuck around, the ones that are genuinely contributing, like they are valuable. They just have to be reminded and sort of get back in that loop. One of the things said on, as a whole third party influences that of Microsoft has not had a good few years.

Leo Laporte (00:14:00):
Yeah. Right. One of the things we've talked about though in the past is that Microsoft some years ago decimated its ba its bug testing team mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, right? Presumably at that time, hoping that the Windows Insider program would, would obviate the need for them. And then if you telemetry the winner insider program, what do you got? They already, they have a problem with bugs with chipping bugs. Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:14:25):
Telemetry will be Steven Synopsis's greatest influence, longtime influence over Windows that, that started on.

Rich Campbell (00:14:30):
Totally great.

Paul Thurrott (00:14:31):
Oh, okay. I thought you were No, I was like, this was, this was his thing. And he was, he loved to pull out numbers, you know, he'd stand in a room and say, how many people in this room do this thing? And he'd say, well, only the X you know, I think you told the story about this, like we're Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:14:43):
The i e nine story. Right? It's like, Hey, we're getting ready to ship i e nine. How much work are we gonna do on bookmark?

Paul Thurrott (00:14:48):
Yeah. How many people here run windows meters and everybody

Rich Campbell (00:14:52):
Marks and nobody else does.

Paul Thurrott (00:14:53):
Yep. The problem with that though, is Yep, <laugh>, I was just gonna say go ahead. Exactly. You said no, no. Good. I The problem with that is that there's no context and you can make data, data can just shows you one thing. You know, that I would say in our world, in the world of communities and enthusiasm and so forth you need to pay attention to people who are influencers. And I don't mean that in the Instagram sense. I mean, the people that people in their family or friends turn to when they need help technically are gonna influence the decisions that normal people, mainstream users make. And you're kind of cutting them out of the loop. And I think that's a, that's a dangerous thing. I think the overreliance on telemetry data is potentially one of the biggest problems with Windows since say the, well, windows eight, let's, let's call it I, you know, it's in that timeframe.

(00:15:43):
 But the, yeah, the other big bucket of data that can influence Windows is definitely feedback through the insider program or just the feedback hub in general, right? Because any user can send feedback in that way. You know, Microsoft talks a lot about ai. You're telling me you can't use AI to filter out the most important bits of feedback, see which ones are the most important, see which ones go back the fur, see which ones are still problems see how hard it is to fix or not fix those things. It's, it's bizarre to be that they're not doing a better job with that stuff. And it's, it's too bad. And I, and it's just telemetry is just, it's, it's not enough. So I don't know if the changes they

Rich Campbell (00:16:27):
Mean Yeah. Don't telemetry is bad on its own. It's, you've gotta use it with other things.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:30):
That's right. That's right. You telemetry is important. I mean, it's absolutely important. But you know, this mad belief that members alone will tell us the story is, is what's gonna lead AI down dark paths. I mean, this is, it's the same problem, really. It's like <laugh>, you know? I, I don't know. Anyway, so that, that's my, that's my little editorial on that. But the, I, I don't know that adding a channel is gonna drive engagement unless people believe it is Windows 12. I could see, you know, there'll be a little bump there and, and if anything exciting happens there, we'll see. But I feel, I just feel like this program has been listless for such a long time. And it's too bad. And there's also, there's, there's a communication issue. And I don't just mean quality of communication, which you know, is classic, but I also just mean the method of communication.

(00:17:18):
 You'll go to them sometimes and complain, Hey, you know, people don't know this thing is happening. They'll say, what are you talking about? We tweeted it, <laugh>, you know, or they'll go back and edit a blog post that went out a month ago with some little bit of information, not understanding that you did the feed didn't get updated. You, you just, you you blasted this information out to no one. There's a, there's a real problem there. With the interaction bit, which I is, you know, the, the very point of feedback from people is that you're interacting, right? I just, I feel bad, you know, I, I have my own channels obviously, but cuz people I'll, I'll complain about things and a very, a very <laugh> typical response from someone will say, well, did you put it in the feedback hub? No, I threw it in the toilet. What's the difference? <Laugh>, they're not paying attention to the feedback hub. You know, like, I, I could probably reach Microsoft easier by just writing about it on my site than by putting something in the feedback hub doesn't mean they're gonna act on it, by the way, I'm, they ignore me as easily as they ignore the feedback hub. But but this, I like, they don't have to answer everything in there. But surely there's a data collection facility that could weed out the important bits from the non-important bits. Yes. My, my

Rich Campbell (00:18:37):
Basis. Yeah. I, I mean, I'm not gonna disagree with you there. It depends on the team. You know, the, you can very clearly see like over on the.net side, but the teams actually use Right? The issues gi having the feedback hub and so forth as part of you can watch their scrums where they talk through them all.

Paul Thurrott (00:18:53):
Yep.

Rich Campbell (00:18:55):
They, the company certainly from leadership has gotten a lot of pressure on, you know, don't act on your own, act on customer feedback. Right. And so, but you know, you get to then choose what do we consider customer feedback? And the great thing about using that telemetry is that you get to interpret it your own way. <Laugh>. So Exactly. You can what, go on the mission you want. Yeah. Just you slice and dice the telemetry data in the way that gets you to what you want to do.

Paul Thurrott (00:19:19):
I, I don't have any particular insight into this, but based on what I see publicly, I feel like the Microsoft 365 team, broadly, by which I basically mean the office part of Microsoft 365, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, the, if you go to the Microsoft 365 blog and they put out monthly updates about all the new features that were added, or here's everything we did to teams or whatever it might be it's very clear. A lot of that is feedback driven. Now those products are so vast and complicated and diverse that you see a, a new feature in Word only appear in one version of Word and not in the other five or whatever, you know, cuz we have web Windows, Mac Mobile, et cetera. You know, that kind of, that's a problem. But they do seem to do a better job of reacting to feedback. And it might just be because those tend to be business customers, right? Yeah. I don't think from the perspective of a typical business or enterprise customer that there's a lot of feedback for Windows. Just leave it alone. <Laugh> is probably the feedback.

Rich Campbell (00:20:20):
Yeah. For the most. I mean, that's, it seemed true for quite a while that the main thing we wanted from Windows was reliability, not features. That's not what we go to look for features,

Paul Thurrott (00:20:28):
Right? Yeah. So maybe that and that, and maybe I've just actually come stumbled upon the real issue with the insider program, which is that most of those people are just individuals. They're enthusiasts. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and who cares? <Laugh>, you know I mean, at the end of the day, that's not where, that's not where the money's coming from, right. To Microsoft,

Leo Laporte (00:20:47):
As the sun comes up on a beautiful, was gonna say Thursday morning in Teranga New Zealand

Paul Thurrott (00:20:53):
Has the is the resurrection happening where

Leo Laporte (00:20:56):
It's Richard, you're getting quite a bit of lens flare from your Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:20:59):
That's a, that's a, I've never seen light like that outside of

Leo Laporte (00:21:02):
Like a religious diora.

Rich Campbell (00:21:06):
I'm ascending.

Leo Laporte (00:21:07):
So I don't know if you have a, you could put a flag on your a little flag on your camera, you know, just a little thing. It's so funny. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. That makes a big difference. Yeah. It's, he's slowly been getting like, I know, it's,

Paul Thurrott (00:21:19):
It's beautiful. It's like, yeah, the heavens are opening

Leo Laporte (00:21:22):
<Laugh>. It's

Paul Thurrott (00:21:23):
So great.

Leo Laporte (00:21:25):
A couple of thoughts from the Discord. Jarno says, well, t who says I don't use the Insiders Build anymore when you're testing something that was gonna be releasing, that was worthwhile, but now it's just here to have some broken, you know, pieces. Right? Right. And and Jarno G says, on the other hand, hardly, barely any insiders are still complaining in the feedback hub. So that means Windows must be almost perfect now <laugh>. And then wellhead says, please stop calling me Shirley. So all together, I think <laugh>, <laugh> nice.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:59):
So yeah, I mean, I, I, yeah, I I, when you're ignored, you stop talking, right? I mean, yeah. It's, it's, I I think you're seeing that I, I, look, I we're in a weird place because Microsoft is trying to do some UI changes, which I think are nice and, and, but they break things, which I think is bad. And then they fix things over time. Sometimes it takes a year. They're fixing some stuff now that, you know, we're, we're coming up on two years and do we celebrate that we just sort of accept it in resignation? I don't know. I don't know. We'll talk about one of those features. So

Rich Campbell (00:22:35):
Does it actually say Windows 12 on it anywhere? Or are you No, no, no, no. Participating. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:39):
No, no. Because, you know, windows 12 is Windows 11. Like Windows 11 is Windows 10. And it's just what the change will be the addition of whatever features set. Huh. You know,

Rich Campbell (00:22:49):
It always comes down to like, why do we need a new version number again? Like, what are we getting

Leo Laporte (00:22:53):
Used to be a big change, right? I mean, going from Windows seven to

Paul Thurrott (00:22:57):
Eight bigger than 11. I'm not sure why I have to explain this. I mean, it <laugh>, it's, yeah, I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I, I think with my, you know, with Windows 10, there was this notion of we're gonna sit on this one for a while. And and I think they saw how that went. And then of course, over time, it's like, you don't have anything for PC makers to sell. Yeah. You don't have any, you know, if the system works, it's boring. You know, if Windows as a Service works, you're updating this thing with major releases twice a year, or one major, one minor, whatever the cadence is, and no, nothing breaks major in the context of Windows 10 with features is not anything particularly exciting. Right. So I mean, what do you have at the end of eight years? You know, it's like, well, it's, it still looks like Windows 10. It's like, what do we, you know I I I I, I've

Rich Campbell (00:23:47):
Always, we have this problem in office too. Like, why would you make another version of Office? Right. When you're getting continuous update? All I know for sure is that stuff and Outlook keeps moving around and I can't find,

Paul Thurrott (00:23:56):
Oh my God, I, so I, I've flagged two things in Word lately that are major pain points for me. And the big one is in the, for, for the, well, for the past 30 years, if you wanted to search for something in Word Control f a little dialogue box came up, and then you could click around and it would highlight each instance of the thing you were searching for. It was wonderful. If you do it today in Word, a gigantic search pan comes up on the right side of the application, covers one-third of the text on the right side of it, and is a horrific interface for finding stuff. Because often the word that's highlighted that you search for is under the search pain. It is the most horrific UI imaginable. And I listen, I I get it. They have to update things, I suppose, but at some point it's

Rich Campbell (00:24:38):
Not like you were gonna say, the old word search was good.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:41):
It was fine. I never thought about it. Yeah. You know, it works.

Rich Campbell (00:24:45):
You had no expectations,

Paul Thurrott (00:24:46):
Mark. No, it was fine. I don't know what they're thinking with this thing. I, I'm sure there's a reason there always is, you know,

Rich Campbell (00:24:53):
I mean, I, I think everybody complains about search every kind of search that Microsoft ever does. And so anybody who you know sure has, has this moment where're like, you know what? I haven't touched lately a third rail. I I pick search the

Paul Thurrott (00:25:05):
Third rail. Yeah, yeah. Right. It's the, is the Stove hot? I dt check it. <Laugh> you

Rich Campbell (00:25:10):
Can't search. Do go Well. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:25:12):
Here's a sentence I never thought I would utter. Hey, word team, why don't you look at Notepad and see how they do it? Cuz it's Right. I mean, it is right. The, the search experience in Wind or the Find experience, I guess we call it it's fine. In, in Notepad works great, you know?

Rich Campbell (00:25:27):
Yeah. It searches for the words that I type in, in my document

Paul Thurrott (00:25:30):
And it's a good ui. It gets outta the way. It's nice, you know,

Rich Campbell (00:25:34):
And if you're really fancy, you can use Replace

Paul Thurrott (00:25:38):
<Laugh>. That's right. That's true. Yeah. So I don't know. Anyway, so I, I don't have a big rant per se about this new scheme. Other, other than the comment I made up front. I, I don't know that anyone wanted this thing, but if it's two Windows 12, that makes it kind of interesting. And it sounds like that's what

Rich Campbell (00:25:55):
It is. If I, there's any motion in the Insider program at all, to me, sounds like good news cuz it's been scale and st for quite a while, right? So if they've decided they may need to make a new category and they're gonna push some new bits up, right? I'm excited. I'm gonna drag out that old hardware and, and fire up the canary version and watch it die

Paul Thurrott (00:26:12):
<Laugh>. Yes. And by the way, I mean we have this kind of understanding that where AI is really gonna hit in Windows is with Windows 12. Presumably some of that stuff will appear in the canary channel. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:26:28):
Which,

Paul Thurrott (00:26:28):
Which by the way, sorry, I, sorry to sort of sidetrack this conversation, but I've just reminded myself of something. When Microsoft announced Bing ai, or they, they don't call it that, but Bing Chat integration in the Windows 11 task bar. They put it the entire world, including Laron, who writes for my site and, and all the other tech blogs kind of just wrote it that way. Like, Microsoft integrates being AI into the Windows 11 task bar. Now when you use this product, you realize that's, that's not what happens. There, there are a bunch of big icons in the task bar in the start menu that can start in search highlights. But there's no integration in Windows, really. It launches a web browser, which by the way is another sidetrack, sorry, I said last week that it was it mistakenly using your own web browser. That's because I use Brave. So Brave actually undercuts search highlights

Leo Laporte (00:27:20):
And it does that on purpose. It's like doing that actively. Oh,

Paul Thurrott (00:27:23):
But don't worry folks. Like I said, they would fix it. Microsoft found out probably cuz they talked about it, and now they thanks. Now they work around it again. I know, I know, I

Rich Campbell (00:27:31):
Know. Well done.

Paul Thurrott (00:27:32):
Yep. That's me. Anyway. so I had people come to me and say, how come everyone including your site is parroting this Microsoft marketing nonsense about being AI being integrated in the windows? And the reason is, Microsoft told us about this release ahead of time, but didn't give anyone the code. Ah, so that even though we were all kind of testing stuff, this stuff didn't appear until that day later. So we all sort of took Microsoft's info related to the world, and now this is collective Body of work telling the world that Microsoft is integrated being AI into the task bar. That's not what happened. But we didn't, we didn't know any better, you know, we just had what they told us to go on, they included a screenshot of a UI of Bing, whatever that looked like. It came from Windows. It didn't, it came from the web <laugh> and we just didn't know any better. So anyway, that's how that happened. Just in case anyone is wondering if we were colluding with the software giants, we were just don't shoot the messenger, I guess is what I'm trying to say. We now know what happened.

Rich Campbell (00:28:34):
Yeah, I don't, I don't like that they call it Bing Chat either because you don't wanna chat with it, you want to work

Leo Laporte (00:28:39):
<Laugh>, but there Well, okay, but notice that at least I notice that there is a distinction between using chap G P T and search and actually, you know, talking with Yep. Bing Chat. And that's off on the right hand side. So there really, it is two different functions, right? I'm not getting it.

Paul Thurrott (00:28:56):
Well, it's almost like they don't know quite how to integrate it yet. I, I, you have to think, and by the way, so we're gonna get to this. So there are competitors to Bing that are well, not direct competitors I should say. There are other products, services that are starting to integrate AI into their own things like brave Search, we'll talk about as an example, or duck dot Go is doing this as well where they have presented this in a different way. And it's a way that is more akin to what Google was doing pre ai, which was you ask it a question and it puts the answer at the top and then it gives you all the search results, right? Which I think is kind of a logical way to handle this. There's a good chance this thing at the top will answer your question and then you can move on with your life. And if it didn't, you go down to the search results. However, AI not particularly reliable, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> these things, it has hallucinations as they call it, which is a beautiful word. 

Rich Campbell (00:29:50):
Again, anthropomorphizing a piece of software,

Paul Thurrott (00:29:52):
Right? Yep. And you get the wrong answer and you think it's right and you move on because of course this thing is authoritative, it's on the internet and it's Google or Microsoft or you know, whatever,

Rich Campbell (00:29:59):
Right?

Paul Thurrott (00:30:00):
So yeah, we'll get, we'll get to that. But that's a, I I think the presentation of this information is gonna be the thing that changes the most. Well, I that in the accuracy hopefully, right? I mean the capability, but yeah. How, how they integrate this in a, how this becomes search, I guess is the way I put it, is up for debate.

Rich Campbell (00:30:21):
Yeah. And you actually, you know, fundamentally these chat phrases are being turned into search strings. Yeah. The search engine still matters.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:28):
Oh yeah. In fact, when you ask Bing questions and it doesn't have a way to converse with you about it, it says, here's some search results. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and it falls back on that, you know? So depending on what you ask it, that's true of all. It's not just Bing. I mean that they all do that, but and it, I I mean that's fine, right? I mean, that's, you're at the search engine. You get search results. If at, if that's the worst case scenario, <laugh>, you know, I mean, that's fine.

Rich Campbell (00:30:55):
Have you noticed they'd ever tried to use voice in any of this? Because we, I've read into this with the Google Home devices, where, where do you that give it a command and it didn't understand it, then it would return search results and it would read them out, which is a great way of let you go. I didn't do what you wanted me to

Paul Thurrott (00:31:10):
Do. Exactly. Yeah. So, I, I, my <laugh>, the two big things there for me that are interesting is I have an Apple watch and if I, if I'm leaning on something and the watch is kind of into my hand, it will mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, listen, that's the, that's telling Siri to listen. So I'll be having a conversation with someone and then it will say, Paul, I'm sorry, but I don't know the, you know, and

Leo Laporte (00:31:29):
It's like, oh, I hate that so much. Just one thing. It drives me nuts.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:32):
That's, that's one thing. We're getting ahead of ourselves here a little bit cuz there is an AI thing coming up. But, but the other thing is this notion of search assistants, and I would say especially, and maybe only Google Assistant doing this thing where you actually start, do start a conversation and it, this must have come out of the early work that they did for the AAI thing mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, which is you ask it a question and then you, you, it answers, and then for a moment it will pause to see if you want to keep going and you can ask it a follow-up question. And you don't have to, Hey, Google it. You don't have to reframe the que you, you, it actually feels like a conversation because you're, you're still on the same page. I think that's a very early, I think that was Google kind of letting slip a little bit of the stuff we now see with the AI things, right? I mean, that was the start of that, I would imagine.

Leo Laporte (00:32:17):
Well, what's gonna be interesting, I mean, Google still hasn't launched its Bard AI and search. It's gonna be really, I mean I don't know if you saw the, was it a Verge or a New York Times story today that said it

Paul Thurrott (00:32:29):
Was, I like that you confused those two, but

Leo Laporte (00:32:31):
<Laugh> I don't, but I just can't remember <laugh>. I do know that it was, I think it was a time story that said that, that you know, not only was it all Hands on Deck event at Google when when Che, oh

Paul Thurrott (00:32:43):
This was in the Wall Street Journal

Leo Laporte (00:32:44):
Journal, that's where it was. But that Google's treating it as they did with Google Plus as a, a company-wide mandate to get the, that's what

Paul Thurrott (00:32:53):
I wanted to talk about with that. So, Richard, I'm dying for you take on this. So that's amazing that you just reminded me of that. So it seems to me that my, that the current situation at Microsoft is that the word has gone out. You must AI all the things, right? This, we don't want to hear about new features unless you can, you know, make it sound like it's AI based. This reminds me very much, of course, I've been going through my book and I just ran through the, the initial.net period where Bill Gates was in charge of this thing basically, and said, look, you're gonna put ai, I'm sorry, you're gonna put.net in everything. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, we're gonna rebrand everything as whatever it is, dot net, you know, windows.net office do net. None of that happened. I mean, and there other, okay. Yes, but I mean, well, none of them, I mean the

Rich Campbell (00:33:38):
Major, but before that it was ActiveX, right? Like mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and, and lately it's been Azure.

Paul Thurrott (00:33:43):
That's right. Yeah. So do you see that parallel? I mean, when you look at Microsoft and ai, and of course it's early, we don't see a lot of it out in the world yet. Mm-Hmm. But when you think about things that will come to Windows or Microsoft 365 or whatever it might be, isn't this, it's that kind of a, an interests

Rich Campbell (00:33:58):
That kind of behavior, right? And we Yeah. Mean it's not bad to compare to.net for no other reason than like 23 years later dot Net's doing. Well, yeah. But I, I think Microsoft has repeatedly come up with a brand that seems to have some PR traction and then just logs the snot out of it,

Paul Thurrott (00:34:16):
Right?

Rich Campbell (00:34:17):
So

Paul Thurrott (00:34:17):
Yeah, it's almost like they, they're so bad at branding when I finally, when I finally land something, they get a little too excited about it.

Rich Campbell (00:34:23):
Yeah. But I'm also hoping that these, a, these large learning language models are coming from a common source.

Paul Thurrott (00:34:29):
So today, Microsoft did release two builds of Windows 11 to the insider preview program, including the first Canary channel build. Right? Now, contrary to what they said earlier, they actually did document it is nothing dramatic, right? So if you're looking for kind of fun windows 12 type stuff, no. But the three things that stand out are access keys in the right click menus, you get an explorer meeting on the desktop or in the five square windows. And what access keys are, are the shortcut keys. So you bring up that menu, and then you can type a letter to go to a particular item in the menu. So one of the goofy things about Windows 11 is that in a bid to simplify everything, they simplify that menu dramatically. If you compare what happens when you right click on the, you know, the task, or sorry, not the task bar.

(00:35:15):
Well, yeah, the task bar, the desktop or the recycle bin or whatever the item is, you'll see that the typical menu in Windows 11 is much smaller than the typical menu was in Windows 10. Well, how do you arrive at that? Well, one way is to remove items you don't really think you need goofy. The other one is, and this is the bad one, unfortunately, they made some of the key items in those menus, icons instead of vertical list items in text. So there's a kind of a horizontal row at the top or bottom, depending on where you click of common items that you would access from right click, cut, copy, paste, share, delete, you know, it depends on what you're selecting, right? So the problem with that approach, of course, is that these hieroglyphics aren't, aren't commonly known to everybody. So you might, you're, you're like, I'm trying to copy something to the clipboard.

(00:36:04):
What, what, what's the icon? It's two little rounded rectangles over each other. It doesn't look like anything. That's what copy means. So with access keys, that's the right term. Yeah. Access keys. In the old days you would, you would access this by hitting like, I think the alt key, but now there's a menu key on the keyboards of most computers, and that will bring up little little previews of what the letters are for each one. So t for cut, C for copy, S for share, you know, d for delete, et cetera. So that feature is won't be coming in Windows 12. We're gonna get it sooner than that because it's also in the dev channel. But the ac the Canary Build and the dev build that came out today, both have that feature. There's also something called file recommendations and File Explorers.

(00:36:50):
So if you're using the default home view which is sort of like quick access favorites, recent things like that they've added a, a, a new area in there called recommended. And these are files that you were working on with people in your organization. So they're only this thing is only something that will appear if you're signing into Windows with an AAD account, not a Microsoft account. So this is kind of a corporate thing. And the idea here is you're working on projects with other people. These are files that are part of that project. If that sounds familiar, that's because they announced this was coming. So this too is not something that wastes for Windows 12. This is something that will be in Windows 11, probably pretty soon, probably in moment three. They're also testing this one in the dev channel.

(00:37:32):
So nothing dramatic there. The only one that I saw that was truly unique to Whoop <laugh>, I'll set my microphone off the side of the table there. That is the only one that's unique to the Canary Channel, is something called LSA Protection Enablement. This is a security feature called Local Security authority that helps protect against credential log on credential theft, et cetera. It's, it, you are familiar with Windows security, it's a new core isolation feature. I don't think this is going to wait for Windows 12 either, honestly. I bet this one does appear downstream as we, as the year goes on. But, you know, that's about it. So there's nothing there yet, I would say. But if people are excited to test what will probably be Windows 12. Oh, good, you're back, <laugh>. Sorry. There's that. Welcome back. And then the dev channel, it's like you never left. Yeah, yeah. So, oh,

Leo Laporte (00:38:28):
We don't have your audio, Richard.

Paul Thurrott (00:38:29):
Oh, no,

Leo Laporte (00:38:31):
No. Oh yeah, you're good. You're good. That was just some, some weird glitch. You're good.

Paul Thurrott (00:38:35):
They've just added more languages to live captions. So live captions is that thing in Windows 11 that will caption anything. So any audio source, whether it's like a YouTube video or maybe you're having a live meeting, whatever it can caption, live, caption, anything. This is in the dev channel, so it's still not out in stable, but Chinese simplified Chinese and traditional French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese for Brazil, Spanish and non US English dialects have been added. So that is advancing. And I think that's, I mean, there's, there's other stuff, but I think those, those three or four features across the two channels are kind of the big ones. So not super exciting, but that's where we're at.

Rich Campbell (00:39:20):
It's windows evolving, right? Still. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:22):
Yeah, yeah. No, and, and I, I, yeah, we can, we can debate this until we're blue in the face, whether Windows needs this evolving <laugh>, you know, whether this serves the user base in any meaningful way. I, I, I like it, you know, I, I

Rich Campbell (00:39:35):
Spending cultures certainly, but yeah, I mean, if you talk about hard things, you would try and fix the windows. Yeah. Which is to really, it would be like uncoupling the network stack,

Paul Thurrott (00:39:45):
Right. And who's gonna do that work now? Yeah. Right. I mean, what, what's the would be the benefit of that? I just don't

Rich Campbell (00:39:52):
Well, the benefit would be that, that, oh, sorry. Could reboot and network works stack without rebooting the machine.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:57):
Sure. Right. I, sorry, I didn't mean literally what the, I meant <laugh>, I meant, I mean, I meant the, whether, what was the, would, when does the difficulty of implementing this change override the, eh, you know, <laugh> just don't do it, you

Rich Campbell (00:40:11):
Know? Wait, are you gonna make it more like a Linux kernel? Is that what you're doing?

Paul Thurrott (00:40:15):
When

Rich Campbell (00:40:15):
I

Paul Thurrott (00:40:16):
Lin, I don't remember what phase of Windows 12, or sorry, windows XP development, this was, but beta two or beta three, we did a little tour at the Microsoft campus, and we met the guy who ran networking, and they were just adding the notion of secondary networking profiles. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So you could have one for home, one for work. And I said, I said, this is fascinating. I mean, why not just do arbitrary networking profiles? And the guy said, no, this is impossible.

Leo Laporte (00:40:38):
And of course,

Paul Thurrott (00:40:39):
Windows Server 2003 added that feature

Leo Laporte (00:40:41):
In impossible. [inaudible] No

Paul Thurrott (00:40:43):
<Laugh>. No, he was, yeah, he was like a, a Russian crazy guy, but he genius, you know, anyway, they, they obviously figured that one out. So

Leo Laporte (00:40:51):
He's possible now you can do it. Yes. Paul,

Paul Thurrott (00:40:55):
The way he said, hold us the way he said, it was so classic. It was like, it was the stupidest thing anyone ever asked. No, it seemed impossible. So you made, I mean, you made two, couldn't you make three

Leo Laporte (00:41:02):
<Laugh> possible? No, no. <Laugh> s not

Paul Thurrott (00:41:05):
Possible. That was so beautiful. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:41:07):
Let's take a little break. Sure. And do a little add since once was this. We got 'em. And then we come, come back and talk more about other stuff. You've kind of gone through the AI

Paul Thurrott (00:41:23):
Thing. Well, the windows inside our bit.

Leo Laporte (00:41:25):
Yeah. But I see,

Paul Thurrott (00:41:26):
Well, yeah, we did, we,

Leo Laporte (00:41:27):
We did a lot of the AI stuff, but we go back to the ai, I'd like to talk about

Paul Thurrott (00:41:30):
It. The biggest chunk of the AI thing we haven't done. And this

Leo Laporte (00:41:32):
Is, okay, this is, to me the most interesting part. Yeah. I, I think I know where you're going, and I, I think it's the most interesting part too. But before we do that, my friends, let me tell you about Collide. Collide. We talked about Collide before in the past. It's a really cool solution for IT departments that want to put end users first. It's a device trust solution. Many of us, you know, now are saying, oh, you know, zero trust. That's the only way to do it, right? But do you really have a zero trust architecture if people can log in and then use insecure devices or apps in your inside your network? I mean, I don't know if you do. And that's what Collide solves. If you're an Okta user, collide can get your entire fleet to 100% compliance Collide patches, some of the major holes in zero trust.

(00:42:31):
That's that device compliance hole. And all you have to do is ask the major password company that recently had a major breach, and we've now learned the way that happened was they had a DevOps guy working on a laptop at home. He had an unpatched version of Plex on his computer logs in the company network. It, you know, the bad guys use that unpatched version of Plex to put a key logger on his system. Then when he logs in, all of a sudden they've got the credentials, they've got, they've even got the, the two FFA information. They're, it's, it's over. Don't let that happen to you. Your identity provider in Siri. Only lets known devices log into apps. But, you know, we could see there's an extra step here. Just because a device is known doesn't mean it's secure <laugh>, right? In fact, plenty of the devices on your fleet like that DevOps laptop should not be trusted.

(00:43:29):
Lots of reasons out of data os insecure apps, you know, personal apps on there. Maybe they've got unencrypted credentials lying around. You know, what they shouldn't have. The problem is they don't. So what happens is, when you're using Okta, if a device isn't compliant, or even if it's not running the Collide agent, you put the Collide agent on all the devices, right? It just can't access your company's SaaS apps or any other resources. It just, you know, it's, the device can't log into your, your company's cloud apps until they fix the problem on their end. So let's say you're you've, you've got a DevOps guy at home. He's u he hasn't updated his browser, right? He's got an old version of Brave or something. Using end user remediation helps drive your fleet to a hundred percent compliance. Because what happens? They get a message, he gets a message, she gets a message saying, your browser's outta date.

(00:44:24):
Here's how to fix it. You, they fix it. And now you're, you're at a hundred percent compliance without involving or even, you know, overwhelming your IT team. They're not even, they don't even have to be involved. They could set, of course, you set the you set the requirements, but then it, the end user fixes stuff without collide. IT teams really don't have any way to solve these compliant is compliance issues or, or stop insecure devices from logging in, but they, using Collide, you can set and enforce compliance across your entire fleet. No, Plex <laugh>, for instance. And here's the cool thing. It's Mac, windows, and Linux. It's completely cross platform. Collide is unique and it makes in that, it makes device compliance part of the authentication process. That's where it's tied in with Okta, right? When a user logs in with Okta collide then alerts the user to compliance issues, prevents those unsecured devices from logging in and gets the user to fix it.

(00:45:20):
It's security you can feel good about. Because Collide provides transparency and respect for users, puts 'em right at the center of their product and users love it cuz it's, you know, it's just a simple lightweight agent doesn't bog 'em down, helps them do the right thing. Don't you think that DevOps person would've loved to have been alerted, Hey, that Plex is outta date. You should fix it before we're gonna let you log in. Don't you think that would've been a good thing? It would've been a good thing. Collide method means fewer support tickets, less frustration, and of course, most importantly, a hundred percent fleet compliance. This is such a great idea. Visit collide.com/ww to learn more or to book a demo. We thank Collide very much for their support over these past couple of years. But we also thank you for your support cuz when you go to that address, you're letting 'em know you saw it on Windows Weekly, K o l i d e collide.com/dub dub, dub dub. Make sure you use that. WW now back to New Zealand and Mexico City <laugh> with Paul Throt and Richard Campbell, our international travelers all around the world.

Paul Thurrott (00:46:29):
There was some late breaking news, Leo. Oh. It's not super, super big, but it's cool. Yeah. this was rumored, or we had heard leaked or leaked or something. We heard about this, but Microsoft just announced they're bringing something called video Super Resolution to Microsoft Edge. It's available now in the Canary Channel there <laugh>. And will make its way to stable over time. But basically what it does is it takes a low resolution video, YouTube, whatever, and appears to upscale it. Wow. Or using machine language. Cuz you gotta get that little AI hook in now. <Laugh> obviously machine

Leo Laporte (00:47:00):
Learning. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That's really interesting. I, so when I downloaded Edge for Mac mm-hmm. <Affirmative> boy, just, that hurts me just to say that. Yeah, I know. Just <laugh> hurt me to

Paul Thurrott (00:47:11):
Hear it.

Leo Laporte (00:47:12):
<Laugh> the top of the page says get the beta version. They kind of, they're kind of encouraging you for some reason. Yeah, yeah. To get the beta version. I did

Paul Thurrott (00:47:21):
That. Well, maybe it's just not as far along on the Mac. I don't know.

Leo Laporte (00:47:23):
I don't know. They, you can scroll down and get the, you know, the sta standard version, but it's below the fold. They really, they That's funny. They, there's a big button at the top says get the

Paul Thurrott (00:47:33):
Beta. You like taking chances. You're a Mac user. I,

Leo Laporte (00:47:35):
Well, I figured. And it's been stable. It's been fine. The only you know, the reason I download it is so I can use Bing chat, you know. Sure. But which works fine on the Mac. It's actually a fine browser.

Rich Campbell (00:47:46):
Which is the, which is the PR win right there, Leo. Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:47:49):
Like, oh, that's always been obvious. That's why they put the little Bing logo in the search pill. It's always been obvious. Right? We want you to use Edge Life has been like,

Paul Thurrott (00:47:58):
Where's Waldo? Like how many B logos can you find in Windows? <Laugh>? You know, <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:48:04):
So

Rich Campbell (00:48:04):
Those car channels that hot. How done all the logos for the car all hidden. No way. Different spots to the car. Yeah, exactly. Look, it's, it's in the center console. It's on the bottom of your seat.

Leo Laporte (00:48:14):
<Laugh> thanks to Kevin ww for posting that in our our Discord. Have you ever wished you could watch your favorite videos? It's like an at t commercial. Have a

Paul Thurrott (00:48:24):
Wish watch. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:48:26):
Your favorite videos and I, it's

Paul Thurrott (00:48:27):
A, you know, a VHS rip on, on YouTube that looks like garbage. It's two 40 p.

Leo Laporte (00:48:33):
We actually know that this upscaling is pretty good because it is on a variety of TVs. I have it on my Nvidia Shield, which has a really interesting AI based up scaler and it actually works fairly well.

Paul Thurrott (00:48:46):
Yeah. Yeah. Why not? Why not? I think about this all the time. I, I, I'm, I'm not gonna switch the edge for this, but hopefully they'll throw it in the chromium and I can get it on brave someday. That'll be nice.

Leo Laporte (00:48:57):
<Laugh>

Rich Campbell (00:48:58):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:48:59):
Oh, you brave users. You, I swear to God.

Paul Thurrott (00:49:03):
Well it's, you know, it's tough when you write all the time. So <laugh> and anyway I keep saying every week I think we're done with quarterly earnings. We're not Dell chimed in recently as well. And

Rich Campbell (00:49:19):
It was beautiful for 'em. They had a great time. They were good. They made a fortune.

Leo Laporte (00:49:23):
They're so

Paul Thurrott (00:49:23):
Rich. They did. We're so, they had a great calendar year and they had a really bad fourth quarter. Does that sound

Leo Laporte (00:49:28):
Like everybody? Yes. Let me guess. Wait a minute. 27% drop in sales on PCs.

Paul Thurrott (00:49:36):
Actually, you know what? It wasn't too bad. The, their client server solutions group, which is the PC business, their revenue. Oh, wait, yeah, sorry. You're right, <laugh>. So

Paul Thurrott (00:49:45):
Annual revenues were down 5%. Quarterly revenues were down 17%.

Leo Laporte (00:49:50):
So, well, that's still, you know,

Paul Thurrott (00:49:52):
Consumer PC revenues were down 40%. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:49:54):
There you go. That's the number. The quarter there's the number Yeah. In a quarter. Yeah. Yeah. That's down. Is that down year over year? So like, this quarter was 40% down over last year's

Rich Campbell (00:50:03):
Quarter. And this is the conversation we'd have all longest, like last year was a bumper year,

Paul Thurrott (00:50:07):
Right? Yep.

Rich Campbell (00:50:09):
As the supply chain started filling in again, and people caught up on orders. And so comparing it is bad.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:15):
Well, but we have to, I mean, you know, it's, I, they didn't, I try

Rich Campbell (00:50:18):
To look at it against 2019 just because

Paul Thurrott (00:50:20):
Yeah. They didn't make, I guess I'm too lazy to have made that comparison. I didn't do it, but neither did Dell. I, I think the the thing I'm looking for here, though, and we've seen it with Lenovo and HP is some kind of a prediction for the future. Like, we think things are going to do pretty good. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and they didn't quite get there. They're gonna focus on the profitable se segments of the PC market which, you know, gaming premium PCs, that kind of thing. And they said, you know, twentie of 21, historic, the PC market slowed markedly in June last year and experienced the sharp decline in calendar q4. Yeah, no kidding. <Laugh>, you know, like, yeah, duh. So they didn't really offer anything about a timeframe. You know, Lenovo and Dell both sort of, sorry, Lenovo and HP both sort of said, Hey, by the end of this calendar year, we think we're gonna see things even out a little bit. So we'll see. We'll see.

Speaker 5 (00:51:12):
We'll see. You still seeing,

Paul Thurrott (00:51:14):
Alright. This is the, to me is the big story. This is the big, this is the big one. And I'll, I'll just preface this by saying anyone who's watched an Apple product announcement, we'll be familiar with this notion of marketing, where you have to walk this fine line between saying, this new thing is awesome, because that last thing was a piece of crap, right? The, the only way you can have double digit anything over the thing that you sold before is that this, something had to have been wrong with the other one. You know? So you have to kind of wa you have to walk that line. Like, we want people to upgrade. We want people to buy this thing. That's part of the marketing. Obviously you can also compare your product to competitors, but, you know, Apple's kind of famous for this 17 x 20 x 30 x 40 x whatever, improvement in whatever the thing is.

(00:52:01):
 We just had a conversation briefly about this notion that a AI or a personal digital assistance we're sort of the predecessor to what we're seeing today in ai. In fact, one might wonder why these AI front ends weren't going there first, right? The natural place to have a conversation about anything is with the technology that's there to have a conversation with you, right? Using natural user interfaces, like speaking, right? Instead of typing into a search box. But they're not, and who was it that did this article? I think it was the Financial Times basically was talking about the decline of these digital assistance, which interestingly was an article I was starting to write a few weeks ago called The Diminished Voice. But the idea here is that there were so many of these things, Cortana, Google Assistant, Siri Bixby, which I always think of as the name of the guy that turns into the Hulk, but whatever. There's a bunch of these things. And now in order to push ai, these companies all have to distance themselves from the failures of these products. Most of them are still in the market. I mean, Cortana basically is the biggest failure of the bunch in the sense that Microsoft kind of gave up on it, is isn't really pushing it as a brand or a product or whatever in most places. But they got a quote from Sat and Adela who said they meaning personal digits, digital assistance, were all dumb as a rock

Leo Laporte (00:53:26):
<Laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (00:53:27):
Whether it's Cortana or, or Google Assistant or Siri,

Rich Campbell (00:53:31):
Still anthropomorphizing.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:32):
They do not work.

Leo Laporte (00:53:34):
Yeah. But that's kind of a cool opportunity. I mean, wouldn't you like a chatty little device in your house that goes on and on and on, <laugh>, of course, it gives you fake facts. I mean, wouldn't you like that?

Paul Thurrott (00:53:44):
But, okay. But if you, but like, yeah, like I said earlier, though, you're in your house, you get your little echo device or whatever, and I, maybe you're an older person and you're lonely, or maybe you know, you're me and you know, your wife's gone and you're own by yourself, and you, you know, you wanna start interacting for whatever reason you haven't. Or you wanna

Leo Laporte (00:54:01):
Learn Spanish, you might wanna learn

Paul Thurrott (00:54:03):
Spanish. I don't mean I'm rim.

Leo Laporte (00:54:04):
Imagine having a dialogue with Quartana. I want learning Spanish. Right? Right. Wouldn't

Paul Thurrott (00:54:09):
That be cool? Why wouldn't this, well, why isn't this like we have, in other words, there's something about these assistants where they've basically failed. They're used to play mu or start a playlist or, you know, start some music playing, ask the weather. Tell me a joke. I mean, what's, what's the, we're talking about like 10 functions, basically, that most people use these things for mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, billions and billions of investments from all these companies. And this is what we have. We have a thing that can crack a joke and tell us the weather. No,

Leo Laporte (00:54:34):
No. But be patient. I think this is imminent.

Paul Thurrott (00:54:38):
What he's saying is, th this stuff is dead <laugh>. Like, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:54:41):
But everybody's saying that. But that's, without this, that's because my you know, Amazon lost 10 billion on a Right, right. You know, quarte, he's easy for Microsoft to say it's 10 cuz it is for Microsoft. We

Paul Thurrott (00:54:53):
Tried it and it didn't work.

Leo Laporte (00:54:54):
Didn't, didn't work. But they, they stopped too soon. How,

Paul Thurrott (00:54:58):
How was this

Leo Laporte (00:54:58):
Hey to this? That's, I'm just saying Exactly.

Paul Thurrott (00:55:01):
They stopped. That's exactly what I'm saying. Yeah. Yep. I, I don't understand why this isn't the interface,

Leo Laporte (00:55:06):
But I believe me, apple interface, it's just a matter of time. Apple and Google and Amazon are gonna do it. I guarantee you. There's just a matter of time before they add. They

Rich Campbell (00:55:15):
Say, guys, the, the, the distinction here is that the old systems, which were machine learning models, right? I mean, all of them were, we had voice before, before machine learning models for voice. Right? It was really bad back when you had to train it, you know, we stopped needing to train it when they started using these adversarial network approaches to machine learning to give up where they were able to train against a lot of voice data. So it worked quite reliably. The real change here is the large language model, the G P T style thing, where you have, you have some concept of context, although the context is still quite primitive, and you have a much larger vocabulary and probabilistic estimation of what the la what the statement is about. Right? It's, it's now index the language well enough to know what the next words are likely to be and what the intended meaning is. It

Leo Laporte (00:56:06):
Could read your mind,

Paul Thurrott (00:56:08):
You know, I Anyone else, is

Leo Laporte (00:56:09):
There a technical reason though, Richard? Why? I mean, I understand they're not gonna rush this because it could be a disaster we've already

Rich Campbell (00:56:16):
Learned. I would argue there are rushing it, but I,

Paul Thurrott (00:56:18):
I was just gonna say, well,

Leo Laporte (00:56:19):
Kidding me, I mean the, the addition of ml more large language miles to yeah, right. Voice clients. But I bet, and I, so I understand they might want to say, well, gosh, you know, we don't want 'em to be chatty. Kathy, how do we, you know, how do we make this work? But there's no, is there a technical reason why they couldn't do it? It's not the cpu,

Rich Campbell (00:56:38):
The, because the system doesn't actually have any intent. It baffles you with a lot of words. Right? That's literally what it's doing. If you look at its response is it's really throwing a bunch of sentences at you like a, a, a a high school student who hasn't done his homework and needs to say something

Leo Laporte (00:56:57):
<Laugh> No, but I, I'm just thinking. So, okay. Obviously when you said a timer, you don't wanna say, let's talk about the nature of time. Okay. But, but when you, but when you ask it, how that actually is, is Richard Burton, it could say something much more useful, the kind of thing being chat search results might say, which is,

Paul Thurrott (00:57:16):
You actually just highlighted my biggest complaint about these things. So I'll ask them, I'll you ask. I'm trying to think about how,

Leo Laporte (00:57:21):
Oh, nowadays they say, Hey, by the way, did you know you can also find out what color shirt you're wearing tomorrow? Just

Paul Thurrott (00:57:28):
Google. No, it's Google that don't show me this photo anymore on a, on smartest spot. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:57:32):
Yeah. I can't

Paul Thurrott (00:57:32):
Do that. Okay. Just to be sure. You want me not to show you this photo anymore, is that correct? Yeah. Yes. So they can be better. I will not show you this. What, what are you talking about? Just do it. But

Leo Laporte (00:57:41):
Adding, adding large language models to that could make that better. Right? Oh

Paul Thurrott (00:57:46):
God, I hope so. That

Leo Laporte (00:57:47):
Makes, and it's not, I mean, it's not an issue of the CPU in these things because it's not doing anything but hearing your trigger word. Yeah. And then sending the rest back to the home office. So it's the home office, it could be the

Rich Campbell (00:57:57):
Cost. So those, since you're making, they don't require any contact, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:58:02):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:58:03):
Well, but again, I often, we've all given up, but in the past, I

Paul Thurrott (00:58:07):
Still, so I've

Leo Laporte (00:58:08):
Asked them factual information, you know, I still do from that time.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:12):
To me, one of the big conversations we have in the Microsoft space especially, but also just in the broader world, but, but because Microsoft missed out on mobile, right? Microsoft missed out on web search and, and doesn't dominate the web, you know is well, what's the next wave? And whatever that thing is, you know, Microsoft wants to be part of that thing. Like, what's the thing that's gonna do to mobile? What mobile did to pc, right? Not, it didn't replace it. I mean, well, it did actually, it's, the PC still exists, obviously. It's not like the PC goes away, but now the volume platform for personal computing is mobile or whatever, right? And so there have been things like I ot, which, you know, from a numbers perspective makes sense, you know, vr, which never made any sense. And now people talking about ai, but, you know, I think AI is something like voice assistance, where it just becomes a part of, so it becomes the part of all those other things, right? That AI will be embedded in everything. It will become an ingredient, you know, if you will, of all this stuff. And that, that's why the, the, the crapping on personal assistance doesn't make sense to me, because this is the thing that will finally make that thing make sense.

Leo Laporte (00:59:15):
Honestly. this quote for such an Adela is gonna be his Steve Bomber on the iPhone quote. I

Paul Thurrott (00:59:21):
Okay, because he, he was right.

Leo Laporte (00:59:23):
<Laugh> Bomber was not right on the

Paul Thurrott (00:59:25):
Iphone. He was, he was absolutely right. What was the quote?

Leo Laporte (00:59:30):
The quote? Was it cost too much? Okay, you're saying, because he was right on that and they dropped the price, but it, but he also,

Paul Thurrott (00:59:35):
He literally dropped the price by 33%.

Leo Laporte (00:59:37):
He also,

Paul Thurrott (00:59:38):
Two months later, and

Leo Laporte (00:59:38):
It doesn't have keyboard. And our business own users don't want keyboards. Well, and we're doing mighty fine with Windows phone. All of this was in the same quote. So that one little part, yeah, maybe they should have, they

Paul Thurrott (00:59:50):
600%, like all people try to prove a point. I'm selective here. <Laugh>. So the

Leo Laporte (00:59:53):
Point is, and the iPhone now costs $1,200 and sells quite well. In fact, it's outselling Windows phone. Last time I checked,

Paul Thurrott (01:00:02):
I'll have to look that one up. But

Leo Laporte (01:00:03):
I, I think <laugh>, I'm just saying, I think Saja might be as wrong on this as bomber was, I

Paul Thurrott (01:00:11):
Don't know what possessed this man to say this to the financial times, other than the fact that, like you said, Microsoft is the one company, they don't have it. Group that is not, is not really doing it anymore. Yeah. But, but, and, and by the way, and I, I'm not suggesting that they should bring Cortana back, put it back on the Windows task bar, blah, blah, blah, whatever. I don't mean it like that, but that kind of natural voice interaction with people, which by the way, was something Microsoft tested as an add-on for Windows Mobile back in the, I mean, a million years ago, like early days of Windows Mobile is still the, the right thing in a lot of places, right? It's the right thing in a car. It's the right thing. If you're an older person, it's the right thing. If you're away from a device and you're in a room and you want the lights to be dimmer, or the volume to be louder, whatever it is, like, it's, it's obviously the right thing. And you don't have to have a brand, you don't have, you know, whatever it is you're using you know, it can be there. And, and maybe that's the approach Microsoft has taken, but he's kind of crapping on this market because it, it sounds sour. Like we're not part of this anymore. So it was terrible. Like we were the only ones smart enough to get out of it. And it's like, I don't know, I think this is gonna work great for these other products.

(01:01:24):
You know? Yeah. This guy Sayq says, bring Cortana back to Halo. Right? That's the only place Microsoft should bring Cotana back. I couldn't agree more. I

Leo Laporte (01:01:31):
Understand. I wonder, I mean, look at Microsoft has chat. G P T. Yeah. I think the reason we don't like Amazon's Echo and Google's voice assistant in Siri, and in its day Cortana is cuz they were too stupid. But, but if they, if sudden, I mean, it might well be that Amazon, of course Amazon did just lay off like 20% of the Echo team. But

Paul Thurrott (01:01:53):
No, but I'm actually, I'm agreeing with you. I I, I think this is the thing that makes those things around better. And Microsoft doesn't have exclusive access to

Leo Laporte (01:02:00):
No. But they could bring back Cortana and, and say Yeah. Mm-Hmm. It wasn't useful. No,

Paul Thurrott (01:02:05):
But well, but where, where, where would it make sense to do that? You know, what, what does

Leo Laporte (01:02:09):
Well, what they already have in a way. Cuz that's what, that's what the,

Paul Thurrott (01:02:12):
That's the problem. The problem is where's the user facing thing where it makes sense? I mean, one of the things that integrating Cortana into Windows 10 proved was that integrating Katana into Windows 10 made no sense at all. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> that's not the right place for voice.

Rich Campbell (01:02:24):
Well, in integrating be a relevant point. Like it was just there Yeah. You didn't do anything. Right. Right. It context is what matters. You

Paul Thurrott (01:02:32):
Could use it. Yeah. You could use it to Yeah. Use your voice to make an appointment. Yeah. I guess. But you know what? I, I think we're all, sometimes

Rich Campbell (01:02:37):
Anyone maybe depend on what app you're using. It we keep, if you trust it. Yeah. We scheduling app, it was terrible.

Paul Thurrott (01:02:43):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Most people are comfortable with clicking something on Google Calendar or whatever they're using and making the appointment. They just do that. It's a rote It's the way we work on PCs. It's just the way it is.

Rich Campbell (01:02:52):
I'm interested to look at like, the integration they're doing with Dynamics. Yeah. Because ERPs are complicated. And if you could actually add, ask broad stroke business questions of an E R P system mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and have it know where to fetch the data to answer that question meaningfully.

Paul Thurrott (01:03:09):
It's the same trust problem. It's powerful. Right? It is. Totally. You're completely right. And yeah, we can't rely on this thing to get the data of an event right. On the web. At what point do we trust it to collate all that business information?

Rich Campbell (01:03:22):
No, I used to pay interns to collate that information. They got it wrong too. <Laugh>, right?

Paul Thurrott (01:03:27):
That's

Rich Campbell (01:03:27):
<Laugh>. Now you have digital, you paid the lab.

Leo Laporte (01:03:30):
No, I think they'd get it right. More likely than an intern. And, and this is the reason it's the same, was the same thing with voice dictation. Voice dictation in a general way was often problematic. But when it was in a specific field, when it was in medicine, for instance mm-hmm. <Affirmative> or in law, it was very good because it was a constrained domain. And so in bi, you're talking if you wanna say, well, you know, how many widgets does I sell last year? And what's the trend? That's a very constrained domain. I think that's where I can get it. Right. It's not gonna make up facts in that context.

Paul Thurrott (01:04:01):
That's a good point. I mean, Microsoft kind of has had this technology for a while. This sounds a lot like the point behind the Microsoft graph that you have this body of I don't wanna call it intelligent data inside of your business that comes from different sources. And you want to ask, you know, who is the person in my organization that knows the most about this topic because I'm writing or working on some project that involves this, that kind of thing. It's, it's kind of a neat, I I I think AI makes this better too. I I, this is, this is an obvious area for, in fact, it's arguably an early example of ai

Leo Laporte (01:04:34):
And that's the best use right now of chat GTP is summarize this text for me. It does a very, it's very good at that. You know, they just announced that Slack's gonna have access Yep. To chat G P T and I applied immediately and I said, what do you want to use it for? And I said, summarizing conversations, because in that regard, I would trust it. It's a, it's a much more limited domain and it's very good at that. You know, where it gets in trouble is when you say, you know, as as our friend Chris Breen did, who is Chris Breen, and it said he was dead. That's <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:05:07):
That's a terrible way to receive that news.

Leo Laporte (01:05:09):
<Laugh>.

Rich Campbell (01:05:10):
What is shock? And there probably isn't. Chris Breen, that was dead. Just thought that one. I'm

Paul Thurrott (01:05:13):
Also, I have to say I'm impressed that Christopher Breen is so alive. This is the guy who used to write for McWell, right? Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:05:18):
Yeah. He's a great guy. Good friend.

Paul Thurrott (01:05:19):
I like Chris. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:05:20):
Wonderful guy. Well, he was ta he was taking off on another this has all happened on Master On, so you might have missed it. But there, a professor of AI had asked, had

Paul Thurrott (01:05:30):
Asked the little of, a little

Leo Laporte (01:05:32):
You might have missed. No, actually, you know what, Paul, you've been very active on Twitch social

Paul Thurrott (01:05:36):
Media. I have just started auto posting everything I write to the bass

Leo Laporte (01:05:39):
On, so I saw that. Oh, it's auto posting. I'm well,

Paul Thurrott (01:05:41):
No, no. I'm writing on there. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:05:43):
I see you a lot. No,

Paul Thurrott (01:05:44):
No, I see. That's something I do on Twitter as well. So I'm, it's Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:05:48):
Yeah. No, I'm aware of it. I'm, believe me, I see all, I know all <laugh>. Okay. at least when it comes to tooting. But yeah, it was a AI professor who tooted that he'd asked chat g p t about himself and was informed that he was dead. And then Chris did it. What? And he was dead. I keep trying to get it to say I'm dead, but I haven't yet. So I'm, there's a certain honor in having chat. G p t pronounce your demise. <Laugh>. Yeah. I like it. I am I honestly dead

Paul Thurrott (01:06:16):
Inside. Is that the same thing? Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:06:18):
Dead inside. Yeah. I didn't think of that. Yeah. I honestly think this is, this is gonna be the savior of these voice assistants. They've just been too stupid up to now, but it has to be done. Right.

Paul Thurrott (01:06:29):
No, that, that, and that was sort of my original, I didn't say it that way, but yeah, that was what I was trying to get to. I Yes, I agree with you. I, I, I, this is, this is is going to what this, geez, let me form a sentence. Chachi tvb, can you form an English sentence for me? This is what's gonna make these things make more sense, I think. Yeah, for sure. Yep. The problem for like, not just Microsoft space, but the whole world is, and you just mentioned Slack is a good example. Every announcement we see this year is gonna have the worded AI in it. There's no doubt about it. Yeah. So we discussed this

Leo Laporte (01:07:00):
Notion as well. This is use blockchain, right?

Paul Thurrott (01:07:02):
Yeah, Mike. Yep. Yep. Linux was like this one. You know, if you wanted to, you had a startup and you wanted investors, you were Linux, you know, or you were Yeah. This is, this is,

Rich Campbell (01:07:11):
Or you were cloud mm-hmm.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:12):
<Affirmative>. This is the new hotness. So

Rich Campbell (01:07:14):
This is the flavor of the week.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:15):
Yeah. Microsoft's been at this for a little while. There're heating that up. So the latest Microsoft 365 monthly roundup is all ai, it's AI features and teams, premium AI features and PowerPoint. You know, it kind of goes on and on. So that's what's gonna happen. But

Rich Campbell (01:07:28):
I'm, I just wonder who wrote the letter, right? Like <laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (01:07:32):
Right?

Rich Campbell (01:07:33):
The, there's the internet title wave letter from Gates where it's like everybody has to implement an internet feature even when it's bad. Right? And then there was the security, you know, the, the trustworthy computing letter. Yep. Like, so who wrote the letter? Who

Paul Thurrott (01:07:45):
Has Yeah. Who has

Rich Campbell (01:07:46):
Tower?

Paul Thurrott (01:07:47):
Yeah. I I have to assume it came from Satcha. Nadela, right? I mean,

Rich Campbell (01:07:51):
Point, possibly. I'm Yeah. Bill's there, but I don't know that he would write a letter.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:56):
Yeah. I I think they're trying to keep that one quiet. 

Leo Laporte (01:08:00):
Completely parenthetically though, this is why we love this beat, because stuff like this comes along and everything's I know. Up in the Yes. Thrown

Paul Thurrott (01:08:10):
Up in the air. So when, yes. My God. Yes. when I got started in this industry, the PC revolution had already happened, right? Apple started, Microsoft started Doss Windows PC versus Mac. And, and I missed it. And I, I, I devoured every book about that era that was ever written. I, I, I hated not being part of it, and I always felt bad about that. And then when my career started in the mid 1990s you know, windows 95 happened, the internet happened, Netscape anti, and all of a sudden I was in the middle of it and I was like, oh, thank God. <Laugh>. Like this is, you know, I, and I was where I wanted to be, not at Microsoft or Apple, but covering it outside the Yeah. Covering it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting because there are waves of that and you think you keep thinking, or something as stupid as, you know, windows is obviously on the decline in the sense that it's not the center of personal computing. And you think, my God, well, it's over. Like, you know, we all gonna start writing about smartphones or, you know, whatever other nonsense. And the truth is it's cyclical. You know, there are things like AI is gonna dramatically impact Windows a product that you know, has been around since 1985.

Leo Laporte (01:09:21):
Well, then there's the question can is, can the incumbents capitalize? Or are they just gonna stumble as, which by the way, they ha sort of have so

Paul Thurrott (01:09:29):
Far. Well, I, so yeah. So I, the, the, the truly the companies you wanna look up to are the companies. Like when Apple looked at the iPod and said, who, what's gonna replace this? And they, and they decided it would be a phone, and they said, well, let's make a phone. Let's do it. Let's disrupt our own selves. You know, I think Microsoft's AI push here, although I think it's a little risky and it's been rushed out the door, is a good example of a company that is the ultimate bill of technology that doesn't have a good impression with young people, or whatever's not like a center of anyone's lives anymore is their attempt to reassert themselves. They are the second biggest tech company in the world. Right. and it's, it, and it's, this is a helpful reminder that they're not ibm. Right. Which is always their biggest pet peeve. Like, we don't want to end up like ibm. And they kind of did. Right. So this is, I I respect this attempt on that level of them trying to reassert their influence over the industry

Rich Campbell (01:10:25):
And mean they've been pouring energy into AI because it was an Azure consumer. That's correct. For a long time. Right. They need products that depend on Azure. Yes. and, and they've been building a bunch of them. The thing that you've seen with the so-called economic downturn and the constraints is that they have now decided, this one seems to have traction the hundred million from Chad G pt. They've caught funding to a lot of those other experimental Azure consumers like HoloLens. Yeah. And, and they're going to double down on this one. Okay. So

Paul Thurrott (01:10:57):
This is very much tied to this Cortana thing, you know, do you know, why would Microsoft bring back Cortana? They wouldn't. But you know what? Microsoft is gonna, you, their Microsoft Azure will be the thing that powers the AA bus company that does disrupt the industry, right? Yeah. That's, if it doesn't come from Google,

Leo Laporte (01:11:14):
They're selling the picks and the Levis. Exactly. That's

Paul Thurrott (01:11:16):
Right. Yeah. That's right. And so, and this is the conversation we had about things in the past, like smart cars or whatever, where you may not see a Microsoft logo in a dashboard, right. It might be an Apple thing or a Google thing, or whatever it is. But the backend for a lot of the stuff that goes through that car is gonna be Microsoft. Right? And, and this is a, and by the way I'm describing I b M here, of course. But this is a, a very rich future for the company. I, I appreciate they're trying to like, Hey, bing, still a thing. See? Yeah. Okay. Maybe. But I, I think the real success of this is gonna be getting developers and customers to adopt this stuff through Azure. And and maybe one of them who doesn't have a market to protect, like Microsoft and Google and Apple do, or Amazon or whatever, will make this innovative thing that changes the world. And you need to have something as powerful and big as Azure on the back of you can't do it yourself.

Rich Campbell (01:12:08):
In a way, and this gets back to your original comment, Leo, that, you know, normally incumbents do not disrupt their markets.

Leo Laporte (01:12:14):
Right? Right.

Rich Campbell (01:12:16):
But now we, we are now experimenting with technologies that have such high infrastructure costs. You need to be a cloud company, essentially, to pull it up. Yeah. And so there's only three players,

Leo Laporte (01:12:28):
Right? Right. Yeah. That is the big difference, isn't there? Although you couldn't mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you couldn't, you know, you couldn't have made the iPhone as a garage startup either. No. I mean,

Paul Thurrott (01:12:39):
No, but it's still, well, this

Leo Laporte (01:12:42):
Is easier than that, frankly, but No, especially because you have enabling technologies from companies like Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:47):
They were smartphones before the iPhone, right. From a variety of companies, different platforms. There were app models or all kinds of things. I mean, what set the iPhone apart was they looked at that stuff and said, well, this is crap. Let's make something that's better in every way. So it's still, it, it's still that kind of disruptive example. Yeah. It's perfect. I mean, it's, it's the ultimate one.

Leo Laporte (01:13:05):
And nowadays you've got people like you know, nothing, the nothing phone, the essential phone. You've got other companies trying, you know, scrap, none of them succeeded,

Paul Thurrott (01:13:14):
But trying. Yeah. 

Leo Laporte (01:13:15):
It is possible to do. It's a little bit more possible to do that. The fair, fun.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:19):
Well, you'll, you'll have, there are indie video games that take off and become very successful. Yeah. They may not rival, you know, call of Duty or Warcraft or something like that, but it's still possible to you know, well, the, so actually that's a good example. Now they think of it Fortnite or this actually what's, Fortnite wasn't first, I'm sorry. This, this notion of Battle Royal came outta nowhere, basically like Pub G maybe was one of the first ones. It

Rich Campbell (01:13:41):
Was, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:42):
Yeah. So that came outta nowhere and completely disrupted Call of Duty and other shooters. Right. To the point where they had to integrate that style of game plan to their own games. I mean, that was a good, that's actually a great

Rich Campbell (01:13:52):
Example. Important Night, overwhelmed Pub G with a, with a different play system, right. With building, right.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:58):
Yeah. Right. Yeah, because that actually, that game was originally just above building, and I think they saw Pub G and they changed it to make it more like that. Yeah. I think, I think that's the story.

Rich Campbell (01:14:07):
No, that think is fair.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:09):
So,

Rich Campbell (01:14:10):
And they were, they were running on somebody's infrastructure, obviously. That's

Paul Thurrott (01:14:14):
Yeah. They sure were,

Rich Campbell (01:14:15):
They were running on unlikely on Amazon.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:18):
Even something like PUBG was so big that there were at least three quarters where Microsoft said that an unnamed third party impacted Xbox revenues in such a dramatic way that they had to call it out and they wouldn't say what it was, but it was pubg.

Leo Laporte (01:14:30):
Right. That's hysterical. Yeah. And I remember how dominant, an exciting Pub G was right up till Fortnite came along. Right.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:38):
Until Fortnite, that was the end of that. Now there's, you know, there's so many of those games now. You know, but whatever. So Fortnite is a, a force unto itself, but,

Leo Laporte (01:14:45):
But that's actually, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:46):
So

Leo Laporte (01:14:46):
That's also instructional because Yep. Pub G was the first, it's often not the first, as you pointed That's right. Out's, right. 

Rich Campbell (01:14:54):
It's that

Leo Laporte (01:14:55):
Wins, that wins, right.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:57):
So there's, there's some company, some guy in a garage or some whatever it is, some small team. I, there's no doubt there's gonna be this incredible innovation that will occur in the AI space. It's, that doesn't mean Microsoft or Google or Amazon can't <laugh> to, you know, right. Truly innovative and amazing work. And, and

Rich Campbell (01:15:14):
Doesn't mean, and quite possibly it's running on one of their clouds.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:17):
It's just, but I think, yeah. That, I think that's gonna be the ultimate outcome here. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> it's, it's, it's the re it's, I didn't read the full article in the Wall Street Journal, but I think one of the problems for Google was it's hard to, you know, to disrupt yourself. You don't, this thing is powerful. It's little dicey, yet it's early, but they, they dominate search so completely mm-hmm. <Affirmative> you, you don't want to throw a wrench into that. You know, it's hard for a company like that to do that.

Leo Laporte (01:15:41):
Hard

Rich Campbell (01:15:42):
For them to react as strongly as he is, is like, they're abundantly aware that they Oh, yeah. Search is a long way removed from its original intent. Right? Yeah. It became primarily a vehicle for advertising. It

Paul Thurrott (01:15:51):
Became, then Schiff, they

Leo Laporte (01:15:52):
Know that ified as we saw. Yeah. Yeah. This is ex existential for them. It's interesting because AWS has been dominant in cloud, and, and much as Google's been dominant in search, it has looked unassailable. But, and then what's kind of interesting, do you think that the ultimately they're gonna win in this? No, because they didn't, they didn't do a Google and, and, and Microsoft did with the TPUs and, you know, building those special machines just for building ML databases and things like that. Right. Remember,

Paul Thurrott (01:16:22):
I, I wouldn't count them out. I, I, I, I feel like they're powerful enough to recover in the same way that I sort of feel like Google is powerful enough in search to recover. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:16:31):
That it is an opportunity for the, the also rands to

Paul Thurrott (01:16:34):
It sure. Is to catch up.

Leo Laporte (01:16:36):
Yep. I love, there's somebody there's a subreddit called Data Is Beautiful <laugh> Okay. Which I love. Yeah. And there's constantly posts of their videos of the shift in, well, as an example, one I just saw was market share os market share. And so they'll start in like 1981. Yeah. And they'll have a pie chart, and then the video goes year by year's. Like windows, windows, <laugh>, it goes, and windows slowly envelops the world. Sure. And it really get points out to you that, you know, you could be Ms. Doss in, or, you know, I don't know what in ni I guess Atari actually, when this started Sure. Atari was this big wedge <laugh> of the Atari os, and you can be at Atari in 1981,

Paul Thurrott (01:17:21):
The Atari 800 was going to be the first IBM pc. They already reached the deal. Wow. And it was the, whoever the CEO of IBM once at the time, said, are you telling me that the world's biggest computer maker can't make a computer?

Leo Laporte (01:17:34):
Oh.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:35):
Mg And that's why they made their own thing. Oh. And they had to rush it to market, which is why they did off the shelf parts,

Leo Laporte (01:17:39):
Which is why it was I had no idea. Yeah. Crazy. And you and I both, well, I, no, you might have been an Amiga guy by then, but I was a big Atari guy in the early days.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:47):
I was a commuter guy and then an Omega guy. But I actually, you know, looking, not knowing more about it now, the 800 as the predecessor to the Omega was clearly the superior machine from a hardware perspective.

Rich Campbell (01:17:58):
Yeah. I was a service guy, then I repaired them all. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:18:02):
That's great. My first computer. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:18:04):
The 800 XL was by far the most durable machine. The, the 64 wasn't bad. The, I made a lot of money repairing the 1540 ones because they didn't have back socks on the rails. Those were search and stroke the head right off the end of the rails. That was good.

Paul Thurrott (01:18:17):
If you bumped the table, you can can throw the head off. Yeah. Those things were horrible.

Leo Laporte (01:18:20):
Yeah. You wanna, you wanna see, I, I found the here's, lemme see if I can show you the video because this is, this is

Paul Thurrott (01:18:26):
Oh, this is the OS

Leo Laporte (01:18:27):
Market. Yeah. The os market share. It's instructional in the sense that nothing is, nothing is permanent. Right. So

Rich Campbell (01:18:35):
Guy was a tri off guy.

Leo Laporte (01:18:37):
T Yeah. Trash 80

Rich Campbell (01:18:39):
Tre could be supposed, could be right in the heart there.

Leo Laporte (01:18:41):
Leo. This is 1978. It starts, yeah. 40% of the market. Let's see if I can play this video. Oh, and then Commodore's growing, there's growing, there's Apple Dos Atari Doss is the pink one. See, it's getting bigger and bigger as trash Doss goes away.

Paul Thurrott (01:18:57):
Sure.

Leo Laporte (01:18:59):
I wish I could move this a little faster, but you see, and we're now in the eighties and all of a sudden, ibm, Ms. Doss with the IBM PC that

Paul Thurrott (01:19:06):
Nation com Commodor wins right there, <laugh>, and

Leo Laporte (01:19:08):
Then stop in 85 and the C 64

Paul Thurrott (01:19:10):
And mega happened, and that was the end of that <laugh>. So

Leo Laporte (01:19:13):
Apples shrinking, Ms. Dos and PC Doss is shrinking too. Ms. Doss is Yeah. Is kind of taken over. We're now in the, in the late nineties late eighties. Now let's go into the nineties. And boy, boy, that blue slice, which is Ms. Duss,

Paul Thurrott (01:19:28):
Nothing, will never lose to anything big. Oh, by the way, there's a good example of the company disrupting itself,

Leo Laporte (01:19:33):
Right? It just killed it. Oh, sorry. I I messed up <laugh>. We'll never know what happened after 1992. Sorry, <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:19:41):
Oh, speaking of which, I got a book coming out soon about what happened. And

Leo Laporte (01:19:45):
<Laugh> forget the animated graphic let me

Paul Thurrott (01:19:49):
Let me, let me spoiler alert you. 

Leo Laporte (01:19:52):
What did

Paul Thurrott (01:19:53):
I do? Yeah. Things change.

Leo Laporte (01:19:55):
Yep. If you want for the whole thing. Kids go to Date is beautiful subreddit date it. Oh, wait a minute. We're, let's see, how did I, how do I speed it up? There it is. I can get back into the, back to the future. And you see windows.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:08):
Okay. So there's windows taking over for dos.

Leo Laporte (01:20:10):
Yep. Yeah. And there's Windows N team. Windows 98, windows 95. Linnux is shrinking Mac,

Paul Thurrott (01:20:16):
It actually becomes all just windows.

Leo Laporte (01:20:18):
Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:20:18):
There'll be no line for me.

Leo Laporte (01:20:20):
<Laugh>.

Speaker 6 (01:20:20):
You know what? There is no line for me. Well, there it is. There it is. Oh, Emmy. Little line, little line. 0.7%. Little bye. Bye-Bye. Little

Leo Laporte (01:20:29):
Line. Terrible. Isn't that funny? Yeah. Yeah. These

Paul Thurrott (01:20:32):
Things, nothing can go wrong now.

Leo Laporte (01:20:34):
I mean, the data is beautiful as all about data visualization

Rich Campbell (01:20:38):
Of XP is astonishing. Look at

Leo Laporte (01:20:40):
That. Just, yeah. Yeah. This is 2008. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:20:43):
So here comes

Leo Laporte (01:20:44):
Vista. I think the animations, the visualizations like this of data can be very instructive. Yeah. Because you sure. You know, we live in this, so we don't see it. We're like fish and water. We don't see the water, but no,

Rich Campbell (01:20:54):
These, these are the waves that we swam through.

Leo Laporte (01:20:56):
Yeah. And it really is a big one. Makos is, is starting to grow. We're in the 2015 timeframe. This is, yeah. No,

Paul Thurrott (01:21:05):
Macros is pretty much the same for about

Leo Laporte (01:21:07):
15, for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. Lennox Dill, a tiny slice. That's the little orange slice at the top there. Yeah. Windows 10. Windows seven. See the red,

Paul Thurrott (01:21:17):
I mean, windows overall you know, there was a point where it, you know, 85% or something, it's, it's down, it's, it's probably closer to seventies.

Leo Laporte (01:21:22):
It comes Windows 11. Whoa.

Speaker 6 (01:21:26):
Woo.

Leo Laporte (01:21:27):
And now we're in the present.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:29):
So what we need is this graphic, but for all platforms. So include like mobile and, you know. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:21:34):
That's,

Paul Thurrott (01:21:35):
You leave, that was the big

Rich Campbell (01:21:36):
Point of iOS.

Leo Laporte (01:21:37):
I think if you did mobile all of those other slices would be so small that

Paul Thurrott (01:21:41):
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:21:43):
Wouldn't be that interesting.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:45):
Well, it, I'd be be fascinating just to watch the shift Right? From desktop to

Leo Laporte (01:21:48):
Mobile. I'll ask them. Okay. <laugh>, I'll ask the sub edit. Hey,

Rich Campbell (01:21:52):
Are we done with ai? Have we talked it through today?

Paul Thurrott (01:21:55):
Yeah. Just real quick, I just, if you want to go see some of this, and it may be a different style of presentation. Brave Search and Duck dot Go. Both added similar features where they try to answer your question at the top. They cite the sources, and then they give you the

Leo Laporte (01:22:09):
I

Rich Campbell (01:22:10):
Told you I like this metaphor being an ai obviously doing this as well. This is jam your summary. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, give it footnotes. This is what I pulled it

Paul Thurrott (01:22:18):
From. Oh, do. Yeah. And do you need more? Here's the list

Leo Laporte (01:22:21):
I told you this month ago with Neva, but nobody listened.

Paul Thurrott (01:22:26):
You and your Neva and your Mastodon and

Leo Laporte (01:22:29):
Like you

Paul Thurrott (01:22:30):
Linn's not your lisp and your

Leo Laporte (01:22:32):
Yeah, I do have a, I guess I have a F you really?

Paul Thurrott (01:22:34):
What are you, what are

Leo Laporte (01:22:35):
You? I don't want to be in the mainstream

Rich Campbell (01:22:37):
<Laugh>. Guess it'll Bere and Pearl.

Leo Laporte (01:22:39):
Yeah. I did Pearl Pearl's. All I, I did that a long time ago. Grip, I'm a very, I'm good at Grip, in fact. Well the guy who wrote the book on Grip, Jonathan Friedl, I have an autographed copy of his Mastering Grip second edition somewhere because and he's, some sent me a nice little note because I, I, again, <laugh>, I've been recommending it for years. <Laugh>, I'm a big EMAX fan too. You might as well throw that one in as well. Yeah. E max. But I, you know why, cuz I know I learned very early on in technology. It isn't always the biggest slice of the pie. That's the best. Mcdonald's sells more hamburgers than anybody else. Are they

Paul Thurrott (01:23:21):
The best? Are you suggesting that they, Ford Eser was never the best car in the world, Leo. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:23:26):
Exactly. I like, I'm an iconoclasts, I think is the Yeah, no, that's the term for that. It's probably foolish given what I do for a living. I probably should be more mainstream.

Paul Thurrott (01:23:39):
But you know what though? I, okay. So I, I'm gonna dis disagree with you only because based on my own personal experience there, I, there was a period in time when I thought to myself the biggest mistake I ever made was latching my career into Microsoft and Windows. Like I should have been more broad. And I realize now, all these years, years later, no, that was actually the right, that was the right approach. The world doesn't need another goon to write, keep, like reviews of hard drives or mobile devices or, you know, whatever. Like, I just, I I you having a kind of a, a point of view especially if you can make people actually think differently, right. Not just because it's different, but because you're onto something. Maybe. I think that's important.

Leo Laporte (01:24:20):
Well, I definitely have a point of view <laugh>. Sure. There's no, no doubt about that. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:27):
We don't know One knows what it is, but you know, it's

Leo Laporte (01:24:29):
Out there. Yeah. <laugh> Oh, oh, you know it's EMAX list. Yes, sir. Neva <laugh>. Yep. No, it's Fast Mail. 

Paul Thurrott (01:24:40):
I think it's important to make people, because people get, they get tunnel vision about stuff, you know? Mm-Hmm.

Leo Laporte (01:24:45):
<Affirmative>, I honestly feel like my job is not to find the biggest market leader, but to find the best. Right. I mean, don't you, you guys do the same way. You, you always look the best.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:59):
That's the way to

Leo Laporte (01:24:59):
Think of it. Best coffee, you know, the best pizza, the best word processor, you know, that's, that's finding best is an interesting problem. Well, it is because emax, while best for me, obviously is far from, best from anybody else, but True. You know, so it really that's true too. Yeah. But I don't, all those vi guys that are so happy, I don't go around, you know, saying you should all be using, you gotta,

Paul Thurrott (01:25:25):
You gotta someday on your Windows machine, just open a terminal and type in Winget and then call me a weekend later and tell me how it went. Cause you'll

Leo Laporte (01:25:33):
Love it. <Laugh>. I've used Wget. You'll love it. I've used Get Winget, I got, I got

Paul Thurrott (01:25:37):
Winget is a way to, to update running every app on your computer no matter where it came from.

Leo Laporte (01:25:41):
It's the long needed package manager for Windows. But I have to say before that, I used Chocolatey. And of course, on every other operating system, I've actually had real package managers since day one.

Paul Thurrott (01:25:54):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:25:55):
Well it's only been Windows that hasn't really

Paul Thurrott (01:25:58):
Yeah. Right. My win get is incredible.

Leo Laporte (01:26:00):
No, it's about time.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:01):
Yeah. It's the type of thing you would really, yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:26:03):
No, I use App to get and PA Pacman and, you know, the real, the real deal going back to gtu and building all my own binaries from scratch. Well,

Paul Thurrott (01:26:13):
Right. But I mean, so on Windows, of course you can download stuff from the web, you can get stuff from the store.

Leo Laporte (01:26:19):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:19):
When get just kind of handles all

Leo Laporte (01:26:21):
Of it. I know.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:21):
It's great. It's, it's, it's really kind of neat.

Leo Laporte (01:26:23):
That's No, it is. It's nice. It's cute to see you guys finally. Yeah. You know,

Paul Thurrott (01:26:27):
<Laugh>. Okay, there you go.

Leo Laporte (01:26:29):
I've seen

Paul Thurrott (01:26:29):
The value of a package. I don't know if you've ever heard of a package manager, but we just got it on a Windows. So lemme tell you something. It's so cute. I have seen the future. No,

Leo Laporte (01:26:36):
It is, it's transformational. I agree a hundred percent. Yeah. <laugh>, when they announced Winget, I said half Hallelujah. Finally. Yeah. Because Chocolatey was, you know, barely everything. You know, this is, this is good. So Winge is pretty complete now. That's great. Yeah, it's great. Incredible. That's wonderful. Yep. I did download contrary to my, you know, plan of only using the best stuff <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:26:59):
I

Paul Thurrott (01:27:00):
Did,

Leo Laporte (01:27:00):
Hold on, I did download Outlook on the Mac. It's actually not bad. It's pretty good. It's

Paul Thurrott (01:27:05):
A nice app. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:27:05):
And actually we talked about it on Mac Break weekly yesterday. If you're using, if you're connecting with an exchange server, I guess Alex Lindsay's company mm-hmm. <Affirmative> uses Exchange Outlook. Is light years better? Is that, is that right for Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:18):
Well, Richard, we'll have to answer that one. I wouldn't go near an exchange server if my life depended on it, but

Rich Campbell (01:27:24):
Remember I'm the guy turning mine off.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:25):
Yeah, yeah. Well

Rich Campbell (01:27:26):
That's, and yes, definitely Outlook was declined. You wanted for Exchange Server.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:29):
Yeah. I, from the

Rich Campbell (01:27:31):
Perspective, really the client you want for Exchange Online, that's an interesting question.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:35):
Yeah. I yeah, but question

Rich Campbell (01:27:38):
Those, they're giving it away for free. Is it worth that price?

Leo Laporte (01:27:42):
<Laugh>? Well,

Paul Thurrott (01:27:42):
So I, I mean, I don't use it, I don't use the Mac Right. For that much. But I, looking at it compared to what we have in Windows, I think it looks great. And this long overdue, new Outlook client that is still not complete, you know, still not ready for primetime, is very much based on the web stuff. It's, it's clearly a web app. Which is fine. I don't have a problem with it. I just think the Outlook app for the Mac looks nice. It's just a nice native looking app, like it looks mm-hmm. <Affirmative> at home on the Mac

Leo Laporte (01:28:11):
And one compatible. It's a, yep. So you're saying it's actually better.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:16):
See, I, I wouldn't put those words in my mouth. I, I'm, I'm saying it looks nicer than any version of Outlook on Windows. Wow. I, I don't use it. That's

Leo Laporte (01:28:27):
Kind of stunning.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:29):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:28:30):
Why does why did, why does Microsoft, they did this before, right? Well, when they did touch first on the iPad,

Paul Thurrott (01:28:35):
Right? It's a native app. It's a native app. You know, it's I, there there's a, there's some Microsoft Design stuff that I really do like, I, I don't like, I'll look on the web looks nice to me. It's fine. I mean, it's, it's, you see like a simil a similar kind of like set of icons and, and textiles and so forth between apps on Windows 10 or 11, and apps on the web that they have, and it, it looks know it's fine. And actually probably on mobile as well. But I think the reason the Mac version shines just from the way it looks is because they just went native with it and they're using whatever the native capabilities are there for the ui. And it just looks nice. It's clearly not a skinned thing that exists elsewhere. It looks like a, looks like a real map. Mac

Rich Campbell (01:29:22):
It strikes me that this is not built by the Outlook team, but rather built by some Mac

Leo Laporte (01:29:25):
Folks. Ah, yeah. Yeah. There you go. Well, there are plenty of Mac people at Microsoft. I mean, there's no, like, yeah,

Rich Campbell (01:29:30):
Absolutely. But that, I mean that the point is like, it was dif built by a different group of people, right. And they were coming at it from a native Mac development perspective.

Paul Thurrott (01:29:39):
Yep. Which, you know,

Leo Laporte (01:29:42):
It's the right way to do

Paul Thurrott (01:29:43):
It. Well, let's, yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:29:45):
Isn't it?

Paul Thurrott (01:29:46):
Maybe, I mean, I, there I feel like some cross-platform developer environments, like Flutter is a good example. Do a good job of providing what I'll call native, like, or just native ui cross-platform works. Well, Maui will probably get there, you know, at, at some point. There's super, there's very strong advantages to doing cross-platform, obviously. Right? I mean, obviously but if you want, if you could, I, I suppose if you just separate out the UI framework and everyone can somehow use the same backend, maybe there's an approach there that makes sense. I know. I don't know. But all I can say is this app looks great. I, you know, I'm, I'm really into the cross platform stuff, but I look at this app like, oh, that's really

Rich Campbell (01:30:27):
Nice. It's a native Mac Mac app

Paul Thurrott (01:30:29):
Show. Yeah. There's something about it. It looks good.

Rich Campbell (01:30:31):
Yeah. Love it. Yeah. Not using it. Don't have a Mac.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:35):
Nope. No, I'm not gonna use it.

Leo Laporte (01:30:37):
If you had a Mac though, you would use it, right? Do you use out, you use Outlook on the pc? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:42):
No,

Rich Campbell (01:30:42):
PC

Paul Thurrott (01:30:43):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:30:44):
Well, I'm kind of on record to say I don't, I think Outlook's a terrible Yeah. Male client, but I use on Mac. It's not bad, actually. I mean, it's fine.

Rich Campbell (01:30:54):
I'm on the record of paying Outlook 64 threads. None of them are for you, <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:30:59):
Yeah. Right. That's one good reason. Right? Right.

Paul Thurrott (01:31:02):
Yeah. That pst PST file's not gonna feed itself. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know?

Leo Laporte (01:31:06):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>,

Paul Thurrott (01:31:07):
You gotta, you gotta keep that thing going. Yeah. I don't know. I, I

Rich Campbell (01:31:11):
Dunno. But yeah, I come from it being an exchange server owner. So of course I used Outlook. I now softening as a, becoming an M 365 person saying, do I really need this anymore? Would you

Leo Laporte (01:31:22):
Use

Rich Campbell (01:31:22):
Scare me hard to the Web Clark

Leo Laporte (01:31:24):
Web client? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:31:25):
The web client. Yeah. The, that's

Leo Laporte (01:31:27):
What, truthfully, that's what everybody does these days. Very few people I think. Yep. Only as

Paul Thurrott (01:31:31):
Old timers. I come all my email through a single interface and use that one interface on the web and that's it. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:31:36):
Yeah. At least then when I'm running outta memory, I don't have to close multiple apps. It's going to be the browser that crashes first anyway, and clears the whole

Leo Laporte (01:31:44):
<Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:31:45):
There's never any guesswork was doing it Now.

Leo Laporte (01:31:49):
It's so funny. This is

Rich Campbell (01:31:50):
The, it's always the problem.

Leo Laporte (01:31:51):
The fatalism of the computer user.

Rich Campbell (01:31:53):
Yeah. There's task manager and Yeah. And there's Edge up to, to 12 gigabytes <laugh>. It's like I'm to close them

Paul Thurrott (01:32:01):
All for I bless its Little

Rich Campbell (01:32:02):
Heart, I'm to close them all.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:03):
It's evil, little black Heart. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:32:07):
Don't know what memory you've lost or where you've lost it, but you're giving it back to me now.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:12):
<Laugh>. Oh boy.

Rich Campbell (01:32:14):
End process.

Leo Laporte (01:32:16):
<Laugh>. all right. So that's good

Paul Thurrott (01:32:21):
Task. Task energy needs like sound effects when you do that. Like, it could make the Pacman dying sound or Yeah. Just like a sad whimper, you

Leo Laporte (01:32:28):
Know? Yeah. let's get boxy.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:37):
Okay. So I'm sure you've all heard the news. This could have been the top story. Reuters reports that multiple sources tell it that the EU is likely to approve Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Right. And for all the reasons we've always talked about, that the concessions it would need to make for this to be truly anti-competitive are obvious. And it's making them, and it has apparently another report says the EU has now delayed their announcement about this, probably because it leaked. But we'll see hopefully in the next week or so. We'll, at the official word on that. So that's good.

Rich Campbell (01:33:16):
In, in an announcement that surprised. No, but Paul Throt not at all.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:21):
<Laugh>, not me at all. Right. Exactly. <Laugh>. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:33:23):
No, you said this and I, I was skeptical, but I'm glad Now, I don't know if this means the FTC will change their tune,

Paul Thurrott (01:33:29):
But, right. Well, you know, so the FTC had, had originally reached out to EU to work in concert, and that stopped <laugh>. So I think they caught wind of the fact that, you know, the EU must have been like, guys what they're doing is fine. Like it's, this is

Rich Campbell (01:33:43):
Gonna work. I, I suspect Sony was making calls saying, you're getting awfully close to getting at making us have to do things here. Right. And clearly it'ss discovery process that Microsoft kicked off Yep. Is really what's agitated everyone. And finally they're like, please, please make this stop.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:58):
Yeah. Right. That it, that may be what makes Sony just give up on this is Yeah,

Rich Campbell (01:34:03):
They don't want those emails out there. That's right.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:04):
Cause it makes, it makes 'em look terrible because they are

Rich Campbell (01:34:07):
Terrible, because they're sure

Paul Thurrott (01:34:08):
They are terrible. Couple of halo things going on. Halo Infinite, we talk about this a lot. Got off to a rough start. And it has been rough ever since <laugh>. So however, I think it was today or yesterday, they just released the, what they call, you know, this is a big thing in video games now, like season three, right. Which is probably, they call it the spring update or the, whatever the thing is called, doesn't matter anyway. It adds new maps, new games, mo well aid new game mode new equipment, new weapons, new cosmetics, et cetera, et cetera. So for the Halo fans that I still hear from, I think like a lot of people I kind of gave up on this I feel like, I think we talked about this last week, maybe, you know, the first three Halo Games classic, the last three games.

(01:34:53):
Like, eh, you know, I don't know. I, I appreciate the halo of this game, if that makes sense. Like, it, it, it, they really nailed the halo look and feel. The music, the, you know, you're running through level and it starts building. Like, I, I, that's something Halo was always really good at. And it, it feels very, it's a good entry in the series, but I just feel like the world's kind of moved on, unfortunately for them. But this apparently does a big, is a big step forward for them and is positive news if you're a Halo fan. So I won't begrudge them that. And then separate from this, Microsoft announced that they call these things creations. These are mostly multiplayer maps, but Halo players have now created over 1 million. I'm gonna call the maps using something called Forge Beta. So Forge was something that I think debut viewed as far back as Halo three. It's basically a way for anyone out in the community to create their own maps and then they can create playlists where you can play these maps with your friends. Right. Or with anybody online. So forge for Halo Infinite is currently in beta and it's apparently going gangbusters cuz there's been a lot of content created there. So that's, that's great. Right? That's, that's good stuff.

Leo Laporte (01:36:02):
It's always good when you can make your own letter.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:04):
Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. This is the second month in a row where it looks like we're gonna get three selections of Game Pass titles through the Xbox Game Pass right across X Ball, Xbox, pc and Ultimate including Cloud. So they've announced six new games that are coming basically in kind of that middle third of the month. Oh, oh, be still. Valin

Leo Laporte (01:36:26):
Is in there. It's still my heart. My Game

Paul Thurrott (01:36:28):
Dead has Dead Space two and three. Remember, dead Space was just remastered or remade I guess. So these are the other two Dead Space games have been added. Civilization Six. I can't tell you how many times one of these things comes out and I'm like, Nope. <Laugh>, you know, and then this time

Leo Laporte (01:36:45):
I'm, it's worse. I download each time and install it. Yeah. And then go, yeah. Nope. <laugh>, who is this? Yeah, so this

Paul Thurrott (01:36:52):
Is, this is like, this is a really good drop for these guys. Val Halim

Leo Laporte (01:36:55):
Is by the way, amazing. Val

Paul Thurrott (01:36:56):
Iims. So good. Yeah. So completely separate from this. I've been working on the book the Windows 11 book and I had to write the Xbox app chapter, which involves games you purchase from Microsoft that are Xbox games, not just any PC games. Like, it doesn't matter if it came from the store, it has to be an Xbox game for the pc, but also especially PC Game Pass. And Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Right. Which includes the PC game. So you can download those games to PC and play them live. And Xbox Cloud Gaming, which is the game streaming service, which is part of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Right. Which you can stream to any device basically these days. But obviously for the book, I'm looking at Windows. So I signed up for Game Pass Ultimate, so I could ex experience all of that. I did this with the account I used for the book, not with my main account, cuz I wanted it to be clean as well, because on my old account I have all the stuff on it. Well, those Call

Leo Laporte (01:37:50):
Of Duty achievements.

Paul Thurrott (01:37:52):
Yeah. Yeah. So I played several cloud cloud gaming games, meaning I streamed them. Right. quake I think was one ri asphalt. Oh, not asphalt. One of the fours a games, I don't remember the exact list. I'm sorry. But you know what, I gotta say, the biggest issue I've had with this thing so far has just been lag or latency. I haven't ex, I haven't played like death match, you know, when a, a third person shoot or anything like that. I think that's still gonna be an issue. But these games all played fantastically well, and I don't know if it's, the internet connection here is really clean or what. I, I, and this was just on a standard business class laptop. It's probably two or three years old. There's nothing going on with it hardware wise. I was really impressed with the performance of this thing. So, you know, if you're kind of on the fence with this stuff, you know, you can, you can test it for a dollar or

Leo Laporte (01:38:46):
Move to Mexico

Paul Thurrott (01:38:47):
Or move to and or move to Mexico. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Come here. Just use my internet. It'll be fine. I

Rich Campbell (01:38:52):
Don't, stadia went so well. So you would actually figure that

Leo Laporte (01:38:55):
<Laugh> Yeah. The late

Rich Campbell (01:38:57):
Lament. I mean, I, you, you, and that's, you're talking ea play as well and electronic artists does not have a great history. If it's working, it's working and, and not just working from Philadelphia. Right. Like not lu in, in a big American city. You're down, you're down Mexico.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:12):
No, I,

Leo Laporte (01:39:13):
It's,

Paul Thurrott (01:39:13):
I I great to, yeah. I'm gonna spend some time with it. I have it for the month. I might as well, you know.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:20):
Yeah. Works

Leo Laporte (01:39:20):
Great fun. Yeah. I mean, there are, there Look, I mean, stadia is, it's sad. It's actually, stadia worked pretty well.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:27):
Stadia might the best of the lot. Yeah. There technology perspective.

Leo Laporte (01:39:31):
Amazon's Luna's pretty good. I like GForce now. And

Paul Thurrott (01:39:33):
The re the reason you, it's a Luna and Stadia both had or have the same advantage, which is that their controllers, if you bought, use their controller, cuz you can use any controller, but if you use theirs, it connects directly to the internet and it, it really helps with that lag latency issue. It was really kind of a neat thing. In fact, when Stadia crashed and burned, I wrote something saying, Microsoft, you gotta, you gotta steal this idea. This is what's gonna put cloud gaming over the top. Although like I said, they, something has gone right cuz it's, it's working pretty damn well right there. Yeah. So

Leo Laporte (01:40:05):
It's amazing. Again, we were talking before the show about how everything's changed. You know, now I can do Zoom calls with somebody in New Zealand and Mexico with no latency. It sounds great. It works beautifully. It

Paul Thurrott (01:40:17):
Looks great. You know,

Leo Laporte (01:40:18):
This is another example.

Paul Thurrott (01:40:19):
Given, given, given what we have to work with,

Leo Laporte (01:40:21):
Who would've thought we'd be able to do, you know, high end gaming. I know I got this Ace or Chromebook for review mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, which reminds me I gotta send it back. And the whole pitch is, you know, it comes, it, it'll work with any of these streaming things, including games. That's right. You know game, game pass. But yeah. I, I played, I did a demo on Sunday on the mm-hmm. <Affirmative> as the tech guy of playing that, that hot new game, that new Survival game what's it called? Forest Sons of the Forest in GForce now on a Chromebook on wifi. So

Paul Thurrott (01:40:56):
This is a p this is a PC game streaming from a data center

Leo Laporte (01:40:58):
Somewhere. This is triple A game. And

Paul Thurrott (01:41:00):
Of course, did you get for the way with the 10 80 p or

Leo Laporte (01:41:03):
What was that? No, 4k. 4K 4k. The way and the way these games with GForce now work is you've got, it's just actually, it's just like Xbox Game Pass. You've got like a whole game of 49 dedicated Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:41:15):
To you. And PC games honestly probably have better scaling anyway. In some ways, you know, streaming a PC game might even make more sense. The Xbox Game Pass or cloud gaming stuff is all console games.

Leo Laporte (01:41:28):
Yeah. it's pretty, it's really interesting. Yeah. This is a PC game. Yeah. On GForce now. And you get a dedicated Ray tracing 40 90. It's ex I mean it's expensive though. The, I can't remember what the monthly is. It's more than a game than Game Pass. But it's still, yeah. Yeah. We live in very interesting

Paul Thurrott (01:41:48):
Times. Yeah. It's cool that we have that kind of choice of scalability if

Leo Laporte (01:41:52):
You want. And Richard, this is just client net Client server computing <laugh>. This is just, yeah, the, the, sure. The mainframe <laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (01:42:00):
Right. Let's not end here.

Leo Laporte (01:42:01):
It's too here. My, with my terminal, my thin terminal running on my desktop. And we've

Paul Thurrott (01:42:07):
Been here before. My son was right about the Net pc. They had it all along. They had it all on. The problem is they had it 19, 19 96. Yeah. It was just too early. It's just, yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:42:14):
Like 25 minutes. I mean, that's essentially what this Ace or Chromebook is, is a net pc. Right? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:19):
Well, you know what, actually it's way more powerful, right?

Leo Laporte (01:42:21):
Because it is, it had a nice, the

Paul Thurrott (01:42:22):
Processor Ramm storage and, and ChromeOS, you know, we can joke about it compared to Windows or Macro os, but honestly it's quite capable.

Leo Laporte (01:42:30):
It's Linux and

Paul Thurrott (01:42:30):
Compared to it is something, there is something on the client. It's not just a No,

Leo Laporte (01:42:34):
No, it's a real deal. In fact, you can run Linux on it and Android and apps and stuff, so. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:40):
Yep. Yeah, that's right, Andrew. You can run Visual Studio Code on it and you can write web apps with it.

Leo Laporte (01:42:45):
Oh yeah. Or as I would do Linux on it and log into a server running vsc the server version.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:54):
Oh, vc. Well, no, but you run, install Linux on it. Install the Linux version of Visual Studio Code.

Leo Laporte (01:42:58):
You could, you could run code na natively, but, you know. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean we, it's, but I, I guess kind of playing off of this games over the internet, you can, you can run a VSC server and and then anything you use Sure. From an iPad to a Chromebook to your laptop, just log into that server and you're running vi Visual Studio Code in the same instance.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:23):
Neely, that model is bogus.

Leo Laporte (01:43:25):
<Laugh>. It's bogus. Well, when I blog, I, of course

Paul Thurrott (01:43:28):
You think that you sell Big Iron

Leo Laporte (01:43:30):
<Laugh>. When I blog, I usually s SSH into my server running EMAX and Run. And, or I could use Tra emax Tramp and do it locally, but usually I'll just log into the emax on the server and blog there. Cause it's,

Paul Thurrott (01:43:42):
How do you find that performance to be

Leo Laporte (01:43:44):
Fine? Yeah, fine. Good. Yeah. I mean, let, okay, like EMAX is not exactly call on duty. That's not, no,

Paul Thurrott (01:43:52):
No, but that's, that's almost the point, right? That's, that's why a Chromebook is probably a good solution for a lot of people because most people aren't doing high end. Yeah. We're not making videos, we're not rendering anything. We're not architects or engineers.

Rich Campbell (01:44:07):
You know, these days we could be doing all that in the cloud anyway. Right.

Paul Thurrott (01:44:10):
Right. So what, who cares what we're using it from. Right. It's probably fine.

Rich Campbell (01:44:14):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:44:14):
No, it's interesting. The world's really changed.

Leo Laporte (01:44:17):
Hey, here's a good one. Somebody in has just, this is from our Discord. Somebody's just issued a pull request to add Bing Chat to Power Toys <laugh>. Sure. So that you can actually run Bing Chat in the task bar.

Rich Campbell (01:44:33):
There you go. Nice.

Paul Thurrott (01:44:34):
That's nice.

Rich Campbell (01:44:35):
Yep. I need a command line chat.

Paul Thurrott (01:44:36):
Yeah. Hey, there are multiple examples of things that debuted in Power Toys that did end up showing up in some way in Windows. Oh, right. Like some of the Snap and Richard, we got in Windows 11, you'll

Leo Laporte (01:44:46):
Be thrilled to know that Chat. G P T has a very inexpensive API and it's very easy to run chat beat G P T on the command line. I do it all the time. There you go. The API's, tri, tri trivial. Cuz it's, you can use Curl. It's just sending you <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:45:00):
Just, do you even hear what you say? <Laugh> the API is trivial because you can use Curl.

Rich Campbell (01:45:08):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:45:08):
So you just, you send a post and you know, quest and it, and it sends back the content as a J S O file, you know, and you That's

Paul Thurrott (01:45:16):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:45:17):
Fairly easy to pars them. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:45:18):
We all know how to pars those. That's,

Leo Laporte (01:45:20):
I mean, who doesn't, right? That's, no, there's plenty of library. I don't know how to pars them, but there's fortunately many libraries out there. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, chat g PT on Command Line is, that's done. And because they made the API so inexpensive, I can't remember what it is. It's like 2 cents per, you know, a hundred thousand requests or something. It's nothing. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:45:38):
Yeah. That's great. Well, that's way, one way to kick off a kind of cam and explosion. No kidding,

Leo Laporte (01:45:43):
Kidding it on. Make a ver make a simple API and an inexpensive in interaction. You're gonna have apps, you know, three months from now there'll be apps all over the place using chat g p t all over the place. You know, we were,

Paul Thurrott (01:45:56):
We were talking earlier about some group, small group guy, you know, whatever coming up and, you know, disrupting the whole world. Maybe that company's already, maybe that company is open AI and it's already happened. Right? Like, maybe

Rich Campbell (01:46:07):
They got, maybe those guys already a billion from Microsoft on something.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:10):
Yeah, that's right. That's right. So, interesting.

Rich Campbell (01:46:15):
Talk to you, talk to me about Starfield. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:46:18):
Ooh, I'm excited about this. I wanna know if I should get it. All right.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:21):
So Starfield is a long awaited game from Bethesda, which has since been bought by Microsoft as part of, well, part of Bethesda. Mm-Hmm. The, the reason this is kind of, well, it's supposed to be, it looks amazing. It's, you know, highly anticipated. But this is the thing that's come up in the argument with Sony, right. That Starfield is an example, I think is right. Isn't this one of the games where they're go like, actually we're gonna make this an xFi, an Xbox exclusive. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Rich Campbell (01:46:47):
Is that not true? Windows an

Paul Thurrott (01:46:48):
Xbox. Yeah. yeah, Xbox part. See,

Leo Laporte (01:46:51):
I told you they were gonna do that.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:52):
That, that, that was Sony's point. So this is the poster child for C They're just gonna do the same thing that we No, no, I don't mean that we do. They're gonna do this thing that is terrible. I, we,

Rich Campbell (01:47:06):
This is, I mean the first time I heard about this was right after Skyrim shipped.

Leo Laporte (01:47:11):
Okay.

Rich Campbell (01:47:12):
Like, how are you good at top Skyrim? And they said, we're gonna do Skyrim in space. I

Leo Laporte (01:47:15):
Love

Rich Campbell (01:47:16):
Skyrim. That's literally game, that's more than a decade. That's

Paul Thurrott (01:47:19):
Beautiful. So I coming this week, so I

Leo Laporte (01:47:22):
Took a laser to the knee. Right. Wow. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:47:26):
This is so they've announced the, oh,

Leo Laporte (01:47:28):
Let's watch it.

Paul Thurrott (01:47:29):
Let's just, the release date is sports. Watch

Leo Laporte (01:47:31):
It. Let, let's just have a little visit to Starfield. Yeah. it looks,

Paul Thurrott (01:47:35):
It does look great.

Leo Laporte (01:47:36):
So, so you're saying Sky ruman space that's

Rich Campbell (01:47:40):
Pretty clean up is essentially the idea. I mean, sky Room was your ultimate open world, right? Right. Gating, I wanted to do the same. Oh.

Leo Laporte (01:47:47):
Oh man. This looks like Metro Prime. Wait a minute, <laugh>. Okay. Okay. Okay. We're we're in there. Okay. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Okay. There's a, there's a crater, there's a sun and another moon, and I don't know what's going on. This is a

Paul Thurrott (01:48:04):
Crater where this your typical kind of landed

Leo Laporte (01:48:06):
Your typical trailer that does nothing and tells you nothing. Yeah. All right. But the idea is we'd be able to wander around an open universe. Yeah. That's in space.

Rich Campbell (01:48:16):
I think there's a ton of open world space gigs, right? Yeah. Yeah. Elite and Eve, and like, right. There's so many. Right. My biggest concern is anything that's been worked on for this long has baggage. Right. Right. Like, there's sort of a, there's sort of a curve for developing anything where it's not gonna be good if it's done in a year, it, it, maybe it peaks 2, 2, 2 and a half. That's

Leo Laporte (01:48:41):
S interesting point. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:48:41):
But at four years you're going downhill. So

Paul Thurrott (01:48:44):
This is like duke Newcomb forever.

Leo Laporte (01:48:45):
Forever, baby. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:47):
<Laugh>. You know,

Rich Campbell (01:48:48):
The, the real question is how many times it been restarted? And it sounds like

Paul Thurrott (01:48:52):
Yeah. How many different rendering engines did they switch to? How many,

Rich Campbell (01:48:55):
Yeah. And, and, and I understand that when Microsoft got the, got the company and they sort of went through the catalog, right. They basically gave them room to say, start Starfield over. So there's some possibility that it's a current, very current rendering engine. Very current. I mean,

Paul Thurrott (01:49:10):
It worked great for Windows Vista. So I think <laugh>, no, I

Rich Campbell (01:49:14):
Don't know. I'm sure it's fine, but they are awfully late to the open world space game.

Paul Thurrott (01:49:19):
Yep. Yep.

Rich Campbell (01:49:21):
Except that it's Bethesda. Like Fallout was a Sky Room was a profound game. Fallout was a profound game. Yep. Like, just a really interesting world that they Yep. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. They did terrible season.

Paul Thurrott (01:49:31):
What was that game? No Man Sky, that kind of cra Was that a Sony title?

Leo Laporte (01:49:36):
Yeah. It wasn't, it wasn't Bethesda. They were in Indie. Yeah. They were in Indie. That maybe so distributed. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:49:41):
Because that, that had the promise of this game. And yeah. And if there were still people using it, they'll tell you they finally got it to where it should be.

Leo Laporte (01:49:48):
It took a long time. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:49:50):
Yeah. It took a long time.

Leo Laporte (01:49:51):
As Will Cyberpunk 2077 article saying it'll never be good. So give up. Sure. <laugh>.

Rich Campbell (01:49:56):
Well, and, and, and what's, what's the one that Chris Roberts has been getting more and more money for Never delivering on? It's just astonishing.

Leo Laporte (01:50:03):
That's a good deal. I'd like that.

Rich Campbell (01:50:05):
Or something rather.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:06):
What is that? Yeah. I don't know.

Rich Campbell (01:50:08):
<Laugh>, that's the, you know, talk about a space game that never ships.

Leo Laporte (01:50:12):
Yeah. Yeah. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:15):
All right. Let's, the problem is it became as biggest space,

Leo Laporte (01:50:17):
We still have much, much to do.

Rich Campbell (01:50:19):
Star Citizen.

Leo Laporte (01:50:20):
Star citizen. That doesn't sound good. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:50:24):
Star citizen. The game that'll never show. Yeah. he's raised, he's raised hundreds of million, mostly from the people who want to play the game by selling them assets in the game. That's kind of a scam. It still isn't.

Leo Laporte (01:50:35):
That sounds like a scam. I'm sure. Has every intention of delivering. He the Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:42):
Interesting balance of power. Is that Chris? What was that game? 

Leo Laporte (01:50:45):
Crawford. Chris Crawford.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:46):
Chris Crawford. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:50:47):
I'm sorry. Legendary. Legendary.

Rich Campbell (01:50:49):
Chris Roberts was the yeah. They he had a whole line of space games where he got like Mark Hamel to voice pieces of

Leo Laporte (01:50:57):
It. Yeah. Right. You know, that's

Paul Thurrott (01:50:58):
Not Mark Hamel was a selling. He wasn't Well, I, okay. No, actually Mark Hamels a good voiceover guy. He

Rich Campbell (01:51:04):
Yeah. Does

Paul Thurrott (01:51:05):
The Joker in the Batman series. 

Rich Campbell (01:51:07):
Hey, you know what, mark, he was used Wing

Paul Thurrott (01:51:08):
Commander was mark, he Wing

Leo Laporte (01:51:09):
Commander. Oh, actually I liked Wing Commander. God, that goes back

Rich Campbell (01:51:12):
Away. This is the classics, right?

Leo Laporte (01:51:14):
Yeah. Oh, I liked Wing Commander. Okay. Oh, he was an origin. All right. Okay. Okay. This

Paul Thurrott (01:51:19):
Is, that goes back to the very early nineties, I

Leo Laporte (01:51:21):
Bet. Yeah. 1990. Yeah. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:51:23):
Okay. There.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:25):
Causely the eighties. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:51:27):
But, you know, it's one of those things where you pro you promise impossible things and then you keep trying to make them, and it's just a stunning amount of money.

Leo Laporte (01:51:34):
Yeah. And I'm sure he's working art on it. It's just hard to Yeah, I hope so. Yeah. No, I don't think it's a scam. I think he's, he's just, you know, it's one guy

Rich Campbell (01:51:43):
Project so large

Paul Thurrott (01:51:44):
That you might be one of those people who can't accept anything that isn't perfect. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:51:47):
Get this, as of February 22nd, they've raised 474 million in crowdfunding.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:54):
Yikes. They could make a Call of Duty game with them.

Leo Laporte (01:51:57):
Half a billion in crowdfunding, and then another 63 million in external investments. Who ho

Rich Campbell (01:52:03):
And

Leo Laporte (01:52:03):
They

Rich Campbell (01:52:03):
Okay. Still have delivered. They've delivered pieces like it's, it's astonishing. Truly

Leo Laporte (01:52:08):
Is. Well, they have announced they're allocating more resources towards this development. <Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:52:13):
Okay. What were they doing with that money before?

Leo Laporte (01:52:17):
Chris Roberts stated that if at least 23 million could be raised over the course of a crowdfunding campaign, no outside investors or developers funding would be required. This goal was reached in October 18th, 2013. 10 years ago.

Rich Campbell (01:52:31):
Wow. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:52:33):
10 years ago.

Rich Campbell (01:52:35):
And Star, citizen and Elite Laurel did their crowdfunding about the same time. An elite been in the market now for 10 years. Right,

Leo Laporte (01:52:43):
Right. Actually, there was just a new kind of elite I saw, where did I see that? I think it's on Lenox, <laugh> not, not elite dangerous, but a new kind of text based elite. Going back to the original anyway, that's enough of this gaming. We've done it now. Have we done it? Oh yeah, we've done it. I played it on the Apple too back in the day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Alright, we let's take a little break. We have the back of the book. We have a brown liquor and many tips. But first, a word from our sponsor, the Good folks at C D W, this episode of Windows Weekly, brought to you by Lenovo, orchestrated by the experts at cdw, the helpful people at cdw. Understand as the world changes, your organization needs to adapt quickly to be successful.

(01:53:35):
So how can c d w keep your business ahead of the curve with, I got one right here. Lenovo Think pads. 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 is not a problem because Lenovo think pads keep your organization productive and connected from anywhere. Plus C D W knows your workforce has different work styles and needs flexibility, which is why Lenovo ThinkPads are equipped with responsive tools and built-in features that let your team work seamlessly across their favorite tools. Thinking about that for a second, let's not forget about security. These high performance 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. Now we get to the back of the book. My favorite part of the show, and let's kick things off with Paul and a tip of the week.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:53):
<Laugh>, I just brought up a, a page that had prices on it, and they were all huge numbers. I'm like, oh, I'm in Mexico.

Leo Laporte (01:54:59):
<Laugh>, you always have to divide by 20, right? How,

Paul Thurrott (01:55:04):
How is Yes. It's not quite as good as 20 right now, but yes. 20 is still,

Leo Laporte (01:55:07):
Yeah. That peso's roughly a nickel. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:10):
Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, sorry, <laugh>, I was like, how is this utility? Hundred

Leo Laporte (01:55:14):
$15? It's $20,000.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:17):
Yep. Okay. Sorry. <laugh>. Yeah. So over, I think it was over the weekend, I saw Zach Bowen over at windows Central tweeted that he wiped out a PC without checking what was on it. And then as it was wiping realized there was a super important file on there. Oh God, he's never gonna get back. Right. We've all done this. The thing is, when it comes to backup religion, or what I'll call now call backup or sync religion, most people have to lose something important for them to get it <laugh>. Yeah. You know, so my tip gib

Leo Laporte (01:55:47):
To Steve, Steve Gibson wiped a hard drive with 50 Bitcoin on it. Yeah. How about them? Apple? I mean,

Paul Thurrott (01:55:53):
This is Yep. This is, this is what, you know, this is what happens. That's a lot of money. It people who know better. And I, my, I've done this too. I mean, we, everyone succumbs to this, but I, I, the funny thing is, back in early December, Microsoft quietly updated OneDrive on Windows 11 without telling anyone it was coming. One of two big updates to Windows 11. They never tested or did anything for the other one being that start pill thing we were complaining about for a few months there. And what they did was they added more folders to the backup function. Right. So for a long, long time you could back up, I think it was desktop documents and probably pictures to OneDrive automatically. And the idea there is if you did that on, on all of your PCs, you'd have the same files in each location on each pc, and obviously up in the cloud.

(01:56:38):
 I think this is a great way to do things. But with that update in December, they added the other two folders that are under your used account. So music and videos. So if you want like, everything to be synced to the cloud, which makes sense, if you have a, a Microsoft 365 subscription Right. With a terabyte of storage it's a great way to ensure that you never lose anything. Right. I, I use the desktop as a scratch space. If I come up here in, you know, the hard drive failed or whatever I could lose that kind of stuff. So I guess the tip is don't be a statistic. And you don't have to use OneDrive. I mean, OneDrive is, is what I use. It's, I do recommend it. There are, there are features to OneDrive that I think kind of put it over the top, including a cloud-based recycle bin and the ability to get filed versions of files, which I think is important, but whatever you can use, like, if you want to use a nas, although I think there's a geographical kind of aspect to the cloud backup that's very important too.

(01:57:29):
But I actually never put yourself,

Leo Laporte (01:57:31):
I I, I concur. I've been allowing both Mac Os and Windows to do what they do by default, which is to back up to the cloud. Yeah. I know they do that because nobody backs up and so they don't, you know, they want to protect. That's right. And you know what? It's fine. I wouldn't say just make that the only one. It's probably depends on

Paul Thurrott (01:57:49):
What it is. Have another backup. For sure. For sure. I mean, I have my photos are in multiple locations like that, that's important

Rich Campbell (01:57:55):
To me and as it should be. Yeah. I'm, I'm in transition of course. Cause I've brought my own infrastructure at home for forever. Right. And my old, the old file server needs to be retired. I have most stuff in one drive, but we're now moving as an M 365 world. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But I'm also abundantly aware that should you run a file of any of Microsoft's Exactly. Rules that close your account, that m lock your account. Now, like if you get marked as say, possibly a, a trader and child porn.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:24):
Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:58:25):
Presuming you're not Yeah. But count will simply be locked. There's, there is no, the, the recourse will take years. Right. The data is not lost. It is no longer accessible to you.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:35):
Yeah. That's, that's happened with Google as well. There are stories of

Leo Laporte (01:58:39):
People, oh, we had a caller on the tech guys two weeks ago. Yeah. Uploaded pictures of his, from his childhood was is scanning videos in from old tapes. And it had the two, he, his sister, you know, frolicking at a kiddie pool. Yep. And Google decided it was child porn and he's lost access to everything, including business stuff. So while there, it's a convenience, but, but Richard, this is the standard for backup in business too. You don't have one copy. That's right. You have near term, you know, online backup, which I would consider this online backup. Yeah. And then you have offline backup, which is,

Paul Thurrott (01:59:13):
If your pictures are permanent, which is important to you, you should be backing up directly from your phone to at least two different things. Do

Leo Laporte (01:59:18):
Amazon and Google. 

Rich Campbell (01:59:20):
So, but my only debate was do we use the SONOLOGY as the, as the local file server for the house? Right.

Leo Laporte (01:59:27):
Here's what I do, here's what I

Rich Campbell (01:59:29):
Do. Or use M 3 6 5 and sync it to the SONOLOGY as a

Leo Laporte (01:59:32):
Backup. I

Paul Thurrott (01:59:33):
Kinda do something. I do. I would actually, I would do that <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:59:35):
I have OneDrive on my Windows machines. The problem is I'm very claros platform, so Right. Having, having iCloud on my Mac and OneDrive, my PC doesn't solve the problem, but I use Sync thing, which is a free open source program that will sync hard drive. So that way I have a standard documents folder, several other folders, music and stuff on all of my machines. And then I use the sonology has a sync thing client on it, which then syncs to the sonology. So that's the kind of the more permanent storage. And then I go one step further. I have a, I have dual chronologies. I have one here and one at home. And my offsite is hyper backup on the SONOLOGY backing up here. So I have many, I mean, if I lost data, it would have to be, cuz there was a nuclear strike on Petaluma <laugh>. Geez. At this

Rich Campbell (02:00:19):
Point you've only, and, and even then you probably still have a, I

Leo Laporte (02:00:21):
Still have the Cloud <laugh>. Right. Right. So even that,

Paul Thurrott (02:00:24):
I mean, you'd have to access it from the space station you'd be going to,

Leo Laporte (02:00:28):
But the biggest, and I should point this out, the biggest risk to all of that's a good setup. Right. That's as good as you're gonna get. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> is human error. Yep. Me, me sinking an empty folder to all of those for something like that. Right. Sure.

Rich Campbell (02:00:41):
Or, or you know, getting yourself encrypted with ransomware and then syncing the

Leo Laporte (02:00:45):
Ransomware and then sinking the Yes. So it's very

Paul Thurrott (02:00:47):
Easy. By the way, one OneDrive has ransomware production.

Leo Laporte (02:00:50):
Yes. Yeah. So I figure I'm kind of, but you know, and, and, and having that hyper backup I think is giving me that offsite, which is important also. So I've got kind of two

Rich Campbell (02:01:01):
Offsite of an air gapped network. Right. Like you have a piece that's not attached.

Leo Laporte (02:01:05):
Exactly.

Paul Thurrott (02:01:06):
I actually use my because we, I rotate through phones not quite as fast as it, well, in some ways as fast as they did with PCs. But when I decommission a phone or reset a phone, I'll download the photos from it to the PC and copy it to my nas. Just as kind of a bulk. This is another place to have it. You know, it's not, it's not day day, it's just

Leo Laporte (02:01:25):
Copies, but multiple. Make sure you

Paul Thurrott (02:01:26):
Have multiple copies.

Leo Laporte (02:01:26):
Yeah. Here's a question though. I wonder, so I turn on versioning as well. Think thing will allow you to do mm-hmm. <Affirmative> fairly sophisticated

Paul Thurrott (02:01:34):
Version, version versioning is really important because like that's the, that's the empty folder thing you were talking about. You could do that on a file basis where you blow something away in a Word doc or whatever, close it.

Leo Laporte (02:01:45):
<Laugh>. But I have the one I did last time and the time before. Exactly. so versioning is huge thing, sync thing, which is, I couldn't recommend more. Highly has a variety of different kinds of versioning systems you can use. Right. But I wonder, and I don't know who to ask on this one, I imagine there's ransomware sophisticated enough to Right. Propagate into your versions as well. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott (02:02:10):
<Laugh>, she's probably a,

Leo Laporte (02:02:12):
I don't know.

Paul Thurrott (02:02:14):
Yeah, it's an

Leo Laporte (02:02:14):
Interesting question.

Paul Thurrott (02:02:15):
Word docs probably have a versioning fill feature built in that's in their whatever op, whatever they have open XML format or whatever. And you could definitely, I'm sure ransomware would've no problem getting into that. It's just an open

Leo Laporte (02:02:26):
File. Yeah. Cuz it's just a folder. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:02:30):
Yeah. Actually it's pretty much, I think it's a zip file basically, right. Is what it is.

Leo Laporte (02:02:34):
I'll have to look at that. But yeah, I mean this is, I mean, it's certainly possible nowadays to say, don't

Paul Thurrott (02:02:39):
Ever have important data in one case. Don't

Leo Laporte (02:02:41):
Trust a cloud. Yeah. Don't trust a company.

Paul Thurrott (02:02:44):
I guess. Don't trust one thing ever. Whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

Leo Laporte (02:02:50):
Alright. Half pick of the week.

Paul Thurrott (02:02:52):
Yeah. This is kind of an old chestnut in a way, but it's was running When is 11 is still important. So one of the things that happened with moment two, which was released last week, is they updated the task bar and broke a bunch of of utilities that integrate with the shelled windows. So start 11 updated their app to work with moment two. And remember that for now the people running this thing are mostly enthusiasts. They know to go to Windows update. They know to look for updates. They know to say yes to a preview version of an update to get moment two, the real release date of moment two is the, what is it, next Tuesday the 14th, which is the second Tuesday of March. So most people won't be getting it until next week, in which case start 11, which is the start menu replacement. The start out makes, will be completely compatible with the moment too. So when people get it, they'll be all set. So if you if you already have start 11, update it and everything will be fine. And I want, I was gonna look up the price. I, I wanna say <laugh>, the price I got was hilarious. Lemme just actually, is it still on my screen? It's like

Leo Laporte (02:03:54):
$6 or something. It's fine.

Paul Thurrott (02:03:56):
Yeah. It might be as much as 11. Yeah. in Mexico it's 115 pesos. So I guess what, I've been divided by 20. So <laugh>, you might

Leo Laporte (02:04:08):
Be racist. It's a nickel <laugh>. Yeah. It's,

Paul Thurrott (02:04:10):
I have, I don't know why this math is still so hard for me, or why every time I get a receipt I'm like, you're

Leo Laporte (02:04:16):
Living in Mexico now,

Paul Thurrott (02:04:18):
Dude. I know. I know, I know. It's hard. It's, I'll get,

Leo Laporte (02:04:20):
So I've, it's what I

Paul Thurrott (02:04:21):
Do. You go to Europe, but it's like 1.2, you know, or whatever.

Leo Laporte (02:04:24):
No, it's easy. What I do is I cut off the last digit and then divide it in half and that's the number. No, I know. It's so easy. It's

Paul Thurrott (02:04:32):
Just, it's, I know.

Leo Laporte (02:04:33):
<Laugh> little big

Paul Thurrott (02:04:34):
Number. It's, you see the big number and you get, you like,

Leo Laporte (02:04:37):
So I see 111, I go 11 still with two taco and 50 cents. It's two tacos, man.

Paul Thurrott (02:04:42):
Yeah. Then you do the math and you're like, oh,

Leo Laporte (02:04:44):
Oh, oh no. I've been watching your Instagram and looking at your menus and then looking at the prices. Oh, I get to listen. Oh my God. That was 70 pesos. Oh my God.

Paul Thurrott (02:04:52):
I gotta tell. Yeah. Oh, so you saw that. So I saw it. Those lunches we have, those are $3 and 50 cents a piece. Three

Leo Laporte (02:04:57):
50.

Rich Campbell (02:04:58):
Wow.

Paul Thurrott (02:04:59):
Yeah. Amazing. This is, I'm talking like a three-course meal. I mean, <laugh>, it's like that chicken soup thing. We had $3.

Rich Campbell (02:05:08):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:05:08):
Incredible.

Paul Thurrott (02:05:10):
Like, it's incredible.

Leo Laporte (02:05:11):
It is amazing.

Rich Campbell (02:05:12):
And, and,

Leo Laporte (02:05:13):
And it's delicious. That's

Paul Thurrott (02:05:15):
The other thing. Oh my God. It's, and it's,

Leo Laporte (02:05:16):
It's incredibly

Paul Thurrott (02:05:17):
Good. Yeah. We walk out of there. We don't, you don't wanna like, leave food on a plate in Mexico, you know, but you walk out of there, you're like, my God, I ate too much. Like, it's crazy. Yeah. Like how? Yeah. It's unbelievable. Huh?

Leo Laporte (02:05:27):
I almost wanna tell you, I so wanna retire

Paul Thurrott (02:05:30):
<Laugh>. It's

Leo Laporte (02:05:30):
Like, but I'm on a retire where? The beach. So I'm, I'm looking at the coasts, you know? Sure,

Paul Thurrott (02:05:35):
Sure. Well,

Leo Laporte (02:05:36):
But I'll come visit you in the city. Don't worry. Get

Paul Thurrott (02:05:38):
The same. Yeah. Yeah. It's beautiful here. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:05:40):
<Laugh>. Oh God. Leon Lisa here again. Oh my God. <Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (02:05:45):
Just don't answer the door. Pretend we're not

Leo Laporte (02:05:47):
Here. Pretend we're not. They

Paul Thurrott (02:05:48):
See your Instagram. They

Leo Laporte (02:05:49):
See your Instagram. I see your Instagram, Paul. I know you're in that <laugh>. What's going on? You munching on run as radio. You're in New Zealand, but you still get shows.

Rich Campbell (02:05:59):
This is a show actually I shot back in February at N D C with a fellow by the name of Cal wick. We were talking mostly about password list, but it ended to be a long conversation about IDO two. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:06:13):
Cool. 

Rich Campbell (02:06:15):
Whatever. I think. Yeah. I don't always think about like these UV keys, right? Yeah. I'm big on, on UV keys to do further authentication, so forth. But Kyle dug into this fact that you don't have to have a UBI key, like the combination of a fingerprint reader with your phone TP machine. Yeah. Yeah. Or your phone will generate a token. So you can, you effectively are able to do that process. I think

Leo Laporte (02:06:36):
That certification think that's why we're seeing password. Listen now finally is almost everybody has a biometric authentication device Yeah. In their pockets. And that's a great solution. Oh, I gotta listen to this. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (02:06:48):
The, and it's another reason, like, I'm really glad to be hanging up my old ad infrastructure because I never upgraded enough to make windows. Hello. Work properly. But now that I'm switching over to M 365 with Azure AD for everything and hello. Works fine. And Windows Hello. Does lots of options.

Leo Laporte (02:07:03):
Hello? Is so good. Yeah. That is something Microsoft does much better than Apple. I really think Hello is amazing.

Rich Campbell (02:07:10):
The, that updated Microsoft Authenticator directly addressed the biggest problem with Authenticators is, which is people just saying yes to stuff. Right? Right. The, the new way that Dedicator works where the app shows you a number and then the authenticator, it's not good. Yeah. Three numbers. Yeah. Because I've been on the, I've been talking to a friend of mine who's an IT guy who's working with one of his users whose account is under attack, like under attack at the time. Wow. And then the saw an authentication request came in and just said yes. Yep.

Leo Laporte (02:07:38):
Ah,

Rich Campbell (02:07:39):
And then permitted the attacker in where with the number trick, that would be impossible. Right. Cause you don't know the number. Brilliant. Yeah. It's a great step forward. And the conversation with Kyle was real powerful just to say. But we really got to a place by the end of that show where it's like, hey, you can do multi-factor authentication that the user doesn't even really realize they're even doing anymore. Like, do they do these com? They, they're doing these couple of steps. It does it feel like authentication and then things just work.

Leo Laporte (02:08:05):
So he's what he works at N nbc?

Rich Campbell (02:08:09):
No, no. This was a conference that we we're

Leo Laporte (02:08:11):
At N DC That's right. You were at the n DC Concert Con Con

Rich Campbell (02:08:15):
Conference. Yeah, we were at the conference. But no, he's an independent consulter consultant in

Leo Laporte (02:08:20):
Town. Yeah. I'm, this is a must

Rich Campbell (02:08:21):
Some interesting project.

Leo Laporte (02:08:23):
Yeah. Yeah. This is good. I have to listen to it. Run as radio.com show 8 78 7 0.

Paul Thurrott (02:08:31):
Hey, I will absolutely be listening to us walking around the park number by place there. Like this is, I just, I I almost this morning, that was almost the thing I listened to and it will be the next

Leo Laporte (02:08:41):
Thing. It sounds, it seems like a must listening Yeah. Actual content as opposed to what we do here at twit, which is a kind of cat g t style

Paul Thurrott (02:08:50):
<Laugh> more of a scrum

Leo Laporte (02:08:51):
<Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (02:08:54):
Than a

Leo Laporte (02:08:54):
Conversation. But brown lick time, my friends, the moment you've all been waiting for.

Rich Campbell (02:09:00):
Yes. And then am am my ongoing saga going through the process of how Scottish whiskey's actually made. So we we've, we've talked about the barley, we've talked about the malting process where we talked about, you know, we dry with Pete. That's where that PD flavor comes from. And so now you've got this malted barley. So it's, it's s sprouted and you've dried it. It's, it's actually like, like heavily dried toast. Like it's crumbly dry.

Leo Laporte (02:09:30):
Mm.

Rich Campbell (02:09:31):
So the next step is to mill it. Right. to actually, to, to break it down. And this, you know, sort of casually mental mentioned malted folks always ask, well, single malts, like what does that even mean? Right. And it, and in theory, you single malt used to mean it came from a particular malting.

(02:09:51):
Oh. So they, when a distillery grew its own grain and malted it itself, if the, if the bottles came from, came from that malting that was single malt, it doesn't mean that anymore. Simply because whiskey has grown at too large, created at too large a scale at factory scale, you can't really count on a given malting. But barley comes from multiple places. It's malted in larger lots. It's dried and, and ground in different lots. So these days, single malt really means came from articulate distillery. Yeah. So you know what a Balvin say, you know, 12 year old single malt is, it doesn't only have to have just 12 year old at it. 12 means it's the youngest thing in the bottle. There might be older in it to get to the consistent flavor profile. Right. This need, this need for folks to say, Hey, if I buy a bottle of Vei 12, it tastes like VEI 12, the same as the last one. Means that there's very clever folks who work hard to get those flavor profiles consistent.

Paul Thurrott (02:10:47):
And this is literally humans tasting it, right. That there are tasting tasters who

Rich Campbell (02:10:52):
Remarkable tasters. Yeah. Like they taste things. I I have sat with one of them. He says, taste these three. And I'm like, these all taste the same. He's like, well, they don't

Paul Thurrott (02:11:01):
<Laugh>. Yep. Yeah. Super tasters amazing.

Rich Campbell (02:11:03):
As opposed to the, and, and then there's the blends. And, and blends typically come from multiple distilleries. And I tell this story to talk about the whiskey that I picked out this week, and it's related to the milling story as well, which is the Craig Aachi 13, the Armac edition.

Leo Laporte (02:11:19):
Hmm. The Craig Aace 13 aged in Armac barrels

Rich Campbell (02:11:26):
Finished in arm, finished

Leo Laporte (02:11:27):
Armac

Rich Campbell (02:11:27):
Because it's last year in Armac. Now the name. And it's not a well-known brand. In fact, most it's

Leo Laporte (02:11:32):
Because you can't say it. That's why

Paul Thurrott (02:11:35):
<Laugh>, that's the, it's

Rich Campbell (02:11:36):
Really

Paul Thurrott (02:11:37):
Scott is Craigslist,

Leo Laporte (02:11:38):
<Laugh>

Rich Campbell (02:11:39):
Scott said Craig Alaki. It's great. Craig Ala Now it's not my favorite Shirley. Not by any stretch in the imagination. Most of their pro, their, their barrels end up in doers. And I do like a doers 12, which is a blended whiskey and doers and sons own Craig Achi, along with Ben Ren and of

Leo Laporte (02:12:00):
Brothers. Oh, that's interesting.

Rich Campbell (02:12:02):
But the Craig Aace is not just a distillery, it's also a town. And it's also got a phenomenal hotel in it called the Craig Achi.

Leo Laporte (02:12:09):
Oof. Let's go. I'm ready. Oh.

Rich Campbell (02:12:12):
And it's, it is my launching pad whenever I'm in, in space side to do some shop, I, I stay there. It's more than 120 years old. It used to be the old trade station, but the train lines are gone now. It is a sportsman's hotel, which is to say that has a sportsman's entrance. A place where you can clean your,

Leo Laporte (02:12:34):
A mudroom. Yeah. Clean your kilt. Clean your kilt.

Rich Campbell (02:12:37):
So if you're, if you've shot an elk or if you've caught some salmon from the spay river, the, there's an entrance for you to go into to prep them up. And then they have easy access to the freezer so you can freeze your catch. They're a lovely restaurant downstairs called the Copper Dog. And they make their own blends there as well. And I've eaten there many times. The the thing about the Craig Locke is the qua, which is the, exactly what you think of when you think of a w of a whiskey bar. Right. Wooden floor, wall ceiling. Yeah. Windows on the spay river, large fireplace at one. The

Paul Thurrott (02:13:12):
Bar goes off to the horizon and neither direction

Rich Campbell (02:13:15):
<Laugh>, they over stuffed chairs.

Leo Laporte (02:13:17):
But do you have to kill your own meal ahead of time? Or is that not part of the deal?

Paul Thurrott (02:13:21):
It's, it's recommended

Rich Campbell (02:13:23):
<Laugh>. Yeah. The, your

Leo Laporte (02:13:24):
Recommended salmon not eaten until you, you have the is

Rich Campbell (02:13:28):
This No, they make, they make a mean Scottish breakfast, man. It's

Leo Laporte (02:13:31):
The best. It's Scotland's oldest whiskey hotel. Yeah. The fact that they brand themselves a whiskey hotel bottle. Look how beautiful that is. Oh, it's

Rich Campbell (02:13:41):
Lovely. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:13:42):
It looks like at a

Rich Campbell (02:13:43):
Street that, that was like on the one sunny day. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:13:46):
Yeah, it is. Be prepared. Yeah. It's a little damp. Yeah. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (02:13:50):
Oh. But yeah. And so, and there are whiskeys there. I mean, many of the unusual whiskeys that I've ever gone and hunted down, I was able to taste it. The,

Leo Laporte (02:13:59):
You can't drink here unless you can pronounce it Laie. Yeah. The cra lucky thing.

Rich Campbell (02:14:06):
But we were talking about milling. Oh, and that

Leo Laporte (02:14:08):
Leads back to milling. Yes.

Rich Campbell (02:14:10):
Milling. So this is when we take the dried malt. Yes. And now we want to grind it into grist to break it down into various components. Most distilleries actually have their own milling machines, although they can, they can, from the major producers order pre-ground grist in their preferred ratios. They, you know, that story of how every machine today is made to be obsolete. Yeah. <laugh>, let's talk about the opposite story. <Laugh>. Let's talk about, let's talk about the company Portus and the company R Robert. Bobby. They both made these mills.

Leo Laporte (02:14:47):
Wait, Robert, Bobby,

Rich Campbell (02:14:50):
Robert, Bobby Mills, Robert, Bobby, Bob <laugh>. This is in the, this is in the late 18 hundreds. So this is Victorian era. And these machines are essentially indestructible. They're still running today. And both companies are out of business because there's only so many distilleries and only so many breweries that need these mills. And these mills never fail.

Leo Laporte (02:15:12):
Oh, wow.

Rich Campbell (02:15:12):
They need maintenance. But other than that, and so, well,

Leo Laporte (02:15:15):
It's just a big rock, right? I mean, how hard could it be?

Rich Campbell (02:15:18):
Two sets of rollers. So they have a screening system that takes out the debris. Then they have a crack a cracker roller, which cracks the grain. And then you have a grinder roller that grinds it down into, into fines. So you really want sort of hu grist or, or the medium. And then flour, which is the fine grind. And you wanted them in different ratios. The, the typical is about 20% hu 70% heart 10% flour. And some ratios are like 1585. Like it's, it depends. The problem here is that when we go to the next step, which is mashing, we're going to attempt to use hot water to start extracting the sugars from the malt. And if you ground it altar flour, it's actually quite water resistant. Like it's hard to get the water into the flour. So they don't want too much flour, they want more crisp.

(02:16:08):
But if you don't grind it of coursely enough, you can't get the sugars out. So this is all about optimizing sugar extraction. And so these mills do do very precise grinding so you can actually pull it out. And the Craig Locke distillery, while it doesn't have a re tour, I have had a chance to take a peek in there. And they have one of these portus mills, like a five ton machine you know, half the height of the building, bright red and and a hundred years old. The oldest, the oldest portus, as they found that are still running, are 150 years old.

Leo Laporte (02:16:43):
Wow.

Rich Campbell (02:16:46):
So that, that's the process. Now you've grounded down into grist. Next step will be getting to get to the mash done. And I can do that next week. In the meantime, the Craig Alaki 13 boss arm is aged in in bourbon barrels and then transferred to Armon y barrels for its last year. So comes across a bit sweeter and stronger as it's relatively difficult to find, although that particular bottling, the 13 about armac almost $60. If you can't find one it's it's an interesting interpretation. Armac is armac barrels. The armac producers tend to hold onto the barrels, so they're fairly hard to come by. So there's not very many Scottish whiskeys made with armac with those armac flavors, which are distinct. Armon y is a very old liquor. One would argue one of the very first liquors ever made was distillate of grape into brandy. And the armac process is sort of the original kind of primitive process. I opposed to cognac, which is a two stave, higher distillation and different aging process.

Leo Laporte (02:17:50):
The [inaudible] they call it muscular <laugh> <laugh>. It's, it's a muscular whiskey. It's not, it's not in feminine <laugh> whiskey. So just a word of warning. It's brown water is what it's Yes. Yes. It, they finish it in the ba arm mania perils to round out the muscular.

Rich Campbell (02:18:12):
There

Leo Laporte (02:18:12):
You go. So there you go. First matured an ex bourbon and exte casks, then rested in ba arm casks for just over a year for a steadfast drum. Yeah. I like it.

Rich Campbell (02:18:26):
It's got a, it's got a punch to it.

Leo Laporte (02:18:27):
It's got, is that what muscular means? Okay. It's got a punch to it. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (02:18:31):
You'll know you were drinking something

Leo Laporte (02:18:33):
<Laugh>. Well, what did I say the first time I had oh. What was that? Geez, I'm losing my mind. I feel like by a horse. <Laugh>. I said, I no, I, I said I feel like I've been shot in the tongue. <Laugh>.

Rich Campbell (02:18:48):
Wow.

Leo Laporte (02:18:49):
Wow. How fun though.

Rich Campbell (02:18:52):
I had some great tales of mash. Tons to tell the next time around.

Leo Laporte (02:18:55):
Well, and then I want to hear about these worm tubs cuz they keep talking about their worm tubs.

Rich Campbell (02:18:59):
That's a, that's a thing. That's a thing. That's a, that's one of the older processes, you know, many, many distilleries of modernized pieces of that. Sometimes you have Victorian gear. The mo the contemporary gear is mostly German. It's derived from brewery. Like everything we've done so far to the barley is making, we're on the same path that we're making here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. And we are going to, we are gonna get to a point of wart and then we're gonna change path

Leo Laporte (02:19:23):
<Laugh>. This is good. This

Rich Campbell (02:19:25):
Is good. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:19:27):
I'm really enjoying it. Thank you for doing this. Richard

Rich Campbell (02:19:30):
I'm having been a great time.

Leo Laporte (02:19:31):
Yeah. We're really learning here. Richard Campbell run as radio.com and.net rocks. You find that there as well. And much appreciated. A new contributor to the show on a regular basis. Of course, Paul Throt, he's at throt.com. Become a premium member. That's when you get the, the really good stuff. I am for sure. And of course, his book, the Field Guide to Windows 11 is available now with the field guide to Windows 10 bundled in Right inside there.

Paul Thurrott (02:20:01):
Yeah. Increasingly irrelevant cuz it's getting there, you know.

Leo Laporte (02:20:04):
Yeah. Isn't that interesting? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:20:06):
Yeah. The book's getting up there. 

Rich Campbell (02:20:07):
And it's gonna be around a long time. Friend

Leo Laporte (02:20:10):
<Laugh>. Well you saw that, that that graph. Yeah. And of course he's writing a new book which we will tell you about when it comes out. But lean pub.com is where you go to get those. We we do Windows Weekly right here. Every Wednesday 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern Time. Used to be 1900, but you know what we are setting our clocks back to summertime on Sunday. So that, by the way,

Paul Thurrott (02:20:37):
Yes. We are not in Mexico. So now the time change is gonna go from one hour to two <laugh>. I know.

Leo Laporte (02:20:44):
Does Mexico not set the clocks

Paul Thurrott (02:20:46):
They did before? This is the first year They're not doing it.

Leo Laporte (02:20:48):
I'm moving. Yep.

Rich Campbell (02:20:49):
People are starting to drop out. I'm moving. They stay like everything. It's finally starting to die. And it needs to die.

Leo Laporte (02:20:55):
It's safer. The food's better. The food's less expensive and they don't set their clocks

Paul Thurrott (02:21:00):
Back. Yes. That's the, the icing on this. You live

Leo Laporte (02:21:03):
In heaven, <laugh>. You live in heaven. 

Paul Thurrott (02:21:09):
I'll tell the I'll tell the sweet potato guy you said. So this

Leo Laporte (02:21:12):
Guy with this

Paul Thurrott (02:21:13):
Tooting his horn

Leo Laporte (02:21:14):
As he goes. So it will be 1800 UTC next week. All of our shows, we, it's not because UTC changes, we change. So because we are Yeah, because

Paul Thurrott (02:21:25):
You do change where you are changes time.

Leo Laporte (02:21:26):
Yeah, we're springing forward. So we actually change our time in, in real world terms, but we're springing forward in on Sunday and that means we'll be at a whatever I said, 1800 UTC starting next Wednesday. You can watch us live. I mean, honestly, you don't need to know what time we recorded unless you want to watch us live. That stream audio or video is live dot twit tv. If you're watching live, please chat with us live. We have an IRC open to all IRC dot twit tv. But of course my preference is you'd be in a club, the club twit and get to chat in the exclusive club Twit Discord, where we only serve 13 year old ba arm mink cas liquors. That's amazing. Actually the club is less, A club club is less expensive than a single shot of that, by the way.

(02:22:13):
Seven bucks a month, 84 bucks a year. You can, you can pay more if you want. You don't have to. What do you get is ad free versions of all of our shows Access to the best dang discourse in the wide world. It is the Discord, I should say <laugh>. It is, it is a fun place to hang with Superman at. Wow. I didn't know he was a drinker. He a Superman too. <Laugh>. Now there's he's drink Superman should at least drink black label. Not Johnny Walker Red. Come on. I mean, get with it. You're the Man of steel. It's, it's matching the Cape. As you can see, our discord is full of animated gifts, but that's not all. We also have discussions about plenty of other topics. Not just the shows. We've got books. In fact, we have a Stacey's book club coming up in April.

(02:23:00):
We have coding, i, I hang out in the coding section, travel anime comics and on and on and on. It's a great community of like-minded people. And you get the Twi plus feed, which has shows we don't put out anywhere else, including this guy's Windows. Hands on Windows Show. Yep. tomorrow's episode I think is moment two. Yes. We're gonna make that one we're gonna make public on the YouTube feed. Yeah. So if you wanna know what Hands On Windows is, like, you can watch that moments too episode. But all the rest are behind the paywall at club Twit. It's a small paywall, seven bucks that's only about that high. It's a really tiny little paywall. But it's important to us cuz it keeps us on the air, frankly in tough times. So and we are in tough times.

(02:23:44):
We actually, advertising is down lower than it was during all of Covid, which is somewhat concerning. So actually Lisa's at the podcast movement right now with our sales team trying to drum up some business, but we shouldn't, you know what? I don't think we should be dependent on that. I'd much rather be dependent on you, our dear, your listeners. So if you can see your way to seven bucks a month, see your way to twit tv slash club twit. I promise it will be worth it. And it does make a big difference to us after the fact. We do have of course, ad supported versions of everything. We well I used to say everything we do, not everything we do, but all the things we used to do at the website, twit tv, including Windows Weekly, TWIT tv slash ww.

(02:24:27):
 We also have YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly, that's got even more ads in it. And <laugh>, I don't know, does, I don't even know. Does YouTube stick ads into I guess it would if you're not a premium premium person, I think Cover it. Yeah. Yeah. So even more ads if you want 'em on YouTube. But the best thing to do of course, is subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That way you'll get it automatically. You could choose a audio or video or both and it'll download to your device or your laptop or whatever. And you'll be able to listen at your leisure which I encourage you to do, cuz those regular downloads help us kind of keep track of, you know, what you're interested in. That's about it for this edition of Windows Weekly. Thank you Paul. Thank you Richard. Have a great time. Richard, are you gonna be in New Zealand again next week or are you coming home? I will not. I will be in Wales. <Laugh>, will you be joining us in from Wales? Absolutely. Fantastic trip. Are you going direct today? I got two days at home in between. Okay. Wow. That's a lot of travel. Fantastic. Hmm. Well have a safe trip and we'll talk to you in Wales and you in Mexico City and you, wherever you are, anywhere in the world. Thanks for joining us and we'll see you next time on Windows Weekly. Byebye.