Windows Weekly Episode 823 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.

Mikah Sargent (00:00:00):
Coming up on Windows Weekly. Leo Laport is on vacation, and I, Mikah a sergeant, am happy to be back for Windows Weekly. First, we celebrate the birthday of Microsoft, which just turned 48. And all I've got are these tiny little clappers to celebrate it. So that's for you, Microsoft. Then we move on to talk about the beta channel build for Windows 11, including a really cool feature for File Explorer called Access Keys. Microsoft 365 makes its appearance first with Bing that might start costing some folks money in different ways and security vulnerability that existed with the launch of the new Bing. We also talk about the Surface Thunderbolt four Dock and how it uses u s BBC instead of that surface connector. And of course, we head into Xbox Corner before we round things out with the back of the book. And a very fascinating look at putting whiskey into barrels. Stay tuned for this week's episode of Windows Weekly

TWiT Intro (00:01:06):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twi.

Mikah Sargent (00:01:17):
This is Windows Weekly, episode 823 recorded Wednesday, April 5th, 2023. The door is made of a rake. This episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by Cisco Meraki. With employees working in different locations, providing a unified work experience seems as easy as herding cats. How do you reign in so many moving parts? Well, the Meraki Cloud Managed Network. Learn how your organization can make hybrid work work. Visit meraki.cisco.com/TWIT and buy Melissa more than 10,000 clients worldwide. Rely on Melissa for full spectrum data quality and ID verification software. Make sure your customer contact data is up to date. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free at melissa.com/twit and by Lenovo, orchestrated by the experts at CDW to help transform your organization with Lenovo ThinkPads, equipped with the Intel Evo platform for effortless connectivity and collaboration from anywhere. Learn more at cdw.com/lenovo client. It's time for Windows Weekly, the weekly look at all things Microsoft, including Windows office, Xbox, enterprise, and everything in between. The voice may sound a little different to you today. That's because I, Micah, Sergeant and back for Windows Weekly, while Leo LaPorte is on vacation. Of course, as one can expect joining us from Lower Mcce or somewhere?

Paul Thurrott (00:02:51):
No, just regular mcce. Regular

Mikah Sargent (00:02:53):
Mcce. It's paul thora threat.com. Hi Paul.

Paul Thurrott (00:02:57):
Hey, how you been?

Mikah Sargent (00:02:58):
I have been well been looking forward to hopping back on the show with you and mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, looks like you are the second of, of two moves is well underway, so I'm happy to see things are coming.

Rich Campbell (00:03:11):
<Laugh>. Yeah. <Laugh>. Yeah. Thank you.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:13):
And we are also joined, I believe this is my first time hosting since Richard Campbell started hosting this show.

Rich Campbell (00:03:21):
Absolutely.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:21):
Hello, Richard.

Rich Campbell (00:03:22):
Hi. Now I want you to take on that name my Town. That's always a good one to try on.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:28):
Oh, what is your town? I don't know where you're calling us from right now.

Rich Campbell (00:03:31):
I'm calling from Coquitlam, British Columbia.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:34):
Coquitlam.

Rich Campbell (00:03:34):
This rolls right up the tongue, just like it sounds,

Mikah Sargent (00:03:37):
Just exactly just like it sounds. If you could just cut him saying it and sort of paste it where I said he's calling us from and then put it there. That'd be great.

Rich Campbell (00:03:46):
That's it.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:46):
You, you seem to be quite the the, the Globe trotter. We have a i a meeting every Tuesday where we kind of talk about what's happening for the week, a little behind the scenes here and mm-hmm. <Affirmative> we always are going, where is Richard gonna be calling from this week? <Laugh>? Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:04:00):
What's it gonna be? Yeah. You know, it's the, the first quarter was particularly hairy, even by my standards. It looks like I flew 80,000 miles in three months. Wow. So yeah, it's a, you know, trip to New Zealand, trip to Australia, a couple of runs to the uk, a couple of runs to Europe, a couple of stops in the US. So it's tapered off a little now. April is gonna be, other than a couple of drives down to Redmond for some stuff is fine. May is one run to Europe and then build, which is Seattle. And then June, I think I'm going to Kansas City, and that's about it. So it's

Mikah Sargent (00:04:37):
Kansas City, Kansas or Kansas City, Missouri.

Rich Campbell (00:04:40):
Well, turns out they're the same town. Just depends on what side of the river you're on.

Mikah Sargent (00:04:43):
<Laugh>. Now listen here, I'm, I'm from Missouri and Kansas City. No, Kansas City, Missouri is the one, but if

Rich Campbell (00:04:50):
You're, now I'm coming, I'm coming in on the Missouri side. Is that the one that has the good barbecues of the other one? Oh,

Mikah Sargent (00:04:55):
God, don't get me started. And which one has the Kansas City Chiefs in it? Which one's the, yeah,

Rich Campbell (00:05:01):
The Royals. Yeah. Oh boy. Yep.

Mikah Sargent (00:05:03):
Oh, anyway well, I yeah, that, that sounds exciting for sure. But something else that's exciting is how we're kicking off the show. And I asked, I said, so I just, I was reading the show notes and it looks like we're kicking things off with a celebration. Do we have any sort of party favors? And they gave me some glitter and there you go.

Rich Campbell (00:05:25):
Tiny

Mikah Sargent (00:05:26):
Little clappers. And they, I don't, yay. Look at how small they,

Rich Campbell (00:05:31):
Oh, those are great. Yay. Happy.

Mikah Sargent (00:05:32):
Oh, Microsoft, they're

Rich Campbell (00:05:34):
Like, Donald Trump's hands. <Laugh>. Yeah. <Laugh>. That's

Mikah Sargent (00:05:38):
Nice. Microsoft is getting near 50. This, this, this week. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:05:46):
<Laugh>, that's enough of that.

Mikah Sargent (00:05:47):
Yeah, that is plenty of that. So I mean, what I didn't know kind of when Microsoft age, so it's kind of interesting to hear that it happens in April. Does Microsoft do anything to celebrate these sort of yearly anniversaries internally or externally that we know of?

Rich Campbell (00:06:06):
Not that I know of. No. Not, I mean, I think they hit the, I was there on Friday and there was things are pretty, pretty calm. That literally was the 31st. Right. You know, if, if you're gonna have a party at campus first, there has to be people at campus and there's not a lot people.

Paul Thurrott (00:06:19):
Sure, yeah. What happens if you have a party and no one came? There you go. Did it happen? Hmm.

Rich Campbell (00:06:25):
So, yeah. And I don't think it was a thing at all.

Paul Thurrott (00:06:28):
Yep.

Mikah Sargent (00:06:28):
They'll probably do something for their 50th, surely.

Paul Thurrott (00:06:31):
Yeah, I would think so.

Rich Campbell (00:06:32):
Yeah. You would hope. I mean, the funny part of course, the thing about is how many people working at Microsoft are still there? Like, of that original dozen, I think they're all gone. Yep. You know, they've, they've, they're also all extremely wealthy, so why would they stay?

Paul Thurrott (00:06:47):
Right.

Mikah Sargent (00:06:47):
That's, yeah. That's a, that's a fair point. If you, you've, you've made your money, you don't need to be there to celebrate. Yeah. th this, this far along. Alright, well if, if we don't have anything else to say about the birthday <laugh>, then we can move right along to Windows 11.

Rich Campbell (00:07:01):
I, I, I did look up the the Microsoft office in Albuquerque. It's, the building is still there. It was a rental office on California Street. It's it looks like a 50 plus year old building. Like, it's not pretty.

Paul Thurrott (00:07:14):
Yeah. It was a strip mall kind of a situation. It was near laundromat and some prostitutes. It was nice. It was a good part of town. <Laugh> <laugh>, but actually used to live in Albuquerque. Random aside myself. But yeah, that's not a good part of town. Not even today.

Rich Campbell (00:07:32):
And Paul Allen had a plaque put up on one corner of the building that says like, this is the original historical headquarters of Microsoft which was stolen like 10 years ago. And then I, he, and then he had it replaced. It's been replaced, but now that he's gone, I wonder if he left in his will to keep replacing that plaque. Right. So funny, the foundation's still operating. Presumably they have plaque preservation in mind.

Mikah Sargent (00:07:55):
The only thing I know about Albuquerque is that's where Bugs Bunny always ended up when he

Paul Thurrott (00:07:59):
That's right. That's in my notes. Microsoft took a long left turn in Albuquerque,

Mikah Sargent (00:08:03):
<Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:08:04):
Nice. That's, that's how I first heard about it as a child. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:08:10):
Didn't know if it was real or not. When

Paul Thurrott (00:08:11):
I moved to New Mexico, people I worked with asked if I needed a visa to work there. <Laugh> land on, that's part of the United States. Oh, that's, they insisted this is not true. So I had to show it to him on a map. <Laugh>.

Rich Campbell (00:08:22):
Now, wasn't this, wasn't this a story in the news just recently of a fellow who tried to get married in New York and when he said he was from New Mexico, they said, well then, you know, where's your passport?

Paul Thurrott (00:08:31):
That's

Rich Campbell (00:08:32):
Incredible. He just didn't know that it was a state.

Paul Thurrott (00:08:35):
Well, ignorance persists. That's good. Good to know. <Laugh>. That's,

Mikah Sargent (00:08:38):
And that's the theme. No, I, I can't <laugh>. So Windows 11 of course has a new beta channel, channel build. Do you wanna tell us about what's going on there?

Paul Thurrott (00:08:53):
Yeah. <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (00:08:55):
Paul, it's so nice to be back here on the show with you. I just, this, I I was, I was ready and excited and you have, and

Paul Thurrott (00:09:04):
I just sucked you in right outta that. You

Mikah Sargent (00:09:06):
Drove it, you drove it home cuz you gave me what I was expecting sort of just yeah. This is what's happening.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:12):
<Laugh>. Well, just to, to bring you up to speed, <laugh> Microsoft now has multiple channels that they test early. Windows 11 builds in there's a Canary channel, which is brand new, which we suspect is gonna be the Windows 12 stuff. Dev beta and release preview. So there was a new beta channel build within the past week. This one, you know, as is off, so off the case, right? It's not like there's a bunch of major stuff in here, but there is some interesting stuff in here, right? And you know, for example, they're testing that Bing button in the task bar. So if you are, are have access to the Bing preview, which by the way, everyone basically does now that dynamic, but you want to or not? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. Yeah. That dynamic search highlights button will be replaced with a giant B because we get to do the superhero thing.

(00:09:59):
 But I'm actually and Richard might be interested in this too. I, I, I'm kind of more interested in this Access Key feature and File Explorer. And this is just because this is vaguely a programming topic to me. You know, if you create apps for Windows, you know, if you go back to the old-fashioned way to create apps, right? You can do things like create keyboard shortcuts for certain actions, of course, that you can tie to the same event handler as like clicking on a menu or whatever. But Windows has long supported this thing called Access keys, which I think a lot of people kind of misunderstand. And the notion here is that you can use something like Alt F to bring up the file menu, and then each action in the, or each command in that menu has an access key associated with it, right? Mm. you'll see a hint if there's a keyboard shortcut which is a completely separate thing. You can evoke that without going through the menu. But the access keys give you a way to basically navigate the menu with the keyboard.

Mikah Sargent (00:10:56):
I like this. This is one of the things that I actually like about <laugh>. Wow. This is gonna sound written. One of the things I actually like about Windows is Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:11:03):
Yeah. No, no,

Mikah Sargent (00:11:03):
I understand. We'll just use that keyboard shortcut. Just type a letter that's underlined. Is, is it like that that mode?

Paul Thurrott (00:11:09):
Yeah. Sort. It is sort of, yeah. And the, one of my frustrations when I go to the Mac is that not everything has keyboard access, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So there's this notion of like Zor is not the right term, but th this way of, you can ta and Windows, you can tab through controls in a, in a menu or a, a toolbar or whatever it is, and you can kind of tab, tab, tab, enter, and it will make that thing happen. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> on the Mac. There's limited support for that. And it varies by app, and it's, it's not a stringent requirement. And so one of the frustrations is you can't tab, tab, tab into a certain thing in a maci and then start typing or whatever it might be. And I always run into that. And as someone, I, I, I think writers encoders or people who like to keep their hands on the keyboard it's a, it's a frustration.

(00:11:56):
And so one of the issues in Windows though, is that we have like multiple archeological layers of <laugh> technologies, right? So applications are written with different frameworks, and all the old ones support this natively. It's a very common thing. And then the new ones probably do support it. Something like the Windows app SDK or the Universal Windows platform. It's less common to see these things implemented in apps written, but to those frameworks, not because it's not there, it's just people are writing these kinds of apps. Don't think about this stuff anymore. It's kind of a, it's almost old fashioned developers.

Rich Campbell (00:12:29):
It was built into the toolkit. You, you had to fight to have it not

Paul Thurrott (00:12:32):
Work, right, right, right. By

Rich Campbell (00:12:34):
Default, if you had a menu, all the alt keys worked. That

Paul Thurrott (00:12:38):
Was just the Yeah. And that's one of the things we've kind of lost a little bit, as you know we've moved past that kind of classic desktop style of application development. So the File Explorer app in Windows 11 today is kind of a hybrid app, actually. Parts of it are the old fashioned you know c probably are c plus plus based app, but parts of it are WIN ui, which is the new modern thing that makes it look pretty. And when you do a like a context menu for right click on something, like if you right click on the task bar, right click on the desktop, or in this case right click somewhere in File Explorer, that UI that comes up is when UI and it's, it's new, it's like modern and it's really nice looking and it doesn't support <laugh> any of this stuff that we're used to. So they, they're sort of retroactively adding it back. And that's what we're seeing. This is a long way of saying that this thing, which I would call a regression in Windows Levin, is going to be fixed sometime this year because now they're testing it in the beta channel and they are supporting what they call access keys.

Mikah Sargent (00:13:36):
Are these access keys closer set by the user or by Microsoft? And can they be changed? Do we know?

Paul Thurrott (00:13:44):
Well, okay, so in this case, I would say no, <laugh>, it is possible as an application developer if you wanted to, to support that kind of customization, but I don't

Rich Campbell (00:13:54):
That would be bad <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:56):
Yeah. I mean,

Mikah Sargent (00:13:56):
I just don't like that cut is T instead of X. That's my only problem I'm seeing in this screenshot. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:14:02):
And well, so this is the, alright, so this is the separation of the difference between a keyboard shortcut and an access key right. Uhhuh <affirmative>. The, the control plus X for cut will always work. Right? Got it. And that's always the more efficient way to do it. Don't bring up the menu, just select the item control X. That will do cut. That will, that's the same. That's never changed. This is literally the, an access key is for the visual thing that you're seeing, that you're looking at a menu and you have choices. Okay. the bigger problem with this context menu, by the way, you can see right at the top is the, I'll call in the, in this case, the three or four most common actions are not written out. They're just icons. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And so cut copy rename is the third one. And then the last one is delete. Are very common file operations, like types of things you might do in file Explorer, right? But do we know, I mean, does a normal person, I mean, the scissors one is pretty good, but that copy icon, does anyone know what that means? Yeah. And the

Mikah Sargent (00:15:00):
Rename that I actually, I could have guessed all of the rest of them, but I did not know that

Paul Thurrott (00:15:03):
Was You never would've. Yeah. And that's, that's a weird thing in Windows 11 and what they were trying to do, you know, in Windows 10, this di this menu was very tall, so they got rid of some things, and then others like this, they turned into icons on a single row. So the shaving space they have more padding. The, the letters were all bigger. It's a little prettier looking, whatever, but I, to me this is, this is like Egyptian higher glyphic. What, what are we looking at here? <Laugh>. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:15:27):
Right. And well, and it's all part of your special series Windows 11. Where the heck did my cheese go, right? Yes. Like, all this stuff you knew about, oh, it's just been moved a little and

Paul Thurrott (00:15:36):
It's hard fun. I'm so glad you just said that because it's even worse than what you're suggesting. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So if you, if you could do this right now, if you're listening and watching, and you have Windows 11 in front of you, right? Click the desktop. Well, actually that's not a good thing to do mm-hmm. <Affirmative> right. You get right click a thing. So you, what you have to do is have a file on the desktop, right? So you can have like a little shortcut or something. I'll just put a new folder there, right? So if this thing is up toward the top of the screen and you right click it, those buttons that I just described, the cut, copy, whatever are at the top, if you move that thing to the bottom of the screen, no, Paul don't. They're on the bottom. They're on the bottom. No. Yep. And listen, if you were looking for consistency, let me tell you, there is no hope here for you. <Laugh>. There is, this is not happening. A

Rich Campbell (00:16:18):
Van all hope.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:19):
Yep. So this is just, yeah. Another, and by the way, I'm sure there's a rationale for this. I'm sure there's a, you know, maybe it's closer to where you're clicking or something. Exactly. You want, you want, but you're ruining you know, there's a muscle memory hit thing Exactly occurring here, right? Me? This thing should always be on the top or always be on the bottom. You can pick one, I don't care which one, but yeah. Welcome to

Rich Campbell (00:16:38):
Have always had shell extensions, right? You're always able to add software that, and then it would ask, can I add the shell extensions so that it would show up in that context menu for a file and so forth. And that was fine. It was only when Microsoft started adding things to that context, it got way outta control because you, you didn't have an option to put it in or not put it in. It's like, oh, you've got two one drives. Here's two sets of OneDrive icons onto every property menu, whether you

Paul Thurrott (00:17:04):
<Laugh>, listen we, there are all kinds of examples of this. I was just talking to someone about the mi what's now called the Microsoft 365 app, which is used to be the office app, which is used to be the office unit 365 app. And it, it's, it's a neat thing in its own way. It, it's a front end to all the stuff you're working on in Microsoft 365. It's get you documents, you get templates, you can launch apps, you know, blah, blah, blah. What app launches when you click on an icon is a complete spin of a rule at, well, there's no way to know what's gonna happen next. It could be the web version, could be on the desktop. My argument is, if you have the desktop version of Word, you will always want that version to launch. No. Yeah. <Laugh>.

(00:17:44):
But I have in the same instance of using this app, clicked on word, launched word on my, on the desktop, clicked on Excel, launched Excel in the web. I have no idea why <laugh>. It's just, you know, so yes. Will they get this thing right someday? Yeah, someday, two years from now, we'll be talking about an insider bill of office or whatever it is. Just like we're talking about this insider bill of windows today, and they'll f you'll fix it, you know, they'll fix it someday. But by that time we'll have other things to complain about. So, <laugh>, it's just the way it is. You know, it's, you never know what you're gonna get, man. It's a box of chocolates.

Mikah Sargent (00:18:18):
<Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:18:19):
<Laugh>. And there's 11. I always get the one with the cherry in the middle. <Laugh>. No. Well,

Mikah Sargent (00:18:26):
Anything else from the insider build Do you want to talk about? 

Paul Thurrott (00:18:31):
That's the big step,

Mikah Sargent (00:18:32):
Maybe one to talk about or need to talk about? Maybe that's a better way to

Paul Thurrott (00:18:35):
Put it. <Laugh>. Yeah. No, I mean, the bing button in the tasker is the one people are gonna notice. And oh my God, are you gonna notice that? <Laugh>? and then I, I just, I, I highlighted the access key thing to me because in my little world like this to me is, I, this is what I like to see because I feel like this kind of thing is what was lost when we went to this simpler ui. And yeah, it's pretty, you know, but for people like me who like to, you know, keep their hands on the keyboard, like I said, like I, I feel like I'm losing stuff. And if I, if I just wanted to pick up a muscle all the time, I guess I would use a Mac, you know? But I, I really like the, the keyboard thing to me is central to the whole Windows experience always has been. It's Windows was designed, the ver version one was designed to be used only with the keyboard, if that's what you had. You didn't have to have a mouse. So I, I don't know. I think it's central to its personality. So it's nice to see them putting it back.

Mikah Sargent (00:19:26):
Yeah. Put that back. Leave it alone.

Paul Thurrott (00:19:28):
Yeah. What did you do? Well, you know, they've <laugh> those guys, I'd say they mean, well, I'm not sure. I think they're just mean <laugh>. I dunno.

Mikah Sargent (00:19:39):
Actually, I think surprisingly it's already time to take a quick break and then we'll come back with, okay Microsoft 365. But I do wanna tell all of our listeners out there about the group bringing you this episode of Windows Weekly. It's Cisco Meraki, the experts in cloud-based networking for hybrid work. Whether you're employees are working at home at a cabin in the mountains or wherever Richard Campbell is calling in for the week cloud managed network provides the same exceptional work experience no matter where they happen to be. You may as well roll out the welcome mat because hybrid work is here to stay. Hybrid work works best in the cloud and has its perks for both employees and leaders. Workers can move faster, they can deliver better results. They can do that with a cloud managed network, while leaders can automate distributed operations, build more sustainable workspaces, and proactively protect the network.

(00:20:36):
In fact, there was a recent report from I D G Market Pulse research conducted from Meraki that highlights top tier opportunities in supporting hybrid work. Why should we support hybrid work? Well, hybrid work is a priority for 78% of C-suite executives. Leaders want to drive collaboration forward while staying on top of boosting productivity and security. And hybrid work, of course, has its challenges. The IDG report raised the red flag about security, noting that 48% of leaders report cybersecurity threats as a primary obstacle to improving those workforce experiences. Always on security monitoring is part of what makes the cloud manage network so awesome. And it can use apps from Meraki's vast ecosystem of partners. These turnkey solutions built to work seamlessly with a Meraki cloud platform for asset tracking, location analytics and more. And with those tools, they can gather insights on how people use their workspaces.

(00:21:33):
In a smart space, environmental sensors can track activity and occupancy levels to stay on top of cleanliness. They can reserve workspaces based on vacancy and employee profiles. This is also known as hot desking, which allows employees to scout out a spot in a snap. Locations in restricted environments can be booked in advance and include time-based door access, as well as mobile device management. Yes, m d m integrating device and systems allow it to manage, update and troubleshoot company owned devices, even when the device and the employee are in a remote location. Turn any space into a place of productivity and empower your organization with the same exceptional experience no matter where they work. With Meraki and the Cisco suite of technology, learn how your organization can make hybrid work work by visiting meraki.cisco.com/twi. That's meraki cisco.com/twi. And of course, our thanks to Cisco Meraki for sponsoring this week's episode of Windows Weekly. All right, back to the program. And it's time to talk about Microsoft 365. Oh, we got you muted, Paul. One moment.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:48):
No, I got me muted. I'm sorry. Oh, you got, you muted. <Laugh> <laugh>. I was trying to say that Hot bag, hot desking is so much better than Hot bagging <laugh>. Which is more of a, a more common thing around these parts.

Mikah Sargent (00:23:00):
I don't even know what that is. Hot bagging.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:03):
Hot bagging is when you close a laptop, throw in your laptop bag, maybe run to the airport or whatever it is you get on the plane, you open the bag and it's like 190 degrees in there and you're like, oh God. And then you open the thing and the battery's dead. Oh, no.

Mikah Sargent (00:23:14):
See, I use a Mac. So I've never really had that problem.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:17):
Ooh. Now, now I'm having trouble hearing you <laugh>. <Laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (00:23:23):
Oh, I tease, I tease. It's fine.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:25):
Nicely done. Nicely done. Okay, <laugh>, I will accept that. Rebuke <laugh>. Moving

Mikah Sargent (00:23:32):
Along to,

Paul Thurrott (00:23:34):
Actually, before we get to that, just real quick Microsoft is also testing a feature called Workspaces in Microsoft Edge. And I guess it is now in public preview. I guess it was in kind of a, I don't know what it was an enterprise public preview before. This is not something that most individuals are gonna want to care about too, too much. But this is the idea here is that we don't have enough places to collaborate. So Edge is gonna become yet another one of those places. And if you think about any other shared collaboration app or whatever, instead of an individual working in tabs and doing things by themselves, you have a group who can do this. So you have a, a group of tags tabs rather, that are in a separate space in the browser that are part of a group workspace. But this is

Rich Campbell (00:24:20):
For consumers, right? It's for you need a personal Microsoft account. It's not

Paul Thurrott (00:24:24):
A Yeah, right. Solution. No, I, right. So originally it was released as like an enterprise preview. I guess this version is now for anybody. Yeah. Okay. So I guess it's for anybody. Yeah. Yeah. Because

Rich Campbell (00:24:34):
I mean, in theory, Jeff Teer would tell you, you should be doing all of this in teams if you're running inside of M

Paul Thurrott (00:24:39):
360. Yeah. It does depend on who you talk to. <Laugh>. Yeah. So, so as an example, Jeff, Microsoft 365. Well, in other words, you have a fam, maybe it's a family, right? And you're, bu you're planning a trip. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I, I can't tell you how many I've done this in the past. I used to do this with one note. We'd be going to some European destination with another couple here's some links to some stuff, throw, you know, add some stuff to it. No one ever adds anything to it. It's all the stuff I do, you know, like I'm the only one that contributes to it. So you could, you could do this now and Edge, right? You're doing some kind of a research for whatever, like a trip, like I said, or whatever. You have a shared workspace. Here's like some awesome things I think we should do. This assumes everyone you're planning this with is using Edge <laugh>, which is a long shot just to begin with. Not optimistic. Yeah. so yeah, I'm not a, I'm not a big, I guess I understand it. I, I, this we're gonna get to an edge topic at, at the end of the show that's semi-related to this in the sense that it, this is a, an activity that maybe is better handled elsewhere and that I feel like maybe we're bulking up edge with too much stuff, but I I, Microsoft

Mikah Sargent (00:25:48):
Doesn't do that. They don't put too much stuff in a and,

Paul Thurrott (00:25:51):
And just keep, it's Steve, we haven't been on the show in a while. I don't know if this has changed since then, or <laugh> it's been, but yeah, they, you know, they have a way of overloading things. Yeah. I think actually what Richard said, he was joking, but I, there's a, there's some reality behind it, which is that depending on who you talk to, you know, he said Jeff Teer, who runs Microsoft 365, he would tell you the way you collaborate is, you know, using teams or whatever teams. Yeah. the guy who runs Microsoft Edge has a completely different answer. Right. The person who runs Windows 11 might have a different, an answer as well. I mean, so it, you know, it's one of those, when you're a hammer kind of situations mm-hmm. <Affirmative> there is a lot of stuff going on edge just to super generalize it, that I would say is kind of the stuff you would put in an os and I don't quite understand why we're you know, adding our own forms of navigation and collections and things like that, that are maybe better handled outside of the browser, but that's not the way things are done in the

Mikah Sargent (00:26:46):
Oh, that's interesting. So you are almost seeing it as there are these different teams who all want to do this similar kind of thing. And so they're just like, you know what? We'll add it in the browser. I, I, so I use a version of this safari has a shared tabs experience where you can share with other people. And one of my co-hosts for iOS today she and I can sort of plan the show using the different articles we're going to talk about in a shared way. So I, I found this beneficial, but I see what you're saying, especially if it was at the sort of the, the desktop level, then maybe it's a little bit easier to integrate.

Rich Campbell (00:27:24):
Sure. Well, there's an interesting power to that. You know, you, it's only gonna work with Safari if everybody's on Safari. Yeah. It's only gonna work with Edge if everybody's on edge. But there's a bigger thing here. You know what I jumped on when I said this may be a screw Consumers, is that personal Microsoft account. Like how many folks are using Edge but have never logged in? Because for what? Sure. Like, why would I bother? Yeah. And now you're gonna force me to do all of those things so that we can share tabs.

Paul Thurrott (00:27:48):
It is it's reasonable to assume that a lot of people on a Mac are gonna be using Safari. Yeah. It's actually not reasonable to make that assumption of Edge on Windows. It's still a very small percentage mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. so yeah, I, I don't know that this is the right place to do things. You know, when Microsoft, for example, I don't like the product, but Microsoft has a OneNote product and team or whatever, and they make a thing in the edge that is like OneNote. I just wonder, why don't you just integrate with OneNote? You already have this thing

Rich Campbell (00:28:17):
Because that's the office team, not the Edge team. You know, you are, you're seeing the schisms, but I think, you know you've just nailed, why did they do this? Because Safari does this

Paul Thurrott (00:28:29):
<Laugh>. That's right. Oh yeah, that's true. That's true.

Mikah Sargent (00:28:32):
I guess, yeah, if you're looking for sort of parody across the mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, the different operating systems, that makes sense. 

Paul Thurrott (00:28:38):
You wanna have an answer? Yeah, I do this over here. What do you have, you know, that type of thing. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:28:42):
I thought I remembered Edge adding other collaborative features, or was that something that they were just showing off where you could have multiple people? It may have been at, at, at like Ignite or something. I can't remember now, but mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, they had, they were showing specifically, it was one of those planning a trip things again, and they were pulling out little parts

Paul Thurrott (00:29:05):
Of it and, you know, almost certainly col it was the collections feature. Right, got it. Which is the, the OneNote thing, which by the way, has its own collaboration capabilities as well. And that's the tool. Like, I, I just coi not coincidentally, I guess I mentioned, you know, years and years ago I tried to use with others and stuff like that just doesn't go well when I do it, I guess. But I, to me, you take advantage of the best that the company has to offer, and you just make those, the integration points. You know, if you can get one note for free, which you can, it used to be part of Windows 10, you know, maybe make that the point, you know, maybe make that the place where that stuff happens. Maybe it'll be Loop in the future. We're, you know, we're working toward changing things a little bit. So I, it's just that every time they add a feature like this to Edge, I think to myself, you put this in the wrong place, <laugh>, you know, this is not where this belongs.

Mikah Sargent (00:29:55):
Especially because it seems like it's it, it's either teams that gets all of these features added to it. We talked before about the fu gra ation of teams as it keeps getting warm

Paul Thurrott (00:30:05):
Stuff

Mikah Sargent (00:30:06):
Into it. And now we've got this edge. They just keep p pa packing stuff into it as well. And I agree a hundred percent with what you're saying in terms of find the best, the best implementation of it, and stick to that as opposed to, because if you were like, okay, we're gonna plan this, we're all gonna work together on this. Well, no, but I'm doing it in edge. Well, no, I'm doing it in one note.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:29):
I know. It's,

Mikah Sargent (00:30:30):
You just have all these bifurcations. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:30:32):
Yeah, yeah. The answer is loop. The answer is Loop <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (00:30:35):
Yeah. Everybody leaves what they're on and they use Loop instead.

Rich Campbell (00:30:38):
<Laugh>. That's it. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:40):
Yeah. Anyway, I didn't mean to get off on a far-reaching kind of theological discussion about design choices, but, you know, there is a, I mean, there are advantages to the Apple ecosystem. I think one of them is that there's a, there is this vision that we're not gonna duplicate functionality everywhere and let every team do their own thing. And at Microsoft, it's, it is absolutely a different culture and a different way of doing things. Yeah. It's, it's, there have been really overt versions of this. There have been times in Microsoft's history where multiple teams were working on like you know, I, I don't know what to call 'em anymore. They're basically Filey applications, right? Yeah. What, you know, what, what now what, what OneDrive is now under Ray Ozzy, we had, I think we had four different versions of those kinds of apps going at one time. And it's like, let you know, let the best app win. It's like, no <laugh> the best. No. If there is a best app, just do that. <Laugh>, why wouldn't you do these other things?

Rich Campbell (00:31:34):
Well, and and that problem was particularly prevalent under bomber when got, yeah. When, when gates wasn't around. Like the, the biggest problem you've got here is you've got these different thief to inside of Microsoft, and there was only one person BG sitting at the top who could declare one way or the other. He's the, he's the guy who said, Hey, you're making three different workflow engines. Right? Each of you contribute two team members build one workflow engine and you all use it. Right. You know, but only Bill had the clout to do that in inside of Microsoft. And when he wasn't around, it just didn't happen. And so Microsoft competed with self routinely.

Mikah Sargent (00:32:10):
That

Paul Thurrott (00:32:10):
Seems, I

Mikah Sargent (00:32:11):
That <laugh>, has that resulted, I guess, in looking back now, did that result in better products in the end? Because even if there wasn't other competition out there, I I, I had a feeling where this was going, but I just had to ask because I would like to believe that it helped, but sounds

Rich Campbell (00:32:29):
Like, well now you gotta throw in that other layer of 10 years of tech support. So Right. Link for SQL makes it out the door first and a bunch of people implemented, and then Entity Framework comes out a year later as the competing product was slightly lagging behind, there's then a bake off internal to Microsoft, but it's already too late. It's both out in the wild. They decide that EF is the winner, but they have to continue doing packages of Port for link to Sequel for a decade. Yeah. And punish developers who jumped on the new bits. Like if you ever wondered why they start getting nervous about trying to do bits, like, I'll wait for Service Pack one. It's because this sort of thing happened. I would say that it's not happening as much today, largely because Bill's back involved. Again, one of, of Satche Adele's criteria for becoming CEO is that Bill goes back to product review. He's not a public face of the company in any way, but he does review all the products and he does these consolidations. And I've talked to folks inside of Microsoft who are a new generation of people who dread going before Bill.

Paul Thurrott (00:33:34):
Sure. They should.

Rich Campbell (00:33:35):
Yeah. That's, it's apparently it's terrifying, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:33:37):
Because it should be. He

Rich Campbell (00:33:39):
He is hard-nosed and on the ball about

Paul Thurrott (00:33:41):
This justify your existence or leave.

Rich Campbell (00:33:43):
Yeah. And, and the only people who could be in the room are the folks building this stuff, not the marketing folks like you. You have to be a part of it and he will tear you to shreds.

Paul Thurrott (00:33:52):
Yeah. I, yeah. I can't say this has resulted in anything good. I think this's a lot more that goes into it too. Not to drag the, so for half an hour, but I spoke to the woman who ran one note several years back and she was asking me about my frustrations with the product and would I, you know, was I looking for something that I was looking for, which is essentially like a really simplified kind of markdown base, something, something that was, didn't have all the bells and whistles and blah, blah, blah. And they were very interested in working on something like that and making that product. And I don't know that that's what turned into Loop. Exactly. I don't mean to suggest that that's how that came about, but I think there were a lot, there was this understanding in Microsoft that we have this stuff that's it's legacy, it's top heavy, it's rooted in the past.

(00:34:34):
It's not the way people wanna work today, but how do we take this stuff we already have that everyone uses and turn it into this other new stuff. And I think the interesting thing about Teams is that it showed a way forward where you can still support the old stuff and have this new thing, and over time, the new thing will take place of the old thing. You don't have to just replace it immediately. And I think that's what they're gonna do with Loop as well. That Loop will eventually replace n one Note first, but also you know, SharePoint such as it is, I know it's based on SharePoint, but and many of the other apps that we use every day, like I think over time these other apps get diminished. And the focus is,

Rich Campbell (00:35:11):
Remember Paul in the end it's all SharePoint. It's

Paul Thurrott (00:35:13):
All SharePoint. That's right.

Rich Campbell (00:35:14):
Teams is a Shell over SharePoint. <Laugh> Loop is an interface over SharePoint. Yeah. Behind, behind the wi the behind the curtain there <laugh> saw

Paul Thurrott (00:35:22):
Sharepoint. Yeah, that's right. It's the virus underneath <laugh> that is it, it holds the system together. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's

Rich Campbell (00:35:31):
Like, it's a, it's actually a good glue. It's just that it's interfaces were terrible. So this effort to build multiple interfaces, so however you wanna work, it still feeds to SharePoint. Yeah. <laugh>, and this is, this is SharePoint, the document management tool, not SharePoint.

Paul Thurrott (00:35:46):
Yeah. Yeah. Not SharePoint, the architecture. No, I, I, I I, SharePoint is like, we talked about this probably a month or two ago, this mm-hmm. <Affirmative> notion of like, you don't ever steam man steam clean your engine. Right. Cuz it is the combination of oil and dirt that is holding that thing together. Yeah. That <laugh>, if you steam clean it, it's just gonna leak everywhere. That's what SharePoint is. Yeah. It's this, it's the oil and the dirt. <Laugh>. Yes. Well,

Rich Campbell (00:36:08):
They've done their best to clean it up. The cloud version, the M 365 version is vastly superior in many ways. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, they, the crimes that have come before largely get peeled off to be able to get into the cloud. And it is a good backend. It's just that people have to go to it and learn it. And so, you know, everything they've done from there with things like teams and Loop and so forth, is about, okay, well let us come to you, but you're still feeding SharePoint.

Paul Thurrott (00:36:31):
Yeah, no, I honestly, it's a perfect solution, <laugh>. Yeah. It's, it's, it's a good idea.

Rich Campbell (00:36:35):
It's good. It's gonna get, anyway, yeah. Pillar, the next version.

Paul Thurrott (00:36:39):
<Laugh>. Yes. All right. Okay. Sorry. Now Bing. Now Bing paying for Bing. To be clear, Microsoft, if you go back to their original announcement about this Bing AI thing, or the Bing Chat bot, whatever we're calling it you know, use of medi, I, I believe you could find, you rolled the tape, Bob, you know, he's, at some point he said, we are gonna monetize this with ads, right? He, they're upfront about it. Like, how do we make money on this thing? We have this notion that these ai transactions, I'll call them are, are quarries or whatever are about 10 times more expensive than a normal search query. That, you know, that money has to be paid somewhere, you know and it's the web. So the model on the web typically is free and ad supported, and that's what, you know search engines are, and that's what Bing is and will be.

(00:37:29):
Right? And so Microsoft sometime last week came out and said, Hey by the way, we hit that 100 million deli active user thing Richard's been talking about mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And now we intend to monetize that, right? And they have these ideas about how they're gonna do that, and you know, how, how that makes sense of any kind. But I, this is, this is both unsurprising. I think it was telegraphed and it should not, it should not. I, I know people are complaining about it. Of course they're gonna screw this thing up, you know, but Yeah, I mean, of course they are <laugh>, they have to, you know, it's not, it's not a charity. Right. but, but then again, you know, I, I think the one thing we do miss mostly in the Microsoft space. Let me think about that before I say it.

(00:38:11):
I mean, one of the things I like to see is some kind of a choice between free ad supported and paid. Hmm. so at least everyone has the opportunity to take advantage of whatever the service is. You know, Spotify does this kind of thing. Other services that started off as just being paid or start an experiment with adding ads and maybe lowering the prices, you know, that kind of thing. It would be interesting to me as a Microsoft user to be able to pay them some monthly or annual fee, which I already do, right. For Microsoft 365 and get other benefits that could extend to things like this. In other words, you have to pay to use chat gbt, is that right? Or no? No chat

Rich Campbell (00:38:46):
Sheet. 20 bucks a month for chat. G D B D Pro.

Paul Thurrott (00:38:48):
Yeah. So what if I, what if I paid an extra 10 or 20 bucks a year to Microsoft 365 and I just got free access to Bing Chatbot or whatever.

Rich Campbell (00:38:56):
Same as like YouTube bread, right? Like, yeah, just get rid of the ads.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:00):
I'd like to see that kind of an option, right? So they're not talking about that, but but what they are talking about is ads.

Rich Campbell (00:39:07):
It is interesting to think in terms of how much more information it has to do advertising for you because you, you wax loquacious to the chatbot, helped you search terms and clicks.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:17):
What do you, what's the term you always use? The at the valley of Despairity? What do you call it? The

Rich Campbell (00:39:22):
Oh yeah, the trough of Disillusion. Trough

Paul Thurrott (00:39:23):
Of disillusionment. So, so

Rich Campbell (00:39:25):
The, it's Gartner's term.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:26):
Okay. Sorry. I it's a good one. The, the <laugh>, so the, the way this will <laugh> summon itself in the case of Bing chatbot is where, where are, we're already disappointed with the terribleness of ads and how they track you. Right? So I look for a pair of sneakers and I see ads for those sneakers for the next two months, even though I've already bought them and they're already worn in, you know, I'm not buying another pair.

Rich Campbell (00:39:47):
I have actually emailed the cust, the company I bought from, and said, if I see another ad for your thing, I, they're never buying

Paul Thurrott (00:39:52):
This product. Yeah, exactly.

Rich Campbell (00:39:54):
I'll send it back. Like everyone, little way.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:56):
Yeah. Everyone has experienced this kind of thing. Yeah. So everyone is all gaga and excited about AI and everything. Oh my God, this is the future. I'm gonna lose my job, but it's gonna be awesome. And when Bing AI starts doing that same dumbness, when that, when that's, that's the, what do you call it again? The trough of disillusionment? Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:40:15):
See, the,

Paul Thurrott (00:40:16):
The, it is, that's gonna be the moment where, where it dawns on users that, okay, so, oh, this thing, I, I

Rich Campbell (00:40:24):
Thought you'll drop the immediately into the creepiness when I quote you back something you said to the bot Yeah, exactly. A month ago and said, Hey, we have a product for that now.

Paul Thurrott (00:40:31):
Yep. You're like, okay, screw this thing. Like, you're just, you're just stealing from me now. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, <laugh>. So before you were stealing from everyone else, but now it's me

Rich Campbell (00:40:39):
And I

Paul Thurrott (00:40:39):
Don't like it. <Laugh>. Yeah. Well,

Rich Campbell (00:40:42):
You remember the original Eliza product, the, or you know, the first time we started speaking existentially to software and every so often it would take, like, it was pretty good at pulling a catchphrase and it would just sort of to change the subject, say, tell me more about how you hate your brother. Right. <laugh>, and that was a, is that was

Paul Thurrott (00:40:59):
A crazy, it's, it's the way a palm reader works like that. You think they're psychic and they're just really good at reading the rum <laugh>. Yeah. You know?

Rich Campbell (00:41:06):
Yeah. So you can imagine being ai, Calvin kept all of these token trees of all of your conversations, you know, argu arguably tied to chats. Like stop speaking existentially to software. It's not a good idea. Get a dog, A dog is a better solution to that problem, but

Paul Thurrott (00:41:23):
Probably understands just about as much as I, now

Rich Campbell (00:41:25):
That you know, it's for ads, everything you say to it is going to drive ads. I would say less.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:32):
Yeah. Yeah. There you go. So anyway, like I <laugh>, I don't know, I, I, because of the world, the little part of the world we live in, in tech people see this story and they get, they're outraged. They're just outraged, you know? Sorry. It's like I said, it's not a charity. Obviously, they're gonna have to make money on this thing. In fact, it's probably getting to be a little bit of a problem. Yeah. Very expensive to do it. <Laugh>,

Rich Campbell (00:41:59):
Well, I, I wonder about the Azure utilization because, you know mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, they were in a crisis through the, through the pandemic when demand went up and hardware availability

Paul Thurrott (00:42:07):
Had no way to expand it. Yeah, exactly.

Rich Campbell (00:42:09):
Right? Yep. So, you know, are we catching now that you've suddenly put more demand on the cloud?

Paul Thurrott (00:42:14):
Oh my God, that's another theory, Richard, right there. I've all these theories about why Microsoft did this. Right now I have, it's incredible. I can start a, no, you just mentioned a new one now. Yes. Shut up sir. Now <laugh> <laugh>. I swear to God my watch is said. I'm sorry. You're always sorry, just shut up. Yeah. So you have a Canadian

Rich Campbell (00:42:32):
Watch

Paul Thurrott (00:42:33):
What's, yeah. No, it's, it's a, an Apple watch. So yeah, no, so they ran into this problem, like you said, during the pandemic, but now no one is using these services anymore and it's like, guys, we gotta utilize all this capacity. We built that. Oh, what do we have that could suck it all up? Yeah. Guy in the back of the room's. Like I, this AI thing, it's insane. Yeah. Tur large

Rich Campbell (00:42:52):
Language models. There's

Paul Thurrott (00:42:54):
Language models, <laugh>. Yep.

Rich Campbell (00:42:55):
Well, and then, I mean obviously all of this was driving, you know, the business is now Azure consumption <laugh>, and so the trick is to make products that depend on Azure. Right. And all of the artificial intelligence initiatives across the board, the Microsoft doing, they all consume a ton of Azure. And this one, especially like now you've moved to G P T four, you just bumped up utilization by I double again. Right, right. Like that's ex that's expensive resources. I don't know how this is gonna ultimately wash out, although I want, I do think this stuff's gonna end up more on the edge. We're gonna have neural processing units and machines. That's right. We'll try and get more efficient, but at the moment, not at all.

Paul Thurrott (00:43:31):
Right. That's right. Yeah. It's a lot of this is you have to be one of the biggest companies in the world even afford to do this. Well they right now, you know,

Rich Campbell (00:43:40):
Where's Amazon in this, you talk about the other cloud competitor. Like, other than saying they're gonna spend less building out their voice product, and I refuse to say the name so I don't disrupt people's rooms. Where's their offering? Cuz they, they're the ones who could be playing in this field. They have the

Paul Thurrott (00:43:57):
Infrastructure before. Yeah. They haven't even vapor weared it, right? No. Even as soon as Microsoft came out, Google tripped over itself. Yeah. Felix, like, we've been doing this for three years. Whatcha

Rich Campbell (00:44:04):
Are you doing? Yeah, no, I, yeah. Walk directly into doorframe.

Paul Thurrott (00:44:08):
Yeah, exactly. <Laugh>, right, right. The door is made of a rake, <laugh>, you know, and like, but, but Amazon Silence. Right? Silence. The last thing they said that was anything even slightly related, it was like, yeah, we just blew 10 billion bucks on this stupid voice.

Rich Campbell (00:44:21):
Yeah. And we're gonna spend

Paul Thurrott (00:44:22):
Less. Yeah. And all anyone uses it for us to tell 'em a joke and start a playlist. Yeah. You know, <laugh> and Yeah. So you want us to do the next thing and how much more expensive is it? Hmm. Yeah. Silence fasting. I don't, yeah, it's really strange. Or maybe it makes sense. I don't know.

Mikah Sargent (00:44:39):
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Paul Thurrott (00:47:53):
We sure do. So this is one I'm actually legitimately interested in. And I have to say it also falls into that category of replacing the old with the new, although in this case it's still gonna be like the old service on the backend, but we talked about loop right and Teams mm-hmm. <Affirmative> as these kind of new style Microsoft apps. Microsoft is in the, also in the process, and this <laugh> taken up a nice long time to replace the traditional Outlook application on Windows with a new kind of web-based app. Which is the, you know, Chris is just called Outlook cuz we can't have too many things called out like <laugh>. Which shares some weird similarities with that Microsoft 365 app I had just mentioned as well, in that it has links to office applications in its sidebar and sometimes they open in the web and sometimes they open on desktop.

(00:48:42):
It's a little weird. I'm, I'm, I'm hoping Microsoft can get that figured out. But people who use, I think web apps or mobile apps or can I help you if you use the Mail-in calendar app in Windows 10 or 11 we'll probably see this new Outlook app is a huge improvement, a huge improvement. It's really, really nice, modern looking, et cetera, et cetera. The people who use traditional outlook on the desktop, that thing that used to be called Schedule Plus back in 1996 or whatever you, that way, those guys <laugh> older people,

Rich Campbell (00:49:13):
64 threads, none of them are for you.

Paul Thurrott (00:49:16):
<Laugh>. Exactly. <Laugh> see, this is a major regression, right? It's not gonna have every single little feature and outlook. Outlook is one of those things that like, teams today grew and grew and grew and yeah. Is this big kind of top heavy thing. But I like it. I I actually really like this app now. It doesn't have a bunch of stuff that it will have in the future. It doesn't have offline support yet. It, you know, it's a web app, but it's, it, it will get there. They're, they're working on that. But in the <laugh>, the glacial development process that this, this app, I, I feel like they pop up every four to six months and say, Hey, we have a new feature. And they did that this week and they are rolling out support for Gmail accounts. You know, oh, wow. It's 2006 again or something. <Laugh>. Is it

Rich Campbell (00:49:55):
Just me or are they just trying to punch

Paul Thurrott (00:49:56):
Google at all levels right now? <Laugh>, well, I wish I could say it was a company-wide strategy, but yeah, Google does come up a lot. They will add support for iCloud the Apple service Yahoo, imap, et cetera. I mean, this is stuff like, you know talking about things you sort of think should be there in version one,

Mikah Sargent (00:50:15):
But they didn't do IMAP before they did Google. That's odd.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:18):
I know, I, I know, I know. It's, they,

Rich Campbell (00:50:20):
They're trying to move off most of those old protocols entirely. Oh, yeah. Cause they have so many security problems, right? Oh, you know, we, we, there's a whole row we could have about what they're doing to old versions of exchange right now. Yeah, I heard

Mikah Sargent (00:50:34):
About that. Blocking this stuff if it's, I I didn't quite understand the whole

Rich Campbell (00:50:39):
<Laugh>. Oh, no, they, it, it is a study in writing bad blog posts, like truly an extraordinarily bad blog post that has now had to be, I pretty much did a whole run as on it that'll come out in a few weeks. Tony Redman wrote a re good recap on it. The old versions of exchange are very exploitable, and they're talking about like Exchange 2007, like old versions of exchange. And if you have it running in hybrid mode, so it's attached to your exchange online instance, which this happens, right? You're in, you, you stay in that hybrid mode where you have some stuff still on-prem and some stuff up in the cloud. Any email coming from those old servers attached to Exchange online is considered good email. It has high priority, it won't be filtered for spam, that sort of thing. Well, if that machine gets exploited because it's not being patched anymore and hasn't for years, then it can use that conduit to get into Exchange online and spray a lot of bad email around.

(00:51:37):
And so Microsoft doesn't want that to happen anymore. So that's what they're actually locking down. Like for an IT person, the question number one, if this, does this affect me? Are you running in hybrid? No. Then forget about it. You are, okay. Why do you still have an exchange 2007 server? Like, stop it. That's a bad idea. You have to up upgrade that exchange 2010 and then to 2016 and you'll be back into support. Oh. But it only, they, what isn't clear in there is that it only affects exchange infrastructure running in hybrid against Exchange online.

Mikah Sargent (00:52:11):
Hmm.

Rich Campbell (00:52:13):
But it, you know, read it again. See if you can see that <laugh>. It's

Mikah Sargent (00:52:17):
Hard read between the lines.

Rich Campbell (00:52:18):
It's, it's hard. Yeah. Well, and, and plus they're not saying they're actually gonna do it. They're gonna start sending, they're talking about maybe sending warnings. They didn't every shitty deadlines. Like, I literally think it was a flyer to see, well, how would people respond if we said this? Oh, wow. And the, and the answer is viciously. Like you stepped in the hornet's nest kids. Like I don't, as soon as you make a hint that we may decide whether your email gets delivered or not, folks get angry. It's shocking. Really?

Mikah Sargent (00:52:50):
Hmm.

Rich Campbell (00:52:51):
Not that I have strong opinions about any of this.

Mikah Sargent (00:52:53):
<Laugh> are you along with, I mean, everybody in, in terms of this specifically, I'm, I'm wondering, they should sort of make a Bing Chat plugin where you can give it a link to a Microsoft blog post and say, can you make this make sense? Yeah. And it just sort of, that's

Paul Thurrott (00:53:08):
Actually the service I provide, but Oh, yeah. What

Mikah Sargent (00:53:10):
You're saying that's true. It's the rod.com <laugh> <laugh>. That's a good point.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:15):
When Steven Kovski ran Windows and he would write these eight to 12,000 word blog posts, I would write a series of articles I think I call sometimes called Blues Clues, cuz it was code name with Blue <laugh> where I would basically take this 8,000 word thing and turn it down into 500 words and say, this is what it really says. And I gotta tell you, sometimes it didn't say anything <laugh>. It just,

Mikah Sargent (00:53:37):
I love the idea of it, just like this one didn't really mean anything.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:40):
<Laugh>. Yeah. This, it's like I went through this whole thing three times. I'm telling you, it doesn't say a thing. It translates to nothing. <Laugh>. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:53:46):
And it, and you could have written that blog post with, if you're not running exchange in hybrid mode, stop reading.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:51):
Yeah, exactly. There you go. There

Rich Campbell (00:53:54):
You go. You know, if you wanna run Exchange Server 2007 on its own and send mail to an Exchange online site, it doesn't know. It doesn't care. It's fine. Don't run Exchange 2007, stop it. But it's only in hybrid mode. It's, and it's just that that wasn't the point they made.

Mikah Sargent (00:54:09):
Yeah. They needed to

Paul Thurrott (00:54:09):
Make, well, I, this is the first time on this show anyone has ever highlighted Microsoft not being able to communicate effectively. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:54:15):
I've never heard that before from anyone. It's so strange show. Usually it's like weird. They're just so clear about everything.

Rich Campbell (00:54:20):
Yeah, it's absolutely

Rich Campbell (00:54:23):
Anyway, I expected, I respected retraction email. I pop blog posts sometime soon.

Paul Thurrott (00:54:28):
I, we, last week we had this issue come up with the Surface Hub story where I rewrote it three times because the beginning said something different than the end. And I eventually said, I, I, I literally said, let's step through this and try to figure out what they're saying. And I kind of highlighted everything and someone got back to me and said, yeah, we didn't write that one correctly. <Laugh> <laugh>, your article has two factual mistakes that we caused by not communicating it <laugh> Right. Correctly. So I was like, okay, there you go.

Mikah Sargent (00:54:55):
Hmm.

Paul Thurrott (00:54:57):
It happens.

Mikah Sargent (00:54:58):
Is there more about Bing that you

Paul Thurrott (00:55:00):
Wanna No. Oh, the Bing. Yes, there is. So yeah. So two, two months ago now, almost Microsoft was on the verge of releasing this Bing chat bot, you know, nonsense onto the world and a security company. This <laugh>, I had to look this one up called Wiz Now, not The Wiz, the movie from 1978 and also not the Wiz, the electronics store chain from the Northeast United States, <laugh> that probably doesn't exist anymore. But rather Wiz <laugh> came to them and said, Hey, you have a really serious security misconfiguration in Azure that allows us to completely inject anything we want into Bing search results. And they have some really, they have some really good examples of how they did it just arbitrary, just add whatever they want to it. It also impacted Office 365 in some way that I don't care about quite as much, but it was literally on the eve of Microsoft getting ready to have hundreds of millions of new people try out to service. And they fixed it. So they let two months go by and then they revealed what had happened. It's been patched, it's fixed. Right. So they believe that no one has ever exploited it. By the way, this thing could have been left open for over seven years. Easily

Rich Campbell (00:56:11):
<Inaudible>. It's also a common misconfiguration of anybody else using aad d. Like this is something that the advocates check for you when you get a checkup with them. Nice it'ss funny that they could have checked up their own.

Paul Thurrott (00:56:23):
It's kind of, it's a little embarra. They do. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. I kind of wish it had been The Wiz that was the electronics stand. That would've been fun. But apparently this is another company. I, so it's fixed. So they, and they, and Microsoft was very they were, they appreciated this company doing the right thing and telling them ahead of time and not just revealing it. They asked for the two month thing. They fixed it. They wanted to make sure it was obviously okay. And I guess it is. So it's fine now. It was never, well, it never, it actually was a problem, like I said, for several years, but it never turned into a, an exploit at least. So that's good.

Rich Campbell (00:57:02):
Just lucky. But you know, how many more are out there, right? It's,

Paul Thurrott (00:57:05):
Well, thank God it was Bing. Right? No one noticed <laugh>. It was fine. <Laugh>

Rich Campbell (00:57:08):
Listen, both guys are using it. We're very concerned.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:11):
<Laugh>,

Rich Campbell (00:57:12):
And now we and now they have a hundred million friends. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:57:15):
Exactly. <Laugh>, right. Exactly. and then this is just slightly related because it's Google Drive is sort of like OneDrive <laugh>, a bunch of sites started reporting, I think it started on Reddit, that you can get drive access in multiple ways. You have a free Gmail account, I think you get five gigs or whatever. It's seven gigs of storage. You can pay for it through workspace or whatever. You can pay for extra storage. You can get terabytes and terabytes of storage if you want. And apparently as of about a month or two ago, Google secretly enacted a 5 million file limit on drive. And so people were getting emails or popups that said, Hey you have to delete 2 million files, so you're gonna lose access to drive <laugh>. It's like, wait, what? And it, you know, obviously this only impacted a small number of people, but I guess if you were hoarding MP3 files or something, I'm not sure how you would hit this limit exactly. But with terabytes of files, obviously you could hit it eventually. And some people had so faced with the complaints, Google took away the, the limit. Why,

Rich Campbell (00:58:16):
Why would they? The only thing I could think of is that if you have lots of small files, it actually allocates a lot of space to them just cuz the block size is so big on

Paul Thurrott (00:58:25):
These giant files. Yeah. It's something, it's something like that. Yeah. Yeah. And so yeah, people, people have done the math. They're like, okay, you have a terabyte how you know, just divide that by 5 million. Like how small would those files have to be? Right. It's a lot, you know, it's 5 million files. It's lot. But,

Mikah Sargent (00:58:38):
And I was wondering too, like the search fee, you know, if you're searching through those files, how much that weighs on the server whenever it's look, trying to look through all 5 million potential files as well.

Rich Campbell (00:58:50):
It is Google. They're supposed to be good at that part.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:51):
Yeah. You think? Yeah. And this is mostly gonna impact people who are paying for the service, right? Yeah. you're paying a hundred bucks a year or more, or whatever it is. And seriously.

Rich Campbell (00:59:02):
Yeah. But I, I wonder if like, the voice systems are generally being cut back on, I wonder if the era of free cloud storage is going to start

Paul Thurrott (00:59:12):
Compaction. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:59:14):
Yep. You know, it's not like it's new anymore. You can pay for this. It's not a ton of money. I would also say, like, I've gradually shutting down my server closet here and home. Like Right. Jane server is off, you know, and I'm getting ready to retire the file server. I've moved everything to to Office 365. It's all up in one drive, but I am maintaining a synchronized copy. So you're

Paul Thurrott (00:59:37):
Running in hybrid mode. You Yeah. You're the problem.

Rich Campbell (00:59:39):
But I'm synchronizing back to my site. So we use the oh 360, the one drive by default mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. But should something stupid like this happen, like that's always been the point. It's like, at some point it can go down or something can get broken. You should have your own copy. And so we have a, you know, what's it still in the closet is a one use sonology and, and, and eight 15 plus, and it's got terabytes of storage on it, and it maintains a copy of OneDrive

Paul Thurrott (01:00:06):
Locally. I think I, so the one thing I can sort of equate this to in the consumer space is if you have a Microsoft 365 family account, you have, you have six accounts that can each have a terabyte of storage, right? Most people don't need six accounts for eight. Most families probably don't need six. So you start doing things like, I'll let my, one of my buddies have one of the accounts, or I'll let like my mother-in-law, you know, have an account or whatever. But, you know, I, and you, you, you do those things and then you're like, well, I have two accounts left with terabyte of storage. Maybe I'll use one to store all my like ripped movies or my CDs or whatever it is. Like, I'll just put like, you know, and I'm sure Microsoft's looking at this and thinking, okay, I think we've been a little too generous on this stuff. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> maybe

Rich Campbell (01:00:50):
That to be clear, they, they do look at what you're storing, like mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I have run across incidences where folks uploaded baby pictures from the bathtub and got their accounts locked out because it got flagged his child born. Yep. Right. And by the way, getting that unlocked is a nightmare.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:08):
It may be impossible. Is there, is there a documented case with someone actually getting their compact up? Something like that?

Rich Campbell (01:01:13):
Not that I know of. Yeah. Not that I,

Paul Thurrott (01:01:14):
It might not be

Rich Campbell (01:01:15):
Because the moment they refer it to law enforcement mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, right. Microsoft washes their hands until law enforcement tells 'em otherwise. So you literally now on the path to a court order before you're gonna get your stuff back. Yeah. Have a great time. And by the way, maintain a local copy <laugh>. Right. And don't trade in child porn. That's gross. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:32):
You just said common sense. Yeah. Yeah. It's

Rich Campbell (01:01:34):
Just like, come on. But I also wonder about cock ride materials and you said, Hey, let's take all these rips and load 'em up in the cloud. Like, when does that become a problem?

Paul Thurrott (01:01:43):
That's, I am surprised it's not a problem right now. <Laugh>. Yeah. This is what I'm getting at, but yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:01:49):
You know, they, we, there's a whole fair use conversation there. Sure. But at the same time, it's like,

Paul Thurrott (01:01:54):
Well, I have to wonder if, you know, Google looked at their drive stuff and said, okay, we've got like 1.7% of these people have over 5 million files. What, what, what are, what kind of files do those guys have? Yeah. You know, and it was probably some, you know, like questionable something, something in many cases. And I'm sure that was part of the impetus for what they did. But Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:02:13):
But these are infrastructure questions that the average mortal knows nothing about, and you're not gonna make them feel bad for you by trying to explain it to

Paul Thurrott (01:02:21):
Them. <Laugh>. That's true. <Laugh>. That's true. That's funny.

Mikah Sargent (01:02:26):
All right. Alright. Right. Moving along with the

Paul Thurrott (01:02:29):
Surface. Yeah. Exciting news. We have a, our first surface hardware announcement of the year. He says speculatively. I think so. Certainly the first one in a while. Bad news, it's a doc. So <laugh>, Microsoft is this, I, I believe is Microsoft's not counting the ones that Surface Pro used to kinda latch into, remember those. But like the standalone doc, I believe this is the third version. So the surface dock, surface dock two, now we have something called Surface Thunderbolt four Dock Boy. And as its name suggests, there's no surface connector on this thing. Right. Or Surface Connect port. It uses u s BBC and it's Thunderbolt four as the name suggests. So two 4k monitors up to 60 Hertz, et cetera.

Rich Campbell (01:03:15):
Is it just me that always associates Thunderbolt with Apple?

Paul Thurrott (01:03:18):
I know. Well, they, you know, that's their AB ability. You, they were first, I mean was their first I

Rich Campbell (01:03:23):
Disagree. And I mean, yeah, the alternative of course is calling it USSB 3.2 and that's,

Paul Thurrott (01:03:28):
Well, they could call four USB four is the word

Rich Campbell (01:03:30):
It USB four. Yep. Yeah. They're all compatible. I mean they, I'll give you credit, like the Thunderbird full four standard is a good standard. Like that's a pretty spooking connector. Yep. and it's still u s bbc. It's the same plug.

Paul Thurrott (01:03:43):
Here's the problem though. <Laugh> here, actually, Richard, you might have run into this with you. You have Surface Book two or three two.

Rich Campbell (01:03:50):
I got a book two. Yeah. When I,

Paul Thurrott (01:03:52):
When I, so I remembered. Okay, so geez, I don't remember which version it was. There was a version of Surface Book, maybe the one with performance based, or maybe it was Surface Book three, where if you put it, if you charge it with the doc, the doc didn't deliver enough power.

Rich Campbell (01:04:06):
That was a three.

Paul Thurrott (01:04:06):
Yeah, that was a three. Okay. So this has the same problem. So this thing can charge devices with power up to 96 watts. The most expensive or highest inversion of the surface studio laptop or surface laptop studio, whatever that's called, which is the

Rich Campbell (01:04:20):
Studio. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:04:21):
Successor to the Surface book is what, a hundred more than 96 watts? Yeah. So you have to have two things connected to it, <laugh> to charge it and talk. Right.

Rich Campbell (01:04:31):
Or you have to shut it off to charge it up. 

Paul Thurrott (01:04:34):
And I, this, I would like to start my new YouTube series called Only Microsoft, where

Paul Thurrott (01:04:40):
It's, they're, they're all about 30 seconds long. I say something stupid like that, then I go Only Mic <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (01:04:46):
I can't

Paul Thurrott (01:04:46):
Wait. This

Mikah Sargent (01:04:47):
Is great. Actually you should do it on TikTok before it's banned

Paul Thurrott (01:04:50):
<Laugh>. Yeah, exactly. Just be, be like the little dancing character, like the dancing build gates, you know, only Microsoft. You know, and then the Rainbow Boomers crossed it says the more you learn

Rich Campbell (01:05:02):
The USB power distribution is capable of doing 200 watts. It's just the Yes. The standard is wonky. Yep. Right. Like, yep.

Paul Thurrott (01:05:09):
Oh, there's surface there are Thunderbolt four docks to do more than this for sure. Yeah. Yep. You could get, if you have that particular surface device, you should get one of those because you could, and it probably costs less than $300. That's the other thing.

Mikah Sargent (01:05:22):
It is very expensive. Yeah. It's

Paul Thurrott (01:05:24):
Really expensive. Even in the world of Thunderbolt Docks, this is expensive.

Mikah Sargent (01:05:27):
There's no H D M I or display port on it, which No, no, no. I understand. You can do that over u s bbc, but I would want to use those u s BBC ports

Paul Thurrott (01:05:36):
Right. For us, BBC

Mikah Sargent (01:05:37):
Port cause I'm comparing it to the dock that I use and have recommended a lot, which is a dock from CALD digit and the similarly priced CALD digit dock has

Paul Thurrott (01:05:47):
Less than 200, right? Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:05:49):
The, the Thunderbolt three one is less than 200, I think.

Paul Thurrott (01:05:52):
Okay. That's, that's what I have a cal digit Thunderball three. But the Thunderball four you're saying is more

Mikah Sargent (01:05:56):
Expensive? It's a, yeah, it's more expensive. I don't know that it's 300, but it's like 2 49 or something like that. But in any case, it has the display port as well as than a bunch of u s bbc, U S B A and it can charge things at full speed or rather full power. So yeah, this is a little bit more disappointing than,

Paul Thurrott (01:06:17):
You know. You know what though? Listen, I to defend Microsoft, it does have a Microsoft logo on it and fair. I don't know what else to say about it.

Rich Campbell (01:06:25):
<Laugh>,

Mikah Sargent (01:06:26):
I gotta give it props for the little raised bumps. That actually would be helpful if you have it sitting to find it with the Yeah. So you can find where I'm supposed to be plugging something in and tell, tell the difference between them. That's a smart idea.

Rich Campbell (01:06:39):
I'm also impressed that it has a 10 gigabit network connection, not a one <laugh>. You know? That's true. That's not that easy. Well, a lot of people, folks are not rigged for that. And the Thunderbird Force spec is fast enough to drive two monitors off one U USB port. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> chained if you have the right monitors.

Paul Thurrott (01:06:55):
That's right. That's right.

Rich Campbell (01:06:57):
So, I mean, that's impressive. And the idea, like rather than having a couple of display ports and a couple of u s BBC ports, I listen, I'd rather have four U uss BBC ports because then

Paul Thurrott (01:07:05):
I can do one. Yeah, fair enough. Cuz then you could do them for, you could use 'em for whatever.

Rich Campbell (01:07:09):
I could thrive and do it. I could a monitor and do it. I can play whatever I want in Surface.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:12):
Surface is famous for a lot of things. One of them is the, the kind of weird choices they made with ports and port selection, a number of ports and so forth. And I would say as, as, as on that note, this doesn't even rate the top 10 of weird, weird stuff my Surface did, but <laugh>, it's

Mikah Sargent (01:07:30):
Your other series,

Rich Campbell (01:07:31):
It's another TikTok series waiting.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:34):
No, but <laugh> I don't know why I keep doing that. I'm sorry, <laugh>.

Rich Campbell (01:07:38):
So, no, I like the whole idea, but I closed my surface. It didn't power down properly. I stuck it in my bag with my McMuffin and he needed to back up by the time I got to the airport.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:47):
Right, right, right. It fried the egg and yep. Holy service. <Laugh>. <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (01:07:54):
I'm looking forward to this. Obviously

Rich Campbell (01:07:56):
This is a great series. I'm delighted.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:58):
Yeah. Yeah. <Laugh>,

Mikah Sargent (01:08:00):
So going back, of course, the thing here is you could buy this and even if you didn't have a surface yeah. You'd be able to use That's right. This right surface connector is sort of the, but I don't know, I kind of liked the idea of the surface connector providing

Paul Thurrott (01:08:17):
Oh yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:08:18):
Connection that is perfect for doing exactly what you needed to do

Paul Thurrott (01:08:22):
This. Yeah. For a lot of surface guys, this is the tough one. It doesn't have the surface connect port. So this was that little fin like thing that uses magnets to kind of slide into the slot and keep it, you know, so you could kick the, the cable and it would pop out and not hurt the computer. So you gotta think back, well, why would they have done something like this? Right. This was obviously Microsoft's response to the MagSafe, the Apple thing was similar technology except it's more like a plug. But the idea is you yanked the cable and you're not pulling the computer off the table. Smart of course. The original implementa actually, I think the only implementation, maybe there were two change, maybe there's one change in there somewhere, but I believe it was basically u SB two to start <laugh> when it first came out.

(01:09:00):
It was very low power. They must have updated one, but they absolutely did. But I'm sorry. There's AB because it's based on u sb, there's no reason they couldn't have done a u SB four version of this. They could have supported all the stuff we're talking about here. They could have done that. But I think what we're seeing, and it's not just this, this is not the first instance of this, but I think what we're seeing finally is Microsoft kind of moving away from that. And I know that's tough for some people, but I, in my mind, I, they adopted u s BBC and then Thunderball for way later than they should have way later than the rest of the industry. And now they're, if anything they're overcorrecting <laugh>, you know, now it's like all u s bbc. But there's

Mikah Sargent (01:09:40):
Probably a little bit of a fear too of proprietary connectors because the EU Yeah. Is really Oh, that's true. Know, coming down a lot of that. So

Rich Campbell (01:09:48):
Yeah, you want to, you want to stick with the u s BBC plug even if it's different

Paul Thurrott (01:09:51):
And Right. And that kind of thing would hurt Microsoft a lot more than it would hurt Apple, honestly. Well, that true.

Rich Campbell (01:09:56):
And as soon as you start thinking of it as a generic, a adapt hub, then I go look at like, let's go look at an anchor hub. Right, right. And anchor's top of the line, Thunderbolt four hub is 360 bucks and it charges up to 90 watts. So, interesting. Okay. It's got a few more. It's got more connectors on it, but it's not any

Paul Thurrott (01:10:14):
Cheaper. Does the Anchor one look like a brick?

Rich Campbell (01:10:16):
Oh no, it looks like a weapon you can kill small animals with.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:19):
Like,

Rich Campbell (01:10:20):
All right, good. Yeah, it's a aluminum chassis. I think it needs the cooling cuz it's pushing itself pretty

Paul Thurrott (01:10:26):
Hard. Boy, it's got a fan built in.

Rich Campbell (01:10:27):
Yeah. Yeah. And it, it can get a little stand to stand it up on its edge. You can make loud lunges at night when you bump it over, you know, the usual. Yep. Okay. I mean, and I'm a huge fan of Anchor Products. I have a bunch of them. I don't have this one.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:38):
No, same. Yep.

Rich Campbell (01:10:38):
But yeah, I mean that, that would be my instinct. If it's a generic device not specific to Microsoft hardware, why would I get that over a third party product that I'm probably playing less of a brand name for?

Paul Thurrott (01:10:50):
Yeah. I mean, I, I mean I, I know that was a rhetorical question. I would just say that there are Microsoft guys who like, you know, they like the service stuff. They would might just gravitate toward this. But I would have to guess the real reason they make such a thing is there are businesses that maybe buy these thing in bulk. That's

Mikah Sargent (01:11:06):
What I was thinking. You just get the whole package discount and then you don't have to worry about it.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:10):
And you pay the, you do the monthly thing too, right. You could, they have those monthly installment plans where you can pay for it over time and you're basically leasing it and, you know, maybe that, that, I'm sure that's the real audience for this. That's my guess. Yeah. Cause there's a lot

Rich Campbell (01:11:24):
Use

Mikah Sargent (01:11:24):
Of companies trying to do figure out docking solutions that just work mm-hmm. <Affirmative>

Paul Thurrott (01:11:28):
So Right.

Rich Campbell (01:11:29):
Well, and get getting it down to just a u us BBC cable, you plug into your laptop and that's its power and set all it's the best. It's, it's gorgeous.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:37):
Yeah. Yep. It's the best. I know. There's nothing better than a one cable connection. That's awesome.

Rich Campbell (01:11:42):
And then in, and then all of the, everything else you need to, you know, the idea that every peripheral you ever buy will also have that connection.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:49):
Yeah. Yeah. I, I think to Micah's point, I I, people are gonna be buying doggles for sure. You know, if they have to connect it to a particular monitor. Although I guess in this day and age, U s BBC is very common on displays as well. You could go straight through the u s bbc.

Mikah Sargent (01:12:04):
Yeah. And we just had, there was a, the television or the, the monitor was H D M I out of the back. And so you just get speaking of Anchor now, instead of having to use a dongle, they just make the cable that it kind of has a dongle

Paul Thurrott (01:12:18):
Technology built in each one. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (01:12:20):
Exactly. Yeah. Which is nice. So mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. All right. Anything else to say about that before we move to Xbox Corner?

Paul Thurrott (01:12:28):
<Laugh>? No, it's apologies to Xbox fans. This one's a little light. There wasn't much happening this week. No news on the Activision Blizzard Victory Party. We're gonna have eventually <laugh>. But it's happening.

Rich Campbell (01:12:42):
I didn't poke a couple of friends of mine about that whole I that are working in space, and they're all about, we are really excited the prospect of Bobby Kotick going away once and for all. I

Paul Thurrott (01:12:51):
Think that's the, it's

Rich Campbell (01:12:53):
The biggest thing. That's the, he's taking a giant pile of money with him. Right. But it's gonna go away.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:58):
Yep. Yep. Yeah. He's a bad guy. And no one's gonna miss him. <Laugh>.

Rich Campbell (01:13:04):
So I, I mean, I, I mean, I literally knew, I talked to one friend of mine who's been in the business long enough to remember when it was four of them in a garage, and he said, boy, they were four in Insult College. Bros. Like, when

Paul Thurrott (01:13:16):
You say, know

Rich Campbell (01:13:17):
Where the culture came from,

Paul Thurrott (01:13:18):
You're talking about Activision, like, about Acts Activision. So like Pitfall Activision, the original Dodge, like that company. Exactly. Yeah. Larry Kaplan. I can almost pull up some of these names. Yeah. 

Rich Campbell (01:13:28):
But it's like, th this has been the culture that was in that group all

Paul Thurrott (01:13:31):
Along. Oh, really? The, the the bro club. Yeah, sure.

Rich Campbell (01:13:33):
It was a bro that makes club from the beginning. It's, they came,

Paul Thurrott (01:13:36):
They were right outta, they were from Aari. Right. Most of 'em, I think are all of them.

Rich Campbell (01:13:39):
Yeah. Or certainly pieces of it, but, and Coach takes part of the original crew, right? Like that? No. Geez. Okay. It's, that's what it's about. Yeah. And he signed, he made a deal that's this gigantic pile of golden handcuffs, and he's gonna sit there giggling until you rang them out.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:55):
And he's like, A toad. Well, he'll be gone soon, folks. Like I said, victory Party, it's coming. So let's see. It's yeah, it's April 1st, this first show of April. So Microsoft, since last week, has announced the first set of games coming to Game Pass. Right. This is across Xbox pc and then the cloud streaming stuff over the first half of the month. It's actually kind of a short list. And the big one on here, I mean, I'll say N Hhl 23 is kind of interesting. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But the big one, the big question is Minecraft Legends. Ooh. So this is another Minecraft game. It seems to be kind of an adventure slash might even an action game. And the reason I'm being so vague about this is they've released a big trailer about it, and I have no idea what <laugh> what kind of game this is.

(01:14:43):
So that one is coming on April 18th, that's the LA latest one in the list. It will be available on day one with Game Pass across all of the platforms. So PC console and cloud, meaning cloud streaming. So you'll be able to play it no matter how you want to do it. I would love to tell you more about it. I'm looking forward to seeing I'm gonna see it soon, so I'll let you know, but I can, but I don't, I don't even know exactly what kind of game it, it's Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:15:11):
It almost reminds me of all of those other strategy games that people get super into and it's like, I've got a, a sourcer and this and

Paul Thurrott (01:15:19):
That and all Yeah. Like an R PPG kind of thing. Yeah. Like yeah. I don't, I don't, I I honestly just don't know. But

Rich Campbell (01:15:25):
Yeah, it's just a question now. Are they, are they abusing the brand or are they loyal to the brand?

Mikah Sargent (01:15:29):
That is a good question.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:30):
So I, I just, I wrote a little article about Visual Studio Code today and I said, you know, just like any popular Microsoft brand visual Studio is a little too popular. We're using that name everywhere. So that's what happens at Microsoft, right? Yeah. God help you if you're successful, you're gonna see that name everywhere. So yeah, there've been a couple of offshoots of Minecraft, obviously. There was kind of a fun, kind of an AR one, remember they demoed right before the pandemic mm-hmm. That I thought was gonna be really cool, and they kind of killed it early. And I thought, man, you should have kept that one around. I think that one would've been fun.

Rich Campbell (01:16:01):
AR and VR are having a big old fat winter this year, so Yeah. Might last for a little while, while we explore large language models to

Paul Thurrott (01:16:09):
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:16:09):
Let's come in and said, Hey, look at,

Paul Thurrott (01:16:10):
Unless you're named Apple

Rich Campbell (01:16:12):
<Laugh>, actually we will plummet down the trough of Disillusionment and then the AR will be cool again. Like,

Paul Thurrott (01:16:17):
We'll see. I think Minecraft and AR makes tons of sense. Me too. It might, it might be The only thing that makes it, it

Mikah Sargent (01:16:24):
Was, was the only compelling AR demo I've ever seen.

Paul Thurrott (01:16:28):
Yeah. Yep. Or vr like the bricky hole in the floor, and the guys like on the edge. And I thought, oh man, this is awesome. You'd

Mikah Sargent (01:16:35):
Be so cool. I just get close to my coffee table and I can see the little mm-hmm. <Affirmative> that's, it just makes sense. Yep.

Paul Thurrott (01:16:42):
The first hall lens demo we got way, but way, way back, like in January, 2015, what one of the demos was Minecraft and it was Minecraft in the room. So it was a hole in the wall, like Minecraft bats flying out of it. There was a castle on the table with parts that went through the table and under the table, and you could kind of walk around it and see it all in 3d and it was like, this is exactly, and that was never gonna be a game. It was just a, they were just using the assets from Minecraft to kind of show off what it could be like. And it was like, we could make meat this. That is what I want. That's the thing. Yeah. Whatever you're doing over here, that's okay. That's fine too. But this, this is what

Rich Campbell (01:17:14):
You, why did we never get Pokemon Go for the HoloLens? I mean, then it was a $3,500 headset, it was gonna cost you a thousand bucks to

Paul Thurrott (01:17:20):
Stick that

Rich Campbell (01:17:21):
Details. That might've been way Details details. Do you know how obsessed Pokemon Go players are? Yeah. If it gave you an advantage to capturing more Pokemon, there's certain class of people that would do that.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:32):
Interesting. Well, maybe this future Minecraft on whatever the Apple thing is coming soon, you know,

Rich Campbell (01:17:38):
Whenever that gets released. Yeah. I mean it's it is very much, feels like all goggles are are being put on hold going into a winter for a little while.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:46):
Yeah. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:17:48):
We'll see Winter's End, but not today in, in Ocean News.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:54):
<Laugh> in Ocean News. Yeah. one of the things I, because I review so many p PCs, is I see how PC makers are using more and more recycled materials in their products. Right. And it's everything from the box that comes in with this, which these days is almost always fully recyclable to the materials that go into the, you know, the, the deck of the keyboard, the speakers, the speaker enclosure, whatever. It's like there's a lot of reclaimed ocean plastics and, and whatever. So Microsoft has not done so much in this era. They actually have a an ocean plastics mouse, which is a little piece of crap you can buy if you want. There's not much, but they did just introduce a new version of the Xbox Wireless controller, which is called the Xbox Remix Special Edition Controller, which is an Xbox Series X and S controller with that middle share button. It is made partially from, I love this so much reclaimed materials from Xbox One controller <laugh>. So it's like, it's like the previous version of the console was used. You know, which is funny, also includes parts from automotive headlight covers plastic water jugs and audio CDs <laugh>. So interesting. Hmm. Now

Rich Campbell (01:19:00):
What is an audio cd?

Paul Thurrott (01:19:02):
Yeah, exactly. They're exactly. So, you know, it's old. There is, so it comes with a rechargeable battery pack. So instead of putting two double a's in there, you get the little battery pack and you can charge it over u s bbc. I, I see this and I think to myself, okay, this thing's gonna be inexpensive. This should be, you know, a typical not on sale. Xbox wireless controller is about 65 bucks. I'm thinking this thing should be like 50 bucks. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's $85. What?

Rich Campbell (01:19:29):
It's more a premium for recycled

Paul Thurrott (01:19:32):
Materials. Yeah. And possibly, I mean, the battery's in there, I should say the battery might be part of that. Mm. It, it, it, I'm assuming, actually I shouldn't assume, let me go look at the actual product listing. It has a, yeah, no, this is the color. So it comes in a, I like color, a variety of kind of green and green light colors. I actually, that's almost my favorite color right there. Or whatever you want to call it. Army green or whatever. Yeah. that's the, the front color. But if you kind of flip it around, you can see there's like tan bits. Like every, every component of the controller is a different color, which is something you could do through the, you know, the Microsoft service where you can customize your own controller if you want to. Right. but 80, it's like 85 bucks, guys. Come on. Like, I actually kind of want to get this, but it's like 85 bucks. I mean, at least be the same price <laugh>, you know, like what? But it's 85. Well, and

Mikah Sargent (01:20:19):
You even said it's more expensive than the other special edition controllers. So even more than

Paul Thurrott (01:20:24):
Just, well, it's, I should say it's more expensive than the other regular controller. So actually, right. So may maybe, maybe what I'm saying is it's, it's recycled. Maybe the incentive here <laugh> should be make it the same price as a normal controller, but

Rich Campbell (01:20:36):
Well, and they want 25 bucks for the battery pack, which is basically a difference in pricing unit. Yeah. So the fact that it includes the rechargeable pack, like then it is a $60 controller with a $25 battery

Paul Thurrott (01:20:46):
Pack. So could I get it without the battery pack? Yeah. Because I already have a battery, you know? Sure. Because I kinda like, I like the look of it. I

Rich Campbell (01:20:52):
Do too. I know. Is that environmentally conscious there, Paul? Really?

Paul Thurrott (01:20:56):
That's a good point actually. <Laugh>, that's a good point.

Rich Campbell (01:21:00):
Oh, 15. It is not, but I mean that's where, how they got, well, I

Paul Thurrott (01:21:03):
Already have, I have the battery, I have the rechargeable battery pack. I, that's the, I I'm not saying I'm, look, I, I take a AA batteries and when I walk to my car, I just throw 'em into the woods. I don't understand. That's recycling. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:21:15):
That'll end up somewhere else.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:17):
They end up somewhere right there. I could tell you they don't stay here. <Laugh>. No.

Rich Campbell (01:21:22):
Al I meanly batteries don't have mercury anymore. They're not, yeah, yeah. For the environment. They're not as toxic as

Paul Thurrott (01:21:26):
They used to. Honestly. It's, I, I believe it's basically that's that that the plant food that's in there ba so it leaks into the ground and everything's

Mikah Sargent (01:21:34):
Alkaline, you know, all Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:35):
Just, that's what a super fun site is. Right? It's just a really ver kind of Eden style garden.

Mikah Sargent (01:21:40):
<Laugh>. Yeah. It's not, it's not super fun. It's super fun site.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:43):
It's super fun. It's a super fun site.

Rich Campbell (01:21:45):
I did some work for the Montana Power Company in Butte, Montana, and we went up to the largest super site in the United States, and it's an old copper mine where the waters are colored green. It says that's not

Paul Thurrott (01:21:55):
Good. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:21:56):
And they showed me the skeletons of the of Canadian geese who landed on it and were burned by the acidity level of that. Oh God. They literally died on the shore and then Whoa. Yeah. No, it's not. And and apparently it slowly fills up with water from rainwater and, and runoff his stuff. And we get to a certain height, the EPA shows up and pumps it back out again. But otherwise, that's all they do. And then, you know, it's a place for teenagers to go and watch submarine races. Now I'm not, I don't have a big problem with dead Canadian geese, cuz Sure. We're not allowed to kill 'em up in Canada. So the more you can take out Thanks very much. Because, you know, they're, they're

Paul Thurrott (01:22:31):
Unkind. They're a menace. They're

Rich Campbell (01:22:32):
Mee Yeah. They're evil grass snake. They're

Paul Thurrott (01:22:34):
The dicks of the bur world. Yeah. Bird world, I think's. Absolutely. What I'm trying to say. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:22:39):
<Laugh>. And there's the title. No <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:22:41):
There you go. So I live in a part of the country where the geese mo look where I used to live in near Boston, the geese would go south before the winter. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And they would come back and they fly in those big V formation. You came up with the honking and everything. Right. But where I live, we're kind of on the line between the north and the south. Oh, wow. So they actually, I'm, I'm a hundred percent po. They just fly in a circle <laugh>. So they don't ever leave. They, they move from like cornfield to cornfield. They eat whatever's left. They don't ever actually leave. So we just got a bunch of loud geese flying around. Yeah. They never go. It's like we never get a break from the geese.

Mikah Sargent (01:23:12):
I was thinking you were gonna say you get the laziest geese because you're right on the edge. So all the ones that will fly all the way. But those, the lazy ones just land there. <Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:23:19):
No, you always see like the, the, like the v and then like a second goes by and then you get the one in the background trying to catch him. It's like, you'll get him, you'll get, keep going. He's the guy in the bathroom when the rest left. <Laugh> <laugh>. That never ends here. It's like all year long.

Mikah Sargent (01:23:35):
All right. Weird. We are near the end in the back of the book, but I do wanna take one more quick break before we get there to tell you about Lenovo orchestrated by the experts at C D W who are bringing you this episode of Windows Weekly. The helpful people at C D W understand that as the world changes, your organization needs to adapt quickly to be successful. So how can c d w keep your business ahead of the curve? With 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 isn't a problem because Lenovo ThinkPads keep your organization productive and connected from anywhere. Plus C D W knows your workforce has different work styles 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. Now think about that for a second. And let's also not forget about security. These high performing machines protect at the highest level with built-in hardware to guard against modern threats without slowing your team down. When you need to get more out of your technology, Lenovo makes seamless productivity possible. CDW makes it powerful. Learn more at cdw.com/lenovo client and thank you CDW and Lenovo for sponsoring this week's episode of Windows Weekly. It is that time I've flipped to the end and it's time, as Leo calls it for the back. It's

Paul Thurrott (01:25:12):
The most

Mikah Sargent (01:25:13):
Wonderful time of the

Paul Thurrott (01:25:15):
Show. <Laugh>. Yes. So as I wrote in my notes, you're <laugh>, you've already proven that you make bad decisions. So you might like this one <laugh>. And by that I mean you're using Microsoft Edge, I'm sorry, but you are. So there is a new feature available in the stable version of Edge. It's not enabled by default. You have to go into that edge flags interface, right? So if you not use that, it's edgeco slash slash flags search for split. And then you'll see a feature called Microsoft Edge split screen, which is actually split window, but whatever. And change that from default to enabled. And then you will have a split window toolbar button up here. And what you can do is split any tab into two, not, I hate to call 'em Windows, but two pans side by side. I have all kinds of problems with this.

(01:26:09):
So I was referring to this earlier when I was talking about putting navigation stuff on edge. I don't get this. The problem with this feature, it obviously you could have two things side by side. There are certain Microsoft sites, including Bing by the way, that actually support this natively. Meaning that you can search for stuff on the left and the stuff that you search for will appear on the right. Like you can, there are, I, I've only found a couple of these things but there's a few out there that do this. I I suppose obviously the, this is like a, like a snap feature inside of the browser. So you could have two sites side by side. Maybe you're watching a, a video and taking notes, you know, in, in, in both the pants. I don't know. The problems, I dunno. <Laugh>, the problems with this are many. I there probably are or could be t you know, keyboard shortcuts for navigating between them. I haven't discovered them, they're not available anywhere that I can find. You can select either side with the mouse and do it that way. There are some options and little floating tool bars that will let you do things like, you know, close the split window, et cetera, et cetera. But

Rich Campbell (01:27:13):
I presume this is for ma for people who maximize windows on wide screens. Like that's what it's for someone who can't get to a place where they could actually put two windows beside each other. So let me just maximize this one window cuz that's my life. But I wanna see two things.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:27):
I love that you cut them that slack. I, I don't know, I don't know what to say to this. To me, this is functionality that needs to be at the OS level and is,

Rich Campbell (01:27:39):
And is and has been

Paul Thurrott (01:27:40):
For ages. And there's, there's a real confusion to it, right? So think about you have multiple tabs open. So as you switch between tabs, the address bar changes to reflect the tab that's selected, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, whatever the name of the site is. So now you have two pans, I'm gonna call 'em cuz that's what they really are. They call 'em Windows, but what two pans. And as you select the pain, that address goes into the address bar, you select the other pain that is, you know, you have to do something. Like, I, I want to, I'm, I'm going to the extensions menu and I'm gonna do something with an extension. You wanna make sure you have the right ones selected. Oh lord, there's a whole ugh, like terribleness to it. Yeah. Like I I,

Rich Campbell (01:28:17):
You're the pain is with an eye, right? Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (01:28:20):
Yeah. Two pains in the neck.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:21):
Yeah. Yeah. I don I don't, I'm not a fan of this is what I'm trying to say. Just

Rich Campbell (01:28:26):
Introducing so many problems. Okay.

Mikah Sargent (01:28:27):
Yeah. This is bizarre to me that it's below the address bar <laugh>. Instead of just being two windows

Paul Thurrott (01:28:33):
Side by side. It feels right. It feels Now, by the way, that said, so you guys, I you agree with me? That's fine. Other people see this like, thank God I've been waiting for this. I I, I'd love, I will use this all the time. Yeah, I don know, you

Rich Campbell (01:28:45):
Know. Well people where do you think the name came from?

Paul Thurrott (01:28:48):
<Laugh>, right? People. Yeah. I, I know this is a, a people view,

Rich Campbell (01:28:53):
You know, this was a requested feature. You know, this was a requested

Paul Thurrott (01:28:57):
Feature. Look, they just did a pan thing with the video there.

Rich Campbell (01:28:59):
There you go. Little, little wipey poo.

Paul Thurrott (01:29:00):
That was good. Nicely done. Pretty, pretty sexy. Muscle swipe <laugh>. Well you're fun with it. Anyway, I, I have to let you know what happened. I will use this as an opportunity to remind you that you should be using Brave or maybe Firefox and seriously get rid of this browser, but whatever. I haven't talked about this in a couple of weeks, but I might as well promote myself. It's been a while. <Laugh> the Windows everywhere came out some number of weeks ago on Lean Pub. But it is also, I don't know, I don't think I mentioned this, but it's also available now on Kindle directly if you want to get it from Amazon. It's cheaper or can be cheaper if you get it from Lean Pub and it will work on your Kindle. But you know, in Lean Pub I can do like a sliding scale kind of thing on the price.

(01:29:45):
On Amazon, I had a selected price, so I cut the difference and I made it 1999, which is like right in the middle. But this is, it's a big book. This is like I don't remember how many pages. This is Big <laugh>. It's 900 and something pages. I dunno, it's a big book. Can we talk about your author photo on, on Amazon for just a moment, please? <Laugh>. I love that. <Laugh>. So that is a really old picture of me. Really old. Look at that here. And I don't know, I didn't crop it that way, but that's, I'm, that's actually was taken in Newport, Rhode Island and I still had brown hair <laugh>, so. Yep. so I'm gonna say 2005 ish, somewhere around there. I'm sure the bio is well is, yeah, there you go. It's all it, it's everything. I should probably probably update that.

(01:30:26):
That's really great though. They, yeah, so right for the super, right at the nose level looks, looks very intentional. I'm sure that's just a mis render of some kind, but it looks so intentional. Hey, neighbor. Yeah. <laugh>, I, I've done exactly. You know, some people talk about doing the minimum. I, I figured out a way how to do less than the minimum <laugh> and that's what I've done there. So <laugh>, okay, so <laugh> sometime ago I would've talked about a feature that's part of Windows 11. And I assume Windows 10, although I never used it. Windows 10 called Nearby Share. This is actually a feature I use with the book all the time. So for example, when I'm writing the Windows 11 field guide, I will have the computer I'm writing on, but I have the laptop that I'm taking screenshots on.

(01:31:09):
So I take the screenshots and I have to get those screenshots over to the computer. There's all kinds of ways to do that. I could copy 'em over the network, I could U S b key them, whatever. But there's a feature built into Windows 11 called Nearby Share that you can configure in different ways I connected to, so that any of my own computers will show up. And I, I, I, the, by the way, we talked about these icons, remember earlier in the show the icons at the top, cut, copy, whatever. The other one that you might not have seen that we didn't talk about was share. And when you bring up the Share interface, one of the options is nearby share. And that's how I copy files to my computers. It works great. Nice. Well, Android has a feature called Nearby Share as well. It works with Android, obviously it's going, it, I think it works with Chromebooks now, but they're bringing it to Windows and they're not integrating it into the nearby Share and Windows probably cuz they can't or maybe cuz they're Google and Google and Microsoft hate each other. I dunno. But they

Rich Campbell (01:32:01):
Have, you're either doing with Gmail lately or

Paul Thurrott (01:32:02):
Yeah, yeah. <Laugh>

Rich Campbell (01:32:03):
Exactly. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> like, so I wonder why they're irritable

Paul Thurrott (01:32:06):
<Laugh>. Google offers the standalone nearby share beta app now that works as it does between the Android and the Chromebook, but it works now on Windows. So I've tested it, it works very similarly to the feature in Windows 11. It's, it's too bad, it's a standalone app, but but it works great. So if you have an Android phone and you have a Windows PC and you want copy files between them this is, it's a great way to do

Rich Campbell (01:32:30):
It. And under the hood it's under the, under the hood it's Bluetooth.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:34):
So it's Bluetooth and wifi, which is actually by the way is how nearby share works in Windows as well. So Bluetooth is for discoverability and then wifi, they transfer wifi,

Rich Campbell (01:32:42):
But, so it's

Paul Thurrott (01:32:43):
Faster. Yep, yep. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (01:32:44):
This is helpful because I, so over on the Mac os iOS side, we use Airdrop and I have in exactly in the past tried to figure out how to do this cuz there are times when I'll have the Windows machine open and I have even just a link and I'm wanting to not have to type out a link or do a Google search to share it over.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:02):
Yeah. And we've, we've all, we've emailed files to ourselves. Exactly. All this, all the

Mikah Sargent (01:33:06):
Stuff. So nearby share that's quite nice.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:08):
Nearby share's a good It works. It works, it works well. I mean I I I've done it to transfer images basically, but it works. It works well. It works we'll leave it at that. It works. End of sentence.

Rich Campbell (01:33:19):
<Laugh>

Mikah Sargent (01:33:20):
Nearby share it works.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:23):
Sort of just asterisks. Puerto Rico <laugh>. It works. <Laugh>. Yep.

Mikah Sargent (01:33:31):
All right. What's next?

Rich Campbell (01:33:35):
It's running as radio time. My my podcast for sis Benz's it pro types and this week's episode came out today 8 74. We're having a chat with Microsoft cloud Advocate Pierre Roman, who's French Canadian and smart as a heck works on some cool stuff. And we talked about a very sensitive thing actually. Like, well we got into this after a while. It's like, hmm, this is interesting. So as your active directory has this thing called conditional access, and I've done shows on it before, but it's basically a way for you to create some more protection for people trying to hack at your tenant where you can specify, here are the IP ranges or names that I'm willing to allow in. And it's always our PO been focused on I p V four. It's always supported I p V six, but I P V six was never enforced. So we never would actually do validation of I P V six, even though I P V six is flying around, well, they're about to turn on I P V six enforcement. So what does this mean or what could it mean? Well, it means if you are using a device that happens to be using I P V six to get to your tenant and you don't, and you have conditional access turned on and you have not put I P V six addresses or locators in middle, it's gonna deny you access

(01:34:55):
Surprise

Mikah Sargent (01:34:56):
<Laugh>.

Rich Campbell (01:34:58):
Now, the most likely place for this to happen is with mobile devices. Cuz most cellular networks, because you're moving around and so forth, have switched over to I P V six almost entirely cuz it's far more efficient for them. And so one of the, i one of the points we got to is if you are, you know, my typical listener who's a assisted men and you're now getting tickets for people having trouble accessing the tenant through their phones, this is possibly a cause. Now at the time that we recorded, they hadn't turned it on yet. The presumption was by the time I published it would, but I got a note today that they pushed it back a few weeks. So I suspect the noise levels start to go up. Like, you know, I like the idea of we should be using more I P V six, and we should be doing some enforcement, but locking people out of their tenants makes them sad.

(01:35:45):
So don't, this should be an opt in feature, you know, that should be showing up in your security advisors. And hey, you can take advantage of I P V six now add this to your conditional access and walk you through the process. In fact, everything you need to know is already in your conditional access logs. Like right now, if someone is connecting to you via I P V six, that's gonna get logged, but then it's gonna use the I P V four address that it's associated with to actually do the validation. So it wouldn't be that hard for you to plow through logs, pull up your IV six groups, starting to add the conditional access, but turning this on and waiting for the loud noises, that's not a good idea. So hopefully wiser minds prevail and we'll sort of get into the reality that that we want this enforcement.

(01:36:32):
We just wanted to be applied correctly. We had a great conversation about how much I P v, you know, showing that, that growing graph from Google about I P V six utilization. We had a great conversation about the fact that V6 is just getting out there more and more and we just don't think about it much, right? That it it's, it's all really the ISPs that we care that are dealing with this. And for the most part it just works for us. But for folks inland dealing with these things, we're starting to see more areas where they're gonna take IV V six more seriously. And and so you're gonna want to be able to restrict it. Like the alternative to this might be that IPV V six is a route to a hack too, right? Like that you, you know, pressing against it that way someday we're gonna be able to retire I p V four no time soon. And so, you know, this crossover is part of it. And that's kind of the direction Pier and I went in.

Mikah Sargent (01:37:25):
Interesting. Well know very, very interesting

Rich Campbell (01:37:29):
<Laugh>. If you're wondering how the plumbing works, this is the conversation we are having. It's like, what does the plumbing look like, <laugh>? And I always like what

Mikah Sargent (01:37:36):
Kind of behind the scenes look at whatever systems happen to be in place. So that's

Rich Campbell (01:37:40):
Absolutely

Mikah Sargent (01:37:40):
Cool to know. And if you are wanting to adjust your own plumbing, you might try doing that with some brown Liquor

Rich Campbell (01:37:49):
<Laugh>. Now you're new to all of this. So I've doing a series for the past few weeks on how Scottish whiskey is made. Oh, and along the way, as I explained sort of the next steps, I mentioned a whiskey that's unique in that particular of that sketch. So we've talked about growing barley, malting it, drying it, grinding it turning it into a wash, putting it through the mash. Tons fermentation. Last week it was distillation. And I talked about the different kinds of stills that Scottish with distilleries use. This week's conversation is about maturation and aging, or typically putting into to barrels. So we left off at a point where you've now created new make spirit. So you've gone typically through a double distillation. In some cases there's a triple distillation. And so you're coming in and around, you've got a clear spirit's about 70 to 74% A B V.

(01:38:49):
And now it needs to be aged. For it to qualify to be Scottish whiskey, it has to spend a minimum of three years in oak casks. And you'll typically see on a bottle of whiskey, you'll see a year on it. Or a, a number of years that it's been, that, that it was aged. That number say it's like we're talking about Macallan 12. That means that the youngest thing in that bottle is 12 year old whiskey. And you'll never see a three-year-old whiskey, even though nominally it is allowed to be they usually age longer than that three-year-old whiskey doesn't taste all that good. It's still pre 80 clear spirit. So they tend to age longer than that in these different kinds of barrels. And interesting that it's oak barrels. Now we've been using oak to make barrels literally for centuries because oak tends to swell when it gets liquid.

(01:39:39):
And so it seals itself fairly well. In the case of whiskey, they typically use only a couple of kinds of barrels, and I'm using their, their Latin names. Kuru Alba is what we normally call American white Oak. There are variations on it, but it's the most common kind. And in Scottish whiskey, we get those barrels extensively because of bourbon. So in, in bourbon land, you have to use American white oak that is toasted on, actually charred on the inside, and you can only use it once. So there's a lot of American oak barrels made for bourbon, and then they can't be used again for bourbon, but the SCOs will happily buy them and use them. American barrels are small, they're about 190 liters. That's 50 US gallons for those who need the measurements of the oppressors <laugh>. Although the SCOs will temporally remake them into hog's heads.

(01:40:32):
Now, on a hog's head is a 55 imperial gallon barrel because having more than one gallon makes the system better. There are 250 liter barrels, and the way they'll do this is they'll take five American bourbon barrels and they'll rebuild them into four hogsheads or hogs. Oh boy. So this is the process. This is cooperage. This is the process of remaking ma remaking the barrel into 250 liter, kind of the smallest kind of barrel you want to use. The, another very popular barrel to make Scottish whiskey is Aquarius Rober or the European or Spanish oak barrel, typically found in the form of sherry casks. There's lots of different kinds of sherry, most of it comes from Spain. Their normal barrel is a 500 liter or 110 perial gallon barrel. These are much bigger barrels because in Sherry making, they don't want a lot of wood flavor in the drink, so they use a much bigger barrel.

(01:41:31):
So there's less surface area contacting the liquid, they slightly toast the barrel. Now why in the world would whiskey distilleries use sherry casks? Well, because in the old days, that's how you shipped sherry. So when they would ship sherry up to Scotland, it would come in barrels and they'd made no sense to ship the barrels back. That's expensive. So ya might as well use them. And they started aging Scottish whiskey in sherry cast. And the first records that I could find on this was from 1814, that they were aging in sherry cast. Now, by 1986, Spain required that all exported Sherry be exported in bottles, not in casks anymore, which eliminated that flow of barrels. But by then the market for Sherry Cascade whiskey was so large that the Scottish whiskey makers were very concerned about this. And they actually grew up a business in Spain to make sherry casks to order for aging Scottish whiskey.

(01:42:33):
Now this is an expensive process cuz you're basically having them make up a 500 liter barrel and then do a first aging of sherry in it, which is typically, they call it a must aging. It's not very good most of that. Then after they've done the three years to get it to that state, they'll ship the barrel over to Scotland. What they get out of it, they typically then turn into Spanish brandy. Hmm. occasionally you'll find French oak barrels, Aqua Caesar flora. These are typically for wine and cognac casks that are sometimes used as finishing castings for Scottish whiskey. We'll talk about that a little bit later. Just a quick rundown on how a barrel works. So these are strips ev oak, they tend to be wider in the middle, narrow at the end so that they can give a curve to the barrel.

(01:43:16):
They're held together with steel or iron hoops. Traditionally, this is six hoops. The French do eight hoops because France <laugh> and then they have oak panels on the gent called the head ends that are fitted together with grooves at the widest part of the barrel, known as the bilge is a bunghole. Traditionally this bunghole is capped with wood, but it's the filling point. It's also the thief thing point. As barrels age and you're checking their progress, you will pop the bung and thief from the barrel and they check the A, B V and, and Google give it a taste and so forth. I have had opportunity to do tours where we have thief from a few barrels. It's a ton of fun. And you're tasting whiskey in its earlier stages, which is really cool. Most while the barrels are wood, because we want the flavors from the wood, the bungs these days are mostly made of silicon because they're easily removable and they don't get they don't allow bacteria to grow on them particularly well.

(01:44:13):
Which brings us to this great question of why the heck do we like wood? Like it's weird. Why do humans like the taste of wood? We've always burned wood to make fire. We cooked food over it and that smoke seemed to benefit. It's also antibacterial, you know, trees solve the battle with bacteria long before mammals even existed on this planet. They're some of the longest lived creatures, and they have a structure that's designed to fight bacteria. For the most part especially in the case of oak, you you've got three primary components. Cellulose, hemic, cellulose, and lignins. Along with a few volatile compounds, ctic conf, fatty acids, various kinds of females and tannins. When we toast the wood, we're actually starting to convert some of those long change hy change hydrocarbons in the cellulose into sugars. Okay? So that chard does a few things.

(01:45:05):
One is that it actually lifts some of the bad notes out of whiskey. Like we often are battling sulfur from the, the, the barley that can make it quite sour. That tends to stick to the charcoal. The, and we are dealing with these, these volatile compounds that we get from charring the wood a bit and then introducing solvents to it. What solvents? Well that's the alcohol. So when you go, when you're gonna pour this clear make into the barrel you're gonna have a ratio of alcohol and water, right? When I talk about, hey, this new make is 73% ethanol, well what's the other 27%? Mostly water and a few other things. Now 73% is actually too high to put into a barrel because some of the compounds that are in the wood are lipophilic. They like alcohol and they'll bind to it.

(01:45:57):
Some of them are hydrophilic, they like water and they'll bind to that. And that ratio is important. If you, the the alcohol, the, the lipophilic compounds tend to be spicier and woodier, where the hydrophilic compounds tend to be sweeter and smoother. So we find vanillas like to bond to water where the spicier compounds like agua call and eugenol, which is that smell of cloves, they tend to bind to alcohol also. You're typically, most of the time in Scottish whiskey, you dealing with a used barrel. They've been used before. They, and the, in the case of bourbon only used once. Sherry Cass are often used for quite a long time before they will actually sell them. Although now they're sort of purpose made in whiskey making a first used barrel, what they call a first fill. So it's been used once. It's been typically used by bourbon.

(01:46:51):
And bourbon has a lower ingress alcohol level, typically coming at about 62.5%. And so with that ratio, it's pulled certain compounds from the wood already. What Scottish min is Scott's makers will do is they'll put a slightly higher alcohol level into the barrel. So they'll, their dis distillate may come out at 72%. They'll then cut that with distilled water to get it down to 63 and a half percent. So 1% higher than the bourbon that was in it before to lift different flavors out. Ah, got it. And so there's this game you're playing with the mix of water and alcohol as to what flavors you're trying to extract from the wood. And in a new fair barrel barrel, they'll actually go lower than that because often these compounds can get very bitter. So if the first time they use a bourbon barrel, now it's already had bourbon in it, but they're gonna use it for the first time.

(01:47:40):
For, for whiskey, they might go as low as 60% and then they'll use, and then they'll take a second fair barrel. So when it's been used once before and that might have 63%. And as they use the barrel over and over again, typically four or five times, they'll raise the alcohol level each time to pull more flavor from the barrel. Now you're putting these things, you're putting that liquor into the barrel for eight to 12 years and you don't really know how long it's gonna be and there's a lot of forces that are acting on it, right? You don't really know what's gonna come of that. So often, and we'll talk about this next week when we talk about what we dig out of the barrel, even though it's all a given malting, you might put a portion of that given malting in first fill barrels and another portion in second and third fill barrels.

(01:48:28):
And you'll dilute them differently to get the different flavors from them. Most barrels are filled almost entirely depending on the distilleries. Part of the forces that are gonna act on this will talk a bit about angel share. Is the oxidation part. You need some room for air to be inside the barrel and some distilleries will fill it less to increase the amount of available air that'll be exchanged over time. But generally speaking, if you put more in the barrel, you're gonna get more result. Cause we're gonna lose some over time. If you start your barrel full, it ages slower effectively. Hmm. Barrels are stored in a variety of ways. The traditional storage methodology for whiskey barrels is called a dge warehouse. And dunwich actually is a tax term. So back before they taxed by the bottle, when they were taxed by the dis distillate, you were actually putting your barrel into a bonded warehouse where it would age so that it would be accounted for tax when it was put into the warehouse, you would pay the tax when you sold it.

(01:49:27):
So it's like Roth I r a versus 401k, that kind of thing. And believe me, we're, we're talking about hundreds of years of taxation related to alcohol. Wow. And in, in earlier shows, we've talked about things like spirit stills where they literally, they can't touch the spirit. They have to control it by remote control because the tax man controls access to the spirits. Oh my. So as we get through, you know, again, these are very traditional mechanisms. Dunna used to be the way that they would do the final taxation on it. And a traditional dunna warehouse, and most distillery still operate on these, it's a various traditional style, are stone walls with a wooden, with a wooden structure roof with tile on top of the roof and dirt floors. The, they have relatively low ceilings. The barrels are laying on their side. So they're horizontal, which increases the open amount of access to wood.

(01:50:18):
 They're stacked two or three high because the dirt, they have to have dirt floors. They can't use machinery. So the barrels are basically loaded by hand up to three high. And remember that a a gallon of whiskey weighs about eight pounds. So when you're talking about a hundred gallon, 500 liter barrel, like get some friends, there are gonna be some lifting involved there. <Laugh>. Now more contemporary warehouses in this, these are pretty common too, are what they call a rack houses. Now an Iraq house in America for bourbon is very different from our, which is the way most bourbon is made very different from a rack house in Scotland. These rack houses in Scotland are concrete floors. The barrels are still stored horizontally, same as the Dun warehouse, but they're on racks that can go as many as 12 barrels high.

(01:51:09):
So quite tall structures. They can obviously have machine handling cuz they have to get quite that high. And the barrels are organized in a way where air is allowed to flow around them. And that's an important part of the aging process. So they're, they're, they're stacked in position in an aged for an extended period of times. The most contemporary versions of of storing systems now are palletized warehouse par and, and when they use pallets for barrels, they're standing them upright. So rather than on their side, they're, they're upright, they're stacked one layer on a pallet, then those pallets are stacked one on top of each other and they can again be quite high. So

Mikah Sargent (01:51:45):
Not as much wood touching in that instance. Then if they're

Rich Campbell (01:51:48):
Standing it might as mu Yeah the, the Lakers not touching the, the wood as much. Cuz you're you're sitting upright, you don't have as much air availability. So there's a slowing of the aging process. And depending on which distiller you talk to, that is heresy and everyone should be burned to the steak <laugh>. All barrels should be stored horizontally. There's a lot of passion Yeah. In making whiskey and, and, and the barrel storage is a huge part of it. Anything other than dunwich would be sacrilege, you know, depends on who you talk to. But we gotta talk about the angels share cuz now we get into the dangerous part of this business. So it's a wooden barrel. It breathes over time as the seasons come and go, as it gets warmer, a certain amount of the alcohol is gonna evaporate from the barrel.

(01:52:33):
And depending on where that barrel lies in the various storage systems, it's gonna lose more or less. There's this thing called the honey spots, which is showed to the places where it, it, it makes the best whiskey. Not every location the same. If you're higher in the rack, it's gonna be warmer up there in the summertime. So you're gonna have higher rates of loss, but you lose up to one up as many, as much as 3% of alcohol per year. Whoa. And remember that the rule for whiskey is if that barrel falls below 40%, you can't sell it as whiskey. So you went into the barrel at 63 or 64% and you're losing a certain amount each year. Now if it gets too warm, it can actually start to lose water and the alcohol percentage will increase, although this has more to do with humidity than anything else.

(01:53:19):
So one of the reasons for the dge warehouses with their stone walls and dirt floors is it maintains a higher humidity. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and a high humidity environment will tend to evaporate alcohol. Where in a place like Kentucky where it's quite a bit warmer and quite a bit drier, the bourbon folks battle losing water and their alcohol level getting too high. And if you get too high in bourbon, you're not allowed to call it bourbon either. So often you'll see in some distilleries in America especially, they'll cool their barrel rooms to try and manage that, that heat problem

Mikah Sargent (01:53:51):
Watering it down is not the same. Then if you, if you had that sort of higher alcohol content, then just add some water to it before you send it off as that a no-no, it's

Rich Campbell (01:54:01):
Pretty much against the rules to do anything to the barrels. Plus it's not scalable. You think about the racks and racks of barrels. So they're pretty much leaving them alone for an extended period of time. But they will check on them and they'll check their A B V. So that's that whole thief thing, process. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> where cca, the, occasionally the barrel one will go in, they'll pop a bung, they'll take a thief, which is basically a glass tube. You hold your thumb over the end of it or you leave your thumb off, you dip it into the barrel, you put your thumb on, you lift it back out, you get a little strip of the wi of the raw whiskey. Whatever's been happening in that barrel. You put it in a couple of glasses, you take a sniff, you test for a B V, what's the current alcohol level? You can see the rate of decline. I'd also point out that alcohol evaporated in the air is an explosive. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:54:47):
<Laugh>. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:54:48):
So you'll generally see in traditional, especially traditional Donny warehouses, like the ends are open. They allow that, that gas to dissipate and the alcohol actually sticks to things and turns them black. And this gets extreme in certain environments. There's recently some news stories in the, in bourbon country in Kentucky where, I mean, forests, you're getting destroyed by the, the mold that grows related to that, that alcohol exposure. But you know, you can recognize old dun warehouses cuz you'll see a lot around the roofline and so forth. This blackening from the alcohol contamination as it evaporates. And so weather matters a lot. It's part of the game to this. Of course. If alcohol's gonna leave the barrel, something needs to come in. It's not like there's negative pressure in the barrel. So you're also breathing, you're bringing air into the barrel. And most of that air is gonna have come from other barrels cuz they're all doing that.

(01:55:37):
But there is this, there is a sense of the rah of what comes from the environment. And a great example of this is Taki on the is of sky in the western most western most part of Scotland amongst the islands. That there's a little hint into salt in the whiskey from the salt in the air that gets drawn in through this angel air process over time. And of course the, in that out, that evaporation process, the amount of liquid in the barrels going down year over year, you're trying to stay above that 40% point. But it's one of the reasons that older whiskeys are so expensive. Not every barrel makes it that long. Not every barrel a B V stay high enough to find a whiskey that's 50 years old, where the youngest thing in the bottle is 50 years old, is to speak to an extraordinary barrel that just lost so little alcohol over such a long time.

(01:56:27):
 It'll be much more concentrated. Barrels do leak. They do get cracks that cooling and heating of the seasons can be problematic. A very hot summer, very cold winter can damage them. Sometimes they can be fixed just with a bit of hammering, pushing those bands of steel down to tighten the wood is enough to stop it from leaking. There's barrel wax to seal it up. I've seen copper plates hammered onto pieces of, of a barrel to seal it. It's interesting just to see the active bacterial processes they do with all of that. So we're talking about aging. And again, if you talk about traditional single malt whiskeys, you typically see them in the 10 to 12 year range. And that means they've been sat in a barrel for that long. No aging happens in bottles. It all happens in the casks.

(01:57:13):
And so the real question you have to ask is, well, when's the whiskey ready? Well, you know, what is ready even mean? So the barrel men are sampling different bo casts at different locations on a routine basis, and they're watching the A B V. They don't want it to fall too low. And they're also studying flavor profiles. And we're gonna get into next week into the finishing part of that, which gets into the really miraculous part, which is how do you make a whiskey tastes like a whiskey year over year, over year? Why does Macallan 12 always taste like Macallan 12? There's an art form to that and it's extraordinary. But aging is not as simple as it used to be. It used to be you put it in a Casper for a certain amount of time, then it tasted, if it tasted pretty good, go sell it.

(01:57:53):
But that's not what happens today. You're doing bottling. There's many, many casts involved. It's much more complex than that. And since the 1980s, starting with a, a particular distiller from Alvin, a guy named David Stewart, they started doing finishing castings. So if you look at on a fairly famous whiskey in this category as Alvin's double wood, what David actually figured out that was clever is you could start in sherry cast and run it for 10, 12 years and then at the end take it out of that barrel and put it in a different barrel like a sherry cast for just about a year. You don't want to age a long time or or in or in pork cast for a long time. Sherry Cas, they do long aging in, but pork casts they typically no more than a year. But you're also seeing finishing casts of all kinds.

(01:58:35):
Now, red wine rum, cognac. I've even found one where they did a final year in tequila. Woo. I don't know that it's just anywhere between six to 24 months. They do these finishing casts before they send off. But it's always this question of, you know, when is it ever ready? And that brings me to my whiskey for this particular show, which we're gonna go to the low lens to a distillery called Aian. Great name Aian. It's barely in the lowlands. It's all the, the low winds is the lower part of, of Scotland attached to England. It's a smaller area than the Highlands, which is the largest area. This particular distillery is all the way west, barely in the lowlands. In fact, it gets its water from the highlands. It's northwest of Glasgow on the area called Clyde Bank. Clyde Bank was an important port during World War ii.

(01:59:27):
And in fact the Aash and Distillery was heavily bombed during World War ii. And today one of their large cooling ponds is actually an old crater from the war. Wow. that they reconditioned the distilleries is owned by Sun Tori, which is a Japanese company that's rolled up a bunch of these different distilleries and we'll talk about that one of these days. They're mashed tons stainless with copper lids. They use wooden wash backs and they do triple distillation, which is very unusual. So they have their regular wash and spirit distill stills. And then is a third still called an intermediate still, which is weird cuz it's at the end. But let's not get technical here, <laugh>. And so their typical new mate comes out at 81% of alcohol, which is very high compared to most whiskeys. Now my personal favorite of all the aach, the one, if I see one L will grab it is their three wood and it's about $50 US for a bottle.

(02:00:19):
And it's called Three Wood because they do their first 10 years in bourbon casks. And then we will put the distillate into a year of ola sherry and then a year of Pedro ye menez sherry and, and bottle that. But the one I wanted to talk about, it's not on the list anymore, but you can find it if you look about it, which is a very unusual whiskey, is their Virgin Oak. About $70 a bottle if you can find one. The whiskey exchange hasn't, but it's one of the very few Scottish whiskeys that goes into raw wood. Oh. So they buy American Oak that has never been used, have it made into barrels, and they finish their Virgin Oak in that it's got a unique flavor, this's a harshness to young wood that gives it a little more kick for what is relatively a short aged whiskey, but it's triple distilled. So that high distillation, then they cut it with water before they put it in the barrel. It gets a lot more spice for what is normally lowlands tend to be very smooth. And this one's got a bit more punch, but it's an exotic whiskey. And again, it's the kind of whiskey I would buy for someone who is really into whiskey. And this is one they'll never try again. They've only done two editions of this. The first edition is Unfindable the second edition. There's still a few around for about $70. Wow.

Mikah Sargent (02:01:38):
Okay. That's, that was, this is fun. <Laugh>. I, I love learning new things. So this was a lot of fun to hear about this process for sure.

Rich Campbell (02:01:48):
Yeah. So next week's show, we'll we'll talk about finishing. So the whole process of getting from all of those tasks, when are they ready? How do you combine them, how do you bottle them? And we're the last steps to making a bottle of whiskey before you can sell it.

Mikah Sargent (02:02:01):
Beautiful. Well, I believe that brings us to the end of this episode of Windows Weekly. Thank you all for tuning in paul throt thro.com. Thank you for everything today.

Rich Campbell (02:02:18):
You too. Good to see you again.

Mikah Sargent (02:02:20):
Good to see you. And Richard Campbell of Run As Radio. Sorry. That's okay. Thank you as well for you. Oh, you're over here. Thanks much

Rich Campbell (02:02:28):
<Laugh>. I am <laugh>. All right. And thanks for diving in on the whiskey story with us. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (02:02:33):
That's fascinating stuff. Folks out there few things, of course you can head to twit tv slash ww if you would like to subscribe to the show. We're on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, YouTube. We try to be in all those places. So you head there, twit tv slash WW two subscribe across different platforms. And if you'd like to, you can tune in live to watch us record the show at twit.tv/live every Wednesday around about 11:00 AM Pacific time. So thank you to those of you who joined the show live today. And I should also mention Club Twit at twit tv slash Club twit. That is where you can go to become a member of the club starting at $7 a month or $84 a year. When you join the club, you get lots of great things, including every single Twitch show with no ads.

(02:03:26):
It's just the content. You also get access to the Twit plus bonus feed that has extra content you won't find anywhere else before the show, after the show behind the scenes Club, TWIT events, all sorts of great stuff, and access to the members only Discord server. A place where you can go to chat with your fellow club trip members, and also those of us here at twit. And you know, I said starting at $7 a month because you can actually elect to pay more. You may, you're going what? Well, we did hear from some people that they wanted to pay more because we continue to add value to the club and they felt like it was a great time to sort of step up the, the contribution they were making. You should check out the great shows that we have as Club Twit exclusives, including the Untitled Linux Show which is a show all about Linnux, as you might imagine.

(02:04:13):
Also Paul Thoro hands-on Windows program, a short format show that covers all sorts of windows tips and tricks so that you can make sure you're making the most of Windows visual tweaks, performance boosts. And I hear we're gonna be doing some registry editing a little on down the line as well, so you can look forward to that as well as my <laugh> ooh, fun stuff. As well as my program, hands on Mac, which is a show like Hands on Windows, all about the Mac, but also iPhone, iPad, et cetera. So I've got short format tips and tricks for you there to check out. And the Home Theater Geeks Program, which is a great show featuring Scott Wilkinson that covers all you need to know about your own home theater and maybe even some aspirational content for how you might want to improve upon that experience. So please join the club twit tv slash club twit. We'd love to have you there. And thank you for joining us for this episode of Windows Weekly. The show will of course be back next week. Goodbye.