Windows Weekly Episode 824 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. I am Micah Sergeant Subbing in for Leo Laport, who is on vacation. And of course, I am joined by Richard Campbell and Paul Throt. We start things off by talking about Patch Tuesday. Windows 11 is adding more features. Also Windows is coming to Hollowlens two. We talk a little bit about where HoloLens can actually be of use, given that it is not really a consumer facing tool. Then we learn a little bit about Microsoft Build, and Paul Throt gives his thoughts on fluent two with the introduction of Loop and how we can take a look at the future of Microsoft's design language. Then there's, you know, a few conversations about AI, given how Microsoft is really the company doing the big AI stuff. It's all about co-pilots, Xbox Corner. And of course, we round things out with our tips and picks of the week. Stay tuned for Windows Weekly

Rich Campbell (00:01:00):
Podcasts you love

TWIT Intro (00:01:02):
From people you trust. This is twi.

Mikah Sargent (00:01:12):
This is Windows Weekly, episode 824, recorded Wednesday, April 12th, 2023. It's called Flocculation. 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? The Meraki Cloud Managed Network. Learn how your organization can make hybrid work, work. Visit meraki.cisco.com/twi. It's time for Windows Weekly. I, Micah, Sergeant, I'm filling in for Leo Laport, who is Yes. Still on vacation. And yes, every time you ask me, I will, yes, continue to tell you that he's on vacation, but he will be back. Don't worry. He's just, what is he on vacation? This is the show where we talk to some Windows watchers about all things Windows, Microsoft Office, Xbox, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. To my right, yes, to my right ear is trot.com. Hello, Paul?

Rich Campbell (00:02:22):
Hello, Rebecca. Hello.

Mikah Sargent (00:02:23):
How are you? Nope, I asked you first

Rich Campbell (00:02:26):
<Laugh>. I, I'm well, thank you.

Mikah Sargent (00:02:28):
Okay, good. Good. I I think I have a little more energy this time. I don't know, it's like, it's caffeine. Wow. Okay. Awesome. And to my left as, as at least from where I'm sitting, it is Richard Campbell. Hello, Richard.

Rich Campbell (00:02:43):
Hello, Micah. How are you?

Mikah Sargent (00:02:44):
I am doing well. I have to ask you because I didn't ask last time. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I've heard it said as Rich and I've heard Richard. Which do you prefer?

Rich Campbell (00:02:53):
I'm a, I'm a

Mikah Sargent (00:02:53):
Richard. You're a Richard. All right. That's good to know. The,

Rich Campbell (00:02:56):
The, the Twitter handle is rich cuz the Richard was taken.

Mikah Sargent (00:02:59):
Got it. Okay. That clears things up for me. All right, well let us get underway because it's time to hear about what Windows is providing this week. And Paul, I think you're pretty excited because <laugh>, I, I just have to read, I need to read this opening line. This is the, I, I, I read this and I had a big old l o l it says, in keeping with its threat to bring quote, continuous innovation to Windows 11 <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:30):
Oh, this is from the article

Mikah Sargent (00:03:31):
<Laugh>, right? Yeah. This is from your article on rock.com

Paul Thurrott (00:03:35):
To say that

Mikah Sargent (00:03:37):
Patch Tuesday, bringing new features, yes, they have threatened to continue to innovate and they have done so. What's going on with Windows 11?

Paul Thurrott (00:03:44):
Well, the threat is not innovation. The threat is the continual delivery of new features after promising that new features would only come once a year.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:51):
Oh yeah, I remember that. I remember, I, I think I remember an episode talking to you about how they said, oh, we're slowing things down. Yeah, not really.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:59):
Yeah. So just to actually, to bring you up to speed, because I think this is kind of a, a healthy framing of this conversation. You know, Microsoft releases a new feature update of what we would call a version upgrade of Windows every year now in roughly October, right? So this is the 22 H two release from last year and probably the 23 H two from this year. But it also reserves the right to release features in between at any time. Every once in a while there'll be a collection of features that are big enough that internally they refer to it as a moment. We've had two of those so far. I know one was in November slash December, which I say that way because frankly, you know, they didn't get around to documenting this until last month. But basically they do a preview version of it one month, and then the kind of stable version of it the following month, which is actually just two weeks later because of the timing of the release.

(00:04:51):
But let's not get caught up in that. So in addition to these moment updates, they also have these like other updates, right? So one of the, the weird things that happened, lemme see if I can get the timeframe on this right, is 2, 2, 2, yeah. So two weeks before the second moment release <laugh>, right? Which came out in April. But the, the preview version of it came out in, sorry, came out in March. The preview version came out in LA late February. We were kind of surprised by the timing of this thing, but since then they've, they've formally announced or revealed that this is a schedule. We're gonna do this now. So every time there's like a feature update coming of any kind, lowercase af, lowercase c they'll do a preview version of it two weeks prior. So typically the the feature update such as it is, will come out on a Patch Tuesday, which is what we just experienced this past Tuesday.

(00:05:42):
Two weeks before that, at the very end of March, they issued the preview version of that update. So we talked about this on Windows Weekly, you know, two weeks ago, right? This is a minor thing from a functional standpoint. And at the time there were four features they were going to release, they ended up releasing three of them. This is Microsoft account notifications and Start, which I haven't seen personally. But the idea there is if you bring up start menu, click on your profile pictures, they could offer you little informational advertisement things like, Hey, maybe you should be ac backing up your just to OneDrive, if you know that kind of thing. Like Microsoft likes to do. There's a search box improvements. This is kind of a hard one to explain, but if you're familiar with the way and everyone gets the language wrong, but Microsoft or Windows rather supports system and app color modes.

(00:06:31):
You can have a dark mode where everything's dark and you can have a light mode where everything's light, but you can also kind of mix it up where the system's dark and the apps are light or vice versa. There was one of those that just didn't look right with the new search box they implemented back in moment two. So that's been fixed apparently, if you have a mixed color mode, I don't know how else to say that. And then there's some Microsoft Defender for endpoint improvements that'll impact people in managed environments. So, okay, cool. But now that the stable version is out as of this past Tuesday, they've actually added another feature. I'm hoping that Richard can explain this one. Cause I don't actually stay in the standard very much,

Rich Campbell (00:07:05):
But I can.

Paul Thurrott (00:07:07):
There you go. There's something called the Windows Local Administrator password. Oh, good.

Mikah Sargent (00:07:10):
It has a great name. And so that's why I was wondering about it too. I started to read about it before the show and I thought this is, this is a lot.

Paul Thurrott (00:07:18):
Yeah. So this just appeared not outta nowhere. They've been testing it, but it, it became part of this update.

Rich Campbell (00:07:23):
Well, yeah. And there's a lovely little storm going on in the SISed Men Reddit channel about it at the moment. And I, and I, I feel for <laugh> for Jay Simmons who just posted it up and is being steadily shredded for the past day or so. I actually did a show about the new version of Laps back in January with our friend Jeremy Moscowitz, but maybe we should back all the way up. So, okay. Cuz this was originally built by the, the Premier Field engineers. So, you know, it's complicated. <Laugh> I was gonna say

Paul Thurrott (00:07:54):
<Laugh>. I did, I did look at it.

Rich Campbell (00:07:56):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Well, here, and here's the essential issue, right? Every machine needs an administrator, a local administrator, password. And normally if you're just trying to manage this yourself, they're all the same. Which means it's a great vector for being exploited. You bra a bad, a bad guy gets into a machine by Phish, manages to scrounge the, the local admin password one way or the other. And now has access to every workstation your place. So same password, bad, different password. Good. How do you manage all of these? If you've got a few hundred works stations enter laps. So years ago, the PFS built this lapse tool that basically gave you a way to interact with active directory and a management console to randomly generate passwords for the admin account, for every workstation. And and you were able to then use a master password to get Yeah.

(00:08:41):
Access to that, to be able to log into machines and you could configure it. And many people did, where the moment you used that password and when you logged out, it would change the password Oh. And, and, and, and write it back, which is great. Like, that's proper security. You know, it's sort of an acknowledgement that breaches are inevitable. People click on the wrong link. Like that stuff happens, but you're limiting the exploit to that one machine. So containment in depth, right? Great feature. What we're talking about here is the new version of laps after many, the pfs largely don't exist now, and the software has been neglected for some time. And finally a group picked it up and updated it to work well with Windows 11. And that's what we were talking about with Jeremy back in January on Run. As you can find the show easy enough the only reason everybody, and, and this is a much more modernized version, it's well configured and so forth and they maintain a legacy mode. So if you're using existing labs, you can work with the new version. It has a bunch of better features and so forth. Or you can switch over to the new mode, although that'll take some effort and time and who's got any of that if you're working in it. So everything is fine. This is great. When we talked about in January, awesome. What you didn't know, what we all found out by surprise, like today is the new version of lapses on by default with new installs.

(00:10:05):
Now where, so what's the impact? And this is the conversation happening in Reddit. Is it person who cares about security and has had lapses running for years, sets up a brand new machine, it defaults to the new lap, which he hasn't got configured cuz he has the legacy lapse in it. It doesn't have the legacy bits and he can't log into the local admin password because he can't find it. So he now you now he can get manual access to the machine and physically fix it, but he probably has a pretty clear deployment time pipeline where he's shipping that machine and and it's already installed in his correct location and then he is just gonna remote into it to take control of it and do the things he needs to, except for that part where he can't, now we didn't talk about this in January cuz nobody knew they were gonna turn it on by default. This was supposed to be an opt-in thing. Right. Except apparently we've been opted any questions. There'll be a test at the end. <Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:05):
I was gonna say any other, I mean, nothing but questions, but to be clear, I mean, so I mean this is very much for managed environments, whether it's on-prem or a d type active directory.

Rich Campbell (00:11:17):
Yeah. This is a, this is your, you your managing workstations, right? Yeah. This is what this is all about it. And, you know, here's the, we we talk about being in the cloud, but let's face it, you need something to get to the cloud with, right? Like we all have workstations and you want common management. You, you're responsible for the security of 'em and so forth. And how do you keep 500 distinct passwords, right? Right. If you've got 500 workstations, the Syapse is a huge and powerful service and you should be using it and they shouldn't be breaking things by creating a new version. Now I, I feel for Jay, cuz I don't think he knew it was on by default.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:50):
You're talking about the guy who wrote the blog

Rich Campbell (00:11:51):
Post Yeah. Put out the blog post and actually worked on the new version of Lap, like good guy by all accounts. Sure. But he's having a bad,

Paul Thurrott (00:11:59):
Now we can line him up on a plane like that scene an airplane and everyone can take their turn with him.

Rich Campbell (00:12:03):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:04):
<Laugh>, you know, hitting with a pipe or whatever.

Rich Campbell (00:12:06):
Yeah. No, well that's, that's already happening in Reddit. They're doing a fine job of it. Yeah. I mean, and then the usual problems are there, like they haven't updated the docs. So, you know, you, and it's not clear because we're going from, from one to two, all the docs that currently say laps are actually all legacy docs. Right? Right. And you just don't know that they're legacy docs. So there's plenty of real problems, but it sure feels like a PM at the last second said, you know, have that on by default with the Switch. Surprise. So now, now we're in the fire. I'm, I mean, I'm gonna reach out to Jay and, and have him do a run as with me or something at some point because, and not only feel for the guy, but this is really a great tool for it. You know, if you're managing more than a ham, more than workstations, you can immediately walk to, you want this. Right. It is part of properly securing your office without a doubt. And and it's, and I'm and it's good news that it's been updated that it's more, it, it's got a bunch of new features in it that's gonna be easier to maintain, but it's, yeah, it's just like, did you really have to trip over the deploy? Like now here we are.

Mikah Sargent (00:13:12):
That's common though, right?

Rich Campbell (00:13:15):
Yeah, we were back to this whole thing of why is Patch Tuesday a day to deploy new

Paul Thurrott (00:13:19):
Feature? Yeah. Like you kind of forget that there are real people out there doing real things with real computers and then they do something like this and you find out how many there are.

Rich Campbell (00:13:27):
Well, and plus the schism between what the consumer is expecting from an update and what it, what it's expecting for an update. That's right.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:37):
Yeah. It expects it to be off by default and that you enable it.

Rich Campbell (00:13:40):
Yeah. And, and then it's on a, it's in a list of things I'm going to get to eventually when I work on preventative stuff is

Paul Thurrott (00:13:45):
One of 'em. Wait, <laugh>. But look,

Rich Campbell (00:13:47):
Legacy Laps works, but it has some pain, so why would you break? I've already done the right thing and now you're breaking me. Like don't, don't be surprised. I'm a little angry. Hmm.

Mikah Sargent (00:13:59):
Can I ask you Paul when they say addresses a compatibility issue that occurs because of unsupported use

Paul Thurrott (00:14:06):
Of registry, right? What

Mikah Sargent (00:14:07):
Is unsupported use of the registry?

Paul Thurrott (00:14:10):
Listen, what? I don't know. So it's, it's amazing to me that you pulled that line out because when I read these descriptions, that one's like, you're just reading. It's like, where, where, where, where they're, they're not saying something. And the funny thing, it's, you're not the first person. So the guy who works with me that writes news, ha literally asked me exactly the same question. He's like, what do you think about this <laugh>? It's like, I think I need to know more about this. I don't know. They, they, they're very purposely being vague.

Mikah Sargent (00:14:38):
Ah, I want to know what people are doing in the registry that mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, they consider unsupported. Hmm. Interesting. Because there's, there's sort of, whenever it comes to editing, making changes to the registry, right? Yeah. You have sort of the little changes that everybody knows about and then you have, or that many people know about. Then you have the ones that are a little bit more obscure where you are asked oh, I've got this problem. You go, oh, just make this change in the registry. So you think this is even more deep and, and sort of Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:15:07):
Let, let me speculate. Okay. And I'll just, this is hopefully an educated guess. One of the controversies in Windows 11 is that they've kind of stripped down the ui, they've made it simpler and pretty and whatever, and people have lost functionality. And what people have discovered is that you can go into the registry and you can do things and like add stuff back that's missing, right? So for example, there's no way to resize the height of the task bar, but if you know the right registry location, you can add a key, you can make it double tall or half as tall and kind of make it the way it used to be. And some people like to do stuff like that. So did Microsoft go in and change fix something to where people would, could screw on the registry and make a change like that?

(00:15:43):
No, not because of individuals, but there are companies like Star, which has start 11 or third parties that make whatever utilities that do things in Windows that bypass things that are a little more important. For example there are utilities that prevent edge from sucking up every search query you do, even though you chose a different browser. They're kind of circumvent this b built-in behavior in Windows 11. And I bet there was a registry key in there somewhere that allowed some third party utility to redirect something that was gonna be redirected to Edge and put it back to your real browser. And Microsoft wants to prevent that because that's, they do this on purpose. They're trying to direct certain things to the edge browser regardless of which browser you chose. So that, my guess, I don't mean that to sound nefarious, but my guess is it's something like that. It's not some random UI setting for, like I said, for the task bar or whatever. It's something related to something like that. That's my guess.

Rich Campbell (00:16:33):
Yep. And, and let's face it, when you edit the registry, you're essentially doing brain surgery on yourself <laugh> Yes.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:38):
That's right. Yeah. But with a proper mirror and good reflexes of it. It's Okay.

Rich Campbell (00:16:43):
Two pairs of chromium tip tweezers, like

Mikah Sargent (00:16:45):
Yeah. Sterilized scalpel at least. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:48):
Yeah. Is my hand shaking <laugh>? It's like the, it's like a weird question I have to ask, but Yep.

Rich Campbell (00:16:54):
Somebody So to, you know, you said something like that in, in it not supportive setting. Like you can get into a blue screen situation.

Paul Thurrott (00:17:01):
Yeah, you can.

Rich Campbell (00:17:02):
It's, it's more importantly you get into a PSS situation

Paul Thurrott (00:17:05):
Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative> where it's unsupported. That's right. And, and Microsoft at any time could revoke or change the way things work. And it's possible that part of this, well, it's probably not possible for this update, but it's part of like a moment two type update. They might make a change to where things are in the registry and that thing might disappear. Things might not work properly.

Mikah Sargent (00:17:24):
I, I want to take a tiny little tangent here. Well, it's not a tangent from what we're talking about, but it will take us Sure. From what the next topic, somebody in the chat has said this, and I'm just wanna hear your mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, both of your responses. This, one of the best things that could happen to Windows is getting rid of the registry. But I can't imagine that happening because it would require major changes to how software works in Windows. Is that the perspective of a, of an IT person or is that the per, like, what, what would lead to that belief of getting rid of the registry? And would

Paul Thurrott (00:17:54):
You, because people would be upset about it. Unix uses plain text files for configuration. Yeah. Windows used to Right. When any

Rich Campbell (00:18:00):
The I and I files. Yeah. Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:18:02):
So I, the thing, one of my earliest memories of Windows is I, I, when I was in, I went back to college in my mid twenties and I was, as part of that, I was working in the com, one of the computer labs, and there was a problem with Word Perfect. It was running on Windows three one, which at that time was basically just pretty much out of date. It was, we were just moving over to Windows 95. But p people don't remember this, but the registry actually did exist in Windows three. One, it's just that no apps used it except for Word Perfect, which is the app I had to call and get support for, which at the time was owned by Novell, I think. And I spent a long time on the phone with these people and they basically, they said, well, you have to open the registry editor.

(00:18:41):
I said, I've never heard of this tool. And that we kind of stepped through what it was, and it was this, you know, it's this, it was meant to be an organized kind of hierarchical thing that was supposed to be superior to what Unix was doing with their own configuration files. And that was the plan. <Laugh>. I think there are a lot of things like as soon as you implement them, you realize we've made a huge mistake and now we're gonna go and try to reverse it. And I, there's been talk about getting rid of the registry, I think forever, but I think I do think we're so far in with it now. I don't know what to say. I mean it's,

Rich Campbell (00:19:14):
You know, I mean there's a, there is a way out, which is the same sort of tricks they've pulled with other things where Yeah, you can still edit the registry, but it's not actually a registry anymore. It's the set

Paul Thurrott (00:19:23):
Of files. That's right. They'll

Rich Campbell (00:19:25):
Do act

Paul Thurrott (00:19:25):
And things. And that's

Rich Campbell (00:19:26):
True. I mean, the problem we have with the old text file config problem is that you can put 'em anywhere. They can contain anything. There's no sense of hierarchy to them. Yep. And so you never know what to change, where to get the effects you want. The problem is the registry is in exactly the same place. It's just also needs a special editing tool. And there's stuff in there that will destroy your machine if you, if you mangele it too badly. So it's, we're

Rich Campbell (00:19:52):
Configuration files are hard as soon as you get to scale in any amount of time. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:19:56):
You could have done like an XML registry perhaps in the early two thousands

Rich Campbell (00:20:00):
I'm sure, because we don't have enough angle brackets in our lives. <Laugh> now.

Paul Thurrott (00:20:03):
We at least, but at least it's a hand editable text file if you want it to be. Yeah. you know, and then you could also write tools to parse it, et cetera. I, I don't, I just feel like you

Rich Campbell (00:20:13):
Could also, it's easy when as soon as you get into that mode where you get into invalid data, like you for you missed a closing brace, you missed

Paul Thurrott (00:20:20):
Not Exactly.

Rich Campbell (00:20:21):
You didn't slash us. So now we have schema validation. Ha ha. You know, I mean, one of the things you can't,

Paul Thurrott (00:20:26):
You tell that too. We're gonna compile the registry, Richard, and then,

Rich Campbell (00:20:31):
Oh wait, let's talk about hives. We could have multiple hives and we could have system specific configuration and user specific configuration and we could have portable user

Paul Thurrott (00:20:39):
Portable versus the Right you could carry Right. With you on a, on a thumb drive and all

Rich Campbell (00:20:43):
Of these things. But every one of these things, you

Mikah Sargent (00:20:46):
Got your registry and my registry,

Rich Campbell (00:20:48):
Ugh. Yeah. And, and all of these things actually happened. Like there was a period where they wanted to make hot desking between PCs possible by hauling chunks of the user registry between

Paul Thurrott (00:20:59):
Machines.

Rich Campbell (00:20:59):
Like they tried all of this. Yep. It was all problematic. And now we are li living in the legacy of it. Right. The registry. This is the Star Wars era of the registry, the degen.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:12):
Right. Right.

Rich Campbell (00:21:13):
And it, they all look like used spaceships cuz they are

Paul Thurrott (00:21:16):
<Laugh>. Yeah. It's like the hairball we deserve <laugh>. You know, it's it's, I just don't, I think it's so firm. I think it's so firmly ingrained in the system. It would be a multi, multi, multi-year effort to get rid of It would require some form of virtualization so that apps, that expected registry will still see it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But we've been, you know, we've been dealing with that stuff on a smaller level with file systems and locations, especially folders, et cetera, et cetera, for years. I mean, it's, it's hard

Rich Campbell (00:21:45):
Register. Yeah. There are still important applications looking at you Autodesk, that count on i n i files that they can no longer write to. Right. And so the os lies to them. That's right. And when, when they write in the system, system, that's how I I files it actually writes to an applicability

Paul Thurrott (00:22:00):
Ships work. Yep.

Rich Campbell (00:22:01):
Yeah. That's a way to compatibility ships, you know, and r i p to Chris Jackson, the god of, of compatibility shims who we lost during the pandemic. Not due to the pandemic, but Right. Something crazier. But he, you know, that's what they were doing is ways to lie to software to keep it running.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:17):
<Laugh>. That's right. I don't understand the physics of this. But the registry is usually bigger than the computer on which it's stored. <Laugh> mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So it's kind of a, it's just a weird thing. Like I

Rich Campbell (00:22:29):
The registry truly is a bag.

Mikah Sargent (00:22:30):
What do you mean by bigger?

Rich Campbell (00:22:31):
Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:32):
<Laugh>? So you've heard of the term, the bag of infinite holding Uhhuh <affirmative>. It's, it's kind of a like there were like in the sense like there were more, like there were more cells in your brain than there are people.

Mikah Sargent (00:22:41):
Oh, got it. Got,

Paul Thurrott (00:22:41):
Got it. Like there are more locations in the registry than there are file system locations on your computer or something like that. Or were bits or on your hard drive or whatever, however you wanna say

Rich Campbell (00:22:49):
It. Yeah. More interesting in the registry than files in your machine, I think is fair.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:52):
Yeah, yeah. Something like, like that. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:22:55):
So

Paul Thurrott (00:22:55):
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:22:56):
This, this leads me then over the weekend. I remember getting a question on

Paul Thurrott (00:23:02):
I love that there's a segue from that <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (00:23:04):
Well, so

Paul Thurrott (00:23:05):
You know what, over the weekend I was thinking,

Mikah Sargent (00:23:07):
I the question was I've got, I've got two Macs and I want to have everything that I do on one Mac be the same on the other Mac. So not only just my font files, I want to be the same between the two

Paul Thurrott (00:23:20):
Of 'em. You want user state replication?

Mikah Sargent (00:23:22):
Yes. User state replication. Is that something that the registry can provide on Windows and is No.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:30):
Okay. <laugh> No, but, but the registry would be a component of some. Oh, got it. Yeah. So you think like the, the, the highest level version of what you just described, like the simple, this is not exactly what you're describing, but there's three components. This, right. There's your data, which you could replicate through something like OneDrive or whatever you choose to use, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So that works. We know that works. There's, you could use a what do you call it? Like a an app app package management. What, like a win get or a, a chocolatey kind of an app, whatever. Just, just to make sure you at least you can do one click, install everything I need, you know, new install kind of thing. It doesn't keep them replicated, but you, you get everything you want. And then the other aspect is setting sync, right?

(00:24:09):
Which is something that, in Microsoft's case, they added in Windows eight and then have been detuning ever since. So Windows 10 took some of it away. Windows 11 took more of it away. There are individual apps that do setting sync, like visual Studio Code is a great job of it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> Microsoft Office does a really terrible job just from a percentage of possible settings you could sync. It's, it's somewhere in the low single digit percentage. Terrible. so I, you know, between those types of things, you, you can kind of get there as an individual, but like true user state replication is something Microsoft chased for many years. Well,

Rich Campbell (00:24:45):
It still is, right? Yeah. What they're doing with M 365 and Azure ad Yeah. Is still another attempt at that same

Paul Thurrott (00:24:51):
Problem. Yep. It's just yeah. It's, it's, it, it, it's hard, you know, it's a hard, it is a hard computer science problem. It, it's it may not be worth it. Right. Which is why I think if, like, especially for people like individuals, so, right, right. You use whatever storage service you, you do replicate that stuff. That works great. Replicating applications. I don't know if you're, if you're all web apps and you use like ac, chromium based browser, I don't know, safari, probably Safari, but you can do something like sync the web apps you've installed. Like you could have all that stuff up here, everywhere that's gets used sort of there. Like I said an app package management, what the right term is, sorry, that type of thing. It can help you at least get up and running on a different computer, quickly have the same apps. But the setting stuff, I mean, you, you need either a third party utility or something built into the system to do that for you. And those are three different things. Three or three or four different things depending on how you look at it. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:25:45):
Speculating further out on this as we get into the containerization of applications on the front end, like which Yeah. Which is a good security solution and, and solves a bunch of other problems. You could see this happening that you u you log into your M 365 identity, which is actually Azure AD under the hood. And it has a set of manifests that are really just containers for the apps you're likely to use. And as you go to use them, those containers arrive on that machine at least temporarily. They're all running in a security box. They have their pieces of the registry simulated that they need and, and other resources. So, and you're writing everything back to OneDrive.

Paul Thurrott (00:26:23):
This, this stuff is sort of there like there's a feature of Windows called windows Pro called Sandbox that allows you to spin up a really fast, quick dirty kind of VM for testing software that might be bad, but it break, it passes through things from the underlying system automatically. Hmm. One of which might be part, I'm sure is part of the registry cuz it's kind of, there's a lot of pass through there that's kind of interesting. You could have a Windows 365 install up in the cloud. I don't know that this exists today, but there's no reason there couldn't be some form of pass through where I've signed in on the local system. I signed in on that system. My apps from the local system were available in the virtual system and perhaps vice versa, et cetera. Like there's, there's things that kind of get us to what you're talking about. Every, what what you want is you, you sit on a plane, you tap on the tray, which is really a keyboard and the screen in front of you becomes your computer and everything's there. Yeah. Right. But you're, it, this isn't like a local system. You're talking about a system in the cloud. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:27:19):
This is virtual desktop. Desktop, right. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and again, Microsoft makes that, they just don't make it necessarily for the purpose you're describing. Right. It's an, you know, the upright from terminal server to this new mode where really mo most of the time what I'm seeing it used for is I have old badly behaved apps that can't be used in work from home settings. Right. So I put them in this Azure virtual desktop setting and then your machine calls into that to be able to

Paul Thurrott (00:27:46):
Access, wait, does to go fell? One of is still around to this category. The idea that you have a, a complete profile

Rich Campbell (00:27:53):
System. I believe that's attempt number four.

Paul Thurrott (00:27:55):
Yeah. <laugh> chapter four

Rich Campbell (00:27:58):
Nem. Pretty sure we're up to attempt number seven now. <Laugh>. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:28:01):
I feel like we've been tiptoeing around it. What, what, what is it you're looking for? Exactly. Like what's, oh,

Mikah Sargent (00:28:06):
No, that, that kind of was, that was, I just was just curious not even to answer the person's question because they were talking about it on a Mac mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And basically what I had to say was, no, that's not a possibility on the Mac outside of MDM solutions that are for the enterprise. I just was curious whenever you were talking about taking a u USB drive around and, you know, using the registry Yeah. If it was easier to do on Windows than it was on Mac os. So you answered

Paul Thurrott (00:28:32):
That. How does Mac handle configuration files? It's Unix based, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, so they have, they must have text files. Yeah. They're basically,

Mikah Sargent (00:28:38):
Yeah. They're xml I think

Paul Thurrott (00:28:40):
Xml,

Rich Campbell (00:28:40):
They have a cloning tool. When you move to a new machine, it will migrate everything to that.

Mikah Sargent (00:28:45):
Yeah. So the, the initial change can take place, but to actually keep it in sync, you're just doing the files. It's not a full on this machine is an exact copy of this machine.

Paul Thurrott (00:28:54):
I, I've never done this because I'm not a crazy person. But when you install Windows on a new computer, when it's 11, one of the choices you get is restore from a backup, which it's Windows. So it's gonna be like a tiny percentage of what you could be getting. Yeah. But the idea is you'll get some amount of configuration you made. So, for example, I don't, just

Rich Campbell (00:29:13):
Enough to give you hope.

Paul Thurrott (00:29:15):
Yeah. This sort of looks like the computer I used to have. I think it's, it's designed for normal people. I'm gonna make something up cuz like I said, I've never actually tried this, but one of the things that Microsoft doesn't sync in Windows 11 anymore is your desktop wallpaper. Right? So possibly if you restore from a backup on a different computer, one of the things you might get through that is the desktop wallpaper you had on that computer. And that would make this thing feel a little more familiar. Right. I'm just guessing. I'm, I I don't know that it does that, but it seems like it would, like, it seems like an obvious thing

Rich Campbell (00:29:44):
To Yeah. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But I, I do think that Apple is still very much in a state of you have a device uhhuh that you use as opposed to, I think the reality we need to embrace, which is that I want to, I, I want my identity and resources to follow me to whatever device I use, however, temporarily.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:00):
Well that's what the account's for, right? The Apple account or the Microsoft account or the Google account or whatever. A lot of that happens to that account. Yeah. I guess it's, that's why you sign in with it, right?

Mikah Sargent (00:30:10):
Yep. Okay. Now that I've gotten us off all that tangent, let's take a quick break and then we'll come back with lots more to talk about here on Windows Weekly. This episode though is brought to you by Cisco Meraki, the experts in cloud-based networking for hybrid work. Whether your employees are working at home at a cabin in the mountains on a lounge chair at the beach, a cloud managed network provides the same exceptional work experience no matter where they happen to be. You may as well roll out that 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. Because workers can move faster, they can deliver better results with a cloud managed network, while leaders can automate distributed operations, build more sustainable workspaces and proactively protect the network there is an I D G market pulse research report conducted for Meraki.

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You can reserve workspaces based on vacancy and employee profiles. This is also called, we mentioned this on the show earlier, 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, and then mdm, mobile device management, integrating devices and systems, allow it to manage, update, and troubleshoot company owned devices, even when the device and 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're working. With Meraki and the Cisco suite of technology, learn how your organization can make hybrid work work. Visit meraki.cisco.com/twit. Thank you. Cisco Meraki for sponsoring this week's episode of Windows Weekly. And we are back to the show. All righty. Paul Throt and Richard Campbell, what's next on the list?

Paul Thurrott (00:33:21):
So, <laugh>, they've emerge had an interesting story about how, actually I should say that's Windows 11 was coming to Hall Lens two which is the Hulen platform. Microsoft's been forced to keep in market for a long time now because they can't come up with a hall lens. Three. That makes sense. The problem was they weren't supposed to write about it yet. Just kidding. Everybody. They took it down. So apparently they violated their nda. Cuz we spent a lot of time trying to find the original source for this and couldn't <laugh>. And it's been pulled down, I guess. Yeah. So it got pulled down. So I guess that's happening. <Laugh>. what does this mean to HoloLens? Not a lot, right? Not a lot. Slight performance improvements and I guess some improvements in getting web-based apps running on HoloLens with the two cited benefits. Not too much else, so no biggie. But

Rich Campbell (00:34:10):
What we really need is new hardware. It's

Paul Thurrott (00:34:12):
Been exactly four years now. Four years. It was pre, they announced before the pandemic. So 24 years. Four years. Yep. I was there in Barcelona for Hollands too. Yeah. Yeah. So it's time for who

Mikah Sargent (00:34:24):
Uses these these days. Who is it? Is there really a market?

Paul Thurrott (00:34:29):
It's not so much a who is it is a what? Okay.

Mikah Sargent (00:34:30):
What use, okay. Which robots out there using this?

Paul Thurrott (00:34:33):
Yeah. No, it's, no, I meant by corporations. You know, it's a vertical solution, right? Yeah. It's a vertical solution. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's not a, an end user thing, but I

Mikah Sargent (00:34:39):
Mean,

Rich Campbell (00:34:40):
HUS two is 3,500 bucks a headset, and if you're using it full-time, it's about a

Paul Thurrott (00:34:45):
Thousand dollars A So who would use this? Right? It costs, so one of the great examples I saw of a good use case for this is you're a car designer. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you're building a car for Ford or whatever company. In the past you used to literally have to build a physical model using clay, right? Which must weigh the same as an elephant and then have people walk around it and say, okay, could you shave a little off here? How does this work? And it was kind of hard to understand the spacial relations of things inside the vehicle because there are certain requirements because of the frame where people have to sit, et cetera, et cetera. But with HoloLens, you could design that thing in a 3D space and then people could walk around with mixed reality or via what we call VR headsets and who just see what you're doing, right?

(00:35:26):
Because you as the designer would have the ability to go in and actually work on it, but they could walk around it and see it in 3D space. You could see it as big as it was physically, really in real life. You could walk it, you know, that kind of thing. Right. that's a neat use case. There are, I don't know, eight or 10 people in the world that need that <laugh>. It's not, it's, you know, that's true's kinda the problem, right? So, yeah. Okay. Maybe a hundred, whatever it is. I mean you know, it's, it is excellent and it's absolutely better than what they used to use before. And then there are kind of minor use ca. I I always really like the remote. You know, you're, you're working on electrical, is it the blue wire or the blue, the white wire or whatever. And this little guy is up there in a Skype window and now it'd be a teams window. And he is like, okay, Bob, don't, don't pull the blue wire. You know, he can see what you're doing and kind of talk you through it. Like, I kind of always liked that notion. But real world, I, I don't know. I mean, I

Mikah Sargent (00:36:17):
Did too. They do. I I thought that was a great use case where, you know, I'm helping someone with tech and I guess in a, it's a world where HoloLens is not as expensive, and so I could just say, oh, just put on those. I'll help you exact. So what you need to do here, or, you know, I could show somebody how to I quickly fix a pipe. This stuff

Paul Thurrott (00:36:34):
Is, it doesn't re most of the stuff doesn't require what I just described. I, I, the car one I think is actually pretty compelling. But I, I've done a lot of, a lot of people have, you know, you have an iPad or something, you do some air thing. This notion that you walk into a museum and there's a giant, you know, bran, well, don't call 'em bra, a patas sous skeleton that goes off into the distance and you hold up your iPad or your phone to it, and you can see the actual animal instead, ofs a skeleton. And then you can kind of walk around it and see that. I, I think that stuff's really fun. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. but I did I just describe a major money maker for anybody. <Laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (00:37:04):
Right. You

Paul Thurrott (00:37:04):
Know, not really. Right? It is excellent, but it's,

Rich Campbell (00:37:08):
Siemens did a whole scenario around power generation turbines.

(00:37:13):
Yeah. And so the, their point was these are $50 million turbines and a full service on them is like 5 million bucks. Right. And you, and there's a problem with counterfeit parts and pro and actually detailed records of maintenance and so forth. And the the folks doing the maintenance, their hands are busy. So having it on, having the goggles on allows them to keep their hands free to do the work right. That they're doing, doing the maintenance bore, scoping, checking blades, like all of these different tasks. And so the, the HoloLens should demonstrated not only a, a more reliable maintenance cycle, a better record of the maintenance being done, detailed recordings of parts being replaced, and showing that they were, you know, real parts and where they hit their, their origins and so forth. And also being able to bring in experts in real time that a person who's an expert in that turbine, but not in the same location can put on their HoloLens and see through the other guy's eyes. Oh, yeah. And, and

Paul Thurrott (00:38:09):
That, that, that was what Yeah, that's the, that's the compelling thing. I, it, it, it at a really high level. I mean, I I I just feel like a lot of this stuff, you know, when you sell, like, you know, back in the 1990s when you had a you know, you made windows and you had Excel and power, you know, and word. And you could say, look, you can, here's this tool you can use to do something. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> it, it was generally applicable to a really wide audience, you know? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And the, one of the problems with HoloLens is like, we have this amazing platform and everyone oozing us. It's amazing. And it's like, well, what are you gonna use it for? And it's like, well, I I, I would use it for this. And then the other guy over here is like, well, I would use it for this other thing. And there isn't a lot of overlap. Like the Siemens thing you just described, or mm-hmm. The automaker thing. The automaker thing, I guess, you know, it could work between different automakers, but I mean, they tend to be very specific to that company. Yep. And they're not universal. You know, they're not something you could resell.

Mikah Sargent (00:39:01):
I guess you have to, I, I have to give Microsoft props for, instead of just completely ditching it all together, they did find that that little place where it could fit. And they go, okay, I guess we'll just have to work specifically with these companies to make it happen. I just, I realized a great use case for it. If John Deere wants to get the government off, its back, then it could start shipping out HoloLens to the different farmers who buy John Deere tractors. And then when something goes wrong with their tractor, they get the little John Deere person to come in on and virtual space and walk them

Paul Thurrott (00:39:32):
Into the process. Yeah. Sending out to two states away or whatever it

Rich Campbell (00:39:35):
Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:36):
Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:39:37):
And it, it might, and then I might, should be cheaper than what they're, than the litigation they're going through right now. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> I mean, I also compare this state with HoloLens to very much the way the Blackberry was like in like 1998.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:52):
Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:39:53):
You know, they, the Blackberry foam was the first phone that had email on it, but if you wanted that to happen, you had to run Blackberry Enterprise on your custom exchange implementation. But it gave you email on your phone 10 years before we everybody got it with the iPhone mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Right. And so, you know, it was for executives, the phones were incredibly expensive. The infrastructure was difficult to run. Like it's very much in the same state. But it's how you get to the consumer product is that first the verticals find that value where the costs are worthwhile. Right. So that you can mature the stacked effort to make sense, to make a lower cost solution a a broader infrastructure solution. So I mean, it, it concerns me that AR is largely stalled. And I think this mixing of AR and VR is hurting both.

Paul Thurrott (00:40:42):
Yeah. There's a real confusion in the market Yeah. About what's what and what's good for what. And

Rich Campbell (00:40:48):
So I'm

Paul Thurrott (00:40:50):
Helpful figured out

Rich Campbell (00:40:51):
<Laugh> and, and the fact that the leadership has largely been tanked. You know, Alex Kipman has gone and so forth. Right. Just speaks to if it's going to live, it needs a new leader who wants to take it somewhere. And hopefully that leader has that vision of how do you get from a Blackberry to an iPhone.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:07):
Yep. I just feel like it's not gonna, it's not gonna be Microsoft. You. Right.

Rich Campbell (00:41:11):
No, it unusual disruptors are not the incumbent.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:14):
Yes. Yeah. Yep.

Mikah Sargent (00:41:18):
All right. You've got a few related in

Paul Thurrott (00:41:23):
Entrance here. Yeah. Kind of a, right. So I, I, I usually write up an article every quarter when both I D C and Gartner weigh in on PC cells. So far I only have id c and, but also there's another company called Canals that Lauren has written about here. I, I don't usually follow what canals says, but whatever, according to I I D C PC shipments fell 29% in the first quarter. So this, you know, the PC downturn that we saw last year is continuing. Not great <laugh> obviously. Interestingly, interestingly, apple took the biggest hit, meaning that they observed a 40, over 40% drop year over year in sales. You know, compared to like 31% with Dell or whatever the numbers are for each individual company. These are just estimates from idc. Like I said, I'll, I'll, I'll probably write up something when I get Gartner as well.

(00:42:18):
 But there's really not much to say here, right. We knew this, this is happening. The question is, when does this stop? You know, we'll see, we still don't know. But <laugh> like you guys, right? I follow i I tech fees, I follow a lot of different sites and everything, and it, it's, it really, there's a, there's a kind of clueless thing happening over on the Apple side, which Mike, I think you might appreciate, where Apple fell much harder than the rest of the industry, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, we're not used to hearing that, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, usually Apple kind of outperforms the rest of the industry, right? So there was a quarter last year when, you know, the PC industry fell 20% and Apple only fell like 9%. It was like, say they always do a little bit better, you know, so they did like, you know, 30% worse or whatever.

(00:42:58):
Why is that? And the, the rationalization I've seen from some of these Mac blog or Apple blogs is <laugh>. Well, I mean, their products kick so much ass that they just didn't ha no one was upgrading cuz the the M one versions were so good when the M two s came out, it just didn't matter <laugh>. And it was like, guys, get over yourselves. Right? Okay. <Laugh>, right? Yeah. Just get over yourselves. <Laugh>, like, everyone who needed to upgrade already upgraded. That's why it's not because there's a problem. And it's like, I, Hmm. I think they have the same problem as everyone else.

Rich Campbell (00:43:27):
<Laugh>. Well, you know, and, and maybe they held it off longer so they, you know, because they had such a small fall in the previous quarter. They have a bigger one now. Yeah. In the end it's a downturn one. We or the other this is a, I even recommended this on Ron ads. It's like, this is not the year to buy new hardware. If you could avoid it, buy the extended warranty because Sure. We, everybody's a little jumpy right now. It's a good time to spend less. And you see the meditation is, I'd also say this, I did rebuild, you know, I have two main workstations in this office. One of them I refurbished, so I replaced all the spinning hardware, new fans and strictly SSDs, but it's eighth gen Intel with a, with a 10 80 Envidia in it. Wow. And then I reeled a new one from scratch with a seven 90 chip set, 13th gen processor. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> 40, 70 in it. You really can't tell,

Paul Thurrott (00:44:20):
You know? Interesting. Wow.

Rich Campbell (00:44:20):
Like quick and it's a little bit better. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But day-today, you know, short is Yeah. The frame rate's higher on some games and the, and they're rendered time for some video stuff, but this just, you know what, computers have been good enough for a while.

Paul Thurrott (00:44:36):
Yeah. And which is the one of, one of the problem. It's, it's a weird problem to have. It's a good problem to have <laugh>. Right. You know, one of the reasons people don't upgrade so often is they don't really have to, you know, and not to speak, not because they're not using computers as much necessarily, although there's a lot of evidence that they're in fact using computers more than they have mm-hmm. <Affirmative> ever before, but rather because they just last longer. You know, that might be one of the little slightly insidious reasons that Microsoft drew a weird line in the sand on Windows 11. Like, you have to have an eighth gener newer if you're on Intel to get this upgrade. You know, we're not gonna support it on older hardware, even though there's plenty of evidence that it works just fine on older hardware. They're trying to get people to upgrade because people just aren't, and of course now this year no one is going to so

Rich Campbell (00:45:20):
Well, and, and honestly, when somebody says, you know, this machine is lousy, I wanna replace it my first, it's like, now that you're ready to get rid of it, let's pave it and see how much that

Paul Thurrott (00:45:29):
Is. Yeah. You might as you're gonna get rid of any anyway. Right. Why you see if it's better

Rich Campbell (00:45:32):
Cleaned,

Paul Thurrott (00:45:33):
Right? Yeah. This is something

Rich Campbell (00:45:34):
Really, this is software rot, not hardware

Paul Thurrott (00:45:36):
Rot. Yeah. If I have a dirty little secret to my kind of professional existence, it's not, I don't do this like in an underhanded sense, but I reset PCs so often that my opinion of how well something can work over time is kind of pointless. <Laugh>, because I don't use computers for long periods of time, generally speaking. Right. I, I reset them all the time. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> I don't mean like every week, but I mean, I, you know, but I reset them fairly regularly and I think this is the type of activity that a normal person would be a little nervous about, which I get. But the reality is, if you're doing things correctly, if you, if you're backing up everything or syncing everything, you have to OneDrive or whatever if you can can't, you know, you're not doing something stupid like, oh, I forgot to, you know, deactivate this Adobe product I'm using or whatever. As long as you're doing everything correctly, it's actually not that hard. You can kind of, it's,

Rich Campbell (00:46:31):
It's common in the managed IT space too. If, when you're an IT guy, often the least expensive solution to getting someone's machine back up and running is paving it because you've built images for all of that. So literally you can fire a script off that blows that drive and restores it back to configuration while you go work on something else. That's right. So rather than wasting time diagnosing, she's like, make that go away. Or someone says, oh, I clicked on a link on an email. I don't know which email is, I can't find it. I don't think anything happened. You're like, right. Pave it. Right. It's one way to be sure.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:04):
Yeah. Yep. Anyway, it's, it's, I don't know, it seems, again, I, I, I don't know, you know, I know this isn't people's lives, like the, I guess in some ways this is sort of my career, but, you know, you, you don't want to turn your career into taking care of PCs. But yeah, but I hear that from, from people a lot, and I'll do that from my wife. You probably do the same thing, your wife and family, whatever, where you you know, they don't say anything. And then it, every once in a while it's like, how's everything going? It's like, oh, this thing doesn't work, this doesn't, you know, it's like, just wipe it out. It's like,

Mikah Sargent (00:47:33):
Yep. Start

Paul Thurrott (00:47:34):
Fresh, you know, <laugh>. Yeah. You know, it's really not that bad. It's got it's, it's very reliable.

Rich Campbell (00:47:40):
Well, and one of the things I'll do is I'll give 'em a new boot, s s d, so I can take the old s s D and hang it as a secondary, just like, yeah, yeah. All your files are still here, but you know, for a hun for a $200 a renew $200 M two, what's the big deal?

Paul Thurrott (00:47:53):
Sure, sure. A lot of times that's the nice boost right there. 

Rich Campbell (00:47:56):
Fast clean drive. Yep.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:58):
Yep.

Rich Campbell (00:47:59):
And, and that replacing the spinning hardware, so there's no more ticking. It's not over heating <laugh>. That's right. Right, right. It's like for, for $200 in high end quiet fans and a $200 M two pretty fresh machine.

Paul Thurrott (00:48:12):
Right.

Mikah Sargent (00:48:14):
All right. We've got one more related topic here. Windows 365.

Paul Thurrott (00:48:20):
Yeah. So Windows 365 is this kind of Windows desktop of the cloud solution that Microsoft released a year or two ago. It's been updated and upgraded in various ways over the years. They just came up with a new SKU or like a new product version called Frontline, which is in public preview. And this is for retail customers, typically. Well, not retail, I'm sorry. Commercial customers. It could be retail, but it could be in other scenarios where they wanna deliver the Windows desktop from the cloud for whatever reason. So now they can use a single license and it will work on up to three cloud PCs as we call these things. Okay. <laugh>, you know, whatever. That's fine. I'm more amused by this notion that there's a new Windows 365 app on 2023 LG Smart TVs, and it's like, guys, come on. Yeah. Are you serious <laugh>? Like who's are there people using, I know I shouldn't even ask this. Are people are using Windows on a smart tv? What are you doing? Wow, <laugh>. Why? What, what is this? What do you, that's what I mean. I don't know. You've

Mikah Sargent (00:49:22):
Maybe view things in your OneDrive. You could see photos on the screen. Mm.

Paul Thurrott (00:49:27):
Maybe

Mikah Sargent (00:49:28):
I'm just trying to, I you

Paul Thurrott (00:49:29):
Like No, I'm trying to understand what point

Mikah Sargent (00:49:31):
Of this is un unacceptable.

Paul Thurrott (00:49:32):
<Laugh>. Yeah. I don't get it.

Rich Campbell (00:49:34):
I don't, well, certainly it'd be a bigger screen.

Paul Thurrott (00:49:36):
It would be a bigger screen.

Rich Campbell (00:49:37):
Yeah. That hard to hang a keyboard off it somehow. Yep. You, you already made the mistake of plugging your TV into the network.

Paul Thurrott (00:49:44):
Exactly. So, yep.

Rich Campbell (00:49:46):
You know, I be, I suspect that's why LGS offering you, cause most people are just

Paul Thurrott (00:49:49):
Like, I'm not plugging, this is like this's, like an intelligence test. You got like a Samsung or an LG thing to sign into that account. No idiot. No. What do you <laugh>? What are you doing? Doing?

Rich Campbell (00:49:58):
Yeah. It's like, listen to me, you're a screen.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:01):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Remember when you used to turn on a screen, it would just turn on, it was just a screen. I don't need it to boot up. I don't need this thing to have a bios or apps or, you know. Exactly. I don't know. Anyway, I old

Rich Campbell (00:50:12):
Man shakes fist at cloud.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:14):
Thank you. Yeah, exactly. Yes.

Mikah Sargent (00:50:16):
Old man shakes fist at digital

Paul Thurrott (00:50:18):
Cloud. That's stupid things. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:50:21):
At Cloud PC

Rich Campbell (00:50:23):
<Laugh>. At Cloud pc. Hmm. But you, you know, the cloud PC thing is interesting. When you think about the state of many people's at home pc, they're working from home, but on a machine that's remarkable vintage, whose fans are not spinning well anymore.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:38):
Do you say remarkable vintage.

Rich Campbell (00:50:40):
Remarkable vintage. You know,

Paul Thurrott (00:50:41):
<Laugh> remarkable in its

Rich Campbell (00:50:43):
Age. Yes. That, and that fan is not spinning cuz it's filled with cat puke like this, those kinds of, you know, <laugh> the state of some home machines. And so rather than in replacing that machine to say, Hey, you've got a tv, do this. Now you're using a virtual pc. Like, it's a workaround.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:00):
The only time I've ever connected my computer, any computer to a screen like a dv mm-hmm. <Affirmative> has been, I've been on a home swap or an Airbnb, and I just, it's just easier for me to access the, my Netflix account through that thing or whatever. Yeah. And it, there's an H T M I cable and I can just, you know, watch it that way. But even that is not a great experience, honestly. Yeah, yeah. I don't know.

Mikah Sargent (00:51:25):
It's okay. I don't,

Rich Campbell (00:51:27):
But we are not normal people.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:28):
Like, you'd be better off if you had an iPhone or an iPad and an Apple tv. That experience would be pretty good.

Rich Campbell (00:51:33):
Yeah. But if some, yeah, if someone's trying to figure this out from a phone Right. And, you know, working on it, trying to work on a spreadsheet on a phone, the idea that their p their TV could be the larger screen is interesting.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:45):
I mean, hone, I can see my TV from here and honestly at this distance, it's not the biggest screen <laugh>. No. So, I mean, it's, it's bigger physically, but

Rich Campbell (00:51:54):
Yeah. You'd have to get up close to it. But I, I, I hear you. I'm not sure who's using Cloud pc, you know? No, I'm, I yet, I haven't, I haven't done a lot of shows on it for exactly that reason. It's like, yeah, show me, show me the use case where people Yeah. This was not, this was a solution.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:09):
Well, the use case provided by is that it's another licensable moment for Microsoft. Oh yeah. And they'd really like someone to figure out a reason to use it. <Laugh>

Rich Campbell (00:52:16):
Well, for sure. And, and, and LG wants you to plug the network cable into the tv. So like, everybody's motivated except the customer.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:22):
I can't imagine anyone doing that. I just, I I'm looking to run a cloud pc, but I want it to run as slowly as possible. Nice. Oh, we have a smart tv. We have a smart TV app. That might solve the problem. Yeah. It's one more crazy.

Rich Campbell (00:52:38):
Yeah, of course. The other question here is, if your PC's in that state, what's your internet connection? State?

Mikah Sargent (00:52:42):
<Laugh>. That's a good point. Yeah. Is it gonna even wor go fast enough?

Rich Campbell (00:52:47):
I've got the can the two cans in a string solution. Right.

Mikah Sargent (00:52:55):
All right. Let us move right along here. It's time to talk about, I can hear it. It's growing. It's building. It's Microsoft build and it's time.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:07):
It's like a Kate Bush song over there, <laugh>. It's in the trees. Yeah, so Microsoft Build is Microsoft's developer show. It usually happens every May. Sometimes it's April, but usually May. And this year for the first time, they're gonna have some live audience there. Although it's gonna be a hybrid show, most of it will occur virtually. So they've posted the session catalog, which is always a fun time for us in the Microsoft space Discovery around and see if there's anything interesting going in on in there. And honestly, I have to say it's been a frustrating several years for the Windows fan when regards to build, because Build has mostly been about cloud Azure type stuff. It's obviously this year is gonna be very AI focused, obviously. But there is a good amount of what I would call Windows content that they've published. And we'll see if there's more, you know, cause some, some stuff they don't actually throw up until later. But some good stuff in there. I'm actually, I'm this is gonna be a good show for me anyway. So you know, Microsoft C T O, Kevin Scott's gonna play a public role. I can't think of a time when this guy has played a role. Really? I ha

Rich Campbell (00:54:13):
I haven't seen him on stage in a Maker's Mi Microsoft event other than he was c t o of LinkedIn.

Paul Thurrott (00:54:19):
Right. Like Yeah, I was Right. Okay. I was gonna say, I know I've seen him on stage. Right. Okay. He was actually at LinkedIn at the time. He was CTO at LinkedIn. So if you don't know this guy the Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott has, he has a podcast, which is, is is inter can be interesting. Yeah. I should say. I, with Tech podcasts, I do this with Richard's podcast. I tend to kind of pick and choose the topics I wanna listen to. I find more things to listen to with Richard than I do with the Kevin Scott. But, but there's some stuff in there. In fact, I, anyone who's interested in software development should go back to episode one and listen to his interview with Andrews Helberg is very, very good. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But, you know depending on the topic, I I absolutely will listen to this.

(00:54:56):
So he is going to present at this show and be involved in some other q and A type stuff. So he's doing a, I think it's a session, I guess I'll call it the era of the AI co-pilot. I think it's a keynote. Oh, it's a key there. You're keynote. Excuse me, I'm sorry. Of course, he's a cto, so that's very interesting. But on in the Windows space there's, they're gonna talk about how they integrated WIN UI three, which is this modern user interface design into the Fol xpo and Windows 11 Raymond Chen's gonna be there which is lost. Yeah. I, I subscribe to his blog, which is the new, the old new thing. We also has a book by this topic very esoteric software development topics. He goes off on these, he'll, he'll, he'll go off on a series, I'm gonna make this one up cause I don't know if this is exactly, but he did a series on, I think it was, it was Power, I think it was mips, assembly language, part one of nine <laugh> <laugh>, like back from the early two thousands or late 1990s.

(00:55:52):
Crazy. AI develop AI powered developer experiences across cloud and Edge with Windows. Best programming practices for creating arm apps for windows. There's some.net Maui stuff going on there. Blazer, which is Microsoft's web technology dot net based web tech. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, including something called Blazer United, which based on the name I assume is a a, a blur ritual. Now this, it's like, I know this Blazer server and Blazer Web and is it kind of a fill stack web? I, Sam,

Rich Campbell (00:56:23):
So the original Blazer was based on web assembly, this ability to put whatever language you want into the browser. Yep. The problem of course, is that the.net framework is not a trivial thing to load into a browser <laugh>. Right. And so, as it became a product and is a great story around how long they took to make it to, into a product, they also offered a server executing version. And normally you would select that sort of upfront as you start to make your project say, oh, this is gonna be a server side Blazer app, it's a server app

Paul Thurrott (00:56:51):
Clients a locally

Rich Campbell (00:56:52):
Running web. And so in United you can mix them. It's like, what would you like to do? Do you wanna run this on this server? Wanna run on the client? There are pieces where you'd like to run on the client. So just being able to say these components, say they're validating components run on the client. So they're super snappy. They don't have to make trips back to the, to the net server unnecessarily. And maybe some more security oriented stuff or stuff that's gonna be data-centric back on the server. So did.net Rox just recently with Steve Sanderson and ha Nelson who are leading that project and they're exactly that. We're just seeing the first bit start to emerge of this. Okay. It's in the, it's aimed for the.net eight timeframe. So by the end of this, which

Paul Thurrott (00:57:30):
Is November this year. Yeah. Should be November. Okay. the biggest thing though that I pulled out is there's a session on fluent two. So MI fluent is Microsoft's design language. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> when ui, which I mentioned upfront is an implementation of that design language. Right. they are, they've never mentioned a version two of this <laugh>. So my guess is that Microsoft Loop, which is this web app that's now available in preview mm-hmm. Will eventually be Windows Mobile, et cetera. Yep. Is what I would call implements most likely. I'm sure we're gonna find out like what they're gonna call fluent two design principles. Right. that the, that the UI we see in Loop is no doubt the latest version of Fluent is my guess. Cuz I don't believe they've ever mentioned that term fluent too. So

Rich Campbell (00:58:16):
I would also note that the new version of teams that's dependent on React also uses Fluent ui. Yep. So I think what you're actually seeing is the emergence of the rewrite of M 360 65 stuff mm-hmm. <Affirmative> with React fluent together. Ah,

Paul Thurrott (00:58:34):
Okay. Yeah. Cuz there is actually a separate implementation of fluent design, like when UI style controls for React.

Rich Campbell (00:58:42):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:43):
Right.

Rich Campbell (00:58:44):
I would be surprised where This's coming from.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:46):
Yeah. I think, I'm sure this design language system kind of appeared and then, you know, people started using it, they started implementing the controls like in Win UI three, et cetera. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> or UI two originally when UI three, whatever. And then now that Microsoft is using it in a bunch of different places, you see Modern UI in, like you said, the new Microsoft Teams app in the Microsoft Loop app in the new Outlook. Yeah. Now there's probably been some feedback from these teams where they said, okay, like, this is okay, but we should change this or this, or we need this. Or maybe there's something's missing, you know, so I'm, I'm sure fluent two is probably part of this feedback loop. Yeah. That

Rich Campbell (00:59:21):
The same way the W P F four came along largely because of Studio 2010. Right. Like Yeah. Once a Microsoft team grabs onto a new actually

Paul Thurrott (00:59:28):
Guy Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then it

Rich Campbell (00:59:29):
Starts to change. They, they kick the snot out of it and they know where these people live. Right. Right. So they're jumping out of bushes and things and like stuff gets fixed. Yeah. Yep. It's, it is this, it usually is a rapid jumping improvement. Like it's a big deal to do that and, and it should be done early as often and, and often, but it isn't. Right. but I've noticed, cuz I've got that O C D, the difference, the little differences in the UI elements. So when you see Loop come up, like the icons are different, they're just position a little different, they feel different. And Teams two, it's different. And now I know why. Right? It's

Paul Thurrott (01:00:03):
Are they both different in the same way? Because this might literally be fluent too,

Rich Campbell (01:00:06):
Right? Yeah. They, I think it's fluent too. And they're, they're tapping a different icon set and a different frame set. And you're seeing that,

Paul Thurrott (01:00:13):
I was just thinking about this the other day. I was looking at the the settings app in Windows 11. So if you, if you think back to Windows 10, like one thing that might be lost on people is that the Windows 10 UI was designed to work well on phones, tablets, and computers.

Rich Campbell (01:00:26):
Right? Yeah. That was original mission.

Paul Thurrott (01:00:28):
Yeah. And so you could kind of squeeze an app down to a phone shape and it would look like, it would make sense on a phone. And a lot of this was like really bare icons that were just white like frames on top of the background. And in Windows 11, they're walking away from that. Cuz of course there's no phone. So if you look at the sidebar in the Windows 11 setting app, each of those top level icons is not a white wire frame kind of an icon. It's color. They're, they're, they're filled in, they're colorful, they're kind of cartoony, whatever, but they're, they're quite different from the Windows 10 icons that were, would be in the same place. And I won, you know, I look at Loop and I see the same sort of thing. Like there's an emphasis on color all of a sudden mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And I wonder if that isn't a, like a a fluent one to two kind of a change. Like we're, we're introducing color and volume and not so much outlines of shapes, but actual, you know, because design norms change, you know, over time.

Rich Campbell (01:01:22):
Yeah. But also, I mean, fluent is a derivative. The original fluent, which was for Win 10, was a deriv of a metro, which was Win eight <laugh>. So they were cleaning up win eight stuff in Win 10. Right. Like, this is only V3 of this. And, you know, as we know, well, with Microsoft, it's kind of every third versions are the good ones.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:44):
I mean, the predecessor to this stuff debuted in Windows Media Center, right? Yeah. And in Zoom used the, the same, you know, thing. And or

Rich Campbell (01:01:53):
We could throw Arrow into this mix as well, but Yeah. You know, it all cons, the, the, the last rethink of design language was really metro. This Metro, yeah. And they built on top of that. And

Paul Thurrott (01:02:03):
I knew Metro was terrible, even though I liked it because they had to keep explaining it.

Rich Campbell (01:02:08):
Yeah. Well,

Paul Thurrott (01:02:09):
There was a lot of explanation. Like, listen, you're not a designers, you don't know how awesome this is, but I'm gonna explain it <laugh> and in 20 minutes we go by like, what is this guy talking about? Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:02:17):
Why are you,

Paul Thurrott (01:02:18):
This was like Elum and those guys. And it's like, dude, if you have to explain why this thing is good, it might not be that good <laugh>, you know?

Rich Campbell (01:02:26):
Yeah. Well,

Paul Thurrott (01:02:27):
I, this stuff to me is, I I it is different, like you said. Definitely. It's, it's, it's a little jarring in a way. Yeah. But it's at least I would call it pleasant. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:02:37):
Right. I'm not, I'm, I wasn't horrified at the new look. Yeah. I just noticed it

Paul Thurrott (01:02:41):
Was a new look. It is noticeably

Rich Campbell (01:02:42):
Different that hadn't been explained, but this seems to be,

Paul Thurrott (01:02:46):
I think this is, I think they're gonna explain it. I think this, this, yeah. Again, I can only guess for now, but I think that this is it. I think that's

Rich Campbell (01:02:51):
What Well, and, and the big thing here is, are you gonna share it with the devs, right? That's right. Once upon a time, there was a mechanism here. You built a new version of Windows, it came with a new version of office. And then, you know, a year to 18 months later, we got the tools in Visual Studio to make our apps look like Outlook. Right. Like, that was the pattern. Let me and then Ribbon,

Paul Thurrott (01:03:11):
Let me introduce the phrase into your brain, which may already be there if it's true, because you would've not have heard it from behind the scenes. But that phrase is when you, I four done and <laugh> and I have spent a significant amount of time, I'm not gonna spend too much time on the show on this, but I have spent a significant amount of time figuring out when ui UIs, if you will, using the Windows app to s stk mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And the one thing I will say, and, and anyone who's ever looked at this kind of thing is there's a lot of code. A lot of code. Yeah. In the old days, you know, visual basic, you want to be like, I want the title bar to be a color title bar dot color equals green. Yeah. It's super simple. In this thing, no, you, you're writing code, it's onto SAML code. It's like lots and lots of Cs sharp code. So if they could do anything for win You wife for it, or whatever they wanna call it, the Win app, TK 2.0 or whatever, go back on the code, you know, make it actually simple.

Rich Campbell (01:04:01):
Well, yeah. It's funny, I, I recorded a show earlier with, with Carl on.net Rocks and I mentioned we were talking about M V V, silver, light, M V M and Zael. He goes, you know, I'm a bit tired of

Paul Thurrott (01:04:11):
Zael Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:04:13):
<Laugh> because

Paul Thurrott (01:04:14):
He, because if you've ever done anything in it Yeah. Too, it's vrbo. There you go. It's, it's wordy. Yeah. It, it's, it's too much code to write to do a little thing.

Rich Campbell (01:04:23):
Yeah. We used to think that was a feature, right. We, it was like it's readable. Yeah. It's readable, but it, well barely. That's a lot of angle.

Paul Thurrott (01:04:31):
Well, okay, sorry. But,

Rich Campbell (01:04:33):
But I think we're getting more particular

Paul Thurrott (01:04:35):
Compared to terse. You know, terse code can somehow, can often be written to beated on purpose, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you have no idea what this thing does. This is a, this is a carrot and a plus mark and what looks like a star and it means something, you know? But this is all written out. Yeah. And it's written out over multiple lines and it's, it's horrific. Anyway, I

Rich Campbell (01:04:53):
I'm hoping that, I think we're in an era of opinionated frameworks. Yeah. And opinionated ux you know, once upon a time in the, in the old visual Basic days and the old Windows three days, like there was a design language. That's right. Right. It was the, the multiple document interface files on the left helps on the right. Like there was a set of standards. And we kind of went away from that because we had so much versatility. It's like, do wouldn't

Paul Thurrott (01:05:18):
You, like we had display density and high, you know, lots of changes there. So,

Rich Campbell (01:05:23):
So I wonder if we're starting to emerge into an opinionated UI space again. And I, and I'm well, for one delighted cuz I'd rather not think too much about this stuff. I just Right. My stuff not suck. Isn't

Mikah Sargent (01:05:35):
That Windows

Rich Campbell (01:05:35):
To help people?

Mikah Sargent (01:05:36):
The opinionated ui,

Paul Thurrott (01:05:38):
The opinionated the wrong opinion. Yeah. 

Rich Campbell (01:05:42):
Now Windows eight was the, we have an opinionated UI and you are wrong.

Paul Thurrott (01:05:48):
By the way, if, if, if you wanna see the Longhorn demo that survived everything you can do, anyone can do this with Windows 11, at least, I assume Windows 10. Bring up the calculator app and just start stretching that thing out. Just pull it around and it resizes and re scales. And that was, that was literally one of the very first Longhorn demos of all time, which was about high d p I displays and how apps could scale to meet the demands of different types of screens and turn

Rich Campbell (01:06:16):
On the turn on the scientific mode. So you have lots of cool buttons to play.

Paul Thurrott (01:06:19):
Yeah, there you go. But you see, you see what I'm saying? It kind of, you know, pulls in every direction and it works really well. And there is really no other app that kind of does that <laugh>, but yeah, that was how they demoed it. They're like, look, this is what all apps are gonna be like. And now we have one exact pretty sure

Rich Campbell (01:06:32):
It was built by interns too, you know?

Paul Thurrott (01:06:34):
Oh yeah, for sure. As

Rich Campbell (01:06:35):
Hundred percent. This is common.

Paul Thurrott (01:06:37):
A hundred percent.

Mikah Sargent (01:06:39):
So at, at Build I do have a question. Do you think that, so we saw Microsoft showing off a lot of its AI chops and then also sort of rebranding all of the AI stuff that it was doing as co-pilot. Yeah. And we know we're going to hear more about that based on what was, what the titles are. But my question for you is, how much new stuff do you think we're going to see? Or did Microsoft kind of show it off earlier to show that they, you know, we're on it, we're doing it, we're making it, or are we gonna see some new stuff, do you think?

Paul Thurrott (01:07:16):
I mean, well, I mean, there are multiple levels to this, right? So there's the co-pilot capabilities that will end up in specific applications, right? Like one, one note we have in the notes here cuz they announced it, but we know it's coming to Word and Excel and everything else. And, and it's not hard to imagine how might a co-pilot functionality, you know, help you start a Word document or create a PowerPoint presentation. It's, it's, that's pretty straightforward, right? It's, it's a matter of timing and, and, and you know, what platforms it appears on first, et cetera. I, I think the more important thing for build and the reason maybe Kevin Scott, although, you know Yeah,

Rich Campbell (01:07:51):
Really, I think Scott's leading this, and you look at his title, like he's literally like co-pilot.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:55):
So I I think he's the co-pilot. That's what he's, he should rename himself the co-pilot. Yeah. Or his, his brand. He should rebrand his title. Yeah. is how can we bring these capabilities to developers so that they can provide co-pilot, like I'll just AI for lack of a better term, capabilities in their own solutions, wherever those solutions may run, right? Desktop platforms like Windows, but also mobile and then just cloud services, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So it is a developer conference. I mean, it's not, they're gonna be because they want the press, they're gonna show off cool. End user features. Like Apple does the same thing at Wwbc. Yeah. Google does the same thing at Google io. Microsoft will absolutely always has done it. But the real,

Rich Campbell (01:08:36):
This this may be their one more thing.

Paul Thurrott (01:08:38):
Yeah. The real bit is, yeah. How, so is this AI thing happening? Microsoft is asterisk, asterisks, kind of on the leading edge of it. How were we gonna bring those capabilities to you? I have to say, as a developer, I, if I were a developer, I would be very excited by the possibility that Microsoft has invested tens of millions of dollars, billions of dollars into a technology that, that he can then license to me. And I don't have to make that investment. <Laugh>. Yeah. Right? Yeah. So we'll see. I don't know what

Rich Campbell (01:09:04):
Would argue, there's Azure open ai, like we're already seeing piece of this in the cognitive services tool set. Yeah, that's true. So, but it, it seems like a logical close to a keynote of build Yep. To say you, even if it isn't shipping at that point, is it

Paul Thurrott (01:09:19):
You're getting an AI <laugh>, you're

Mikah Sargent (01:09:20):
Getting an, everybody look under your chairs. There's an AI under there.

Rich Campbell (01:09:25):
Yeah. How do I get the whole room cheering? That's like

Paul Thurrott (01:09:27):
Your chairs <laugh>. Yeah. It's a little, it looks like a virus. Don't worry.

Mikah Sargent (01:09:31):
<Laugh>. I promise. It's just ai. You're fine.

Paul Thurrott (01:09:33):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:09:35):
I that's, that's pretty brilliant though. If, if that is what ends up happening, because I mean, if suddenly all of these apps and services can start saying, oh yeah, it's, well,

Paul Thurrott (01:09:47):
But that's what they do, right? Microsoft makes platforms, right? I, yeah, I know they sell apps to people and they sell services and stuff like that. But I mean, at the, at the end of the day, they are a developer company and they're a platform company. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And this capability is not something that just is given to the office team or whatever. This is something we're gonna license for developers to put into their own stuff as well. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:10:06):
The goal is to sell as much Azure as possible, and copilot runs on Azure.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:11):
Oh, it's a dream come true. Yeah. We're looking for something that will up consumption. Oh, listen, <laugh>, we've got, you know, it's, this is it

Rich Campbell (01:10:19):
I'm now giving you,

Paul Thurrott (01:10:21):
And it turns into a giant thing.

Rich Campbell (01:10:22):
Yeah, yeah. I've given you, I've given you capability with no definition of how much resource is gonna consume. That's right. Enjoy. That's

Paul Thurrott (01:10:28):
Right. That's right. Just sign here. You, we've got your credit card. Yeah, we're good. Yeah. <laugh>. So yeah, there's definitely gonna be some, there has to be something along those lines. Sure. This, it's Microsoft

Rich Campbell (01:10:37):
And everybody wants to have an existential conversation with their accounting software,

Paul Thurrott (01:10:41):
<Laugh>. Sure, sure. <Laugh>. I don't, I don't know. I mean, we're gonna see a lot of stupid ai, you know, this I Oh yeah. Think back to like 1988 or whatever year it was. And desktop publishing was becoming a thing thanks to Apple and Adobe. And all of a sudden every document turned into like a ransom note with like, every letter was a different Yes. A different Exactly.

Rich Campbell (01:11:01):
Mueller.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:02):
Yeah. AI's gonna be like that. It's gonna just show up in stupid places. I'd like an AI sandwich place <laugh> just use what it knows about me to make something I might like.

Rich Campbell (01:11:10):
It's kind of the metric, you know, which, you

Paul Thurrott (01:11:12):
Know, it's there when you can shoot your foot off with it. Yes. Right. Yeah. That's gonna happen.

Mikah Sargent (01:11:17):
Let's see. Please give me a recipe for a sandwich for a man who has devoted his life to covering Microsoft and surrounding software. And it's

Paul Thurrott (01:11:36):
Gonna bes a puffer puffer fish sandwich with hemlock,

Mikah Sargent (01:11:41):
The Microsoft insider sandwich. And here are the ingredients, <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:46):
Okay.

Mikah Sargent (01:11:46):
Two slices of whole grain bread. That's reasonable. Two ounces of smoked Turkey breast, one ounce of sharp cheddar cheese, a fourth of an avocado, a small tomato, a red onion. You also get mixed greens such as spinach and arugula, mayonnaise, dejan mustard, honey, salt and pepper. And then optional <laugh> you can add, and I don't, please don't, this is optional. Don't add it. A fourth of a teaspoon of windows themed edible glitter or sprinkles for garnish

Paul Thurrott (01:12:16):
<Laugh>. Yikes.

Mikah Sargent (01:12:17):
So

Paul Thurrott (01:12:18):
That sandwich is terrible. The windows, and again, that's what I would expect of ai. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:12:21):
The windows sauce that you're making is the, the mayonnaise, the dejan mustard sauce. You

Paul Thurrott (01:12:26):
Don't wanna know how they make the windows sauce. <Laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (01:12:28):
<Laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (01:12:29):
Let me tell you, if I'm gonna make Paul Throt a sandwich, it's gonna be a lobster roll. Thank you.

Mikah Sargent (01:12:33):
There you go. Yes. Oh, you use the mixed screens to create a Microsoft garden. Oh my God. Let's get outta here. <Laugh>. Yes.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:42):
Help me. Mike. Cliche is hurting. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:12:45):
<Laugh>. Exactly. There's, there's, there's a cream for that. Let's move on to Microsoft 365.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:52):
Yeah. Yeah. So we mentioned this notion of co-pilot. So one of the things that Microsoft just announced literally was that co-pilot, like what they're calling the Microsoft 365 co-pilot is coming to one OneNote, just like all the other productivity types apps. And it's just exa, it's exactly what you think it's gonna do. Right. generate ideas, create lists, organized information, transform text by summarizing, rewriting, formatting, et cetera. It's exactly what we expect AI to do to text, right. <Laugh>. So very similar to what we would expect this thing to do for us with Microsoft Word or whatever. So, we'll see. I, I'm, I'm very interested in seeing what form, you know, these things take in different, I I I, I mean I'm most interested per personally in Word, but even something like simple, we see the basic versions. This an email. You get an email and it's, we'll suggest replies mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, or you start to write an email and it's, it starts suggesting things you might, you know, it's trying to figure out what you might want to say. I think AI is gonna be that kind of capability on steroids,

Mikah Sargent (01:13:59):
Basically. I, and I, I have to admit, I do like the little suggestions. You just hit tab Yeah. To have it sort of auto fill. Yeah. I do. The, the problem that I've seen, and they keep showing this, I've seen Microsoft do it times, is you are a manager for a team, and your team has just done something great. And instead of taking the time to sincerely write a message saying, Hey, I think you're all great. They just have the AI generated that makes me

Paul Thurrott (01:14:25):
Feel, says they did great. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:14:26):
So cynical. The,

Paul Thurrott (01:14:27):
The biggest problem. So if just something simple, like if you spell spell checking or grammar checking in a product like Microsoft Word, if you don't, if you're not a good writer Yeah. You would today probably accept any changes or many changes that this thing suggests, right? Like, you would just assume this thing

Mikah Sargent (01:14:43):
Goes, oh, this knows better than I do. Right?

Paul Thurrott (01:14:45):
Right. But as a writer, I look at a lot of these changes and I say, no, this is not wrong. And I have these conversa, my wife and I are both writers, so we have like really boring conversations about this kind of stuff, where it's like, you're never gonna believe what words it suggested to me to <laugh>, you know, that kinda stupid idiot. Anyway, so this is what's gonna happen. This probably already happens in email. Like if you're in Gmail and it suggests to reply, people will knee jerk say, yep, that must be right. And then as they're clicking it to go, they can, they might see it as it goes away. They're like, oh, I just wrote something nonsensical back to this person because I assumed that what this thing suggested was. Right. How much worse is it gonna be when it's something complicated <laugh>, right.

(01:15:26):
Where it's I, I, or I wanna write a note to the team mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you know, hopefully if you're that lazy, how much time are you gonna spend proofread this thing? Right. And the reality unfortunately, is you're gonna wanna spend some time proofread that thing. This can be a help. I, I do, I do think ultimately this is a good thing, if that makes sense. But we're really gonna have to pay attention when we use it. And when you think about it, the point of this is that we don't have to pay too much

Mikah Sargent (01:15:53):
Attention. And that Yes, you're, you're, you're dead on with that. It's the trick that, that folks are just gonna go, okay, it's doing this. And there was recently a great article in the Washington Post that was talking about this specific issue where it's like, you, your child starts walking for the first time, and so you decide that they can fix one of those turbines or whatever it was that you were talking about earlier. Yes. Just because you see them

Paul Thurrott (01:16:18):
Do block the turbine over

Mikah Sargent (01:16:18):
There. Yeah. Because I've seen you do this one thing very well, then I think you can do all things. And that is,

Paul Thurrott (01:16:24):
Well, you're, I, there's a problem there that has nothing to do with ai, which is that every parent thinks their child is the golden child. That is a good thing, has invented a new form of intelligence that doesn't exist elsewhere.

Mikah Sargent (01:16:34):
Yeah, that's fair. And

Paul Thurrott (01:16:35):
My kid's been walking for 25 years. I mean, I'm impressed <laugh>, but, you know, let's like let, let's see how step two guys Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:16:41):
Let's, let's see you doing that. But 

Paul Thurrott (01:16:43):
Before we put 'em in the Mensa Academy over there, you know, <laugh> like, I mean, every parents, we're all, we've all done this, we all think every every one of them's the star child, you mm-hmm. <Affirmative>.

Mikah Sargent (01:16:51):
And I think that there's some of that that we can accidentally, without necessarily having a front of mind apply to ai. Okay. Now that it's wrote, written this this recipe, and I've seen it somehow be able to make a rhyme out of an explanation for this, then Oh, I bet it'll be good. When I need to ask it, which of these three creams that my doctor has prescribed, should I actually be using? Well, I mean, it got the, it got the recipe. Right. So surely it can do this as well. And that's where we Yeah. We need to be careful about proofing it and, and checking it and making sure that it's

Paul Thurrott (01:17:28):
Accurate. And we're not gonna be, we don't do that. Nobody does that <laugh>. Yeah. You know, that's the problem. I mean, we, we, the pr this tool, this technology will make tools that are unfamiliar to us accessible mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and in doing so, we don't have the expertise we know to know whether it, what it did is right or wrong. Yeah. Oof. Right. So it's kind of the, the yin and the yang of it, or whatever the, the light in the dark side, whatever. But it's,

Rich Campbell (01:17:53):
This is where the trough of disillusionment loves. Yes.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:56):
<Laugh> interpret. Yes.

Rich Campbell (01:17:58):
Right. It's it, and it but's, you know, this, and I'm hoping that's what the Kevin Scott keynote is, it's like co-pilot. It's your foot,

Paul Thurrott (01:18:06):
It's your freight. Now AI may be stepping on it, but when the forensics comes in, I

Rich Campbell (01:18:11):
Know I handed you a gun, but you're the one who pointed it at your foot.

Paul Thurrott (01:18:15):
<Laugh>. Exactly.

Mikah Sargent (01:18:17):
Hmm. I mean, that is why Microsoft is being, I would say, pretty clever and calling it, you know, it's a co-pilot. The the pilot is still

Paul Thurrott (01:18:26):
The one, it's such a good brand. It is. It's the right name. The they this

Rich Campbell (01:18:30):
Insane. They got that so, right. Yeah. It, it's so free. They

Paul Thurrott (01:18:33):
Branded their branding is so bad and they did such a, it's so Right.

Mikah Sargent (01:18:36):
Is that because it came from GitHub? Because GitHub did the co-pilot thing. I know it's owned by Microsoft, but I wonder it just some other minds we're working on it. I guess what I'm saying,

Paul Thurrott (01:18:47):
I that is plausible. Yeah. Yeah. That's

Rich Campbell (01:18:50):
Plausible. I mean, it was GitHub co-pilot first. Yep. But at least it's such enough to run with it. Yep. Yeah. As it built right into it is, it's not our fault. You were the pilot <laugh>. That's right.

Paul Thurrott (01:19:01):
Right. There's two steering wheels in the car, you know?

Rich Campbell (01:19:04):
Yeah. I mean, I'm a OneNote user. I'm interested to see what the single do all of my abstracts for conferences and things are in there, the idea that I could point into an abstract and say, Hey, rewrite this,

Mikah Sargent (01:19:17):
I'm jealous.

Rich Campbell (01:19:18):
Yep. You know, like that, that what I find interesting with one note in this context is exactly that. It's actually pretty hard to chat GB t to take like several paragraphs of text, say, Hey, give me another version of this. Well, it's

Paul Thurrott (01:19:29):
Also this, it's also another tool. Like I, I, I think the, the fun thing about putting it, well, not the fun thing, the the right thing about putting it into a tool like OneNote or Word, or whatever you use is, it's where you are, right? Yeah. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative> that I, I am literally in the app that I use to create this content, whatever it might be. Having it here makes sense. It's great that this other thing exists out in the world. It obviously that's fantastic, but I really need it right here. I don't want to keep, I'm not gonna, my, my life isn't copying and pasting between two different things. Right. It, it, if I could do everything in

Rich Campbell (01:19:57):
Here Yeah. Where I am. Yeah. That's the right way. It makes me wonder if the M 365 co-pilot isn't gonna just be the winner. Like that's going to be the co-pilot that impacts the moseses. Especially

Mikah Sargent (01:20:06):
Because you've got your own little training set right there. Yeah. All, everything that you're doing in M 365 is all right there. It can look at all of those bits and pieces and act on them. That I think is, that's gonna be magical.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:20):
It really, it's such a beautiful moment for Microsoft, obviously, but whatever community there is out there of people who have just kind of been in this space for years and just watched as the rest of the world has marched by without them, and for this to suddenly happen, it's like nice. Because like, there, there is no, it, it, it doesn't matter if someone comes up with an AI-based word processor because everyone uses Word. Yeah. So now this thing just has this, it's yet another reason to stay. You know, it's, it's like when you buy, like Microsoft 365, I could always make the argument like, look, even if you don't use the office apps just for the terabyte of storage, this thing is worth it. You know? Yeah. or six terabytes, if you get the family version here's another reason, you know mm-hmm. <Affirmative> that this thing becomes an no more of an no

Rich Campbell (01:21:05):
Brain. This is what the office Steves are trying all along Yeah. Is how do we get 'em to use more cloud. Gotcha.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:10):
Gotcha. Right, right, right. Like, no, it's amazing. This is one. Yeah. Yeah. This is a lot of cloud. It's, it's, it's, they're just through no fault of their own are perfectly positioned for this future where AI is a thing.

Rich Campbell (01:21:21):
Yeah. And it, and it speaks to why did they jump show sharply? I think this vision became clear in January. Right. And they have just moved Heaven and Earth to make it happen. So that here we are coming into their developer event in May mm-hmm. <Affirmative> with ducks rapidly following into row, or at least messaging, we'll see where the products are actually at.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:42):
Yeah. That's interesting.

Mikah Sargent (01:21:45):
Now more on ai. Yes. <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (01:21:48):
A little bit, a little bit, a little bit more. Just a little bit more. I, yeah. I mean, up at the top of the show, we were talking about this notion that Microsoft just updates windows whenever they want now. Right. It's kind of a weird thing. A Microsoft Edge, like Chrome and other chromium based browsers is in a much more rapid release cycle. Right. A new version of this thing comes out every four weeks. It is fascinating to me that when they released edge one 11 couple weeks back, that within a week they re-released it because there was a feature in there, that stupid Bing button at the top on the toolbar that businesses hated so much that everyone complained and they rushed out a, a, a new version of that to correct this mistake. It is equally amazing to me that since that happened, Microsoft has released three new features from Microsoft Edge that did not come out when EL one 11 first shipped.

(01:22:39):
They've just come out since, and it's like, what? <Laugh>, why? But, you know, here we are, and by the way, this isn't the only one, I should say. We talked about Edge Workspaces, that's another one. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> it, it, it's in preview, but you know, features are just kind of <laugh> like popping up all over the place all of a sudden. So there are three new features that came out. One of them is AI based. So if you're familiar with Micro, the, the Bing AI stuff, the Bing chatbot, you may know that sometime, I don't know, back in March, probably whenever it was that they added, actually we might have been more recent than that. Whenever they did it, they added the ability to generate images similar, actually similar, identical to Open AI Dolly. Right. Which is something I've used for a lot of stuff.

(01:23:24):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So you could go to bing.com and you could say, make me an image that looks like an oil painting, however you wanna say it. So you could do that. There is a sidebar feature in Microsoft Edge, which I find excruciatingly painful. However, they are starting to add a lot of interesting new features to it. And one of them is this integration with the Bing AI stuff. And now with this what they call Bing image creator mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, which is that feature the Dolly based thing that's now available directly in Microsoft Edge as well. I mean, obviously it's going to the cloud to make it happen, but you can do it right in the browser, which is kind of interesting. There are two other features drag and drop image editing in the browser, which is like, okay, I, I guess if you're familiar with the Photos app on Windows 11, you will immediately recognize these tools.

(01:24:14):
It is, I'm not saying a hundred percent identical, but it is pretty damn identical. So you drag an image into the browser and an editor comes up if you want to, one of the choices is edit, and it has all of the, you know, the filters, the adjustments, the cropping, it's, it looks exactly like the Photos app. You can share, you know, the edited images, save them, et cetera. And then what is the other one? There is a, oh, drag and drop drag and drop. There's a new, this is the sidebar feature. So you can drop images into the browser, so from a webpage. So you literally click on an image, drag it over, drop it into the, the folder. This is sort of like collections, which is another feature that, you know, maybe should or should not exist.

(01:25:01):
I noticed because I used this feature that it created a folder up in OneDrive, which I do not appreciate. <Laugh>. I have since deleted it, but let me go look. Cuz I believe, I think if you go into your pictures, I think it's pictures, you'll see something called, I think it's called Edge Drop, or Edge Drop Images or something like that. And I think the reason it's there is, so it can save those images in your OneDrive. And then when you go to a different computer with Edge, it will just pop up in that sidebar thing. It's k it's kind of like a, you could use it to s to share an image with yourself, if that makes sense. Rather than emailing it, you drop it into Edge and then on your other computer, you op or in your phone probably eventually you open it there and there it is, that kind of thing. So, I don't know, I guess it's April we're adding stuff. I don't know what's happening here. This is just stuff is happening. So we're adding features to Edge now because of course we are. Well, I mean, you've gotta have some reason to pop up in that sidebar <laugh> and look

Mikah Sargent (01:26:02):
What we've, look what we've added.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:06):
I don't like the sidebar, but Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:26:08):
No, well, yeah. At least they've stopped popping it open on every instance of the browser at the same time. Like, that's, that seems to be progress.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:19):
I just like to turn stuff off. I, I prefer my browser to be kind of minimalist. Yeah. I'm trying to turn off as much stuff as I,

Mikah Sargent (01:26:27):
I can Same. Get everything outta my way. Cuz I want the Yeah. I want the window

Paul Thurrott (01:26:31):
To be Yeah. I'm not here for this. Yeah. You know, I'm, I'm there for this, all

Mikah Sargent (01:26:34):
Of this

Paul Thurrott (01:26:35):
<Laugh>. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:26:36):
Which reminds me of last week with the weird double pain situation.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:40):
Right, right. Well, I mean, if you're gonna do double, why not just do three? Where, where does it end? Where

Mikah Sargent (01:26:46):
<Laugh>, where do the pains end? How do pain,

Paul Thurrott (01:26:48):
How do you think about it's so poor pain view. Oh God, <laugh>,

Mikah Sargent (01:26:51):
What can you even fit on the screen?

Paul Thurrott (01:26:54):
<Laugh>. Right. I don't know. It could be all like phone, phone size things.

Mikah Sargent (01:26:58):
I will say I did just use the image generator to make the Windows Insider sandwich.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:04):
Oh, nice sounds.

Mikah Sargent (01:27:05):
So I'll be sharing that in the Discord for

Paul Thurrott (01:27:07):
Photos. Oh, that's beautiful.

Mikah Sargent (01:27:08):
Yeah. I would maybe

Paul Thurrott (01:27:11):
That the little those little bits around it that like look like in Fedi Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:27:16):
Sparkles tho those

Paul Thurrott (01:27:18):
Little alarming.

Mikah Sargent (01:27:18):
Yeah. Those

Paul Thurrott (01:27:19):
Are the Jimmys or

Mikah Sargent (01:27:20):
Something, the garnish that the garnish that it said it wanted.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:24):
I don't wanna get a little Windows flag stuck in my teeth. <Laugh> can't stand that.

Mikah Sargent (01:27:28):
I hate it when that happens.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:30):
Hmm.

Mikah Sargent (01:27:32):
<Laugh>. Oh boy.

Rich Campbell (01:27:33):
I remember getting I think it was Crystal Reports sent me like the reviewer's copy of Crystal five. Oh, that's how long ago we're talking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so they fill and it had a a helium balloon in it and, and a bag of glitter that was like 50.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:51):
Yep.

Rich Campbell (01:27:52):
And when I opened the bag, the thing basically exploded. It went, I mean, I found those five Os in the carpet. Yeah. Four years.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:01):
No, it's like when you have a cri a real Christmas tree and you find the needles from like two years ago stuck under a grate or something. <Laugh> still going. My, one of my sisters is I mean, she's, she means well, but she did something similar for like my birthday where I got a card and I opened it up and it exploded glitter everywhere.

Mikah Sargent (01:28:17):
Oh no.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:18):
<Laugh>. And it's like, Cheryl, are you kidding me? Like seriously, I literally called her and, and she's like, hello? And I'm like, what the hell is wrong? <Laugh> <laugh>. She's like, is this Paul? And I'm like, seriously, seriously. <Laugh> like, yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:28:31):
That is what's amazing about that is I would never get that for you. I like,

Paul Thurrott (01:28:36):
I right. I right. That's what I mean. She means Well, but, you know. Yeah. I'm, I'm not for a, I'm not a five year old girl. And b don't you don't send that in the mail. Yeah. Like, what, what do you think's gonna happen? It all collects in the bottom <laugh>. You know, it's not like, what do you, what did you think was, what do I don't know, this is, she meant, like I said, she meant well, but

Mikah Sargent (01:28:56):
Hey, it's memorable.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:58):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. Yeah. I'll never forget it. That's true.

Mikah Sargent (01:29:00):
<Laugh>. that's cuz the glitter's still around in different ways. It's, it's moved with you somehow. Yep. The glitter never goes. Alright. And then up next we've got the quick access toolbar that just won't leave us.

Paul Thurrott (01:29:17):
This is, this is almost my favorite topic in this entire show and I, I don't want to beat this one to death, but I, I'll just say this is a mini-story lesson if you go back to office 2007 is when they introduced the, the Ribbon ui. Right. Still controversial today, by the way. There's still people today who complain to me. Literally not every day, but literally all the time about the ribbon. And the idea behind the ribbon is a good one. We've run out of space for toolbar and menus for all of the commands that are built into office, right. Back in 1995 or 1990 or whatever office had 127 commands or 150, whatever it was. And those UIs made sense, but once you get up into several hundreds or thousands of commands, the, we don't have enough room to open those venues. The other issue was that I think it was, I think the figure was eight of the top 10 feature requests for the next version of office were features that were already in the product, right.

(01:30:10):
That nobody could find cuz they were so buried in the ui. So they came up with this ribbon thing, which I still to this day think is a good idea. Just in, in the sense of exposing people to features. Nothing is ever hidden. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> well, I mean, nothing you need at the time is ever hidden, I should say. So there's no, like, if you go to the view tab, there are no view fe like features that are not in the view tab. Like they're, they're, everything's there, you know, that kind of thing. Problem with the ribbon is as big. Right? And so kind of, you know, it's this big chunky thing. If you have like a 16 minus screen, which is kind of not very tall or low-res screen, is it, it can take up some space. So, and there were people like me, power users who complained about it.

(01:30:50):
So they came up with this thing during the development of Office 2007, if I'm not mistaken, literally right at the beginning called the Quick Access toolbar. It was like the mini little toolbar. You could stick it at the top. It was populated with a couple things by default, I wanna say und, undo, redo, maybe a's save icon. Remember just a couple little things. And the idea was you can minimize the ribbon so it goes away, frees up all that space, but there's a couple of commands. And if you're, if you really like it, you could fill that thing with commands. You could put all kinds of stuff up there. If you use certain commands all the time, they could put 'em in the quick access toolbar. Nice. Anyway, flash forward many years, the ribbon has evolved in many ways. They, they've came up with this idea called the Simplified Ribbon, which one might call a toolbar <laugh> whatever.

(01:31:32):
And then in the most recent version of office, now we have this notion of personalized toolbar. So you can minimize the ribbon and use office for a little while and then it will say, Hey, we can make you a personalized toolbar based on the commands we know that you use all the time. I've done this many times. It's always exactly the same commands. I'm not even sure it's doing anything, but whatever pops up a little toolbar. You're like, nice. But since they, since they started getting rid of the ribbon, not really getting rid of it, but, you know, giving you ways to get it outta the way. Microsoft last year said, maybe we should just hide the quick access toolbar. Like no one's, you know, like no one really uses it that much. It's not really necessary anymore. And oh my God, do people complain?

(01:32:10):
So now they're bringing it back, baby. It never really went away. You could always enable it if you wanted, but now it's on by default again. And they've added back a bunch of commands that they took away. And basically this is just, this is like, what, what Susan, what I say? So we're talking 15 years of UI back and forth, and we still haven't figured this thing out, <laugh>. They're like, we just give up. We, we've tried our best to create a good ui. You all hate everything we do. Here's your stupid little quick access toolbar knock. Just use that <laugh>, you know, you know what? You

Rich Campbell (01:32:40):
Can't put on the Quick access toolbar, the the one I use all the time paste as text.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:46):
Yes.

Rich Campbell (01:32:47):
Because if you make, if you paste in the title of another link for me, I will stab you.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:51):
<Laugh>, soe.

Rich Campbell (01:32:52):
So freaking link.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:54):
All right. So, because I use words so extensively, the one thing I've learned to do, and it's one of those many, many things that does not sync, you have to do this every time you set up Word on a new computer is I go into a setting, you know, settings, advanced settings, I paste as text by default. When, when whatever's coming in, if it's from another application Yep. Always text

Rich Campbell (01:33:13):
For that. It does work for Outlook and it doesn't work. For One Note,

Paul Thurrott (01:33:17):
It's different because they probably use some version of the word because

Rich Campbell (01:33:21):
It's different. Yeah. Right. And it's like, because why would you have a common ui? Who would do that? Nobody

Paul Thurrott (01:33:25):
Does ask. So, so by the way, that's another example of how Microsoft addresses. So in other words, they've created a problem. And so what happened, like I'd have, I'm gonna bring this up just to kind of see what happens. Yeah. So when you, when you paste anything into Word or any of these other applications, a paste options thing comes up mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Right. And you click on it and then depending on what you pasted, you'll have some number of little icons there. And of course, one of the options is keep text only. Right? Right. So if you were like a real cont you know, keyboard guy, I think you could dorl t I already do it as text. I can't see it, but I think if you type control t, it will do paste as text, I think. Oh.

Mikah Sargent (01:34:04):
Oh, wow. So there is, they're not like a universal because on the Mac I, no, I do shift alt command V and that is what lets me paste anywhere on

Paul Thurrott (01:34:12):
Anything. This is a controversy in Windows. Exactly. So in Windows it should be control shift. V uhhuh paste, right Paste as text. Yeah. That doesn't exist. Wow. Sorry. It does exist. It's not universal and it doesn't work in office. And you were not here for this, but sometime in the past month, Microsoft announced they're gonna add paste, azt, text to Word.

Rich Campbell (01:34:30):
Yeah. Not

Paul Thurrott (01:34:32):
Because it's 2023. And are you fricking kidding me? This capability doesn't exist in the word process. I know everyone who hears, that's like, no, no. Come on. That's in there. No it isn't. No, no.

Rich Campbell (01:34:45):
And in OneNote control, he adds a new section and control shift V does nothing.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:50):
Right? Yep. Every other app on earth control. Well, every app I use for the most part, control shift V will do it. Paste his text. Yes. Because Word does not support this. I use that worker and I described earlier, I can figure it to only that is goofy fake text. Yeah. From

Rich Campbell (01:35:04):
Externally. Because it, yeah, because I always wanna pace his text because that's why I'm Course you

Paul Thurrott (01:35:08):
Do what wrong. What should do,

Mikah Sargent (01:35:09):
Do you think at some point that they used to be the other way and then they got so many complaints that they decided that they wanted to make it so that it's formatted text by Dean? No,

Paul Thurrott (01:35:20):
I, I refuse to believe that they haven't been getting complaints about this since 1997. <Laugh>. So why would they address this now? I don't know. Why is this not just universal to Windows? Yeah. Right. I don't know. But

Rich Campbell (01:35:35):
This is that, you know, 20 years of not having a design language of how not controlling that interface Sure. And letting each team do their own thing.

Mikah Sargent (01:35:44):
Got it. Got

Paul Thurrott (01:35:45):
It. Oh, it's al it's also just let, let's bring a common sense problem to the team that creates Microsoft Word and say, you know, it's, it's kind of interesting when I do control V to paste in something, it doesn't go as text. Maybe this should be a way that does that. And they're like, Hey, here's an idea. I I, we're gonna invent a platform that creates a UI when you paste and you can click on it, and then you're gonna see a list of icons and then, and, and you can't tell what any of 'em are. So you get a mouse over each one so you can see what it says. Cuz there's no text on, despite the fact that I have this in Incre huge

Mikah Sargent (01:36:16):
Screen. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:17):
It's ridiculous. You

Mikah Sargent (01:36:18):
Lost me at take my hands off the keyboard.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:21):
I know. You know, I know. It's, well, you can, if you, you can. I think it's Control T that does it, but I never,

Mikah Sargent (01:36:28):
But you wouldn't know that off the bat. Figure.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:31):
I can figure it for ta. So I, I only paste this text, so I've worked around this problem, but I believe you can do it with a keyboard, but you have to figure it out.

Mikah Sargent (01:36:40):
Oh boy.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:41):
Yep. And you're wondering, see, people wonder, like, Paul, why, why are you an insane person? <Laugh>? And I said, well, you know, it's for, it's because of stuff like

Mikah Sargent (01:36:50):
This. It's all these little cuts, right? Yeah. What is that? Right.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:53):
Spends, it's like a woodpecker on the side of your head, like every day. Like, you know, you know, when that gets annoying.

Mikah Sargent (01:37:00):
I think Richard, you've done for me service now in the understanding of how, because, and, you know, I try to be very open-minded and understand that different companies work differently. But w when I think about, you know, apple and how, yes, there are individual teams, but there does seem to be an overall sort of, this is the way that things go because you've got the head of software. When I understand now, I keep pointing to the right when I understand now what you're saying about all of these teams sort of getting to be their own individual guiding light and how they all sort of did their own way of, of setting things that this starts to make a little more sense. I don't think it's great that it's that way, <laugh>, but at least I can understand a

Paul Thurrott (01:37:44):
Little more to be, there used to be a hierarchy and kind of an understanding, and maybe it was implicit, but the, the back in the day, you know, like 20, 25 years ago, Microsoft Office come out with some UI innovation, I'll call it, for lack of a better new ui. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, when when, when Windows had toolbar were office had command bars, you know, that kind of thing. And the idea was always that thing will become available to third party developers and will become part of Windows. And it would happen sporadically, but it didn't al it wasn't always that clean. The Ribbon ui, for example, is something that was eventually made available to third party developers through Microsoft's developer, you know, toolkits of the day, like at the Windows Presentation Foundation and so forth. You could do it you couldn't really make it look exactly like Office <laugh>, right. That was always, you know, a little bit off. And it, it, it, and it, it didn't always happen. And in some cases, office just kind of went off and did its own thing. Like we're saying, like Control V is a great example. Like how something that basic has remained that wrong for so long is hard to explain. It's impossible. Explain. they just, there own little fiefdoms. You know,

Rich Campbell (01:38:55):
There's a gr famous graphic by Bonkers World, the bonkers world organizational chart mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, it's years and years and years old. But it, it's incredibly correct <laugh> because it shows the Apple diagram as literally hubbed around a center point. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, right. Which is was, was jobs and, and the Microsoft one is a set of fiefdoms all with guns pointing at each other.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:18):
<Laugh>. Oh no. Right. Classic.

Rich Campbell (01:39:21):
Yeah. And it's just like,

Paul Thurrott (01:39:22):
It will absolutely come up in the in the discord. I'm sure someone will Yeah. Someone someone has found it already.

Rich Campbell (01:39:27):
Bonkers world organizational charts. Yeah. And, and, and listen, it's not true today, you know, Satcher really has attacked that element. This was very much bombers. Microsoft became like this, it didn't happen under Gates because Gates was always the most technical guy in the room. And he reviewed every product and he broke up those fiefdoms.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:47):
Well, he could say, you will do this. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:39:49):
You will do this.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:50):
They will do it thing. Yeah. You will do this. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:39:52):
And, and to SAT's credit, part of statue taking over as CEO was that Bill is back. He's not the face of Microsoft in any way, but he's still, he's back to doing product reviews. And cuz he has this magic power where he says, Hey, these three teams are actually all working on this one thing in common. And each of you will donate to people to a sub-team. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and you will all use what they make mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And so they, they sort of undo these problems under the hood rather than ship three of the same flippant product. Cuz that's happened.

Paul Thurrott (01:40:23):
Yep. Yep.

Rich Campbell (01:40:26):
There it is. And it's a classic. It's years and years old, but it's like, but they still have the hangover of the fiefdom. So like this UI problem we're describing is a hangover of the guns Gunza.

Paul Thurrott (01:40:37):
That's right.

Mikah Sargent (01:40:39):
It's not. So these days it's not as I don't know, as as angry

Rich Campbell (01:40:45):
<Laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (01:40:45):
It's

Rich Campbell (01:40:46):
Not as exactly,

Paul Thurrott (01:40:46):
You know, it's,

Rich Campbell (01:40:47):
It's SATs one Microsoft. Right. Like they, and, and pretty heavy force. It has good and bad days without a doubt. I,

Paul Thurrott (01:40:55):
I feel like, well I feel like this used to be based on how popular, how much money a division made, you know, when Windows was the center of everything mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you know, those guys didn't give a crap what anyone else said. Yeah. You know, and there was a time when Office was the biggest business that Microsoft by far. And that's probably where this kind of stuff came out of, you know, like we're doing our own thing. Like we, you know, I, we don't really care what happens at the rest of the company. We're doing our own thing. I think these days there's an understanding that this company, the different parts of this company have to work together. It's a different world, you know,

Rich Campbell (01:41:26):
But you're also dealing now with each of them have a different paste solution. I just checked Excel. It's different. Again, you have key formatting, not key formatting. Okay. And changing any of them is going to make a certain number of customers

Paul Thurrott (01:41:39):
Mad. Yeah. Cuz people have muscle memory. Right.

Rich Campbell (01:41:41):
They've all gotten used to that for the product they live in. Paul lives in Word, so he knows his way around Word for its paste. I live in OneNote, I know around OneNote's Paste. Right. There are people who live in Excel, I don't know. Happy they are, but they obviously Right. They have their way. Right. I'm, you know, no, there's no point making, I made a show called Kill you know, about getting rid of Excel. That was fun. Sure. Right. And what we're really talking about is people do things. You could do things in Excel that will endanger your business. Right. Like there's no two ways about it. Like, people do a remarkable bits of analysis in Excel and then, you know, there's a computational error and you cannot find it. It's, you know, there are better ways to go about that stuff so that it is, you know, there's no easy way to fix that. The damage of that period. It's just

Paul Thurrott (01:42:28):
Gonna, well, and by the way, so in some future version of Windows 11, Microsoft is, for the first time, since the first version of Windows in 1995, gonna change what the print screen key does on your keyboard. Right. It actually dates back further than that. Cuz print screen was part of MSOs in 1983 or whatever year that was. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> would literally print a printout of the screen, which was text to whatever was attached to L P T one. Like that's what it did. These days, or since the G u i since Windows, it has taken a screenshot Right. And saved it to the clipboard. You know, they added at some point the Windows Key plus print screen, which would save it to a file. They added the capability to OneDrive, which would prompt you if you wanted to save screenshots to your OneDrive pictures folder. But now they're gonna change it, it's gonna load the snipping tool app instead. You'll be able to go back and change it if you want it to be print screened or you know what it used to be. But the default is literally for the first time, what is that, 28 years? 20, no, 38 years is going to change <laugh>. But the default, essentially nothing about

Rich Campbell (01:43:33):
This. Right. Like you, you mo most people, like you and me, we're we're used to. It's just going, it just makes a copy to the clipboard and you have paint to open and then you check to see if you paste it in. But depending on what keyboard you're using, print screen can be pretty buried. Right. That's right. It's, I have to have this function key on and alt this and, and so you don't even know if you hit it. At least when you have an app assigned to it, you know, you hit it cuz the app pops up.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:57):
So I, yeah, I just, <laugh> I just wrote about this for the book. I will say it is interesting to me. God bless you. That <laugh>. 

Mikah Sargent (01:44:05):
I thought I had it muted. Sorry,

Paul Thurrott (01:44:07):
<Laugh>. You did. I could, I'm sorry. I could see you one thing. Oh. Oh, <laugh>. Sorry. We have a multi-camera view here. Yeah, I don't know why I said that a loud. I can't. That's okay. Anyway, so when you do Windows Key plus print screen, the screen actually flashes. Right? So you get that visual feedback that it did something. I think that's pretty cool. Yeah. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative> that's not, not a bad solution, you know? I don't like skipping tool. I think it's too much tool for what this is. Right. I think we're overthinking this a little bit. But whatever, I, I don't, I don't mind them changing it. I, I, especially if I can just kind of put it back, but, but people are gonna freak out, you know, because Muscle memory.

Rich Campbell (01:44:47):
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:44:49):
Reasonable. I mean, <laugh> expect I, I under Yeah. Expected and understood.

Paul Thurrott (01:44:54):
I, yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:44:55):
I don't like losing my muscle memory either.

Rich Campbell (01:44:57):
I look at this from the other side of which is at least there's some people in the Windows team starting to work on stuff cuz it Windows felt awfully neglected for quite a while. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:45:05):
It did. Yep. Yeah. And that ties into the thing we talked with Build mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, one of the many ways that Windows felt neglected as Microsoft's only big developer show would pop up over and they wouldn't talk about Windows. Yeah. You know, nothing tells you that they don't think about it as the future more than we're not talking about it to developers. Yeah. You know and they are this year I, again, it's not gonna be the focus. I get that and that's fine. I, I don't expect it to be, but I, I'm very happy with that focus with what I see based on our experience over the past several years. It's good.

Rich Campbell (01:45:36):
I'm just wondering when there's gonna be a Windows co-pilot, because that's not

Paul Thurrott (01:45:40):
Windows 12

Rich Campbell (01:45:41):
<Laugh>. Well, I, I wouldn't doubt it for

Paul Thurrott (01:45:43):
It's literally gonna say, where do you want to go today? It's gonna be beautiful. Richard. I

Rich Campbell (01:45:47):
Like Windows mom. Where do you think,

Paul Thurrott (01:45:48):
I can't wait today.

Rich Campbell (01:45:50):
<Laugh>. but I think M 365 already owns it because that, you know, windows is just a host. Where we're gonna work is M 365.

Paul Thurrott (01:45:57):
So they're part of, they're part of M 365. It's fine. Theoretically.

Rich Campbell (01:46:00):
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:46:01):
Have you had your vegetables today?

Paul Thurrott (01:46:03):
Yeah. <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (01:46:04):
You can't, don't do the park and take computer. Had your vegetables. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:08):
I'm sorry Paul, you can't eat lunch. You're doing more writing.

Rich Campbell (01:46:12):
How can you have any pudding if you didn't eat your meat

Paul Thurrott (01:46:14):
<Laugh>?

Mikah Sargent (01:46:16):
Alright. How do I prove that I'm me on LinkedIn? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:21):
I, I don't know if you guys have been paying attention to the news, but there's been some stuff with a certain social media network.

Rich Campbell (01:46:27):
I have no idea what, it

Paul Thurrott (01:46:28):
Has slightly changed how a certain little blue check mark works. And I have to think that this story was inspired by that. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So LinkedIn, which is an even smaller network, like, well, I shouldn't say that's LinkedIn, which is a different social media network has announced they're gonna provide three different ways that users of the service can identify themselves of verify their identify identity, if you will on LinkedIn. Right. So thi this is actually kind of interesting. So the first one is Clear. Clear is that thing that's not TS or what do you call it? It's not,

Rich Campbell (01:47:02):
Yeah. Not TSA pre, but

Paul Thurrott (01:47:03):
Yeah, TSA pre mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. it's a, actually like a th it's a, like a, I think it's a private company, isn't it? I'm pretty sure. Yes. I'm pretty sure it is. But anyway, so Clear is one of those ways you can skip the line in security when you go, you know, and you fly. So they have a really good kind of a facial recognition based system for verifying identity. Linkedin is going to partner or is partnering with Clear and their secure identity platform so they can help people prove they are who they say they are. Right. Which is to me is a much better idea than just charging people a couple bucks a month. So they can pretend that they're Woody Woodpecker or whatever. But anyway, that's a different network. They're going to use company e issued email addresses to help verify your identity. This is only work for companies with over, no, I'm sorry. It works for over 4,000 companies. So I guess very specific companies and LinkedIn will add more soon. And then they're going to integrate with Microsoft Intra which is a, I think it's a, it's a service of Azure. Right.

Rich Campbell (01:48:07):
Just they just added this name a, a few months

Paul Thurrott (01:48:10):
Ago. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:48:11):
Yeah. But it's, it's, it's now in a, what I, I'm, I'm pretty aware that, you know, identity is the third rail at Microsoft <laugh>. And, and a few VPs have crashed their careers on trying to d address identity at Microsoft because it's it's the ultimate legacy problem. Many accounts over many generations of technologies. Right. And now we have a, a d Right. Azure active directory. The, the, the, the next layer. And if you, if you have an urge to descend yourself into, hell, you take an old Microsoft account that you have mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Right. Which should we normally call an MSA account, a Microsoft account and make an Azure a a d account of the same email address?

Paul Thurrott (01:48:53):
Oh,

Rich Campbell (01:48:54):
We the best, you know, we call this tenant iis <laugh> because depending on what machine you log into with that account, you're either get the MSA account or the Azure ad account. Oh no. Like

Paul Thurrott (01:49:06):
It's just, it's also the hilarious circumstance where you got your a a D account through a school or a workplace and you got fired and left the school and now no longer have it. And you just lost access to every single bit of content Yeah. That you purchased from Microsoft through your m msa because it's gone baby.

Rich Campbell (01:49:20):
Yeah. Not your identity anymore, you

Paul Thurrott (01:49:22):
Know? Yep.

Rich Campbell (01:49:23):
So good stuff. Intra seems to be representing a new set of leaders trying to get their hands around the identity problem once again. And so they've got a branding exercise going on, on top of owning all these different pieces. Sure. I mean, that being said, I'm ex I'm excited, you know, again, it's like somebody's working on this problem, at

Paul Thurrott (01:49:44):
Least <laugh>. Okay. It's like, I'm like, I really like the, I like that this is a new brand. Anyway, so who LinkedIn is, who can

Rich Campbell (01:49:52):
Destroy their career today?

Paul Thurrott (01:49:54):
I'll just say LinkedIn is approaching the concept of identity verification in a slightly different way than one of its competitors. Mm-Hmm.

Mikah Sargent (01:50:03):
<Affirmative> than a couple of its competitors. Cuz Facebook slash meta, I

Paul Thurrott (01:50:08):
Know that. I know. Conference, it's crazy. Yep. Yep. Like, here's a terrible idea. Let's do that too.

Mikah Sargent (01:50:14):
<Laugh>, let's make you pay to prove you are who you

Paul Thurrott (01:50:17):
Say nothing says leadership like <laugh>. Right. Copying a horrible idea, but yeah. That's what they're doing.

Rich Campbell (01:50:25):
Oh, I'm, you know, I'll certainly play with it and it's just a question of is this gonna help? I don't know. Okay. Well this,

Mikah Sargent (01:50:33):
I I'm mean anything to anyone. I guess if you, if you have a LinkedIn account and someone else has come along and made a LinkedIn account that is you as well, this is a great way to make sure that you or you, and also, I

Paul Thurrott (01:50:44):
Mean, honestly Yeah. The notion of verifying yourself in a professional service like this is a very good one. You know?

Mikah Sargent (01:50:51):
Yeah. This is where you almost want it more than any, than than in other places.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:55):
And Yeah. Yeah. I never saw a, a reason to get like a blue badge on Twitter, but I, yeah. You wanna make sure you're, you on this thing and you certainly wanna do it to make sure that no one else is you. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know? Yeah. That'd be the, the best reason to do it.

Mikah Sargent (01:51:07):
Yeah. And I was just thinking about you know, a company, a recruiter from a company reaches out, you wanna make sure that that's a real person. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> from that company and not

Paul Thurrott (01:51:16):
Some random, there you go. That's who. Yep.

Mikah Sargent (01:51:20):
All right. For folks who are on Android, they may soon have access, or do they have now access to the Bing Chat bot?

Paul Thurrott (01:51:28):
It's in beta. Okay. So if you're on the beta version of Swift Key, which is the Microsoft owned virtual keyboard for mobile you can access Bing Chat bot functionality from the keyboard, because this has to be everywhere. I guess. I don't, I don't know. I mean, I'm, they've not said about iOS. I obviously, right. I mean, well, I'm assuming Apple allows that, I guess. But I mean, obviously they would intend to bring it there. Yeah. This is, this is a race to eyeballs from Microsoft, from what I can tell. And they're going to have as many integration points as possible. Not, not that honestly. Many of these are probably big integration points. I mean, Microsoft Edge, user base swift Key user base. I'm not really sure what to say there, but they want people to, yeah. They want people to hit this thing. So

Rich Campbell (01:52:22):
Do you remember when Bill Gates put out the security letter, the trusted compute letter? Yeah, I

Paul Thurrott (01:52:28):
Sure do.

Rich Campbell (01:52:28):
Yep. And, and it basically made every team stop what they were doing and work on security. Yep. And before that, in the nineties, there was the internet Tidal Wave letter. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> did he put on a co-pilot letter, <laugh>. Because, because one of the things that happened with both of those is like, stuff just showed up everywhere, and some of it was dumb.

Paul Thurrott (01:52:45):
I guess the question you're really asking is, did Bill Gates write those memos himself? I'm

Rich Campbell (01:52:51):
Pretty sure he did. He says

Paul Thurrott (01:52:52):
I would, I would say that he did. Yeah. From, did he? I

Rich Campbell (01:52:54):
Think so too. Did he write this one? I don't know.

Paul Thurrott (01:52:57):
Yeah. Yeah. <Laugh>.

Rich Campbell (01:52:58):
But somebody did. Yeah. And, and somebody, because literally it's like every team needs to say something

Paul Thurrott (01:53:03):
The next, the next quarter. That corporate memo will not be written on Swift Key. It's gonna be my guess <laugh>. I could be run.

Rich Campbell (01:53:10):
I could be, but I mean, hey, you're building bits and pieces for Android in Microsoft, and this letter comes across your desk, like, what do you do? It's like, Ooh, I know

Paul Thurrott (01:53:19):
<Laugh>. Yeah. It happened pretty quick. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:53:22):
I, I remember when sequel, you know, after the Gates letter on the internet title Wave SQL Server would output his H T M L for a query.

Paul Thurrott (01:53:31):
Oh, sure,

Rich Campbell (01:53:31):
Sure. It was such a bad idea, but it's like they complied with the requirement.

Paul Thurrott (01:53:37):
Yep. Yep.

Rich Campbell (01:53:40):
It's amazing. Anyway, I, I get it.

Mikah Sargent (01:53:44):
Anything else you wanna say about Bing with

Paul Thurrott (01:53:48):
Swifty? I've said too much about Bing, I think <laugh>. Okay.

Mikah Sargent (01:53:51):
Well then let's head into Xbox Corner.

Paul Thurrott (01:53:56):
Hooray. Yeah, there's some interesting stuff this week. 

Mikah Sargent (01:54:02):
Oops.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:03):
So every, well, not everyone, most people have probably heard of Xbox Game Pass which is the service on the console where you can stream, or not stream, I'm sorry. You can you basically subscribe and have access to a collection of over a hundred game titles. So you can, you actually download and install, right. You don't actually stream them, but there's also Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which provides you that capability plus the ability to stream some number of games less well known, perhaps something called PC Game Pass, which as its name suggests, is the PC version of this. It's actually, it's actually a really good service. I, I used it while I was in Mexico in March. It, like Xbox Game Pass, it's 9 99 a month. If you get Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, you actually get Xbox Game Pass, PC Game Pass, and the game streaming service Xbox Cloud Gaming.

(01:54:53):
 But it has been in Preview, man, I don't know I don't know, since last year, maybe long, I'm not even really sure. So apparently now it has come out of preview. Oh wow. It's available in an additional 40 markets. So it's basically all over the world. It provide, you know, like I said, nine, nine a month, 9 99 a month. I don't know the exact number of games that are available. I'm gonna guess that it's not as well. No, I'm not gonna guess. It's definitely not as many as you see on Xbox. But if you have Windows 10 or 11, you can bring up the Xbox app. That app has a couple of different primary functions, but one of them is as a front end to this service, and this is where you can go and see what's available through your subscription, download them to your computer, install them, and then, you know, play them. So it's actually, it's actually a very good service. So,

Rich Campbell (01:55:42):
And there are games there you want to play, is what you're telling

Paul Thurrott (01:55:44):
Me. Yeah, yeah. Yep. Yeah. And if you well, yeah. So right now, like on my current, I can't look at it now, but the, my main Microsoft account, I do not have an account on PC Game Pass. So the only thing the Xbox app does for me is show me the games I purchased, which I also have access to, obviously through Microsoft. But if you have an ex, you know, it's like a, it's like anything else. Like if you have a music subscription service, you have access to their entire library plus your own music, you know, depending on the service. It works like that, but for games, so yeah, it's good.

Rich Campbell (01:56:17):
Well, they put, they put Bethesda's Starfield in the list, which there you go, is good <laugh>. That's a game that's been in the making for a decade plus. Yeah. So everybody's gonna pay attention to that game

Paul Thurrott (01:56:28):
For, actually, I should say, if you, let me see. Lemme just bring it up here. Yeah, actually the default view is Game Pass. So you can u you can, the Xbox app in this case actually works a little bit like an ad because you can see what games are available through the right through Game Pass, right. So you can just kind of browse the list and see if there's anything good in there. But it's like all the, you know, the Halo stuff all in there. Age of Empires, gears Games, guess war games are all in there. There's a lot of stuff. It's good. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:56:52):
But it's always the marquee title. Like is that going to be part of that or they office, office, all those stuff.

Paul Thurrott (01:56:57):
Yeah. As soon as they, God, if they, when they get Activision Blizzard and the Call of Duty stuff is in there

Rich Campbell (01:57:01):
It's never gonna happen. <Laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (01:57:05):
Now the truth comes out. <Laugh>, I knew you were sitting on the fence, like Bastard <laugh>

Rich Campbell (01:57:10):
<Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (01:57:12):
Anyway <laugh>,

Rich Campbell (01:57:13):
Everybody wants Bobby Kotick gone. It's gonna happen.

Paul Thurrott (01:57:16):
Exactly.

Rich Campbell (01:57:17):
Which it'll be they but you, it's interesting to think about what that period will look like. Like how do you tell that is owned by Microsoft right now? Other than the fact that yeah, the brand new Starfield title will show up in Game Pass. Like that's gonna say

Paul Thurrott (01:57:30):
It's because the Castle castle Wolf is saying games are all, and in games are all available in in game Game Pass, is how I can tell, but okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To the average consumer, there's no way. Yeah. Honestly don't make any difference. Yeah. They're gonna treat this thing like they treat LinkedIn or GitHub actually, or Mogen or whatever. Yeah. Or yeah, it's all by Microsoft, but

Rich Campbell (01:57:51):
Be Bethesda and so forth. I mean, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:57:52):
You're not gonna see a big it seems logo.

Rich Campbell (01:57:55):
Yeah. Certainly for the first year or two. I mean,

Paul Thurrott (01:57:58):
Although I have to say, if I was Microsoft and I'm just bitter enough to want to do something like this, I would make sure that every PlayStation game that comes out from Activision has an Xbox logo on it just to mess with those guys. <Laugh>, you know, just to mess with those guys. That's how, that's how my brain works. But, you know, <laugh>, yeah. 

Rich Campbell (01:58:17):
<Laugh>, that won't make anybody angry.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:19):
I am a bitter bitterman. Okay. So Microsoft today started rolling out the Xbox April update. There's some redesign search stuff going on. But the big thing to me is this in this part of the world kind of controversial power options thing they've been screwing with for a while. And I have to say, I think they found a good compromise. So <laugh>, I would, I I thought so much of this joke I tell my wife, I, it was an episode a couple weeks ago. I made a, I made a crack about, I've, you've never seen a, a Toyota Prius kicking ass <laugh>, you know, and that was in, that was in reference to the fact that you buy an Xbox cuz you want to play video games, not cuz you're trying to save the environment. Right, right, right. And this notion that I'm gonna have this thing go into a cute little sleep state so I can, you know, puff like clean air out of its backside while it's, you know, saving the planet.

(01:59:16):
And then when I have to actually want to turn a game, you know, watch a game play a game, I have to sit there for a minute while the thing boots up, you know? Mm. And this is the direction a lot of Microsoft's going in. They're really pushing the energy efficiency stuff. So obviously whatever they do, it will be an option. Right. It's you, if you don't want that, if you want full-blown power instanton, you'll always have that option, that's fine. But I think enough people complained that they, I hope someone told them the Prius story, but they came up with this thing that I think is actually it's, I'm okay with this. This is a good compromise and it's based on something we have in Windows. And that's this notion of active hours. Right? Right. That you're probably not gonna, well you might, I I I probably am not, I am absolutely not gonna be playing video games between the hours of say 10:00 PM and well 5:00 PM but whatever, let's let's say 10:00 PM and 6:00 AM or something like that. So there's no reason that this console can't go to sleep. I can't just turn off Right, right. During those hours, however, and, and then save energy, all that kind of stuff. And then during the hours, I actually do want to play games. Have the thing being a, a less time consuming sleep state. Right. Like, yeah, there you go.

Rich Campbell (02:00:24):
So that's, you want in instant on when you want to play. That's right. The, the only thing you've gotta add to that mix is and do your bloody updates outside of the side of the window when I want to

Paul Thurrott (02:00:33):
Play. I said that I so yeah, you're right. So one of <laugh>, one of the it's not an Achilles heel, but one of the little minor problems with the Xbox that I've experienced is cause I leave it on instant on. Right? So this thing should be downloading updates, installing things to the background all the time. Yes. I, many, many times I've gone to start a game like call of Duty or whatever, and it's like, yeah, hold on, you get install update, come

Rich Campbell (02:00:56):
Back in 45 minutes. What

Paul Thurrott (02:00:57):
If, what have you been doing <laugh>? Yeah. Like you know, to me like it should be doing that. But if you set your, this makes something up, like you said, you're active hours of some 12 hour window from nine to nine, it's highly unlikely at 9:01 AM I'm gonna be playing a video game. That's the time to download those things. Right? Yeah. Like do it, do it. Then it's fine. Hopefully, hopefully this thing is we'll do that and that works. But it, like I said, however this works, I'm fine with it. I, where

Rich Campbell (02:01:20):
Is Xbox Co-pilot? Like shouldn't it be watching when I play figuring out we should be instant on in this time. I know. Cause that's when he always plays. Yep. And he never plays after this point. So before we shut down, let's do all our patches and then shut down.

Paul Thurrott (02:01:35):
It looks like you're trying to play again. Why

Rich Campbell (02:01:36):
Do we have to think about this

Paul Thurrott (02:01:38):
<Laugh>? Yeah. Are you trying to play a game you should play? Yes. Yeah. Now downloading update. No. Wait, what, what <laugh>?

Rich Campbell (02:01:44):
Yeah. Can you have a little paperclip say that to me? That'd make me happier.

Paul Thurrott (02:01:47):
Sure. It kinda sh comes up on the screen, <laugh>,

Rich Campbell (02:01:50):
It's like, it looks like you're trying to waste time. I'm gonna patch to save you from yourself because I've been looking at your N 365 productivity and you really should be playing games,

Paul Thurrott (02:02:00):
Right? Yeah, exactly. Well, it's to the Microsoft. Well, 10 o'clock in the morning on a Thursday, right Paul

Rich Campbell (02:02:05):
Microsoft mom is back. Where do you think you're going? <Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (02:02:10):
Right? While we're at it, we're also gonna turn off the instant on capabilities. Cause you obviously are not saving the environment with this thing. Okay. 

Rich Campbell (02:02:20):
Really the best use of your time,

Paul Thurrott (02:02:22):
<Laugh>. It's definitely not the best use of my <laugh>. Microsoft has not really announced it, but they have confirmed that they are turning off access to a lot of third party emulators on Xbox Series X and S. Hmm. yeah. So this one, I I have to think this is like a copyright strike kind of problem or something. This is,

Rich Campbell (02:02:46):
Yeah. I wonder if in, I wonder if Nintendo called cuz they hate

Paul Thurrott (02:02:49):
This. Yeah. Because there's all these retro game emulators. Yeah. 

Rich Campbell (02:02:53):
You know, <laugh>. Yeah. Not that I'm cynical, but it's like, is this why the Ion deals going through mm-hmm.

Paul Thurrott (02:02:59):
<Affirmative>, right? I <laugh> I think you're a hundred percent right. I think that's it. Yeah. Just prove we're a good community citizen here.

Rich Campbell (02:03:08):
Well, wait, Nintendo says you want our endorsement, here's what I need. Mm-Hmm.

Paul Thurrott (02:03:11):
<Affirmative>. Yep. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, I'm, yeah. I'm sure there's a very healthy market for like ROMs and, you know, whatever. Yeah. But yeah, not on an Xbox. So, sorry. Yeah.

(02:03:23):
Okay. Interesting. That's happening. Yeah. So Microsoft has a service, which is really cool called Xbox Design Lab. And the idea is you go up to this website and you design a controller, you can have all different color, you know, different parts, we're gonna be different colors and everything. I've actually done this a couple of times in recent years. They've they actually turned it off for a little while and turned it back on because they wanted to support a couple of different things. First is the new controller type, which debuted with the X Xbox series X and S. This is the one that has the button in the middle for sharing, right? Where you can take a screenshot or record a video so that now these customizable controllers so you know, are that form. But there's also a new version of what used to be called the Xbox Elite controller there, the wireless elite controller, whatever the name was.

(02:04:05):
So the Xbox Elite series two is a k kind of a middle ground controller. So it, you know, the normal control is 60, $69. The elite, the full blown elite was like, I wanna say 300 bucks, I think two 50, something like that. It's a lot controller. And this version is the Elite series two is $150. Right? starting, I don't know, a couple months ago they, they opened up the service so you could custom design your own elite series two controller. And now as of this week, they have a bunch of new color schemes and dis accent colors and so forth. And they also have a bunch of accessory packs. So you can just buy the little bits that you want. So if you want just like thumbs sticks or D pads or triggers, or you just want that stuff, but not a new controller, you can actually customize those as well, which is kind of cool. So it's just kind of a, kind of a neat way to get the ultimate, you know, version of the controller. You like customized monkeys. Some of

Rich Campbell (02:05:01):
These colors look like you could land aircraft

Paul Thurrott (02:05:03):
With them. I know <laugh> I love, I actually little Gotti. I think they're pretty cool. Yeah, I do too. I like this. I

Rich Campbell (02:05:11):
Like customization. Like

Paul Thurrott (02:05:12):
Make your control of your own. I just, this is, yeah, I mean, dating back to I guess the Windows 95 plus pack, remember this thing? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> people used to make fun of it. And I was like, you know what? People like to make things their own. You could have like, you know, fun little icon sets and the mouse cur looks like a little mouse or something. Yeah, exactly. People like stuff like that. But there's

Rich Campbell (02:05:29):
Really no change to the controls. It's

Paul Thurrott (02:05:31):
Just No, just a look. <Laugh>. Well no, not to the right. Not to the base control, like the Elite series two controller supports two different styles of Dazs, for example. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, this is the one that looks like a radar dish. And then you have the one that's like the four prongs and you support both. So if you get a customized version of that, you'll have that color scheme in both styles. But no, there's no custom, no changing controls. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. All right then. Exciting news. Microsoft has hammered out another 10 year cloud damning deal with the company not named Sony. And I know, I know what you're thinking. We've run out of those companies, but we haven't <laugh>. So there's a company in well, it's a carrier actually in the UK called e e, which I will pronounce e e <laugh>.

(02:06:17):
And I don't, I don't, I, I mean eventually they're gonna have indi individualized partnerships with me and Richard and Micah and everyone else. I dunno, like basically everything on the planet that is not Sony has agreed to partner with Microsoft for 10 years on cloud gaming. So geez, whatever. Okay. But the interesting thing about this maybe is that this sort of hints at the fact that there will be cloud gaming of PC games, right? So if you follow Xbox Cloud gaming, which is that feature of Xbox Game Pass, ultimate those games are Xbox console games right up of the cloud. In fact, I think they're all Xbox Series X Games right now, or they're running on Xbox Series X. This specifically says a commitment to cloud gaming to bring PC games built by Activision Blizzard following the acquisition and Xbox to EE customers, which suggests that if this ac if this acquisition goes through Microsoft is gonna be bringing PC class games to cloud streaming as well. Interesting. Oh, interesting. Yeah, I support it.

Rich Campbell (02:07:28):
All right, you now, all more evidence that bits and pieces are being cleaned up at the end of the Activision deal here. Yeah. So ti for tat

Mikah Sargent (02:07:34):
And stuff going on up next, it's time for the back of the book, but I do wanna take a quick little moment to remind everybody out there about a little thing called Club Twit at twit.tv/club twit. When you head there, you will learn about our club where for starting at $7 a month or $84 a year, you too can join the club. And when you do, you get lots of great stuff. First you get access to every single Twitch show with no ads. It's just the content. Because you, in effect are the sponsor of the show, you are supporting us directly. And so you get to have all of those shows with no ads. And then you also get access to several other things, including the twit plus bonus feed that has extra content you won't find anywhere else that's behind the scenes before the show, after the show.

(02:08:29):
 Special Club events will also get posted there from time to time and access to the members only Discord server, which is where you can go to at least for this show, get the show notes for the show early. You also, in some cases get to see images like the ones I generated earlier of a sandwich tho that might end up making its way, but to, you know, get early access to that fun stuff. It's also a place where you can go to chat with your fellow club TWIT members. And also those of us here at twit, one of my co-hosts, Rosemary Orchard of iOS today, is an incredibly active member of the club regularly responding with answering questions, all sorts of fun stuff. And along with all of that, you also are going to get to check out some great shows.

(02:09:15):
There's the Untitled Linux Show, which is, as you might guess, a show all about Linux. You also can watch Hands on Mac, which is my short format show that's all about tips and tricks related to Apple devices and the wow. Home Theater Geeks is what it's called, home Theater Geeks, which recently relaunched with Scott Wilkinson. So if you've got home theater stuff, you can check that out. And then for those of you who watch Windows Weekly, I know the one you really wanna see is Hands on Windows with Paul Throt, where Paul provides some great tips and tricks and all sorts of fun stuff. I, I hear Will, you'll be looking at the registry sometimes soon too. So digging into all that fun stuff as part of Club Twit and honestly, we continue to make the club more and more valuable as time goes on. So you wanna hop on now, join the club twit.tv/club twit, and thank you to all of you supporters out there for helping us continue on with our shows. We do appreciate you Alright. Back from that little break and it's time to go to the back of the book with the tip of the week first.

Paul Thurrott (02:10:27):
Yeah, so I, I think in my little space of the world, I'm semi-unique in that I talk about developer topics a lot. I feel very strongly that people should learn how to write software code, right? And I think it's the best way to understand a platform is to write apps to that platform and so forth. But it can be daunting to get started with something like this, especially if you're not a child <laugh>, right? I think kids fall into this kind of naturally, but mm-hmm. <Affirmative> among the min, many, many, many ways that you can learn to write software code. The Raspberry Pie Foundation has released a beta version of a web-based software code editor for kids. It's, it's at co or I'm sorry, it's at editor dot raspberry pie.org. And the fun thing about is you don't have to be a kid <laugh>, right?

(02:11:10):
It works everywhere. You don't, you don't need a raspberry price. It's a website, so anyone with a browser can access it. You can save your coding projects up to their cloud, right? That they offer you if you sign in. And right now it's just Python, which isn't super interesting. But they're gonna add support for web development languages like HTML and c s s and JavaScript. And they have a free course called Intro to Python which the first two projects are available now, and I'm hoping they'll do like a intro to web development at win to web apps, whatever in the future as well. But kind of an interesting little project and you know, probably not a bad way to, you know get a kind of a nice simplified path forward from learning this kind of stuff. So this is kind of good to know about. That's awesome

Rich Campbell (02:11:57):
Actually.

Paul Thurrott (02:11:58):
<Laugh>. Yeah, it's kind of cool.

Rich Campbell (02:12:00):
It is a big challenging to buy a raspberry pie right now.

Paul Thurrott (02:12:03):
Yes. Which is <laugh> not the only reason. It's not only available in Raspberry Pie, but Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's notable that this is not a native app <laugh>. Right. That runs under what, where rasp, whatever the Raspberry p os is called, their version of Linux. But yeah, it's a web app, so Yeah. Maybe we could use AI to figure that one out. Where can I buy a raspberry Pie?

Rich Campbell (02:12:23):
Yeah, there's literally websites for it, for certain form factors like CM four or something like that. Some of the more basic raspberry pies are around,

Paul Thurrott (02:12:30):
But Yeah. But you, yeah. And they what's that guy's name? What's the guy who runs raspberry Pi? Yeah, Evan, what's his name?

Rich Campbell (02:12:40):
There's a few of them. Yeah. One of the Canadian shops has an eight,

Paul Thurrott (02:12:44):
Even Upton. Yeah. Yeah. So back in December he was talking about, you know, the issues with supply and all that stuff, and basically confirmed that we're not gonna see a Raspberry Pi five until 2024. And that the goal this year is just to kind of get caught up, right?

Rich Campbell (02:12:58):
Yeah. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, get the pipeline filled back in again. Yeah. It's, it just got hit.

Paul Thurrott (02:13:01):
Does it have that cool little combiner 64 looking thing that's like the raspberry pie with the keyboard built on top of it, you know? 

Rich Campbell (02:13:07):
But you're, I mean, you're getting to the point, which is the current generation of like single digit price socks, the bait, the chip that's about the size of your thumbnail.

Paul Thurrott (02:13:16):
Yep.

Rich Campbell (02:13:16):
They are pen jam class machines now.

Paul Thurrott (02:13:19):
I know, it's crazy, right?

Rich Campbell (02:13:20):
Like

Paul Thurrott (02:13:20):
They're, the thing to punch me you know, from a, you know, the people of my generation, Rich's generation, we grew up with, you know, commod 60 fours and Ataris and Basic was built in and you could learn how to program on these things. It was, in fact, it was kind of the only thing you could do <laugh> unless you bought something else for it. I mean mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, it was just built in, it was the capability. I think that Microsoft did something really special in the 1990s with Visual Basic, and that that could have served as it probably did at the time served for students of that era as the introduction, the kind of soft landing and the software development. I feel like Raspberry Pi can solve or serve that part of the market. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> I, Python, I'm not sure <laugh>, you know, I'm, it, it, it's, it's sad to me that we don't have a VB type product. 

Rich Campbell (02:14:07):
I mean there, there are language generation, like I I think of Scratch is a great place for students to learn to program on PCs. It's just the thing that's cool about a pie is it's not in the web that it is hardware you can use. Yeah. And when you learn, start learning a little bit about the shields, they, the various parts. It's like, first you make an l e d link.

Paul Thurrott (02:14:28):
Well it, it literally brings back that enthusiast element to it. Yeah. Right? It's not so much about going into a store and buying software for this thing as it is about putting it together and figuring out how the thing works, you know, but

Rich Campbell (02:14:39):
It's, it's real easy now to get into physical stuff, right? Yeah. To make a, to make a little robot, you know, you can attach pies to, to little wheel sets and like, all of that is way more feasible. And then when we were younger, oh my God,

Paul Thurrott (02:14:50):
For sure. You know, yeah. You can do little weather van type things or barometers and all that kind of, it's really, yeah. All

Rich Campbell (02:14:56):
Sort really real stuff. So there's the basic programming element and making those more approachable is great. We don't have to program in, in low level languages anymore. Cause we have enough horsepower to be able to afford to be a little less efficient with their, with

Paul Thurrott (02:15:08):
The

Rich Campbell (02:15:08):
Infrastructure. So you know what, I think what, because every kid now has a phone and is surrounded by screens and technology, the only way you make programming interesting is to make it more physical is to, is to introduce that element of move something, beep something, blink something. Just the, the they are, at

Mikah Sargent (02:15:29):
Least until they get older, right?

Rich Campbell (02:15:30):
Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:15:32):
Well, no, I, I, yeah, I mean, I, I I do think the physical aspect's nice that you could gamify it a little bit. I think like the Swift playground stuff on iPad is kind of interesting. 

Mikah Sargent (02:15:41):
A few programming with with the, the, you have it's blocks and you hit them and they turn in, use your

Paul Thurrott (02:15:49):
Words

Mikah Sargent (02:15:50):
What is that game called? It's mining Minecraft, Minecraft coding with Minecraft, it's blocks and you hit them, you know?

Paul Thurrott (02:15:59):
Yes. Yes.

Rich Campbell (02:16:00):
Because the programming language underlying Minecraft is Java. Yeah. Right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, or better or worse. And for, for a long time they kids did get into building extensions to Minecraft and they learned to co Java for, it's not that difficult. Like the language isn't the issue. You, you could make this work with some good templates and so forth. Yeah. It's just a question of can you do stuff that they can connect with?

Paul Thurrott (02:16:24):
Well, I, I, so I I was just holding up basic as some kind of an easy thing or something. Yeah. But the truth, to take advantage of a Commodore 64, what you really needed to do was like peek and poke and you had to have charts of what all these things did, and it was actually fairly complicated. So yeah, I, I like, well I like, as I sort of alluded to at the beginning, this stuff's a lot easier when you're young, <laugh>, you know mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, it might work out children's coded it or might be better for you. 40 to 50 year olds who are looking to get into coding for the first time in your life, you know, kind of take baby steps in that direction. At least it's free, you know, should be pretty basic. Yeah. If not literally basic. I

Mikah Sargent (02:17:00):
Was gonna say there was a little Yeah, <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (02:17:04):
Yeah. Anyway. Okay. All right. Yeah. So the Apex this week is opera just today I think released a version of their browser on iOS that supports their free V vpn n service. This free VPN n is now available in every version of the browser, right? So this runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Now the iPhone. And what's interesting, well there's a couple of interesting things. So first of all, it's free. You can pay a subscription service to get more functionality. This basically involves, you know, more endpoints, more servers more devices protected, et cetera. It's only 3 99 a month. That's actually very cheap. For example, I prefer Brave and I use Brave mm-hmm. <Affirmative> but Brave VPN costs 9 99 per month period. There's no free version. There's no cheaper version. Like it's, it is more expensive. And so that's kind of interesting also if you do have an iPhone, I don't think this is true.

(02:17:56):
Hmm. I'm not a hundred percent true. I don't think this is true on all of the other devices, but on iPhone at least, it actually is a V P N for the entire device. Hmm. I think for most of these, or at least certainly on Android, but I think most of these are all of these. It's a V P N for the browser, which is fine. I mean, that's fine in its own right. But you know, a lot of times you might want to be doing whatever it is on you're doing on the device, on the PC over A V P N and the, the iPhone version, I think maybe just cuz of the architecture of the iPhone actually supports the entire device. So you can get a free VPN n on an iPhone through opera. It's just a flick of a switch away. So something to look into. Do you know

Mikah Sargent (02:18:32):
About their privacy policy?

Paul Thurrott (02:18:35):
Yes. well, I mean, I can state it relative

Mikah Sargent (02:18:39):
Simplified. Could you read out the privacy policy form? Well, I just, I'm curious about their

Paul Thurrott (02:18:42):
Login. Yeah, no, what, so what they, I cuz I just quoted a little bit of this, it yeah, all traffic is encrypted. Your IP address is private. It doesn't collect any personal data or information related to your browsing history or originating network address. Nice. there's no data or a bandwidth cap. Yeah, no, I don't, I mean, no, I can't <laugh> I'm not intimately familiar with the privacy policy, but I would trust opera more than I would trust Google. Right. If that puts it in any perspective. Yeah. Opera's go gotten really good at not making any money. They're used to <laugh>. Yep. Yep. That Yep. I like that you've out cynical me at least twice today. <Laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (02:19:30):
It is rather impressive.

Paul Thurrott (02:19:32):
That's really, it doesn't happen a lot. That's learn for the best. Yep.

Mikah Sargent (02:19:36):
<Laugh> it should be like cynic coins or something and you can

Paul Thurrott (02:19:38):
Just ding changing. It's just like over the quarter. Yeah. Like Mario jumping over a block. <Laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (02:19:45):
Exactly.

Paul Thurrott (02:19:50):
That's funny.

Rich Campbell (02:19:50):
Alright. Use a vpn, it's a good thing. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (02:19:53):
And now I believe we are shifting gears, switching gears. Sure. One of those to talk about run as radio and more on liquor. I'm looking forward to it

Rich Campbell (02:20:07):
One more time. Right. this week's run as radio I did with Angela Duggan, who's a regular on the show. We were talking a bit about team metrics. So this is sort of an ongoing series about we're dealing with everybody doing remote work and where are the limitations there? How do we know and people are being productive and how they're doing it. Angela's been doing this for years, she's really good at it. And her thoughts in the space were were quite enjoyable. Just different elements of checking in with folks and, and having comparable metrics doing both soft metrics and hard metrics are qualitative versus quantitative. And part of happy people was also building in training time, learning time that they, they pick a project that's important to them to add to their skills and share 'em with others. And so solid 30 minute conversation, very pleased with it. I hope hopeful all give it a listen. Actually I just got a nice, nice comment on that show or a nice note on that show saying really enjoyed it. So you know, it can't be hard tech every day. Sometimes it's a soft skill thing and I just am very aware there's lots of people still dealing with remote work and really struggling with how do I keep my manager happy? Or managers saying like, how do I know, hey, that my people are getting things done and that my team's holding together

Paul Thurrott (02:21:20):
Is the solution not putting webcams in people's houses.

Rich Campbell (02:21:23):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Not,

Paul Thurrott (02:21:24):
I have a friend, I'm not an expert.

Rich Campbell (02:21:26):
Yeah. I have a friend who's a university professor and like home exams and just the, the level of cheating where it's not that they want a camera that's, they want two <laugh>, they want a camera set up overhead so they can see what screens you're using. Like Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (02:21:42):
I can't imagine trying to do set all of those up. You have to become your own producer at the same time. Yeah. And you're just trying to take a test.

Paul Thurrott (02:21:49):
That's one thing. But I mean, like, are you kidding me? Yeah. I would be, that'd be my last day at the company right there.

Rich Campbell (02:21:55):
Yep. Yeah. I know. And it's one thing for employment, it's, I'm talking about these, they're, they're trying, they're trying to manage an exam with people remote where they actually have sun sense that these people have actually learned anything from their class. And I, I mean, yeah. And the fact that it's being pushed onto the professor is part of the problem.

Mikah Sargent (02:22:11):
Yeah, exactly.

Rich Campbell (02:22:12):
It is dire. There's no two ways about it. I mean, for better or for better or worse with M 365 and most importantly with Microsoft, Viva, like the Microsoft graph knows everything you've done for, for the company. Like every email you've sent, every you've worked on every chapter, every

Paul Thurrott (02:22:26):
Breath you take, every movie you

Rich Campbell (02:22:28):
Take, it's all there. All Yeah. Except it ends with I'll be paying you. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (02:22:32):
Exactly. <Laugh> or Won't be <laugh>. That song stinks. <Laugh>.

Rich Campbell (02:22:39):
It is a song about stalking after all.

Paul Thurrott (02:22:42):
Yeah. It is.

Rich Campbell (02:22:43):
Some music does not make it into the modern era <laugh>. But yeah, it, and so trying to, trying to be a good leader of a team where you're, you are actually in service to your team and understanding where they're at and giving them room for having a, a good day and a bad day. And her particular case, she's dealing with consultants, so they're work, they're working in the field anyway, so it's like, hey, you know, the subtext of this is what is the customer gonna say about you? Like, how do I support you if there's a problem? Is every, you know how, you know, always that discontinuity. If you say everything's fine, the customer's not happy. Like where's the communicating communication happen? I mean, you know, we ended up at one point talking about this idea that sometimes you burn out your relationship with the customer and it's like, the customer's still good, the project's still good, but I don't think I can be that person anymore.

(02:23:30):
Like, maybe it's time to switch me out, coach and put me somewhere else. So yeah, again, a really enjoyable conversation. Just somebody who's fighting the good fight. And I was pull, I pulled a couple of good clips from that, and we were talking about, you know, being on the same side of the problem. This you know, everybody, everybody, all facts are friendly even when you don't like 'em. Right. Like that they, because it's just, it's a set of facts. You can put it over there and talk about them. Right. Even when they may, even when they don't, not necessarily complimentary. So, but yeah. Angela puts that stuff very well.

Paul Thurrott (02:24:04):
Yes.

Rich Campbell (02:24:07):
That's all I got to say about Run Ass. All right. One oh, we just passed year 16 this week.

Paul Thurrott (02:24:13):
Oh, congratulations.

Rich Campbell (02:24:14):
16 years ago. Published the first episode of Run Ass Radio. Wow. Yeah, because starting a podcast for Microsoft SIS bins just after Vista Ship seemed like a good idea. <Laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (02:24:24):
Well, it recovered nicely. <Laugh>. Yeah. <Laugh> A few years later,

Rich Campbell (02:24:28):
It's been okay. And it's nice to be, I, I see folks like in the sis men at Alias at Reddi saying nice things about the show. Like, well On Run Ass, they said, or like, this is the thing I count on. So that is cool. That's how it, it's a good day.

Paul Thurrott (02:24:42):
It is, it's a good show.

Rich Campbell (02:24:44):
Yeah. Thanks. I've certainly been persistent, you know, it's every week since April 11th, 2000. Well,

Paul Thurrott (02:24:50):
As I, so I've said this many times. I, I, I started saying this about blogs, and now I say it about podcasts, which is, anyone can start

Rich Campbell (02:24:57):
One. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:24:58):
The, the trick is to keep doing it, to keep going. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, how long have you been doing.net Rocks? Since like, 2002.

Rich Campbell (02:25:04):
2000. Yeah. Carl started in 2002. I came on board in 2005. So I'm the new, I'm the new guy. The new

Paul Thurrott (02:25:09):
Guy.

Rich Campbell (02:25:10):
<Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (02:25:10):
Hey, we re You like the new guitarist in Def Leopard?

Rich Campbell (02:25:13):
That's it. <Laugh>, we just recorded episode 1874. Holy

Paul Thurrott (02:25:17):
Molo. Little bit.

Rich Campbell (02:25:18):
There you go.

Paul Thurrott (02:25:19):
It's incredible.

Rich Campbell (02:25:21):
Yeah. Now, somewhere along the line, somehow I made thousand podcasts. I don't know what to do. Yeah, it was an accident. <Laugh>. Oops. Oops. Yep. All

Mikah Sargent (02:25:29):
Right. Let's go into the Brown Liquor Pick and the rest of the story.

Rich Campbell (02:25:35):
Ah, we are at the end of the story, Mikay, you get to be part of this, which is, you know, we've gone through growing barley, mulching it, grinding it, washing it to extract its sugars, fermenting it distilling it in multiple stages, then we put it into barrels. We are in the stage we call finishing, which begs this question, you know, you've put this clear solvent this alcohol into these oak barrels. When is it ready? Right. I know it's not, it's not an obvious question. Like when what is ready. Now, according to the rules for Scottish whiskey, it must be barley. It mu barley and water. The only ingredients, and it has to have been placed in an oak cask for a minimum of three years before you can call it Scottish whiskey. Now, you'll never find a three year old Scottish whiskey because they're really not that good.

(02:26:33):
 I think the youngest I've ever seen, the young, smallest number I've ever seen on a bottle. And that bottle is always the youngest thing that's in the bottle. There's often older things than that. In the bottle is an eight. There's a few eights out there. You'll occasionally see a 10, like the art beg makes a 10 12 is far more common. Right? But then it's a long time to be in barrels. They're not always the same barrels. They may move them around a bit, but there is this question of when, when is a barrel ready? And I mean, and when I a, I had the chance to go walking through barrel rooms with master distillers, and you asked that question like, when's it ready? And he says, when it tastes good. That's a good answer. You know the main thing to think is that and, and we talked about this in the last episode, when, when we put it in the barrel, we typically put it in at about 63.5% A B V.

(02:27:22):
And it's important to remember that the other 36.5% is primarily water. You know, that's, that's why it's only 63% alcohol. The rest is, is water. And it's spent time into barrel, pulling some flavors out of the wood, both alcohol solvent flavors and water solvent flavors. And so we lose a certain amount of water in a certain amount of alcohol every year as it sits in a barrel. And there are hundreds and hundreds of barrels in these rick ho houses and, and racks and so forth. When I've walked around with a master distiller, they're actually tapping the barrels to see where the li the liquid level is. Like, they know the level so well, they can see the rate of loss. They, it'll actually stop and go, that's too low. I bet you that barrel's leaking and then go all around it and find a little crack somewhere.

(02:28:08):
But you are talking hundreds of barrels, right? I mean, just cuz you've got a, you know, a set, it's, it's gonna be 12 years old. So means you also have a set there at 11 years old and a set that are 10 years old and so on down the line. And it takes hundreds, hundreds of barrels for production. But let's talk about the simplest form of finishing. Let's talk about a single casking. Now, these are relatively rare. They didn't used to be they used to be that that whiskeys that were sold by the cask, there wasn't a bottling process. Go back a hundred or so years. Bottling kind of came along later. Glass is expensive and it's a complicated process. But back in the day, and this still happens occasionally, and if you've got enough money and you wanna spend it on whiskey, you can go to a major distillery and essentially buy a cask and they'll let you come and visit your cask periodically.

(02:28:56):
<Laugh> now these casts are b they have a little thing in the center of them that typically be a silicone and they'll pop the bung out and they'll thief from the barrel. And this is a normal part of the process every couple of years for any given for a few of the barrels, depending on where they're located. So they'll take a glass tube and they'll put it into the barrel, and they'll draw a little whiskey from it, and they'll measure the A B V. So they'll check like, what's the alcohol level? They've write, they write this all in shock on the side of the barrel. So each time it's thief, each time the A B V was measured, where it was at what the approximate level is, they have level checks for them as well. And sometimes the distiller will make notes on flavor.

(02:29:36):
Every barrel is a little bit different. It came from a different tree. It's been used different number of times. It's been through different weather. All of these factors apply in creating a flavor of whiskey. But, and sometimes you'll get a, a nicely rounded barrel. Like it'll, it just produce a set of flavors that are really great and that might become a single cask. And when I've talked to Master Soul about that, they've talked about tasting several hundred barrels to find one or two worthy of a single casking. And depending on the kind of barrel that's only gonna be a few hundred bottles. You know, a hog's head. The typical bourbon barrel remade for, for whiskey purposes is about can produce about 200 bottles. Think if you're talking about, like, take a typical single casking would be maybe 15 years old. So it went into the barrel.

(02:30:24):
It's 63.5 and 15 years on. Now it tastes great. It's down to maybe 56, 50 7% alcohol. And so, okay, we're gonna pull this from the racks and we're gonna, we're gonna send it off to bottling now and pull it from the racks. It's, it's got, you know, several hundred liters of liquid in it. It's heavy. You'll, you'll probably need some help. And especially if that's a ho a hog set. If it's a punchy on like one of the sherry casts that will hold 600 bottles, you're not moving that. So, but you'll, you'll pull it, you'll send it off for bottling on its own. But that's the exception. That's just not a thing that normally happens. And it is, it's a snobby way to drink whiskey, to drink single casks. Like you can do that. You remember, if there's only gonna be 200 bottles of this whiskey's mostly priced by its rarity.

(02:31:14):
And so, I mean, there's only 200, you're gonna pay a big premium, that's gonna be at least a four digit number most of the time. Yeah. for that kind of whiskey. There are exceptions, but not usually far more common are combining barrels to get to a flavor profile. And this is, this is the modern whiskey way. So for the last 60, 70 years, really Glen Fit pioneered this technique. They found a way to make a whiskey taste like the whiskey you expect, like the miracle of a Macallan 12. Is it a taste like Macallan 12 every year? I mean, how, how is that ever possible? They make thousands and thousands of bottles of this. Why does it have a particular taste that enough that you will prefer that brand and continue to spend on that whiskey? And this is the talent that Master Distillers have, is that they are, they know the flavor profile destination they're trying to get to.

(02:32:12):
And remember that when you buy a bottle of Macallan 12, it's only 40%, 6% alcohol. So they're tasting it at a pieces of it, at a much higher alcohol level, which is challenging on its own. And then they're also grabbing the elements of those flavors one piece at a time. A typical bottling run of something like a Macallan 12 is gonna involve between 150 and 300 casks, the youngest of which will be the 12 year olds, because that's why they want to be able to put a 12 on it. They can only, the youngest thing in that bottle's gonna be a 12. So they're gonna pull barrels, they're gonna try and get all the flavors from their 12 year old, and then they're gonna decide what they're missing and maybe pull a couple of olders to add into the mix to get the flavor profile they're looking for.

(02:32:58):
And when I've been in, in the sample rooms where they've pulled, they thief a bunch of bo of barrels, they'll bring them all back into the room and they have reference bottles, hundreds and hundreds of reference bottles of different past barrels that were part of a given mix for a given edition. I mean, it sounds like it's fun, but it's just like working in a chocolate factory. Eventually you're sick of chocolate, right? Like these people do. No, it sounds love their whiskey. It sounds hard, <laugh>. It's very hard. And it's an extraordinary village because this is not automated. This is literally people tasting something to get to the exact Yes. And, and by people you really mean one or two in the entire distillery. Like there are only a handful of master distillers. They all kind of know each other. It's a, it's a pretty closed club and they're assembling a flavor essentially for every addition that they make.

(02:33:50):
Now, most distilleries don't have their own bottling facility. A bottling facility is an incredibly elaborate huge piece of machinery. Glen Finnick has their own, but Glen Fitt makes a lot of whiskey, and they've been doing it for a very long time. But most of the time you have large bottling plants. So you gotta think about everything that goes into bottling, like if literally from, they're gonna start with casks being shipped to a, to the building. And on the other end it's gonna come out pallets of wrapped boxes of bottled whiskey labeled with export permits and all of those things. And so in between, there are many, many steps. So when 150 barrels show up from a given distiller for a given edition, this is going to be essentially a bottling. They're rolled off, they're brought off the truck, and they're rolled into the trough set.

(02:34:39):
So these are warehouse like looking rooms, but they have troughs running down them that are very clean. They've cleaned out in a sterile, and they place the barrels over top of them. Each bong is removed. The barrel is first, is measured to see how much, exactly how much liquid is in it, and then added to the tally. And then they're dumped, they're dumped into the trough. Especially with bourbon barrels, the X American barrels, you'll see bits of charcoal and things come outta the barrel as well. So often when you see this, you'll see all of this debris in the trough, which looks shocking, but it's, it's literally a charcoal from the inside of the barrels. And they'll, every single barrel, barrel will be measured. They won't avv them all. They don't need to at this point. That's already been done by the distiller to some degree.

(02:35:26):
 And they're gonna adjust the A B V in the end anyway. But they will measure and ca keep tally of exactly how much liquid arrived because they want to be able to count for all of that back to the distiller. So from those troughs, the everything gets pumped into a mixing a blending va. And that those vats are big. There's lots to them. And they will take an A B V overall at that particular point. And then comes the sort of next step. So they've combined all the flavors together, all those barrels that they've just emptied, they put temporary BS back into them, and then they get shipped back to the cooperage where the barrels will be reconditioned and returned to the distiller. Some barrels get junked, but recognize they use the barrels several times. In fact, often a first use barrel they won't use for very long.

(02:36:16):
They'll use it for two or three years and then do another batch into it. So those barrels are, are repurposed very quickly. After a fourth or fifth go on a barrel, it's typically assessed as used up, and they'll use that wood for other things. In fact, I have several staves from from the Glen fitting distillery that I've done smoking with or put a piece of lamb on top of a couple of staves from maker's mark and sort of steam bourbon into might <laugh>. If you can, if you can get your hands on those I highly recommend that. Nice. so now that it's all added together we now go through a series of steps depending on the particular whiskey and what they, each distiller will have a recipe for a given bottling. So one of the steps, arguably one of the most controversial ones is called chill filtration.

(02:37:08):
So here's the problem real, if I take that cast strength whiskey, especially, say I just bottled that cast strength whiskey, and you put it on a shelf or you put it into shell or, and it gets cold, you take the bottle out and you look at it and the liquid is no longer transparent. If that has gone kind of cloudy, has it gone bad, then people, people don't like that. Especially if you bought an expensive whiskey, to have it go kind of cloudy makes they make him sad. And, and the lower the A B V, the more likely this is to happen. This also will happen in the glass if you choose to put ice in your whiskey. And there's some whiskeys, I would say that too. But look, if you're spending a thousand dollars on a cash drink whiskey, they don't put ice in it. You were trying to drink it for the flavor. Why are you suppressing the flavor?

Paul Thurrott (02:37:52):
Hey, come see your quick question. I'm sorry. Yeah, I, maybe I missed this, but this, this thing comes out at some A P V A, which is just a B V, which is just based on, it could be a range.

Rich Campbell (02:38:04):
It yeah, absolutely.

Paul Thurrott (02:38:05):
So at this stage in the process, is there anything you could do about that?

Rich Campbell (02:38:08):
Oh yeah. Well, it, most whiskeys we're gonna add water too.

Paul Thurrott (02:38:12):
Okay. And that doesn't change the flavor too

Rich Campbell (02:38:15):
Much. Absolutely it will. Okay. But without a doubt.

Paul Thurrott (02:38:17):
So I mean, is that part of the calculus of arriving at that desk? Okay.

Rich Campbell (02:38:21):
Yeah. That's all, that's all part of the calculus. But before we do that, we'll typically chill filter it although, oh, okay. Sure. I mean, sometimes they'll add water first. It depends, again, this is very much the recipe, but you recognize a lot of those casts when you first get, when they first report in, they may still be pushing 60%. And that's very strong whiskey. In fact, it's illegal to sell 60% plus alcohol in many countries, like including Norway. Like I happen to know, you're a fan of Avalara Abuda. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, which is a cast strength whiskey. And so their A B V varies between 55 and 62. And apparently when they gotta ship a bar, a case over to Norway, they picked through it to move all the sixties, conceal illegal, import 60% plus into Norway. Okay. and generally you don't want label

Paul Thurrott (02:39:05):
Like that or can you actually

Rich Campbell (02:39:07):
They're individually labeled.

Paul Thurrott (02:39:08):
They are. So you, okay. So you can actually look at the bottle and this one's 55, this one's 57. Okay.

Rich Campbell (02:39:12):
Wow. Okay's totally normal. And again, only for this cast strings. So do you see that particular problem most production whiskey? Because most people want the same thing every time. Yep. Will want the same A B V and it'll typically be, you know, in, in the forties. Okay. So again, the distiller tells 'em what they want. And and the magic number actually is 46. And partly that has to do with this clouding problem because if 40, the higher the alcohol, the less likely it is to cloud. Now what's actually happening when a whiskey clouds, it's called fo flocculation. So there are, there are long chains, batty acids that still exist inside of the whiskey at this point. If you, if you heat it, it'll break them. But when it gets cooled, they clumped together, they flock and you, and it makes the liquid somewhat translucent.

(02:40:03):
That's all it is. If you let it warmed up bit, it wouldn't happen that if the ABVs are higher, it's very unlikely to average. Why? Typically in a calf strength whiskey, you'll never see any flocking. Hmm. It's just they, because the alcohol rate said over is in 55, 57, that's, that's not a problem. But you know, your traditional spirit, like if you're talking about a gin or a vodka, they're all 40%, right? That's sort of the definition of a spirit is 40% alcohol. And if you lower whiskey down to 40%, it will flock unless you chill filter it. So you set the A B V by adding water to it and it's purified water. It's another the kind of water you wouldn't enjoy drinking, but you know, you really shouldn't put any other kind of water in whiskey or you really gonna change it as soon as you have mineralization to, to whiskey at all, you're going to change it substantially.

(02:40:48):
Now are you changing the flavor of the whiskey? Absolutely. And for two reasons. One is obviously you're diluting it, so the brightness of the alcohol is gonna diminish, but also whatever came out of that barrel had pulled substances from the wood, some of which solved in water, some of which salt in alcohol and the, and eventually the solvent ability of the water gets saturated, just like the solvent ability of the alcohol gets saturated as well. It's been in there for a decade plus. So when you introduce new solvent, new water, it's going to break some of the esters down. One of the things when I'm drinking cast strength and, and when I think I've done this with you Paul, is we'll pour cast strength straight into a glass. We won't put anything in it nor should we and taste it as it is en goin they're quite potent.

(02:41:37):
And then I'll take a dropper, typically even just a little glass rod, we'll dip it in some clear, some distilled water, you know, very pure water and put a drop of water into the whiskey. Again, seems terribly pretentious, but for an actual cast strength whiskey, what you'll see as that wa that droplet falls through the whiskey is the Esther breaking apart. You'll see a rolling effect through the whiskey as these long change acids change. And then we'll taste it again. And even with just a drop of water, you'll get a new flavor. And not always better. You know, sometimes you want those compounds to break in the mouth rather than rak in the glass, cuz this is what you're always introducing water when you drink it. Anyway.

(02:42:19):
So all that's going to happen as we set a consistent A B v again for a consistent flavor profile. So that's already been done in the vat. Now at 46% we can probably get away without chill filtering at all's. Just a question of whether we want those compounds or not. But to understand this is not a chill ion's not about flavor, it's about aesthetic. It's about the look of the whiskey when you put an ice cube in it. Right? And so whiskey that is sold at lower ABVs, especially like most blended whiskeys, which are sold at 40%, they will always chill, filter it just to avoid the clouding when you put an ice cube in it. And the filtration process basically involves chilling the whiskey down enough that it flocks, and then pumping the whiskey through filters that will pick up those long chains that have now clumped together in the flocculation.

(02:43:11):
And they come out clear so that now when they get chilled, they won't actually flock. Are there, are there any cloudy whiskeys? Absolutely. There are plenty of non-filtered whiskeys. I like, I've seen something like this. Yeah, sure. And, and, and I, and in fact, it had, I told the story of Glen Levitt naura sometime ago with the Shackleton whiskey that they found. Yeah. Because this is all modern stuff, right? Yeah, yeah. Clouding whiskey used to be a normal thing. And after the Shackleton was hit, they made naura. One of the thing claims to fame is this, oh, we don't chill filter our whiskey. Right? Right, right. And so I one is cloudy. Yeah. But you'll also see on it, it says, Hey, you're gonna na because it's natural whiskey. Natural. Yeah. Now that means anything you're gonna see clouding when you cool it.

(02:43:54):
Right. And often they'll even say, don't cool it because why would you suppress the flavor of it? Like, the point is to, to to to breathe that in, to take all those things in. And so but it clouding is doesn't mean it's defective. I think the way it frightens people is when you pull it out of a cooler and it's all clouded up and you wonder if it's gone bad. Right? Right. And it's just once it's in the glass and it, and it was clear going into the glass and now it's not, you may think maybe the glass is dirty, there was something in the ice and so forth. But actually it's this natural flocculation just, it just comes from flavors. Hmm. so when we're not done yet, so we've set the A B V, we've perhaps filtered it. Now comes another very controversial tendency, but it's all in the name of creating a consistent product, which is coloring.

(02:44:42):
So yeah, the age of a whiskey doesn't necessarily dictate its color. The flavor of a whiskey doesn't necessarily dictate its color. And I would, I would show you something like an Aard bag 10. If you ever take a ti, if you ever get a look at an Aard bag 10, and it's in a dark bottle, so you can't really see it. But if you pour into glass, you'll see it's a very pale straw color where you go, oh, it's only 10 years old. Right? But this is aard bag. This is one of the most ped whiskeys in the world. This is one of those whiskeys that has like the taste of a forest fire. Right? It's like, you know what? I feel like, I feel like sitting on a, i, I feel like I'm sitting on a big leather chair that's on fire while licking a dirty ash tray <laugh> or big cat, right?

(02:45:25):
Like, yeah, sad Dave, sometimes you're in the mood for that. Now compare that to say ad delmore 12 a Delmore 12 is you almost opaque. It's such a rich ruby red color. Now reason the dalmore is so dark is that it's finished in oso sherry casks and that sherry color comes into the, the drink pretty strongly. So you get a really dark color. However, the different wood emits a different amount of color, even if you've aged the same amount, even if the flavor profile's right on the color might not be what the customer's expecting. They want a consistent product. They want it to taste the same. They want it to look the same. And so there is a color measurement system they use with a thing called a tin o meter that uses the lava bond series 52 brown Color scale. Maybe you've heard of it.

(02:46:17):
Now, this was not invented for whiskey. This is actually a system they use for measuring honey colors and other food stuff colors. And there is a thing called spirit caramel which is supposed to be organ elliptically inert. And that a k a does not provide a flavor. It's very potent. One drop per liter is enough to change the color of that liter. Purest disagree that it affects the flavor, but it sets to a particular color. You can set it by based on number drops to the color you're looking for or whether your customers are looking for. There's certainly bottles out there. We'll see, just like no chill filtration, no color added. So it's a preference thing. But we get back to this is the commercialization of whiskey where we're after consistency. Now, typically a given batch is 30 to 50, 60,000 bottles.

(02:47:11):
So that's gonna be several hundred barrels as we've talked about before. We've now made the batch, okay, we've done all the treatments to it. It's now essentially ready for bottling. There are a bunch of different styles of bottles you specified to the bottler, which you what kind of bottle you want. There's very popular common styles of inexpensive bottles that are used all over Scotland for most editions. The bottling machines have a the bottles are supposed to be sterile going in the normal practice is they have a spray of the whiskey they're going to be bottled with for their final rinse. So a certain amount of the whiskey from the VA is going to be used in a high pressure spray that basically cleans out, gets that final blast into the bottle so that it's, it's clean. Then they go through a filling process.

(02:47:56):
They are corked, they're labeled, and then they have a foil capsule put on, which is the final seal on it. The, sometimes the labeling is a two-step process depending on the export license being purchased. So this is often a, a taxation point. If they have a UK export license on it, they pay an additional fee to the government for export. And then they're boxed. Most many whiskeys are put into separate boxes into a square box that holds the bottle. That then is put into a larger box of six or 12. Some have cylindrical boxes that are put into and then put into a framed box. Boxing of whiskey can get very fancy for higher end whiskey bottles. You'll have wooden boxes lined with velvet with different fittings. Like you spend a thousand dollars on a bottle of whiskey, they're gonna spend 25 bucks on a fancy box for you.

(02:48:45):
 Then those boxes are sealed, they're packaged together, they're wrapped, they're stacked in on pallets and prepared and, and sent off for shipping. You've made a bottling most, like I said, most facilities don't have bottling facilities. It's also important to know, especially in Scotland, that there are major conglomerates. Companies like de Diagio and and Santor and so forth that own many distilleries. And so they have tend to have centralized bottling facilities. And we've just talked about sort of traditional bottling of a single malt, right? We talked about Macallan 12, there's many others, but there's also the process of making blended whiskeys. And there are a bunch of different kinds of blended whiskeys. Now they're a well known. You know, the main thing that a blended whiskey talks a blended whiskey is, is typically a, some kind of single malt, maybe more than one.

(02:49:39):
And then a certain amount of grain alcohol attitude or neutral spirit, high distillate distilled with a column still so that you get it up in the 80, 90% range. So it has no flavor in it at all. And that'll be more than half the bottle. So it reduces the price a lot cuz that grain spirit's very inexpensive to make. You're still gonna cut to 40% a B v. Now, you know, you know these names, things like Johnny Walker, which is owned by Diagio Shava, which only makes blended scotch, which we'll talk about. Asac owned by Pernell doers, one of my favorites. I love a doers 12 may. It's owned by Bacardi and this week's whiskey. The famous grouse listen, I have a bottle of famous grouse the whole time. I mean, we've been talking about whiskey for weeks here. I talk about a lot of different whiskey's.

(02:50:26):
People's familiar, not only talk about expensive whiskeys we all can just decide what a level of expense is for me. I always have a bottle of famous Gruse and I usually have a bottle of doers as well. And I'll tell you why. Because after the second a hundred dollars bottle taste of a hundred dollars whiskey, you could be drinking copier fluid. Like what difference does it make, right? Drink, don't drink expensive stuff after you've had a couple of drinks. And grouse is great. Grouse is pleasant to drink. It's very nice now. And you're talking, that's a $20 bottle of whiskey for a 750 mil, 26 fluid ounces in the measurements of the oppressors. And it's a 40% alcohol. It's about 60% grain alcohol with a combination of both Macallan and Highland Park. Now why those two whiskeys? Well, it turns out that the EDR tin group owns both Macallan and Highland Park and Famous Grouse.

(02:51:23):
So this is a way, so you, you know, we were talking about that whole blending process, like how the dis the, the Masters shoulder goes through and picks barrels. What happens to barrels he doesn't pick, right? Some of them don't always get to a flavor profile that you're looking for. Well this is one way to use them up, send them off for a blend to a blender. We'll talk about some other ways that they can be used up as well. But this is one of the ways that they get used up. Now it's interesting to note that famous gross is labeled as a blended scotch, as is all Shiva is landed as blended scotch as opposed to a blended whiskey. Now this is supposed to be the rules we're never really sure if everybody's following them, but to be called a scotch. Nothing can be and nothing can be in the bottle.

(02:52:06):
It's spent less than three years in a barrel. So supposedly the Riting group uses takes pure grain spirit. I believe it's wheat, but it might be barley high distillate. They use a column still for it cuz remember that they also make gin and rum and a bunch of other things which they use the same bottling plants for. And then they throw it into raw virgin casks for three years. Now they need to do that anyway because those barrels are now in better shape to age whiskey for longer. You rarely want to use virgin oak for more than three years. It imparts too many strong flavors. So they actually aged their highest dist distillate spirit. So they can call it blended scotch. And then they combine them. They also talk about in their process that they marry the blended 46. So normally when you're gonna marry that blend, when everything goes in the vat, it's at whatever a v v it was in the barrel, right?

(02:53:04):
But they apparently cut the individual distillates that they're combining in the vat down to 46 before they combine them. And they do this to avoid chill filtration. I don't know that it works cuz they still ultimately bottle it at 40, but they don't bother with chill filtration, which is the costly step as well. But it's part of what makes famous grouses distinctive is to be able to combine those whiskeys together. So while they may marry at 46, they ultimately bottle at 40. So they add more water a little later on in the process. Sh Regal, the owned by Pero, they only blend single malts together. They use no grain spirit. But again, it's those, it's the extra casks. They combine them in a larger variety of ways. Pero owns many distillery, so they have a lot of different barrels to play with. So it doesn't get to be called a single malt.

(02:53:54):
It's not from a given distillery. It doesn't have a year on it because it'll often be young barrels cuz same thing. They want to use up some of those version oak barrels in their first fills. So they'll use that in the blend to get to their flavor profiles. But many of the others are called blended whiskeys because they do have straight spirit in it as well. They tend, you know, from a taste perspective, the, the neutral spirit's pretty tasteless, but it does have a brightness to it, a sharpness to it. So it, it's really a question of do you get the flavors through? And Highland Park and Macallen are both sherry casks. So they have a nice, rich, sweet flavor to them. Makes for a nice whiskey. I want to point out one very unusual set of bottlings, and this is Diagio Diagio, the ones who make Johnny Walker and Diagio Na only owns famous brands you've heard of, but they know many distilleries you've never heard of.

(02:54:48):
Like I talked about the Craig Aachi. They're, that's a semi-famous, they have a bit of a brand, but they're not particularly well known. But there's ones you've never heard of, like Clannish and link Wood and 10 Niche, like they largely don't have a brand, but they do make a lot of whiskey typically for blending. Many of these distilleries don't spend money on marketing. They have relationships with their blenders. And one of those very popular blending places for Diagio is of course Johnny Walker. They make a tremendous amount of whi in a lot of different flavors. Red, black, blue, green, gold, you name it. They consume all that whiskey. But they do have good master distillers. And the master distillers go through their barrels and when they find exceptional ones, they pull 'em aside for special bottlings, they call the flora and fauna bottlings. They don't get export labels.

(02:55:34):
So generally you can only find flora and fauna bottlings in. When they started these back in 91, you would only find them in Scotland sell. So I would go up to Scotland to buy Flo and Fauna bottles cuz they were often only 20 pounds, like $30. They're very inexpensive and some of them were exceptional. They've now become so popular they started getting export labels and occasionally could flying them. They do additional additions. The Mortlock, which is one of the Flo and Fauna set, which again, when, when this started back in the nineties, they had no branding. They were nobody. They were so popular. Their prices went through the roof. Last time I saw a Mortlock 16 Flo and Fauna bottling, they wanted 250 bucks for it. And I bought that stuff for $40 back in the day. And now they're actually making branded Mortlock.

(02:56:19):
So it literally drove it to be a brand but a variant. All the bottles look the same. It's only the labeling that's different. Like it was a very interesting style that Diagio took to, to do that particular edition. One more thing, just because whiskey's not a complicated enough. Now let's talk about independent bottlers. So there are a set of bottlers out there that had some of been around for more than a hundred years, like Gordon McFail that do not own a distillery at all, but they have relationships with distilleries and they have opportunities to buy barrels. Sometimes they'll buy barrels and just keep them, get them to a particular age. This is one of Caden heads, which is another one of these that although they actually also own a couple of distilleries, they ho they hold a lot of interesting barrels for a long period of time and then do the bottlings when they think they're ready.

(02:57:05):
So you'll find these in some stores and wonder what the heck. They're like, what's Gordon McFail? They are an independent bottler. They buy barrels from lots of different distilleries. They aged them themselves, they finish them, them their own way and they'll typically be on the bottle. You don't buy a Gordon and McFail whiskey. You buy a Gordon McFail Mart Lock 24. That was a set of barrels. The youngest was 20, that's now 24 years old that they decided to do a bottling on Signator is another one. The Douglas Yang and Hunter Lee Yang. They do independent bottlings. So they're literally buying casts, keeping them for a certain period of time and making their own additions of whiskey. And it's part of what makes I think mar Scottish whiskey particularly confusing. And one last call on that is to the Scotch Malt Whiskey Society.

(02:57:53):
So the this is really a UK thing, although there is a US branch and a Canadian branch and a few other countries they buy barrels on behalf of their members and do custom bottlings. They are, as they're quick to say, not a whiskey of the Month Club. What they are is a club where only members can buy bottles from them and they go looking for bottles as well. So rather than just go to stores to buy Gordon McFail, you can be part of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society if that works for your country. Different deals in different places. It's often hard. Whiskey is one of those things that's difficult to import in small numbers. And so they will push out for there. And that is the story of finishing whiskey.

Mikah Sargent (02:58:38):
Hmm. Oh, let me turn my microphone back on. That's important. That then officially brings us to the end of this episode of Windows Weekly and the end of the explanation of bottling of I guess creating and bottling whiskey. 

Rich Campbell (02:58:56):
The finishing

Mikah Sargent (02:58:56):
Of Whiskey, the Fini, thank you. The finishing of Whiskey. Folks, thank you all for tuning in to this episode of Windows Weekly. If you would like to follow along with the show as we record it live every Wednesday, you go to twit.tv/live there. You can watch us run about 11:00 AM for the starting time Pacific 11:00 AM Pacific. So tune in to watch it recorded live, but we think the best way to get the show is to get the edited version, which you can get by subscribing to audio or video. Go to TWiT tv slash ww there you can choose to subscribe an Apple podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, YouTube. We try to be in all the places so that you can get the show no matter what application you are using. Let's go from left to right, Richard Campbell. Where can folks go online to check out your work and make sure they're staying up to date with your long lift podcasts?

Rich Campbell (02:59:55):
<Laugh>. So Renez Radio still@renezradio.com of course.net Rocks is also@dotnetrocks.com and you usually find me on the Twitters and the mastodons.

Mikah Sargent (03:00:04):
Awesome. And Paul Throt, thank you. Of course, throt.com is the main place to go. Anything else you wanna pitch? <Laugh> <laugh>, just go to throt.com people. Come on. It's all there. It's all there. I can be found at Micah Sergeant on many a social media network. Or you can head to chiwawa.coffee, that's C hhi h hua h hua.coffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. I think that'll do it for this week of Windows Weekly. So we'll see you again next week. Goodbye.