Windows Weekly Episode 825 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 mikah Sargent, I'm subbing in for Leo Laport. We've got Richard Campbell and Paul Throt here, and we've got a lot to cover. We kick things off with an AI slash Bing chat and yes, that is a bit of a pun. First, with Samsung maybe considering replacing Google search with Bing, could Apple follow after that? What's going to happen to the future of Google search? Plus we talk about Bing making its way into Swift Key and Microsoft Start. It just keeps popping up left and right, Microsoft creating its own AI hardware. Windows 11 updates and X Box plus our tips and picks of the week. Stay tuned for Windows Weekly

TWIT Intro (00:00:46):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWIT.

Mikah Sargent (00:00:59):
This is Windows Weekly with mikah Sargent in for Leo Laport, episode 825, recorded Wednesday, April 19th, 2023. You're not a normal human. This episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by Miro. Miro is your team's visual platform to connect, collaborate, and create together. Tap into a way to map processes, systems, and plans with the whole team and get your first three boards for free to start creating your best work yet at miro.com/podcast. And by Cisco Meraki. With employees working in different locations, providing a unified work experience seems as easy as hurting cats. How do you reign in so many moving parts? Well with the Meraki Cloud managed Network, learn how your organization can make hybrid work work. Visit meraki.cisco.com/TWITt and buy cash. Fly Cash Fly is the only CDN built for throughput. Delivering rich media content up to 10 times faster than traditional delivery methods and 30% faster than other major CDNs.

(00:02:05):
Learn how you can get your first month free@cashfly.com. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we talk all things Windows, Microsoft, and all of the stuff that windows and Microsoft have to do with. I am your host mikah Sargent in for Leo Laport, and I am joined as always by two of the greatest Windows watchers in the world. To my of all time of all time to my right is, I don't know what happened there, Paul. The rot of the rot.com. How you doing Paul? I am doing well, thank you. How are you? I'm doing well, thank you <laugh>. And to my left noted Black tea drinker. It's Richard Campbell coming to us from a new location this week. Hello, Richard. Where are you calling from?

Rich Campbell (00:02:58):
I am in Studio C in building 25 on the Microsoft campus in Redmond. It's the MVP summit this week. So I was able to sneak out and borrow a studio for a few hours.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:09):
Nice.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:09):
What's like that front page and Windows me are prominently featured in the room you're in. It's nice. Yeah,

Rich Campbell (00:03:15):
This is, yeah, this is one of the small studios. I've done a bunch of things in here over the years, but it has a whole bunch of archaic Microsoft technology back here. Some Windows 2000 professional mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you know enterprise editions of thing. I think there's a, there's a Studio 2010 up there. It's awesome.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:32):
Yeah. What is that? To the left of Visual Studio? It's red and blue.

Rich Campbell (00:03:38):
Yeah, it's like a cube of some kind. Oh. With a big red button on top of it. I think it's one of the game show buzzers.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:45):
Oh. Now I just really want to press it and I'll spend the rest of it. So

Paul Thurrott (00:03:48):
Basically, Microsoft is a hoarder, is what I'm seeing.

Rich Campbell (00:03:52):
<Laugh>, this is a hoarding. This is a carefully organized hoarding room. There's a hollow lens over there and a R two D two. Like there's this fits and pieces. There's, there's

Paul Thurrott (00:04:00):
Sure.

Rich Campbell (00:04:01):
We were not far from the 16, 17, 18 complex where they put down the big tiles for each product. Yeah. At least I think they really keep that up to about 2008 and it's like, that's too many products. We don't have enough tiles,

Mikah Sargent (00:04:12):
<Laugh>. Oh, wow. Kind

Rich Campbell (00:04:13):
Of.

Mikah Sargent (00:04:14):
I remember Scott Hanselman giving a little tour of the software archives

Rich Campbell (00:04:21):
And Yeah. Last week

Mikah Sargent (00:04:22):
Built. Yeah, that was super cool to see that they've got everything down there. The

Rich Campbell (00:04:28):
Archive is so lovely. They're really great people and it's a lot of stuff. You know, this campus has got a certain gravity to it. It, especially with the v MVP summit. First time in person in three years. Right. So there's a lot of brand new MVPs who've never been here before. And they're just kind of

Paul Thurrott (00:04:44):
Oh, cute. It's like the first day of school.

Rich Campbell (00:04:46):
It's exactly like <laugh>. So we're all in building 33, which is the conference center typically.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:52):
Building 33 used to be. Oh, no, you're right. This is the executive, the old executive conference center.

Rich Campbell (00:04:57):
That's right. Is the b c is now built above it.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:00):
Sorry. So when you said that, I thought it was the old one, the Windows building, but that was 37, maybe 35.

Rich Campbell (00:05:07):
I've yeah, I blast. I live three hours drive from here, so I've come down to Redmond almost every month for various reasons. And and check in with teams. If you ever wondered why.net Rocks always seems to be on point for the next show, next technology, that kind of thing. They tell me, I'm just not allowed to tell you until it gets released. So I'm able to build shows to help people get ready.

Mikah Sargent (00:05:27):
Well, it's good that the trust is there. That's nice.

Rich Campbell (00:05:29):
Yeah. Well, they left me alone in the studio. I don't know how live that is.

Mikah Sargent (00:05:32):
<Laugh>. once you press the button, we'll find out. I, I, again, I'm just gonna be thinking about that button anyway. We should probably talk about the things that Paul Throt has gathered here for us. The things, the things, the things, the, the topics. Starting with Microsoft Bing and ai. Samsung

Paul Thurrott (00:05:56):
Might be getting into the mix. What's that about? Yeah, so I have you, I assume you guys have talked about this on one of the other shows, but there was a news report this week. I th I wanna say from Bloomberg, I can't remember, but that Samsung was allegedly considering replacing Google search on their devices with Bing mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So I had two reactions to that. One was I thought they couldn't do that <laugh>. Right. because of the licensing agreement they have to license full Android. And, but the second one was, you know what, we don't actually know what agreement Samsung has with Google. They're the biggest oem. They could probably do lots of different things that smaller companies can't, you know? Sure. So maybe, and I gotta say, I, I don't think going with Samsung would be, wouldn't move that needle that that much.

(00:06:46):
But, you know, what would apple doing the same, right? The Apple deal with Google for search is worth over 10 billion a year, if I'm not mistaken. And probably drives a significant amount of traffic to that thing. And if there's any company in this earth that would like to prevent the privacy stealing ways of Google on their devices, I have to think Yeah. That, that company is Apple. Yeah, absolutely. Well, this is kind of interesting all around apple of course doesn't suffer from any of the licensing issues, so that's not a big deal. But Samsung falls, I mean, I have to think Apple's gonna be right behind me.

Rich Campbell (00:07:22):
There's many conversations going on now. There's no way. There isn't. Yeah. You know, all those companies are always in contact at some level. So it wouldn't surprise me at all if it's just a talk in that space. I mean, they always, the question is, how's the search <laugh>? Exactly.

Paul Thurrott (00:07:36):
Well, well let's not go there yet. <Laugh>, but, well, I mean, I, there there's there are little things in the news from time to time that suggest this, some of this monopoly stuff is gonna fall, right? Apple or Google. Hello. Yeah. Google is now, I think talking to the UK about lowering their licensing fees through the app store and allowing third party stores, or third party, I'm sorry, third party payment systems on annual. Yeah. this is how the dominoes start to fall, right. Because all of these kind of belligerent monopolistic practices that these two companies have, Google and Apple, in this case on mobile are almost certainly gonna be found to be anti-competitive and illegal in various jurisdictions. So

Rich Campbell (00:08:19):
I'd be in Samsungs due to renegotiate contracts with Google. Cause this is good positioning for negotiating a new agreement with Google.

Paul Thurrott (00:08:26):
Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I heard you were having some kind of a red alert thing or something. Yeah, yeah. We were thinking about paying less for the same thing. How does that sound? You know, that kind of thing. Sure.

Rich Campbell (00:08:37):
Yeah. No, I think that, that, that might be the positioning piece, but

Paul Thurrott (00:08:42):
Also

Rich Campbell (00:08:43):
The thing is, sir, Google, they are under attack to some degree about their monopolistic practices. So anytime you can point to a competitor is competing, you kind of undermine that

Paul Thurrott (00:08:53):
Message. Right? Right. The other thing too is this is Samsung, and so it's been kind of quiet on this front lately, but for years I've been kind of making the argument that Samsung had set out to replace as much of Google as they could on their devices. And anyone who wants, look, whatever you think of Samsung, there are a lot of do duplicate apps and services on their devices, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> I, at some point there will be a Samsung Maps <laugh>, you know, and I mean, I mean, you know, at some point they just basically try to replace Google everywhere. That's kind of their model. Maybe this is a step in that direction too.

Mikah Sargent (00:09:32):
Android Authority has write up a writeup talking about what you were suggesting.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:37):
Yeah. But we, nobody knows what Samsung my is. Yeah. This is, we, we all know this <laugh>. My my point is Samsung is probably bigger than all of the OEMs combined outside of China anyway, and I think they have a different kind of leverage over Google than other companies. So this is, yeah, this is the private deal. If, you know, Bob's computer company or whatever wants to license Android they have to sign this agreement for sure. But Samsung is in a slightly different sphere here. So I guess my point is simply we don't actually know what deals that Samsung and Google have that are separate from this. So it's possible they have different capabilities. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:10:14):
And how much of this is just posturing versus an actual attempt to change anything,

Paul Thurrott (00:10:18):
Right? That's

Mikah Sargent (00:10:20):
Right. I've tried so many different search engines and I always end up back at Google.

Paul Thurrott (00:10:26):
Yeah, me too.

Mikah Sargent (00:10:27):
No matter like it. And I know Leo's big on, I think it's like, I can't remember now what it's called.

Paul Thurrott (00:10:32):
Yeah. It begins with an end. It's like a, it's a paid search service next, you know, you probably have Juco brave Search obviously Bing whack, that was the thing. <Laugh>, you know, the, the, those, there, there are, I'm sure there are many. Yeah. but most people have that same reaction, and part of it might not literally be, I'm doing a side by side comparison, and I like what I see on Google. I don't like what I see over here. A part of it I think is just familiarity. Absolutely. You feel Absolut.

Mikah Sargent (00:10:58):
Yeah. Whatever. It's, it's, it's that the way that I expect a search to be returned, because I've used Google for so long, obviously,

Paul Thurrott (00:11:07):
It's like when you provide it, a lot of movies and TV shows will have someone go to a Google like search page on the internet. It's like search.com or something. And it doesn't quite look like Google, but it's sort of like those other search services are often like that mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And it's like, so this is what is, this is like a search service from like a Van Dam movie or something like <laugh>, you know, <laugh>, every search is this, you know, IFPs, some loam, <laugh>, you know, all the results. Yeah. I

Mikah Sargent (00:11:33):
Dunno. I mean, but I then it makes me wonder, yeah, if Samsung were to do this, are people going to be the average person? Are they even going to be aware that their search engine has changed? Will they know that they can go in and switch search engines? Or will it just be, I mean, that kind of seems to be the, what's most valuable to Google is you just have this default and people tend, you know, the average person tends not to change from that default.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:02):
Yeah. So I guess it depends on what, what is the search interface like on these phones? So the, the deal with Apple, if I understand it, is the search is inside of safari, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's not a standalone search thing, right? On Android, there's a search box on the home screen. Oh, there's many times that Google has one. So obviously you type a search query in there, it loads Chrome <laugh> and it has probably a Google Discover type interface, and you get search results, whatever. So it's this thing that's kind of familiar. I don't know, I don't have a Samsung device in front of me, but I, I wonder if Samsung does the same thing, or if it's slightly different or how, you know, how they surface this. I know surf Amazon rather Amazon Jesus, I know that Samsung has their own web browser that no one probably uses mm-hmm.

(00:12:49):
<Affirmative>, but whatever it's there. I, they have their own widgets and things for, you know, their home. They have their own UI and, and you know, whatever you wanna call that stuff. So I don't know how they surface search results, but the more they change it, the less you would be likely to notice. You know, if the UI remains the same, if it's some Samsung specific thing, you might not even realize it happened other than the fact that the searchers also would be terrible <laugh>. But, but I mean, as far as, you know, as I, I think UI is a big part of it.

Mikah Sargent (00:13:23):
I I agree. Yes. It's, it is the familiarity of the UI that seems to be the bigger, and so you wouldn't necessarily, the Android Authority article has a photo at the top of a Samsung phone and Yeah. On that main screen you can see the search bar and it says search with Google. There you go. So I guess I would say search with Bing. But if they just, here's my advice search, don't Yes. Just say Search <laugh>, don't save with Bing. Yeah. It has this this's piece to,

Paul Thurrott (00:13:50):
Its, I, again, I don't use a Samsung device. My wife has a year old Samsung device. Every time I look at it, I get frustrated. <Laugh> No, I mean, I, I mean that honestly. But there, there's some interesting cross licensing stuff going on, even in this very screen, right? So they're using the Google Messages app, which is a fairly new development. Samsung used to have their own Messages app. I believe they're using their own phone app, even though Google has their own app for that, right? Obviously Chrome and Google search of the defaults. Samsung has their own camera app. They're using OneDrive and they have that right on the top there. I guess they use that for backup or whatever, photo backup probably whatever. But they have Play Store and Galaxy Store in the whole <laugh>. I mean, this is in a, it's a very clean looking design, but even in the small screen, you can see the weirdness of Samsung.

(00:14:36):
It's like a bunch of different thing places to get stuff. That's kind of the Samsung and they've always had their own UI look, right? Yeah. Yeah. I don't mind the ui, I don't mind the look, honestly, I think it looks pretty good. The one UI or whatever. It's the duplication stuff. I don't really like, you know, the, why are there two calculator apps? Why are there two calendar apps? Why are there two, you know, it's, this kind of goes on and on and on. Like they have to include the Google stuff, cuz that's part of the, their licensing argument, I guess. And they also feel the need to make another one that has their own name on it for some reason.

Rich Campbell (00:15:08):
Yeah. And it'd be, I'd be interested to know the usage on that. Like, I generally like a bare metal Android device, right? Yeah. Gimme a mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I know what I'm getting, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:15:18):
Yeah. Same.

Mikah Sargent (00:15:20):
Yes. I mean, same, that's, I've got the Pixel and that is yeah. Specifically for just having Android as pure as it can be. And anytime I've used a different Android device, I'm always going, what is all this stuff on top? Why is, why is there gunk on the lens? <Laugh>, it's, it feels like I'm just not getting to Google

Rich Campbell (00:15:37):
Experience in general. Right? Like at least you're used to looking past Google ads in a Google search.

Mikah Sargent (00:15:43):
Well, that's true. That's

Paul Thurrott (00:15:44):
Right. Sort of

(00:15:46):
<laugh>. I will say, I, I, we can't blame the third parties, the hardware makers for these problems, right? This is part of the Google licensing requirement. Maybe this is part of something that falls down and is related to this possibility of Bing, Bing being on Samsung. But the re you know, these companies want to make devices that have their own branding and, and whatever they, they're trying to sell their own product, but they also have to license Android. And to do that, you get these requirements from Google and, you know, there you go. It's, it's like when Windows 95 came out and all the PC makers wanted to put Netscape on the desktop, and Microsoft said, no, and we have our own browser now, and blah, blah, blah. Kind of went back and forth and it's, it, it, this is the same kind of battle. 

Rich Campbell (00:16:29):
Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:30):
You know, they don't Google doesn't want you to put Firefox or some other browser on there, and they certainly don't want you not to have Chrome regardless. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Right. So Chrome becomes a, a, you know, a requirement and they build, they actually, they really do what Microsoft did back in the day. Cuz a lot of these kind of secondary and tertiary screens you see are actually run by Chrome even though you don't realize it. Right. like that Google Discovery feed is, is just a front end of Chrome.

Rich Campbell (00:16:55):
Yeah. I think we see more search boxes around than just have no attachment to a browser anymore. Or at least you can't see it, so you don't know what it's searching on. It just happens.

Paul Thurrott (00:17:03):
That's right.

Rich Campbell (00:17:05):
In the end, it'll all be chat bots,

Paul Thurrott (00:17:07):
<Laugh> mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, that's, you just be talking to yourself basically.

Mikah Sargent (00:17:09):
Yeah. It's on the iOS site, it's interesting how Apple has slowly attempted to circumvent sometimes Google, whenever you, if you use the spotlight search, the basic built-in search they will, in the case of typing in a celebrity name or certain plants and those kinds of things, it, it will go as direct as possible. So imdb is essentially what it looks for, or it will have sort of a little database of information instead of providing that option to search via Google or, you know, open Yeah. Your, your browser and look up there, I mean,

Paul Thurrott (00:17:44):
This isn't the the topic per se, but I, I feel like this is the natural of it because like I said, apple is the, the most obvious candidate to do something like this. There were stories that Apple was looking at Bing a few years ago actually. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. When you think about Apple stance on privacy and all the marketing they do around that, and everything you do on the iPhone stands on the iPhone. The one big gaping hole in that strategy is that they use Google search as the default for search. And they do that because that's what people want. That's what they expect. I mean, they have to, they're forced to. But Google or Apple strategy, just like Samsung is to replace as many partners as they can and do everything themselves. Right. So there are rumors of Apple maybe working on their own search engine, for example, or whatever, but you know, they want to get rid of that, right. That mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, they would love for their audience not to want Google. Because honestly, it's kind, it's, it is a hole. It, it's, it's a real problem when you're saying you're, everything you do is private and it's like, then you're sending stuff to Google about those people.

Mikah Sargent (00:18:44):
Yeah. Especially given the search deal that's in place. Yeah. So the company is making money off of that and that

Paul Thurrott (00:18:50):
Billions and billions at all.

Mikah Sargent (00:18:51):
Yeah. That is not necessarily a good look if, if you are claiming in one breath you know, protection of privacy.

Paul Thurrott (00:18:59):
Right, right.

Mikah Sargent (00:19:01):
All right. Let's move on to talk about the Bing Chat bot coming to Yeah. The keyboard. I think both now on iOS and on Android. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:19:12):
Yeah. Hooray. <laugh>. So, you know I, I know around the world there were people who are not Microsoft users per se. They don't use Windows, maybe. And they're laughing, right? Because they see this Bing button appearing everywhere. It's on the Windows task bar now. It's an edge, you know? Well, now it's on your phone too, so keep laughing guys. It's gonna be everywhere. It's coming. It's coming for you. The interesting thing about the Bing button on Swift Key, swift key is the mic. Microsoft owned now virtual keyboard, right. For Andrew Android, iOS. You know, it's one of those things that people like that kind of stuff are not, I, to me, these things never work as well as the built-in one for some reason. I'm sure there's an integration issue. This was always a big issue on the iPhone in particular, where sometimes the real keyboard would come through, even though we're using a different keyboard, whatever.

(00:20:00):
But, you know, it's customizable, all that kind of stuff. But Microsoft is stick and bing everywhere they can, and they added its swift key, and I'm sure some people like it, but just as is the case and edge, as is the case in Windows, a lot of people said yeah, okay, but can I get rid of this? Please? You know, I, I don't necessarily want this giant blue button on my stupid, you know, keyboard. So Yeah. Like, I have so much room on my phone in the first place. Yeah. And this is the way Microsoft releases software today. You know, there's not a lot, there's no testing in this case, there's no word. It's coming. It just derives. People complain and then they say, oh, okay, sorry. We'll, we'll give you the opportunity to get rid of that when it should have been obvious from the get-go that some big percentage of the population that uses this product would not want that there, you know? But that's the world we live in. So here we are. Anyway, you can expect this stupid chat butt button to be

Mikah Sargent (00:20:55):
Everywhere. I think actually Paul, if you look behind you, it's just showed up there. It's sort of coming in the frame.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:01):
It's, it's creeping up behind the thing. <Laugh>. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:21:03):
<Laugh>. I'm here. It's

Paul Thurrott (00:21:05):
You, you, did you say you wanted something

Mikah Sargent (00:21:08):
<Laugh>? Oh, no, it's the new Clippy. Oh, not again?

Paul Thurrott (00:21:11):
Yeah. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, let me lie to you.

Rich Campbell (00:21:14):
Yes. Animated pip clips are your friends. Come on.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:18):
Yeah. You thought Gilbert Godfried was terrible. Now it's like a pathological liar. Liar. You know, it's, it's,

Rich Campbell (00:21:23):
There's gotta be a clippy in this room

Paul Thurrott (00:21:24):
Somewhere. It's gotta be, yeah. The clip, the clippy costume has gotta be within a couple hundred feet of you.

Rich Campbell (00:21:28):
Yeah, for sure.

Mikah Sargent (00:21:31):
So, I mean, what, what is the, what's, what is the benefit? Is this just Microsoft attempting to make sure that everyone sees its AI prowess in the end? Because of course, the chatbot has all of this technology. Are they just trying to get everybody familiar with it to prepare them for when co-pilot is, is fully Yeah. Official.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:53):
I think they're just capitalizing on the publicity and, you know, suc relative success that Beng Hass had in the wake of the chat G P T integration stuff. So

Rich Campbell (00:22:01):
It's the last time that Microsoft had a PR

Paul Thurrott (00:22:03):
Hit. I know. Now. Really with, yeah. Yeah. It's incredible. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:22:08):
It's, it's, it would do what you can. I mean, I don't think it's a good idea, but while you got some momentum here, maybe you'll win a few folks. You, you can't get bang into the iPhone very easily, so we stuck it in the keyboard.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:20):
Well, but you know, this is a way to get bang into the iPhone when you think about it, because Apple sees what's happening here too, and they're like, Hmm. Interesting. Yeah, I can, I can assure you language number or Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:22:33):
It's a, it's a good play. It, it's good to turn it off too. Is that'll also tell you more Right. As well how many people said, stop wasting my screen space and pushed it away.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:42):
Right, right. That seems to be the reaction every time they added anywhere <laugh>, you know, frankly. But I would imagine Microsoft start, most people probably don't know what that is. It's basically the old MSN website. It's just a news aggregation site with terrible sources. <Laugh>. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:22:58):
They really do seem to pick the worst sources.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:01):
Yeah. It's really bad. I, I, and I, you know, I wish, I can't even say I feel bad about this per se, but I, it bothers me how bad it is every time I check it. I just did it and it's just like, it's like a horror show of, of sources I would never wanna read or, you know, and I just feel like life's too short to spend the rest of my life saying No, no, no,

Mikah Sargent (00:23:24):
No. Yeah. To try to train it. Yeah, exactly.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:26):
Yeah. I've done this. Like, you have, like, have you used Facebook a lot? Facebook has a newsfeed. I've spent time saying, hide this story, hide this publication. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, hide this story, hide this publication. Right. So I've done this for a long time, and I was just looking at it the other day and I thought to myself, okay, what, what does this look like inside of Facebook? And I found the pa there's actually a page in settings. You can see everything you hid. And it is hundreds of, it's like hundreds of items I've spent, oh goodness, I guess years doing this. And to what end? I still every day say, no, no <laugh>, no. You know, and there are story, like you could tell the sign of a bad news aggregator is one that picks up stories from like a local TV slash radio station that has a webpage that is just republishing, like Reuters stories or whatever. So like, one day I saw the same story, like some cute kitten story about whatever. I'm like, I don't know why this is news. I don't wanna see this. I don't wanna see anything from kd tv.com, whatever it was. But I saw that story again 11 times just from different little local broadcasting companies around the country because they're all picking up the same garbage. You know,

Mikah Sargent (00:24:32):
If they would just, if, if all of these news apps would talk to Spotify and learn from Spotify, cuz Spotify actually seems to get that dialing in thing. Right. I just to sort of double down apple News is the same way I can, no, I don't wanna hear about this topic anymore. No, I don't like, no, I tried to give it the time hoping that it would and it's still all garbage.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:55):
I, I, I would get, I listen, if there's anyone out there who has a high quality newsfeed of some kind, please let me know. I, in the morning, I go through a sir, every couple of newspapers. I read Google News for technology news, and I do a couple of other feed things. But in Google News, I'm literally in their technology section and every single day I report something to them. And I say, this is not a technology story <laugh>, and I'm talking, it will be a story about animal husbandry was one the other day. It was a story. No, I mean, it's, it's crazy. Like, wow. It's, it, it's, it's not even close. You know, there was like a women's issue type story. It's just mis you know, it's mis tagged or something. Yeah. But it's, you know, but I always have the same reaction to this, which is otherwise, you know, other than my innate anger at the world is if this is, this is the simplest thing in the world, right?

(00:25:49):
When it comes down to it, of all the functions that Google serves, filtering stories by topic is easy, right? This is not anything, but if this company can't do this accurately, why on earth would I trust their ai? You know, you can't do this then, then how is this much more sophisticated than gonna work? You know, which I think should be the normal reaction to anyone using these products. But this, which is why we have sort of our reaction to Bing because we've used it <laugh> and yes, we're a little worried about, you know, whether or not Bing chat chatbot actually, you know, is something we should rely on.

Rich Campbell (00:26:26):
I, yeah. And I do wonder if these things are gonna get better because utilization is increasing, right? That's

Paul Thurrott (00:26:31):
All we know. Are you are you, have you turned into the dark side of the planet? The

Rich Campbell (00:26:35):
Room's starting to do its own thing,

Paul Thurrott (00:26:37):
So pretty soon it's just gonna be like

Rich Campbell (00:26:42):
Rant. What

Paul Thurrott (00:26:45):
Do Yeah. Yeah. <laugh> thought you could hide.

Mikah Sargent (00:26:50):
Well, so in order to power the news generation platform, you might need some hardware to do that. Segway.

Paul Thurrott (00:27:02):
Yeah. Nice. Yeah. So there was a, a really interesting report in the information that Microsoft is working on their own AI hardware for their data centers. Right? Which, when you hear that, you're like, right, obviously I think the recent success they've had with Bing and the understanding that this traffic is a link gonna explode in it, by the way, it's really expensive. They could save some money if they have AI hardware of their own that they don't have to try to get through Nvidia. Although by the way, they have a huge partnership with them for that. And I think it's notable that all of their major competitors companies like Google and Amazon have been creating their own AI chip sets actually for years in most cases. Right. So I think this is them. I think, I think the story here is gonna be eventually we're gonna find out that someone up high up at Microsoft sent out a Bill Gates type memo one day and said, we are really behind on this. We have to move quick. Like we are, we're gonna be lost here if we don't do something.

Rich Campbell (00:27:59):
Yeah. I'm wondering if there's an AI all of things letter out there somewhere that's just dunno where it's, yep. I would say the energy around large language model technologies here at the summit has been incredibly high. Folks are very interested. There's lots of conversations going on. I'm doing my best not to violate ND NDAs here,

Paul Thurrott (00:28:18):
But <laugh>. Yep. I'm

Rich Campbell (00:28:19):
Surprised that that was a huge talking point. And you and I talked about this before Paul Yeah. You replacing this old laptop and it's like, it's probably worth holding off for another generation because I think we're gonna see dedicated compute units for a lot of this new software. Yep. Imminently really, and this story clearly points to this work's been going on for some time. That's right. Question of when they commit producing enough of them to put them in a machine.

Paul Thurrott (00:28:46):
Yeah. We know that Microsoft has worked with all of their chipset, you know, microprocessor partners, right? A md, Intel and Qualcomm to get that stuff going on. The client, we know that the, it's essentially Qualcomm based service Pro Nine and also their project filter the Windows dev box I think it's called which is a Qualcomm based machine as well. Both have NPUs. And when Microsoft came up with this Mac mini looking thing last fall and said, here, look at this thing. It's based on arm. It has an npu, you can get going on your AI workloads. I think most of us looked at each other and said, I, what, what are you talking about? AI workloads, you know, and, and to date the types of things that take advantage of this capability. And Windows are fairly minor, right? Like the Windows studio effects type things.

(00:29:35):
We're talking about using AI to blur the background, right. Which is a feature of all video conferencing software, but I guess works better when it's backed with hardware or something. It's probably more effective. There's a bunch of those effects, but very few people in the window space have a, an arm-based pc. So right now we're not talking about a lot of people, but like yeah, like Richard said, you know, he's using a Surface Pro two, sorry, surface Book two and I think eighth gen intel. So we're, you know, getting there five, five years on whatever, six years almost. Yeah, it's time. And I don't know, you might wanna wait, you know. Well, let's see what happens because

Rich Campbell (00:30:13):
Sure. Like, look in the fall, possibly next spring. Yep. we should get some interesting hardware and, and and get on board with that. Plus the, the looking and the nature of the products that are coming. It'll be interesting to see how they build an emulator so that they can run the same way on the machine. Whether you have it or not, it just runs faster when, when you've got it.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:32):
Yes. oh boy. What, what was the demo I just saw that was similar to this? I can't remember if it was an Adobe thing or I just saw a demo where they, they, they're, they're starting to use ai well, for everything, right? I, we, I don't know if you guys have discussed this out in the world, but AI is kind of a thing right now. So companies, yeah. So companies like Adobe are, are using AI more and more to apply certain effects to video and, and still images and so forth. And they would, I, I can't remember the exact demo, but I just heard a demo that base it was, it's sort of like when you do software versus hardware rendering or graphics mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, here's what it looks like. We're our hardware accelerated graphics very fast. And then in the software version you can see it draw each line.

(00:31:09):
And, and it was sort of like that. And I think that's gonna be the deal. And that's part of the conversation we had earlier on the show around this notion that Windows 12 is gonna be the AI release. And that I, I would, I wondered out loud, and I sort of just blurted it out, but I sort of said, I wonder if Windows 12 is gonna require an N P U because of all these things. It's far more likely that it will be some things that do require an npu. So you just don't get those if you don't have it. And then some things will just be much slower, which is what you're talking about. You know, this, you don't have a special processor to run this stuff against, so it will probably go against the GP or in some cases the cpu. Yeah. And it will run, you know, four to 10 x slower or something. And,

Rich Campbell (00:31:47):
And, and like a video game, you'll turn down the resolution mode. Like I could imagine that green screen, in fact mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, they'll do the comparison. It's like, here's without the end. Yeah, there you go. Here's width. And you can see that it just looks more natural when we use Width.

Paul Thurrott (00:32:01):
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's where we're going. So yeah, you're gonna see in the PC space in general a lot of, well, it's, it's just gonna be part of the chip set. Is this gonna arrive? Just like Intel integrated Graphics at some point actually became pretty good, you know? M P U will just be part of each of these systems. This just the way it's gonna be.

Mikah Sargent (00:32:24):
Oh,

Paul Thurrott (00:32:25):
Okay.

Mikah Sargent (00:32:25):
Well, I think we can move on to talk about, and I was curious about this yeah, how much ai, how much new AI announcements we would see, how many new AI announcements we see at build versus what we would see ahead of time as Microsoft and many other companies are going, look, we're doing it too. Here's how we're doing it. Here's what we're doing. So you have a, a report here about Yeah. More.

Paul Thurrott (00:32:53):
This is Microsoft and Richard will know we'll smooth this too. I mean, they have an interesting history of we have a big developer show coming up in two weeks. Here's a developer announcement. <Laugh>, you know, they, they'll actually announce things before the show and it's like, guys, what are you doing? You have this, but, but the reason they're doing that is, well, a, they, they want to hit on this cycle, right? This is a popular thing right now, but also I think Bill is gonna be jam-packed with with AI announcements in particular, but also just announcements in general. So they released that session list a week or two ago. I think we, I'm sure we talked about that. There's a lot of AI stuff in there, but I think the bigger news, so to speak, is gonna be during the keynotes. We know Kevin Scott, who's never done a keynote at a major show like this Yeah. Is gonna be doing an AI keynote in particular this Microsoft C T o I should say. I think that's gonna be one to watch <laugh>, you know, if you're interested in this stuff. You know, build is just about a month away, right? So. Yep.

Rich Campbell (00:33:49):
I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if Sam Elman walks on stage at some point, like what? Meet

Paul Thurrott (00:33:54):
Course. Yep. Of

Rich Campbell (00:33:54):
Course. Yeah. He's not announced or anything, but it's just like, do the math and say, look what we're talking about here. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, why would we appear,

Paul Thurrott (00:34:01):
Hey, we didn't give you 11 billion not to appear on stage, buddy <laugh>, get out here. You know? Yeah. Of course he's got, yeah, absolutely. Of course. To a standing ovation, no doubt. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:34:12):
But you found the sessions that I found where they're, they pretty point blank about bring co-pilot to your company. I, I expect it's gonna be a very much a M 365 experience that you're going to, that you're, it's because you're in the Microsoft graph and your resources are there, right. That these tools will be able to tokenize elements of your data so that they can be identified and call and, and correlated quickly for a chat bot to work on. It's just to bes more and more like, this is a new ux, just another way to interface with your data. But yes, perhaps to do the thing you've always really struggled with. We just find out, you know, has somebody already made this report? Who else is working on these kinds of documents? Microsoft's made a bunch of attempts in this area. Like they, they made a product at one point called Delve. It's just said they dropped quick very quickly into that creepiness factor that people get really turned off by it and then the product goes away.

Paul Thurrott (00:35:10):
Yeah. Delve was the one that spied on users and said, Hey Bob's been taking a one hour and 15 minute lunch a couple days a week. Maybe we should see what's up with that. You know? Yeah, there was some weirdness there, but hey I, to me, the trick, look, Microsoft will have this stuff, it will be part of Microsoft 365. We all know this. We can imagine what word is gonna look like and how it's gonna help you write things. Right. Some, some of that stuff's easy. What I'm most curious about is how they bring this to third parties, right? Through Azure. I don't know anything about their existing Azure Open AI service, what these APIs look like, et cetera, et cetera. I, I literally have no idea. But what I have spent a lot of time with in the Microsoft software development space over the years is looking at their kind of UX frameworks, right?

(00:35:55):
And how that stuff has changed over time. And I gotta tell you, a, as impressive as some of the capabilities are in what I'll call like the.net era, the aml.net era I also think, I feel like things have gotten so complex that we've kinda lost the script a little bit on what's important and what's not important, like how developers wanna spend their time. And just a simple, like a simple example. Like I want to do something like color a, like a title bar in a window, which in VB was the, the flipping of a single property without writing any code as simplest thing in the world requires a lot of SAML and C sharp code. Actually C sharp code in this case for a modern application is, it's silly. You create modern apps style

Rich Campbell (00:36:36):
Sheets. That's a fun way.

Paul Thurrott (00:36:38):
Yeah. Yeah. But, well, yeah, I mean, there's just a complexity and there's a code kind of density. I think we talked about this a little bit, the ver verbosity of it. And I, I, I think for this to kind of take off with third parties, I, I hope they make it simple. And I know that sounds silly because it's AI and there's nothing simple about aa, but I think the benefit Microsoft can bring to this is to have all that stuff running on the backend and have simple services that run on top of it. They'll let you access that information. What you're basically doing is plugging in those data sources and saying, Hey, what do you wanna know? It, you know doing that VB thing where you would create like a, like a beautiful chart or a beautiful, maybe a data grid of backend data that visually shows you what you're looking for, but apply, you know, make that like an ai, an AI type backend or, well, I guess it would be an AI service running on top of the backend. So, we'll see. I don't, like I said, I don't know anything about it. Really curious to see how they present this. Cuz if it's anything like the quantum computing stuff they we're talking about a couple years ago, I, I can't hit my head against the wall enough to tell you how frustratingly difficult or how impossible that was to understand little, you know.

Rich Campbell (00:37:47):
No, I, it's quantum computing. If you can't understand it's cuz you don't understand it.

Paul Thurrott (00:37:51):
<Laugh>, <laugh>, exactly.

Rich Campbell (00:37:53):
At least those projects were all msr. Like they were not trying to sell you anything. They were not That's right. With anything you currently bought. It was a recent set of research projects. They had a huge blunder where they announced that they had found the marma firm on Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:38:07):
They had they had the breakthrough.

Rich Campbell (00:38:09):
They hadn't. Yeah. Yeah. So, and they, then they had to backtrack on all of that. So I, this is, they are productizing here. Like this is a set of products. I am concerned about the challenges of using your own data and know, you know, this kind of fights against that Dunn Krueger effect. Like all these chatbots are awesome when you know nothing about the subject. Yeah. When we start actually trying to put machine learning models over top of our own data where we know what the right answers are a lot of times and it keeps getting them wrong. Right. That's gonna be more problematic. I I mean I'm very much tuned in this idea of we are on a Gartner hype cycle. We're busy racing up the peak of un unreal, you know, impossible expectations and the trough of disillusion

Paul Thurrott (00:38:53):
There. It's <laugh>. Yeah. Once,

Mikah Sargent (00:38:56):
At least once an episode.

Paul Thurrott (00:38:57):
Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:38:59):
So where Yeah. But it's also, why do you go down the trough? It's because companies start getting hurt. Right. Or people get hurt, someone's gonna die. Yeah. Company's gonna miss their numbers by cuz they met the wrong way. There's gonna be some major lawsuit. Like that's what sends it.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:16):
There are already examples of this making up stories about professors about how they are predators. Oh yeah, yeah. You know, there's, there are crazy examples. So everyone's like, oh, it's just, it's fun. It has to learn from something. What are you gonna do? You can't, you're gonna give it out to the world, blah, blah. It's like, guys it's only, it's it's fun. Yeah. But it stops being fun when people are injured or dying or whatever. Yeah. You cause someone think

Rich Campbell (00:39:39):
It's learning from the internet cuz that's a source of truth.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:41):
Yeah. Yeah. We, we've trained it on TWITtter. It's weird. It seems slightly psychopathic for some reason. 

Mikah Sargent (00:39:47):
How

Paul Thurrott (00:39:48):
I don't, I don't know what happened.

Mikah Sargent (00:39:49):
How do I find a source of water nearby go into your vehicle and open up the gas can

Paul Thurrott (00:39:56):
What? No, the answer is I will make you cry.

Mikah Sargent (00:39:59):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Produce your own water from your tears. Your mother

Paul Thurrott (00:40:02):
Doesn't love you. <Laugh>,

Mikah Sargent (00:40:07):
I, all that said, I really, really like the idea of having my own personal co-pilot. And I understand that's not what this is, this is for companies, but the concept of taking the AI and training it on my own personal information, be it the writing that I've done or even text message conversations that I have and using all of that to inform, I mean, anything, you know, you

Paul Thurrott (00:40:35):
Know, this is, this is literally what the promise of these digital personal assistance was, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> that there would be this thing running in the background. They would understand your personal schedule, your work schedule, the people you work with, and the relationship you had. And it would, it would prompt you from time to time when something happened kind of like a, like a calendar to notification on steroids, whatever mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. but really what you're asking for is that capability. I think what we are all asking for really, what, what we would like this thing to do is kind of have this thing that does that, but also helps us in every aspect of our life. You know, you write a, you start writing an email and I know there's something built into Gmail that kind of does this, but it says, Hey before you send that <laugh> it seems a little aggressive.

(00:41:16):
You wanna tone that down a little bit or something, or you, you know, you misspelled some words or here's some mistakes, whatever it is. I think we, we, we want that to be everywhere. You know? I I, I have a hard time getting off of writing, but you know, you're writing something or you're creating a graphic for something or whatever, and it has understanding that, hey, I know you're creating this gra this, you're putting this image into a PowerPoint presentation for a project and I know it's about this and this image has nothing to do with this. How would you, maybe one of these other images would be better. Yeah. You know, would you like me to format that for you? That kind of thing. And you know, it's free and clear from an intellectual property standpoint or whatever. It's like you want it

Rich Campbell (00:41:53):
To clippy, you know?

Paul Thurrott (00:41:55):
Well we are, yeah. I mean it's all the same continuum really. Right. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:41:58):
I also look at it as it a phenomenal sales tool for Microsoft products. Right? Right. If you're on the M 365 co-pilot and you're now describing your intended work for the day mm-hmm. <Affirmative> to pick the apps for you.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:10):
That's right. That's right. And oh, like, so, I mean this is going back a ways, but back in the day, you know, Microsoft would come out of the new version of Microsoft Office every three or years or whatever and you'd go to some place, they'd have review's workshop and they would have some Microsoft guy woman do a demo of like all the awesome new stuff that was in across the product. The Chris Microsoft office is several applications at the time most of which no one ever uses. Right. So it was important that whatever scenario they came up with, you had to step through every single application in the suite to get this project done. And it was always this really convoluted mess to try to arrive at that. Cuz that's not how anyone works. Right? <laugh>. And the truth is, even if it somehow made sense to use all seven of the apps or whatever it was that were available in the suite, nobody knows all seven of themselves. You know, most people are good at like one or two of them. And and I think what Richard is describing is how that becomes possible. This nonsense scenario from the past becomes reality. Because now you don't really necessarily have to be an expert in each of those applications. It will guide you through the parts of 'em you need to arrive at the other end. Whatever the project is you're working on. It's kind of an interesting idea.

Rich Campbell (00:43:15):
I mean, overcome, you know, the main thing away every time you look at a new app is will this app help me? Yeah. So the fact that you have an overconfident piece of software saying this app will help you. Sure. You know, you're, you're overdoing that piece right away. It's like, now let me take you down the tutorial. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> actually includes your work in your learning piece as you learn it. It's, that's compelling. Yeah. The reality is you own these apps. You're already paying for your E three or your E five or whatever accounts you've got in M 365. Just dunno how to use them so that, that tool could really help.

Paul Thurrott (00:43:45):
That's yeah. So I, the problem I described earlier when it was just Microsoft Office and a suite of applications has exponentially multiplied, but the introduction of office and then Microsoft 365 because anyone who subscribes to this should probably go to the website and look at all the apps. Cuz I bet you don't know half of them even exist. <Laugh>, you know they've

Rich Campbell (00:44:04):
All made up icons, you know? Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:44:06):
Yeah, yeah. If somebody worked on the icons, they created them. They're kind of nice looking, some of them. And you had no idea those apps even existed, but there they are. 

Rich Campbell (00:44:15):
Yeah. I just wonder about the war inside of Microsoft or mm-hmm. <Affirmative> who gets, whose product gets recommended first for what task.

Paul Thurrott (00:44:21):
That's right. Right.

Rich Campbell (00:44:23):
That, that's gonna be a good jello fight right there.

Paul Thurrott (00:44:25):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yep.

Mikah Sargent (00:44:27):
All right. We need to take a quick break before we round out the, an AI topic. 

Paul Thurrott (00:44:33):
I wanna actually we could, we could just round it out. I think we're done. Oh, if it's a quick one we just, yeah, just real quick we mentioned Microsoft Spring and a bunch of AI developers. I wanted to say Amazon also announced some developer generative AI tools and technologies. The key one being bedrock this more actually to that. But everyone's doing it right except Apple, but the <laugh> Apple, you know, they'll get there, they, apple tends to show up from V3 and then they're like, wow, they really kind of hit that one another park, didn't they? Those bastards. So they'll get there. I'm sure they'll get there too

Mikah Sargent (00:45:04):
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Be a part of more than 1 million users who join Murro every month. Leo and I use Murro for our show. Ask the tech guys because it is a great way to have, again, everything in one place. I think if you're thinking about this as a whiteboard tool alone, then you're not quite getting the full concept and the full understanding of what it can do because it keeps you from having to switch contexts. And when you don't have to switch contexts as much, then you are holding onto those ideas. You're staying in the flow. And so having, you know, every episode, having all the information that I need, questions that people have asked, actually being piped in from email or from TWITtter or from wherever it happens to be as well as my show notes, all of that all together on one whiteboard is so nice and it's great to not have to switch between tabs and apps and move from here to there.

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Paul Thurrott (00:48:36):
Are we? Oh yeah, we're

Mikah Sargent (00:48:37):
<Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:48:38):
Oh, you bet we are. Yeah. So between today and our previous show there have been two builds, each released to the Devin Beta channels, I think <laugh>. But certainly today we had two, we had one of each and I, I believe last, late last week, we had one of each as well. But today's new builds nothing major, right. But the dev build is adding the ability, I would say Redding, the ability to remove the time and date area from the system tray, which is kind of interesting if you want to get rid of that for some reason. And then speaking of behaviors from the past they're gonna change the hover behavior on search. This is something that was broken after 22 H two came out late last year, and they released that search bill update that they never told anybody about. The way that search on Windows 11 and worked in the past was that you would mouse over the search icon and you would see a jump list of your previous searches. So you could just click on one of those, skip back that ended with the search pill. It doesn't work with the search bar. They're looking at bringing it back. So there you go. That only took six to nine months, depending on how you measure things. And

Mikah Sargent (00:49:49):
Gestation period for

Paul Thurrott (00:49:51):
A human <laugh>. Yeah. And then in the beta channel, they're adding a feature that was previously tested in the dev channel, still in the dev channel called Content Adaptive Brightness Control. And this is just a way to individually control the pixels on the screen based on co what content is there. So you could have a part of the screen that was a certain brightness level and another part that's a different brightness level, which I think is something we already see on mobile. But anyway, a good idea on the backlight being adjustable too, right? Yeah, based on the All Monitors have, yeah. Also it's enabled by the PC maker, so not everyone will see it. So it's probably something you'll see in New PCs, basically going forward or if they decide to support in, in existing PCs. And then for you RDC fans out there, you will enjoy this.

(00:50:38):
The first redesign of the remote desktop Connection app in, I'm gonna say forever, I don't think it's ever changed. If you're familiar with this app it works. If you use Hyper V, which I'm gonna talk about later, you see it there too. But when you go full screen, you get that little trapezoidal shape at the top that gives you like the pin and the different things you can do. They have, because they're really prioritizing what is important and what isn't. That will be adopting a Windows 11 look and feel sometime soon, <laugh>. So honestly, get an

Rich Campbell (00:51:10):
Update to RDP was Windows 11, look and feel All right.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:14):
It might literally be the only update that has ever occurred to this app. I don't think it's ever been, I could be wrong, but I don't think it's ever been updated. And then late last week we got two other updates. This one's kind of interesting on a couple of levels, but they're adding a, well, they're actually gonna call it Gallery. It's a view in File Explorer. So if you're looking at a folder full of photos, it will do a gallery view, which doesn't just look like, but is in fact identical to the all photos view in the photos app that's in Windows 11, which is actually kind of nice. You can scroll down, you can go by you, we'll show you the years of all the photos and stuff. You can, you can makes, makes it easy to kind of get through a big set of photos.

(00:51:54):
 But the interesting thing about this to me is not that they're adding it to Photo Gallery. I mean this is, or to a pilot store. This is kind of something Microsoft has worked on on and off since, I don't know, windows Vista, basically. I mean, it's been stuff like this actually even, I guess even Windows xp, technically it's something a little bit like this. But rather that functionality that literally clearly came right out of the Photos app as being integrated elsewhere. We just learned that Microsoft Edge got the photo editing functionality from the Photos app. Yeah, I think in, yeah, actually in the stable shipping version. So if you have one, whatever the version of one 11 I think is the current version you actually have a way to edit images on the web using the exact interface that you use in the Photos app, but built into the Edge application. So it's kind of interesting seeing them bring that functionality elsewhere. So that's kind of cool. And then separately, they're also

Rich Campbell (00:52:48):
Into Windows. Like this is a Yeah, you know, this used to be the Microsoft's whole shtick, right? The embrace Xtend extinguished kind of mindset where you take an app and just make it part of Windows. Now they're doing it to their own apps

Paul Thurrott (00:52:59):
And they're doing it to parts of their apps. Like, it's kind of like a component of an app, you know, if you will. It's kind of interesting. Yeah, I don't know. It

Rich Campbell (00:53:05):
Also simplifies your interface. Like you, you go look for files first and you look for pictures, and then you're already got your tools in. Why do you then have to go to an app and navigate to that folder to get to those photos?

Paul Thurrott (00:53:19):
Yeah, that's actually, that's, I mean, that's always been the central dilemma of photo management probably on any system is do you do it right in the file system, which to me has always worked out pretty well. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> or do you do it in a dedicated app? Right. So they're, they're

Rich Campbell (00:53:36):
Towards the file system mindset.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:38):
Well, they've been screwing around with Files <laugh> for a lot lately. So obviously with 22 H two they added the tabs. There's a session at Build where they're gonna talk about how they added the Windows app sdk to File Explorer, which is kind of interesting because they were using something called SAML Islands to get this kind of modern look and feel in File Explorer, which is a classic, you know, WIN 32 app, really under the covers. What they found was that it was too limited and they had to contort it for their own needs, which is not something they could provide to the public. So they went with the Windows app to SDK and mark my words. What you're gonna discover is they had to contort that to their own needs too, and that whatever they did to FOL for is not gonna be something you're gonna be able to do in your own app. So I guarantee I a hundred percent guarantee it, but I will wait and see. I can't wait, but we'll see. Anyway, there's been a lot going on with File Explorer, which is kind of neat because File Explorer, you know, is an app that's based or Explorer aac it's been around since Windows

Rich Campbell (00:54:37):
The younger generation. A lot of them don't think about files at all. Yeah. You know, they, that they don't know where study, there was a great set of articles written recently from multiple sources we were talking about. They just don't know where their files are put because that's not a thing.

Paul Thurrott (00:54:49):
That's not a thing. You make trust people like these people, they don't know. They know this is not, that's not acceptable. You need to know where your files are. Well,

Rich Campbell (00:54:59):
Do you, do you really

Paul Thurrott (00:55:01):
<Laugh>? I think you do. Well as long as you know, they're safe. I guess,

Mikah Sargent (00:55:04):
What is it? It's 5:00 PM Do you know where your files are?

Paul Thurrott (00:55:07):
Yeah. Your files were right where you left them. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:55:09):
Yeah. I, I know what you're talking about, Richard. That's the problem. The professors specifically there was a professor of like graphic design or some sort of art, and they had to teach their students how to install font files because Right. The concept of a desktop and where you put files in what folder to make things work was specific

Rich Campbell (00:55:31):
Structure. I mean, and again, these are all metaphors. You're created for the limitations and machines at the time mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Sure. The question is, are those metaphors still relevant? Do we have to know any of this stuff? You know, in a, now I'm pulling up the IT hat, right? Like in a zero trust world Sure. Where my identity associates to that file associates to the resources that are available to me, that is a sufficient, unless you have my identity, you cannot access those files. You cannot see those files and knowing the details of how and where the story is kind of irrelevant.

Paul Thurrott (00:56:03):
So, right. And, and this is they can apply to us to a lot of different things. So back in the day, and actually I'm sure today a lot of old timers especially will organize their email into folders, right? And they, they get an email from work and they, they either use a rule or they just move it over and like, this goes there and this goes there. And they do this because they wanna be able to find things. Right. And my against this now is when you can use search to find anything instantly, maybe it doesn't matter so much, right? Yeah. And I ha I will say I have found, I use a very specific files structure for, and I use OneDrive. Every once in a while I can't find something that I'm looking for. And what I've found is I don't search in Windows because that doesn't, that never works. That's hilarious. You can, but I do want, you're just, you can, but, but I, but my, but my time's valuable. So what I do is I go to onedrive.com on the web, and I just, I don't have to go into a folder. I just search for the thing. Any part of it. It finds it instantly, I mean, every single time. So yeah. That's,

Mikah Sargent (00:56:58):
That's interesting what you're saying, Paul, because we had someone call in on Ask the Tech guys and was saying, I, I'm trying to figure out how to speed up my search every time I try to search for something on windows computer, it takes forever to find what I'm looking for. I've got, they had like two OneDrive drives, I guess, and they just couldn't get anything. So you actually don't use the built-in

Paul Thurrott (00:57:21):
No, I, there, so there's a, so there's a lot of back and forth on this, right? I'm sure what you guys looked at was like the indexing options dial. Yep. Like that still exists in Windows, which is kind of crazy. And you can go in and you can kind of screw around with that. You can say like, what, what is this thing gonna index? You know, yada, yada, yada. Technically everything, if you're using OneDrive and you know, to, for your files, I mean, and, and it's inside your user profile unless you moved it it that's indexed like they should, it should find that stuff very quickly. My experience, <laugh> is that that's not how that works. So if it's super important, I just need to get going. My, I just use the, the web search always works,

Mikah Sargent (00:57:59):
Always works. Someone is saying, use everything to search quickly for files on Windows. Is everything an app? Is everything? Search? yeah, I don't know. I don't know what everything is. They, yeah. Okay. Anyway, sorry that that was not No,

Paul Thurrott (00:58:16):
It's okay. No, back, back in the day, you know, this was a key thing they were gonna solve in Longhorn, right? And one of the embarrassing things that came out during that era was Apple saw that Microsoft was struggling to release Longhorn. And they said, how much of this can we do quick? And there's a, there's an amazing, probably couple, but at one, I can remember in particular of keynotes for Apple events where they added what Sherlock, it was probably called at the time, but whatever, desktop search to Tiger, I think it was. And it was instant. And the interface was very reminiscent of what they had in iTunes. In fact, they they compared, it says, they said, we already created this great indexing, you know, technology for iTunes, so we're gonna use it in in the Finder, you know, and they just made Microsoft look stupid.

(00:59:01):
And the hilarious thing is that when Windows Vista finally ship, that's not hilarious. It's sad, really. But is that we never had this thing we promised everybody. It all got instant desktop search. It all got, you know, it all went fi because, you know, win Fs never happened. And yeah, all these ideas they had for the file system, all that code ended up in other places. But they, the things they were proposing in 2003 never came to no. And so that's always been kind of an Achilles heel on the Windows side. I mean, I, interestingly, I might have been 22 H two, they, they were just talking about this again, they Microsoft about making desktop search more instantaneous. But I, that's, I don't know. Not to me, it's never been great.

Mikah Sargent (00:59:40):
I did wanna follow up. It's a search tool from void tools.com. Okay. And there's, there are rave reviews in the chat room about using everything to search on Microsoft or excuse me, on Windows via the

Paul Thurrott (00:59:56):
Desktop. That's interesting. Okay.

Mikah Sargent (00:59:58):
Alright, let us move right along here to your next topic.

Paul Thurrott (01:00:05):
Yes. As we mentioned surface earlier there are rumors now from credible sources who say that Microsoft is looking at making a smaller version of the Surface Pro, cuz it's not small enough and a, an arm version of Surface go because that wasn't underpowered enough. So there's some two good decisions right there, <laugh>. I, I don't, here's my frustration with Surface because I actually, maybe I'm an outlier here. I really like Surface PCs for the most part. I think Surface Laptop, I know it's a kind of an MacBook or knock off what I think it's beautiful. I think it's a great laptop. Surface book back, i, i two surface books. I can see from here. I really always really like Surface Book, although I never used it as a clipboard, you know, you take it apart kind of a thing. I never really needed that.

(01:00:49):
I liked it as a nice laptop. I don't have a Surface laptop studio, but I suspect I would love it. <Laugh>, you know, and maybe the, a future one of those is maybe that's what Richard ends up with, I guess we'll see. But these, these computers are not particularly popular for reasons that I don't quite understand. It seems like the only thing they've made that's ever sold, well, relatively speaking, is that Surface Pro Design, which I know is the original surface, but really what we're looking at is the thing that they viewed with Surface Pro three when they went to the three by two screen. It, it seems like they just hit on this nice form factor and they're like a, it's like a pop band that can't keep re-releasing the same song over and over again. Like all of their music sounds exactly the

Rich Campbell (01:01:33):
Same. Make versions of it now.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:34):
Yeah. Yeah. It's a little strange because there have been, in addition to the Surface Pro Line itself there was, you know, the surface go, there was Surface three, there was Surface. Remember we had Surface Pro and Surface. Right? Surface two, surface three. I I I just feel like, I mean, do we have enough tablets? Guys? Could, I mean, <laugh>, like how many it's, and

Rich Campbell (01:01:59):
They're really laptops. It's just a question of Yeah. How kind of keyboard you get, what's the overall form factor? But sure, the pros the hit, right? They, they, they're, they're made 10 versions of the thing.

Paul Thurrott (01:02:10):
That's crazy. I I just, I I, I appreciate, it's probably frustrating for them. They did invite Invent, well, that's a strong word, but they formalized the form factor, let's call it that. Everyone else is copied, right? They, once the Surface Pro came out in Surface Pro three form, anyway there, everyone has one now. Meaning like Lenovo, Dell, hp, et cetera. Like, everyone makes something like that. For those other companies, those are not the successful products, right? Those companies all make really successful laptops.

Rich Campbell (01:02:43):
Well, and I don't know how successful any of these machines are for Microsoft. I've always looked at them as reference machines. Yeah, yeah. They're setting the bar so that they, the other vendors can live underneath it, which is also why they're expensive, right? For what you get, you can get a better deal for auto comparable for Harmon's Machine Yeah. From a Dell or a Lenovo. And it's been less

Paul Thurrott (01:03:05):
No, it's true, it's true. I, I, I don't, I, listen, I it's not the Microsoft logo. There's something about these computers that I really dislike and, and it's, it's, it's awkward because if somebody who was non-technical came to me and said, Hey, I wanna buy a new computer, I would never recommend a Surface ever. I just can't. I, I don't, I wouldn't want anything to happen. I just can't know. I don't know that I can trust this company.

Rich Campbell (01:03:29):
You, you have some scar tissue there have, but you can't say that of any of the recent ones.

Paul Thurrott (01:03:36):
No, that's the thing. And that's, that's right. That's a good point. So there, there was a real low point with surface, you know, surface Pro four and Surface Book one where, where everything went kind of south from a quality and reliability perspective.

Rich Campbell (01:03:50):
And, and that would, and it's

Paul Thurrott (01:03:51):
Kinda, it's calmed down

Rich Campbell (01:03:53):
Hardware, like it was their fault.

Paul Thurrott (01:03:55):
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. 100%. And that has really calmed down in recent years mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So

Rich Campbell (01:04:01):
They've learned to make PCs for better or worse. Like Panos team has got it figured out now. Yeah. I think the studios are a unique machine. They're not for everybody. Right. But again, if you look at it as the reference machine, they set high bars in places they don't, and they don't promote it in a way that's like, like Apple setss a high bar too, but they promote that high bar to their consumer. I don't, I think Microsoft doesn't even try and promote us at the consumer level for the most part. Right. I see them as they're popular in corporate spaces, right? Like I know plenty of, of IT folk, you know, that, that are running as listeners where Yeah. All, all of their portable workstations that they provide right. Are surface pros.

Paul Thurrott (01:04:46):
I wonder if there's some licensing ease here. You know, that they're, we're already essay on essay or something and, and it's just, you know, we're, we're licensing this and this and this, and we, it may, you know, may they make it easy. You have a single source for this stuff. Yeah. I mean, we've come a long way from the dancing school girls with the cliquey <laugh> tablets. Remember from the first Yes. Second generation, whatever that was

Rich Campbell (01:05:10):
Yeah. When they were showing off the key keyboard. Yeah. A few times that you've ever seen Apple make fun of a Microsoft technology the way Microsoft often made fun of Apple technology. <Laugh> back fired in their face.

Paul Thurrott (01:05:22):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. Yeah. It's like combining it, what was it? A a refrigerator and a toaster. Yeah. What was the combination?

Rich Campbell (01:05:30):
It's like, it looks like people like to dance with a refrigerator toaster. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (01:05:35):
True. Well, to which I replied, you know, people do like to combine some things. Like a, a microwave in, in an oven is pretty good. Pretty popular, right? <Laugh>? I don't like our toaster in an oven. I mean, whatever.

Mikah Sargent (01:05:48):
Yeah. I really like my blender, air fryer. That's nice. Good mix. Alright, let's take a quick break before we come back.

Paul Thurrott (01:05:56):
It's wet and dry.

Mikah Sargent (01:05:57):
<Laugh>. It's both wet. It's, it's odd. It's weird. <Laugh>. I can, I can make a fried smoothie. I wanna tell you about Cisco Meraki who are bringing you this episode of Windows Weekly. Cisco Meraki are the experts in cloud-based networking for hybrid work. Whether you're employees are working at home at a cabin in the mountains, or on a lounge chair at the beach with their surface laptop, a cloud managed network provides the same exceptional work experience no matter where they are. If you thought hybrid work was going someplace, you would be thinking wrong. It's here to stay. Hybrid work works best in the cloud and has its perks for both employees and for leaders. Workers can move faster, they can deliver better results. And with a cloud managed network, it all works seamlessly. While leaders can automate distributed operations, build more sustainable workspaces, and proactively protect the network.

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This is integrating devices and systems, which allows the IT to manage, to update and to troubleshoot company owned devices, even when the device and employee are in a remote location. So you can turn any space into a place of productivity and empower your organization with the same exceptional experience no matter where they work. With Meraki and the Cisco suite of technology, learn how your organization can make hybrid work work. Visit meraki.cisco.com/TWITt and we thank Cisco Meraki for sponsoring this week's episode of Windows Weekly. All right, we are back to the show with Paul Throt and Richard Campbell, and it's time to head into Xbox Corner.

Paul Thurrott (01:08:36):
That'd be a fun little podcast. <Laugh>, so we're past the middle of the month, so we're kind of overdue for news on what's coming to Xbox Game Pass over the second half of the month. But Microsoft came through, I think just today, if not mistaken. Bunch of stuff. Two of these stand out for me. Minecraft Legends just came out today, is that correct? No, yesterday. So I've actually been, I've been playing that a bit. That's actually a pretty good game. So kind of a, an action adventure game in the Minecraft space, if that makes sense. You know, if you're familiar with Minecraft, you know, you create your own little world and bad things happen and you kind of have to deal with that stuff. And it's, it's basically just enemies take over the world and you have to go fight them and stuff. It's, it's, it's pretty good. And then of course red Fall which unfortunately will only run it 30 frames per second on your Xbox Series X when it first arrives, but it eventually will hit 60 frame per second, like a big boy game. But anyway, that's coming. Among the gaming streaming services I did not know existed, there was something called Ubisoft Plus. So Ubisoft makes the assassin screen games, they make the far car games. This thing is on pc, I think is,

Mikah Sargent (01:09:57):
I am so mad. Paul Throt.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:00):
Okay, what happened?

Mikah Sargent (01:10:01):
I have been subscribed to Ubisoft Plus for quite some time because I play assassins Creed Valhalla on Amazon's Luna, it's cloud streaming system. Then my partner got a,

Paul Thurrott (01:10:14):
Hold on a second. Why do you have to subscribe to Ubisoft Plus though? What, what It wouldn't it make make sense just to buy the one game?

Mikah Sargent (01:10:19):
No. So with Amazon Luna, actually, that probably, I, I think I may have been able to do that, but I was able to play a bunch of different Ubisoft games, so I wanted to, I okay. And what I ended up doing was I just stuck with Valhalla. So yeah. Then the, the problem with it was that I had to constantly have a ethernet. It, it just, even with the, the fast wifi that I had and with an iPhone that had Fast.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:43):
How, how were you, you were playing, how were you playing the, where were you playing the game? On,

Mikah Sargent (01:10:47):
On an iPad? That, or on a Mac, an iPad. I could, I could do iPad.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:51):
Are you using a Luna Controller?

Mikah Sargent (01:10:52):
Yeah. And you used an Amazon Luna controller, so that was great, right? Well then my partner ended up getting a PlayStation five, and I wanted to play it on the plays PlayStation five, and you

Paul Thurrott (01:11:03):
Had to start over

Mikah Sargent (01:11:04):
And I had to buy the game for the PlayStation five. Oh.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:09):
Because Right. It wasn't available. It's still not available on Sony. That's right. Correct. And yeah, so this is new to Xbox, so, so if it's gonna Xbox, I wonder if it'll eventually, well actually you would know, how much do you pay for this thing every month, the version you're using? Is it nine or 15? Nine $15? It's $15 a month. So it's expensive for this kind of thing. It's very expensive because it's just one company's games. Right. I mean, I would say those two franchises are the big ones. They have a few others, but that's, that's the big stuff. And

Rich Campbell (01:11:36):
It's back stack too, like far Christ six is visually impressive, but a stupid game. Far

Paul Thurrott (01:11:42):
Cry. Yeah. Far Cry is phenomenal. Far Cry five was not crazy. Yeah. yeah. Yep. Kind of hit or Well, assassins Cree games like that too. So supposedly the next one's kind of gonna go back to the classic, original style, but I always do the same thing in the sa I did this with Val Hella, unfortunately, I, the previous scan, the one that took place in Egypt was like this, whatever that was called, where you get in the game, it's beautiful. And you played the beginning and then you're like, I don't know, <laugh>, I just couldn't, I just couldn't get it, you know what I mean? Like, I, I like the, I played the beginning and it's like, yeah, I dunno. I get it. I guess we're going on a boat now or something. Oh, I don't know. That's, that makes me sad.

(01:12:18):
That's a really, no, don't, no, no. These things are all very subjective and you have purple facing games. That's fine. <Laugh>. So <laugh>. No, just, you're right. So yeah, so <laugh>, I know, I know that you like No, no. Ubisoft Plus was previously unavailable on PC and Amazon Luna. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So there's a new version called Ubisoft Multi-Access, which is the premium tier. And that's actually, maybe that's pre-existing, maybe multi access means multi platform. And so it's adding support for the Xbox or it did add support for the Xbox. So I looked at this and I was like, ah, geez. I mean, it's like kind of a tough add on price, you know, if you're already paying for an Xbox Game Pass subscription or something, it'd be kind of cool to get these games somehow. I don't know. So yeah, it's interesting that they're coming

Rich Campbell (01:13:08):
That Netflix, Disney, paramount, like too many subscriptions

Paul Thurrott (01:13:13):
Passed. Yep. Yeah, exactly. Right. At

Rich Campbell (01:13:15):
The same time, these companies can't make a living selling a title straight up anymore. Right. Too expensive to make. They need an ongoing revenue model. But this is the battle that Microsoft had over office a decade ago. Yeah. And now they've succeeded in pretty much you buy M 365 for whatever a month per seat, and the gaming industry is trying to do the same.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:38):
Yeah, I don't hmm. I did. Yeah. I mean, I tried like I I think it was far, far Cry five, I played on Stadia of all things, so I mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I'll make all kinds of good decisions <laugh>. So yeah, I don't know.

Rich Campbell (01:13:52):
But it, now, when you look at it in the context of these kinds of, you know, subscription models, Microsoft buying up every game company you lay their hands on does make sense,

Paul Thurrott (01:14:01):
Right?

Rich Campbell (01:14:02):
Because people don't want 15 different subscription.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:04):
Yeah. Actually, that's gonna be part of the back of the book, because I feel like the offering that Microsoft has which by the way is less expensive than this <laugh>. So, makes a lot of sense. We'll get to that. But yeah, I just feel like this thing's a little too expensive, but

Mikah Sargent (01:14:18):
I, I think the one thing about it is that was at first at least made it worth it. If I had, if I hadn't put such a pause between when I started playing and then when I picked it up every now and then, it wouldn't be so expensive, was that you get like, the most premium version of the game. So you get all of the downloaded pa you know, which you end up buying. I get,

Paul Thurrott (01:14:37):
I

Mikah Sargent (01:14:37):
Get it. But yeah, at this

Paul Thurrott (01:14:39):
Point, that's true. I mean, that's true on you know, game Pass. If you wanna play Fight Simulator, you get the, you know, you don't get the bass version, you get the, the, the awesome version, but yeah. Yeah. That's, that's, yeah, that makes sense.

Mikah Sargent (01:14:51):
If you're committed to playing it within a period of time, you know for the next three or four months at most, then it doesn't end up adding up as much as if you just keep

Paul Thurrott (01:15:00):
Yeah. So we don't know what's gonna happen on the Sony side, but I would expect this service to come to Sony. Right. Yeah. And maybe there's an exclusivity window for Microsoft or something. I have no idea. But I, there's no way this isn't coming to the PlayStation, so it will happen, and then it gets, so did you actually end up buying it on the PlayStation?

Mikah Sargent (01:15:18):
I bought it flat out.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:19):
So you would've had to, you had to start over then,

Mikah Sargent (01:15:20):
Right? No, that was, thank God, because if you have an Ubisoft account, then it linked, oh, there you go.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:26):
That's, oh, great. That's good. Okay, that's cool.

Mikah Sargent (01:15:28):
So it wasn't a completely a waste, but it was, you know, I had to buy it <laugh> again. Sure, sure. Straight out.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:35):
Okay. I would say that Amazon Luna today is probably the best. Well, well, we're gonna get to this, but in terms of latency, if you have that controller, it's pretty good. Yeah. And that type of game, that's not quite, it's not, it's a third person game, I know, but it's not quite the rapid action of like a first person shooter. Right. It's probably, it's, it's right in the pocket for what's good for game streaming, I would say. Like high quality graphics, but also good action and stuff. It's probably in the right space for that kind of game, if that makes sense.

Mikah Sargent (01:16:01):
I agree. Yeah. I I was impressed with it for that. But I know people who are, you know, hardcore gamers who you do need to have that trigger action happen as immediate as possible, who would be a little upset with it.

Paul Thurrott (01:16:16):
Yep. Yeah, no, that's, we're gonna talk, like, we're gonna talk, like I said, about game well, game Pass Ultimate, which has game cloud gaming, which is the streaming service Microsoft have, it's gotten better, but it's a little tough for third person shooters, let's put it that way. Okay. what else do we got here? So, in the wake of the debacle that is Halo Infinite <laugh> I have expected Microsoft to tear Halo away from 3 43 Industries, which is the game studio that is responsible for this. Now that Bungee is gone. And that hasn't happened, but a lot of the people in charge, or in the higher the executive part of 3 43 have been leaving the company, which I don't think is coincidental. And the creative head for Halo Infinite left Microsoft to join Netflix games where he will create a new AAA Multiplatform game in original ip. Interesting. Hmm. Yeah. So I, you granted, Netflix is all of a sudden one of the big opportunities in the gaming space, I guess. But I, I think there's there's been a lot of call for shake up in the Halo world, so maybe that isn't so surprising. I don't mean to dump on this guy.

Mikah Sargent (01:17:26):
If there's one company that has figured out how to stream content to people whose connections can be as bad as, I don't know, somebody spitting peas across the space Yeah. To get the data to them, it is Netflix. So I find this, I think this is a cool, I if they go further than what they've done right now, because right now it's, I think garbage stuff. But if they make a true streaming gaming system or platform in the future, I, I

Paul Thurrott (01:17:55):
Really, so I want that to be, I want it to be successful really badly. And the reason is I want them to take it out of the stupid Netflix app and put it in its own app so I don't have to see it <laugh> like, I mean, they're, they're clearly trying to push it on the audience. Right. That makes sense. But I want, I, Netflix games should be its own thing. I don't think that has anything to do with video streaming. It's not like my wife and I are sitting here on the couch one night, we're like, do you wanna play an interactive game or do you want to just couch potato with and watch a movie or something, you know, like this, this is not the same activity for a lot of people. I know. Maybe it is for some, but

Rich Campbell (01:18:27):
Yeah. And Netflix needs to diversify, right? Like yeah. They, they have licensing other people's content to stream on their very good streaming engine. And those other people are now pulling their product, their content back to do their own bad streaming services.

Paul Thurrott (01:18:41):
<Laugh>. Right.

Rich Campbell (01:18:42):
And Netflix has tried to make their own stuff, and some of it's been pretty good, and some of it's not been good at all. Yeah. So if they can put together right team together in crank out any billion dollar hit, like there's only a dozen a year. But if they get, if they can snag one or two of those over the next few years, they've got something. If you could make a Call of Duty that was streamed from very beginning, that was just part of your monthly package, it was never anything else, and it was part of your Netflix account that will help carry that company. You know Val, they remember that the guys at Valve stopped making Halflife because they make

Paul Thurrott (01:19:16):
Dota damn those people.

Rich Campbell (01:19:19):
But Dota two makes so much money, but it's

Paul Thurrott (01:19:22):
Not halfway <laugh>. It's this, this kills me so much. I would, I, right now, I would give them hundreds of dollars to play a new Halflife. And they, I am literally be, I know. So I haven't written this up yet, I haven't even done it yet, but there's a, there's a tip out there in the world now that you can download off of GitHub, the files you need to run the Alex game, which is the vr halflife experience without VR at all. It's the whole game. So Halflife, Alex cus 60 Bucks, which crazy to me. But you can buy that from steam and then you can download these files for free from GitHub and you can just play the game. And this is what I wanna do. I wanna play another half-life game. <Laugh>, I don't understand why

Rich Campbell (01:20:02):
Back that

Paul Thurrott (01:20:02):
World, these guys don't get this. How do you not just have a team of people just working on

Rich Campbell (01:20:06):
This? Yeah. They found a way to make even more money.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:09):
Oh boy.

Rich Campbell (01:20:10):
I dunno. Yeah, that's reality. And it, and it also speaks to the monthly revenue games as opposed to the package games just make more money. And so that's where the talent goes.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:22):
I hate this world. Okay. God, it's so frustrating. It's, it's, it's dangerous for me to love things cuz they always get this destroyed. Oh, oh, oh yeah, I really like you, by the way, <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (01:20:39):
Oh, great.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:41):
It's funny,

Mikah Sargent (01:20:41):
When I'm watching shows, I will sometimes find myself accidentally saying out loud, oh, I really like that character. And then immediately we go, no, no, that's the worst character possible.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:50):
It's nice, like right then. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:20:51):
If you, if you quickly say no, you're just no, I don't like that character, then they, then

Paul Thurrott (01:20:55):
They're fine. That's <laugh> that's my special skill with restaurants. If I ever start liking a restaurant too much, it just drops off the planet. Yeah, it's, yeah. Any who, okay, so there's that, that guy. And then this doesn't deserve too much time, but let's just say that Microsoft has been frigging around with the Xbox UI since there's been an Xbox and it's never once gotten it right, but it reached ludicrous proportions during the Xbox One timeframe where they kept replacing it, kept replacing it, kept replacing it. Eventually over time they realized they, there was nothing, despite the fact that this thing was, you know, at the time, a really powerful console. They basically figured out there's nothing we can do to make this thing faster. So the only thing we can do now is just make it more efficient. Meaning we'll take it few, you know, fewer clicks to get to the thing you want to do, which, you know, should have been the UI from the beginning.

(01:21:43):
But you get to the Xbox Series X and S today, and it's the same, you know, they brought over the same ui, but they've been screwing around with it. And and people just hate, no matter what they do, everyone hates it. You know, so they've released a new version of the dashboard and people are like, I can't see my backdrop. And I'm like, you know, this thing should be like the Google search homepage, right? I'm here for, to do one thing. There's a, in this case, I'm typing something into a box and when I go to, when I turn on my Xbox, I wanna see like the last couple of games I played and then have a button for everything else. Cuz pretty much that's why I'm there. And I don't know why they don't quite get that, but I guess people, people are gonna complain no matter what they do. So whatever the new dashboard is, they just release, don't worry, they're gonna replace it in two weeks. That's how Microsoft works. So that's happening. And then after this being rumored for a couple weeks, it finally happened Sega announced this week that they're going to buy the makers of Angry Bird, which yes, they, they still make Angry Bird, by the way. This thing still makes millions and millions of dollars a quarter different versions of it

Rich Campbell (01:22:45):
Gives you a hint like, holy man, that's a lot of money for a game where you chuck birds through the air.

Paul Thurrott (01:22:50):
Yeah. Well, when that game first came out it was the most addictive thing that's ever happened on mobile. It was the biggest thing in the world. And one of my kind of happiest parenting moments, not that it involved parenting, but just moments as a parent was, we were flying home from a trip from Europe with the kids who were little and they had little iPod touches at the time. They were playing Angry Birds and the adults sitting in the row in front of them. I dunno if my son saw they were, they were also playing Angry Birds. And the four of them colluded together over the seats to show each other how they were doing things. And they were just playing the game together. And I thought, this is a, a wonderful moment that makes no sense, but everyone was super addicted, you know, to this game. That was possibly 10 years ago. I mean, actually I'm sure it was 10 years ago or something like

Rich Campbell (01:23:36):
That. Yeah. 10 years ago, spending 770 million on that game would've made a lot of sense. Right. Today. Really.

Paul Thurrott (01:23:43):
Wow. So the latest Angry Bird game which is I've never heard of. It's called Angry Bird's Dream Blast earned 25 million last year. Wow.

(01:23:56):
 and it was the second biggest angry bird came of the, of the year financially <laugh>. Right. But most of their games, and I mean like 90% of their games are Angry Birds something. Right. Angry Birds, two Angry Bird Stream blast, angry Birds friends, you know, it goes on and on. But yeah, I mean they, they've obviously, they're also having that one hit wonder problem. But I, I think the deal here is similar to what Microsoft is trying to achieve with Activision Blizzard, which is this company which Sega, which makes games obviously used to be a major player in the console hardware business is probably doing okay. But they're, the, the biggest part of the market is passing them by <laugh>. Right. Mobile. And this is their, one of their, they may acquire other studios, I don't know. We'll see. But this is their attempt to get into the mobile game business in which they have no position right now, basically. So we'll see, I

Rich Campbell (01:24:51):
After the AWA position, can they still make another Angry Bird games that sells and can they make anything else? Yeah. Roco never really was able to make anything else.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:59):
Sure. Well I think, you know, culturally Japanese company and a finished company have a lot in common, so that'll be fine. And be great. Time zone won't be an issue. I don't know. I'll see <laugh>, I dunno what to do. I dunno. But there you go. Anyway, you can expect antitrust regulators to ignore this particular deal. Don't worry about that.

Mikah Sargent (01:25:17):
<Laugh> <laugh> okay. We are coming up on the back of the book, but I do wanna take one more quick break this time to tell you about Cash Fly who are bringing you this episode of Windows Weekly. Customers are not going to hang around for your contents to load, so don't give them a reason to leave. You can dramatically increase your sites and your app's speeds over long distances for global audiences with cash Fly with more than 3,500 clients in over 80 countries around the world, organizations like TWITt consistently use cash fly for scalability, reliability, and unrivaled performance. Some markets are more challenging than others and content delivery costs very drastically partner with the CDN that knows what it takes to deliver content fast in global markets and is honest about the costs to get you there. You can scale your content delivery in several emerging markets, including South and Central America.

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Paul Thurrott (01:28:32):
Richard, let me ask you a question. Yeah. Money. Do you ever do anything with virtualization?

Rich Campbell (01:28:37):
All the time.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:38):
And okay, so what do you use for that

Rich Campbell (01:28:41):
Hyper V? There you go. But I own servers, right? It's trivial.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:44):
Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Rich Campbell (01:28:46):
Right. I have a, I have a dedicated machine with that's basically a hyper machine. No Hyper V host. Fire 'em up, pull 'em down. Don't even think about it. That's not normal. <Laugh>. I also have a server closet in my house, so Sure. Not normal.

Paul Thurrott (01:29:00):
Okay. So I, I recently, I don't remember when sometime this month wrote the virtualization section of the Windows 11 field guide. There are two major virtualization solutions in Windows 11 now HyperV, right. Which is the mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, the hardware hypervisor solution. Right. That debuted in Windows Server 2003. In fact, one of my earliest <laugh>, my <laugh>, one of my funnier stories was Microsoft once shipped a Viridian box to my house. So that geez, I just forgot his name. This guy, Italian speaker book writer guy could use it at a speech in Boston. And then I saw an internal email where someone in the server team said, you just shipped a Viridian box to Thres, you're fired <laugh>. And like I was gonna break into it. Wonder

Rich Campbell (01:29:51):
Dino. I suppose it though. Thank you.

Paul Thurrott (01:29:53):
That's who it was. And my wife actually dropped it off and man, she could not stand that guy. But anyway Dino, so yeah, that's who it was. Thank you. So Espo. Yeah. Anyway so Hyper V is the sta you know, the, the virtualization solution we've had forever in Windows. It debuted in on the client in Windows eight, right. So it kind of got lost in the mess that was Windows eight. I never thought they would bring this to the client. But Windows 11 has a second thing you can use for this type of thing, sort of called Windows Sandbox. Hmm. Windows Sandbox is based on HyperV, it is lightweight but it's not configurable in any way. And the idea there is that you can fire up a virtual machine based on your pc. So it's always the version of Windows 11. You have you have the ability to bring in apps from your configuration if you wanna do that. And the reason it exists is so you can test offer that you might think is unsafe. Right? Right. And it's not persistent. So you can reboot the virtual machine and it will come back and persisted state, but if you shut it down or close it in any way, it's gone forever. Like everything you do in there is, is lost. So what you do in Windows Sandbox stays a window sandbox.

Rich Campbell (01:30:58):
Yeah. I I know folks who use Windows Sandbox for browsing.

Paul Thurrott (01:31:02):
There you go.

Rich Campbell (01:31:02):
Yeah. That they're that paranoid like that the fact that it can never reach the rest of the machine. And those are typically people that have been exploited, like they have clicked on the wrong thing, had their accounts hijacked and so forth, not that being in the sandbox will stop the account and be hijacked if it's there. Right. It's usually a lateral exploit and because there's very little in Sandbox is very a little there.

Paul Thurrott (01:31:22):
Yeah, that's true. There is very little there. Yeah. And, and like the app list is, you know, five or six items long, it's not very big. Yeah. So, you know, the question there is like, you know, well what do you, if you wanna do virtualization in Windows 11, like what do you use? I mean obviously Hyper V is is the solution that the problem with both these things is that they require Windows 11 Pro. Right. There are actually workarounds on the web to install HyperV on Windows 11 home. And I've done it, it works fine. There are also workarounds for installing Windows Sandbox and Windows 11 home. And I've tried that and I've never gotten it to work. So you could get some mileage out of that. There's also a a virtualization subsystem Windows 11 that is used for the Windows subsystem from Linux and for the Windows subsystem for Android.

(01:32:04):
But you don't have to worry about those things too much. Right. You just get those you just install those features and that happens for you. But I gotta say I find for, for kind of a client type thing and having used, you know, parallels desktop on the Mac, I find a hyper vbs vaguely unfriendly and not necessarily obvious to use. I use it a lot myself. It is what I use. But I actually think for a lot of people, depending on what you're trying to do Oracle Virtual Box is free. Something kind of interesting. It supports sound out of the box <laugh>, which Hyper V does not, which is kind of strange to me. 

Rich Campbell (01:32:39):
Hyperv is a server product.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:41):
Yeah, right. Yeah, no, I know, I know. But it's you know, it's almost 10 years later from the client. Like, I mean, it, it feels like it hasn't been updated in a while, but it is getting the windows left and look and feel in the RDC client here. So better

Rich Campbell (01:32:52):
I'd also say that for devs have moved away from using very minute virtual machines where it's a container world today. Right, right. And it's just more efficient when you're doing development to have a set of containers that are more like what you're gonna end up in the

Paul Thurrott (01:33:03):
Production. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, there

Rich Campbell (01:33:07):
Was a do development and you were always running a couple HyperV instances at the same time.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:12):
Yeah, yeah. I use HyperV all the time, but I

Rich Campbell (01:33:15):
Don't, but you're not a normal human

Paul Thurrott (01:33:18):
<Laugh>. I think that's, that might be the proof. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Anyway just so you know, they're there and if you do have a Windows 11 home, Google this, you can probably get 'em installed. Okay. So the app pick is a couple, well, it's two different things in a way. So also because of the book, and I did this back in March and then I've actually kind of continued it is I had to write about the Xbox app, which is part of Windows 11. And the, to take full advantage of it, you need an Xbox, well you need a PC Game pass or an Xbox Game Pass, ultimate subscription, right? So Microsoft has three of these things. There's one for Xbox, one for pc, and one for both. And the one for both Ultimate also includes the cloud gaming service, which is the game streaming stuff.

(01:34:02):
 This has gotten significantly better over the years since I first tried it and well years I guess year <laugh>, year and a half, whatever. It's been a year and a half. So the two standard services of 9 99 a month, the ultimate version is 1499 per month. I just switched over to it, like I said last month. I'm actually gonna hold onto it. I've been trying to get outta my little Call of Duty rut and the thing, you know, we were talking about Ubisoft Plus, so it's a little bit less money. It's a much bigger collection of games. It spans things like Bethesda and EA plays in there. Oh wow. It, it spans platforms if you get Ultimate and it includes the cloud streaming stuff, which is really interesting. And when I go into this thing, I, I, it's funny, I've been playing kind of a mix of old and new games. So today I was playing a little bit of Minecraft legends also was playing Quake and Quake two <laugh>, right. Which are really old, you know, nineties PC games, right? Yeah. there's no way

Rich Campbell (01:35:04):
That pays $15 a month. There's no chance what they, they, they're buying Ion for $69 billion. Yeah. You gotta pay that back. You're right. Yeah. Like, you know, the thing to do is buy this now and buy a year.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:16):
That's right.

Rich Campbell (01:35:17):
Because it's gonna go up as soon as the vision titles start to land.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:20):
Yeah. And actually one good way to do that, cuz they make it harder now to buy it in multi-month or whatever year end. I don't think they even offer technically a year of Xbox Game Pass, whatever. They, they, I sure they have three month and sometimes maybe six, but they're not big savings over, you know, just buying it month to month. Yeah. But what you can do is buy a year of Xbox gold Live, which is often on sale, and then you can churn it. You can say, I'm gonna switch this over to Game Pass, whatever, and they'll apply whatever, you know, to some number of months. And so when I did that, it went out to next February <laugh>. So I was like, nice <laugh>. So I, I, I, you know, I don't actually have to pay for this thing again, so I, until next February.

(01:36:03):
So it, that worked out pretty well in my case. So if you can find like the little cards or whatever, you know, they used to have or buy the codes online if you can get those on sale, that's a good way to get into it. The reason I want to do this is because I play too much Call of Duty, so I feel obligated to tell you that Call of Duty Modern Warfare ii multi-player, not the campaign, but, and not Well Wars, it's always free, but not anything else is free to play for the, for one week on all platforms starting today. So if you're on PlayStation, Xbox, pc, whatever and you don't own this game and you want to get in and see what it's like they just launched season three, which means there's a couple of new multi-player maps.

(01:36:39):
 There's other modes. I mean, compared to what I play, I play a very specific part of the game. But there's a lot going on in in season three. And there's a lot of maps now. Cause when this thing first launched, you know, last October, I think it was in November there were only a handful of multi-player maps. They added two, I think in season two, but they've added a few more. It's finally to the point kind of where it needs to be. So if you're not sure about this game, it's also on sale. Just saying, you know, we can, <laugh> could pick it up. This might be the time. It's

Rich Campbell (01:37:07):
Awesome.

Paul Thurrott (01:37:08):
Get addicted. I'll see you there, <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (01:37:14):
All right. I think that means it's time to talk about this week's run as radio

Rich Campbell (01:37:20):
This week on Run as I talked to one George Finney. So George is a professor and a, a security expert. Has done a bunch of different books, but he did a new one, which I thought was particularly interesting. It's called project Zero Trust. And what he's done is written a sort of fictionalized account of a company getting breached and then recovering from that and actually getting to a good secure zero trust model for themselves. It reminds me of the Phoenix Project, which is one of Gene Kim's books about DevOps and, and really this sort of effort to stop talking technical about these practices and talk, talking in a more narrative model. That being says, if you are sort of all on board with zero trust and just trying to make your way on it, you probably don't need to read this book.

(01:38:07):
You need to give this book to other people, so maybe the rest of your team so they can kind of get in the groove. But more importantly, the leadership, the folks are gonna tap for the money and the effort around this. This is a way to, to tackle this problem. And so I, I was glad to have 'em on just to have that discussion about how much organizations are struggling to understand the zero trust model and how much of a transformation it is to the way you approach security and kind of essential in a cloud world.

Mikah Sargent (01:38:36):
All right. You should

Paul Thurrott (01:38:37):
All be zero. Trust <laugh>. I should be everyone's mantra.

Mikah Sargent (01:38:41):
I think you, Paul, you are, it sounds like, cuz you, you you can't trust that you can like a restaurant and have it stick around

Paul Thurrott (01:38:48):
<Laugh>. Listen, zero trust everywhere. I, I I have too much experience to know otherwise, I'm just saying when it comes to technology,

Mikah Sargent (01:38:56):
Zero trust. Don't trust. There you go. Alright, let's move on to your picker. The picker of the week. Yes. <laugh>. That is a mix. That is a port manto of liquor and pick the pick of the week. <Laugh>.

Rich Campbell (01:39:10):
Well, and then this has sort of evolved into these whiskey stories. You know, when I first got an opportunity to do the show, we talked about whiskey a bit. And often I found myself explaining bits about how whiskey was made to sort of understand why I selected this particular bottle. And that has now evolved into, what was it, eight or nine parts where we talked through the entire Scottish whiskey making process. And, and mikah, you got to see the end of that last week. And so I asked on the discord what we should do next and folks ask for American bourbon. So I'm not gonna do a nine part series on American bourbon <laugh> because it's not that different. I will focus on the differences. I mean, in the end, for some reason humans like to take grains and ferment them, distill them to raise them to solvent levels and then suck flavors out of wood and drink it. Mm-Hmm.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:59):
<Affirmative>

Rich Campbell (01:40:00):
In a, an American bourbon of course starts back with America first being a, a set of colonies in the uk because it grew a lot of corn. And generally speaking, you only make alcohol when you have enough to eat. And so you have food, you need, you have grain left over to store and before it goes bad you distill it cuz it's a way to store it for longer and it's kind of fun. But the modern American bourbon really starts in 1964 when congress passes a law declaring bourbon whiskey, a distinctive product of the United States and the federal standards of identity of a distilled spirit. Cause there is such a thing specified what an American bourbon was. And it was to be a grain mixture that was in at least 51% corn that would be distilled no higher than 80% alcohol and then would be aged in new charred American oak barrels.

(01:40:58):
The dis distillate putting, being put into the barrel can be no higher than 62.5%. And we talked about this when we were talking about barreling on the whiskeys on the Scottish whiskey side, that much higher than that. And you start to pull bad flavors outta the wood. So it makes sense that they came to that number, although the Scots used 63.5 because they're often using used bourbon barrels and they still wanna pull some flavors from those. If it's spent two years, it has to be aged in barrels. It needs to be a minimum of two years. At two years they can be called what called straight bourbon. Most bourbons aged longer than that. If it's aged less than four years, you're required to put an age statement on. In other words, the youngest thing in the barrel in the bottle has to be on the label.

(01:41:41):
After four years, you're not required to do that. And so the fact that if you think about most bourbons, you've never seen an age statement on 'em. They're typically five to six years old. That's the normal range of aging in Kentucky, in Kentucky conditions. It doesn't have to be made in Kentucky. But Kentucky has ideal conditions for it, which are different from Scotland. They have similar water in the sense that there's lots of limestone in Kentucky, which makes the water very soft. But Kentucky is quite a bit drier and quite a bit hotter in the summer and colder in the winters. You know, Scotland is a very humid temperature consistent place. So its process of aging are different, which is why you rarely see very old aged bourbons. It's very difficult to keep the barrels in range. It's warm often it's warm enough that they actually lose water and the alcohol level goes up.

(01:42:36):
Well that's mostly because it's low humidity is so low. Other rules around bourbon whiskey has to be made in the US to be called bourbon. No filtration steps at all. I'm looking at you Jack Daniels. They're not allowed to be called bourbon because you do carbon filtration. Not that it's a bad thing, just those are the rules. Also, no caramel coloring and only water for dilution. So let's talk about how this is different for Scottish whiskey. The first and biggest thing is a mixture of grains or what's known as the mash bill. So a mashbill is basically the recipe of what kind of grains are you going to use, you make your whiskey and because of the rules, it's going to be corn. First and foremost, at least half corn, typically 67, even as high as 80%, almost all bourbons. And there are a few exceptions, will have a certain amount of malted bar in it between five and 15%.

(01:43:28):
And that's because it provides amylase, which helps to digest the in the fermentation process, the compounds that will tend to make methanol, the stuff that makes you go blind. You want ethanol as little methanol as possible. And then there'll be a flavor grain, a grain that'll sit in between those two, between the corn and the barley. Often rye, sometimes wheat. So most of the whiskey, most of the bourbons you know, of like your buffalo traces, bullets and so forth, are what they call high rye bourbons. They have 10 to 20% of their content is rye. And then there's a few high wheat bourbons. Not as many. I think the best known of the wouldbe maker's mark. Maker's mark is 70% corn, 14% barley, 16% red winter wheat. But also Blain's weller, the famous Papi Van Winkle. All high wheat bourbons. The the other interesting step because now you have a multiple grains is how you treat the grains in preparation for fermentation.

(01:44:32):
So we're used to malting barley because malting barley really means germinating it, getting it ready to actually grow to be a plant and then killing it before it can really live. So two or three days in water, typically a little bit of churning up until it turns a bit green. And that's actually converting a lot of those long change carbohydrates into sugars, which we can then extract to make our our our initial stage of beer. But it doesn't work the same way for corn and for rye. They don't tend to make short change sugars right off the bat. So there's a different extraction process and it's called grain cooking, essentially imagine a gigantic pressure cooker, although the pressures are relatively low, different grains are cooked. Each grain is cooked separately for production purposes because we're usually using continuous column stills. We want to keep this process going all of the time.

(01:45:27):
They keep the cooking time down to between 25 and 30 minutes, but they vary the temperature and the pressure depending on the grain. So corn goes at the hottest. About 220 degrees Fahrenheit is I 114 Celsius for about a half hour. They typically use a little extra pressure on corn cuz it's the hardest to extract from. It's a very robust grain. But that cooking process helps to break the hulls down a bit. Start the sugar conversion process, rise a little bit cooler, 170 Fahrenheit, 77 degrees Celsius. And barley, which is already malted, is the lowest at 150 degrees, 66 degrees Celsius. So each of those grains that are handled separately they're done in water in these pressure cookers, and then they're combined into a mash barrel typically directly in, in fermentation. And then they're cooled, they're cooled down before they don't kill the yeast.

(01:46:17):
Where in Scotland yeast are very consistent. There's basically been strict rules around which yeast to use in America. The ye vary wildly. They're also tend to be trade secrets in the early the pre-prohibition days. And believe me, the stories about whiskey before and after prohibition are great. I think we'll end up doing a whole thing on that at some point if we want to keep talking about this stuff. <Laugh> each of these facilities have basically developed their own and maintained their own yeast. Do they have little yeast banks? They have growing facilities and so on. And for some brands, different additions of their bourbon will actually use their different use strains. Normally a fermenter are gigantic tanks. They're usually made of wood, sometimes oaks, sometimes cypress. And they operate around 77 to 86 degrees Fahrenheit as 25 to 30 degrees Celsius. You'll note I'm using all the measurements of the oppressors first cause we are talking to America.

(01:47:14):
<Laugh> they'll also add sour mash to the, the, the, the tank for fermentation. And we'll talk more about sour mashes that go along, but it's basically the leftovers from previous distillations are put into it. You'll see the word sour mash on most bottles. It's a normal thing. There is such a thing as sweet mash. If we were gonna make a bourbon without any of the the stillage from previous distillations, thatt would be a sweet mash, but it's not commonly done. The goal is to ferment essentially a strong beer, a kind of what they call distillers beer. Nine to 11% of alcohol depending on the particular distiller and the particular yeast ferments run about three to four days long. The fermentation process course is warm and you don't want things to get too hot. So those tanks can only be so big if they get too hot, it'll kill the yeast.

(01:48:07):
Anything about about 104 degrees is gonna start killing off yeast. In some cases, some distilleries will actually cool their fermentors. They run coils of stainless steel piping in the tanks to try and keep the temperature down. But there are limits as that fermentation reaches the alcohol level, they expect they will drain it into a beer tank. These beer tanks tend to be bigger than the fermentation tanks because they are then going to feed it directly into a still, and it's a continuous process. So when the, the, the beer tanks, which are stainless steel get down to about one third, there's enough room typically to make a full drop of a fermentation tank into it and keep the process running. I I give you a sense that there's an urgency here of continuous flow for most of these bourbon distilleries. The and that takes us to distillation and the vast majority of bourbon distilleries use column stills.

(01:49:09):
Now, column still is basically a big metal tube, almost always stainless steel, and they're quite large 15 to as high as 60 feet tall. And somewhere between two to six feet wide, they're big. I've seen a bunch of them. The larger they are, the higher their level of distillation. And so depending on the way you want to make your bourbon, you'll want a bigger column still or a smaller one. We've talked about column cells a bit in the, in this, the Scottish series. Not that the column cells are rarely used in, in Scottish distillery. It's always pot stills, which are batch based. You load them, you run them, you clean them, you run them again, you do it again. In column stills, the beer is basically being dropped into the top of the still and inside these columns are a series of plates, and the plates have holes in them.

(01:50:01):
The holes have lips. So that build beer has to build up a bit on each plate before it can drip down to the next one. Those holes also allow alcohol to evaporate out, and it's taken out the top of the column still. So beer goes in at the top and works its way down and alcohol evaporates and heads back up. This whole process happens at relatively low temperatures. The bottom of the column, which will be the hottest, it's near boiling somewhere between 200, 210 degrees Fahrenheit. And the top of the column is more like 170 to 185. The small stills typically will distill up to about 60% a B V. Remember, you're not allowed to go over 80%, so the biggest stills tune themselves to go to about 80%. If you go higher than that, you're not allowed to call yourself bourbon. Now you're getting ready to make vodka essentially, right?

(01:50:51):
Vodkas are often distilled to 93, 90 5%. So this is a continuous process. You're always able to fear feed beer into the bottom into the top alcohol coming out of the top bottom. But you do build up tillage in the bottom. This is leftover bits of grain leftover bits of the ferment, proteins, fats, things like that. Lots of water. And so that is drained off in shipped to stillage tanks where it will be prepped to be sour mash. In every case, after you come out of this stainless steel column, steel, you need to be exposed to copper. We talked about this in the, in the Scottish stage as well, where you need to take certain bad flavor compounds out of the distillate, typically sulfurs, which come from the barley and from corn. And so if you're not actually using a pot still, and some distilleries do, you'll use a thing called a doubler.

(01:51:46):
And a doubler is essentially a reflux flow. It's got a sort of dome shape to it. And as the alcohol evaporates up, it hits the walls and falls back down, and some of it will skip up the top. And in the process has this catalytic reaction that removes those poor flavors from the distillate, and then it can head over to the cool, into the condensers. So in the case of like a distillery like Maker's Mark, and we've talked about Maker's Mark before, they use a column still that raises it to about 60%. And I've had a chance to sample that 60% in its particular flavor. And he literally took it directly from the distill as it was running. And I'm like, aren't you afraid of contamination? Oh wait, it's pure alcohol, it's gonna, what? You know, what would you sterilize it with? And then running right beside it is the pot still, which raises it from 60% to about 73%, and it does it in a much slower batch process.

(01:52:39):
So they have several of these pot stills and we get to taste it again. And you saw this really remarkable flavor change that the sort of oily bitterness that came outta the column still is removed by the pot, still that copper reactions as well as the reflux process. But either way, this all now ends up heading over to the condensers to be cooled. In the meantime, we have this sidetrack where all that stillage is being shipped over to sh to the stillage tanks. Now this stillage is a bit sour, which really means it's acidic knowing, recognizing that a pH of seven is completely neutral. Yeast doesn't actually like to be in a pH environment of seven. They'd rather be in a pH environment of 5.4 to 5.8. It likes a little acidity, it runs, it operates faster, generates carbon dioxide, converts alcohol and so forth.

(01:53:31):
And so rather than spend money to lower the pH level in the, in the fermentation tanks, you take the sour mash and you treat it, you get it to the right acidity level, and then you put it back into the fermentation tanks to sour the tanks. That is sour mash. It's only a little bit somewhere between five and 10% depending on the distillery, but it's a mechanism where they use the distill and goes on. All of the rest of the leftovers are dried and turned into animal feed, and then other souls are given away. All right, we're coming by the condensers. We've cooled this liquid that's somewhere between 75 and 80% alcohol. And we turn it back, we get it back into a liquid. It's often tasted at this point, not at that GE fuel volume. They'll usually cut it with water, get it down to about 20% and check its grain flavors and so forth.

(01:54:19):
At this point, you really are just tasting the grain. There's no color to it, it's completely clear. And if you're happy with it at that point, sometimes there's sour notes and so forth, it might ruin a batch, which does happen. You're ready for barreling. So the barreling process, this is the bourbon process with one of the things that makes bourbon distinct. Always American white oak barrels. They are 53 US gallons, which is what used to be called a Queen Allen gallon. But nobody talks about that anymore. That comes out to about 200 liters. There are local cooperages all over the different whiskey making areas, and they make the barrels out of this white oak. All oaks are toasted. So as the barrel is assembled, the staves are put into a base. The initial set of bands are put on and the bottom is put on.

(01:55:05):
And before the upper part of the barrel is contracted to complete its shape and a top put on, they'll do two stages of firing. The first stage is called a toasting stage. This is lower temperature for a longer time, and it actually causes wood sugars, turns the wood red quite, quite a bit of color from it. It's almost carrot like caramel. And then the second firing is with much higher heat, and they'll char the inside of the barrels. Every distillery and every brand has their own recipe for how barrels should be done. There's lots of variations in that. Sometimes the char is very strong, sometimes it's lighter, and then the barrel is finished assembly and it's shipped off to the distillery where they could begin their aging process. So barrels are loaded the traditional way. They're typically stored horizontally in rack rooms.

(01:55:55):
Different distilleries have different styles of rack rooms. The most traditional one looks very much like a warehouse. It has multiple floors on it, sometimes even an elevator. And they lay the barrels horizontally in racks. Kentucky is again, both hotter in the summertime, cooler in the wintertime and low humidity. So aging is very challenging. Sometimes you lose alcohol, sometimes you lose water depending on the conditions. And if you go above 80%, you can't sell it as bourbon. And if you go below 40%, you can't sell it as bourbon. So you're playing a game. Many distillers rotate barrels. In fact in Maker's Mark was famous for having these, or they used to be more popular now. But Maker's Mark has this very famous racking system where they can take the bottom barrel out and have the other barrels slide down. And so every six months or so, depending on the season, you have a rotation of where the barrels are taking heat or being in more moderate environments and so forth.

(01:56:51):
There are also some that actually cool do air circulation or provide other temperature management for the barrel rooms to try and get those barrels go longer if you can. Again, most bourns you don't find very old. The typical age is five to six years. Where you find older bourbons, you'll find their barrel rooms are often made of stone, partially underground. All mechanisms slow the aging process. You can spend more time in wood without all cl altering. The alcohol level near as much bottling process is basically the same. Once it's reached a point where they're happy with the aging master distiller pulls barrels for a given lot. They, they sample them, test taste test them. Then they'll use the same, combining, very similar combining techniques, add water to it to re reduce it to its typical proof levels, which are 45 to 47%.

(01:57:42):
Again, a recogni a good level for minimizing flocculation. Do you remember that? I remember that word <laugh>. Not that the, not that the Americans do any chill filtration ever. So they do that primarily by keeping their alcohol level a bit higher. And that brings us to our whiskey of the week, which is Woodford Reserve. River Reserve is very well priced, about $35 for a bo, a seven 50 bill bottle, or 26 ounce bottle. The history of the site for Woodward Reserve has been many different distilleries over the years. Again, prohibition had a huge impact on its current. Owner is a company called Brown Foreman. They are, they also owned Old Forester Cooper's Craft and Jack Daniels. The mash bill in their standard Woodford edition is 72% corn, 18% rye, 10% parley. They ferment in 7,500 gallon Cypress fats. They run about a five to seven day fermentation.

(01:58:40):
They use very little sour mash, typically as low as 1%, one or 2% as all. And unlike virtually any other distillery in the US they use only pot stills. And they triple pot still distill. So they have a 2,500 gallon beer still. That's the large one, which typically will raise your 9% beer up to 40%. Then they have a low wine still, which about 1,650 gallons. That takes it to 55%. And then their high wine or spirit still, that raises up to about 78%. Then they'll cut it with water to 55% and barrel it typically for five to six years in a water cooled and water heated rack house. So they take water out of the river all of the time, and if they need cooling, they pump that cold water through the pipes in their rack houses. And in the wintertime, when it gets awfully cold, they actually have a little boiler and they'll heat water up and pump it through the rack houses to keep the temperature more stable. That's what's makes Woodford distinct. It's a triple distilled rye mash. It's quite a mild easy drinking kind of whiskey one I recommend. I usually have on my shelf. If you like bourbon, you'll like, this one hasn't got a lot of punch to it but it's nicely made and reasonably priced.

Mikah Sargent (01:59:55):
Hmm, yeah, I've actually seen that in stores. <Laugh> just you know, right there on the shelf, not hard to find. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (02:00:02):
Yeah. Not a, not a rare, I mean, there are incredibly rare bourbons. I have pursued a few unicorns over the years, like Parker's Family Select, which only makes a few hundred bottles of that addition any given year. If you want to go nuts, some bourbon, you can, but there are plenty of, of reasonably priced bourbons. You can get that drink very nicely.

Mikah Sargent (02:00:23):
Yep, I agree. All right, well that brings us to the end of this episode of Windows Weekly. If you would like to watch the show as we record it live around about Wednesday at 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern, you should tune in by going to TWITt.tv/live. There you will see options to stream the show on lots of different places, TWITtch YouTube live. Basically we're streaming in as many places as we can so you can watch it as we record. The best way to get the show though is by subscribing to or following the show, which you can do by going to TWITt.tv/ww. When you head to that link, you will see the option to subscribe to audio or subscribe to video your version of choice across a bunch of different platforms. Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube pockets. We try to be in all the places.

(02:01:17):
So that way, no matter what podcast application you're using, you can get the show cuz at the very heart of this, it's an RSS feed. So even if you're using some strange player we haven't ever heard of, you could probably pop that RSS feed in there and get the show as soon as it's done being edited together. I also wanna mention Club TWITt right quick at TWITt.tv/club TWITt, consider joining the club starting at $7 a month or $84 a year. When you join the club, you get several great perks. First, you get access to every single TWITtch show with no ads. You also get access to a special TWITt plus bonus fee that has extra content you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes before the show, after the show, all sorts of great stuff there. And you gain access to the Club TWITt Discord.

(02:02:07):
It is a fun place to go to chat with your fellow club TWITT members and also those of us here at TWITt. Along with those great perks, you also are going to get some great club TWITt exclusive shows. There's the Untitled Linux Show, which is a show all about Linux. There's also Paul TH's Hands on Windows program with yes, this Paul Throt who is covering all sorts, sorry, <laugh>, all sorts of tips and tricks for Windows to help you make sure you're making the most of that machine you have. Hands on Mac. If for some reason you're listening to this show and you want to learn more about Apple, then you could head to that show. Nobody's perfect. Yeah, Pobody's Perfect. So you can check that out. That's a show that I host. And last but not, excuse me, last but not least you can tell I was excited. I was. We have Scott Wilkinson who has relaunched home theater geeks. So if you are all about that home theater and want to make sure that you know you've got the, the latest and greatest or at least that you've got your settings as they should be, check out Home Theater geeks, all part of Club TWITt at TWITt.tv/club TWITt. Please consider joining. All right, Paul thro of throt.com. Anything you want to pitch this week?

Paul Thurrott (02:03:26):
Boy. Okay.

Mikah Sargent (02:03:28):
<Laugh> surprise.

Paul Thurrott (02:03:29):
I am on TWITtter as you know. Everything, everything I'm on is my last name. So Throt Throt, T H u r r O t t. Best way you guys could support me if you'd like to is to buy one of my books. The Windows 11 Field Guide and Windows everywhere are both available on Lean Pub and the Windows Everywhere book is available on the Kindle on Amazon.

Mikah Sargent (02:03:51):
Nice. All right. And Richard Campbell it is your turn for your pitch.

Rich Campbell (02:03:58):
I'm itRichard@darkroom.com. <Laugh>, you know, I thought I clearly this thing's on a timer, so I thought in between each break I'd reset the timer. It didn't work. Aw.

Mikah Sargent (02:04:08):
So

Rich Campbell (02:04:08):
I got the dark room, but yeah, you find me@runasradio.com. I'm also at donna rocks.com. Rich Campbell on TWITtter and richCampbell@macedon.social, if you're have wander over there mm-hmm. <Affirmative> but always have fun hanging out on Discord with the folks. So you'll, you'll see me around.

Mikah Sargent (02:04:26):
Awesome. You can find me at mikah Sargent on many a social media network or head to chihuahua.coffee, c hhi hoa h hoa.coffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Please join us again next week for another episode of Windows Weekly because your favorite guy, Leo Laport will be back next week.

Paul Thurrott (02:04:48):
Oh, is he coming back? It's, I feel like I like the new format. Mikah, we need to keep you

Mikah Sargent (02:04:53):
<Laugh>. Well, that's very kind. I have enjoyed this time that we've spent together and I am, I will be back again in the future, but I think Leo is is ready to join Paul and groaning at about a few windows changes. So

Paul Thurrott (02:05:08):
I'm ready to go to Europe and join him. Yeah, there you go. You can just switch the format up again. <Laugh>,

Mikah Sargent (02:05:13):
Where will Paul be coming from this week? Thanks everybody for tuning in to Windows Weekly and they will see you next week.