Windows Weekly 874 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.

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thorat's here, richard Campbell's in Las Vegas for his Fabric conference. There is, of course, as always, lots to talk about Moment 5, yes, it's still on its way, in fact, now there's a preview update. You can check it out. Good news Qualcomm says most Windows games will just work on that new X Elite processor. We'll talk about gaming on ARM and AI, the new Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 with Copilot Key built in. All that and more coming up next on Windows Weekly.

00:32
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01:47
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02:16
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03:16 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, don't rub it in. Nobody's happy about this, did the robot follow you from Mexico City. The robot was a gift from my daughter, who actually built that out of Legogo.

03:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it's not I go wow, very nice yeah on the right is little ricky campbell. Look a little little paulie little ricky little ricky campbell from run as radio and he is in a glass cube yes, I am, or being fumigated, one or the other I I think that's where Paul went immediately.

03:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You got a tent. I'm at the MGM Grand. I'm in a Skyloft, because if you bring 4,000 of your closest friends to a conference, they give you a Skyloft. It's nice, a Skyloft.

03:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are you in the air?

04:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, 29 floors up, I'm overlooking the airport. So I watch Janet Airways go to Area 51 every morning. Wow, the 737s. If you're working at Area 51, you park over here and then you get on the 737. It's all white except for a red stripe along the windows, and they fly you the half hour and that's the only way in and out of that place.

04:21 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wow, you think with all that alien tech they could cut down on the flight time?

04:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, but you see how much that plane glows as it lands. It's something.

04:31 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I wanted to believe Bob Lazar so much.

04:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What brings you. No, I'm not going to fall for that again. You're going to walk into that one again.

04:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

04:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I'll give it to you. What brings you to Las Vegas, Richard?

04:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm here for the Microsoft Fabric Conference.

04:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is one of the shows that.

04:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I've been organizing alongside Dev, intersections and others. What's your show? My show? Yeah, oh nice. This is the new data analytics stack that Arun Gulag and a group of brilliant, brilliant minds have been putting together, and the folks are really excited about it. This is the first community conference and, yeah, we filled it right up. People want to get on board. This is huge competitive advantages when you do it right, allowing analysts to drive all the way down to really shape data and then to retain all of that knowledge effectively so it can be shared with others. It's cool. What is that? We had a two-hour keynote yesterday and it was spectacular.

05:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice. What is the nexus between business, information, BI and data fabric?

05:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Data analytics, data analytics these are all terms that are intertwined, right? Really, what you're seeing happening now with with what microsoft fabric is becoming is really taking advantage of the cloud. You know, once upon a time we were doing business intelligence more that olap cube data warehouse approach. You had a limited compute resource and so you tended to polish the data a lot of right, low transform and stuff just to be efficient enough so that you could this is r is Ralph Kimball's terms, if you're old school in OLAP. To pursue a thread of intuition, you need the querying to go fast, right, you're slicing and dicing through huge reams of data, and so we'd spent a lot of time as the data engineers getting that data to a shape where you could analyze fast.

06:22
Well, welcome to the cloud friends. And suddenly we have all the compute and all the storage we need. So no more polishing your data. Really, you put it in a data lake and they have this concept they call One Lake, sort of like OneDrive, and you're able to organize data fairly easily and you have as much compute as you need on demand. So one of the problems that happens with a load transform process often you're shaving sort of the most interesting bits off the data to make it fit into a query plan, and the lake approach sort of avoids that. In exchange for you're using more storage and you're doing a lot more indexing, but you've got the compute to do it, so why wouldn't you?

07:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So no more pivot tables, huh.

07:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You can still make them them, but they are derived on the fly. You don't pre-compute in real time that's it nice.

07:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you still have a big dashboard for the ceo so he can see how?

07:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
everything's dashboards are bigger than better than ever. How many graphs would you like? Today they they announced the new 100 area graph uh area line graph. That was very, very sexy, with smoothed uh corners, so no rough edges anymore. So the graphs are more elegant.

07:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Looking good for the c-suite they, uh, they have made for me. Patrick delahandy has made for me. I wish I could show you my. It says my twit primary systems display. It's right in front of me.

07:45 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I assume it's modeled after some Star Trek. I wish it were.

07:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It has a calendar. It has date and time Most recently published shows. It has a fascinating factoid how many days of episodes? 1,058 days, 16 hours, 10 minutes and 29 seconds of content in 28,277 episodes. But it also tells me a very important thing how many Club Twit members we have. And I'm very happy to say we are now at 11,437. Wow, isn't that good that's amazing.

08:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You had some big goals for this year. It looks like you're on your path.

08:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, we're going to do a tomorrow. Tomorrow we're going to do an inside tweet and I think Lisa has said that we're going to have to lower our standards, lower our standards, lower our goals a little bit. We didn't make a goal as far as club membership in the first quarter, but we're working on it. And the reason we're working on it? As everybody knows, media is in trouble, especially podcasting, because advertising is dwindling and I always thought it would be better to have our audience support us anyway. So that's what we're doing and you've been great. Thank you, club Twit members. If you're not a member, I'll just put a little plug in before we get into the show. $7 a month, lots of benefits. You're helping us stay on the air. None of it goes into my pocket. That seems to be a concern. I am not a TV preacher.

09:13 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
You don't use your company like a bank, like I do. That's weird.

09:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am not going to pray for you, just send it to PO Box. No, no, go to twittv. Slash club twit. You can see, it seems to work for all the tech bros. I really honestly I think I made a mistake early in life. People said sometimes they would say well, like having integrity.

09:34
And yeah, that was my mistake. Yeah, is that it, they said. They asked, would ask you know well, if there weren't computers, if you can be on the radio, what would you do? And I said I'd probably be a preacher and I'd probably have a lot more money. Yeah, right, but there you have it. We did build a little crystal cathedral here in the Brick House Studios, the East Side Studios. So let's talk about Moment 5, because God knows, we haven't done enough about Moment 5. I had thought maybe if I missed a couple of shows, Moment 5 would have had its moment. But no, we've come and gone.

10:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, we'd be talking Moment 6 by now, right, I thought so.

10:13 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Once a year, though, right? Well, there's a question about whether there will be a Moment 6, or whether that is what becomes 24H2, right? So that's an open question for now.

10:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh.

10:29 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
But we still an open question for now. Oh, but uh, what are we on now? I'm on 22 h2, right or no? Well, you could be on 22 h2 or 23 h2 same code base, same update path, same moment five. By the way, oh, I think at this point the only difference between 22 h2 and 23 h2 might be where the co-pilot button is. But even that might not be a difference. I think they're just the same thing.

10:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I'm going to push this restart now button. What could possibly? Go wrong the time-honored Twitch tradition, I'll be back in a few. In the studio reboots, everything is right where you left it. Paul actually is in Pennsylvania, richard's in Nevada.

11:02 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Actually I'm back in Boston. We've gone back in time.

11:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, he's in Dedham, ladies and gentlemen, amazing.

11:10 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
So what's up?

11:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
with Moment 5?. What are we getting? What's up with?

11:12 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Moment 5? Yeah, there's been some. In fact, I put this in the notes. I mean, people seem confused. I thought this came out last month. What's going on? Yeah, I did. Going on, yeah, I did that's.

11:28
Oh, microsoft announced it last month and you could get parts of it over some kind of a controlled feature release type thing. You know you could force it using third party tools like the viv tool, but officially it hits the preview a path this week. This is week d, right for march, and then it will go into stable on patch Tuesday in April. And we know, because Microsoft I don't think we talked about this, oddly, we must've talked about this but Microsoft, sometime in right ahead of the deadline for the DMA, published a website where they said here's where we're going to, where we're going to document how we are conforming to the requirements of the DMA and our gatekeeper products and actually give them a little bit of credit for that.

12:08
Some other companies that shall go unnamed are more in the kicking and screaming style of compliance. Uh, microsoft seems to have just kind of embraced it and, um, okay, so, uh, moment five of the moments we've had so far. These are the quarterly feature update packages. It's kind of a minor one. Frankly, there's not a lot of big stuff going on. We've already talked about it, so there's no reason to go through it too too much. But it's happening and I'm sorry. I mentioned the DMA compliance website. One of the things that they mentioned there was that they had told European regulators that this Moment 5 update would be fully deployed publicly by the end of April.

12:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So we're a month off. You can get it.

12:59 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
You'll start getting it next Tuesday, the second Tuesday of April, April 9th.

13:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
A few more shows of talking about Moment 5.

13:09 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think we're good. You know well, I mean, some of these updates are a big deal. Some of the moments have been big deals. Obviously, Moment 4 was a huge deal. That was 23H2, right, I mean. So there's been some big stuff. This one is this is not much going on here, I mean, it's mostly minor. Interestingly, Microsoft also released a preview update for Windows 10 yesterday. So week D wasn't just for Windows 11, right, it was also for Windows 10.

13:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But we're not getting more updates to Windows 10, right, oh yeah, security patches.

13:43 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
That was so one month ago, richard. So now we are getting more updates to Windows 10, right, oh, yeah, security patches. That was so one month ago, richard. So now we are getting more updates. And yeah, this was remember, I think it was last week we talked about Microsoft started testing additional cards in the lock screen. Right, there was a weather card that they tested for about 10 seconds, pushed out the stable, and now they started testing sports, traffic and finance cards. This is just happening. We're not, we're not gonna, we're not gonna screw around with this. It's happening. It's happening on windows 11 as well, by the way. So, as expected, as promised last week, as threatened, I guess, um, they are now testing that as well, and that will almost certainly go out with moment five in stable next month.

14:26
They've added Windows Spotlight to the desktop. This is a feature Windows 11 has had, if not forever, at least for some time, probably a couple of years. Hopefully, it works better in Windows 10 than it does in 11. The biggest bit of feedback I get about Spotlight is that it never seems to. Sometimes it just stops updating the desktop for some reason, but it's supposed to give you a new Bing desktop wallpaper every day, and probably the favorite feature eventually for people is an upgrade invitation to Windows 11. So if you have somehow made it this far and are running Windows 10 on supported eligible hardware, microsoft would really like you to upgrade to Windows 11. And they're going to start being a little more aggressive about letting you know More aggressive.

15:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, I'm tormented constantly on one of my desktop machines that I'm still holding it to end.

15:14 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's weird, they don't call it a torment, they call it an invitation. But I, you know, I guess we have different semantic. Yeah, yeah, potato potato, yes, almost the same. Potato, yes, almost the same. Really, yeah, so yeah windows, windows 10,. Windows 10 is a little bit like the desktop version of outlook of a one note. Sorry, they told us they were done with it and uh, and then they weren't, you know. So it's back, and now they're updating it again.

15:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And here we go here we go, here we go.

15:43 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it's still on 22H2. They at least stuck to that 22H2 will be the last supported version of Windows 10. They didn't change that, but they are adding new features to it, most notably, obviously, copilot, which they did last October, most likely November, somewhere in that timeframe. So yeah, that's where we're at All, right.

16:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Sorry, I can't wait for the next week, the next month, who knows what's going to happen next. I'm excited.

16:12 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, exactly, they're going to rename Windows 11 to Windows 10, probably We'll see. We are eagerly awaiting the first Qualcomm X Elite-based PCs. We keep getting more and more indications that these things are actually going to be pretty damn good, unlike every other Qualcomm chip for PCs ever released so far, and soon Soon-ish A couple of months, probably in May will be the first PCs. I know we're going to talk a little bit about some new Surface PCs and some timing stuff, but the yeah, unfortunately, the timeframe for the Qualcomm chipset is a few months away.

16:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm pretty excited, though, about that.

16:57 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I am too. I am absolutely going to get one of these PCs. It might be a Surface laptop, we'll see but I've always wanted this to make sense. I'm at least clear-headed enough to understand. It never has right. I mean, some people can be a little delusional about it, but this one.

17:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It has all the errors. I get it.

17:21 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I get wanting to believe I am that person.

17:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I read an article today that was showing gaming on the Qualcomm, on Windows. Yeah, that's the thing I don't quite understand.

17:29 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yes. So look, I've been playing around with one of Apple's M3-based Mac. Pretty nice, huh.

17:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, very nice.

17:42 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
And I've only played one game on it and it runs spectacularly well, but one of the goofy things native game or a windows yeah, this was from the store. It was a resident evil. Yeah, they're resident evil. Yeah, yeah, it's like I had one, uh cassette stuck in the car driving across the country. I can't remember what it was. What was the game? Paul? It was, uh, yeah, resident evil something, one of the one of the recently remade resident evils they also have death stranding out.

18:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
These are all kind of older games, but uh, they play pretty well it's still they're playable, that's yeah they're beautiful looking.

18:16 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this game is anyway. Anyway, metal is good, but when you look at windows games, there's one of the issues with emulation is you don't get on Mac is you don't get DirectX 12, which is the kind of modern standard. So this is one area where Qualcomm-based hardware might actually be better. You know, if you want to play games Not that you would play you know, not that these things are gaming PCs. In fact, this first generation of chipsets is very much aimed at the ultra book market, right, these are mainstream productivity long next, yeah, yeah, but yeah, they were talking about how, um, they I'm sorry they qualcomm were at the um, uh, the gaming conference, the gaming um game developers conference. That was last week.

19:02
They had a session and they were talking about this x64 emulation, right, and there are three levels of compatibility now on arm, on windows and arm, there's obviously you could directly port an app. If you have a modern app, it's pretty easy to target arm. If you have a legacy app, it can just be emulated in x64. And then they have these kind of interim libraries that developers can use to kind of bring in some native features to what is otherwise an x64 title and this could be an app or a game, right, and I guess it's like ARM64 EC or whatever. It's kind of like a hybrid app.

19:42
So you look at the parts of the application of a game that aren't running very well and you can port just that part of it to ARM, basically kind of just an interim step. But for games in particular, I guess what they're saying, because the headline that games will run fine on ARM seems not to make sense. It doesn't seem believable. But what they're saying, qualcomm, is that the performance of the GPU is not an issue, right? If it runs well on x86 or an x64 PC, with whatever that GPU might be, and you have the same GPU but you're running on ARM, it will be fine, it will just work fine. Arguably, the buck speeds are higher.

20:27
So it could be even better. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, it just seems not, it doesn't seem right.

20:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But this is a side effect of how good the ARM architecture is, that it can emulate faster than native execution. You know there's a lot of huggly-puggly that goes on inside of an Intel processor to figure out are you going to go main pipeline or speed pipeline. You've got long instruction set problems, like there's a lot of pre-work in every cycle and ARM just skipped all that like because they got to start over, they stayed short on the instruction sets and so the silicon just works more efficiently and so in many cases the you're going to be able to emulate really stunningly fast. Um, for a lot more watts, right? Like yeah, it's not going to be as efficient as native by any stretch of the imagination. So yeah, I mean I could probably have a game emulated. It ran fine, but it probably consumed twice as much energy as it would have been running native, right?

21:26 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, I I'm vaguely well, I'm very, I'm very much hopeful for a variety of reasons. The gaming thing, just based on very limited experience on a mac, I was like, you know, this is not something I would have thought anyone would even bother with on such a computer. It actually works fine.

21:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So but is, is this all just a confidence play, right? Right, it's just to say listen, these machines are good enough, they can do these things even if you don't need to do them. And so you, you know what your fear is is you're going to drop a couple of thousand dollars on this machine and it's not going to run the stuff you need. That's right.

22:00 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I many years ago, not, not not dating back to Windows RT. I many years ago, not, not not dating back to Windows RT, I don't think, but probably just to the initial discussions we had around Windows 10 on ARM, back when that was going to be a thing. You know, my basic conclusion was that if this platform is successful, it will just be boring. It won't be even worth it. Don't even know it. Yeah, You'll just. You can just buy one and you will choose a pc based on characteristics like battery life and performance, not on compatibility, right, the the problem with arm to date has been well, the performance has been terrible. The compatibility, depending on the year, has gone up or down, whatever, but um, it's just, it hasn't come together as a total package. So you immediately notice the problems and I you know again if, if they can get it right. No, you know someone who's an average consumer who in the past you'd be like wait, wait, what did you buy? You know it won't matter.

22:55
Yeah, for people like us, who know what we're doing. We will specifically seek these things out for various reasons.

23:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and we'll be more tolerant of the problems too. But if're happy, you know, we're also prone to going first, and if we're happy that encourages others to come along. So we'll see. So so far we haven't been that happy but um. But like I said, the reality is that games can. Most games are written in c++. Sometimes they have NET involved, but NET's even easier to make run on ARM. The runtime just has an ARM mode.

23:28 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, if it's NET based, it's almost certainly using Unity, and that platform does cross-platform already, so they handle that stuff Well.

23:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Paul, once upon a time that's what C was about too. You know, in theory, if you built the libraries out sufficiently, you should just be able to recompile and run on. I hear words but I don't know. You're cynical because it's wisdom, right, it's actually correct, the probability it will actually work. It's going to be all the edge cases, and often we're calling into APIs that are very OS specific and often those OS specific APIs are platform specific. You know, the hardware abstraction layer in Windows is long gone. It left us in 2000. And we've been hardware dependent ever since.

24:17 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think that whatever work has occurred on ARM for Windows so far, we can complain about whatever, but by this point the software side of it is very mature, able to absorb a lot too. Yeah, by all accounts, very well done. So we've been basically waiting on the silicon, so this looks good.

24:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It had to get to this point. It had to be this fast to be able to overcome the inertia of so much code.

24:44 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, and all the bad memories that the few of us that have spent thousands of dollars on these things and were disappointed can get over right. So this is just the latest in a long list of indications that this thing is going to be where it needs to be, and actually arguably the best one. Just happened as well. Google announced yesterday that Chrome is coming to windows and arm in a native version and stable um, starting, I think, next month. It's available now, I think, in the beta channel.

25:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Wow, um, that really just means they've built the pipeline to deploy arm.

25:18 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think that did probably yeah, but it's I. This is also a chicken egg thing, right, I mean right. I mean, how do you get Google, which by all accounts does not give a crap about Microsoft or Windows, to pay attention to something like this? That is absolutely a niche platform.

25:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You have an interesting adjacent story that when I saw these two stories together, I thought this is tit for tat, okay Right. This is tit for tat, okay Right, like Microsoft pushing through that work on the text rendering yeah, and Google agreeing to it. They did some heavy lifting for Chromium.

25:55 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, look, I don't remember the year anymore, but when Microsoft adopted Chromium for Edge and made that big shift, one of their big publicly stated goals is that we're going to commit things back to this and we're going to improve all web browsers on windows, and it's a that sounds very altruistic, you know, but the idea here is that we can contribute to this as well, and they have. I mean, this is the one of several high profile things that they've.

26:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, that team had been collaborating over the rendering engines the whole time. Right, the bad guy here with apple it wasn't. You know generally microsoft and chrome and well I mean alignment.

26:35 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
We used to have the four major rendering engines and I guess we have three or two and a half, if depending on how you feel about fire and you can argue about how wise it is for everybody to consolidate on Chromium, but rendering is just not that interesting an equation.

26:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You were hoping that the digital effluent side of the browser would change, but that didn't happen either.

26:56 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, unfortunately, that's where browser makers are innovating, Richard. So the effluent side.

27:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So his treatment is excellent yeah it's top of mind.

27:08 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, so what we're alluding to there sorry I skipped over that was that chromium announced and you can see the, the sheer number of uh commits that microsoft tried to make over a long period of time they're going to uh implement a microsoft text rendering technology that's based on what they do at microsoft in edge using clear type.

27:32
Um, chromium and chrome and all chrome-based browsers, I believe use a text renderer called Skia, and so the way this is described is that Skia to date has been ignoring the configurations that users make in their PCs for clear type, which, frankly, most people don't make. But whatever it happens for you and in Edge, of course, that is automatic it grabs all the clear type stuff. So Chromium is not switching to the Microsoft Edge text rendering engine, but they are still using Skia. But they are improving Skia on Windows to respect the clear type configuration. So it's using that code base is as close as they're going to get and it's supposed to be very good, but we shall see, cause that's coming out. That's also happening, if I'm not mistaken, in April, when I think it's Chrome Chromium and Chrome one 24 go live in stable. So it's happening, cool yeah.

28:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Co-op Still happening, happily.

28:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right.

28:39 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Still happening happily, eh Eh, eh, all right. So last week Mike and I originally planned to cover the Microsoft AI at Work event live yeah, and then I was briefed on what that was going to entail and I contacted him and said ah, forget about it.

29:02
I don't know. It doesn't seem like it's worth doing Now. Here's the issue. It's not that there wasn't anything interesting announced. Oh no, I'm sorry, that is what it was. So the problem is, the problem is they had this kind of AI work event, which they've done in the past. Remember I'd gone to one in September in New York. When I looked over the video they eventually went public and the materials and everything, it was very clear that, despite the fact that they talked about Windows 11, windows 365, copilot and Microsoft 365, there was not an iota of news there, like not one new item. Wow, there were some new Surface PCs announced, but only for business, which we'll get to in a moment.

29:50
And I had a weird kind of PTSD flashback, flashback Back in the day, by which I mean the very early 2000s and beyond. Microsoft used to release software in a very kind of what we would now think of as like lengthy schedule, right, so a new version of Windows might come out every three to five years or whatever. And the problem was for Microsoft that you would get these big bang sales things occurring at those times and then things would slow down and there was nothing to talk about in between. And so when Microsoft was about halfway between a release of windows or windows server or office, they would go out and beat the PR drum in what they used to call they would have momentum updates. And I I started like, uh to me, me like the word momentum is actually triggering to this day, like I still it still makes me like feel it like weird.

30:46
Like you would, you would sit in a meeting for 45 minutes in person back then, right before, all of a sudden you realized wait a minute, they don't have anything. They don't have anything to discuss, they're just talking about how successful the thing they did two years ago is. And those things were called momentum meetings. And I was at a tech ed with a coworker. We were sitting outside of a meeting room waiting for the previous meeting to end and I looked at this guy I was sitting next to and I said, if this guy says the word momentum, I'm going to slowly close my laptop and I'm going to beat him to death with it. And he opened the door and he said Paul, sorry to keep you waiting, I'm really excited to talk to you about Windows Server Momentum. We just both lost it.

31:32
Like that's what this thing is. Anyway, that's what that event was. It was Momentum and it was presented as if no one had ever heard of Copilot, how it has improved Microsoft 365, whatever features are in Windows 11, which aren't much. It was presented as if it were new, you know. So that part was not particularly interesting, I don't think to a lot of people. It wasn't embarrassing, it wasn't like panos pene at Build last year, but it was off Like it felt weird.

32:06
The other component, the bigger component to this, was the Surface stuff and slightly undercut by the fact that these are for businesses and are hard to buy. If you're an individual, you can do it, I mean you can, in fact you can buy them direct from Microsoft if you want to, but you really have to go through some contortions of navigation to get to that point. And you know we're in a weird place too in the release cycle, because Intel announced their Core Ultra chipsets. Well, I'm sorry they announced them last year sometime, but they released them in December. There were some new PCs available. Then More came out at CES, along with non-Ultra Intel Core 13th generation based PCs that don't have MPUs. And then you know we've been told that next fall they'll go back on a normal release schedule, intel, and this will be the way it was.

32:59
But right now we're on this kind of weird cycle and in that cycle, microsoft and Surface are once again kind of late to the game in a way. Right, if you think about it, from a December to September schedule, march they announced this stuff. It's like guys, everyone else already did this, so it's good. We have a new Surface Pro X and a surface laptop 6 intel core ultra chipsets, which are okay, right, I don't think they're. They're not setting any records for anything, but they do have mpus and uh, and these are the right surface computers in some ways. Right, these are the mainstream ones, right? Surface pro that's been a successful form factor for them and surface laptop, obviously we can't actually buy these yet.

33:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right like they, the website still doesn't have them on there. It's still the nine and the five I want my I thought you, I thought you could buy them.

33:48 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm not really sure, okay, I don't remember, but I, I see these announcements and I'm like where where I'm looking past. So they're yeah, they're going to be sold through the channel mostly, but I I believe if you go to Surfacecom you can get in there.

34:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where is the Copilot key going to be? Just out of curiosity.

34:05 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Where is it going to be? Yeah, so, whatever that. What was it called that context menu key? Yeah, that used to be between Alt and Control on the right side of the keyboard. Oh the old menu key.

34:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, the menu key.

34:17 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you just like, take a screwdriver and dig that thing right out of there.

34:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Save your menu keys folks, so you can replace the copilot key. Yeah, and I presume you can remap it. The copilot key is important, unfortunately.

34:29 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, whatever you say, well, so I'm always fascinated to watch how other people in my industry report on things that I'm also reporting on. Right, and sometimes there are big differences. So I saw headlines that claimed these were Microsoft's first AI PCs.

34:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, not true. That's not true. Microsoft kind of implies that though.

34:53 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, well, I could actually explain it now. But he owns a Surface Laptop Studio or Surface Studio Laptop, Surface Studio 2 Laptop Laptop, right, which has an MPU in it. Right, it's an Intel chipset and an MPU. That was the first, that was the real first. Well, okay, but then we can go back in time to Surface Pro X, which was the Qualcomm. It had an MPU in it as well, and they've had a couple of gens of that. So what's going on? Well, as it turns out, microsoft has. First of all, microsoft did not describe this as their first AI PCs. They've described them as their first business or AI PCs for business. But to Microsoft, an AI PC is a computer that has an MPU and a copilot key on the keyboard. That's literally their definition. That's how you know what Richard's missing on his computer is he doesn't have a copilot key.

35:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He ain't got a copilot key. How are you going to live, Richard?

35:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I got to return this machine.

35:51 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't even know how you live with yourself. I don't know. I'm in agony. Do you hide it behind a wall and use it with an external keyboard, Like I don't even know how you do it. I don't know. It's horrible.

36:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So where are these on the Surface page? Where are they Right? Where would I find these Brand new co-pilot keyed NPU based fine machines?

36:12 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let's find out. I believe the way to get these is actually to go to the Microsoft store. But let's look.

36:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So, computers we can go to Store store, that's okay, we can go to Surface Laptop.

36:20 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're not there. What's going on? They're actually gone. I found these on the store. What is happening? They're literally not there. That is hilarious. Why, oh, computers for business? That's why, nope, nope, they're not there either. I have found them here Somewhere inside here. That's crazy. Meet the new AI, here we go. I'm sorry, microsoftcom slash Surface, slash business. Okay, surface Pro details, surface Laptop 6 details, and that's a PDF file. I think they've changed the site. I literally clicked through to this.

36:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They saw.

36:57 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Paul visiting Meet the new AI PC. That's amazing. Is there a?

36:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
co-pilot key on this sucker, wow there are co-pilot keys wow there it is because you can search.

37:06 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
when you search for resellers, one of the resellers that comes up is microsoft and you click through to that and then you get to yeah, here we go. Surface all right, so it's it's really hard. Like I said, I told you it was hard to find, so doing this live was maybe a mistake. It is pre-order, so they're not available yet, but you can pre-order and they are available in a bunch of different configurations and it's really hard. I don't know if you found it or not, but I could probably step you through it if you really want to find it.

37:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, I'm looking at it Right, aren't I?

37:33 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, yeah, this is a 9, but no, no, no, no, If you want to get to the 10 and then.

37:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it says introducing the new AI PC. Oh, there it is, Surface Pro 10. There we go.

37:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oops, that was a PDF. No, no, that's the wrong thing.

37:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's just watch the video Unlock a new era of productivity.

37:50 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
The way to do it is to find the.

37:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
These haircuts are terrible. What is going to find the at these haircuts are terrible. What's going on? All right, I see the copilot key. I can spot it.

38:02 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
So one of the reasons I'm not crazy about this is because I use linux and uh yeah I thought you were going to say it's because I have a brain in my head and I know that there's no, this key doesn't make it.

38:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't want a copilot key. I can. I got it anyway, right, I just I know how to get a copilot.

38:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We could find a way to make this work without a copilot. It's branding. It's like putting Intel inside a sticker.

38:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, what's that? Oh those are adaptive technologies. Oh, that's cool.

38:28 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's like having a sticker. I like the adaptive Atari 2600 joystick.

38:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's pretty funny, isn't it?

38:39 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
funny, isn't it? Hey, it's a classic. Anyway, you can. You can pre-order them. Now it's very hard to find, as we just demonstrated, but it is there. You have to go to the place where it says find a research reseller, and then you select microsoft and that gives you microsoft website, you can actually pre-order.

38:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can in fact pre-order. I like that. This is all part of the qualcomm elite, right? That's the whole key no, what's that? No, these are intel so that's the.

38:58 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the issue. So microsoft has long been rumored to be coming up with updates to these devices in both qualcomm and intel forms. Right, so the intel forms are available now. Slash soon, I guess. Uh, for businesses. And? And look, and yet another indication that microsoft believes that these things are going to make sense for individuals. They're actually going to make sense for individuals. They're actually going to ship the consumer versions, just with the Qualcomm chipsets. Apparently, they haven't announced that, but that's the story.

39:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So the business will be Intel. It's the mullet of computers Intel in the front and Qualcomm in the back and Qualcomm in the back. Okay, I get it.

39:37 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Which part is the pun? I don't even know. Interestingly, we learned of Microsoft's definition of an AI PC from Intel, which has its own definition, which has nothing to do with Microsoft's, other than the fact that Intel, too, would like you to use an Intel CPU with an MPU, which today is the only generation we have of Intel core ultra chipsets. Right, that's what we have. So I don't know. Intel, being a kind of a hardware maker, is talking about more technical details. They want the MPU to hit a certain, you know, tops value, which is one of those benchmarks we use to measure the performance of an MPU. That will probably be out of date in about 10 seconds. And yada, yada, yada, whatever. But there you go. Npu co-pilot and the new co-pilot key.

40:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know that this event started out being broken. Yeah.

40:36 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I wondered the same thing.

40:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm wondering if the moves happening on the consumer AI side broke it.

40:42 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Here's my only concern with that. This was not a live event. They could have just not announced it and pushed it back, right. The only thing that tied it to anything was right at the beginning of the pre-canned recorded presentation they said one year ago we announced Copilot, which of course, was called Bing Chat. One year ago. But yeah, okay, oh, no, no, no, sorry, we announced Copilot for Microsoft 365, which one year ago was called Microsoft 365 Copilot, so it was kind of tied to that.

41:17
I guess this was the alleged milestone that necessitated this event, but I don't know. Look, I think Surface has enough cachet and enough interest, even in our kind of jaded tech media world of today, that if they had announced a Surface event, people would have paid attention, right, as many people would have watched this thing. It's still interesting. It's a little bit of a downer that these things are not available easily for consumers and it doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense to me. But okay, and I think just reiterating the same old stuff that everybody should already know about Windows, windows 365, copilot, microsoft 365 is kind of a.

42:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think they may have pushed us over to business because they are revamping their consumer AI play, and so this was a way to tuck that out of the way. So they don't step on the new folks coming in. Don't step on the new folks coming in, okay so?

42:17 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was. I was. If you did not touch on that, I was going to say I'm surprised you didn't say Richard, but you did say it. Microsoft last week announced what, by all accounts, is a reorg, and now, because of more recent news, we know this was in fact a reorg and we'll talk about this a little bit later. Well, we'll talk about this a little bit later. Well, we'll talk about it right now. Actually, um we, if you looked at the leaked memo from rajesh ja and any of the news stories about this microsoft ai event from last week, you would have come. Well, I came away as the windows guy, mike. My takeaway was okay, but what about? It was like the one part of this that wasn't part of any of the messaging. There's a team that is responsible for things like, but not only, bing and Edge and advertising and all that horrible online stuff that nobody likes to think about, but also Copilot. That was moved into Microsoft AI, which is being led by people from outside of Microsoft right Now will be Okay.

43:27
But it's, and there was some uncertainties in here around such people as like Kevin Scott right, the guy who put together OpenAI and Microsoft and it's like, oh no, no, don't worry, you're still the AI guy. But some of this felt weird to me. So the guy who was in charge of that team Bing Edge, copilot, et cetera said, yeah, no, I'm not doing this. He literally said no, I'm not, I am not moving under this new team and I will not work for this man. And it's not clear today whether that means he's leaving the company or he's looking for a job somewhere else at Microsoft. The claim is that he's going to try to find a new role at Microsoft, but I feel like any second now we're going to find out this guy's left.

44:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I'm surprised there isn't more pushback like this. Right, I disagree, I think. I think microsoft knows what they're doing in the enterprise. I think m365 co-pilot is a hit, uh, and it's big. And I think satcha is unhappy with the consumer adoption and everything they were doing was not working and he doesn't know what to do, but it wasn't what they were doing, so he is literally shaking the Etch-a-Sketch Okay.

44:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think you need to bring him over.

44:46 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nobody from the outside of Microsoft needs to tell anyone at Microsoft that Bing is a horrible brand and is the Achilles heel of this entire endeavor. Well and.

44:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think you know, remember, satchit comes from Bing too, so he's got his own issues there like, and the opportunity to grab sulam and these, these two guys, the deep mind guys get them.

45:08 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's a score. You know, there's a dozen people in the world at this caliber for for ai, and I'm just saying there are all these guys at microsoft who are qualified and have years and years of experience.

45:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I have to think, a lot of them are like I don't know.

45:23 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
We'll see.

45:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I, I, I'm like I said, my take on this is just but it's also the way that he organized it that he very much isolated it from the rest of the company. I think he well just looking at it.

45:34 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
So hold on. I mean, first of all, sorry, my opening point here was that at the time of the announcement, big chunks of what I think of as their kind of consumer-facing front-end stuff went into this group, but not Windows or at least not explicitly has left, and rajesh shah, who's, uh, in charge, basically in charge of microsoft 365 we'll call it um revealed more details in a memo that has been leaked, and so we finally realized that's what, that what's happened to windows is almost nothing, right. It's basically that it's the same as it was before. Windows and surface are together again, or still. I guess maybe is the right way to look at that. But we have this, we have this weird they use this term internally partnering, right.

46:29
So when the Microsoft AI organization was announced at that time, rajesh Jha and his organization were going to partner with Microsoft AI on the AI things that would bleed into his products, meaning Microsoft 365 co-pilot, windows 11 co-pilot, but also presumably some of those AI experiences we get in paint and photos and elsewhere that kind of thing. Microsoft Edge, right, which is not just Windows but has its own kind of copiloty stuff going on. So there's a whole kind of list of stuff that I guess just has more clarity now. But I don't really feel that. I guess what I'm saying is Windows was an unknown quantity when this announcement was made and a week later it's like okay, now we know what's happening and it's not. It's nothing has changed, basically. So I'm curious, we'll see. We'll see what happens with this man.

47:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Veruna mentioned in the chat there about Satya saying and I went and found the real quote where Satya said we want to move people from needing windows to choosing windows, to loving windows that was in 2015.

47:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
To holding windows hostage until it falls in love with you.

47:50 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I took great exception to that quote when he made it. I wrote an editorial about it at the time and if you look at the events that have occurred since then, nobody followed that as a rule of any kind. They've done everything they can to make people hate.

48:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
In 2015,. He was a year and a half into being CEO. All that, the love period. And it's before the AI bomb went off. You don't have to love us, just bias. And now we know Dark Satya has appeared. Dark Satya has appeared. Dark Satya. Oh, look at the moves he's made the past year and a half. That's by far.

48:25 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I've done a complete 180 on him because of the last year, really, yeah.

48:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, yep From positive to negative or from negative to positive.

48:35 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
That might be the wrong way to even think of it. I thought of Microsoft as being unique among big tech companies in having what I'll for lack of a better term, I'll I'll call the ethical high road. The ethical, they were going to be the kinder gentler tech giant. Yes, and I. It's very obvious now that that is just a tech giant, just marketing and and I fell for that and I'm stupid for it.

48:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, I think an element of this is what was going on inside of the company, which was Satya. Very much was like we're all going to play and work together or people are going to get fired. And you know, his one Microsoft mantra was an internal mantra primarily, which, by the way, largely worked. Like you do not get promoted at Microsoft if you don't pass a cross-team 365 eval right at certain levels.

49:22 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you're describing literally the term partnering, which I think is so important to Microsoft's legacy and history, and it seemed like under Satya Nadella that this tradition would continue into this kind of way. At the time we thought it was the cloud era and, um, this was a company you know I've talked about this a lot with you know Google and Microsoft, specifically how these two companies should be partnering more and not at each other's throats. Um, I feel like a lot of the antagonism comes from Google, frankly Microsoft but then again, microsoft has been pretty aggressive anti-Google in the Epic trial and elsewhere, trying to change the way app stores work and all that kind of stuff. So there's a lot of animosity on both sides. But, yeah, you're right, the past year and a half I guess we'll call it we've seen. Well, god, this company didn't have a heartbeat.

50:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The argument would be he's now gotten the company in alignment and now he's taking it for a ride and and this is his win, and that would be you know I can't, look.

50:25 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can't argue with the fact that it appears to be working. Yeah right, and what I mean by that is for a publicly owned, shareholder driven company like mic.

50:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If you're a shareholder, you're awfully happy.

50:39 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep and my complaints about the inshirtification of Windows would, you know, not be of much interest to those people. Yeah, but look at the stock price.

50:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean they're doing something right, but this is the path to de-shirtifying Windows is to bring in external forces that are not mired in all of that and get and allow a rethink of it under the context of well, except that is the most important thing that windows is the one thing that's not under that company, under that organization.

51:07 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the problem. The guy running windows now who I happen to like, by the way, he's a nice guy, he's been there for a long, long time um, I don't know. I don't know. I always have hope.

51:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But it's what it's going to take. Like you, really, I'm excited. The prospect of separating enterprise Windows from consumer Windows.

51:27 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh my God. Yes, this has been the dream for a long, long time. This is another conversation we would have had, I mean, probably 20 years ago. Which is look. All that matters is the app model. They can look completely differently.

51:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Why don't they? There's an argument for it. Leave Windows 10 Enterprise alone. Just do security patches. The Enterprise is going to use M365 Copilot anyway, so don't worry about that. Now go rampant on a consumer version of Windows. It's different and it needs to approach large language models differently for consumers, because they're not sitting on. You know the idea of sitting on a pile of enterprise data that needs to be utilized effectively.

52:08 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's a very different proposal from taking that kind of similar tool and applying it to your life I was just talking to some folks who were saying you know everyone's so excited about getting all their data into Copilot because you know that will be that finite set of data that we know that you know Copilot and other AIs work well with.

52:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I remember we were so excited to put all our data into social media and that went really well.

52:35 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, well, but the point that these people made to me was that, uh, I don't know, like I don't, I can't speak for every company on earth, but this, you know, our data is garbage. I mean, why, why would I want to feed this thing, our data? I mean we?

52:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
have. I'm telling you, I'm at a conference right now with thousands of people who's one of their key responsibilities will be on the microsoft ai path to get your data estate in order. Right, that is the tag line.

53:03 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is, I'm sorry, but the speaking of tags. What you're describing is almost metadata, right? It's like if we could just clean up this data, we can search it and we can find things.

53:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's gonna it goes, it goes along with, yes, the system is secure and yes, the check is in the mail, like it's all of the same. You're never going to get there. It's a journey, but every CIO's fear right now is twofold I'm going to miss the AI wave or I'm going to jump on the AI wave and blow this company apart. And you're trying to skinny down the middle of that line.

53:37 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is a scary take on the red pill, blue pill dilemma.

53:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like I mean, I don't know, we'll see, let's uh, let's take a little uh time out to enjoy the ai that refreshes and when we return, a little bit more, it's a burst of AI in my mouth.

53:58
It tingles. It's got AI inside. Wow, I'm going to do this as an actual human reading a commercial about that. I love it. That's the AI prompt I'm using. Respond as if you were a human reading a commercial Our show today brought to you by.

54:21
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55:31
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57:31 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
It has a little removable lightsaber.

57:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, that's so cool.

57:34 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
It shoots out like in Return of the Jedi. Wow, it's nice.

57:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did she build that over the holiday or something? And yes, she did. Wow, you gotta do something when you're stuck at home. I said I can't believe you built this yourself.

57:47 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
And she said I knew if I gave it to you unbuilt, you would have thought of it as more of a punishment than a gift, so true so true, that's right. You've given me, like, something to do for some reason.

57:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you I almost, I was almost going to name this show momentum, just to bug you it's, it's.

58:07 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
We could go back and look. I wouldn't be surprised if this has come up in the past.

58:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we might have used it, so I'm gonna call it dark satya yeah, you to get like the red eyes.

58:16 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you know.

58:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think the first appearance of Dark Satya was the Santa Malton firing.

58:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yes, well, we don't know, but I'm sure somebody's reading them.

58:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
By all accounts.

58:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Gene Paschal Zachary's got to be working on this book, right?

58:36 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Satya Nadella, sitting in his morning coffee, reads the headlines in the newspaper, rushes to the phones and says First of all, you know it's morning tea and he's reading the cricket scores, right, yes? Between the cricket scores Stan, he's like he got the actual paper and he's like don't tell me what happened. Everyone else is like no one knows what happened. Satya Cricket.

58:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We don't know, how do you even?

58:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
know who's won on cricket? You don't. Three days went by, everybody's asleep, yeah.

59:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richard, you probably know how to play cricket because you're a New Zealander.

59:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm a really Canadian and we all stare at cricket sideways. Like the rest of us, I'm generally only learn cricket rules while drinking heavily, which means when I wake up in the morning.

59:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I forget. You don't remember a thing.

59:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's it.

59:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, All right. What's next? I've lost track. Are we going to talk about AI and Microsoft Teams? We sure?

59:25 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
are how exciting Two great tastes that go together. Yeah, so the other day. Look again momentum, right, you know Microsoft is saying that Microsoft 365 Copilot. So Microsoft is saying that Microsoft 365 Copilot is saving 11 minutes a day per user over 11 weeks is a million something, somethings, and whatever. Anyway, obviously they are going to be bringing more AI capabilities to teams. These are the two big pushes at Microsoft 365 right now.

59:57
So, you know, you get Copilot in a meeting chat, so you're in a chat with other people. You'll be able to interact with Copilot and get summaries, et cetera, et cetera, during and after the meeting In the compose box, right where you need help writing, just like you can get it today in Word or wherever else. Intelligent call recap it's all. This is all honestly, this is all 100% obvious. Every one of these things Automatic camera switching, it's just like. Okay, for Teams rooms right, that makes some sense. So you have in other words, it's not you with one camera or one system switching cameras, it's a Teams room where someone speaks up and that person's in frame, et cetera, et cetera. We, someone speaks up and that person's in frame, et cetera, et cetera. We already have stuff like this, but you know, ai makes everything better, or something like that.

01:00:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So the transfer summary is the thing, yep, and you know. The best part about it is that every time you've ever had a secretary or you know and in secretary I mean the role, not a person per se, but somebody who's doing the notes for a meeting yeah, you didn't like the set of notes, you went after the person. It was an instant ad hominem attack of you know. You can use the joke at this meeting. Now we have software to yell at. That's miles better. There's not going to be an HR call out of it. It's perfect.

01:01:14 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, here we go. So I had a Teams meeting recently with a partner I'll call them, and let me maybe put this in kind of a dark mode I don't know why this is so bright, but you are illuminated yeah, I like how he glows when he's looking at it anyway, that's not gonna work, uh anyway.

01:01:32
So anyway, they sent me by email um the summary of the meeting generated by teams Right, and it's interesting on many levels, but let me see if I can find it. Yes, it says, paul suggested going to a shooting range instead of an axe throwing place good on you, I want to be super clear about this I have never once in my life recommended such a thing that's the ai talk oh, that's hysterical.

01:02:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh bless its heart. Oh bless its heart I don't know.

01:02:07 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know we'll get there maybe Wow, A shooting range.

01:02:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wait a minute.

01:02:11 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the summary of the meeting yeah, the summary it's one of. It's a surprisingly long summary.

01:02:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And.

01:02:18 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I actually missed it when I read it and someone else pointed it out later and I was like come on, I said that I didn't say that.

01:02:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, it doesn't matter who said what, but you know now, ai is like pointing a finger at me, like what paul said oh no, I'm not

01:02:36 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
on trial here. What you said, wow, exactly right. The ultimate you said you said anyway.

01:02:42
Um, one thing that's come up a bunch recently and, leo, you might have missed out on this little bit of excitement. But uh, there's a. There's a grid of ai capabilities across copilot and you've got. You can look at it like the. Here are the capabilities listed on one side and here are all the places you can get copilot and, just as was the case with microsoft 365 features over several year period, microsoft will announce a new feature for something and it will plug into one of the places, but not all of them. So get out your bingo board, because we got two more little pegs to put in this grid.

01:03:15
Um, designer, which is the new name for what used to be bing image creator and co-pilot pro, sorry, not co-pilot. Uh, co-pilot pro is the consumer subscription that is sort of almost exactly Copilot for Microsoft 365, but for individuals are both coming to the Microsoft 365 mobile app. So if you have Microsoft 365 on your iPhone or Android today, you will have seen that Copilot is front and center in that thing. Now, baby, because of course it is, and in the same way that you can access I think it's Word, powerpoint and Excel functionality without having to install separate apps, you're going to be able to do designer, image creation and Copilot Pro capabilities in this app, which is interesting because it literally means in some cases that some of those app-specific functions like we get in, say, like Word which, which like text generation, will be available in the I'm making this one up, I'm actually not sure if this is one of them, but in the word component of the Microsoft 365 mobile app, right, not just in the standalone windows word mobile app.

01:04:22
I'm surprised I can even keep this sort of straight. Anyway, it's confusing. So these will both happen by the end of April. I think the Android version is available in preview now If you're into this kind of thing. To me the Microsoft 365 mobile app is kind of perfect because you don't want all the Office apps on your phone really, but sometimes you do have to deal with these things, these types of documents, and you know, actually that app works great, so it's nice having the one app.

01:04:51
And you know actually that where app works great, so it's nice having the one app. And you know they're going to overload it, so it will become stupid. And then we would have talked last week about the fact that we knew that build and Google IO were both happening in May, and it was only a matter of time before Apple announced WWDC 2024. And now they have and not surprisingly, it will be full of AI. Goodness, presumably Apple and, or I don't know, google, openai and whoever else will come to some sort of agreement before this date so that we can find out who they're going with, I guess, on the AI stuff, because it seems like they're not going to be going along.

01:05:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They can deal everywhere they can, yeah, ai stuff because it seems like they're not going to be going anywhere they can. Yeah, I would love it if they did something like uh, you know perplexity, does I?

01:05:37 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
know you use, like an open model, kind of perplexity you choose the model.

01:05:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can have, open AI you can have, so you can have whatever you want.

01:05:43 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think, as you say, that I I agree with you. That's an awesome idea. Apple will never do that. No, you know why Apple?

01:05:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
because somebody's gonna write him a big check right.

01:05:52 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, okay, that's why no, google's going to give him billions to make it Gemini.

01:05:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're 100% right?

01:05:58 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yep, you are right. There is prior behavior to suggest that that is what they're going to do?

01:06:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was going to take a slightly less cynical uh stand on this, which is kind of bizarre for me.

01:06:10 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
But yeah, I was going to say something like apple will decide which to you, which you can use where, because they will pick in their own little bespoke way which one's best. But you're right, let's get a big check now that's the rationalization apple is going to publish.

01:06:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But the real reason is, who writes the bigger check? Yep, yep, you're right.

01:06:28 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're right, I don't see OpenAI writing any checks?

01:06:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, but Microsoft might. Wouldn't it be interesting if it was co-pilot.

01:06:35 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Microsoft could have been in this conversation, oddly enough?

01:06:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, we don't know, it's a rumor. We don't know who's talking to whom.

01:06:40 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, but come on, you're telling me this wouldn't have going to write a check, so I think Google is going to win this one Google OpenAI takes checks.

01:06:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They don't write checks, that's not their business model. You're not talking about a minor increase in cost to sign up to many billion iPhones. Nobody can afford that. I don't even know that Google could afford it, but Google needs it.

01:07:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I raised a theory or my theory on MacBreak Weekly yesterday, which is because Apple. So the reason Apple's doing this obviously is so that if there are, if there are hallucinations or privacy issues, we'll blame Google. It's not our fault, Right? But I also wonder if Apple might not try to we don't know. I mean again, this is a rumor Use the models on device, that's right, and do it locally.

01:07:31 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like the Gemini Nano model or something. They'll announce we're the first phone that has whatever. The next one up is right, like other phones, have Nano, but we have Gemini, whatever it's called.

01:07:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then it does it. It offloads Google, they make the model, but they don't have to worry about all those billions of users. But it also reassures users because it's on device, so it's private.

01:07:56 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
And they already have the slogan what stays on your iPhone, or happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone. It may be complete nonsense.

01:08:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was a lie, but okay.

01:08:04 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.

01:08:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They still have it.

01:08:07 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look, whatever they do, it's going to be really interesting.

01:08:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm curious.

01:08:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're so far behind right and uh well, I think the pricing what it was going to take to build their own and when. Yeah, wow, we can buy a lot for this well, they also.

01:08:22 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, we do have infinite cash in the bank, while we just buy something you know we'll see.

01:08:28
I don't think apple and ai uh really go together, to be honest well, I, that said, I, they were very early to the game of in fact they almost invented it in a way the on-device ai and uh, this hybrid model, I I think is something the rest of the industry has kind of adopted and they've been talking I mean, they used to they would call it machine language, but they've been talking about how they've been these capabilities on mean, they used to they would call it machine language, but they've been talking about how they've been capabilities on device for several years now. I mean I I don't know.

01:08:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know.

01:08:58 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'll look. I'll tell you this because I never give up an opportunity to you know kind of crap on Samsung. Samsung put Google's thing on their phone and they have their little remove stuff from photos. Galaxy S is terrible, so now they're bringing it to more phones. So, um, so if you've ever used a pixel and you've done this magic eraser thing, it doesn't. It's not always perfect, I mean, I'm not. I didn't mean to suggest that, but my God, it's really good actually. And then you do the same thing on a Samsung Galaxy and you're like yikes, it's not even close, there's something wrong with it.

01:09:36
So Samsung, if anything, is providing a model for Apple to look at for the pitfalls of what can happen when you just add AI willy-nilly all over the place on a phone, because it's going to feel like a weird little pockmarked. The messages app gets this AI, the photos app gets this AI that you know that that's what it looks like today on all other phones, right? So maybe they'll at least learn a lesson from that and be better. I mean, this is the promise, right, of that ecosystem. We'll see.

01:10:11
Yeah, I wrote a1, not AI. But yeah, galaxy AI is coming to more phones. So if you have an S23 or any of the current generation folding phones, tab, I think it's S6 series tablets. That Galaxy AI stuff that debuted on the S24 series back in January, I think, is coming to your devices starting tomorrow, and it doesn't matter where you got them. Remember the battle days? Oh, you got it on AT&T. Sorry, it's going to be a couple of months. No, it doesn't matter, you got it AT&T, us Cellular, verizon, t-mobile, samsungcom. It doesn't matter, it's just gonna. It's coming, coming to everybody.

01:10:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So you'll get that soon, you know, like a virus or a cold or something I do wonder if, if google is going to have a at&t experience with apple goes full bore that's so.

01:11:05 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's okay. I I thought that and forgot it immediately. When leo was talking about earlier, I was thinking to myself oh, you mean like when Apple blamed all the connectivity problems on AT&T? Well, the only company that would take a bet on the iPhone. They just threw them right under the bus.

01:11:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
CEO said it was you know, the unlimited data was the worst thing he'd ever done.

01:11:25 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep oh just a huge mistake I, years later, I had had, when I um, I had to. So what AT&T did to get rid of those plans, cause I got that plan the day the iPhone came out, right, the unlimited plan, and they stopped going to higher speeds's. Like you gotta, you're gonna have to switch the plan. You know, this grant, this thing's been grandfathered in, you know. So I was like all right, I guess I'm going to do this. I went to the store to do it and the woman said you sure you want to do this, and I'm like I have to, you know. And she said I feel like I'm killing a unicorn. Oh, I hear you. But I mean, I got to get, but I don't remember if it was a new phone or I don't remember what I was doing.

01:12:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, I had another feeling I had to you know A lot of people had to do that. Yeah, yeah.

01:12:13 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah, everyone did eventually as long as they could.

01:12:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yep.

01:12:18 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, now we have unlimited plans.

01:12:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But you know it's all good, all crank a few terabytes through, you'll get a call, exactly Well yes, yeah, or just yeah.

01:12:31 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
You'll notice something, that's for sure. Yeah, and that's it. That is our AI story.

01:12:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's everything this is actually for 2024,.

01:12:43 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
this has been pretty light on the AI side somehow, although we have there were several.

01:12:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the calm before the storm, Paul.

01:12:50 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah Well, developer season is upon us.

01:12:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think AI. I don't know about you guys, but I think AI has some legs. I don't know.

01:12:59 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm still not sure it's real. I think it's. I think it's a scam perpetrated by Microsoft. Oh, no wait, that was someone on my side who said that. Someone literally said that it's like I don't know how far, how disconnected from reality you need to be.

01:13:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There are people, though in fact we've had them on the show who really think this is a hype cycle, kind of like blockchain, where it's really not gonna. It's gonna peter out and not gonna make a big difference.

01:13:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, no, GitHub Copilot is my anchor on that. Just too many productivity benefits. I completely agree.

01:13:30 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah, there are far too many real-world benefits.

01:13:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You saw me last year how uncomfortable I was with how big this hype cycle was.

01:13:38 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, me too.

01:13:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I was very worried, but as real people doing real development, we're saying good things, but for me it was when the PMs started ringing in. It's like my whole team is 25% more effective.

01:13:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, exactly it's when we had experience of how useful it was that we went from skeptics I don't want to say true believers, but people who see the value. No but to understanding.

01:14:02 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
There is value here, right? I subscribed to Copilot Pro back in January, assuming I would find it completely useless and would maybe move on to the next thing, test a couple of different things. I've not stopped paying for it. It's fantastic.

01:14:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm now in the habit of something I used to do anyway, which is I get into a class, I start writing my comment right, this is what I intend to do here and Copilot writes the code while I'm writing the comment. Wow, and it gets 80 percent of the way there from the comment.

01:14:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What language are you using? That?

01:14:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
c-sharp, c-sharp, but it works. It'll do that with python too.

01:14:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've done it with python I do with common lisp, although I made a custom uh chat, uh gpt, uh gpt for it, but it is replaced flipping through hundreds of books or dozens of books. It's replaced my brain.

01:14:56 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's what's replaced is Stack Overflow and going off on some that's what it's replacing. Stack Overflow the afternoon where you look something up and then you go and you go and you click and you try things and nothing works. And then suddenly it's four o'clock in the afternoon. You're like what the hell was I doing? You don't even remember why you were there in the first place.

01:15:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're so deep in the rabbit hole.

01:15:15 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
In the same way that you know, like a lot of the IntelliSense capabilities in Visual Studio kind of kept you where you were, which is its own form of efficiency and productivity. You know, being able to solve problems because no one knows how to do everything. We all have to refer to things or whatever. Um, keeping you there, uh, it is almost 50 of the battle, and then solving the problem for you there, yeah, I think is the next level.

01:15:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Benefit you know I used to write out the comment because it helped me write the search express, the searches to go into overflow. Yes, exactly.

01:15:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't do that.

01:15:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's hysterical I, I don't let it write my code.

01:15:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I very rarely will paste code in, but it sure is helpful for pointing you in the right direction yeah, no, it's the way that it's integrated into visual studio.

01:16:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Literally below the comment, the code is appearing as I'm describing what I needed to do.

01:16:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's fantastic because, uh, I also, you know, I pay for like you, paul I. I thought, well, I'll try this for a month or two, I still pay for uh, you know, chat, gpt, uh, and for perplexity I pay. And uh, because I had used different models. I even have a local model running, so I was trying to learn a new concept pattern matching and, you know, none of the books had a really satisfactory example and there wasn't one online. So I thought, well, I'll ask perplexity because it's still has access to the web. It's not one of those canned llms where my knowledge has stopped. In march of 2020, uh, it's got access to the web. It wrote me out a page. It wasn't huge, but a page that clarified stuff that I was not able to understand from any other source. I was blown away.

01:16:53 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean to be clear, it's not just like software development. I mean, some of the productivity features they've added to the apps in Copilot for Microsoft 365 are really exciting and kind of speak to that notion of you know, you may spend your day in Excel but you're not a word expert or a PowerPoint expert and you need some help to get over some hump, whatever it might be. But they're also just kind of simple, um kind of consumer focused things where, uh, you're, uh, the video summarization features, right, or are you a podcast summarization features or whatever? Um yeah, summarization features or whatever. Um yeah, sometimes you, you can use it to get an answer, but you can also use it to know whether this is something you might want to pursue further. In other words, how much time could you waste watching a video hoping to see the answer to a question, only to discover it's not there? You know, I mean, I guess you could, you could, you could yourself manually copy and paste the transcript and go try to find the term you're looking for and maybe you know something like that.

01:17:54
But like, this is just useful and I kind of made fun of it earlier, but Microsoft had that quote about you know 10 whatever's of 10 whatever's and Microsoft 365 Copilot has resulted in whatever million something and it's like well, actually saving time is important and this was the argument for the cloud, right? I guess we could hire a team of people to manage our exchange server, build up this infrastructure and do all this stuff. But remind me, we're not an email company, right? We sell widgets. Why are we doing this? Why are we spending time, money and effort on this stuff? You know, I think freeing people who are, whatever they might be software developers, writers, presenters, you know, whatever market, whatever they are, who cares, from the rigmarole of day-to-day life and letting them focus on the job at hand is this is promise realized.

01:18:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, what productivity is about?

01:18:55 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
so yeah, that's the point I think, so, anyway, I feel like ai meets this bar and will continue to do so. There they will look. Our job collectively is to point out the stuff that's nonsense and say look, some of this is hype and it's not going to make it. You know, some of it is.

01:19:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Or the M365 co-pilot case study. That'll be a run-on episode and I haven't got one yet, but it's coming Right, right.

01:19:19 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, we'll see if the usual suspects show up. You know Forrester, etc, etc. And what they have to say.

01:19:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm curious you want a columbia sportswear, or you know yeah like a, like a, like a, almost a customer profile yeah, you want a customer that said here's the performance boost we got when we were able to.

01:19:38 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
We are able to put an llm into the knowledge base that is our company all of that corporate knowledge and save time to move faster yeah, yeah, Look, I think we all went through like the seven stages of grief with AI, because I remember my initial pushback against paid AI services like Microsoft 365, Copilot. It was like hold on a second. You're telling me I as an individual can buy Microsoft 365 family for six people, terabyte of storage, all the apps, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever. So that works out to whatever family for six people terabyte of storage, all the apps, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever. So that works out to whatever. That is six, eight bucks a month or something, and I'm going to pay 20 bucks a month per user to kind of an upsell. Is that you don't upsell?

01:20:21
me by 250% by 11%, like an E3 at $65 a month.

01:20:25
Yeah, and it gets, it gets 20% but then you have that conversation with people like, hold on a second, you're acting like this amount of money per month is a lot of money, but when it saves me whatever from having you know, or or or just opens up like in my case, for example, something stupid like I create graphics for articles in the web, right, my initial thing was like, well, I'm going to use this for, like, the paid premium articles because, you know, there, those are important.

01:20:49
I'll never use these for news articles. And then after a while, like, well, actually, you know, and there's no version of a world where I could go to a friend of mine who is a graphic artist and say, all right, this is what I want you to do Create four images based on what I'm about to say. Come back and show them to me. I won't like any of them, but I'll say this one's close Make these changes to make four, change for new images based on that and then come back again and I might or may not have you know whatever. That that's impossible, so it's not. This is not a like a direct savings of money per se.

01:21:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No and it's a capability that was impossible before.

01:21:24 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you just wouldn't do it, just wouldn't do it, you wouldn't even dream of doing it. It's stupid, yeah, and now?

01:21:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's easy. Don't you worry, though, Paul. You're a designer. Don't you worry that it takes food out of the mouth of design?

01:21:36 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I can see the event horizon on my retirement.

01:21:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can see it, it's yeah, that's why you and I don't care. No, it's ready to give in, to give in anyway.

01:21:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The argument I have against it is you would never have gone to a designer for that. This is work that would not have been done.

01:21:53 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So someone asked me a simple question like given what's going on with AI, would you recommend going into a college student, perhaps going into this, into software development, as a career? Right now you know what's the recommendation. Unfortunately, that's going to change in the weeks and months ahead we'll see.

01:22:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But just if you're writing, if your code is prompts, fine, what difference is it? You still need a person to figure out the problem that was.

01:22:19 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's where I landed. It was. It was basically that in something that important especially, we'll always understand there needs to be a human being there and look. Look, the training might be a little different when I was younger and I would have gone to school. I did go to school for this. You learn programming languages and that's what you did when my son went to school. He learned about psychology and user experience and accessibility, because now that field is different. It's not engineers creating apps, it's there's a team of people. They need to understand all these issues when they create user experiences for ATM machines and cars and whatever it might be.

01:22:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The coding part was the easy part. Defining the space is the art. The knowledge domain has always been the tricky part yeah.

01:23:02 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I think I, yeah, anyway, I, it's changing things. But I, you know. So, to bring it back to Leo's comment, I mean for me as like a creator or something, a writer, a designer, whatever it might be, I mean, yeah, I, I, when I went to art school, they didn't have computers in the you know, they did that for the next group of people that came in, but not for me. And how would that have? It would have changed things, but it might not have changed my career arc, you know. Um, so I think ai is going to have that same kind of impact. It's uh, I might still want to look if I I'm a writer, but if I was coming up in the world today, maybe I'd be making tiktok videos, you know yeah that's true.

01:23:44
The medium is maybe, maybe the way you communicate with people has changed I wrote, wrote books on paper Honestly and got paid, yeah, and got paid for that it sounds stupid.

01:23:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I still think, and it may always be the case, that it's not great as good as a human in generating art or writing. It's still very mechanical and weird Still very mechanical and weird. Yeah, richard, and I use it more as an advisor, right? Or as an information extractor. I think it's very good at that.

01:24:16 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and I think that's going to be true for a lot of people.

01:24:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's what it's good at, yeah, and I worry that. I think that, just as we learned, really, I think we've learned that self-driving vehicles are not going to happen because it's too hard. It's a hard problem.

01:24:30 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's too hard. As terrible as drivers are here in Pennsylvania. The one thing that would be worse is everyone driving around in a Tesla. Yeah, you know.

01:24:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's turning out harder than we thought, as is often the case with these things and I think maybe writing and art are in that same bucket.

01:24:52 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
But advising, I think, understanding what AI can and cannot do. I yeah, I wonder, important to this whole process. Years ago a friend of mine from france started a publishing company, or a company that worked with publishing companies, to bring french fiction to english-speaking languages. So I read a few of these books and they had that kind of halting off, weird flavor right that AI sort of has. Right now you know they, you could kind of tell they weren't written by someone natively.

01:25:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Our biology is super well, even though the person doing the translations was really good at that. We're super well tuned to the slightest nuances in things like that. Yeah, and and I don't know if a machine will ever get there- it's like the uncanny valley.

01:25:35 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's where it heads.

01:25:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So, maybe.

01:25:38 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, the real tell on AI is not some AI service that tells you it's AI. It's a human being saying this doesn't feel right.

01:25:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you just kind of know the princess's hand is a little bent.

01:25:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's not right yeah a little bad.

01:25:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's not right. Yeah, yeah, um, and I. I think that that's fine I don't mind that, because it means writers and artists and photographers and painters, and all those people will still have a graphic designers, sure, but they will be ai assisted, oh yeah, yep, yep.

01:26:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think back to when microsoft started backing off on pursuing Windows piracy and developing nations Right, because those people couldn't pay for it anyway.

01:26:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep it was no loss.

01:26:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, and it was no loss and it's like what Paul just described with the art that he had made for his articles he was not going to pay someone for it.

01:26:27 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, that wasn't never. No one would.

01:26:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right. No, it's no loss, it's just new things being made with a new tool. Yep.

01:26:35 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, there you go. It would always be a net gain, I guess, but I but yeah, I mean, ideally it will be that it will be the helper, it's the thing that gets you over the top. You know, and I I guess you could just come up with whatever worst examples, but I always use that PowerPoint thing. Every once in a while you have to create a PowerPoint presentation. It's not what I do for a living, I'm not good at it and getting help with something like that awesome. And before AI, we had various tools that Microsoft, in this case, created to make that better, and they worked or didn't whatever. They were pretty good, and I think AI will take it to a new level too, and I, I think that's important because I I am, in that case, same story. I'm not going to go to some expert and pay them to make some ugly presentation, beautiful, right, I'm just not going to. But if ai can do this for me, fantastic.

01:27:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're just going to have a less ugly presentation.

01:27:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, hopefully all right, I want to take a little pause. Uh, that refreshes, and then we shall return with the xbox segment and the back of the book. You know, you don't have to refresh if you don't want to but you may, I guess, a little splash on the face.

01:27:46
Oh yeah, a little right bottle of Evian in a spritzer and she'd just go ch-ch-ch-ch. A little water on the face. That's all You're watching or listening, or even maybe sleeping through Windows Weekly with Paul Thorat and Richard Campbell On. We go with the Xbox segment. Now I'm a Diablo 4 player. I like Diablo 4. I like that. Just mindless thumb mashing. There you go.

01:28:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
As you bash All the things yeah.

01:28:17 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and I love the loot box. I feel like I've been waiting for Activision Blizzard games on Xbox Game Pass since they announced they intended to acquire this company.

01:28:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is this the first?

01:28:29 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, this is the first. Yep, this is the first one. So when this deal went through when was it October, I think I thought here it comes, baby. And then two weeks into it, they were like, yeah, it's not going to happen by the end of the year. I'm like, okay, that stinks, but that's okay, january's quick enough, yeah, so this is the first one. So I believe it's tomorrow or friday this week anyway, diablo 4 will be the first activision blizzard title to appear on xbox and pass six months it took right from the acquisition and there is not an iota of news.

01:29:03
Because everyone asks, like god, I wish I knew about what happens next, because now that we finally this little bit of waiting is over, we're already moving on to the next thing. Um, interestingly, you will have to install the battlenet uh launcher on pc right. Um, because I don't know why. Because, actually, who?

01:29:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
knows that's where everything saved on battlenet.

01:29:28 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's kind on Battlenet this was written to that and we're not changing that. I have to assume. Well, I shouldn't assume, I don't know, I'd like to think that kind of thing goes away. I mean, I don't know, but anyway that's going to be a requirement on the PC.

01:29:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean it's a requirement for every new PC anyway. They weren't able to get it retired and go all Xbox on it. I think think Right right.

01:29:51 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, yeah, I don't know, I don't know what happens next. I you know I get a lot of email from these guys and this came down the pipe. I'm like, here we go, it's happening and nothing, so enjoy this for what it is. And then normally what we get is usually two, sometimes three drops of Game Pass titles each month. You know, for beginning of the month, halfway through the month, I'm thinking, because of all of the Activision, blizzard games, that maybe it will be a little better than that for the rest of the year. But we have. I haven't heard a thing. So I apologize, I don't know anything about it.

01:30:36
Um, phil Spencer was interviewed recently and he had a lot to say, uh, which I think is really interesting. He's open to third party game stores on the Xbox, which makes absolutely zero sense but is entirely in keeping with his whole. Everybody should be able to play anything anywhere. Who cares. And it's like, phil, you got the acquisition, you can stop talking like this. But whether anything like that happens, I don't know, I don't even care. That doesn't make any sense to me.

01:31:03
But he did say something really interesting about gaming handhelds and he basically threw Windows under the bus, which I found to be kind of amusing. He feels that Windows is too big and too heavy and is the wrong platform for this, and that we would be better off collectively, as gamers, if we had an Xbox device, a portable gaming device, and I think a lot of people agree with that, but Xbox uses the Windows 10 kernel, yeah, but it's purpose made for this workflow or whatever, right, I mean it's, you know it's, yes, it's a Hyper-V kind of a thing, but you've basically got two like what do you call it?

01:31:40
A parent partition and a child partition. The parent partition is a tiny tiny thing for the UI and then the game runs in the child and that's the whole system. Right, there's not a lot. You know we aren't getting notifications and other apps running and stuff like that. So, yeah, I mean it sounds good. I mean, we've been asking about this for I don't know 20 years, Phil. So whether the time for an Xbox portable gaming console has kind of come and gone, given mobile and all that stuff is kind of unclear. But then, mobile and all that stuff is kind of unclear. But then again you look at the popularity of steam deck and some of these other devices and it's like switch and so forth.

01:32:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like handheld gaming has never been hotter. Maybe you?

01:32:16 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
know, maybe maybe the xbox architecture isn't a bad place to look. I mean, isn't that technically what windows 10x sort of was? Right, you know, partitioned, we'll call it containerized lightweight os.

01:32:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Maybe there's an interesting architecture there for these things you actually could stick on top of that kernel that would fit on an eight inch screen, with a pair of controllers snapped to the side of it and that 10 000 milliamp battery on the back of it that lasts about four hours they made a version of the Xbox app that does that sort of for Windows for these particular devices, right, I mean, I, I don't know, this doesn't seem like.

01:32:58 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I used to always imagine that Because they might get it neatly in a new consumer division. There you go. I wonder if they could use AI to figure out how to make it work. I had always imagined, as each generation of Xbox occurred, that they could create a portable system that would run the previous gen titles. Then that would be kind of cool, right? Sony, of course, had the psp and the ps vita.

01:33:23
One would argue things become much easier with an arm chip exactly, which is still the current rumor for the next generation uh, true, new generation of xbox consoles, so so, it's worth.

01:33:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I wonder if this is coming together. You can get arm running on windows and you have the backing of the windows team for the kernel anyway. Now you just take that kernel, put a lighter weight UI on it, just as a game selector and interface. I love it. You've got yourself a pretty good app and that 10,000 milliamp battery just turned up to seven hours instead of four.

01:33:53 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and they also have enough games for this to make sense as just sort of a first party.

01:34:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, I mean other developers will support it, but one of the advantages to owning the game houses themselves, as you can tell them go read, compile these things for arm and figure it out.

01:34:11 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and that is of course yeah, that that kind of uh respect of your game library and backward compatibility is, I think, one of the kills he's selling uh key selling points of the xbox platform, if you will. Um.

01:34:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, it's also a part of microsoft culture right and to keep the backwards compatibility thing up for a long time.

01:34:29 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah yep, that's right and gamers love it. I mean, I think you're even a sony guy you know that sounds pretty good to me. Although the best backwards compatibility these days is almost certainly on a PC, it is kind of interesting how you can play like older games still pretty well, much older games.

01:34:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
DOS games yeah.

01:34:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:34:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, I think you're sensing that intersection coming. Well, yeah, yeah.

01:34:58 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean speaking you were talking just the kind of Microsoft mentality. I mean throughout Microsoft's history there have been various times where do we go PC or do we go dedicated device? You know media center is a good example of one where they they basically felt like they had to choose the PC because that point in time the device capabilities just weren't there. But I think a lot of people would agree if they could have just held out a little bit and done like kind of an xbox style standalone device for the living room that didn't require all the ir blasting and the cables and the cable card stuff.

01:35:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Later on in the game would have made a lot more sense for that market right I built a home theater pc back in the day and all those problems and I was the only person to keep it running.

01:35:39 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know they were, oh yeah how many times we've both done this right. You're on a work trip. Your wife calls. She's like I want to watch tv. What's going on? Yeah, and you know, here's the 27 step process. It's actually easier to land a 727 than it is to get this thing.

01:35:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I had a network shop where I could come into the back and reset everything myself.

01:35:56 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like, there you go yep, yeah, we've all done that. So anyway, yeah, an arm-based xbox platform. Uh, handle, yep, sign me up. Yeah, he was surprisingly vocal about it, I thought, but then again, that's him. He's very, he's plain spoken.

01:36:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like bill spencer so funny because, uh, but who's asus and others are doing it in windows yeah, I know, the steam deck is linux but, but the other ones are windows right

01:36:25 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
this is. You've got this trade-off right. Linux is, uh, lighter weight but doesn't have as many games, isn't quite as compatible. Windows got the compatibility, but it's heavier weight and you want, you know, is there I mean I agree with phil, but I just.

01:36:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's's Apparently. There are people who don't.

01:36:43 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean ideally, it just runs on the same hardware. In other words, you could go to these guys and say you could run Windows, you can run Linux, you could run Xbox OS.

01:36:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it a problem in miniaturization? I mean we had the NUC. I mean we can get a pretty small.

01:36:58 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I feel like Xbox has only fairly recently, if you will, done the work to make their machines energy efficient, which has become a big thing, right, which wasn't a big was not a big thing in the first couple of generations. So, in the same way that PC, you know, to get a PC down from a tower to a laptop, that made any sense, it wasn't a luggable. You know, a lot of work had to be done at the chipset level, at the software level, etc. So, uh, it's, it's possible that this expected shift to arm might be the final piece of the puzzle to fall into place to make this make sense. Very interesting, you know, I mean an arm. We were talking about emulation earlier and our pc could emulate previous chin xboxes easily, right? Um, so you know, I'm not, I don't know anything, I'm just guessing, but I mean this seems, this seems doable to me that's so.

01:37:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and smart people are working on it. We're not that clever, so somebody's already further down the path exactly maybe, and maybe phil's just hinting at something he's seen.

01:38:00 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
really, I don't mean to say. The problem with Phil Spencer is, I think if this were anyone else, you'd say, oh my God, can you believe? He just said that you know what that means and unfortunately, with him, that's not what it means. Phil is a gamer, he's altruistic and a kind of a cross-platform I'm not just the pro-Microsoft Xbox guy sense and sometimes he just talks about things he wants which are just the things that we want. It's not an indication of strategy or work or anything. Not necessarily it could be, but you got to be careful not to read too much into it. But yeah, I mean, like I said, as a gamer, you listen to this guy talk and you see what he said about this. You know, yeah, like this would. Yes, we, a lot of people want this oh, let's take another uh time out.

01:38:51
Well, actually let me just, I can just finish.

01:38:52
Oh, you're not done, I'm done, yeah one quick uh, one more thing, one more thing yeah, so in addition to standalone xbox consoles and to the PC stuff, microsoft also has these services right. So Game Pass and cloud gaming and cloud gaming. You know there are issues there with latency and bandwidth, etc, etc. But they've been improving the service and they are now testing mouse and keyboard support, which makes sense because those games can be PC games right where you might want to have that support. So there's a finite list of these games. It's a weird list, frankly.

01:39:26
I mean the browser-based version of Fortnite, sea of Thieves, grounded, halo, infinite. Then you get like, not any of the Gears of War's game, but Gears Tactics is in their pentament, which is brand new, doom 64, which is a port, literally, of a Nintendo 64 game from not quite 30 years ago, about 30 years ago, age of Empires 2, etc. So they are looking at you know they've done things where if you have a touch device, they have like an on-screen controller. Now they're going to be adding mouse and keyboard support where they can. I don't want to play Age of Empires with a controller.

01:40:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's just no fun, I want to click.

01:40:05 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I want to click on those gothics.

01:40:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, now we can pause. I just want to, you know, just take a little time, just a moment, to mention I did already at the beginning of the show Club Twit Thank our Club Twit members for making this possible, especially those in the Discord, who really make it fun to do these shows. In fact, all the time, even when I was on vacation, I was hanging out in the Club Twit Discord. It's a really nice social network. For your $7 a month, of course, you get access to that. You get ad-free versions of all of our shows. You get video of all of our shows. That's something new.

01:40:38
We decided to make the, for instance, paul does hands-on windows. We decided to make the audio available to the public so everybody can hear it, ad supported. And then we're going to keep the video for shows like that hands-on Macintosh, ios Today, the Untitled Linux show, so forth. Keep that in the club. So all the shows now that we were doing behind a paywall only are now available to the public as audio. Thank you, lisa, for approving that change. But the video is in the club.

01:41:07
But we want to give you a benefit for joining the club. You know ads-free versions of the show, video versions of all the shows, the Discord, some additional content, like tomorrow's Inside Twit. That's club only, but I got to say the real benefit is that you are helping us continue to do, I think, a job we do well and a job that needs to be done, especially in the age of AI, you know, help you navigate what's going on in the world If you listen to a show or two or three every week. Please consider joining the club. Seven bucks a month. Twittv slash club. Twit Enough said. I'm sorry, not Thursday, friday for our Inside Twit. I've said Thursday a couple of times. I meant Friday. Lisa and I will come on and tell you what's going on inside Twit. Now back to the show we go and the back of the book, which means it's time for Paul Theriot's tip of the week.

01:42:07 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this is almost like three app picks in a row, but as a tip of sorts, I have recommended Arc Browser in the past. It's particularly good on the Mac. In fact, I love it. It's kind of a revelation on the Mac.

01:42:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's all I use. Yeah, it's particularly good on the Mac. In fact, I love it. That's what I'm using. It's kind of a revelation on the Mac. It's crazy.

01:42:21 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's all I use yeah, it requires a bit of work. Like I said, it's what do you call it? The navigation is a little different, things are different, but it's one of those things like it clicks or it doesn't. But one of the problems on Windows is that it sync, and so on the Mac they moved from iCloud-based sync to their own sync engine specifically so they could do this with Windows, and now they have. So if you can get access to the Windows app I know it's not broadly available yet you can now sync your spaces and your other things between Mac and Windows. So that's been great for me, because I kind of dabble in it on Windows, but on the Mac I just use it. It's awesome.

01:43:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just got my acceptance to get ArcFood. Yeah, me too.

01:43:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just got mine and now it syncs and everything.

01:43:12 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so if you've got it set up on the Mac which is kind of ideal you can now do that. It's not going to get me to buy a Mac. No, don't worry, it's okay. My efforts in that vein have only just begun, but anyway for now, I will just say try. Arc, and if you found it to be lackluster before, it's a little bit better now.

01:43:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It still has a way to go, I agree, oh yeah.

01:43:38 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, but it's not Not on Mac though. Well, it was written in.

01:43:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Swift, and so this is the problem. Right, it was written in a language really designed for Apple. That's why there's no Linux version and no mobile versions yet. Well, the mobile arc on iOS is actually really good and different, but it's not the same.

01:43:57 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not about a browser, it's a search. It's not a browser anymore. Yeah, it's almost like a summarizer.

01:44:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love it. It's using AI.

01:44:04 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's very interesting.

01:44:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I turned Lisa onto it and I was really surprised because I thought well, this is going to be a bit of a different way of thinking.

01:44:11 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can't quite use Arc on Windows full time, but I can on the Mac.

01:44:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh it's great Thing of beauty.

01:44:18 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
And I've gone down the whole rabbit hole of their videos, like, if you're interested in this stuff, they make a lot of videos about why they do things a certain way. There's a really good video about them coming to Windows and they talked about, you know, writing the app in Swift and what that means, and it's very interesting. Yeah, to me. I don't know, maybe not too much. Canva this week announced that they acquired Affinity, which was an interesting coincidence of timing for me because I literally just bought on sale their entire suite of apps across platforms so I can use them on Mac and iPad as well as Windows. Low cost, relatively speaking, versions of well, apps for photos, vector graphics, for design work for apps, websites, whatever, and page publishing or desktop publishing, and it competes sort of with the Adobe apps which are now CC and mostly subscription-based, although you can get Hi everybody, what, hello, who's that? Although you can get, it's a voice from the future. I don't know. Paul, switch to the Mac, so you got to move quick. No, it's so. I would say that Affinity Photo 2 and Adobe Photoshop's Element 2024 are kind of on the same page. You know, functionally, whatever, the only thing Affinity doesn't have to me is a video editor, which is a little weird, but that's okay.

01:45:43
But Canvas has been buying some companies they own, like Pixabay. Is it Pixabay? No, what's that online photo editor? The web-based one? That's really good. Pixlr Pixlr is one of those things, but this is a big one. This is millions of dollars of acquisition, but they're literally going to try to take on Adobe, but do it in a way that is not subscription-based.

01:46:05
One thing which I kind of like Did Adobe buy them? Well, they weren't able to buy Figma, so maybe they would be stopped from this as well. I don't know, but I appreciate what they do. I've always liked Canva. I pay for and use the affinity stuff. Um, actually it is pixel. Yeah, pick pexels. Oh, pixabay is an uh, what do you call it? A? Um, a source for images where you can use in your articles and content and stuff. That's what that is, pixabay, um, so anyway, they're, they're coming together.

01:46:35
I don't use the other apps that much, but I use Affinity Photo 2 now. I used to use one every single day. It's fantastic, and I went through my little passkey phase with security and all that stuff. I was hoping to get by that, but Proton, which is very interesting to me, announced this past week that their Proton password manager now supports passkeys on all devices and across all account types, meaning it's for free as well.

01:47:03
And these, to be clear, are portable pass keys, which is not a FIDO standard, although Proton, like Dashlane and these other companies, are working with everyone in the industry to make this a standard of some kind. And the point behind a pass key is that it's device specific. So you create a pass key on your iPhone, you create one on your Windows PC, and those are two separate things. But when a password manager supports this, like Dashlane, does the new Dashlane or now ProtonPass, you can create it once on one device and if you're using other devices with that thing, with that password manager in this case, those PASCIs will be available everywhere, right. So that's fantastic and having done that with Dashlane, I can tell you it's an awesome capability. So this is something to look at. Proton is one of those companies that's privacy first, et cetera, et cetera.

01:47:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm just wondering if it's going to come to Bitwarden eventually because they've got a PASC. No Bitwarden already.

01:48:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I use Bitwarden to log into my Passkey accounts all the time you want to see Nope.

01:48:10 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I'm trying to remember what the limitation is on Bitwarden. I don't remember, it doesn't matter. Anyway, this stuff is all in Flex. It's kind of hard to keep track of. I use.

01:48:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Bitwarden as a preference for storing pass keys. It used to be, of course, on my phone or my device.

01:48:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, but that's portable, so I want to have it there so I can log into GitHub using pass keys on every single device that has Bitwarden.

01:48:33 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
It works. Yeah, so I do that with Dashlane. But I stupidly spent about 15 minutes the other day obstinately trying to get a PASCIDIS to save to the device, oh, and could not make it work. That's interesting. Just no problem putting it in Dashlane. It worked everywhere. But I'm like no, I want to use the device, oh, no, they're not portable.

01:48:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the problem and that's not written into FIDO.

01:48:58 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it will be.

01:49:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way they're working on it, I think it's a security issue. I don't think they want them to be moved around.

01:49:06 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, they do want them to be moved around, they just want it to be secure. So you, know.

01:49:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But as an alternative, you end up making a lot of keys for each of your devices, Right? That's not good.

01:49:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Or you use a password manager to do it instead. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, which is already portable.

01:49:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I always worry about my Microsoft authenticator on my phone because losing that is very difficult to deal with. Yeah, that's not good. I don't like that single point, right? I'd rather have it in all of my devices.

01:49:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, I should mention BitWord as a sponsor. So disclaimer there, I'm a BitWord user. Yeah, me too.

01:49:41 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I as a sponsor. So disclaimer there. That's. I'm a bit word user, you know? Yeah, me too. Yeah, good, I was until recently, but I know I like bit word. Are you dash lane now?

01:49:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
exclusively, or yeah, interesting it's just it's just, it just works, and that was because of the passwordless sign on I wanted to really I didn't want to master password.

01:49:55 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
That was my big. Yeah, that was my big thing, yeah, uh. Okay, leo, let me explain to you what I do. I, I have a pass key for dash lane that I store in bit warden, and then I it's. It's like an extra layer of security. Yes, they need this google authenticator to open it. I mean work through the logic of this.

01:50:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like 128 bit encryption does dash lanes passwordless login use passkeys or do they have some other method? It's passkeys, it's passkeys, Okay. Steve did a piece while I was gone a couple of, I think it was last week on why passkeys are in fact preferable to YubiKey or some other hardware authenticator. So he's convinced that they are fully secure.

01:50:41 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean I could get my wife to use PASC. She's never going to use a YubiKey. No, that's exactly right.

01:50:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I've been using YubiKeys for years and I'd give it up in a second.

01:50:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, it's Runners Radio time. Ladies and gentlemen, here's Richard Campbell, your Runners Radio host. Hi, Richard.

01:50:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Thanks, leo. This week's Run as Radio is with April Edwards. The weather this weekend is Coming up, next sports. I had a great chat with April Edwards. This was actually a few weeks ago when we were in NBC London together. So always fun to be face-to-face with someone when you're doing an interview. Just there's an energy to that and April's a live wire at the best of times and she was hopping. It was her birthday that week. We were at all sorts of fun together and this was a conversation we were having. I'm like we just need to record this Because she is obviously a GitHub dev rel, like the advocate in that.

01:51:34
But she's also shown that GitHub is for everything. You know people store recipes in it because as you tinker with them, that source control effect of all of your changes being kept track of. But the integration of GitHub Actions, this idea that when you make a change to a document it can kick off a workflow, opens this really interesting angle for sysadmins that just says, hey, this is a way without buying a commercial product, you know, just having a GitHub account or a GitHub Enterprise account which is not free to allow you to interact with code, to deploy pieces, to send off messages, you know, with a detailed log of everything that's happening, including how it's failed, and a record. You know each of those things actually gets stored. You can make revisions and those get handled for you.

01:52:21
So we really ran down a whole series of scenarios where it's like you can do this in GitHub Actions and then it just becomes a natural tool suite that you can improve over time just about repeatability for everything and so it was just a really fun conversation to explore all that, and we're doing this anyway Somewhere inside of our organization. Most admins now have some kind of workflow manager, but this is one your company probably already pays for, because they've got developers and you should be storing your scripts there anyway. But what if you didn't just store your scripts there? They ran from there too.

01:52:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice. Yeah, I likeub I. It's amazing what you get for very little money yeah I use it. I actually back up my. I have a website that's static, based on hugo, and I can use github to serve it as well as my own server. So if my server fails, I just I.

01:53:14 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is where my books are, yep oh, really they're on.

01:53:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, that good.

01:53:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's nice. And Microsoft moved all their learn hold documentation engine, all that stuff that you searched. That's why, at any point, you can go in and correct something and go through a PR process for them.

01:53:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very nice. Yeah Well, if we have talked about Renna's radio, that means there can be what one thing left to talk about? Licka?

01:53:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
our pick of the week. I really enjoy doing shows with Micah. I'm glad you're back, leo. I did one last week that I felt a little bit bad about. Actually, I didn't really feel that bad about it. It was a bad whiskey story. It sent me down a path and I got a little angry. I needed to solve, I needed to feel better, and my Danish friend Casper pinged me privately who's also a listener to the show about a Danish whiskey that he wanted me to try and we were talking about that, and so I started digging into Danish whiskey and it's and fell into a story that's everything good about whiskey, because the story that I told last week about Macklo was everything bad about whiskey.

01:54:26
The ultimate commercialization without a care for the product, like it was dreadful. But it's weird because you don't think about Danish whiskey Like why would you? It's just so odd. And the point is that the Danes haven't got a big history around whiskey because they didn't get into it until. Just so odd, and they're really the. The point is that the danes haven't got a big history around whiskey because they didn't get into it till just very recently.

01:54:45
Now, part of this has to do with older scandinavian culture, where, of course, they were all farmers. You know we talk about the vikings being these, you know marauders, but they were farmers first. They just you you know got good at it and needed more land and went and acquired it by force, and so they were actually really strict about alcohol. Uh, and to the point where, coming into the modern era, alcohol was so restrictive in scandinavian countries across the board, it's relatively rare. But when the, when denmark joined the ecc's or the ec's this is the year what became the eu? Alongside that was a change in regulations and taxation for things like alcohol. So they aligned their regulation and taxation to the EU standard and that just opened the door to the possibility of manufacturing alcohol and having it reasonably priced. And that happened.

01:55:38
So around 2005, there was a group of fellows nine of them actually Danish fellows in a little town called Stawning and I'm probably mispronouncing it in the Danish. They've got shapes to their words that are hard for my Canadian mouth to spit out. Actually, they were in a butcher shop. One of them was a butcher. There's a doctor and an interesting set, interesting set of characters, bunch of engineers, but they started tinkering with making whiskey. They had a local barley farm. Uh, they even got some local peat and they used part of the butch of the butcher shop to dry and malt. The barley and uh made a small batch. Uh, they, they bought a couple of small alambic stills. These are the old style um pre-pot still designs. They were spanish and they were able to make a few hundred liters of a small bottling.

01:56:29
But they sent one of the bottle, one of the sample bottles, to jim murray, and jim murray is one of the gods of whiskey. He writes the whiskey bible and so forth. The quote from jim murray which they, they, they're apparently now allowed to use, but it's all literally what he said to them is what on earth is this? Whiskey lovers would kill their mothers for a bottle of this. Wow, this could possibly be some of the world's best peated whiskey. From a group of guys in a butcher shop in a little town in denmark.

01:56:59
So, with Jim Murray telling them they've got a good idea, they were able to put together enough money to build the distillery just south of Stawning, which happens to be essentially the same latitude as Edinburgh in Scotland. There's a lot more to do. That part of the world is more like the highlands of Scotland than a lot of other places by the ocean. It faces into the north sea. Uh, so they converted an old farm into a small distillery and switched the buildings over to become to do floor maltings very old school, not the modern malting techniques. Uh, built a drying kiln kiln using peat and sometimes not. They bought a couple more spanish pot stills. They directly heated them. They didn't use steam, they kept the system simple.

01:57:45
By 2009, they were sort of assembled and starting to produce. They built a fizzler to spake right off the bat, like you could watch us make our stuff. That was always their way and they were all everything local, everything as local as it could be. They got smitten with ryeye, so they started buying local rye and malting it, which is very unusual. Most rye is just direct ground and you usually see rye in american bourbons, but they were malting rye, which is hard to do. But they were using a floor method. It doesn't do go as well in drum methods for for malting. So they're the first bottlings done in 2012, and you've not heard of them, for a simple reason they sold everything. They could not make enough. How well did they do? Their production was somewhere around 80,000 liters by 2013, but it was all instantly sold out. All of the top-tier restaurants in Scandinavia put it on the shelves. Noma, arguably the best restaurant in the world, had it on the shelf. This was very good, very rare whiskey, and around then Diageo showed up.

01:58:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, no, don't tell me no.

01:58:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, no, that's not what happened. Diageo did not buy them up. Diageo made an investment in them. They refused to sell but they said they did need some money and they could use the help. And so Diageo did buy into as I've read the various bits and pieces around this this idea that what these guys were doing was super old-school whiskey older school than the Scots were doing at that time, because they weren't trying to do the volume. So they bought 25% of Stowning, which gave them a substantial amount of funding. So they had the money to build out a larger distillery next door to the original farm.

01:59:35
But they refused to use bigger stills. They started out with small stills. So instead of having a handful of big stills, they bought 24 pot stills from the Scottish manufacturers. It's just a ton of these little stills. They thought that floor malting was incredibly important. So they custom built their own automated floor malting system. So automatic turning and watering of both barley and rye.

02:00:02
They not as efficient as the modern drum techniques, but they're sticking with their methods. They did the same for their. For the rye they they didn't have the big cypress barrels to do mash in the old farm. So what they'd actually done is they kind of converted this washing machine into a rotary mash tun that would do extraction for them. They run it through multiple times. So they had a totally unique mashing approach and they just scaled it in the new distillery. So they mash unlike anybody else in the world.

02:00:36
All those 24 pot stills, all still direct fire, which is dangerous. But they have come to appreciate that the direct fire makes the still, the base of the still, so much hotter to get the distillate to actually start to evaporate that it toasts some of the residues which introduces set of cereal flavors that they don't think they can get anywhere else. So it's old school but it creates this other flavor to it. They do do a double distillation, which is very traditional Scottish washing spirit still distillation. They use a pallet rack house, which I think would be the most modern thing that they do, where they are stacking the barrels upright on pallets high in their rack buildings rather than laying them on their sides. So their aging behavior is a little bit different but that's all they had at the time and they refused to change their methods. They're sticking with this style.

02:01:26
They prefer, uh, american oak, both virgin like unused, which they typically put the rye into, and the burb, and they also have used bourbon cast, which are, you know, common and popular and effective, uh, which they do a lot of aging with. But they also experiment with barrels all the time. So if you can get your hands on any of it, they've got wine finishes and tequila finishes, sherry finishes, you name it. So their primary production whiskey, what they make most of the time, are basically four versions, both a peated and non-peated malted rye and a peated and non-peated malted barley. But then they play with the bottlings. So the whiskey I'm going to recommend today, which you can find it is available in the US Flavor US website had it for about $85, is the Stunning Chaos Danish Whiskey. So this is arguably their most popular, most award-winning. They blend together their single malt and their peated single malt and the malted rye, so it's all from the same distillery.

02:02:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We call it a single malt, so there's a hardcore edition and a regular edition. Is one's cask strength More peat, more peat, if you like your peat go with the hardcore.

02:02:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's Danish peat, right. This is not peat from If you like your peat, go with the hardcore, it's Danish peat, right. This is not peat from the Islay Bottle at 46, which is your traditional, normal, clear bottling level, but just the most honest manifestation of whiskey I've seen in a long, long time. So I haven't had a chance to tour this place yet, but I'm going to be in Copenhagen later this summer so I'm trying to see if I can add a day or two and get down there and take a walk around and uh, but it's inspired a danish whiskey industry that is very much based on this attitude of terroir, of making from making your whiskey from the thing in your area, which is very danish, and it's turned into a successful industry. So it's a stunning movie with the first but they are not the only that's happening in Denmark today.

02:03:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Stunning chaos K-A-O-S. Or, if you really like your Pete, get some hardcore.

02:03:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You'll find them mostly in Denmark. They're hard to come by otherwise, but there are a few that are brought to the US. So grab what you can, but the chaos is the one you must like.

02:03:45 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
Their website, like many whiskey maker websites, has some terrific cocktail recipes by the way, yes, it does.

02:03:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I saw that.

02:03:51 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
So if you can't find this, I was just looking through, I might do their little variation on the Manhattan. It looks pretty good, that looks pretty good.

02:04:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There you go.

02:04:02 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
You could just drop the Pete into it and then you'd have all the Pete. I'm going to forego the Pete, but that's just personal preference.

02:04:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richard Campbell is at runasradiocom. That's where you'll find his shows Run as Radio and NET Rocks. It's too late to go to the Fabric Conference this year, but next year maybe Go to Vegas and see Richard.

02:04:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We've already declared the dates. It'll be the first week of april 25 and uh, are you coming home after this or what's what's up for you next? I got a few days in san francisco, so I'll do a show, uh, probably from berkeley, nice, maybe menlo park, depending on where I'm staying, and then I'm going to be home for a whole 12 days before I go to romania. Because Romania, as one does, as one does.

02:04:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you're in the mood, you could come over. We're maybe not as close as you'd like, but we're about an hour from Berkeley. You could come over and do the show here if you wish.

02:04:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I've just got to time the Wednesday. Maybe I could do one in studio. That'd be fun, think about it, it's just a possibility.

02:05:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I that before think about it.

02:05:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's just a possibility I can arrange for some whiskey to be delivered I. You know I'm concerned about that stuff. It affects my judgment yes, what a surprise I've never noticed that.

02:05:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's weird I accept something unique to you I find paultherotcom teacup, so no one knows nice. No, paul thurot is at thurotcom t-h-u-r-r-o. Double good dot com. That's where you'll find his writings. If you're a premier or premium member, you can see even more stuff, including the pages that eventually became his book windows everywhere, which is available at leanpubcom along with the field guide to windows 11.

02:05:39
Pa, paul and Richard and I gather every Wednesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern Time, 1800 UTC, to do the show. You can watch us do it live on YouTube, youtubecom slash twit, although you know the live show requires you be around at that time. If you are watching live, though, chat with us in the Club Twit Discord. There's always a nice conversation going on behind the scenes, and Paul and Richard go in there too, which is kind of fun. After the fact, on-demand versions of the show are available at Paul's site, therotcom, or at our site, twittv slash www. There's also a YouTube channel with the video of every show and, of course, easiest thing to do is subscribe to the podcast feed, and you can do that in any podcast player. Just look for Windows Weekly, and that way you'll get it automatically. Thanks to our Club Twit members, thanks to all of you who join us, thanks to Paul and Richard have a wonderful week. We'll see you in April for the next Windows Weekly. God, oh God.

02:06:39 -  Paul Thurrott (Host)
And welcome back Liam.