Windows Weekly 833, Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott here. Richard Campbell is here. The government is suing to keep Microsoft from sneaking in buying Activision. Okay, the EU says Google's ad model is just not right. Windows 11, version 22 H two moment three arrives, and no one notices. Plus the big Xbox Game sale and a whole lot more. All coming up next on Windows Weekly

Speaker 2 (00:00:28):
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Leo Laporte (00:00:29):
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Speaker 2 (00:00:30):
From people you trust. This is,

Leo Laporte (00:00:40):
This is Windows Weekly with Richard Campbell and Paul Thora. Episode 833 recorded Wednesday, June 14th, 2023. Where games go to Die. Windows Weekly is brought to you by Brook Lennon. This year. Give your dad the gift of a good night's sleep cuz Dad deserves the best rest. And Brooklyn has dad's comfort covered with a lineup of home essentials made for relaxation. Visit brooklinen.com today and get $20 off plus free shipping own orders of $100 or more with the code Windows. And By Duo. Duo protects against breaches with a leading access management suite, providing strong multi-layered defenses to only allow legitimate users in for any organization concerned about being breached. Any organization that needs a solution Fast Duo quickly enables strong security and improves user productivity. Visit cs.co/twit today for a free trial and buy cash. Fly Cash fly delivers rich media content up to 10 times faster than traditional delivery methods and 30% faster than other Major CDNs. Meet customer expectations 100% of the time. Learn how you can get your first month free@cashflow.com. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we cover the latest news from Microsoft. And this is a big day for Microsoft News. Paul Theat is in the house, literally in his house. <Laugh> theat.com is his blog. And lean pub.com is his publisher, where his books live. Mr. Run's radio is also here. Richard Campbell, happy National Bourbon Day. Richard,

Richard Campbell (00:02:31):
Thank you. I'm very excited. I got a good bourbon to talk about today.

Leo Laporte (00:02:34):
Perfect.

Richard Campbell (00:02:35):
So things are gonna be fun. Are

Leo Laporte (00:02:36):
You in the lake house or Coquitlam?

Richard Campbell (00:02:38):
We're in Coquitlam for now. Next week we list the house for sale. What? Trying to move out of the city. You're

Leo Laporte (00:02:44):
Moving to Mexico City too?

Richard Campbell (00:02:46):
No, I think I'm gonna visit there a fair bit, but yeah, no, we think we're gonna spend more time by the ocean.

Leo Laporte (00:02:51):
What where is that? BC of course is is a coastal state, obviously in

Richard Campbell (00:02:57):
Province. Yeah. We keep all, we keep all our coastal, the west side <laugh>. It's about three, three hours north of here where I am right now, including a 45 minute ferry ride.

Leo Laporte (00:03:07):
Oh wow. So it's an island?

Richard Campbell (00:03:09):
No, it's not. Actually. It's connected to the mainland, but the highways don't go through cuz that's how severe the mountains are. So it's literally a strip of highway with a ferry at each end.

Leo Laporte (00:03:18):
Wow. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. That sounds great. Yeah, it's

Paul Thurrott (00:03:22):
Very pretty.

Leo Laporte (00:03:22):
Yeah. Funny.

Richard Campbell (00:03:23):
And you've been, you that great transition you get on the ferry and now you're kind of in a different world. Yeah. Right. And then we you know, we live by the ocean.

Leo Laporte (00:03:30):
We have, we have that here in Petaluma. When I used to work in San Francisco. I know. I was home when I saw the cows in the fields. Yeah. And I thought, yeah, this is home. So it's kind of agrarian out here. So,

Paul Thurrott (00:03:39):
Oh, I know. When I'm home here, when I see the Rite Aid in the <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:03:42):
<Laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (00:03:43):
So very

Leo Laporte (00:03:44):
Similar Hang left at the Rite Aid. Yep. And

Richard Campbell (00:03:47):
You're there. You got it.

Leo Laporte (00:03:48):
So I was up five 30 mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And in the morning, sorry to say,

Paul Thurrott (00:03:56):
Why, why is that? I don't,

Leo Laporte (00:03:57):
I couldn't sleep. I woke up. Oh, it's the worst. It's the worst. And I thought, why am I lying, staring at the ceiling? I should just get up mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And then sometimes I could do that. And then I, and then if I didn't have to work, I would go back to bed. I, after I would get up, have a cup of coffee, read the paper, and then go back to bed. But I couldn't do that today. I had to come to work <laugh>. Darn it. So if I get a little sleepy during this you'll understand why. Sure. But I

Paul Thurrott (00:04:23):
Did know, you know what I'm like every week, <laugh>, little slapping.

Leo Laporte (00:04:27):
I did know some, a couple of stories. You know, the EU is suing Google to put it outta business. Okay. Love it. Love it. Good for them. Good for them.

Richard Campbell (00:04:36):
I don't know how you break up an ad business. How does that even work? I

Paul Thurrott (00:04:39):
Know us find out. All I have to say is let's find out. Mm-Hmm.

Leo Laporte (00:04:42):
You know, if the EU said, oh, Leo twit can't sell ads anymore, do something else. It'd be like, what else? You know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't, anyway, that's one story. But the other one was the ftc asked the court for a temporary restraining order.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:01):
You know what I love about this story, Leo?

Leo Laporte (00:05:03):
What's, what do you love about this story? Paul?

Paul Thurrott (00:05:05):
There was a news report about a week or two ago that claimed that Microsoft, according to sources at Microsoft, they were considering a, a, a cunning plan as Baldrick would say, <laugh>, to just consummate the acquisition. Like to screw the regulation,

Leo Laporte (00:05:21):
Do it. We're

Richard Campbell (00:05:22):
We're doing this. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:23):
In other words, the, I almost said the legal version of a flight risk, the antitrust version of a flight risk. Right. so I thought when I saw this ftc lawsuit or the filing, I thought to myself, man, this is why they're doing it. But they just, they're not gonna be able to say that. Right. They'll have some other justice. Well,

Leo Laporte (00:05:41):
I, I thought

Paul Thurrott (00:05:42):
That they said it. That's literally why. Yeah. They literally said it. Yeah, that's exactly why said they want

Leo Laporte (00:05:46):
I forced all any ac, but Right. So I'm confused. So if Microsoft went ahead mm-hmm. The FTC could still say, yeah, unwind that deal. Right. I

Paul Thurrott (00:05:55):
Mean, that's right. But how is it to unwind a deal? We just talked about that, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, we just mentioned it. We didn't really talk about it, but like, how do you unwind something? Like it's, it gets to be difficult. You know, the other half of this is, you know, the CMA and the uk of course has blocked it as well. There, there have been reports of Microsoft has said, you know, what, if the rest of the world, okay, this, we're just gonna do it, screw the uk mm-hmm. And you, you get into a weird kind of situation where these products get to be sold all over the world. What are you gonna do not have Activision Blizzard and Microsoft products sold in the uk. I mean, it kind of, it kind of pushes the point. You

Richard Campbell (00:06:26):
Know, that's, yeah. That's sort of the, that's the option there. You know, I, I read the FTC play the other way around. This looks like a mechanism to force the FTC to make a decision. Like the reason to get the injunction is to expedite the case.

Paul Thurrott (00:06:40):
So that, by the way, that is the reason. And from Microsoft's perspective, and from Activision's perspective, this is the, the good news here. Because Microsoft had said that they would cons or finalize this acquisition by the end of their fiscal year, which is June 30th. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's getting right down to the wire.

Richard Campbell (00:06:55):
Yeah. Here we're two weeks out.

Paul Thurrott (00:06:56):
The hearings for the FTC would've been in late August. Right. By moving this into a federal court, it can be expedited, which it is now. The hearings are next week. Yeah. Which is before the end of Microsoft's fiscal year. There is actually a chance this deal could go through on time and before the end of Microsoft's fiscal year. Yeah. Which would avoid Microsoft having to pay a penalty of, I believe it was thir 3 billion. Yeah. which they would just hand in cash to Activision Blizzard if this acquisition did not go through. So to me, that is fascinating. And I I, I, I have to think, this was Microsoft's cutting plan. This was the, the idea was let's let's slip this idea that we're a flight risk, forcing them to seek an injunction, which pushes it into federal court, which expedites it, which puts this thing before the end of the fiscal year. I, I, I, I actually think this was Microsoft's plan, not all along, but this, this was Microsoft orchestrating what just happened mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, which, you know, if true good for them.

Richard Campbell (00:07:52):
And then the next phase of this is like, well, you have to have the FTC on board. It's an American company, ultimately, you can call it multinational all you want. But the reality is the FTC could be leveling you know, leveling fines and so forth. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> nonstop, which I would wonder if the Cmma on the UK might do, but only if they actually break a rule of some kind. So just saying, okay, well these products are not available in the uk so it has no impact on UK customers.

Paul Thurrott (00:08:16):
Well, there's also the, you know, Microsoft is appealing this UK decision mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, and it, there's a possibility, I don't know the UK legal system works, of course, but I assume it involves sticks and bones and stuff. But guys

Richard Campbell (00:08:27):
And weights, basics, if I remember this, corrected weights, powdered weights, it's important.

Paul Thurrott (00:08:30):
Yeah. but whatever it is, I mean, you know, there's a possibility they could win on appeal there as well. I, the <laugh> I would, the, the problem with antitrust, and I was talking to Brad about this this morning, is that antitrust is, is not only can't keep up with changes in technology, which is just true of law in general. Right. But it's also just deliberately vague. And that can be really problematic. And this case, you know, the UK has said, or the CMA has said, Microsoft has a dominant position in this market that we call cloud game. You know, game cloud streaming or whatever you wanna call it, game streaming. And Okay. Microsoft's argument is, well, there's this market called gaming, and game streaming is like this thin little sliver of a line of usage that has nothing to do with what most people do.

(00:09:17):
And we don't really see it ever being a huge chunk of it. So when you think about it in the context of gaming, there are companies that are dominant in gaming mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, apple and Mic Google and mobile Sonian consoles, you know, whatever, however you want to define that market. We're not dominant anywhere. And if we succeed in getting this acquisition, we become bigger. It's better for us, it's better for our customers, but we don't ever, we don't end up still don't dominate. We don't dominate anything that matters. Right. So, yeah, we'll dominate this cloud gaming thing, but there's nothing going on in cloud gaming. So

Richard Campbell (00:09:48):
Yeah. Both guys will be really excited about that.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:50):
Yeah, exactly. So it, it, it kind of hinges on semantics or definitions or however you want to, you know, market definitions, whatever you wanna say. So we'll see, you know, we'll see what happens. But this was this was an interesting little overtime, you know, gambit on Microsoft's part. I think that

Richard Campbell (00:10:10):
Did they pull this too late? Like shouldn't they have done this a month ago? The ftc

Paul Thurrott (00:10:16):
Yeah. Microsoft and the, well, Microsoft and forcing the FTC stand. But did

Richard Campbell (00:10:20):
The judge, by the way, give them the injunction, the expedited? Yes, they did for next week. Yeah. Yeah, of course. Yeah. But he did the, he did the two things side by side. Okay. There's an injunction, but that puts an impairment on the company. So we should accelerate the company's That's right. Injunctive relief. Oh, good. Because otherwise it would've been August when the exactly administrative judge

Paul Thurrott (00:10:41):
Looked at there was also looked at this, I love the language of it too. It was like we're preventing Microsoft in acquisition from finalizing this acquisition that they had planned. But we're also, just to be clear, there's no other version of it that we're gonna accept. Either you can't come to some other deal that's like a lesser ac in other words, like Microsoft or Acqui, Activisions can say, we're gonna sell off Call of Duty and we're gonna sell the rest of it to Microsoft. What, what they're saying is, no, no, no, no. We, we get that. You have all these little ideas about how you can kind of get around what we're trying to prevent. We're not gonna allow any of it, but now it's gonna, now they'll be able to present their case in court. And I think this is where things get really interesting, because I think Microsoft has a wonderful case to present.

Richard Campbell (00:11:20):
Yeah. And, but it is a $3 billion case. If anything other than a win happens here, there's

Paul Thurrott (00:11:27):
Only $3 billion

Richard Campbell (00:11:28):
Flows. There's no chance to not pay the, the breakout fee, essentially. Yeah. Yeah. Unless they're willing to negotiate an extension in terms, but I can't imagine why Bobby Kotick would, it's 3 billion bucks.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:38):
Well, I, because I think for him personally he has got this, it's not golden. It's a platinum par parachute that he's gonna have. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>

Richard Campbell (00:11:46):
Iridium, like it's Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:47):
Whatever the Yeah. Like unium para, you know, a parachute. Yeah. that might be, I mean, 3 billion is 3 billion, but what they wanna do is sell the company for 69 billion. So Yeah. Yeah. And

Richard Campbell (00:11:59):
He'll do very well with that.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:02):
I see. Yeah. I'm pretty sure he gets,

Richard Campbell (00:12:04):
I wonder if the breakup fee, again, is a forcing function to the courts,

Paul Thurrott (00:12:07):
Right?

Richard Campbell (00:12:08):
Right. It's like, this is you, your inability to execute to make a decision here is risking a three comma number.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:17):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:12:17):
But there's always a breakup fee. I mean, that's part, that's inevitably all of these deals ha have breakup

Paul Thurrott (00:12:22):
Fees because here's, here's the thing, I I, I, it's usually

Leo Laporte (00:12:24):
Occasions not 3 billion, but it's sometimes a, a lot,

Paul Thurrott (00:12:26):
You know? Mm. But just looking at the deal in general, I I, I, I feel there is no logical argument to be made against Microsoft acquiring this company. Now. I agree. I know there are. I agree. I know. And I think anyone who knows what they're talking about would, of course, they would think that. But if you disagree, let's just, if you're out there there,

Leo Laporte (00:12:45):
FTC apparently does,

Paul Thurrott (00:12:46):
Well, it, and Sony literally said the, the c e O of Sony, whatever, the American, the Sony, whatever the company's called, the Sony America, basically literally wrote to Activision going back and forth and said, outright, look, we don't care. We just don't want this acquisition to happen. It's literally that dumb. So there are people out in the world who just, I, we don't like Microsoft. We don't like this idea of this giant company owning more of some market. It doesn't really matter. Like, I'm not thinking about it clearly, maybe, but it doesn't matter. I just don't like, bigger, big, becoming bigger. You know, I go fine. But the thing is, the, the thing you can't really argue against is let's pretend game streaming as a market let's, it is okay, it's a market. It's gonna be a market. It's gonna be the biggest thing in the world.

(00:13:27):
What Microsoft is offering is the same thing they are for, with Call of Duty, which is we'll put our stuff everywhere. We're not gonna restrict access to games. So if Sony, actually they do, it's in the newsletter Sony has, is testing a game streaming service of PS five. They've been talking about this for a long time. This is gonna happen. There were other game streaming services that Microsoft has already had deals with, with regards to different things related to Xbox, call of Duty, Activision, et cetera. We'll, we'll just offer you that same deal. 10 years. We'll give you 10 years. Everything we do, we'll make sure it goes on your platform too. This answers any com actual complaint. So if the, if the UK CMA is serious about this, that cloud gaming is the issue, and if the ftc, which is frankly colluding with the cma, I is also making the same argument, well, that just throws that all away. So if you can present this in court and say, we are literally meeting every issue they have. I don't see how this doesn't go through. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And your only argument, because I just don't like it, <laugh>. It's like, I get it. It makes, but it makes me sad. It makes me crazy, you know? So anyway, we'll see what happens. But

Richard Campbell (00:14:34):
It's dumb that I'm excited it's coming. It's coming to the head by the end of the month,

Paul Thurrott (00:14:38):
Like Yeah. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (00:14:39):
Watch this space cuz Yep. It's gonna come up next week and it's gonna come up the week after that.

Paul Thurrott (00:14:44):
Yeah, sure. Is two days of hearings next week. So we'll see. Yeah. I I just, it it, it's sad that it came down to this and I think a lot of people and myself included, have thought like, why does Microsoft even bother at this point? Like, there's so many head, there's so much headway here. Like, why are they, they're getting so much pushback

Richard Campbell (00:15:04):
And it's really Sets a bad precedent to walk away on this too. Yeah. That, that it, this deal's dying, not because it's not for the greater good or that it causes any specific harms. We just don't like it. And that's, that's terrible

Paul Thurrott (00:15:17):
Precedence. Well, I, listen, I love that government has woken up to the notion that big tech is bad. Thank you. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (00:15:24):
Too late a decade ago.

Paul Thurrott (00:15:24):
Exactly. 10 years too late. Thank you. But 10. So, but you're gonna survey the world and this is what you're gonna go after. Really? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:15:32):
But it's not gonna get past the judge. I'm sorry. Cuz the judges, what do you mean you, the FTCs not gonna, I think it's not gonna succeed because the judge is gonna say exactly what you just said. What is the harm? Where is the harm? Yeah. That's their job. And I think that, and failing the FTC proving harm.

Paul Thurrott (00:15:49):
Oh, I'm sorry. You're agreeing with me. I'm sorry. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:15:51):
I'm agreeing with you. I'm No, I'm saying that you could, yeah. That was a strawman argument. You were making sure, and I was just punching it with you. Oh, I got you. I'm sorry. Sorry, sorry. <Laugh>. Together we were God,

Paul Thurrott (00:16:01):
Leo. I thought I just made a

Leo Laporte (00:16:02):
Compelling case. No, no, you did. But the court, this is the whole why it's bizarre because of course, gonna

Paul Thurrott (00:16:08):
Sleep last night. I'm, I'm

Leo Laporte (00:16:09):
Concerned. No, I didn't. I'm so tired.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:11):
<Laugh>, you seem a

Leo Laporte (00:16:13):
Little off. I woke up and I read this story, and I couldn't go back to sleep. I knew that I would Well, the facing this, not to

Richard Campbell (00:16:20):
Change gears here, but the EU Google thing. Yeah. At a time when I would argue that online advertising is the most messed up. The, the arguably the weakest. As we, you know, forces are pressing against it in so many different ways. Now you're coming for

Paul Thurrott (00:16:34):
Them. I know. Like,

Richard Campbell (00:16:35):
I know

Leo Laporte (00:16:36):
A little many, I a decade

Paul Thurrott (00:16:37):
Ago. This is, this is, this makes me crazy because my business can't succeed being supported by ads. It can't mm-hmm. If that's the, if that's all we get, I have to go out of business

Leo Laporte (00:16:47):
Because, you know, it's funny. Say that It's the same thing for us, and it's cuz of Google and Facebook. Yep. Because you can't compete against somebody who collects every ounce of data about the people who are looking at the ads. Advertisers want that. And, and, and you can't do it. Could, this is why could arguably do better than, than we can. But we can't do need

Paul Thurrott (00:17:08):
Competition in this market. You need competition in apps. It's the same thing. You just, when you, you funnel everything to through one or two companies, this is what happens. Yeah. You know?

Leo Laporte (00:17:18):
But I think that maybe it would be more appropriate for the EU and I hope our federal regulators as well, to go after data brokers. Yeah. the people who are, you know, collecting information and selling it on to anybody. I mean, you go after TikTok, even if you killed TikTok, the Chinese government just goes the data brokers and gets the same thing. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:17:38):
You're talking about big, like, basically like privacy laws. And this is Yeah. But that's another area

Leo Laporte (00:17:42):
Where, but that's what they don't like about online advertising. Yeah. Right. Yeah. That you have to invade people's privacy to do so, the

Paul Thurrott (00:17:49):
<Laugh>, we all know this, right? The central stupidity of advertising and tracking people online is that it has been proven time And again, that personalized ads, meaning ads derived from tracking someone online, are not more effective than just random ads. And in fact, I I, I mean we all know this. Everyone knows this. How weird is it when you had a conversation with your spouse or a friend, or you Googled something, or you watch the show on Netflix and then this stuff appears in search results everywhere. Right. Or it just appears, I'm sorry, now. Or

Richard Campbell (00:18:18):
You make the mistake of visiting a site once and then it's every other

Paul Thurrott (00:18:21):
Ad. Yes. Like, it's like seriously. Yeah. And, and like that, that just, I think that just turns into a trust problem. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, if you want people to trust this stuff, stop tracking them. <Laugh>. You know,

Richard Campbell (00:18:35):
One of my favorite, my, my favorite moves I did a while ago was sending a, i, I bought a product and then I started getting ads from it. Right. And then I messaged and says, I will return this product unless fricking ads go away.

Paul Thurrott (00:18:47):
This is pointless. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:18:48):
<Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:18:49):
Yeah. I bought the sneaker Stop stopping. You're showing me sneaker ads. That's the height of stupidity. Yeah. I always say, this is a million years ago, but I bought my mother, this might be even 20 years ago, it was a long time ago. I bought my mother a book on Amazon. So it was some book my mother would like. And then I was just recommending

Leo Laporte (00:19:05):
This, well, now we know what you like <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:19:06):
About menopause or whatever, you know, and it's like, guys, you gotta think a little bit here. Like this is,

Leo Laporte (00:19:12):
You buy one bottle of Viagra and for the less, it was a joke. <Laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (00:19:18):
You know

Leo Laporte (00:19:20):
I I mean, one of the stories that we're covering, we'll be covering later today on on this week in Google is the fact that the, the US de intelligence agencies, it's from Wired Magazine. The US is openly stockpiling dirt on all its citizens. Jeez. A newly declassified report from the office of the director of National Intelligence mm-hmm. <Affirmative> reveals the federal government is the what? A huge customer of these data brokers. And even though it's illegal, they're buying it on US citizens. Yeah. And it's illegal. It's, it's explicitly illegal, but they're doing it. So I I, you know, instead of going after Microsoft Activision or going after Google for their ad model model, it is actually illegal

Richard Campbell (00:20:14):
To buy it. Or is it illegal to use it?

Leo Laporte (00:20:16):
Oh, we can buy it. We just can't look at it. That's it. This

Paul Thurrott (00:20:19):
Is the Amsterdam doctrine. You can, you can have marijuana, you just can't

Leo Laporte (00:20:24):
Grow it. Where we get it from, we're

Paul Thurrott (00:20:26):
Not, we're not addressing

Leo Laporte (00:20:27):
It. <Laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (00:20:28):
You know, it's,

Leo Laporte (00:20:30):
It's incredibly infuriating. Yeah. Oh, it's great. But instead they're gonna, they're gonna ban TikTok because China, well,

Richard Campbell (00:20:38):
It's easy to go after China right now. And I'm not saying China shouldn't be gone after. Right. But there are, it's cheaper. If this is your concern, there are other

Paul Thurrott (00:20:46):
Concerns. Exactly. Well, so seriously, like <laugh>, like there's all this like surveillance or whatever that China's doing, and you're, the thing you're worried about is TikTok. Yeah. Yeah. Tiktok.

Leo Laporte (00:20:56):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:20:57):
That's, that's

Leo Laporte (00:20:58):
Crazy. Well, and by the way, the Chinese government could do exactly what our government does, and by information about you and me and everybody else. Sure. And all that information is being collected. Now, the funny thing is, I don't think Google or Facebook Right. Lets that information out, because that's their secret sauce. That's what they sell advertising against. So they don't just go to data brokers and say, Hey, let me tell you everything there needs to know about Paul Theat. They keep that closely protected.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:24):
Yeah. I, I mean we don't know, obviously how the, what the information looks like that they give to data brokers, but we know where the information comes from. Right. Because we have whatever behaviors and usage we have online, we use Google Maps, we use Gmail. We use Google.

Leo Laporte (00:21:35):
Yeah. But Google, I'm telling you, Google doesn't want someone else to know that information. Right. Because it helps them sell ads. That's their secret sauce. Same with Facebook.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:43):
Well, I would, I, I would argue there are other

Leo Laporte (00:21:45):
Googles case, every app you put on your phone is what's selling them to data

Paul Thurrott (00:21:48):
Brokers'. It doesn't matter. It's not Google. Someone knows that Google's collecting information about where I went to eat because I was traveling with Google Maps. Right. Like, like it's that's fine. Like,

Leo Laporte (00:21:57):
But even Google Maps, they're not selling that. I don't think. I've never seen any evidence that they are, I mean,

Richard Campbell (00:22:02):
Effectively they are when in the sense that when you, the, your ability to define a demographic for running an add-on Google Yeah. Is based

Leo Laporte (00:22:11):
On Yes. They're selling it in that way. They're saying, look at Richard, if you would like to reach, you have more targeted advertising men in their fifties in dead Dham, Massachusetts, we can sell you them. Hey, hey, hey. But we don't, but we don't tell you who that we don't give you their names. As long as

Richard Campbell (00:22:26):
I don't have to advertise to Upper Macungie. I'm good

Leo Laporte (00:22:29):
<Laugh>. However, you know, three quarters of the apps you're running are doing all that and gathering it and selling. That's where the data brokers get it. It's not from Google and Facebook, because they don't wanna give that information away. That's that's their, that's what they sell, you know, in effect against. So I think it's just a very misguided all around. And by the way, very, I played Diablo four for most of the weekend. Listen,

Richard Campbell (00:22:55):
That's why you're tired.

Leo Laporte (00:22:56):
And that's an excellent game. <Laugh>. It's a little grim. <Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:01):
Yeah. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:23:02):
Interesting. I'm a di Oh, I'm a Diablo fan. I played one, two, and three. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And

Paul Thurrott (00:23:07):
So that's a, that's a Blizzard game, meaning it's anion blizzard game, meaning

Leo Laporte (00:23:10):
Uhhuh

Paul Thurrott (00:23:11):
Soon, coming soon on Game Pass if everything goes right. Am I, am I, yeah. Am I right? Am I right? Mm-Hmm.

Leo Laporte (00:23:17):
<Affirmative>. Yeah. And it's, yeah. If, if, if the evil courts allow it,

Paul Thurrott (00:23:23):
Right. Well, we're gonna hope that the courts are not evil and are not, and are thinking and are listening. Yeah. I

Leo Laporte (00:23:30):
Can't imagine the courts letting

Paul Thurrott (00:23:31):
This go through, confronted with this argument. I don't see how any court doesn't say, I,

Leo Laporte (00:23:35):
The courts are gonna rule against the FTC

Paul Thurrott (00:23:37):
A ludicrous waste of our time.

Leo Laporte (00:23:39):
Yes. I agree. Yeah. Yep.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:41):
Yeah.

Richard Campbell (00:23:41):
And, and, and this whole activity has been a forcing function.

Leo Laporte (00:23:46):
Oh, in your isp Can

Paul Thurrott (00:23:47):
I mention that Sony, so the country of Sony okays this

Leo Laporte (00:23:50):
Deal, <laugh> the mastery of Sony.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:53):
That would, that if I was Brad Smith, I, that would be my only thing. I'd be like, Sony approved it, and then he sits down. It's like, do you have anything else to say? No. Approved, you're, you're protecting a

Leo Laporte (00:24:01):
Japanese in Sony country.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:02):
No one has any idea why. Even Japan doesn't understand it.

Leo Laporte (00:24:07):
<Laugh> Okay. The country of Sony approved it. The country of Sony. I'm just making a note for the brief. When I do the Amicus

Paul Thurrott (00:24:19):
Dudes, I'm not, I'm not a

Leo Laporte (00:24:20):
Lawyer. I'm not a lawyer. But <laugh>, the country of Sony approved it.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:26):
Just a small town, Mac country. It's my plain spoken mind.

Leo Laporte (00:24:33):
All right. I've completely lost track of where we are. Should we

Paul Thurrott (00:24:36):
Do some windows?

Leo Laporte (00:24:38):
No, no, no. You should stop. And I will I will do an ad and then, okay. And then you should do some windows. Then we can do some windows. If we've got ads, we're gonna do 'em. The good news is we're not gonna collect any personal information Right. About you. They're

Paul Thurrott (00:24:53):
Not targeted. Interesting.

Leo Laporte (00:24:55):
Leave that to your I S P. Yeah, that's the problem. You said in a very interesting thing, Paul, that it's not ads. You can't be ad supported anymore. You have to have, you have premium. I mean,

Paul Thurrott (00:25:06):
You can be if you don't wanna make any money. Yeah. It's like going to art school. I mean, you could do it.

Leo Laporte (00:25:09):
It barely covers costs. It's the same thing for us. And those, and the, that revenue's dwindling. That's why we have the club. Right,

Paul Thurrott (00:25:17):
Right. That's why we have a premium

Leo Laporte (00:25:19):
Program. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why I'm always telling people, you should join the club because it really is what's gonna keep us around in the long term. If without it, I don't, you know, Spotify's you know, firing people right and left from their podcast division NPR fired 30% of its staff because a podcast revenue was down so dramatically. If you're not a member of Club Twit, you can hear Paul's hands on Windows. Mic is hands on. Mcintosh, she Untitled Linnux Show, Scott Wilkinson's, home Theater Geeks all of these are in the club. Only. You get access to the Discord and you get ad free versions of all the shows. And that means no trackers. We don't, you know, you're just pure unadulterated content. <Laugh> Jesus and all of that. Seven bucks a month. I think it's the best deal in going. All you gotta do is go to twit tv slash club twit, sign up for a month. Sign up for a year, get your family plan, get the whole family involved. Corporate memberships also available. Twit tv slash club twit. Now you can talk about Windows. So

Paul Thurrott (00:26:23):
Just tell you right now, it's raining really hard here. So if I disappear, it's because Storm, the lightning has arrived. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:26:30):
You should do what they do in those German towns on the Rhine. Yeah. You should put a little mark on the Wall River rose this high in 1624 <laugh>. Right. Put that there cuz you know, future Macon. I,

Paul Thurrott (00:26:44):
That's where I'm, we're really in trouble. Cause I'm on the second floor.

Leo Laporte (00:26:46):
<Laugh>. Is it Macon or Macon?

Paul Thurrott (00:26:50):
Yeah. I don't know. I'm gonna go with Macon. Oh boy.

Leo Laporte (00:26:54):
<Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:26:56):
There might be a tree coming right there in my apartment

Leo Laporte (00:26:57):
Anyway. Oh no. It'll be okay. Oh no, it'll be okay.

Richard Campbell (00:27:01):
Now you heard of the concept of hunger stones, which is the opposite.

Leo Laporte (00:27:04):
Oh no. What's a hunger stone? Is that like stone soup?

Richard Campbell (00:27:09):
Yeah, a hunger stone are carvings in stones that are only exposed when the river levels are catastrophically low. Oh. Oh. That car, because of drought. And the crops are gonna fail that literally they're carved in stone. If you see this weep.

Paul Thurrott (00:27:22):
Yeah, you're in

Leo Laporte (00:27:23):
Trouble. We didn't see those

Paul Thurrott (00:27:24):
Time this happened, we

Leo Laporte (00:27:25):
Died. We were on a roof of cruise. And if it had been that low, the boat would be like this. <Laugh>. actually, but you know, let me do one more thing. Cause I want to tell you, I did tell you about my lousy night's sleep last night. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. It was not due to the sheets. I just wanna say our show today. What about you by Brooke Linen? Oh, these sheets are so nice. We have Brooke Linens best selling the looks, Satine sheets. So smooth and soft, luxurious finish when you get in bed, it's one of those, it's those sheets. You know, when you go to a hotel and you, and the med is freshly made and you get under there and you go, oh, that's, oh, it's what you that's what I got. Oh, it's so nice. Brooke Linen. I think they should license the Beastie Boys.

(00:28:20):
No sleep till Brook Linen. But that's just me. Brook Linen. Just, that's cuz they come from Brooklyn. It was a, it was a couple, rich and Vicky back in the 2014. They started Brook Linen with the idea that we can get, we can sell really beautiful linens online, hotel quality, luxury bed bedding, delivered right to your door at a much more affordable price. Everything you need to upgrade your home with quality products and curated designs, you and your guests will be swooning, swooning, Brooklinen. Although I'm not putting the good stuff in the guest room, I can tell you that right now. Linn's been making Dream space a reality for almost a decade. They're the obvious choice of making your house a home. What a great gift for a house. Warming a newlywed couple. Even I have to say, even Father's Day, dad doesn't want a tie.

(00:29:15):
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(00:30:08):
Awarded Brooklyn for their outstanding betting. Over a hundred thousand five star customer reviews. One reviewer said, I seem to get to that wonderful sleeping temperature very quickly and stay there throughout the night versus my older cotton sheet sets. Another said, best sheets in the world like butter. It is, they are, it's like butter without the grease. It's really, they're, oh, you feel so good. The best gift for dad this Father's Day. Brooklynn uses only the highest quality materials for all their products. Long staple cotton. Everything they create is built to last sheets. Pillows, towels, bath rugs, robes. Oh, a robe for dad. See, wouldn't that be nice? Dad would love that. What are you waiting for? Now's the time. Shop in store or online? Brook linen. B r o o k l i n e n brooklin.com. Gift yourself for your loved ones. The rest they deserve.

(00:31:07):
Visit brook linen.com today. You'll get $20 off plus free shipping on orders of a hundred dollars and more when they offer code windows. So when you're in the shopping cart, use the offer code windows. You can remember that. Right? And that helps us too. Cause they see that and they go, oh, those Windows people love linens. Brook linen.com offer code windows for yourself, for dad, for grad, for new brides. It's a great gift. $20 off. You don't have to tell him that part. Plus free shipping. No sleep till brook linen brook linen.com. We thank him so much for sporting Windows Weekly on National Bourbon Day. How's the rain? I gave, I decided to do another commercial interview all so I know. Weird thing. Concerned. Yes.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:54):
Yeah. I said my wife go cuz she has a plant hanging out of a tree, actually, which kinda weird, but it was like <laugh>. It was at one point, but now I can still hear the thunder. But now with the sun is out, it's just been when weird.

Leo Laporte (00:32:06):
Oh,

Paul Thurrott (00:32:07):
Dawn, the sun. Dark thunder sun.

Leo Laporte (00:32:10):
Do you have a storm cellar? No. <laugh>. You can't go down into the storm cellar.

Paul Thurrott (00:32:16):
No.

Leo Laporte (00:32:17):
Oh man, you're gonna regret that. I'm just gonna

Paul Thurrott (00:32:19):
Ride this out. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:32:22):
So now Richard, now yeah. Let's talk about Windows. If, if, if you want, what happen

Paul Thurrott (00:32:30):
If you released an update to Windows and nobody noticed

Leo Laporte (00:32:33):
<Laugh> did that happen?

Paul Thurrott (00:32:34):
It did happen.

Leo Laporte (00:32:36):
Moment three is here

Paul Thurrott (00:32:38):
It is here. And obviously if you install the preview update as we talked a few weeks ago, you're not gonna notice anything because the, the non preview version of this update just adds the stuff that wasn't in that, which is just basically bug fixes and security fixes. So kind of a non-event. But even the people who did not install this in preview are noticing different things. Right. I've heard from multiple people on this. Some people have installed it on different PCs. They get some features on one but not on the other. And this is that controlled feature rollout thing that we were talking about. Cfrs just randomly deploying stuff. And I've seen this on my computers as well. It's weird. So, you know, we talked about access keys. Remember Leo did the, the demo where you could see what that looked like. That's one that some people are not seeing. Most people, but not all are actually lemme think of it. The alt tab change where not all tabs from the Microsoft Edge browser will appear an alt tab. It's been reduced down to 20 tabs at most. Not everyone's seeing that <laugh>, you know, this is stuff like that. So it's Microsoft. This is my entertaining life. Late of late. I don't know what to tell you. So that's what's happening.

Richard Campbell (00:33:53):
Yeah. At least nobody's screaming. Like

Paul Thurrott (00:33:55):
It hasn't. Well, yeah, so Well that's, and okay, that's interesting because that's the, I would say the other issue with moment three, which is that as moments go fairly un momentous, <laugh>, you know, it's a non momentous, I guess.

Richard Campbell (00:34:09):
Well, and any, and you're up against the issue here, which is nobody was looking for these changes. Right. And so your best you can hope is they don't notice that you made them

Paul Thurrott (00:34:18):
Right <laugh>.

Richard Campbell (00:34:19):
Well, that's cause the other possibility is that you've now moved their cheese and they're angry.

Paul Thurrott (00:34:23):
If that's the plan, it's working great. Cause yeah, they're killing it. <Laugh>. Yeah, they're nail it. It's so yeah. Anyway, that happened on Tuesday. It's weird. I dunno. I I spent some time updating the book for this. I don't even know why I do these things anymore. It's just pointless. <Laugh>.

Richard Campbell (00:34:44):
You're on the treadmill

Paul Thurrott (00:34:45):
Now? Yeah, I am on the, yeah, there's a, one of the other changes, lemme see if it's on this computer, is yeah, actually it is. So there's a new interface for pinning widgets if you care about that kind of thing. That's new. It's really not a lot. We're running outta stuff. Halftime adjustments. I don't know. There's really not much to say. So that's where we're at.

Richard Campbell (00:35:07):
One could argue we've been running out of stuff for some years

Paul Thurrott (00:35:10):
Now. <Laugh>.

Richard Campbell (00:35:11):
I, I, well, I mean this app isolation thing is incredibly important.

Paul Thurrott (00:35:15):
Yes. I 100% like

Richard Campbell (00:35:17):
Of all of the things, I mean, I've read all the things. Paul, I do read your stuff. I am a premium member. I, I apologize. And, and most of it I am happy to mock <laugh>. This is actually important.

Paul Thurrott (00:35:29):
It is.

Richard Campbell (00:35:30):
Like, it genuinely is important. It has been a problem for a long time. This is the, yes, this is the 10 x solution is the 10 F solution. Like they, this is what we've been trying to do all along.

Paul Thurrott (00:35:42):
I wish to God Microsoft would say it just the way you just said it, because I I, yes, a hundred percent. You know, you have to kind of know the history, know what you're talking about, and can draw these kind of connections. And I just wish Microsoft would do it because when you think back to Windows 10 x and this idea of this alternate version of Windows that was gonna have a simpler new UI and a container based architecture where all win 32 apps would run in, in a single container and be isolated from the rest of the system. And then uwp or what we now call it like windows app SDK apps, well run in their own containers Right. With their own sandboxing. Right. Which is the model today. You sort of applaud this and you think this is, you know, this is a good idea, but they canceled Windows 10 x and part of the reason was this compatibility issue that they had with this container system.

Richard Campbell (00:36:27):
Everybody has an app they must run. Yeah. That won't, it won't work with. And it's never the same

Paul Thurrott (00:36:33):
App. So, you know, you were this was a long time ago, but back when Windows 10 s was a thing, back when s mode was a thing. The argument I made, and I made this directly to Terry Morrison by the way. But the, the argument I made about this was, guys, you're doing this all wrong. It should not be a mode. What you should be able to do is have what we now like a like a a an allow list or a block list mm-hmm. <Affirmative> for these apps. Right? Are

Richard Campbell (00:36:55):
You whitelisting or are you blacklisting?

Paul Thurrott (00:36:56):
That's the question. Yeah, you can, you can block everything by default. That's fine. But let me get Chrome in there. Because Chrome is the one app I rely on that I need to be allowed to run free. Whatever, you know, I just, I need it. I, it doesn't work in S mode. I need this app, whatever it is. And your only

Richard Campbell (00:37:12):
Option is to simply shut off as mode.

Paul Thurrott (00:37:14):
Yeah. And I, to me that was just, it was too black and white. I don't un I I never understood why they architected it that way. I think that's the reason to fail. This was Windows rt, you've got this thing that like back in Windows eight timeframe, you've got this thing that looks just like Windows eight. And then you go to the web and you're like, I'm gonna download iTunes at the time or Chrome or whatever it is. And that thing will not install. And what the heck is this thing that looks like Windows that doesn't run Windows apps? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So it seemed like this container system for Windows 10 X could have solved the problem. Performance issues, obviously. But also actually the reason they canceled it was compatibility issues. So how is this new thing different? There's a new technology they announced in the build code 1 32 app Isolation. It does use containers by the way, app containers, Microsoft Technology. Right? Nice. It works on an app by app basis. It's exactly what I've been asking for. Right. So it's not something you can as an end user cause it's brand new. Right? So we, right now we're at the point where we're asking developers to take a look at this and see if they can put their apps in this container and make them more secure, make them better citizens on the computer.

Richard Campbell (00:38:17):
I I expect it folks to jump on this.

Paul Thurrott (00:38:19):
I do too. I, I I literally went in that direction and the article I arrived was like looking ahead, thinking about what they did with ES mode and Windows RT and, and everything else. Like what's the logical end game here? And the logical end game is this lists of apps you can use or not use, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, we're gonna lock down the entire system, but we're gonna allow some small list of 1 32 apps that are not contained because we, they're vital to the business or whatever. It's like there, there's no way that this is not where this is going.

Richard Campbell (00:38:44):
No. And I, and I've, I've seen companies do machine isolation for this, where it's like those insecure apps only run on these machines Air gaps or air air gaps, or they're, or they're living in Azure Virtual Desktop for the same reason. That's right. What you're now offering here is that solution, but back onto the desktop.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:01):
Yeah, yeah. You know, this is this has been a long time coming. I mean, there's no doubt about it,

Richard Campbell (00:39:07):
But even it's, it's gonna, it's a common, it'll be a combination of, of dev changes and cis admin changes Yes. To apply this to a machine that's essentially a lockdown machine that we, we have a set of apps that are allowed to run. And yes, we have that cranky old app running, but we've gone through the computerization process for it.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:28):
Geez, I gotta think when did they add this? Yeah, windows Vista. They added this thing called user comp control. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. See. And the idea behind user comp control was like, look, we made this, we made a little campaign to try to get people to run as limited users. No one's doing it. They're all running as admin. Okay, what, what can we do? And you basically put up like that middle brake light on a card. It's like a little, just a just think about what you're doing here for a second. Like, you as the user have permissions over everything on this computer, but the thing you're about to do could be dangerous. Just think about it for a second. Right? Yeah. And whether or not uac,

Richard Campbell (00:39:58):
It didn't work because

Paul Thurrott (00:39:59):
It

Richard Campbell (00:39:59):
Popped constantly

Paul Thurrott (00:40:01):
<Laugh>, right? You

Richard Campbell (00:40:01):
Learned to just say, what do I have to say to make you go away?

Paul Thurrott (00:40:05):
Yes. But the, the, but what it, it never solved, it was this notion of when you install an app, whatever it is, Chrome, I'll keep using Chrome as the example Chrome runs under your permission level. Chrome can do whatever it wants. Chrome could be malicious, but the bigger problem is that Chrome could be compromised and a malicious actor could act on your behalf, on your system using your permissions to do nasty things to your documents, to your private data, to whatever else. And this, this is, this is the solution to that other half of the equation, which is the user is the weakest link for sure, <laugh>, but by extension, the user's permissions <laugh> spread over the computer are also a very weak link. Maybe literally the weakest link. And this is what we're trying to address. So listen, this is this been 20 years of work that went into this that we used to have what was it called?

(00:40:54):
The mdo, the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack. Had app virtualization had, I can't pick out the names of Med V and App AbbVie, I think were the two products. And you know, one of the neat things you could do was like ver run a virtual application on a physical computer without having a virtual machine that was the entire desktop. That kind of thing. That's one. Virtualization is kind of one way. I think this containerized approach is maybe the more modern slash I'll call it better way where it is locally installed. It's the native app, it's on your computer, but we just, you know, and by the way, there are gonna be prompts, there's gonna be UAC type stuff. This is the thing. You're gonna have an app that's gonna want to access your documents, it's gonna wanna access the camera. I don't know what that looks like yet.

(00:41:33):
It's probably gonna look like a UAC prompt. Right. We're going to get, they are gonna be a little more annoying. But this is, this is the right approach. And, and to Richard's point, start with developers go to it, but the end game is gonna be some version of Windows where this thing outta the box is gonna be secure. It's gonna be a little more annoying, but hopefully, but I think the, the hope or the goal is by this point, maybe we've mostly moved on to more modern apps that are sandboxed array. So you don't have to think about this. And it will make the older apps that we sort of still rely on the offices of the world, the Chrome, you know, the well web browsers, unfortunately a little more annoying and maybe we, we will move on to a more modern architecture for apps. And those things start to go away. So anyway, I, it's a good thing it's in public preview today. It's really kind of, I guess technically dis aimed at developers. Really. I think they wanna get developers going.

Richard Campbell (00:42:24):
Yeah. I I don't know. The devs are gonna grab onto this so much as, as Yeah. I know cis admins will, and then they'll go to the dev saying, I can't make this work. Help me.

Leo Laporte (00:42:33):
Right. Does the developer have to support it

Paul Thurrott (00:42:35):
Explicitly or Yeah, it's something you can add to an app.

Richard Campbell (00:42:39):
Yeah. That's not, it's about a, essentially the containerization is about a manifest. What rights do you need? What ability to access.

Leo Laporte (00:42:46):
Oh, that makes sense. And cuz you have to get entitlements to use those things, right?

Richard Campbell (00:42:50):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and so what the bigger thing you here is some of those entitlements are so comprehensive that they're, they're insecure, right? Like pushing the, you're

Leo Laporte (00:42:58):
Not really sandbox stuff off. I need to be able to write to ring zero and the hard drives.

Paul Thurrott (00:43:04):
Thank you. I don't see, I don't, I don't think most app developers actually think that way, but I, I

Leo Laporte (00:43:08):
Lazy ones do. That's the problem. That's a lazy approach.

Paul Thurrott (00:43:12):
Yeah. Right. Yeah. Well, I, I, but Microsoft has been kind of pushing developers in this direction for a while. So it's

Richard Campbell (00:43:17):
Microsoft also who is good at line. It's about packaging software, right? Like, this was Chris Jackson's old shtick. We did a bunch of shows on this, the shimming effect, where it's like, oh, I wanna, I wanna write into system 32. And you go, sure, no problem. And it

Paul Thurrott (00:43:29):
Actually

(00:43:30):
In the, yeah. So this data virtualizing the file system or you virtualized the registry and you're like, oh yeah, no, just do whatever you want. What mean it's what I want. It's writing to a fake version of the registry. And then, yeah. So this is basically about packaging. Like you said, there's a manifest file that kind of explains what it can and cannot do. And we'll see, I the goal this needs to be as easy as possible. Yeah. I haven't looked into it. There's a GitHub repository you can go check out to see how to do this.

Richard Campbell (00:43:55):
I mean, dude, it'd be nice if this is easy, but it's even more important to that the bottom line is the thing that you hit on, which is I have an app that's badly behaved, right? Yeah. The one that, that everybody depends on, and I am willing mm-hmm. <Affirmative> to spend a whole day trying to figure out how to Right. Build a,

Paul Thurrott (00:44:12):
Wrap this around

Richard Campbell (00:44:13):
This thing. Yes, exactly. Right. Because it's that important.

Paul Thurrott (00:44:16):
Yep. So I think it's gonna happen. I I I, I've always thought I, as soon as I saw this thing in Win win 10 X as a logical extension of the work that came before it as as mm-hmm. As well, I think, you know, yes. They're on the right path. I think there, there's an answer here. Yeah. the wind Windows 10 s thing or the ESMO thing was not the answer and it was so easily expressed. You can't just lock down the whole system. Like that's when, you know, you can't ship something, you can, I mean they did actually. But you, when you ship something that looks exactly like Windows, but doesn't run all Windows apps, you know, people tend not to like that thing. <Laugh>,

Richard Campbell (00:44:49):
They get a little grumpy.

Paul Thurrott (00:44:50):
Yeah. So it was fun that in esmo, they, they were like, oh, you know, we fixed it. You can, you can get out of it. And it's like, yeah, but you get completely out of it. There are actual real world reasons why you don't want background apps running all the time. You don't want the win 32 apps to have access to the system all the, the time whatever it might be. There were good things about it, but you know, there, there had to be a co kind of a common sense Yeah.

Richard Campbell (00:45:12):
Middle ground. Well, and that all or nothing thing meant it was always nothing.

Paul Thurrott (00:45:16):
That's right. Yeah. That's what happens. That's what happens. People would try it and then they would fail. Yeah. And they would say, screw it, I'm just gonna go back to I, and I'm just gonna run. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (00:45:23):
And my security doesn't matter if I can't conduct business.

Paul Thurrott (00:45:27):
Right. End of story. Yeah. So that was the real, anyway, it's happening. So that's neat. Yeah. To me, I, to me this is kinda like the biggest, I mean, well the Activision Collision thing's pretty big, but this is, this is big. This is big.

Richard Campbell (00:45:39):
Yeah. No, it's, it's a really important thing in Windows. Something that's been coming for forever and we've been hoping for, for a long time. So Yep. The idea that it's in the insider's Bill just speaks to Holy man, we may, we may actually get this dealt with before win 32 becomes irrelevant. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:45:54):
I don't remember the timing on Windows 10 x Exactly. But let's say they canceled it probably in boy, I'll, what are we looking at? 20 20, 20 night, 2018, something like that. And, you know, the UI pops up in Windows 11. You're like, oh, cool, okay. That was a cool idea. I get that

Richard Campbell (00:46:09):
May of 21.

Paul Thurrott (00:46:11):
May of 20. Oh that. Geez. Okay. And but you're like, but what about that other thing? Because the UIs are fun. We, they're easy to see. You can talk about it, it's neat, but this kind of fundamental architectural change was so important and I was so excited about it. Yeah. And it just kind of dropped off the earth. And so

Richard Campbell (00:46:28):
Yeah. I mean, the good, the good, the honest truth there is like the code never goes away. Yeah. So that, you know, it just goes back into the lab and they munge on it for longer. Like Right. I, I don't know that they could have gone any faster if they just said it's gotta be app containers. Right. But maybe a little, but there were definitely some other attempts there. You know, I, I always wondered what the minimum uptake would've had to been to keep it going. Yeah. Like if 10% of enterprises had been able to use 10 x, would they have kept it alive? Well, I think it was like 1%.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:00):
Yeah. So 10, I mean 10 x I you almo it almost had to be its own OS because they couldn't just do it to Windows. Yeah. Whereas with this case, you can say, well, yeah, the windows is unchanged now we're just gonna change apps. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and that's fine. We, we've, we've lived in a world in Windows now where we've actually had app sandboxing since Windows eight, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, so type certain types of apps, right? Yep. And Microsoft has allowed packaging of desktop apps to be sold or downloaded through the store since Windows 10. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So we, we've really been kind of taking all the steps we need to get developers used to it. And then users don't really have to get, well, they will have to when they start seeing prompts, but it should be basically seamless. You're still gonna install the app, there's not gonna be, the UI doesn't change or anything. But you may see occasional,

Richard Campbell (00:47:47):
But you, you see the trepidation. It's like there's a group of folks that have to walk around the Gordian Knot that is Win 32 going, you really wanna take the sucker on like, are you sure? Like it is the giant bug bear in the room.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:59):
Right? Yep.

Richard Campbell (00:48:00):
And, and literally decades of essential software Yep. Built in it.

Paul Thurrott (00:48:07):
I mean, I'm looking at my task bar right now and there is not a, a single, let me think about that. An app that has any bearing on like uwp at all in there. Yep. Now there are modern apps, like teams that are based on web technologies. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> a notion I'm sure is a web app. But but the rest of it, you know well, visual Studio Code is a, a web app. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, but the rest of this is desktop stuff, right. Word, brave Photoshop, paint, notepad. Yeah. All that stuff

Richard Campbell (00:48:37):
Is desktop. And a lot of those apps have modernized

Paul Thurrott (00:48:40):
Know Yes. Oh yeah. Mod. Yeah, absolutely.

Richard Campbell (00:48:42):
But there's plenty out there that, that haven't. And I mean, I think one of the greatest centers of all time is AutoCAD. Autocad still tries to write the in I files for goodness sakes. Right? Like, that's us. And I mean, the number of internal shims at Microsoft inside of Windows that say, if AutoCAD is not trivial, but they're utterly dominant in their industry, there is no alternatives. They, the ecosystem is so massive that it is what it is, and they don't have to get better.

Paul Thurrott (00:49:14):
Well, they're gonna be forced <laugh>. Well,

Richard Campbell (00:49:17):
We we're gonna extr

Paul Thurrott (00:49:18):
These apps through

Richard Campbell (00:49:20):
This is, this is gonna be the package I have. I have friends who are the CIS admins for larger organizations that use a huge amount of AutoCAD. Like this is a technology that they will literally pull one of their people on and say, you know what you're doing this week? You're figuring this out because if this actually can address this problem, the amount of challenges they have on around security, you know, they're, they're afraid of software updates. They're afraid of all of those things because of their privilege escalation risks.

Paul Thurrott (00:49:47):
Right? Yeah, it's good.

Richard Campbell (00:49:49):
It's exciting.

Paul Thurrott (00:49:50):
Yeah, it really is. That's why I buried it in the middle of the notes. <Laugh> like

Richard Campbell (00:49:56):
Escalation risk. I love

Paul Thurrott (00:49:58):
That. Yeah. No, but I, I I've, there's, most people can't see the notes, but there, there's a section that's just like Windows Insider program. It's just previous stuff. So I put it at the top of that because it's not really an insider program thing per se, but it is more interesting and important than the other stuff. Although, I will say today's dev channel build is interesting. But yeah, I wanted to highlight that part of it.

Richard Campbell (00:50:22):
You know, usually we debate the fact that the search box is curved instead of square <laugh>. It's true.

Leo Laporte (00:50:27):
It's nice to have something a little more meaty. I agree. I agree. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:32):
Yeah, yeah. I, I, I'm gonna regret this sidetrack. I know you know this Richard, cuz you talked to Jeffrey Snower. But I was in writing about PowerShell recently, I came across this quote from him where he was talking about why this thing was needed, PowerShell being the the command line scripting environment and windows that he wrote, net based, right? Object oriented, et cetera, et cetera. Because obviously they looked at Unix shells, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And they would've used Bash or something like Bash that, that was what they thought they were gonna do. And what they found out is that it doesn't work in Windows, because Bash and those Shell, and all of the commands that are in them that, that you pipe things through are all based on this notion of text-based files. Unix is designed with text-based Exhibit Everywhere files.

(00:51:17):
That's the point. Windows is not. It used to be. Yeah. That was the infile. That's why I thought of it. But they used the registry now and they use they're basically, I'll call them like not digital files. They're all digital files, but they're binary data files. They're binary files. Thank you. And that's why that's why Windows had to use a different kind of scripting environment. And the thing it created was incredibly elegant and is excellent. Yes. And is in many ways superior to what you see on un explain Well, and

Richard Campbell (00:51:42):
Conceals you from that complexity. Yeah. I would also, the other element was active directory, which just Yes, yes. Same thing. The privileges models were so intensely complicated.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:52):
Right. Where this is

Richard Campbell (00:51:53):
Hierarchical was wonderfully

Paul Thurrott (00:51:55):
Thing. Yes. Right. Exactly. So I, I, anyway, I thought that was kind of interesting because I think a lot of people today still would look at Windows and be like, how come they don't use the like, just use the Unix shell? Like, why wouldn't they just do that? It's like it doesn't work.

Richard Campbell (00:52:06):
Yeah. If you want to use Unix, shell, we've got w you know, w s L for you, the Windows substance Linux. Yeah. So you can go do that. It won't help you in the Windows area, but at least you'll

Paul Thurrott (00:52:14):
Be happy. And that's interesting. But I do have to say the fact that the search bar has a different curve in the window and in the task bar, to me, is still kind of a bigger deal. But

Richard Campbell (00:52:23):
I'm not saying it isn't dumb <laugh>, and I'm not entirely sure that it's important.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:29):
<Laugh>, what

Leo Laporte (00:52:31):
Are you laughing at, Paul?

Paul Thurrott (00:52:33):
One man's junk. Leo's another man's treasure. That's right. All I'm saying, that's all I'm saying.

Richard Campbell (00:52:38):
You know, I, I wear, I'm afraid I wear more tinfoil than you do <laugh>. Like, you know, there's some stuff I'm worried about and curb of that thing and not one of them.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:47):
Well, you just don't have as good a D H D as I do. That's true. <Laugh> that might be why. Anyhow, okay. So in addition to 1 32 App Isolation, we, there have been a couple of windows Insider program builds over the past week. When was last week? When was today that one Today is much more interesting. I have been waiting, as they do every year for the dev channel to kick in with a, a build that has a bunch of new features in it, right? When we, as we kind of head toward the next version of Windows, this has to happen at some point, right? And in the world of today where we have these moment updates, so you don't get the Big bang effect anymore, this might be as big as they get. But today's Deb Build was pretty big, and you should take a look at it.

(00:53:28):
The big one is something that people who do like smart pens and, you know, surface tablets and that kind of thing are gonna wonder why this didn't happen 10 years ago. But they're actually improving windows, ink or modernizing it, I guess we could call it mm-hmm. <Affirmative> so that you can drink, drink <laugh>. I also didn't sleep a lot last night, Leo <laugh> so that you can ink directly into any edit field in Windows, right? And so, which is better than drinking directly. So I think you chose the right phrase, <laugh> Yes. Ink directly. Directly. So if you follow the history of the tablet pc, you may know that back in the day in literally the day 2002, you would click in an edit box somewhere in Windows and a a keyboard, what do you call it? The tip, the tablet input panel would appear at the bottom of the screen and you could write in it.

(00:54:16):
And what you wrote would then go into that edit box, right? It would recognize the handwriting, put it in the way. It had to go in digitally in the second version of the tablet PC operating system, they made the tip of floating thing that would appear near that edit box. So if you clicked in there, it would appear right under it, right? So it's kind of context aware or whatever. But the update we're getting now, which I guess will be in 23 H two, will be the ability you just, you're handwriting right on the window, right? And it's hard to tell from the screenshot but I believe what happens is it goes in with your handwriting cuz it's terrible looking. And then when you finish writing, it just goes into the text boxes text and you go from there, right? So if you want, the example there you're using is you're searching in the search box that's in the settings app.

(00:54:57):
You write something in there with your pen back off it, you know, it recognizes your text, puts it in his text, and then the search goes. So it only took 20 years, but it's happening. So that's cool. Right? Love it. Nobody okay but me. Yeah. Again, both guys using their pens are really excited. <Laugh> oh Lord. Alright. Alright. Hold on, hold on. I'll on, I'll get you. There's more. There's more. So that's one. There's some folder option changes and File Explorer are not a big deal focus decision, which not a big deal. If you've been waiting for features like never combined in the task bar, which only went out to some people asked in the last build, or the ability to tear tabs off of file Explorer and have it open a new window or merge tabs by dragging them in, that's there for everybody.

(00:55:42):
But the other big one is the goofy thing that's been in Windows 11 since day one that hasn't made a lot of sense to people. There's an app in there called Chat, and it's on your task bar by default Purple looks like the teams logo a little bit. It is a front end to a consumer version of teams that is not the teams that you and I use every day. It's like a, a home version of teams. Nobody uses this thing. It's been a huge problem. It's the replacement for Skype, basically. Although they haven't replaced Skype, which is also part of the problem. It doesn't integrate with Skype directly on and on go. But anyway, the, the, the hidden dumbness of this is that the, the team's home client that's in Windows 11 is actually pretty fantastic and it doesn't matter because nobody uses it, right?

(00:56:25):
So starting, I will as assume, well, I shouldn't assume this, but sometime in the future, because it's in the dev channel now, they're actually gonna rename chat to Windows teams free. So they have a new brand they're gonna just acknowledge this is in fact Windows teams. It's the thing, it runs its startup, it's on your task bar by default. Like I said, the u the default UI is actually really neat because it lets you start a meeting or a like a chat session or a video call just right off the window. Like it's not the full teams experience. It's like this little customized thing. So I don't know if that's changing, but they are in fact renaming this thing and they're kind of admitting, okay, it's teams just kidding. And so we'll see what that looks like. That's kind that to me is kind of interesting. I feel like they need a, yeah, I just,

Richard Campbell (00:57:07):
I just wish they wouldn't use the same name, you know, like let it be a different product because it's separate install. It's a separate update. Yeah. All you're doing is confusing people. There's no reason it couldn't, why didn't you just call it chat?

Paul Thurrott (00:57:19):
Well, yeah, so the other well, speaking of confusing, if you use teams on mobile, you can actually have home and business in the same app and you can switch between those profiles. It's a little awkward. I kind of wish there was a view where you could kind of have both at the same time. I don't like going in and out of that. It's like if you have different profiles in you know, Facebook or Instagram or something and

Richard Campbell (00:57:39):
Stuff, and, and yet I'd argue in favor if it was the same app, but there was clearly like a home mode and a work mode. Yeah. That would I find that more acceptable than two pieces of software both named teams. One of them is in teams.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:50):
Yeah. Right. And I, I kind of hope and wish and expect even that that's what would

Richard Campbell (00:57:55):
Happen. But this was Skype. Skype for Business, right? Skype for Business not being Skype. And probably not good for your business, right? Like those were bad names.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:03):
<Laugh>. Well, it's like if you, and if you sign into Windows with a work or school account and you have got your OneDrive for business icon and the desktop, you can also sign into your OneDrive consumer account. And then you have two cloud icons in the tray. You've got two instances of OneDrive

Richard Campbell (00:58:16):
And you don't know which is which.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:18):
And well, one's blue and one's gray. It's super obvious. No, I <laugh>

Richard Campbell (00:58:22):
Well, and, and that's my M nine cleanly built M 365 machine. There's exactly that. There's the Business OneDrive account and the personal OneDrive

Paul Thurrott (00:58:30):
Account. That's right. Yeah. So, and,

Richard Campbell (00:58:32):
And, and you recognize these are the features that Microsoft deploys themselves use. That's why they work fairly well.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:38):
Whereas you think, okay, but why don't you just have one OneDrive icon, one OneDrive node and X File Explorer, and then it could say Work and home. Just gotta go. I don't know

Richard Campbell (00:58:47):
Why now you're just talking crazy talking. It's just, you know, this is two different teams, so it has to be two different icons.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:53):
Yep. I know. Sorry. last week there was a beta channel bill. We don't have to talk about too much. There's not too much there. But there's a new narrative voices I should say new natural sounding narrative voices for Chinese and Spanish, both Spain and Mexico. And then there's some a toggle that will if you have a cellular connection to your laptop, it will help kick in when your wifi connectivity is poor, which is I'm sure a feature that was already in Windows. So I'm confused what that even means. But anyway, that's what happens there. And here's the next huge announcement. Cause this is also

Richard Campbell (00:59:26):
Humongous <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:59:27):
Now this is also big, and we were, this is what we were talking about, Leah, when you came in AMD at CES announced that they were adding an AI engine, as they call it, an mpu to their chip sets. Ah. And the first of those is now shipping, and it's actually a product that's out in the world today. So this I believe is called the R Pro 70 40 series. It's in some Lenovo and HP PCs right now. It is that N P U thing that we've been talking about. It is the first X 86 n p it. So you can enable such thing, well, not such things. You can enable the one thing <laugh>, which is called windows Studio Effects, which is those kind of you know, blur your background type of webcam nonsense that everyone does, but requires an npu.

(01:00:10):
So that's available. But the next step of course is copilot. So for people who wanna use copilot to its fullest extent I'm not saying this is gonna be required, but I am saying it's gonna work a lot better. So this will be kind of interesting. And they have, they kind of have this mul or not a d no, it was a D I'm sorry. Talked about a multi-year plan where the, the rationale for needing this will grow and grow and grow. Oh yeah, it's right today, today it's literally like, well, you can have like a, you know, blur your background in your

Leo Laporte (01:00:37):
Probably in the next, your webcam in a year, everything will have a, an NPU or some sort of AI processing chip. We always media like is coming out this fall from Intel. Yeah, that's right.

Richard Campbell (01:00:48):
Are these NPUs big enough for some of these bigger models? Like if co-pilot's really gonna run on the local workstation, right? Is that GPT three? Cuz the last time I looked, that model was a terabyte,

Paul Thurrott (01:00:58):
Right? Right.

Leo Laporte (01:00:59):
So it doesn't, but it doesn't

Richard Campbell (01:01:00):
Have nobody, nobody knows how

Leo Laporte (01:01:01):
To be, the GP doesn't have to load the whole terabyte, does it? I mean,

Richard Campbell (01:01:05):
It says that's how models work, man. If you don't have the whole model, how do you do the execution on it?

Paul Thurrott (01:01:11):
Huh? I think this is the point of the hybrid AI thing that Microsoft as partners talking about where parts of it are in the cloud, parts of it, local and

Leo Laporte (01:01:19):
Yeah. And Google's talked a lot about shrinking the models so that they can fit on the phone and that kind of thing. Well,

Richard Campbell (01:01:24):
And, and this what I was looking for in the early conversations around GPT four a couple of years ago, they were saying, Hey, we're gonna go three is as big as you wanna go. We're gonna work on a smaller model. Now they ended up not doing that <laugh>, they made arguably one of the largest things that's ever been made and is now costing a fortune and more and more that's being surfaced. Right. because as long as something's growing like that, it still hasn't been figured out. Right? Sizing is a measure of, yeah, hey, I've got the shape of this and now I can tighten it up.

Leo Laporte (01:01:52):
I'm able to use stable diffusion models, which are 1.6 gigs on my iPhone, which has Right. Less ram, obviously. So they must paging

Paul Thurrott (01:02:02):
It somehow. Must have a Promax though. Cause you need a bigger

Leo Laporte (01:02:04):
Iphone. No, no, no. It works. Yeah. Promax, I do have a promax. I do, but well, how much RAM does it have though? Not a, not a gig and a half.

Paul Thurrott (01:02:12):
Actually, iPhones do not have a lot of ram.

Leo Laporte (01:02:15):
They're notorious for being quite on ram. Yep. So I'm thinking paging it, right? They must be able to do the work. Or maybe, I mean, maybe there's, you can use an index or, so, I mean, is it, do you really have to have the entire model in ram?

Richard Campbell (01:02:30):
Yeah. I mean, it, it's interesting to think about how they might break those things out. Are they doing word pre-processing on the machine? Right. And actually doing the back end of the cloud, you know, they have talked about pus being able to run stable diffusion, but the full model of stable diffusion is like eight gigs. Which, huh. Actually that's way too much for a foam, but that's totally pable.

Leo Laporte (01:02:50):
Oh, I see. That's what

Paul Thurrott (01:02:51):
Qualcomm showed off at Build was stable diffusion running on a Qualcomm based or yeah, dragon based pc, but I don't know if it was the, huh.

Richard Campbell (01:03:00):
I, I don't know that we fully got our head around how this is gonna go about. But I think we, talking to hardware folks that I know, when they're talking about these NPUs, they're saying, where do we draw the line while you guys keep billion gig models that are destroying? Do

Leo Laporte (01:03:13):
They have, does the NPU have dedicated memory or is it using ramm?

Richard Campbell (01:03:17):
Yeah, I, I don't know the answer to that. I think it depe the answer. It depends.

Leo Laporte (01:03:21):
Depends, right. Because I just think that the NPU is kind of an MMX on steroids is like the, I think so some sort of, you know, special processes. I've

Paul Thurrott (01:03:28):
Never heard any conversation about NPUs having dedicated rem mm-hmm.

Leo Laporte (01:03:32):
<Affirmative>, I mean, GPUs do, right?

Paul Thurrott (01:03:34):
GPS do. Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:03:35):
And NPU is in some respects a faster gpu right? Or a purpose built GP

Richard Campbell (01:03:40):
Specialized purpose. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:03:42):
Yeah. They're basically V lsi, they're FPGAs they're they're program, I, I don't know if mpu

Richard Campbell (01:03:49):
Program Bill Gator rates, I mean, effectively they all are. Yeah. They specialized in different things.

Leo Laporte (01:03:53):
Specialized, yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:03:54):
And the, and the RAM in GPUs is also specialized cuz it's meant for ray tracing. Right. So it needs to do rapid updates of simultaneous numbers. So Right. Actually the organization of the RAM is different because so many different scaler processes have to write to it simultaneously. Right. And that's why they ended up putting RAM there. I don't think the machine learning models have that issue. And so regular RAM should work for them, although there's an argument at some point for a cache.

Leo Laporte (01:04:19):
Yep. And remember, the Apples have this unified memory architecture and Right. There is no issue. That's probably how that

Paul Thurrott (01:04:24):
Helps. Yeah. Yeah. You don't have to worry about that. That's interesting. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:04:28):
Although, although RAM is shared with the GPU u the npu

Paul Thurrott (01:04:31):
Cpu, I just might, without knowing the full details of, I think it's fair to say that even these first gen NPUs, as we'll call them, will offer advantages over just a CPU GPU setup. But that as we go forward in time, they will advance to the point where maybe they will be dedicated, but it doesn't really matter what the details are. But they will get, they will get better over time. Of course. And it's just sort of

Richard Campbell (01:04:53):
A, it's, and the same, the same thing happened. The first generation GPUs were onboard. Yeah. Right. They getting to, and then there they, the dedicated cards and the dedicated architecture changed over time. Right. I mean, even Intel stuck with their onboard GP stuff for a long time. Right. So it, it's interesting. We're just in early days it'll iterate as the workloads iterate.

Paul Thurrott (01:05:16):
Right? Hmm.

Richard Campbell (01:05:20):
Exciting. I don't know, you know, especially the fun part is we talked about weeks ago, Hey, I'm gonna hold out for an MPU and a machine now that it's actually getting closer. I'm like, but what pu and what do I want from that Mpu? Right? Right. And, you know, and you start to get into the harder problem of how is this going to make a difference? Like what's the benefit

Paul Thurrott (01:05:39):
They're gonna, you know, just in the same way that people would compare a t I and a well, ATI and NVIDIA radio and Nvidia graphics cards, whatever. Some of you know, this one's best for this game and this one's best for this game. Yeah. It will probably be temporarily, it's like the you know, this website runs best on Netscape Navigator.

Richard Campbell (01:05:56):
No. And the test will be

Paul Thurrott (01:05:58):
Model,

Richard Campbell (01:05:59):
Can I unplug the network card from this machine? Can I take this machine offline and still do this stuff? Right. Because I'm not, I'm not expecting any copilot to work offline. That just doesn't seem like a thing.

Paul Thurrott (01:06:10):
No, no, that's interesting. Okay.

Richard Campbell (01:06:12):
Just realistically knowing the, the shape of

Paul Thurrott (01:06:15):
These models. Well, I know. So I, I, so one of the interesting things about Microsoft's copilot approach is that it kind of takes the internet out of it, depending on the use case. In other words, you're working against maybe organizational data in the case of Microsoft 365

Richard Campbell (01:06:30):
But then you have to be on M 365 because the language model's living up there as well. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:06:35):
No, no, no. I'm sorry, but I was going down. So, but if you go down to like Windows copilot, you, you know, this stuff where it's like, how do I turn on dark mode to be more productive? That stuff's just local. So there, there're gonna be parts of it that run locally. Right. I mean, those parts,

Richard Campbell (01:06:48):
I am not convinced

Paul Thurrott (01:06:50):
<Laugh>. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:06:51):
But where does my Spotify playlist come from?

Richard Campbell (01:06:54):
<Laugh>. I su Yeah. I suspect there's gonna be a trip to the cloud.

Leo Laporte (01:06:57):
<Laugh>. All right. I clearly have some, I have some reading. I'm also, this weekend. I gotta find out how

Richard Campbell (01:07:04):
This stuff works. Microsoft likes to make money today and it involves a trip to the cloud. <Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (01:07:09):
To the

Leo Laporte (01:07:09):
Cloud, wasn't that Yes, that was the slogan. Yeah, it was to the cloud. My whole desk flipped over and

Paul Thurrott (01:07:15):
To the cloud, and then from the cloud we had to go

Leo Laporte (01:07:18):
The other way too. Back and forth and Yeah. But that is their, that's their business model. I understand that. Yep. That's, that's how it ought to be. What else you have before? I wanna take a break before the Microsoft 365 segment.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:33):
Okay. All right. So there's another interesting one. Now this is only in preview, so, well, it's in the insider preview, but the version of the Windows subsystem for Android at W S A that's available, I think across all of the channels in the Windows Insider program has now gotten windows Linux file sharing capabilities. Right. Excellent. Windows. Sorry, Android. I know, I, I always get confused, the two subsystems. So the idea there is you're running an app on an, an Android app, like a photo sharing app or something, or whatever it might be. And you want it to, you know, you wanna save a file, it can save it to an a Windows location. Right. You know, you're using photos in this app, you're using photos in your pc, they should be the same, the same thing. And so that's, that's kind of, that's one of those really obvious and it's finally happening.

(01:08:17):
So that will probably be live and stable. I don't know, sometime this summer. I would think kind of the ability to go back and forth between the Android, I keep saying Android, the Oh, Andrew's correct. I'm sorry. The Android file system, <laugh> and the Windows file system. Good. And you can drag and drop between them and File Explorer and all that stuff. So Good. That's kinda cool. Absolutely. my pedantic little monkey brain got hung up on this one. I saw the announcement that Microsoft was bringing voice chat to Bing Chat on the desktop. And of course, the first thing I thought was Bing chat on the desktop. Is there a Bing Chat client that I'm not aware of that runs on the desktop? And I'm like, do they mean like the thing that's built into Microsoft Edge or something? What does that mean?

(01:09:02):
And so I looked at their blog post and I read it, and I, you know, I, I googled this, I searched in the store. Is there like a Bing Chat app that I didn't know about? There is not. What they're referring to is you're going to the web, which technically requires Edge, but you're on the website for Bing mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, and you gonna do a interaction with the Bing chatbot or whatever. And now there's a microphone icon in the little search box. That's literally all it means. It's just, you can talk to it, right. So you can do to it what you would do to Cortana. Right. And speak to it instead of just type in something. Now that makes tons of sense. It's fine. You know,

Richard Campbell (01:09:36):
It was inevitable.

Paul Thurrott (01:09:37):
Talk back. It's, it's, I it's curious. It wasn't there already. I think that the copilot stuff all needs to have a microphone icon too, because I, I think that's one way you can interact with the computer. Yeah. typing long things is not necessarily a natural act for some people, but saying it out loud is possibly. Anyway, I just, I went over this blog post so many times, I didn't understand how they could call, they, they referred to it as voice chat on desktop and it's like on desktop. Yeah, it's on the web.

Richard Campbell (01:10:03):
It's in the browser. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:05):
Anyway, it's, I got hung up on

Richard Campbell (01:10:07):
That, by the way. Tomorrow's Net Rocks is with Mark Miller, who's the guy, the chief architect for Code Rush, which is one of those, oh, one of the, the development accelerating tools, productivity tools for studio. Mm-Hmm. And he's been doing experiments with Open ai. So he's now talking to studio through his plugin Oh, okay. To make code changes while he's also typing. Oh boy. Oh, it's happening. But that's, Mark Miller was the kind of guy who did automations where he could out program you while using a pair of chopsticks on the keyboard, which was obnoxious. But he's that guy.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:38):
Nice. I always tell I, when I was a kid, I went to Casey Jones basketball camp. Casey Jones was the coach of the Boston Celtics. And so he brings Celtics players to the camp, which is always amazing. We met Larry Bird and Nate Archibald and Boston, lots of other players. Anyway, there was a, there was a bench player ml, what's, God I describe his name. Ml. Oh boy. God, I'm getting old. Anyway, there was a bench player for the Celtics who I, no one really thought too much of. And he was there and they said Hey. He said, listen, who's the fastest kid in camp? And we kinda went around a little bit, finally picked someone. He said, all right, we were gonna race across the courts. We're inside the thing. So two basketball cards and I'm gonna dribble two basketballs and you're gonna run. And I can't, why can't I think of his name? That's terrible. ML

Richard Campbell (01:11:20):
Carr,

Paul Thurrott (01:11:21):
Bobby Kotick. Okay. He got back to the f starting point before the fastest kid in camp hit the far end of the wall. Yeah. He was not even halfway done. And he was dribbling two basketballs. He's

Richard Campbell (01:11:30):
Dribbling two monster balls going as fast as he

Paul Thurrott (01:11:33):
And that's what you just described for Kobe. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:11:35):
<Laugh>. It's just a different league. Right. And it's just like, listen, the guy who does not, he's on the bench, he never gets up to play. Right. He's way better than

Paul Thurrott (01:11:43):
You are for waving a towel when they were winning a championship. <Laugh> Yeah. From the bench. And

Richard Campbell (01:11:47):
He's way better than you are.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:48):
Oh, yes. Just be

Richard Campbell (01:11:50):
Very clear.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:50):
Yes. Anyway, I'm sorry, you just, you literally just described that exact scenario.

Richard Campbell (01:11:54):
Yeah, no, mark with

Paul Thurrott (01:11:56):
Chopsticks is excellent. Yes.

Richard Campbell (01:11:57):
It's, it's a, it's hilarious to watch. But yeah, he's also been doing that shtick for a long, long time. Like, he really good with the chopsticks too. <Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (01:12:09):
I, I don't want to beat this one to death too, too much, but Microsoft Edge one 15 has hit the beta channel. I keep looking at what I did it with one 14. I looked, I did it with one 15. When is this new visual refresh that Microsoft talked about at Build gonna happen to Edge? And if you look at one 15 and the beta channel, you'll see that it's about 50% of it <laugh>. And what I mean by that is they've reorganized where things are in the toolbar area. The profiles goes over to the left side. It used to be on the right, that kind of thing. But what you don't get is the floating rounded tab tabs at the top. You actually have to enable that feature. So maybe it's gonna be one 16, it's gonna be a while. It's kind of weird how long this is taking. But the

Richard Campbell (01:12:47):
Reason this is triple are four versions. You may actually have a seizure.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:51):
Yeah. Back in April or maybe early May. I knowing that before Build, it was before Build. I knew this Visual Refresh was coming cuz they were testing it in the Insider program. And I thought, I'm gonna start updating the chapters in the book. So I have the new ui, I wanna get on top of this. And I got halfway through, I, I updated over a hundred screenshots. And then my build happened. And they showed off the ui, it was completely different <laugh>. And I'm like,

Richard Campbell (01:13:16):
What have you done

Paul Thurrott (01:13:16):
To me? So for the past last week and all of the weekend, and then part of Monday I finally went, I, using the beta version, turned all, all the stuff, I updated all seven Edge chapters. Every single screenshot has been updated. I've added some content to it. I'm guar I tell you, by the time this thing ships, it will be different again. And I'm gonna, I just, I buy a Mac and call it a day <laugh>. Okay. And then finally, oh my, I can fed Bill wildly announced that they will masquerade his edge so that its, users can use Bing Chat in the browser. And I, I, I'm sure this generated some chuckles in certain corners, but I will just tell you, browsers masquerade his other browsers all the time. They have to. Yeah. Like, that's how browsers work today, unfortunately. So you know, most browser or most websites are written to Chrome, you know, whatever, if you have special features, it, it kind of pays to pretend you're Chrome a lot of the time. Being based on chromium really helps, obviously. But this is not unique and honestly good for them. I, I, Microsoft is gonna add the ability to use Bing Chat for any browser at some point this year that is in the plan. But if you wanna do it now and you want to use your browser, well, if you want to use your browser, if it's Vivaldi it works.

Leo Laporte (01:14:31):
I guess any chromium based browser could, could do that. Right? Yeah. Is it just the, did they just say what the agent is? They sort of pretend the agent

Paul Thurrott (01:14:39):
Is it's user agent right? Term for this. Yeah. Their, their term is, I believe it's, I just wanna make sure I get this right. I think they call it user agent discrimination. Yeah. That's what they call it. What? So

Leo Laporte (01:14:50):
It's impersonation is better than,

Paul Thurrott (01:14:52):
Well, what they're suffering from is the discrimination. So now they're impersonated. Oh, see, I call it, see I call it Coplay. They're cosplaying.

Leo Laporte (01:14:58):
Coplay is perfect. <Laugh>, you

Paul Thurrott (01:15:00):
Know, it's like they dressed up in a little costume

Leo Laporte (01:15:01):
And That's right.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:03):
Oh, look at that. How do I, come on in. Come on in. You want

Leo Laporte (01:15:06):
Some coupons? Tea <laugh>. That's cool. Good for good. That's actually a reason to use Vivaldi.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:14):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:15:15):
At least Clever instead of Edge.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:18):
Yeah. I mean, people have asked me about this cause I used, you know, brave, obviously. And I would say the difference between Brave and Vivaldi, they both actually have a pretty similar kind of security posture. Like if you go to those, you know, tracking sites, see how it's doing, it does a good job. Well, assuming you turn on well in, when you set it up, turn it up to be good protection. The big thing about Vivaldi is it's super customizable. Like to me it's almost too customizable. But some people are really into that. And there's, oh

Leo Laporte (01:15:45):
Man, it has

Paul Thurrott (01:15:46):
Many enormous amount of ua. Many you can

Leo Laporte (01:15:47):
Have so much. It's crazy. It's crazy. So many knobs. It's so many knobs.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:51):
Yeah. There's like the sidebars on every side. There's like panels and there's apps they have and for mail and everything. I, it's crazy. But, you know, some people love that stuff. So you can tune Vivaldi to be just as secure, as brave, and then you can really screw with the UI if that's what you want. You can have the tabs on the bottom. It's not just top and side. It's like, oh, it's crazy. Bottom, top

Leo Laporte (01:16:10):
Rough. Right. It's actually why I don't use it,

Paul Thurrott (01:16:11):
Because it's too

Leo Laporte (01:16:12):
Much tweaking.

Paul Thurrott (01:16:13):
It's, it's a lot. But some people, you

Leo Laporte (01:16:15):
Know, some people want that. That's good. Yeah. It's a browser for all four seasons. It's all

Paul Thurrott (01:16:23):
Actually, in Vivaldi's case, it's all nine seasons. Oh, okay. We have a lot. It's a lot

Leo Laporte (01:16:26):
Extra seasons. Yeah. We have more seasons than the other guys.

Paul Thurrott (01:16:29):
That's

Leo Laporte (01:16:30):
Right. All right. Microsoft 365 coming up. Xbox. Yes, there's Xbox News and AI news even. But first a latte

Paul Thurrott (01:16:40):
Big day.

Leo Laporte (01:16:40):
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(01:17:49):
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Paul Thurrott (01:18:44):
Pretty sneaky sis sis.

Leo Laporte (01:18:47):
Go get it, isn't it? We were, I was talking about that with Steve Gibson. We said that's a really good short url. Cs.Co. I love it. Although you might say, if you're gonna make the dot the I, you could be C dot c s c o and then the dot could be, but you know, let's not get crazy. I guess you, you don't have an S C O tld so you can't No choice. Let's talk M 365. What do you say? Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:19:16):
I've got one 365 story, one surface story, one dev story, <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:19:20):
So, okay. One of each,

Paul Thurrott (01:19:22):
All the same way. There's been a couple of things over the past few years that we waited and waited and waited for. One with regards to Outlook, I should say. One is the, that new Outlook version with the new UI and all that stuff that's kind of slowly wind its way through the preview program. But the other was this thing called, you might remember, called Project moca. Project moca eventually turned into something called the Calendar Board view. And it doesn't matter cuz it's dead <laugh>. So Microsoft released it, I wanna say I bet a year ago finally it basically kind of a, a visual planner view, I guess. So you could have multiple calendars to-dos and, you know, kind of, they didn't really call 'em widgets, but they should have, you know, it's kind of widgets and stuff. Apparently nobody used it, so they're getting rid of it.

(01:20:05):
So that's what happens, I guess. So that's gone. There was also <laugh> the Microsoft or Microsoft announced that it's Microsoft store, which is a, an online store is gonna start selling components for surface devices so that users can replace them themselves using free free repair guides. That's good. That's great. Yeah. The components vary by device as they would. And it's kind of interesting that, and not, maybe not surprising that newer surface devices offer many more components that you can replace. Right. And this is part of the Repairability story that has occurred over the past few years, thanks to lawsuits. Right. Which is great. So if you have a Surface Pro Seven, you can replace the kickstand. But if you have a Surface Pro Eight, you can also replace the display, the solid state drive, and the SSD door. If you have a Surface Pro Nine, you can also replace the battery, the US bbc. That's interesting. Surface Connect charging port back cover speaker wifi modules, thermo module camera, front and rear camera deck, powerful button. Good

Leo Laporte (01:21:06):
For you on Microsoft. That's great.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:07):
Yeah. So yeah, so if you go across the various product lines, you'll see similar lists where the older versions that are still supported, not so much newer version, lots and lots more. So that's Well,

Richard Campbell (01:21:18):
And when older version is a seven <laugh>. Yeah, yeah. You know, there's six versions before that.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:25):
Yeah, that's, well that's true. But, but I, I, I don't off the top of my, I can't remember what even what was in a surface press seven. So Surface, I'd have to go back. So three, four. So that might be the last one that is supported in Windows. I, I'm gonna to guess I should just look it up. Why am I guessing? Yeah, yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:21:42):
Te first

Paul Thurrott (01:21:42):
For this, I'm just trying to figure out the yeah, what the process the set would've been. So I'm gonna guess and say it was 11th

Richard Campbell (01:21:47):
Gen,

Paul Thurrott (01:21:48):
Was it really? 11? Yeah. Okay. So it's actually newer.

Richard Campbell (01:21:52):
Yeah. Now you can get 'em anymore. But yeah, they're relatively new. It, it, I mean we, like Repairability, repairability is a good thing. And you bet they've gone that far.

Leo Laporte (01:22:03):
Yeah. And that's actually, you know, you mentioned in your article, Paul, that Apple's doing some of this, but this is nowhere near what Apple's doing. Apple makes you rent these a hundred dollars kits and, you know, I mean, and send them back. I mean, it's much more complicated. You can't just open up a MacBook. So this is, I think it's a much more compelling story, frankly. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:22:24):
That's not Apple's style at all. Right? Like their machines,

Leo Laporte (01:22:27):
They're doing it kicking and screaming. They don't want to, they don't want you to go in there.

Richard Campbell (01:22:31):
Well, plus they still have the stores. Like, I'm kind of sad that my Microsoft doesn't have their stores anymore. Cause their stores were really kind of great. They were emulating the Apple stores. But the reality is that you should be able to just go to the, like you can with an Apple store. You go to the store and they will take care of it for you. Like

Leo Laporte (01:22:46):
They, they, that might be the, that might be the real stories that at Microsoft has to do this cuz they don't have a place you can easily, everybody can go to mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, unlike Apple. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, we, I don't know if the storm hit Paul's house.

Richard Campbell (01:22:59):
It, it might have been the hit

Leo Laporte (01:23:00):
<Laugh>

Richard Campbell (01:23:02):
And I mean, and his and his and his next story is one I know intimately well, why

Leo Laporte (01:23:06):
Don't you do it, do it then. I could just, just go ahead. You literally,

Richard Campbell (01:23:10):
This is Paul's writing and of course Paul's writing is phenomenal, but he's talking about the c developer experience and Visual Studio code of what or, or what we know of as the c dev kit. So, I mean, it's kind of funny to think about, but Visual Studio Code is an, is an editor with plugins without, you know, without a doubt. And it's really meant for anybody's use. It's it very much focused on opensource. That's

Leo Laporte (01:23:36):
The L s P standard, right? That's is that what they call it?

Richard Campbell (01:23:39):
L S

Leo Laporte (01:23:40):
P? Yeah. I think that's what it is. Because I know on emax, if I have an LSP engine, I can use the code plugins. So have to look that up. But that's, that's the standard

Richard Campbell (01:23:52):
And it's an, and it's the number one

Leo Laporte (01:23:54):
Language server protocol.

Richard Campbell (01:23:56):
Yeah. Yeah. And it's the number one editor according to Stock overflow days. Oh yeah. Cuz everybody can use it. Oh yeah. But it wasn't necessarily great for net. I mean, you could do net development. I've done net development with it, but I'm also a Visual Studio user. And so typically if I'm gonna do work in Net, I live in my I d e, that's what I grew up on. Yeah. I've been using it for 20 plus years. Like, that's home for me. But different cultures, different things. You know, there's lots of developers that have never had an I D E, like that's not a thing, especially in web dev. Like you assemble your own toolkit, your your preferred editor, your preferred pipeline pieces, your preferred debugger. Like that's kind of normal. The idea that an I D E comes with all those things, sometimes with customizations, a very different mindset. So bringing in the C dev kit is really about making c productivity in Studio code really, you know, powerful. Again, you know, like you said, the L S P hosts Right. Gives all of the same sets of features. There is some controversy around it as well because there's, there's been some changes in Omni code, the underlying piece or or Visual Studio Code and the open source folks are, are generally screaming about this in the sense that my Microsoft up to its old tricks are gonna want to charge us for all those and so forth. Not that Microsoft has just that the changes are, are upsetting people. And so there, there's a lot of questions as to, you know, where this ultimately goes.

Leo Laporte (01:25:29):
We were talking Paul doing your, based on your story, your bit Paul. Yeah. And, and, and I have to say Richard did a very credible job. Did you lose power? Yeah, we did. And it came right back on. I wanted to hear what he <laugh> I wanted to hear his,

Richard Campbell (01:25:42):
So

Leo Laporte (01:25:45):
Sorry about that. He made the excellent point that while he has for a long time been using a full fledged I d e Visual Studio Code, visual Studio rather Visual Studio and you know, like people on the, on the Mac use X Code or people on mm-hmm. <Affirmative> doing Java development might use IntelliJ or Eclipse. There are is a whole, I think I agree the whole generation of programmers who have grown up with a much lighter weight kind of vs code, which looks kind of like a, just a text editor, but thanks to plugins and this lsp, this language server protocol can really become a more full fledged Oh God. Of course. I, yeah. I

Paul Thurrott (01:26:23):
I, there there is a much bigger audience for people that could use Visual Studio Code or another coding editor to do whatever their job and development is than there is, I would say, for Visual Studio full, you know? Mm-Hmm.

Richard Campbell (01:26:34):
I mean, my counter argument to that is when you're a novice developer mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, the prospect of assembling your dev environment is very daunting. Yeah. And then every time you have a problem doing development, you're questioning, is this my lack of skill in development? Yeah. Did I misconfigure my environment? There's so many more issues.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:50):
But also it's a workload issue too, right? It like, what are you doing? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, like what's the, are you a web developer? Are you, you know, the, the the interesting thing about you, there were already basic capabilities and extensions for Visual Studio Code for C Sharp and there are workloads for C Sharp. You can't do a Visual Studio code. You're not gonna write a W P F app or U W P app or whatever in Visual Studio Code. But it's interesting, like this update adds a solution explorer type

Richard Campbell (01:27:20):
Experience, C sharp dev kit. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:22):
Which is very interesting to me. What's that? And I wonder if

Leo Laporte (01:27:25):
There is, what does that do

Paul Thurrott (01:27:26):
It? So Solution Explorers the, when, when you have a Visual Studio project, the projects files are shown in the Solution explorer. When you code in Visual Studio, you're often opening a folder and operating on whatever files are in that folder. You actually, it's your projecting about the structure. Yeah. That's your project. It's got, it's just a slightly different way of thinking about it, but it's, it's bringing this kind of classical.net style to Visual Studio Code, which I could picture the guys on the full VI Visual Studio team going Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:27:57):
<Laugh> a lot

Richard Campbell (01:28:00):
Of people. It's not just them, it's the, the, it's the FO there, you know, folks out in the field, the MVPs and, and people like that going. So is this it for Visual Studio <laugh>?

Leo Laporte (01:28:10):
You know, well, I mean, visual Studio feels very heavyweight for me. I I use emax. That's right. Right? Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, but emax really spiritually is a lot more like Visual Studio the code than

Paul Thurrott (01:28:20):
It's Visual Visual Studio for sure. I I use Visual Studio Code every single day. Yeah. I like it. I use it to write, but I, but for like, I'm doing like web dev stuff right now. I'm learning JavaScript games and things like that. And you do that in Visual Studio Code, you don't do that in Visual Studio. Yeah. I mean, you, I guess you could <laugh> Yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:28:37):
But I, where, where you'll be impressed with Studio, especially as an in inexperienced developer society of, oh, we're gonna keep our source code in in GitHub, that's this pop out over here. Boop boop, we're off. Right. Oh, you want to deploy it through Azure? We're not gonna use GitHub actions. Let's do a direct deploy to Azure that's over here. Like, all of those things are already there. Yeah. The side effect, of course, is that the, the I D E looks like the cockpit of a seven seven, like, there's so many knobs and dials and buttons. It is that, it's overwhelming.

Paul Thurrott (01:29:05):
I would just say, so two things to GitHub. One, you can sign into Visual Studio Code with a GitHub account. It's not just a Microsoft account. Interesting. and the GitHub to my mind, the, the GitHub integration and visual Full visual started Studio, to me is very complex. I I have a hard time using it, whereas it's just automatic in Visual Studio Code. I love the way it works

Richard Campbell (01:29:27):
There. But you're f you're familiar with it. The, yeah. The approach that they took in Visual Studio feels like tfs, but happens to be GitHub. There you

Paul Thurrott (01:29:35):
Go. They Right, right, right. The previous what do you call it? Code repo repository

Richard Campbell (01:29:41):
System. But you gotta think about what their audience is, right? Yeah. And their audience doesn't want stuff moved around. Like, in a lot of respects, studio has looked this way since the 2010 refresh. That's right. Like that's how long, and we're at 22 now, like, right. Right. It's been more than a decade of essentially since the W P F came to it and they got that refresh except for that brief moment in 2012 when all the venues were upper case. I know. <Laugh> for a screaming year, then it went away again, <laugh>. And, and I think it's one of the problems that Studio has, right? Is that you have an an entrenched incumbent user base that is comfortable with the complexity cuz they grew up with it and everybody new looks at it and goes, holy man, where do I start?

Paul Thurrott (01:30:30):
Yeah. It's, it's a, it is a daunting application. Yeah. if you don't know what you're doing, for sure. Even if you do, there's all kinds of weird things. Like for example I'm just, now that I'm thinking about it, weird little things. Like I wanted to get going with the Windows app SDK program. So you, you install all the workloads you get in there like, all right, so we're the projects, you know mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and in the beginning you actually had to install this separately as some kind of a, a new get package or something. And then eventually they added it. But it's an optional component. You actually have to go into the settings and like check two boxes. You have to check one that's in net and one that's in probably desktop or mobile, I can't remember, whatever it was. But then you get the project types and it's like, guys, like, this is crazy.

Richard Campbell (01:31:11):
Yeah. But

Paul Thurrott (01:31:12):
They're the, it's like it's concrete. Like the way they, they've set up these workloads and they're just not changing. Like they're

Richard Campbell (01:31:19):
Just stuck on this. And it's very difficult to change. I would argue, and I'm only gonna say this because I have no information that it's true whatsoever. Okay. That studio is begging for a co-pilot. Ah, because co-pilot is actually an alternative user interface. Now, knowing you have an entrenched customer base that does not want you to mess with that gooey, right. That is utterly unapproachable by new people. Right. And if you simplified it for them, you would alienate your existing customers. Okay. Introducing new UUs interface. And that interface is a conversational one where you say, I need to do X. Right. And the, and the co-pilot navigates the UX for you,

Paul Thurrott (01:31:57):
You know? Yeah. By the way, 100%. I, you're, you're absolutely right. I'm, I'm just looking this up now and Word, and I don't even think it's there anymore. Maybe you have to add this to Word at some point the office applications. I'm just trying to figure out if it's even here. I don't, I don't even look at the office UIs anymore. I don't really care, but, well, anyway, at some point they added this w like you could, you could type in, I want to do this thing. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> up at the top and it would do it in other words, like, I wanna italicize some text and it would actually show you where in the UI this thing was. This is in many ways conceptually, like an early,

Richard Campbell (01:32:28):
A lightweight co-pilot.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:29):
Co-Pilot. Yeah. A hundred percent.

Richard Campbell (01:32:32):
You know, the Visual Studio is a giant Swiss Army knife with every blade and, and tool out. Right? Right. The idea that I could ask an interface, you know, just like dark mode. It's like, Hey, I want to do mobile game development. And a bunch of blades started going flipping in so that the ones that were important were more visible. Sure. And you could, you know, effectively simplify the user interface, which you can always do. You can customize the snot outta the studio interface, but nobody dare do it because then you have to undo it. So the idea that we would have a smart interface that would do that for us, I think it's pretty compelling.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:08):
Oh boy. I I, how little of Visual Studio I use, if I could write wpf or whatever mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, those kind of traditional Windows app workloads in code, I, I would do that in a heartbeat.

Richard Campbell (01:33:24):
Sure. Especially if it led you down the right path. Especially if we got you to the hella world implementation of a given staff. Well, I just

Paul Thurrott (01:33:31):
Mean, I already have apps. Like I wanna go and update an app. I just wanna load that project in. I want, God, I wonder, I'm sure that visual, I'm not sure Visual Studio must rely on text based configuration files, not binary configuration files. But there's gotta be something that describes

Richard Campbell (01:33:48):
What if, what if I told you it was a, is it

Paul Thurrott (01:33:50):
Xml?

Richard Campbell (01:33:51):
That's a little bit of

Paul Thurrott (01:33:52):
Both. Yeah. Okay. So that's the problem. That is your problem right there. So,

Richard Campbell (01:33:55):
Well, it's a side effect of a 25 year old product. Well, really a 30 year old product.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:59):
But let's, what I was gonna originally blurt out was I'm sure they use binary. Then I was like, wait a minute. No, there's no way. It's gotta be like XML or something. Yeah. But, okay. So it's mix. So that's the, that's the, we're never gonna cross that Gulf. That's not gonna happen in co. Well,

Richard Campbell (01:34:11):
And and Aaron lies the real question, which is can you keep a piece of software that's been around this long in sufficient shape to be usable by an expanding number of people? And I, and I, and I would've said no up until last

Paul Thurrott (01:34:26):
Fall until copilot. Oh, what the

Richard Campbell (01:34:28):
Copilot like til the copilots. Okay. Right. When, when that, when all of this started coming down, it's like, holy man, this is a new user interface and it's one that is compatible with the existing interface. That's pretty powerful.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:40):
It's too, the, the, the, you can, you can see the corrections all over the place. Like there are all these little like tool kits that create like te they're basically templates for more complete application start points. So instead of get like a blank application, you get like a, you can check out boxes and say, I want this thing to have a sidebar and a toolbar and in a above box and blah, blah, blah. And it does its thing and it creates all these files and it does it for you. And like that's, I mean, that's just the way it should be. Yes. Like that's

Richard Campbell (01:35:06):
Well, and, and when you we're back to, you're really gonna wanna listen to tomorrow's dot net rocks episode. Mm-Hmm. Like when you watch an at very proficient studio operator using studio a number of times, it's like, I don't care about the project you're working anymore. How did you make the app dude <laugh>?

Paul Thurrott (01:35:21):
How did you

Richard Campbell (01:35:22):
Make my development environment twitch like that? Right, right. You have so many shortcut keys, so many different approaches. You do things that if, when you know them, it looks magical to those that don't.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:32):
Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. Okay. So I, I'm God. So if I, if I could have picked a part of the show to miss it, would it, it would've been anything but this part. Cause I really

Leo Laporte (01:35:41):
Wanted, this is the part you like, I know, yeah. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:43):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. Well I wanted to hear what Richard I to say about this. Cause he's way more involved in this than I am, but,

Richard Campbell (01:35:47):
Well, and like I said, I don't have a problem with them improving vs code and opening the door to folks that are used to the VS code environment. Now, touching into net apps like this is clearly a tool that the Net team want. But yeah, you're pressing against the studio space. And I want, I'm sure what the Story Studio is this

Paul Thurrott (01:36:07):
Two things to this. Right? Right. So one is you could, you could almost feel the politics through the blog post that they made. Right? Like there's something going on back there. But there's also this notion that Visual Studio code is Open Source net is open source. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> Visual Studio is proprietary. All of those workloads are mostly proprietary. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> which one, I mean, which of these things And not that. I'm

Leo Laporte (01:36:31):
Gonna guess though,

Paul Thurrott (01:36:32):
That one doesn't destroy the other. But despite

Leo Laporte (01:36:34):
The fact that Visual Studio Code is open source, that in order to use the C Sharps extensions, you have to use the closed

Paul Thurrott (01:36:42):
Source. Oh, Leo. That is a huge part of this story. <Laugh>. So there, although actually, yeah. So there's some licensing issues. The issue is, by the way, it's not, so C technically is probably Open Source. Sure.

Leo Laporte (01:36:55):
Open.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:55):
Yeah. That's not the issue is you as a developer need a license to create production code. So the way that this works is if you're a C developer and you're just doing it for yourself, that's free. That's fine. You can use Visual Studio Community, but you get visual, you does it work with Visual Student Community. You get a Visual Studio community license as part of this toolkit to use it in Visual Studio Code. That's how this works.

Leo Laporte (01:37:17):
Ah, you still have License Studio. It's stilled. Yeah, that's

Paul Thurrott (01:37:21):
Right. Okay. And this is this is a licensable moment. <Laugh>, this is what I'm talking about. Like this is, this is kind of the, I think this is part of the politics. Like how do we bring this thing that we charge people for, essentially, right. Through a full version of Visual Studio to a product that is by, as by nature or open source.

Leo Laporte (01:37:42):
I, if you use the Visual Studio code or OS code, this isn't gonna work. And that's the thing is the open source people go, well, that's the problem. It's not really an open source project vs.

Paul Thurrott (01:37:54):
Code to use all of these, but it's, listen features use Lennox enough to know that most Lennox distributions you come up and one of the check boxes Contrary stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you want the proprietary stuff, right. Or do you want to go, you know, you get that option. So I, I think it's important to have that option. It would be better if this was just freely licensable. Obviously, I'm not gonna argue otherwise, but I kind of, I made the argument a few years ago, like, I don't understand why Microsoft charges for Visual Studio. I'll tell you. Don't say that in front of people from Microsoft. Cuz there are reasons. Right. And you, they will tell you what those reasons are. Apple gives theirs a, apple gives theirs a

Richard Campbell (01:38:27):
Way, means a billion plus annual revenue. Right? Yeah. You are talking about a non-trivial amount of money, non-trivial number of developers that build

Paul Thurrott (01:38:36):
It. Yeah. Also, I just to, to Apple giving it away. I'll just say they do, but they require you to buy a Macintosh to use it and mm-hmm. <Affirmative> you, it only targets their platform, so, right. Yeah. I mean, you, you're sort of buying in, you, you're paying for it. I mean, you know, you are paying for it. Yeah. A more subtle way, whether you use it or not. <Laugh>, you know, and I, but I think the point really is that VS Code is intended as a gateway drug to Visual Studio. I, I don't know. Actually, I

Richard Campbell (01:38:59):
Don't, yeah. I disagree. I don't

Paul Thurrott (01:39:00):
Think, don't think actually

Richard Campbell (01:39:01):
Know, honestly, I think it's misnamed the two don't have anything to do with each other.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:05):
Okay. It's Microsoft's sublime. It really is just, they saw there was another audience out there that was never gonna use Visual Studio and God bless them. Honestly, I, this is the one product Microsoft has made. Let me think about that. Yeah. That has been like, not universally, but nearly universally embraced by the open source community. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, like, it's just recognized as being the best product

Richard Campbell (01:39:27):
Of that company. I, I would argue this in the book, I will ne I seem to have never been able to finish. Typescript was an accidental success in open source <laugh>. You're right. Right. And, and understand. But it was also the first time Microsoft had made something not aimed at its existing customer base, open source. And the broader community grabbed onto it. And everyone was a bit shocked. They, you know, Anders, who's not a big open source proponent, Anders is very, doesn't care. Right. He was very much of the mindset of, I'm gonna help the Microsoft development base be more successful in JavaScript by introducing things that they're used to, like stereotyping and so

Paul Thurrott (01:40:03):
Forth. Right.

Richard Campbell (01:40:04):
But after that success, there was sort of this idea of, hey, when we do open source right, the open source community accepts it. Right. We should try

Paul Thurrott (01:40:15):
<Laugh>. Yep.

Richard Campbell (01:40:16):
And that's what Visual Studio Code really was. Yeah. Was a first completely intentional attempt. Yeah. To build a good open source product.

Paul Thurrott (01:40:25):
This is the ultimate. And, and if you, you know, it's one of those products that works so great across PCs, you sign in, you get all your extensions, all your settings. It works across platform in the same way. So you could sign in on a Mac, on a Linux box, doesn't matter. Yeah. It's all there. It just works exactly the same way. It's, it really is. It's, it's such a great product.

Richard Campbell (01:40:43):
Yeah. You go read the comments on Tim Huber's blog post mm-hmm. <Affirmative> about C Sharp Dev Kit <laugh>. Okay. That's some rage

Paul Thurrott (01:40:53):
Now. Okay. So that's the part I missed. So what was the ra, if you don't mind just quickly Well, it's the rage about the licensing. The licensing. Oh, the, yeah, that, okay. That was the thing. So that's what, that's the thing I wanted to, that's what I wanted to hear from you was just because it's just the reality of it's where Microsoft is Microsoft, right. I mean, it's, we, we, I guess I would just argue, I'm go at least you can do it. And for someone like me who is just a, you know, an enthusiast developer, really, I mean, just the ability to do that stuff in C in C with Visual Studio Code. Fantastic. Yes. Yeah. But I think that was the point. I think that was the spirit of it. Right? Yep. So that's what they wanted to do. But I would argue that all those other things are also true and potentially useful. Yeah.

(01:41:40):
All right. All right. All right. Let's let's do some AI then or something. Yeah. This is also kind of all over the place. So there's a Wall Street Journal report that talked about the internal, and I guess I'll call it external conflicts with between Microsoft and Open AI, about Microsoft putting out the Bing Chatbot last February. And this is fascinating to me, <laugh> like fascinating because of course, my initial confusion over what they did was like, why are they doing this right now? Cause we went over this over many, many weeks. And there were a lot of people inside Microsoft and also inside Open a AI who were asking the same question, why are you doing this right now? You know? And I you know, we talked, Richard had that notion of a hundred million users daily active users.

(01:42:23):
They achieved that with Bing. Now to be clear, they didn't achieve 100 million daily act like new users. They got to 100 million daily active users. This report says that open a or Chachi PT vastly outstrips that is, is has now hit over 200 million and daily active users. Why can't I find this? That's amazing. Yeah. And they don't expect Bing to ever catch up. I, and this kind of ties back to something I said originally about this stuff. It was like that goofy, I don't wanna make fun of the guy, but the guy from the New York Times who said, I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm switching to Bing. You know? No, you're not <laugh> <laugh>. No, you're not. And sure enough, a week later he was like, it's calling me a criminal. It's not that I was a bad person.

(01:43:12):
You know, he's freaking out. It's like, yeah, cuz this thing's insane. Whatcha are talking about. No one's switching to Bing. You know, and I think this is part of the problem, right? Like the open AI has gotten a huge investment from Microsoft as we know, 11 billion, right. But the Wall Street Journal calls their relationship influence without control. Openai is free to license this and to anyone else and to partner with anyone else than they are. You know, it's forced them into a weird cooperation competition kind of a standpoint where they're actually going after some of the same customers. And Microsoft is, you know, this is leaked, this leak. Months ago, there was this thing where Microsoft's marketing approach was to kind of poo poo open ai. Cuz they don't have all the stuff that we have. And you know, obviously, you know, we want you to come over to us.

(01:43:57):
So there's a lot of stuff going on here behind the scenes that you don't really, you know, all they're talking about, oh, we're great partners, but love those guys. And it's like, oh God, I can't really to get rid of these people. You know, like they're, they kind of I, I think this is gonna end badly. And I, and I gotta say, you know disruption, there are exceptions. We know Steve Jobs is a great version of this, but it doesn't come from the company that's dominating, you know, typically. Mm-Hmm. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative> not like Bing is dominating, but it, it doesn't come from the established players.

Richard Campbell (01:44:26):
Yeah. The, the incumbent tends not to disrupt the market.

Paul Thurrott (01:44:29):
Yeah. And I, I, I just feel like at the end of the day, everyone's gonna have these capabilities. Google will have it and Google search, I, I don't see much changing. But the thing that could change is open AI as its own thing. I guess we'll call it chat, G P T or whatever, you know, like this, I, this has proven to be very popular, you know? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's the type of thing.

Richard Campbell (01:44:49):
It's, and continues. But I really question how many people signed up for the $20 a month. That would be the

Paul Thurrott (01:44:53):
Thing. That's actually an interesting question. Yeah. It mean

Richard Campbell (01:44:56):
The, let's let's be the, and by the way, it's 13 billion on 11. There was, oh, 13, I'm sorry, an original billion dollar investment, which was 500 million in cash, 500 million in Azure credits. Like this was all about get those people over to Azure. Right? Right. Then there was a couple years later, there was another 2 billion, mostly Azure credits. I don't know how much of the 10 billion from earlier this year was there, but talking to Mark Russinovich and some of the other work that was going on in that space, like they built some of the largest sub supercomputers in the world Right. Inside of Azure to build these models. They aren't portable. Right. Like, you're not moving this thing around.

Paul Thurrott (01:45:34):
Well, but that's where, that's where Microsoft is gonna be successful, right? Yeah. So in other words, I don't, it bings, it's like ping's gonna take over for Google search, but we could see a reverse of the Azure revenue growth slide. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, because Azure is necessary for these open I ai.

Richard Campbell (01:45:50):
Well, and I, and I think you hit the real point is why did we do this in February? Because we knew what the quarterlies were gonna say about our rate of GLO of cloud growth. Right? That's, and we needed a new story. This is straight shareholder optimization games. Yeah. This is not necessarily benefiting the industry and so forth. This is how we keep the share price moving at a time when we're absolutely convinced, right. Because there's all these other markers that were in for a bigger downturn, which I'm not convinced is true, but you know, remember this was the quarter when all the PC makers are down 20%. So they're thinking, Hey, we're a trailing indicator on this. A couple of quarters from now, it's gonna be us. We better have a good story.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:27):
Yeah. No, I, yeah. I, and, and the other, you know, the other question that this wall Street Journal story sort of answers for me is the obvious one, why didn't Microsoft just buy this company? Right? Forget about Activision Blizzard. Yeah. Throw, throw this money at Open ai. Right. And the reason is they can't Yeah. I think the charter prevents that. Yeah. Well, but it's also an antitrust issue, right? So apparently the funding they've provided is only 49% all of these Yeah. Specifically in the Yeah. Charter of the company that they

Richard Campbell (01:46:57):
Can't do that. Okay. That this is something they wanted to, that the founders

Paul Thurrott (01:47:01):
Opened AI wanted a card against also, they also remember they were like a nonprofit, you know, whatever.

Richard Campbell (01:47:05):
Then they, then they became a capped profit, which I went and looked that up. Looks like they made that one up. Like that's original. Yeah. Right. Yeah. No, they're, they're in an interesting position here. I don't think they can pull apart from each other, but they're not always agreeing. Right. if I was in Sam Altman's shoes, I presume I'm on the phone with Amazon already talking about an implementation of at least GPT three running in, in Oh, interesting. Ah, right. At least now the spec, I mean, I got a copy of the specs for the GPT three engine build. It was 285,000 CPUs. 10,000 GPUs. Yes. That, and that's, you know, top tier, top 10 supercomputer specs.

Paul Thurrott (01:47:48):
Right.

Richard Campbell (01:47:49):
But, and I don't know that GCP could even do it, but I'm sure Amazon could. And if I was in the Altman shoes, having an alternative cloud vendor really would be a bad idea. I think he doesn't want to piss off Microsoft. I, what's the difference? I wonder they're they're in bed. Yeah. Right. Like that, just cuz you're still in bed doesn't mean you don't at least prove options.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:15):
This is the problem. Well, problem, this is the design. It's non-exclusive, right. I mean mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, both these companies have to have gone into this

Richard Campbell (01:48:22):
Open. Well, and if Microsoft was wise, they wouldn't even discourage it because it helps with the antitrust problem.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:28):
Right. And it helps with their, it also, there's always gonna be a good Azure story here. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I mean, I, I, this stuff is too important to rely on one cloud vendor mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And really there are only two cloud vendors that matter here. I mean, I guess you could throw Google in there, but can

Richard Campbell (01:48:43):
No, you really can't. Not when you stop this scope. But it's, the thing is, I that was suspects on GPT three, GPD four is seven to 10 times larger. Right. Which makes it the largest of your computer that has ever been built effectively. Interesting. even though it was, you know, temporary implementation, but the operating, you get me, like, we're coming off the peak of of, of hyped expectation. And one of the things we're talking about is just how much the operating costs are for this stuff. Right. Here's the real question you gotta ask yourself, <laugh>, when does the next 10 billion come?

Paul Thurrott (01:49:17):
Yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:49:17):
How much Ran That's right. Has open AI got, because Microsoft already knows 49%.

Paul Thurrott (01:49:24):
Yep.

Richard Campbell (01:49:24):
Where's the next 10 billion come from?

Paul Thurrott (01:49:27):
I wonder if it's not gonna be direct, but we'll rather be in the form of Azure resources and credits and whatever.

Richard Campbell (01:49:32):
Well, that's what it's been anyway.

Paul Thurrott (01:49:33):
Yeah. I mean, I think it has to kind of be right.

Richard Campbell (01:49:35):
Like, well, they don't need that much cash.

Paul Thurrott (01:49:37):
Yeah. Right. That's right. Of

Richard Campbell (01:49:39):
Course. They really don't. They, this is what it's always been. But the, and herein lies the real issue is what do you, what can you even sell Amazon? Like why would Amazon give you 10 billion worth of compute? Which I suspect is what you're gonna need to do an implementation.

Paul Thurrott (01:49:54):
Right?

Richard Campbell (01:49:55):
Like, how do you go about that? Unless you don't do it that way. Amazon's gonna pay for it effectively. Like they, we are, theyve got themselves in an interesting corner here.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:04):
Yep. And Amazon's been kind of quiet on ai, you know they, they'd had that one developer announcement, but Yep. Yeah, they could, I mean, they, all, they have, they, all they have to do is be Amazon and they can be part of the story, you

Richard Campbell (01:50:16):
Know? No, and I think they're, they're wise not to chase. It's not a bad time to sit back cuz we are headed down the Gartner trough. Now <laugh>, this is a real good time to just pop some popcorn

Paul Thurrott (01:50:31):
<Laugh>. This is the the hype cycle. Like when does it turn into 5g when we all finally realize war or,

Richard Campbell (01:50:39):
Exactly. But this is the normal thing, right? Like we went, we went through, we've gone through this with cloud, we've gone through this with every technology. Yeah. You know, this is just another one. We're on our way down. Like the peak is coming on. If you wanted to jump on the high train, you missed it. Right now we're, we're down the rollercoaster ride on the way down. And jumping on now is dumb.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:00):
Right? I, I tweeted this today or yesterday. But I, I need to see the, the way you know that the hype cycle and AI is over is when the Onion publishes an article called, we just interviewed the one guy who lost his job because of AI <laugh>, you know, like, you know, it's coming. Yep. It's like, are you doing every day? And he's like, you know, honestly, I was kind of coasting. I <laugh>. I wasn't doing a lot.

Richard Campbell (01:51:23):
Well, there is the couple of lawyers who use Chappy G P T to write their summary that cited cases that didn't exist that look like they're gonna get disbarred. Yes. So, you know, congrats for using software inappropriately. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:37):
I do like the idea of AI as a <laugh>. It's like a lie detector almost. Like but it detects it by lying itself. <Laugh>, you know, it's, it's like a reverse lie detector. I love it. So weird. Anyway, I, yeah, so this Wall Street Journal, if you can access it, it's, I know it's a paywall, but it's it's a good article. Yeah. <laugh>, so this next, this, these two things happen on the same day. They're just kind of thematically related, but they're so different. I just, it's astonishing. So Adobe and Microsoft both came up with blog posts about, you know, making AI something that people can use and feel like it's kind of legally Okay. Microsoft's solution to this, so to speak, is just ex is exactly Microsoft. It's a lot of talk. We're gonna get people together. We're gonna form committees, we're gonna do this.

(01:52:25):
We're gonna blah, blah, blah. We, we've been on this responsible AI journey since 2017. We're gonna see what the mar you know, what the regulators want. We're gonna do this. There's no concrete anything in any of it. It goes on and on and on. And then Adobe's like we're gonna have full ind indemnification for the content created through our generative AI <laugh>. That's it. We're just gonna, it's gonna handle it. Yeah. If you make something with us, we will cover you legally. You're good <laugh>. That's exactly what you want to hear with this kind of

Richard Campbell (01:52:54):
Thing. Yeah. And well, and I think it's, cuz the other option is cuz you're paying monthly to Adobe anyway for Creative Cloud to have access to this. So they were gonna get nailed one way or the other. Like the reality. Well, the reality

Paul Thurrott (01:53:04):
Is, yeah, God, I'm

Richard Campbell (01:53:05):
Sorry. I mean, if they hadn't done this, anybody who did get sued would say, well, I was using their tools. I pay for them every month therein. Yeah, sure. So you might as well do this because A, the people aren't gonna use it and B, you were gonna be there anyway. But

Paul Thurrott (01:53:19):
They're also, and I'm

Richard Campbell (01:53:19):
Saying they didn't do the right thing.

Paul Thurrott (01:53:21):
This is kind of like the to, to content is sort of what copilot is, or sort of in the sense that they have this giant library of content. They own it. It's licensable. You pay us, you get the license. Right. So we're gonna build our models off of this content. You're good to go. Microsoft is using open AI stuff that's using what the, the internet <laugh>. So, you know, like where's this stuff come from? Like, one of the fears I do have for images in my case that are created with you know, Chachi PT or a Dolly rather, or whatever is that I, I, I check every single, I do a Google reverse image source search, not just on the image, but on parts of the image. Right. Because I'm like, where did this come from? Like, what, what, what made you get to hear? I'm nervous that someone's gonna down the road's, gonna come back and say, Hey, a little part of your image there. Here's my original. You know? And that's scary. Do you

Leo Laporte (01:54:12):
Ever come up with hits?

Paul Thurrott (01:54:14):
No. Not even once. Yeah. Not yet. No. Nothing. I think

Leo Laporte (01:54:18):
They're pretty well mushed up.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:20):
I hope so. Yeah. I'm kind of counting on it at this point. But I don't pay for like Adobe cc, but I Yeah, you could make a case. I mean you know, it's

Leo Laporte (01:54:30):
Mid journey.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:32):
Like Microsoft's just like, you know, we like waving their hands and go and Amazon's or Adobe's like, yeah, we'll pay for it. Don't worry about it. Yeah, we'll take care of it. That's how Sure. That's how sure works. It's

Leo Laporte (01:54:41):
On us. Microsoft's that guy in the bar. It's on us. It's buy around for the whole Right. Fam. Right.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:51):
And then no big deal. But we know Microsoft's doing this in the Microsoft store Amazon, predictably. And, and obviously we'll use AI based review summaries on its site. I think this makes sense because most of those reviews are written by, by ai

Richard Campbell (01:55:03):
Yeah. In the first place. Might as well be reviewed by, we'll

Paul Thurrott (01:55:05):
Just collate them together. And here you go. So everything's like five stars, guys. This is a great product. You should definitely buy it. That's how its

Richard Campbell (01:55:13):
Going. I mean, the real question is, are they gonna market as this was written by AI and also approved by ai,

Paul Thurrott (01:55:18):
Right. <Laugh>. Right. Also created by ai. AI as it turns out every step of the way. And yeah. And we already talked about Google and, and that stuff. So

Richard Campbell (01:55:26):
I got came in earlier.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:27):
Yeah. I like that. Google wants, or the EU wants to divest Google of their ad empire. I think that's hilarious. I mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. That's a true popcorn. Good

Leo Laporte (01:55:36):
Luck. Good luck. Yep.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:37):
Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. Yep.

Richard Campbell (01:55:38):
Yeah. Is there any more proof that they don't understand

Paul Thurrott (01:55:41):
<Laugh>? The only problem with the EU is that they move so slow mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And by the time this thing is resolved, we won't even have ads anymore. This won't matter. So,

Richard Campbell (01:55:51):
Yeah, I don't know that I disagree with you that clearly the model's co imp, you know, collapsing in on itself. Just ask Mark Zuckerberg.

Paul Thurrott (01:56:00):
Yeah. Just ask me. <Laugh>. It's, it's not going well. But yeah, now let's Xbox it. All right. Well, we had our big Xbox story upfront, but actually this story is almost as big, right? Because in a world in which Microsoft might not, and, and to some people's opinions, probably won't be able to acquire Activision Blizzard, what does the future look like? Right? So they had this big event on Sunday, they showed off a bunch of new games, whatever, you know, game, game game, a lot of these game demos, you know, but then at the end, they had this kinda little talk with, you know, guys, I'm sorry, I should say they now, some things that PC Game pass titles are coming to Nvidia GForce. Now this year Starfield is gonna be the big game of the future. So there's a Starfield controller you can buy, you know, there's a one terabyte Xbox Series S console, but also no plans for an interim Xbox Console upgrade.

(01:56:53):
I'm like, what is the one terabyte Xbox Series S I know it doesn't have better graphics or cpu, but it does have the storage we need in today's world because these games are humongous. And right now in my Xbox series s, which again, I have not used since March 2nd. Mm-Hmm. I can fit like maybe three games on this thing. I mean, you need more space. So it's a good thing's all fine. But what I, what's like, what's gonna happen? Like, you, Microsoft just spent almost a year and a half crapping on Xbox. And it did it to prove to regulators that this thing is not competitive in any way, shape and form. Right? The idea here is you have to let us buy this thing, because on the other side of it, we're still not gonna be dominant. We, we can't compete in consoles. We literally are losing and have always been losing.

(01:57:38):
And why can't you just let us do this thing? Well, now they're probably not gonna get it or might not get it. And you just spent a year and a half ex almost telling everyone how bad Xbox is. So this event was kind of designed to reassure people, I guess. Right? And I gotta tell you, I I, I, I, and I stand in contrast to some people I've talked to. Not everyone agrees with this for sure, but I kinda look at the state of Xbox. They, they provided some more concrete numbers. I, I <laugh> when I talk about like quarterly revenues, you know, there's like hard numbers and soft numbers. Microsoft has invented a number in between those things, which is, I don't know what we call the semi number. I don't know, but the, there's <laugh>, there's all these, you know, new records from monthly active users and monthly active devices, okay?

(01:58:22):
Xbox Games pass should surge 40 percent's 46% in the most recent quarter. Okay? we already knew this one, but subscription revenues from Xbox reached nearly 1 billion last quarter, blah, blah, blah. Whatever these things are, it's like, okay, okay. And I think the point of all this is we're doing great. Like, we'll be fine, you know, but it's like, we'll, we'll be fine. And, and when you kinda look at some of their stuff, like, some of the stuff they say, like, they obviously have a lot riding on Starfield. This is gonna be like the biggest thing in the world. This is the one example, by the way, of a game where Sony could point to something and say, Hey, they're doing what we do all the time, but they, this was a game that was gonna be cross-platform, and now it's gonna be all Xbox or all Microsoft, right?

(01:59:04):
They took it, it was going to ship on the PlayStation. Now it is not. And now they're hoping that this thing will be what Sony has a bunch of, which is like an exclusive title. That will be a big deal. Microsoft has said they believe this will be the biggest Bethesda game ever released. Bethesda being part of the one of the, the biggest studios they've already acquired mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And, but it's gonna launch with 30 frames per second on the Xbox Series X guys. <Laugh> like, the, the, the point of this console, if I'm not mistaken, was 4K 60 frames a second. What's happening? It's, it kind of undercuts the, the console. You know, there's also this quote I, that I kind of pulled out. It said, every one of the Game Pass titles featured this year, meaning at the thing they just had the event, came from a creator that has previously released a game with Game Pass.

(01:59:50):
And I guess the idea there is that these guys have had such a great success with Game Pass, that they're doing it again, or mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, why are there no new developers targeting Game Pass? <Laugh>, you can only attack, you can, you can only grab the guys that are already there. Like, in other words, one of the goals with Game Pass was to extend the life of games. So you have some big blockbuster game, you put it out in the world, you sell it at retail, 60 or 70 bucks, hour pop, whatever it is, and then it kind of runs the course, and then it stops selling. And the, and the idea here is like, okay, one of the things we can do, this is not the only strategy for Game Pass, but one of the things we can do is we can take these catalog titles and say, Hey, throw it in the Game Pass. People will download it and play it, and you'll get some more money. You'll get money that it's like free money. It's like low hanging fruit. And you're telling me there were no, there were none of those guys left. Like, you're only getting guys that are already using, like, already targeting Game Pass. Who are these people? You know? So that's, I don't know. So I mean,

Richard Campbell (02:00:45):
I, I just wonder if this an economic play. It's like, the question is how much revenue do you allocate from Game Pass to that game,

Paul Thurrott (02:00:52):
Right? Yeah.

Richard Campbell (02:00:54):
So taking Redirect revenue,

Paul Thurrott (02:00:55):
Here's a question. And I actually, this is semi rhetorical because I don't know the answer to it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, one of the big things that Microsoft promotes is this notion of day and date game. So in other words, we, Microsoft Studios will come up with a new game, whatever it is, like that red fall piece of crap that came out a couple weeks ago, right? Red Fall is something you can buy retail, you can pl you can stream it through I'm sorry, you can download it through Game Pass or you can stream it through Xbox Cloud gaming, right? So it's a first party game. It's out every way you can get it, but are there a lot of third party games that do that, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> like, can you, I mean, by the way, there could be, I'm not saying there aren't, but I think there aren't <laugh>, I I might be saying there aren't, I actually, I don't know it to be a fact. If there are third party games that do that, they're minor. They're not like the big ones, right? Like, if Starfield was a game that was out in the world, it wasn't a Microsoft Studio game, would they have done that? Activision Blizzard is not doing that. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and regardless of the acquisition play, like no, they never did anything with Game Pass. I mean, so

Richard Campbell (02:01:57):
No. A game, a game Pass to me is kind of like where games go to die, right? It's, it's my That's terrible

Paul Thurrott (02:02:04):
Marketing, by the way, <laugh>, but it's

Richard Campbell (02:02:05):
My, you know, Microsoft's counter to Steam. Yeah. It's like, Hey, we want to have recurring revenue on older titles. People aren't gonna buy these. Discounting is a pain in the butt, you know, it's an easy solution, a monthly fee. And we keep getting, we just take games that fall below a revenue threshold and stick them in there and then advertise the fact if you're getting more value for your monthly fee.

Paul Thurrott (02:02:25):
Yeah. It's like the you know, Netflix has the big blockbuster stuff, but then there's a catalog of just crap. Yeah. And there's, well, it's

Richard Campbell (02:02:31):
Not necessarily crap. It's just old. Like it's fallen off the slope.

Paul Thurrott (02:02:35):
Oh, in Netflix it is Crap. <Laugh>. Yeah, <laugh>. But, but yes. Okay. fair enough. All right. So I, you know, look, it's fair to say that Game Pass and games cloud gaming are other ways to game. It's fine. I, I think one of the great strengths of the Xbox platform is that you have all these different ways and they kind of meet you where you are on all this stuff, and that's great. But if Activision Blizzard falls through, here's what Microsoft doesn't have a mobile play at, and this is the thing that is inexcusable, because whatever's happening with Activision Blizzard, this is something they absolutely should go on after, gone after this is the, this is the biggest part of the game gaming market. In fact, it's such a big part of the gaming market. You could make a very logical argument that it is in a market all in, in and of itself. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> <laugh>, there, they, there's, there are no part of it. Microsoft is hoping and betting that regulators will, pr will force Apple and Google to open up game stores on their platforms, and they want to have be part of that. Activision Blizzard would help fill out that catalog very nicely if it happens. But I really feel like they need to, if an, if this falls apart, they should earmark some huge chunk of that money to jumpstart a mobile games effort of some kind.

Richard Campbell (02:03:44):
The thing that's interesting about mobile games is that they're generally not made by very large teams. And that most popular mobile games are made by smaller groups of folks all over the world, by the way. And largely the business model is relatively predatory, right. It's free to play pay to win type games. And they've got a ton of Skinner boxes in them to design for you to, to spend more money on them. Like, and so in some, you know, arguably the only way you get away with a business model that bad is to be a small enough firm running out of Russia that there's nobody can do anything about it or electronic arts. Like that's sort of your choice, right? Sure. Yeah. Microsoft could, I don't know that Microsoft could make money in the mobile game business.

Paul Thurrott (02:04:23):
Yeah. Okay. Interesting.

Richard Campbell (02:04:24):
Just because the predatory nature of mobile game revenue is not something a credible corporation could do.

Paul Thurrott (02:04:31):
You're talking about the company that puts ads in their operating system. This is right in their wheelhouse.

Richard Campbell (02:04:35):
Yeah. But that's that because they're not charging the customer for, they we're just stealing the customer's information for it and wasting their time. That's different.

Paul Thurrott (02:04:43):
These are complimentary business models. That's

Richard Campbell (02:04:46):
As soon as you're, as soon as you're manipulate, you're effectively getting into the gambling drinking business, you are now manipulating people's psyche to collect cash. Right. And you, you know, you've already got problems with regulators. You want more.

Paul Thurrott (02:05:01):
Yeah, no, I, I, it's, I'm not saying they should have bought like Ro <laugh>, you know, or anything like that. I don't mean that,

Richard Campbell (02:05:06):
But, but look at the flack that electronic arts got over fifa. We in the EU where they literally declared that game gambling,

Paul Thurrott (02:05:14):
Right?

Richard Campbell (02:05:15):
And so the kids couldn't play it anymore in the eu. Geez. Like, that's what you're talking about. Because that is the business model of mobile games.

Paul Thurrott (02:05:24):
Okay, well, what's left then, I guess is my point. So if they don't do this, they are a distant number two in consoles, right? Yeah. they are like, they're part of the PC game market. I don't know how to even categorize that. I mean, they're obviously big players, big studios that have very popular games, you know, steam epic, whatever. Okay. So, I mean, they're part of it. They're there. I think I, I like what they're doing.

Richard Campbell (02:05:50):
And, and you are talking billions of dollars. Admittedly, there are other people making many more billions, but it's still billions of dollars.

Paul Thurrott (02:05:57):
Yep. Yep. And then there's this nascent market for cloud gaming, which

Richard Campbell (02:06:02):
May or may not be a thing as long as soon as we can figure out how to get rid of the speed of light, it'll be great.

Paul Thurrott (02:06:08):
Yes, exactly. So <laugh>, right? We'll be on Mars before we figure that one out, but yes, fair enough. So I don't know. I mean, I, it's a, it's a tough marketing thing to be like, Hey, we're always gonna be number two. You know not, I

Richard Campbell (02:06:22):
Guess that tough Avis made it a whole pitch, right? Like, like there's a way. Yeah. A number two with billions of dollars in pocket and less flack is not that bad. Let the leaders take the arrows, right? Like, it's not the end of the world.

Paul Thurrott (02:06:36):
The, for, I think for Xbox to make sense for Microsoft, they need to actually get out of the console business. They can't do that now. Because consoles are where you lose money every time you sell something, right? The model is the

Richard Campbell (02:06:50):
Cost. And making a console only makes sense if you have exclusive titles,

Paul Thurrott (02:06:55):
Right? So Microsoft and I might point out that

Richard Campbell (02:06:57):
Avis is now number three, so it didn't work out that well for 'em in the long run. Okay?

Paul Thurrott (02:07:03):
But, but Microsoft, you know, every console makers cost reduce their products over time and Sony has been public, has been very successful. So Nintendo, I, I, I actually think Nintendo bucks this trend completely. I, I think Nintendo might make money on their consoles from day one, but whatever the fact is there, they do make money on consoles over

Richard Campbell (02:07:21):
Time. But what's, what's the key to Nintendo exclusive titles that is the key of Nintendo. So maybe that's, you play Mario nowhere else.

Paul Thurrott (02:07:29):
Alright. So actually you've made a compelling case that Microsoft's biggest failing with Xbox is their inability to ship exclusive titles at volume like Sony, Nintendo do mm-hmm. <Affirmative> that people want. And I think that's fair.

Richard Campbell (02:07:44):
Yeah. And you were, and you were never going to, you people buy your console cuz they want to play your game, which by

Paul Thurrott (02:07:50):
The way does explain Activision Blizzard, right? Yes. Like once now. Well,

Richard Campbell (02:07:55):
I'm sorry. No, the real reason to buy Activation Blizzard and they keep saying it's a mobile play. Yeah. But it's not, it's it's World of Warcraft

Paul Thurrott (02:08:02):
And Call of Duty and

Richard Campbell (02:08:04):
Yeah. Yeah. Well it, they it's the recurring revenue that's a multi-billion dollar business. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:08:10):
It's not an exclusive though, right. That I, in fact, Microsoft has gone to create lengths to explain that these things will not be exclusive. But you know what, that's fine.

Richard Campbell (02:08:17):
No, it's, but what they will do to Blizzard, what they will do with World of Warcraft is they'll move it into Azure. It's permanent recurring revenue.

Paul Thurrott (02:08:25):
Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Richard Campbell (02:08:28):
Okay. All right. As long as you keep the game moving. Right? What's the, the miracle of World of Warcraft is that people still play it. Hundreds of thousands of people still play

Paul Thurrott (02:08:39):
It. Yeah. Every time I look at that, I, I believe in your miracle, because I don't understand it, but <laugh> No,

Richard Campbell (02:08:45):
But you know, that's

Speaker 5 (02:08:46):
Where my friends are. Yeah. Barry the, or, and

Richard Campbell (02:08:49):
My, my

Paul Thurrott (02:08:50):
Friend, you know, Afro the

Richard Campbell (02:08:51):
Elf and Yeah, Jiminy the Arrow

Speaker 5 (02:08:54):
Dancer. Yeah, exactly. I love hanging with him.

Paul Thurrott (02:08:57):
Chaotic is my favorite.

Richard Campbell (02:09:00):
Spend a little time looking at all of these recurring revenue games defense of the ancients too, right? Like, they're so strange. And people pay every, people love NoDa two. Oh, they love it. Every month. They love it. Yeah. Right. It's crazy

Paul Thurrott (02:09:18):
That thing's been around forever too.

Richard Campbell (02:09:19):
Yeah. Yeah. So you talk, and those are Azure workloads. Those could be Azure workloads, they may already be Azure workloads.

Paul Thurrott (02:09:25):
So they really, the sneaky strategy here is real, it really is all about Azure. Right?

Richard Campbell (02:09:29):
Totally. Like why would you look anywhere else? Right? Right. And it, oh, by the way, all these mobile games need a cloud backend. Yes. Every bit of it. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (02:09:37):
That's true.

Richard Campbell (02:09:38):
Yeah. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (02:09:40):
All right. And then just, just real quick Sony already has a streaming component to play. What's it called? Playstation Plus, or PlayStation nine, I think it's PlayStation Plus, where you can stream older generation PlayStation games to a PS five or a PC, actually, which is kind of interesting. But right now you cannot stream PS five games. They're testing that. Now, obviously, the plan is to bring that more, you know, make it more broadly available. By the way, this might be running on Azure too. Speaking of Azure, remember, I think this was pre pandemic right before the pandemic, but Sony and Microsoft partnered on some future game, you know, cloud gaming platform. This might be it. So I don't, maybe they'll split it between Azure and Amazon, who knows. But they're, they're going down that route. So soon it will be possible to stream PS five games.

Richard Campbell (02:10:31):
Ha having spent some time with the folks that run backend infrastructure like World of Warcraft and things like that. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you're not gonna multi-host, cuz the only pressure you get from your management is to spend as little money as possible per user running the infrastructure.

Paul Thurrott (02:10:45):
Okay. There you go.

Richard Campbell (02:10:46):
Absolutely. Yeah. Pair it to the bone.

Paul Thurrott (02:10:48):
So no one is talking about what the backend is to this thing. But then again, no one has ever come out and said, Hey, remember that agreement we had three years ago now, whatever it was, I guess it

Richard Campbell (02:10:58):
Was three years ago. Yeah. But I would argue this, if if you're running a 24 hour day game mm-hmm. <Affirmative> with a hundred, several hundred thousand users distributor around the world, you're not gonna pay a commercial cloud vendor for any of that equipment. You're gonna run your own, you're already doing the hard part. You have 24 hour a day staffing, you can afford a knock. Yeah. Yeah. So this is about controlling costs. A hundred percent. The only the exception of this is when you are the cloud vendor,

Paul Thurrott (02:11:23):
Right? It's, Sony has an insurance company, but I don't think they have a cloud. No.

Leo Laporte (02:11:30):
They bought Guy Kai to do streaming. I don't know Okay. If that infrastructure still exists,

Richard Campbell (02:11:37):
But I'm sure they're running their own infrastructure to some degree. And it's, and finding out it's hard, like that's not a trivial thing to do. And I know Blizzard a division runs their own infrastructure cuz it's the most cost effective way to do it once you're at scale. But it could be an Azure workload,

Paul Thurrott (02:11:52):
<Laugh>. Oh, I hope it is. Because at the end of the day Microsoft may lose out in a lot, you know, and we talked about ai, we talked about gaming mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And this could be the fun way that Microsoft kind of wins too, right? Yep. I mean, they, by being the backend,

Richard Campbell (02:12:06):
Every time I look at any of these deals going on, I'm like, what does it do to Azure? And it's like, it's, it's fixed recurring revenue. I mean, as long as you keep the content chain up, right? Like they botched the content chain up for Halo and now you know where it's at.

Leo Laporte (02:12:19):
Yeah. When Sony bought Guy Kai 10 more than 10 years ago, they got their cloud infrastructure. I don't know if they're still running it, but that's one of the main reasons they bought it.

Paul Thurrott (02:12:28):
Interesting.

Richard Campbell (02:12:29):
They

Leo Laporte (02:12:29):
Have a bunch of data centers,

Richard Campbell (02:12:31):
But the ba the Battle for, for World of Warcraft was against final Fantasy. When Sony produced Final Fantasy as a, as a massive multiplayer game, it pulled a lot of cu similar style of game, pulled a lot of customers across. And the funny part is that they actually botched the initial versions so badly that then when they decided to rebuild it, they actually invented an end of the world scenario to destroy the world, which in the new version of Final Fantasy, they now refer to routinely as the, you know, the day the comets came and destroyed the whole world. <Laugh>. That's funny. It's all brilliant. And they were, they

Paul Thurrott (02:13:06):
Do that kind of thing in like warzone type games or yeah. What do you call it? Whatever those games are there.

Richard Campbell (02:13:12):
But that battle back and forth and then, you know, world of Warcraft improved and tightened and consolidated with classic, you know, and brought back some users. Like there's a whole business there, a phenomenal one for creative folks to keep telling stories, to keep people engaged, that it's part

Leo Laporte (02:13:30):
Of their lives and it's worth billions of dollars.

Paul Thurrott (02:13:34):
And by the way, totally healthy thing to do. Don't pay no attention to my three month video game band. Just definitely spend life

Leo Laporte (02:13:41):
In the video game. Oh no. Are you? No. <laugh>. Let's take a break and come back with the Xbox segment. Has Paul resumed Paul of Duty? This is the, this is back, back of the book. Back of the book. Are the Nazi zombies quivering in their jack boots, skilled

Paul Thurrott (02:13:57):
Free enemies of

Leo Laporte (02:13:58):
All time? Stay tuned. It's all coming up next <laugh> as the Windows Weekly turns. But first a word from our sponsor, cashflow. This show is brought to you by cashflow. Literally <laugh>, all of our shows are cashflow is our content delivery network or cd. And we know you should know, you probably do know cuz you've experienced it. Viewers don't hang around for videos that go buffering, buffering. How many seconds before? You'll watch that before? Yeah. Forget it. Have you ever abandoned a shopping cart because it's spinning and you're waiting and you just go, forget it. I don't want to buy that that bad. I have. We all have gamers will leave bad reviews if the latency is bad. You know, you go around a corner and somebody frags you because you didn't even see 'em because of the latency. And that's why you need cashflow.

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Paul Thurrott (02:18:00):
Xbox is having a humongous sale. They're, they're saying that you can get up to 80% off on select games. They say Xbox, it's also PC by the way, actually you can get up to a hundred percent off <laugh> depending one, one game and then 90% off in some games. There's some good stuff in here you definitely want to get. Just go to the xbox.com and check this out. Remember to sort by percent off high to low. I guess that's technically the tip some, and then also you can show up to 200 games per page and then just go through the list is is, you know, the Halo Master Chief Collection is in here. The Metro Games are all in here. The, a lot of Batman games are in here. I tend to focus on, you know, dead Island. The original version is in here. Lots and lots of stuff and some really, really good prices. So this is a good time to stock up cuz it's all so cheap.

Leo Laporte (02:18:48):
Yeah. Wow. Yeah. $10 Xbox

Paul Thurrott (02:18:51):
Two

Richard Campbell (02:18:51):
And the Xbox Shoe Collection or X com two collection. I had a great time playing excom

Paul Thurrott (02:18:56):
Back in the day. X com. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I gotta still have to go, I still need to go through this whole thing, but I'm definitely gonna grab a couple things there. It's Far Cry, bunch of Far Cry games. Some of the, there's a Far Cry insanity bundle, which is Far Cry three, four, and five, which is like 18.

Leo Laporte (02:19:10):
So a lot of these are older playing. A lot of these are older games,

Paul Thurrott (02:19:12):
But the entire bios shot collection. Oh I love, are you kidding me? Yeah, still

Leo Laporte (02:19:17):
Good stuff too. RK Bio Shock. Scared

Richard Campbell (02:19:20):
To snot out Me. I'm playing it at

Leo Laporte (02:19:22):
Night. Wasn't that a

Paul Thurrott (02:19:23):
Game's Frightening Underwater? That was one of the games I played all the way through. Yeah, it's a excellent Me too.

Leo Laporte (02:19:27):
All three levels. I paid all the way through. Oh, look at this. This is good.

Richard Campbell (02:19:33):
Good for four bucks. Good

Leo Laporte (02:19:35):
Lord. Is it, I mean, why do they do this? I mean, it's not like they've declared them out <laugh>. Exactly. I but

Richard Campbell (02:19:41):
But they're making money out of nothing.

Leo Laporte (02:19:43):
That's all incremental. They're sending you income. Yeah, yeah,

Paul Thurrott (02:19:46):
Yeah. I don't think, yeah cuz people weren't just like browsing or looking for something to buy and now you can get this, you know, these are catalog games mostly. Right. So you can get 'em for cheap. It's good.

Richard Campbell (02:19:54):
The ultimate edition of Assassin Creed Odyssey for 24 hours. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> that, I mean there I stopped and that was the Greek one where I just stopped playing the game and just

Leo Laporte (02:20:05):
It so beautiful. Yeah. Just look around. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (02:20:08):
Well, you know, watching a lady get, you know, leave her hut, go make bread. I know, it's amazing. And then, and then go just

Paul Thurrott (02:20:15):
What? Playing like, I don't know. I'm just,

Richard Campbell (02:20:17):
I'm just living in, in ancient Greece.

Leo Laporte (02:20:19):
Yeah, it's, no, I agree. I, I stopped playing the game and just looked around. It was fun.

Richard Campbell (02:20:23):
Watch the world function, you know? Yeah. It's funny. The game was a distraction there. That is from living in ancient Greece.

Leo Laporte (02:20:30):
Good deal. Yeah. Assassins Crete Odyssey, deluxe Edition. 16 Bucks Odyssey. 24 bucks. Yeah. Origins 20 bucks.

Paul Thurrott (02:20:41):
So maybe that's the pyramid one. It's o the Egyptian one. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (02:20:44):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:20:46):
I like the Rome, right? The Rome one. Wandered around Rome for a long time.

Richard Campbell (02:20:49):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:20:51):
All right. That's that's one. What else you got?

Paul Thurrott (02:20:54):
So AP Epic star Doc has released the is released Groupie two. So this is sort of the, their version of sets that feature Microsoft promised for Windows 10 and then reneged on. They

Leo Laporte (02:21:04):
Never did that, did they?

Paul Thurrott (02:21:05):
They never did it. But it also improves on what sets was gonna be. Remember the point of sets was you could have multiple tabs on an application window. This one you can just combine apps into like a kind of a combo window has a bunch of different apps. You can save it or, you know, pin it to the task bar. So every time you launch it, you get the full set of apps with all the tabs and all the different apps and it, it's

Richard Campbell (02:21:23):
Kind of a workspace idea, right? Yeah. Like it's just, I have a workspace of all the things I need together and there you go.

Paul Thurrott (02:21:29):
Yeah. So 10 bucks for people this business version and it's included in Startup Object Desktop if you're already paying for that. So, so now Windows 10 and 11

Leo Laporte (02:21:39):
Run as a radio. Mr. Richard Campbell,

Richard Campbell (02:21:44):
Hey, hey. This week's show, 8 84 high availability in 2023 with Alan Hurt. So Alan and I go way, way back. I think the first time he was on the show was 20 2009. And I bumped into SQL bits of all places cuz he's, and he's always been the scaling guy, like, how do we scale up SQL Server? How do we build clusters and maintain them properly? And so it was really fun to go back on that topic, but just living in the cloud because this whole conversation about, okay, we know how to do high availability premises, but in the cloud it's easy, right? There's just a knob. You turn it up and he's like, haha, sure. Now let's go talk through the problems. And, and so really working on how do we tune workloads properly to scale in the cloud. And part of that is just the mindset of people who do scaling.

(02:22:31):
When you were, when you were doing it on premises, you always provision for peak. So you're pro you, you buy enough equipment so that they, you have the resources for peak load and if you take that workload and you shifted to the cloud, you are spending a lot of money be provisioning stuff. You're not actually using the challenge of high availability and, and scalability is really elasticity, being able to scale to what you need to use at the time. And that'll save you the money and get you the comparable results that ended up being the bulk of the conversation.

Leo Laporte (02:23:05):
Nice. So

Paul Thurrott (02:23:06):
Richard, I have to tell you, my wife just came in to find it, figure out how long this was gonna be. Hmm. And I said, you know, it's like five, 10 minutes. And she said, is it Whiskey a clock yet? I said,

Leo Laporte (02:23:15):
Yes, <laugh>. Well, it is, it is right now. International Bourbon Day. So let's let's get Yes, let's get bourbon in.

Richard Campbell (02:23:26):
Yeah. In in honor of International Bourbon Day, I thought we'd go with one of my very favorite bourbons and a very cost effective one. Maker's Mark.

Leo Laporte (02:23:36):
The, that's the one with the wax, right?

Richard Campbell (02:23:38):
That's the one with the wax from the very beginning. So maker's Mark started in 1953 when Bill Samuels Jr. Bought the Burkes Distillery in Loretto, Kentucky. Back in 53. Took him a few years to get up into production, but from the very first bottle in 1958, they did red wax dip by hand on the bottle.

Leo Laporte (02:23:59):
Oh, it's not like some plastic thing on

Richard Campbell (02:24:01):
No, it's not industrialized in any way. Oh, that's cool. As far as I know, I took the tour in 2011

Leo Laporte (02:24:08):
And they were still dipping

Richard Campbell (02:24:10):
Well and dipping by hand. Right. Wow. What was, I've toured a lot of distilleries. I think, you know, that <laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:24:18):
Have you

Richard Campbell (02:24:20):
Now and the many, there's many distilleries where it's like, it's very much you get to see the sausage being made. Yeah. It's vaguely gross in

Leo Laporte (02:24:26):
The end. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (02:24:27):
Yeah. And this was the opposite of that. I came out of the Maker's Mark tour liking Maker's Mark more

Leo Laporte (02:24:34):
Nice.

Richard Campbell (02:24:35):
And part of it was a, we had a phenomenal tour guide. One of, he was actually one of the Makers Mark ambassadors. He travels the world talking about, about Mark and, and being involved in all those sorts of things. So,

Leo Laporte (02:24:47):
Great tour. I'm not tour a drunk, I'm a Maker's Mark ambassador.

Richard Campbell (02:24:50):
Yeah, no, if when, you know,

Leo Laporte (02:24:52):
I'm

Richard Campbell (02:24:52):
A professional,

Leo Laporte (02:24:54):
He to drink this stuff <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (02:24:56):
As, as he's physically

Leo Laporte (02:24:57):
Thrown through a dumb waste. Yes.

Richard Campbell (02:24:59):
So, I mean, I, we got to taste the wart, literally the, the initial brewed beer at, at eight 9%. It's like, taste this. And it was very rough beer. Like, it's a, it's a, it's a grain. It doesn't have any hops in it and so forth. Then they're distally. They, they use an unusual mash bill. Most bourbon is primarily corn by law 51% or more. And in the case of maker's bark, it's 70% corn and then typically at least 5% barley, sometimes a bit more. And that's just to provide the amylase for you, get rid of all the methanol so you don't make anyone blind a feature. In the case of maker's markets 14% barley, but that middle grain, the flavor grain for the vast majority of American bourbons is rye. But in the case of Maker's Mark, it's red winter wheat. So they use 16% red winter wheat in their mash bill.

(02:25:49):
And it's one of the distinctive aspects of Mark is it's a, not that same level of spice it gives it that, that's part of its character as well. And they do a double distillation, which is also not unusual. So they use a column still to take that initial ferment, that eight 9% wart, and they take it up in a co in a 30 foot tall column. Still, I think they, the time they had two of them, I think they have three of them now up to 60% alcohol, which is quite low. Most bourbons go higher than that. So that

Leo Laporte (02:26:22):
When they say lower barrel entry proof, that's what they're talking about.

Richard Campbell (02:26:27):
Right. Well, actually they go lower than that. But first they go up. So again, part of my, the tour experiments was literally he stuck a cup under the running on, on, on under the output from the column still. Wow. So we were able to sip the 60% per 60% alcohol clear liquor. And then he took the excess and dumped it back into the still. I'm like, wait, you're gonna contaminate. Oh wait, it's alcohol <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:26:54):
In fact, we're adding a little flavor to the the, it's just birds off on the

Richard Campbell (02:26:57):
Surface of the sun. Yes, is fine. But what I noticed when it came off the column still was kind of this oily very grain flavor cuz they don't distill it so high that it takes all the grain flavors out of it. The next step is to put it through a pot still. So first the column still takes at 60%, then a pot still raises it to 65. So it's not actually trying to distill very high, but what they are taking out is a lot of the sulfur compounds, remember this is the copper pot stills. There's a lot of reflux in it. And so the, the alcohol is evaporating hitting the sides of the still and coming back down repeatedly. And so then when you taste what the white dog, the sort of raw whiskey at 65%, you see how much it's changed between from columns still the pot still.

(02:27:44):
So you get that feel of what the pot still really does to it. Now that lower barrel entry proof you saw on the front page of Maker's Mark is that after that process is finished, they then cut it with water down to 55% before they barrel it. Now this isn't introducing anything new when it's 65%. Like what is the other 35%? It's water. Oh. So you're putting a little more water in it to lower it down a bit to decrease the bite that it pulls from the wood. The higher the A B V going to the barrel, the more draw from the barrel you're gonna get. Ah, and typical for American bourbons is they go in at 62.5%. And that's why the Scots, when they're reusing American bourbon barrels go and at 63.5% because they feel like certain flavors have already been taken from the barrel.

(02:28:42):
So they go in at a lower number and then they have, I think they're up to over 40 barrel warehouses, but they are rack houses, so they stack their barrels one on on top of each other in, in slates because they rotate them. The barrel houses go up as high as seven floors. And of course, oh man, man in Kentucky where it's warmer and drier than Scotland, it can get very hot in the upper levels of these barrel houses. And so every barrel rotates over the duration, which typically five and a half years of aging for regular makers, mark move moves into different locations in the barrel houses over time. That means they can't gets handle as many barrels. And each of those barrels, by the way well filled runs about 500 pounds. Yep. They move them so that they live in all the different levels over the duration of their aging. And it, it is part of the character of Maker's Mark is to be consistent like that.

Paul Thurrott (02:29:35):
And now we understand Dokey Kong better, don't we, <laugh>? Yes, that's right.

Richard Campbell (02:29:40):
That real behavior happens there. That's right. Yeah. After the five, five and a half years and part of our tastings, they actually gave us a chance to taste like, here's what it tastes like at four years, here's six five, here's what it tastes at five and a half, here's what it tastes like. It's six and a half when it's been over barrelled. Like there's a reason why we take it at this time. Huh? That it's that it had very tour specific place. That sounds like really interesting. It's such a phenomenal experience. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:30:05):
And then when you went to Kentucky, did you, I assume you did a bunch of tours there.

Richard Campbell (02:30:09):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:30:10):
So did you find the driving between these places to be problematic?

Richard Campbell (02:30:15):
So we, how

Paul Thurrott (02:30:16):
Far

Richard Campbell (02:30:16):
Apart? Right. We had volunteer drivers. So we basically, we basically did solve, solve the problem different regions. We did the, the Frankfurt region, and so that was the RAC distillery, which is Buffalo Trace and mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and Pappy Van, Winkle Eagle, rare Blanton's all right in there. That's also roughly where Four Roses is. And Woodford Reserve, they were, they were all relat close together there. And then we went south to Bargetown and that's where Loretta is, and Maker's Mark and Heavens Hills, Elijah Craig, you know. And so we really did 'em in two groupings. Now, I mean, you always have the same problem, which is by the third distillery. Yep. <laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (02:30:57):
This is what we used to call a Table five wine. How can you trust yourself?

Richard Campbell (02:31:00):
Yeah. We don't buy that point.

Paul Thurrott (02:31:01):
I know nothing. You don't buy a bunch of that cause you just don't know. I know. Nothing.

Richard Campbell (02:31:05):
Yeah, it's absolutely a problem. One more piece of the story I would say we're Maker's Mark a as we're wrapping up here, actually there's two good stories I gotta tell you. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> in 20, in 2013 in February, 2013, Baker's Mark, like many whiskeys at the time, was selling far more record numbers and they were running out of whiskey. You know, it takes a long time to make, it takes five and a half years to make up the whiskey. They didn't expect to sell that much that that early on, and it was gonna take five years to make up the difference. And so they put out a letter where they said, listen, we're running outta whiskey and we're not gonna have enough for the year. And so we've been testing a lower proof for flavor, and if we lower our A B V from 45, which is their normal A B V to 42, that actually lets us stretch the whiskey for the rest of the year, we won't run short.

(02:31:58):
And we just wanted to tell you, like we, we've tested it, we've, we've done all these experiments, we we're sure this is the a great product. And so we just want to, we don't want to make any surprises. We're saying, this is what we're planning on doing. The customer's freaked out like, don't lower my A B V, like, you're destroying the way skin's amazing. Okay, well there's another way that we construct the risky for the rest of the year, and that's to raise the price 10%. So we'll do that instead. <Laugh> nice. And then they sold that anyway. Yeah, yeah. No, they, they, they did just fine. And they've kept it at 45% ever since. But I've, I I felt like a very new Coke moment. Yep. Like doing it in the open like that and letting the customer decide on the solution, I thought was very, very well played.

(02:32:40):
That's great. The other aspect of this I think is important is that Beam Sun tore bought maker's market in 20 20 15, like most major distilleries that are being owned by more and more conglomerates, which also brings up the interesting point, which is that all used maker's mark barrels go to Lefroy lefroy, the in in Isley the Lefroy distillery, I call it Le Lere, but which they also own. Yeah. Yes. Which also owned by Beam Sonari. Like, it's, it's very simple one with a G at the end that you don't say the g g Well I think it's, you have to silence regurgitate <laugh>. It's like as you, the G is for G who put a cigarette in my whiskey, mike. Right. dip your own ma souvenir makers mark bottle at the dipping station when you go and no dipping station. And if you order and if you do it in advance, they'll even put your name on the bottle.

(02:33:39):
I will do. That's, I have a bottle of Maker mark with my name on it. There is a, although there's many different kinds of maker's, mark now that's largely an influence of, of Beam Suntory. Even before Beam Suntory makers wanted to innovate on whiskey and they were, had been experimenting with French oak, but that's a violation of bourbon rules. Oh. And they found a workaround for their makers 46. And here's the solution. The rules say it has to be aged in American Oak. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And that's what they did, is they've aged in American Oak, but they hung 10 toasted French oak staves inside the bar. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:34:17):
Oh. Clever.

Richard Campbell (02:34:18):
On a, on a piece of them. Safe plastic,

Leo Laporte (02:34:21):
Liberty Oaks, STAs, let's just

Paul Thurrott (02:34:23):
Get they reflect. That meets the letter, but not the spirit.

Richard Campbell (02:34:26):
A hundred percent. You're totally, totally correct, but they, they couldn't deny them calling it bourbon cuz they had followed the rules. And 46 is an interesting, it's a more expensive version of the whiskey. It's at 47%. It's a, it's a little bit different. Listen, the Mark Classic is the one you want. It's $30. Yep. $30.

Paul Thurrott (02:34:47):
It's ev it's everywhere. Everyone can get

Richard Campbell (02:34:49):
This. Yeah. And you can drink it neat. You can drink it on ice. You can make a great old fashioned out of it and you're happy every step of the way. <Laugh>, this, this is what bourbon's about <laugh>. Right. The most approachable bourbon you could possibly get made in a very friendly way, admittedly noun owned by a giant multinational. But that, you know, what are we gonna do? You'll be happy drinking maker's Mark

Leo Laporte (02:35:15):
Tip one out for Ivan Za, who was the CEO at Diaggio, who passed away last week at the age of 63. Oh boy.

Richard Campbell (02:35:24):
That was pretty

Leo Laporte (02:35:24):
Young. He, he very young. He had an ulcer and was in complications and surgery for the ulcer that he passed. Mm-Hmm. But of course, that's the company that knows Johnny Walker. Yeah. Guinness Captain Morgan smearing off

Richard Campbell (02:35:38):
Ray and about 30 Scottish distilleries. Right. That is yeah. Yeah. You know, Walker's built from a dozens of different yeah. Wait,

Paul Thurrott (02:35:48):
Go back. Scottish the quote. Go back to the, it says we are losing older drinkers by the bucket full. Well, yeah. I mean, <laugh> obviously the sky is blue, water is wet, and older drinkers are dying.

Leo Laporte (02:36:01):
Yeah. They're passing on. He was not an older drinker, but he was for 10, at least 10 years, I think the CEO of Diageo. So Evan men who really put Johnny Walker back on the map. Yeah. after some bad years. Happy bourbon Day. Now you have a reason to Yeah. Tip one back. I'm

Paul Thurrott (02:36:23):
Definitely, I am Cheers. Absolutely. Using this as an excuse to make we drink <laugh>.

Richard Campbell (02:36:29):
Yeah. I had a little taste of Green spot last night after we got the all the house photos squared away. Nice. And that stressor was over. Nice. It's like time for a drink, but yeah, I'll go. I actually have a really great rare American bourbon stashed away. I think I

Leo Laporte (02:36:48):
Taste of that today. I as as, since you've been doing all this, I've really decided to give up drinking entirely. So thank you. Thank you for that.

Paul Thurrott (02:37:00):
Listen, as long as we're one kind of an influence, I think that's all we could

Leo Laporte (02:37:04):
Ask for. I'll tip back some fine Kentucky Spring Water, a little branch water. I

Paul Thurrott (02:37:09):
Strongly recommend looking into kombucha. I think it's a nice little

Leo Laporte (02:37:12):
Cocktail. Is good. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I, I like the boots. Yeah. My I have a little bottle of Jet jet the Creed, which is actually made with red corn. Oh, how indeed. And yeah, give it to me by a friend of mine. And does that fact the color at all? It's very red. This the whiskey quite that is it for this edition of Windows Weekly, paul thora thora.com get his field guide to Windows 10 and 11, all in one volume there. And of course, the new book Windows Everywhere. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, which is a really good tour through the history of windows via its programming languages. Lean pub.com and of course, become a premium member@theat.com to keep the presses rolling, as they say. Host of run as Radio, Mr. Richard Tom Richard Thomas. Goodnight, John boy.

(02:38:08):
Goodnight. Mary Jane, Richard Gamble. Gamble's been on your cheek. Oh, no, no. A good, a good Scotsman. A good Scotsman. Richard Campbell run as Radio and Net Rocks. Thank you Richard. Thank you all for doing the show with us today. Lot of fun. I'll just have, you know that my wife just texted your wife and us and said, for some reason Paul always wants to have whiskeys on Wednesdays. Now <laugh>, what is going on? Tell her you're having Johnny Walker tonight, my friend. Oh boy, that's true. Or, you know, maker's Mark that, that'd be pretty good too. I'd take that, I'll take that. It's funny. We do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern Time. That's 1800 utc. If you wanna watch it live, you can, you know, we stream a lot of our shows as we're making them. So people want the, you know, like the most freshest possible version.

(02:39:03):
Unedited Unex Expirated can do that. Live Twit TV is the url. If you're watching Live chat, live in our open to all chatroom, irc twit tv. You can also, if you're a club member, visit us in the Discord. There's a Windows Weekly chat going on there too after the fact on demand ads, supported versions of the show available at twit tv slash ww. There's a YouTube channel as well dedicated to Windows Weekly. And of course, the best way to get any of our shows subscribe and your favorite podcast client, then you don't have to think at all. You just, you know, it'll be there of a Wednesday evening so you can listen at your leisure. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Richard. Have a wonderful evening and we'll see you next time on Windows Weekly. Bye-Bye. Listeners of this program, get an ad free version if they're members of Club twit. $7 a month gives you ad-free versions of all of our shows plus membership in the club. Twit Discord, a great clubhouse for twit listeners. And finally, the Twit plus feed with shows like Stacey's Book Club, the Untitled Linux Show, the GIZ Fizz and more. Go to twit tv slash club twit and thanks for your support.