Windows Weekly 844, 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's here. Richard Campbell's here. Paul says, it's not you. It's Windows some of the massive flaws in Windows these days. Paul says, what is it? Kids writing this stuff. Interns. We'll also talk about show season and the Microsoft Surface event coming up in a couple of weeks. And then Windows 11 Insider builds Xbox News and Paul has a great tip for backing up and reinstalling [00:00:30] your Windows machine. Stay tuned. It's all coming up next on Windows Weekly podcasts you love

Speaker 2 (00:00:38):
From people you trust. This is Twit.

Leo Laporte (00:00:48):
This is Windows Weekly with Paul OTT and Richard Campbell. Episode 844 Recorded Wednesday, August 30th, 2023 Friday Suites. This [00:01:00] episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by ACI Learning. Keep your team's IT skills current visit go dot ACI learning.com/twit. Twit listeners will receive at least 20% off or as much as 65% off an IT Pro enterprise solution plan. The discount is based on the size of your team and when you fill out the form, you'll get a proper quote tailored to your needs. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show. We cover the latest news from Microsoft. [00:01:30] Paul Ott is here while he's in Macee, which is almost here. throt.com Closer than Richard. Yes. Richard Campbell of run's radio.com is in Copenhagen. Juan Copenhagen, are you visiting little lady? I was going to say the only thing anyone knows about Copenhagen, the one statue of, is it a [00:02:00] mermaid or a little girl?

Richard Campbell (00:02:01):
Little Mermaid. Mermaid. Yeah, the mermaid. I'm a big, I'm the fan of Victor Borga. Right. Talk about you want to talk about Denmark?

Leo Laporte (00:02:12):
Denmark. Something's rotten in Denmark and it's you buddy. His audio punctuation bit is one of the funniest things you've ever

Richard Campbell (00:02:20):
Seen. Funniest, funniest thing. No, I love the bit. Whenever someone would arrive late to one of his presentations, he'd stop. Right? And he would mock them as they [00:02:30] were coming in and make this foot sounds and they finally, he goes, ma'am, where are you from? He goes, California. He says, I'm from Copenhagen now. I got here before you. Nice.

Leo Laporte (00:02:40):
Very good. Very good. Well, welcome to you both. What are you doing in Copen, by the way? Tivoli Gardens. That's what I know about Copenhagen.

Richard Campbell (00:02:50):
Yeah, right next door from where we are

Leo Laporte (00:02:52):
Right now. Perfect time of year too. Oh, you

Richard Campbell (00:02:54):
Have? We are here for the Copenhagen Developers Festival and we've been recording [00:03:00] some T Net Rocks episodes and I did my current generation space presentation, so through the state of space in 2023. All fun stuff. It's really an enjoyable show.

Leo Laporte (00:03:11):
Nice. Well, good to have you. Well to have you. It's be, and our theme today is it's not you, it's Windows.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:24):
There's also a sub theme. I bet you never heard of the thing I'm talking about. Oh, [00:03:30] I'll mention when that comes up. There should be at least two of,

Leo Laporte (00:03:32):
Okay. All right, all now. I feel like I'm challenged. I should know. Alright, what is up? You lead this off, Paul, with the words. I think it's time we addressed a painful reality,

Paul Thurrott (00:03:48):
Right? As all of I tend to be very positive and not negative in any way, and so this is going to be like a sharp right turn in some way. Shocker, a shocker. No, actually this is [00:04:00] a set of issues I've kind of ignored, which is dumb actually, to frame this, I will tell a story because we all tend to blame ourselves when things go wrong with the computer. You wonder, is this something I did? Maybe it's me. And in the late 1980s, up until the late 1980s, maybe the early 1990s, there was a story in the Boston area called Bradley's, which was sort of like the Walmart of the area of the day. And [00:04:30] so this would've been 89, somewhere in that timeframe, 1989, I'm standing in line paying for something at Bradley's and the woman is tapping her fingernails on the register thing and she looks at me and she says, I'm sorry about, this is taking so long. She says computers. And I said, I do know computers.

Leo Laporte (00:04:47):
I happen to be an

Paul Thurrott (00:04:48):
I don't know that. I don't think that excuses it. We just sort of accept that things go wrong, right? It's very common. So if you're using Windows 11, what I'm about to say, this is not one of those things [00:05:00] you may not have experienced. You've experienced it, you absolutely have. Now I'm waiting for people in comma, I've seen this, but you have, if you're using Windows 11, you have, and that's this, you're doing something, it doesn't matter what it is. You're working on some app, some window, whatever, and all of a sudden File Explorer just jumps to the front, right? File Explorer seizes the focus.

(00:05:22):
This is a bug in Windows 11. It's been there for several months. People complain about it in forums and whatever and [00:05:30] no one seems to know anything about it or can do anything about it and whatever. Now, one you might not have experienced or might not have seen, but this also Windows 11 bug is you're working on whatever, same thing, but all of a sudden all of the icons in your desktop shift to that blank white piece of paper look and icon, that doesn't mean anything. And if you right click on the desktop and refresh, it'll go back to normal. The first time I saw that, I had been having a series of problems with that particular computer and I said, I'm going to hum this thing right through the window. I can't do this anymore. But before I did [00:06:00] that, I clicked on the desktop, it was fine. I looked it up, I talked to Raphael, I was like, yep, this is happening. All kinds of people. It's also about to get worse because Windows 1123 H two is coming out in a few months and it includes, I'm going to call it a new version of File Explorer. It's actually the same file explorer, but they've done some deep changes to it with regards to the user experience. This thing is a performance dog and is one of the biest things I've ever used in my life.

Richard Campbell (00:06:28):
But you don't think they've addressed the existing bug, [00:06:30] just introduce new ones.

Paul Thurrott (00:06:32):
Yeah, that's how I think this team works, actually. Yes, I'll confirm. That is my opinion. So here's the problem. Well, I don't know the problem, but I don't actually know what the problem is. But what they've done is they couldn't get Zamal Islands to work correctly, which is how they did part of the UI and File Explorer for Windows 11. So they reverted or not reverted, they switched over to the Windows app, SS d k. They also couldn't get that to work. So with both of these technologies, they've created a custom version [00:07:00] of it just for the one app that they're not giving to the public and aren't explaining what the problems are and it is buggier than health. I am using this on three different computers now. All of them have Blue screened, all of them. The routinely explorer crashes, the screen blanks, all of your windows closed.

(00:07:18):
If you have any Explorer Windows open, it's terrible related to this. I'll just say anyone who's paid attention to Windows over the years will know that Microsoft has at different times talked about improving [00:07:30] the performance of file copy through File Explorer, right? Steven OVS was big on this. I think this was a Windows eight thing. It was one of those desktop features that was a big improvement for the day, but it was kind of lost because of all of the Touch first nonsense that everyone hated so much. But it was a big improvement because I've been having problems with File Explorer. I've started testing third party file managers, which I don't typically care about. And there's a thing called Directory Opus, which actually has been around [00:08:00] I think since the late 1980s. I used to use it on the Omega. So it's been around a while or it's some version of It has, it's an ugly app.

(00:08:08):
It's a desktop app, it's an old app. It's an old app. And I'll tell you something, and it doesn't matter if it's the beta version of the file explorer that I've been talking about, that was a problem or R T M version, which is what's happening on this computer. This thing transfers files somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 times the speed of File Explorer. And that's true whether you're going over the network or from [00:08:30] disc to disc. I'd like to understand, and this is a rhetorical question, why a third party file manager that frankly is one of the ugliest things I've ever seen in my life, can somehow work better than the beautiful but nonsense thing that Microsoft builds into Windows 11. It doesn't make sense to me.

Richard Campbell (00:08:47):
It shouldn't be a product, right? The fastest client for transferring files should be the thing built into Windows.

Paul Thurrott (00:08:54):
How could be

Richard Campbell (00:08:55):
Anything else?

Paul Thurrott (00:08:56):
Why is it anything else? So one of the many goofy [00:09:00] things about File Explorer is that they keep screwing with it, right? As we talk about the soon to be three different versions of Windows 11, one of the fascinating things about this product to me is that the initial version that shipped in the first version of Windows 11, a file explorer was different from what was in Windows 10. They made it different again in 22 H two, and they're making it different again in 23 H two. And to me, the problems they're solving are not issues. There's a gallery view

Richard Campbell (00:09:28):
A problem, there isn't even a problem [00:09:30] there. They old File Explorer worked

Paul Thurrott (00:09:32):
Fine. I don't understand this stuff. I mean, some of it, look, I don't care about the homepage. If they want to surface favorite files and recently access files, that's cool. As long as we can configure that. I don't really use it, but I don't care. It's fine. But they're making it. For example, one of the big changes is there's a new gallery view, and this is a photo gallery view that's built into the navigation pane as a standalone node between Home and OneDrive. Awesome. [00:10:00] I don't want it there. And I'm guessing that there will be, if there isn't already a way to remove this thing from File Explorer, but it is the most superfluous waste of time I've ever seen. There's also this sense of when we were going to Windows eight, one of the things we had to do was make sure all the buttons could be hit with thumbs so everything got bigger and it was comical in Windows eight. If you ever looked at an app bar at the bottom of a full screen app, there was big stupid looking buttons. It was really nonsensical for desktop app use. But [00:10:30] the user interface elements in this version of explorer are, I don't know, 27% bigger, some weird scaling thing. It looks like it's been retroactively enlarged to make it better for touch, which is like it's guys, it's 2023. Nobody needs

Richard Campbell (00:10:46):
This. No, no. And I think you're being charitable, it looks like it's been tinkered with by children.

Paul Thurrott (00:10:53):
And I'm glad you said that because yesterday the Windows Insider program had a little video chat and you would think [00:11:00] that the people working on this low end system utility would be middle-aged, experienced developers with literal tool belts around their waist and whatever. And no, it's a bunch of kids who were born since Windows 95 came to market. And I'm not trying to be mean. I mean young people have great value to, I don't mean you have to be older and experienced to offer anything. I really don't mean that, but you just say young people have great values. You really are. No, no, I didn't say values. Young people can offer a great value. They can offer value, [00:11:30] they can offer value. They're often comical. They could be funny. They're a good example of what not to do. I don't mean it like that. You

Richard Campbell (00:11:38):
Pat 'em on the head too, Paul,

Paul Thurrott (00:11:39):
Is that what you No, it has that sort of, well, this is a little sad because this isn't the phone link app or some stupid thing. This is the central file management utility in the windows. I am sure there are adults working on it too, but that was a little alarming to me, Paul, you're just getting old. This is what happens. No, when you [00:12:00] get old, the cops all start looking young and you go, how that young person, I've experienced that. Yes, of course, as you get older, the people who play basketball for your professional sports team are 12 younger than you are. I get that. Our quarterback in the Niners Brock Purdy looks like he's in sixth grade. Alright, listen, I can't prove this, but I would like to think that I am, I almost said emotionally intelligent. I'm not going to say that I'm a good enough person that if file explorer in Windows 1123 H two was [00:12:30] awesome, and I saw those kids, I would think to myself, good for them. They did a great job. But that's not what I thought. Because File Explorer in 23 H two is a piece of crap. So sorry.

Richard Campbell (00:12:43):
And to be clear, a slow piece of crap, it's not

Paul Thurrott (00:12:46):
Even, and also to be fair to myself, I wasn't going to bring up the age of these people. Richard just happened to mention children. And of course I went right there.

Richard Campbell (00:12:55):
There's this interesting problem in the window space now where you're either [00:13:00] a 30 year veteran and you don't want to work on certain things and nobody can make you, you've made enough from the stock now that you don't need a job unless you have eight wives in a cocaine habit, you don't need to be there.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:13):
So how do

Richard Campbell (00:13:14):
They persuade you to do anything? Then you have a younger generation that's just trying to be a part of a product and I think they're up against it.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:24):
Yeah. I don't mean to generalize here. I don't mean to say that everyone who's an intern starts on Windows [00:13:30] where we're at now, I don't mean it like that, but I do think a lot of the older, more experienced people who work in the Windows org so to speak, are actually in the Azure org working on backend stuff. The guys who stick it out are the deep architectural guys.

Richard Campbell (00:13:47):
Well, and I think that's sort of the dynamic is, right? It's like they've made them uncomfortable enough that they've gone and jumped to another team. So who are the folks that are behind that are still there? What's motivating them?

Paul Thurrott (00:13:58):
I'm not saying bring [00:14:00] your kids to the workday or anything. I don't mean it like that. I'm just saying,

Richard Campbell (00:14:04):
I can't say this,

Paul Thurrott (00:14:05):
Can't keep doing, I'm sorry, I'm terrible. But listen, this is not something I ever would've brought up. It's just that this product is terrible. This thing might ship in as little as two months. It's not ready, not even, it should not be a thing.

Richard Campbell (00:14:22):
And it's super fixable. Just go back to the old version.

Paul Thurrott (00:14:26):
Yes, yes. What File Explorer needs to [00:14:30] be is a pure win 32 app with assembly language for the performance bits. Who cares what it looks like?

Richard Campbell (00:14:37):
I don't think it needs that. This is not that hard.

Paul Thurrott (00:14:40):
It's awesome.

Richard Campbell (00:14:42):
It shouldn't be bad. It's

Paul Thurrott (00:14:44):
Not. I've been doing a lot of big file copy stuff lately, which is why Wang is a problem. I've been doing that digital stuff. I've been doing

Richard Campbell (00:14:52):
Your giant photo realignment and moving those YouTube videos around. And by the way, I've been watching it all and loving it.

Paul Thurrott (00:15:00):
[00:15:00] Honestly. I've made great progress. I never thought I would get as much done as I'm getting done. And I'm going to sort, I don't mean finish, but I'm going to finish the core archive bit of it. But it has required me to run wires around this apartment. You just can't

Richard Campbell (00:15:14):
Because his wires are faster.

Paul Thurrott (00:15:17):
Or even plug in a hard drive, copy it locally than copy it locally over here. It's stupid. But this is the problem. Anyway, this has caused me to look into this stuff and it's a problem. I'm not done. So there's a lot more than File [00:15:30] Explorer.

Richard Campbell (00:15:30):
I mean, not to pile on, but I'm in the midst of retiring my old file servers. I've been trying to copy stuff up into the teams shares and it has a nasty habit of just copying the file structure and telling me everything's fine,

Paul Thurrott (00:15:43):
Right?

Richard Campbell (00:15:44):
It's like, Hey, I have a bunch of empty folders. Thanks

Paul Thurrott (00:15:47):
For that. I mean, anyone who's done cross disk cross network file copy knows that there's a real problem with, I'll just call it metadata for date created, date modified whatever,

Richard Campbell (00:15:58):
Take the ACLS with you, [00:16:00] any of those.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:01):
It's a huge problem. Yeah, huge problem. But I'm not going to call that a file explorer problem. That's just been a long, long time issue.

Richard Campbell (00:16:08):
Well, you're hitting on the issue, which is like, how could you mess this up? It's the most basic thing and it already worked. What feature were you trying to add? That you impaired the fundamentals?

Paul Thurrott (00:16:22):
Yep. Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:16:25):
Is it possible it's just

Paul Thurrott (00:16:26):
A bug

Leo Laporte (00:16:27):
That they're going to fix? I mean,

Paul Thurrott (00:16:30):
[00:16:30] You get regressions, absolutely.

Leo Laporte (00:16:32):
You have a program file

Richard Campbell (00:16:32):
Many, many bugs.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:34):
Well, so the file copy performance is something I've experienced on the current version of Windows 11. Not just the, but this

Leo Laporte (00:16:42):
Historically a problem on Windows. That's why they put robocopy in the command line, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:16:48):
Because yeah, if only they could, I don't know, have a G Y front end of Robocopy or Xco or whatever.

Leo Laporte (00:16:54):
Sure, I know.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:57):
So alright, as we're talking about things, you might've seen problems. [00:17:00] You're like, oh, maybe it's me. People who upgraded to the latest monthly update, I believe it is for Windows 11, are getting unsupported processor blue screens all over the place, which is of course, it's impossible if you're a Microsoft guy these days. Not to immediately go down some weird conspiracy theory path and Microsoft is obviously aware of it. They're investigating it, they're asking for people to file reports in the feedback hub. This is something [00:17:30] I've experienced on one computer. I do the one, I always test this kind of scenario and I got to be honest that computer's basically unusable right now. So I don't know how people are even going to update, update this thing when whatever update comes out, but well, they

Richard Campbell (00:17:46):
Swore to us we needed at least gen eight and and we needed TPM B two. That's right. And then we found out none of it was true. So maybe they're now trying to make that true. Is it just older hardware that [00:18:00] has the problem?

Paul Thurrott (00:18:01):
This is going to come up again. In fact, it might be the next. Yeah. So the next topic, this comes up a lot. Microsoft does something really bad. People complain and they're like, guys, guys, this is a mistake. We're going to fix it. You get the feeling that it was like, let's just see how it goes. I

Richard Campbell (00:18:17):
Mean one way to fix it, to let your hardware age out and you'll buy new gear. In fact, wait for September 21st. We've got some

Paul Thurrott (00:18:23):
Announcements. Yes, we've got some. We're going to talk about this. So the other one that's like this, I've not seen this one myself, so that's kind [00:18:30] of fun. But Tom Warren over at the Verge wrote about how Microsoft is using a new version of what we all call malware tactics to push people usually to edge. So you're using Chrome and you go to big doc arm or Well, why would you do that? I'm sorry, that's a ridiculous scenario. But maybe you're using Edge and you go to the Chrome website or whatever and you're like, Hey, you should use our browser. Eyebrows is fun. They started testing that with binging as well and trying to force people with Chrome on Windows 11 when they do a Google search to go through binging. [00:19:00] Wow. Yeah. Yep. Now Microsoft says this was unintended and they're going to fix that. It's only happened to some people because that's the way software goes out nowadays. But lemme ask you a question unintended, but you built the software that made this happen. This isn't a random collection of bits. You built something to do this, people saw it and now you're like, oh, we're just kidding. Yikes. Yikes.

Richard Campbell (00:19:27):
This was eminently testable by your team. [00:19:30] None of these scenarios are that exotic

Paul Thurrott (00:19:32):
Right now to the people out there. This is something that happens a lot. I'll raise an issue where anyone, it doesn't have to be me, but someone will raise an issue and I may be privy to the fact that this is happening to people, but you always get that one guy in the corner who lays his hand is like, I don't see that. Or Paul, you always complain about edge hijacking web links or whatever nonsense that is you're worried about this week and I never see that. [00:20:00] So it must never happen. It's like saying I don't have cancer, so cancer must not exist,

Richard Campbell (00:20:05):
Right? No, I have the perfect grip on reality and I reject yours.

Paul Thurrott (00:20:09):
I guess all I'm asking from people is to maybe look out in the world and see what's happening. And if it's not happening to you, congratulations. But

Richard Campbell (00:20:18):
Do you know why? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:20:20):
Could you tell the rest of us? Yeah. What are you doing? Right? Is it a metabolic thing? I'd like to know. And then I haven't written about this yet, although I became aware of this a [00:20:30] couple of months ago and then found out I had actually sort of written about it several months ago. But Microsoft is retiring what it calls the legacy troubleshooters in Windows 11. Now what does that mean when you troubleshoot in Windows today? It runs that troubleshooting platform they have, which by the way, debuted in Windows seven I wrote and I think that's true. And these are those wizards that kind of step through like you're not connected to the internet. We'll reset your OID and [00:21:00] does it work and blah, blah blah. And they try to help me, but of course I will be writing about this soon. But of course I looked at this and I thought to myself, well okay, I feel like I'm up on Windows to some degree.

(00:21:14):
What's the new, is there a new Windows troubleshooting thing? And the answer is yes. And this is one of the two things I thought people would not have ever heard of. There is an app in Windows 11 called Get Help that I assume 99.9% of the people listening to [00:21:30] or watching the show have either never seen or have completely ignored because it says Get help and you don't need help. But actually this is going to be the home for the new troubleshooting platform. Actually, it could be the same thing on the back end. I actually don't know. So if you run a troubleshooter today, which you can do, it will have a link in the bottom of the dialogue box that says, Hey, legacy troubleshooters are going away. Learn more. You can click on that, go to a Microsoft support page, it'll explain it, and it actually steps through the various troubleshooters they're replacing with this Get Help app. And I did a few of them [00:22:00] just to see what they look like and it's the same sort of thing, but it's just a modern app. So the legacy troubleshooters are these kind of Windows 1 32 control panel type interfaces that have persistent

Richard Campbell (00:22:11):
Our C the management

Paul Thurrott (00:22:12):
Console, and they work fine. They're fine. Honestly, I would say I've only, the only times I use them a lot or have you had to use 'em as been networking, which is why I said that one first. Sometimes you might need it for back in the day, you would need it for such things as my fonts appear blurry or [00:22:30] when we were moving to high D P I displays and all that kind of stuff. But I think these days you don't really, not super necessary. But anyway, it's not you issue. But I threw it in here because it's another thing that's kind of happening in Windows that no one's really talking about. And then maybe it's not a huge deal, but I just think people should know about it. And I don't know why I haven't written about it yet, but at some point I'm going to have to update the book. But oh, I should say the Stockholm

Richard Campbell (00:22:56):
Syndrome thing, right? Yeah. So long you forget you're being beaten,

Paul Thurrott (00:23:00):
[00:23:00] Right? So if you're on Windows 1122 H two or older, including Windows 10, whatever supported version of Windows, this is not going away. They're not going to update this in those older versions of Windows. But for Windows 11 fully supported, you move forward to 23 H two starting on a certain date that I think is next year. These are going away. Just something to be aware of. What else can I say about young people? You kids [00:23:30] get off of my windows. Your kids. I would've gotten away with it if it wasn't

Richard Campbell (00:23:35):
For these darn interns.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:36):
Yeah, the interns let the intern do it, right? How are kids going to learn if you don't let 'em try? I don't want them to try on the thing that is so central in corridor to how Windows works, play with paint as you have been, by the way jerks. But that's when they gave the intern, by the way actually. Well, okay, so I should speak to that because I wrote [00:24:00] about this a few months ago, Microsoft, I don't remember the dates anymore, it doesn't matter. But at Microsoft at some point gave a modern front end to the classic paint app in Windows 11. Bright White didn't support dark mode. Okay, terrible, whatever. But what they screwed up was all the keyboard shortcuts. Remember I complained about this. One of the common things I do in paint is I'll have an image, I do control E.

(00:24:23):
And literally for the previous 20 years in a row, the width box, there's a width [00:24:30] and a height would be selected. And so I have muscle memory to, I knew I could just start typing numbers and I could resize this thing. Starting with that, whatever that, I think it was late last year, some other control was selected. And to get to the width box, you had to hit tab five times. You could hit I think it's like control tab or shift tab or whatever. It's to go backwards two times. But I don't understand changing something that basic, it's so stupid. Plus I also don't understand putting this UI out with a supporting dark mode. Also stupid. They did this right with Notepad for example. So [00:25:00] one of the other issues in the, it's not you thing, actually this does fall into this category, I should have added it, is there are features that come to Windows that don't come to everybody or to every computer.

(00:25:11):
And I've witnessed this in the several computers that I use many, many times. Here's a great example, back in November and then again in December because Microsoft, they silently updated OneDrive so that it has this new modern ui. If you do a clean install of Windows 10 today, windows 11, sorry. And go right into OneDrive before [00:25:30] anything happens. You'll still see the old UI that debuted with the first version of Windows 11 and is in Windows 10 is still there. Some update occurs over time where you get the modern ui. But the thing that's different between PCs is some computers, it lets you back up three folders to OneDrive really sync. But what they call it backup. And one lets you back up five. And to this day right now, here it is August 20, 23, almost a year later, two years later, really, I still have computers where I can't back up all of my system folders [00:26:00] to OneDrive.

(00:26:01):
It's crazy. So with that in mind, this past summer, remember the day you guys remember this? I was complaining about paint. There he goes again, right? He's going to town on paint, he's complaining he can't stop himself. And I brought up paint to make my point and I was like, huh, the keyboard shortcut worked. The one I said didn't work. That's weird. But it was only on that computer. And what I've noticed over the course of the summer is that different behaviors on different computers, one day less than a month ago with the white full white version [00:26:30] of paint I brought up did control E and that width box was selected. I was so surprised by this. I tabbed five times. Now I'm getting used to doing that and left it behind. I see different behaviors on different computers. Well, I'm happy to announce that Microsoft just updated the pain app again, it supports dark mode now. Yay. And I believe, at least on my computers, I shouldn't say this definitively, but if you do a Controlee, it starts up in the width [00:27:00] box just like it used to. So it only took them, I don't know, nine months to set this thing that they screwed up. But this is what using Windows is like

Richard Campbell (00:27:08):
How long did it take to convince them it was wrong?

Paul Thurrott (00:27:11):
I know. Well that kid, he probably had to go back to all elementary school, whoever was working on it and no, I don't know. I'm sorry I can't stop doing it. But this is the frustration of using Windows. It is especially frustrating for those of us, and this is all of us here probably, [00:27:30] right? And including people watching or listening who have used Windows for a long time. These kind of regressions are, they're problems. They're bugs unless they're purposeful. And I think we can agree that not doing the right thing is not the purposeful, I think it's a mistake. It's just bad programming.

Richard Campbell (00:27:48):
Yeah, no, and inexperience just not being aware of the user experience. They're living in the sandbox and they could just play with things not understanding.

Paul Thurrott (00:27:58):
People

Richard Campbell (00:27:59):
Have

Paul Thurrott (00:27:59):
Work [00:28:00] to do. I don't mean to generalize, but one of the big complaints I had about a year ago or so was this video they put out how we designed the new star baby. It was two years ago how we designed a new star, remember this stupid thing? And I was like, this is a bunch of Mac people who have never used Windows and they're like, this is how I think it should look. Young people don't Mac people. It's the worst. Anything. That's how it felt. I know it's unfair. I'm not trying to generalize, but you want to think that the people working on the [00:28:30] thing you're using a know the product, care about it, want to do the right thing. And this is the central disconnect I feel in Windows these days. You don't get that feeling. I talk to Darling toward the both

Richard Campbell (00:28:43):
Doing their work are a long way disconnected from the user.

Paul Thurrott (00:28:46):
Yeah, I mean Bill Burr I think it was, no, it was Bill Burr, some comedian. Bill Burr probably did a joke one time about you call a plumber and his wife is telling you what she thinks you should do. And I didn't call you, [00:29:00] I called the plumber. I want the guy who knows what he's doing to tell me what's going on. And I just feel like the people who are fronting this stuff right now, it's like no one else seems to. Bob, do you want to do, I dunno, core networking and windows. I am kind of a M UI guy. No, it's okay. You got it. This would be great. You'll have a great time. It's similar. I dunno. So it's a frustrating thing. [00:29:30] Yeah, this is my whole life I think is what life is like now with this stuff. Okay, let's move on. We talk about seasons here. There are shows.

Leo Laporte (00:29:43):
Oh wait, before you do that, lemme do an ad. Yeah, so you're done bitching, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:29:47):
Well I can't promise that, but yes, that round, that round is thing. Don't

Leo Laporte (00:29:54):
Segue so quickly into the non, I'll think

Paul Thurrott (00:29:57):
Of something else to complain

Leo Laporte (00:29:58):
About that. So I could do an ad [00:30:00] and then resume.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:04):
I just wanted to get past

Leo Laporte (00:30:05):
That. Actually. I want to talk about the Microsoft event that's coming up and I think it looks like they're going to stream it because of the time they set, which is one in the page. They

Paul Thurrott (00:30:14):
Are not going to stream it. I know. We'll talk about

Leo Laporte (00:30:18):
It. We'll talk about it. All right, we'll talk about it. Yep. All my hopes and dreams of coming in at 10:00 AM on the 21st are shot. Sorry, I was going to work on a Thursday just for you Paul, [00:30:30] our show and for our fine sponsors in this case a c I learning, we love these guys. You know what else I love in the world? Managed service providers. Russell is our managed service provider. He's the best. He's the MSPs love a c i learning because they have a team in some cases, teams of hundreds of techs who are going to go out in the field, help get networks running and secure services for businesses [00:31:00] and so forth. And if you're an M S P, you know that the most important thing that team of yours needs to keep its chops up needs to be trained. But why give 'em training they hate because they ain't going to finish it and they ain't going to learn it when you can give 'em team training, they enjoy, they're entertained by short format content from a c i learning 7,200 hours of UpToDate on demand content.

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You love it because they're becoming more valuable. They're advancing their skills. A c i learning's over 80% completion [00:32:30] rate, that's 50% higher than the other guys. The industry average means that people who take these courses from a C l learning love them. They complete 'em because they're entertained and informed. They know there's value here and they enjoy it because they're learning from people who have the same passion they do for this stuff, for this content. Oh, and MSPs love the practice labs, not just for practicing the skills they're learning in class, but because they can also use those to test and deploy new [00:33:00] apps and updates before actually compromising the live system they're working on. MSPs also love the, and everybody loves the A C I practice tests, as you probably know, I certainly experienced this when I was a youngin. If you can practice the tests before you actually take the tests, I did this with the SATs, you're going to do much better because you're familiar with the format, you're comfortable and you have the confidence to know, yeah, I know this stuff.

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Acis Practice Exams let you take the [00:33:30] tests again and again until you really know you're ready to sit for the exam. C i learning's New Insights. This is a great tool, this insights tool, you can actually assign it to your team and it'll identify their weaknesses. It provides you management and individuals with assessments that are so valuable. It assists in professional development planning. Know which courses to take, where you need to shore up some expertise in certain areas, that kind of thing. Identify skill gaps. [00:34:00] It lets you personalize your training to protect your business. Insights is the name of that tool. It's really, really cool. A C i Learning provides you with a personal account manager so that you know you're not wasting anyone's time. Your account manager will help work with you to ensure your team only focuses on the skills that matter to your organization.

(00:34:20):
So that's where you don't have to do that redundant training. You don't need it. And also by the way, a C I learning is I S O certified. So you know you're getting world-class training, [00:34:30] the training you and your team deserve. It is fantastic. Keep your team's IT skills current visit go dot ACI learning.com/twit. Twit listeners will receive at least 20% off and as much as 65% off the IT Pro enterprise solution plan discount depends of course on the size of your team. So best thing to do, visit go dot ACI learning.com/twit, fill out the form and get a exact quote tailored to your needs. Go. [00:35:00] But at least 20% off as much as 65% off go dot aci learning.com/twit. We thank 'em so much for their support. They sponsored the studio. They make it possible to do Windows Weekly with these two, these crazy clowns. Paul, I talking you about something else. I hate you young and thro. I hate young people. Write you Darn kids. You kids. It really isn't like that. Alright, let's [00:35:30] talk about the seasons because you started and I want to talk about that. So spring is developer season, right? We have

Paul Thurrott (00:35:37):
Google io, we have Microsoft Build, and we have Apple, WW d c. And then the fall is a new hardware season. Yay. And there's several events to keep your eye on, one of which is happening in just a few days, which is I f a. This is the annual event held in Berlin. This is where the PC makers, this is other stuff that goes on, but from our perspective, this is where PC makers announce new PCs [00:36:00] for the holiday season. Intel will have their 14th gen Intel core chip sets out for desktops, not for mobile. That happens in the early next year. And the thing to look for here, of course, is that thing we've been talking about all year, which is NPUs or whatever they call them, right? Neural processing units or AI engines or whatever you want to say. And lots of talk about ai.

(00:36:22):
We've already seen a peak at this. When Lenovo announced their earnings a week or two ago, they were talking about future growth and they were saying AI is going to be [00:36:30] the driver of this stuff. And I think we were going to talk a little bit about, yeah, we are about some PC market share, not market share, just PC sales and yada yada yada. So yes, this is one of the growth trajectories for PCs, particularly in the commercial space. So there's that. That's the first one. Apple of course is having their annual, your iPhone event, September, September 12th. Well who caress? Microsoft is having a special event as we know on September 21 in New York [00:37:00] City. I am going to this, I'm very excited. It's a live event. This will be my first in-person Microsoft event since November, 2019 if you can believe that. Woohoo. It's been almost, I know saying that out loud, it's like it can't be, that can't be right.

Leo Laporte (00:37:13):
I think it's going to be a big deal. I saw the invitation and it's like Satcha Nadela is going to speak and I think this is going to be a big thing, is this Windows toilet.

Paul Thurrott (00:37:22):
So this is the thing. So when I first saw a mention of this, it was on Twitter and it was a headline that said it's going to be a surface event. And I'm like, that's [00:37:30] interesting. And then I looked at an email and I had an invitation. It didn't say anything about Surface. And I thought, okay, and someone must know something. I accept that it's going to be surface slash Windows. And we talked about this bit. I'm sure they're going to mention ai. Well, they've sent a second invite and this one had a little more ity

Leo Laporte (00:37:50):
Specificity.

Paul Thurrott (00:37:51):
And that is, this event is about Microsoft 365 surface windows Bing and more AI specific. So Surface is part of it, but it's only [00:38:00] a minor. You're saying

Leo Laporte (00:38:00):
Copilot? Oh,

Paul Thurrott (00:38:02):
I'm thinking copilot. I'm thinking NPUs, right? We talked about this notion that future surfaces, especially the high-end premium versions will have NPUs, right? So I was already interested in this and now I guess I'm even more interested. So does this mean Windows copilot won't be just the junk we saw this year? It'll be more impressive. I don't know. Does it mean we're going to hear anything about Windows 12? I don't know. I don't know. So we'll see. They're not going to live stream [00:38:30] it unfortunately.

Leo Laporte (00:38:32):
Little nuts. Yeah, we were really looking forward to

Paul Thurrott (00:38:35):
Covering this. Yeah, I'm surprised by that. Honestly, I've been to events like this. I'm sure they will eventually broadcast the event part of it, but a big chunk of it's going to be some big room you walk around from table to table and talk to different groups and get demos and do things like that. So we'll see. That's on. It feels like they're missing an opportunity to get some buzz. [00:39:00] Yeah, so I think it's because it's live. I think they're still trying to, well Richard knows this better than anybody. Richard's done a lot of behind the scenes stuff with Microsoft events and better than anybody just explain the situation there. I think a lot of people there just aren't used to doing this anymore

Richard Campbell (00:39:20):
As

Paul Thurrott (00:39:20):
Much as you can.

Richard Campbell (00:39:22):
I mean basically they got out of the live production business for three years and so not only did the folks who liked doing live production [00:39:30] go do something else, but just a natural turnover left

Paul Thurrott (00:39:35):
Only. It's like institutional memory no longer exists. How do we do this? And then

Richard Campbell (00:39:39):
Normally that happens anyway. But normally we're educating them. It's been normal for me for more than a decade, maybe close to 20 years to be in on the campus almost every month. And inevitably at least once each month I am talking to someone. Well, this is a podcast. This is how an M V P works. [00:40:00] You have new people coming in all the time and you're having those conversations and that didn't happen for three years.

Paul Thurrott (00:40:05):
So now everyone's gone. It's not like we lose one bob every month. We've lost everybody. I'm just guessing.

Richard Campbell (00:40:13):
Turned over completely mean I'm enjoying it. But you are starting from scratch. You're dabbing very sense. So when you say influencer, what do you mean? What does a live event mean to you? Now that's [00:40:30] the scope of things and the expectations of leadership are really interesting. I've had some conversation, okay, well we want to do hybrid because we can't fit 30,000 people into the Seattle Convention Center, so I need at least 30,000 watching. And I'm like, are you counting 4,000 people in a room alongside 26,000 people online as the same thing?

Paul Thurrott (00:40:55):
Really? Yeah, it's not. Yeah,

Richard Campbell (00:40:56):
Exactly. It's not even close to the same thing. [00:41:00] Well, the other part is to build a room that can hold 4,000 people and then also stream well is a too common

Paul Thurrott (00:41:08):
Enough.

Richard Campbell (00:41:09):
The equipment you need to make that room work is expensive.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:12):
I mean this is just a, well, that's why Apple built their own event space, right?

Richard Campbell (00:41:17):
Well inevitably

Paul Thurrott (00:41:18):
And they use effectively,

Richard Campbell (00:41:20):
If you think of all those buildings that Microsoft just built on campus that they started before, it's repurpose them into a streaming space. You

Paul Thurrott (00:41:28):
Might as well have or turn them into apartments. [00:41:30] We probably need those too. The download numbers

Leo Laporte (00:41:32):
For the Microsoft event last year were the largest of all the events we did Bigger than Apple. Sure.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:39):
You

Leo Laporte (00:41:39):
Want to see this? I'm not sure which one just Lisa was telling

Paul Thurrott (00:41:42):
Me they probably build Interesting.

Richard Campbell (00:41:43):
Yeah, I just wondered. They like the commentary we're laying on top of it because I think they really struggle with context extend spend our time on on these events. Well one with you guys,

Leo Laporte (00:41:56):
Apple's very good at distilling it down. They know really the big audience for [00:42:00] all Apple events is it's

Richard Campbell (00:42:01):
Selling the

Leo Laporte (00:42:01):
Consumers. They're selling a consult. But Microsoft and Satya especially tend to be a little more generic and do need some contextualization. We really rely on you guys because you can explain what it means. And I think that that's probably why you're right.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:19):
Yeah. I mean I assume I shouldn't find out. I assume we can sort of tweet about it or whatever at the, I don't know. We'll see. I mean obviously what people are going to write about it and [00:42:30] we can't record anything. Maybe this might suggest some future leaning stuff where things might not go and maybe they don't want that happening live

Richard Campbell (00:42:40):
Mean, but it's a surface event. So this is pen.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:43):
No, but it's not. No, it's not it'ss. Actually an AI event spans Microsoft

Richard Campbell (00:42:48):
That happens to span hardware.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:50):
Well no, and I think that's the N P U bit. I don't think they're a big part of it. They're just part of it.

Richard Campbell (00:42:55):
So I wonder if this is Kevin Scott.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:58):
I don't

Richard Campbell (00:42:59):
Office [00:43:00] as C T O and not an events guy like this. Not is

Paul Thurrott (00:43:05):
Thing. I mean they did a B WHO

Richard Campbell (00:43:06):
Event. We're not going to stream this. That's fascinating to me because the events team has been stream only for years for this whole pandemic period. They didn't want to do an in person event. I don't know

Paul Thurrott (00:43:19):
What to tell you.

Richard Campbell (00:43:21):
I'm abundantly aware that there are forces out of Microsoft that where some folks are like, we just want to be online and folks, we just want to be in person. I'm just amazed that the manifestation [00:43:30] of this comes in September 21st.

Paul Thurrott (00:43:33):
I think the answer is always hybrid. No. And I don't understand not doing that.

Richard Campbell (00:43:37):
Yes. And it is like where do you prioritize?

Paul Thurrott (00:43:41):
And actually I should say to your point, and if you can only do one for some reason, that one is streamed. It's not with a small group of people in

Richard Campbell (00:43:49):
A row. I'm with you. But I think streamed events are better when there's an audience. People have to make that stream and to have people in the room watching them and reacting [00:44:00] to them makes them better.

Paul Thurrott (00:44:02):
I agree.

Richard Campbell (00:44:02):
And so you kind of got to do both.

Paul Thurrott (00:44:05):
I mean you'll see it eventually, but I think what you'll see is the live stage stuff and not the whatever they call it as you walk around and get those experience. I don't know.

Richard Campbell (00:44:17):
Yeah. What's the format That makes sense. And I think back to the old, you remember the old Connect events? It's been a few years.

Paul Thurrott (00:44:23):
Yeah, I do.

Richard Campbell (00:44:24):
They were in New York and they were small. There was only a few hundred people in the audience. It was enough to make [00:44:30] the speaker,

Paul Thurrott (00:44:32):
Just so people understand what you're talking, what he's saying is connect, not connect. And it was connect with the parentheses behind it. And this was an IT pro. I guess it was some dev too, a little bit maybe kind of dev. Yeah, a

Richard Campbell (00:44:44):
Lot of open web stuff they talked

Paul Thurrott (00:44:46):
About there. It was always after Ignite, which was weird. You would've thought it would've been right between Build and Ignite in the middle of the year, but it wasn't was in December usually. I think one of the many videos I chose not [00:45:00] to put on my YouTube channel was a connect briefing that somebody leaked me that they had provided to the MVPs ahead of the show. And I was like, this one's maybe a little too much. But yeah, there was a good little show.

Richard Campbell (00:45:14):
They get embargoed briefing books a little

Paul Thurrott (00:45:16):
Early. Yeah. Yeah. This was an actual video. It was probably, it was a webinar. They walked through stuff and Okay. Sorry, a little off track there. So Google is next. Google will announce Pixel eight series [00:45:30] on October four in New York City. They just announced that today related to this, they just killed the Pixel Pass subscription, which I think says a lot about the rise in cost of subscription cloud services. Now this was number two on my list of things you probably have never heard of. So everyone probably knows that Apple has something called the Apple one subscriptions. This is three tiers of different subscription bundles that you can get for different prices per month. Two years ago, Google announced one, a similar thing, but [00:46:00] one tier called Pixel Pass. The only difference was that you could get a different pixel funnel like a pro or non-pro 45 to $55 per month.

(00:46:09):
It was a good deal if you wanted all those services. Most people didn't. YouTube premium YouTube Music Premium Google Pay plus Google Pay Pass, which I believe was a game subscription service preferred care, which is a warranty thing for the phone. I think these things have gotten so expensive they can't do this. They would've to rise [00:46:30] the prices bundle. Yep. Too much. Wow. Yeah, which is kind of interesting. So as far as pixel hardware goes, pixelate Pixelate Pro, I don't know, I'm sure there's going to be other stuff. Pixel Watch two has been rumored probably. And then, I don't know, maybe there'll be new Pixel, but I have no idea what they're going to do. But also not really completely on Target here. And then this isn't really this fall obviously, but CSS 2024 is in January. And the reason I mentioned that is that [00:47:00] by that point we will see PC makers announcing new laptops and other portable computers based on the 14th gen Intel mobile chip set. And those are the ones that are supposed to have this AI engine as Intel calls it, the M P U. So I'm curious, with I F A happening Microsoft doing an AI push, if we're not going to see some early stuff, we'll see. I don't know. So between I F A and css, I think this is our window for we're

Richard Campbell (00:47:26):
Really staring the N P U in the face, right? If not now, then [00:47:30] when

Paul Thurrott (00:47:31):
And if not us, who or something, somebody's got to build it. I dunno. So those are your events. We're entering the season. It's exciting.

Richard Campbell (00:47:41):
Now would you actually go to css Paul? That's a lot of people.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:44):
Nope. Nope. Not doing it. Now, if Microsoft said to me, Hey, and this hasn't happened in a while and I'm not good buddies with the guy running the division anymore, but I want you to come to have a meeting, I would do that. But as far as going to the CSS floor and walking [00:48:00] around, no, no way. I would do the little hotel HP Lenovo briefing things and not go to css maybe, but still. Yeah,

Richard Campbell (00:48:09):
And I've done a few CSS over the years, but I can't imagine Microsoft engaging all this in the days of the Microsoft c E O. Having the primary keynote at c e s there past,

Paul Thurrott (00:48:21):
I just posted that video, so whatever year it was at 2010 maybe that Bill Gates did his last c e s keynote

Richard Campbell (00:48:27):
Right before we send it over to Steve to

Paul Thurrott (00:48:30):
[00:48:30] Bomber who did it for four years, I think maybe five,

Richard Campbell (00:48:32):
Something like that. Then there was that weird one when Sinofsky did an announcement the day before, that was basically

Paul Thurrott (00:48:39):
Keynote. But what I had forgotten was the day that Bill Gates did that keynote, we knew it was going to be his last one beforehand, but he kind of came out and said, Hey, it's my last one also. I am stepping down from my day-to-day activities at Microsoft. Just kidding. But I'd forgotten that that was part of the thing. And it's very interesting to go back in time and look at the stuff that he announced. [00:49:00] It's like

Richard Campbell (00:49:00):
2008, that's pretty far back. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:49:03):
It was a while ago. It seems so antiquated compared to what we have today. But a lot more consumer stuff from Microsoft back then. I mean, they were really throwing stuff at the wall and nothing stuck, but they tried. And

Richard Campbell (00:49:14):
Microsoft spent a lot of production on those keynotes too.

Paul Thurrott (00:49:18):
Maybe they had his mother doing. They just, yeah, I do. I do think they're better. We don't want to do this anymore. We do people, the thing is, it's unnecessary because, well, what I think what they're bitter about is that Microsoft, [00:49:30] there's always been that yin and yang at Microsoft of consumer business. Business has always been the much bigger slice of the pie. And they always felt, there's an argument to made like, hey, every person who walks into a business is a human being. They have their own life at home. They do personal technology. It's all very obvious and everything. And they made a big, big consumer pushes over the years. It is fascinating how poorly that stuff fared and how good some of it was or how forward leaning a bunch of it was or how they worked.

Richard Campbell (00:49:58):
But this is such a grass is greener thing. [00:50:00] It's like, hey, we kill an enterprise. We got to do better with consumer. And everybody else is like, I'd love to kill it in enterprise.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:06):
So I mentioned this notion of what I call institutional memory. There's also institutional jealousy, right? This notion that Google is killing it in the cloud, not cloud compute, but in search and advertising really. And Apple is killing it with devices. And why can't we do that? Is

Richard Campbell (00:50:27):
Somebody else good at something? It's not

Paul Thurrott (00:50:29):
Right. [00:50:30] Well, it was almost like antitrust did the little thing where they poked them on the shoulder and they looked around and then Google and Apple raced ahead with their stuff and Microsoft was in no position to do what they did to Netscape and WordPress. Sorry, word. Perfect. And Lotus and every other company in earth back in the nineties. And here we are. And honestly, the world's a better place. And I say that as a Microsoft guy, I mean it really is. It's not perfect.

Richard Campbell (00:50:51):
But the consent decree has also been over since 2011.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:55):
I know. I know. But they never got their motion

Richard Campbell (00:50:56):
Back. It's been a long time. And then, I mean the big deal with the whole open [00:51:00] AI thing in Bing and so forth, it's the first time since the consent decree Microsoft's taken a lead on a technology.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:07):
That's right. Yeah. I like to see them taking big Betts. Activision Blizzard is not taking a lead on anything, but it is them just really throwing a lot of money at something and saying, Hey look, this is important. We want to be part of this.

Richard Campbell (00:51:19):
I'm sorry. A lot of money in context of what? That can be

Paul Thurrott (00:51:23):
A

Richard Campbell (00:51:23):
Lot of

Paul Thurrott (00:51:24):
Money. Yeah. Well, I mean, we don't actually

Richard Campbell (00:51:26):
Know the shape of the deal. Is that a cash deal or is it just a shares deal? [00:51:30] Because if it's a shares deal, they're going to get it all back in the market

Paul Thurrott (00:51:32):
Bump. I don't know off the top of my head. I think a big chunk of it is cash. There's a big cash payout. Well, it's cash.

Richard Campbell (00:51:38):
You have a lot

Paul Thurrott (00:51:38):
Of cash. Yeah, there's a lot of cash. They do. They can cover it. They can cover it. I know. Yeah. You're still like buying a Lexus with cash. I mean, good for you, but it's still a lot of money.

Richard Campbell (00:51:48):
Yeah. Billionaire. Billionaire. Pretty soon you're talking about real money.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:52):
Right? Nice. Okay, so that's that devices. Okay, so [00:52:00] how do I frame this one? This is interesting. So lately for some reason Microsoft has been releasing Windows Insider builds after the show. There was a long period of time where right before the show, the day of the show, the day before the show, there would be insider builds and they of course.

Richard Campbell (00:52:14):
Do you think they're watching Paul?

Paul Thurrott (00:52:15):
No, I don't. I mean, I do think some are maybe. But no, I don't think anyone important is decision makers.

Richard Campbell (00:52:21):
It's like, no, no. Wait till after Paul's talk then let's make 'em wrong.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:23):
Yeah, I'd like to think they were that bitter and petty. That would be great. It'd

Richard Campbell (00:52:26):
Make you happy. You

Paul Thurrott (00:52:27):
Were good. Yeah. I'm glad that you're a child too. That's good. [00:52:30] No, I don't believe that. But I mean that would be funny. That would true. So late last week, there was one build each to beta canary dev. I don't know why I ordered those like that, but the beta channel build that we got has a new home view in settings. So if you're doing this thing, testing 23 Street, you can go take a look at it. It's kind of a neat little dashboard thing. If you're familiar with the settings. It used to just dump you into the system view and now there's a new home view and it's just got [00:53:00] your recommended settings. You might want to do cloud storage. How's that looking? If you have Microsoft subscriptions like Microsoft 365 or Xbox Game Pass, whatever, you'll see that there a couple little, there's not much you can do to, in fact, there's nothing you can do to customize it, but it's kind of a neat little front end to settings. I think that's nice. Maybe you went there for a reason. You want to change some configuration. They put some of the common configurations up front, so that's nice. There's a slightly new UI for casts. You may recall that as Windows Key plus K, which now I'll never forget because [00:53:30] I brain farted on that last week. But no big deal there. And there's a new Windows backup app, which you may get excited about but don't because it is terrible and

Richard Campbell (00:53:42):
Also we'll get better.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:45):
Well, okay, so what this thing is is just a front end to four features that are built into Windows. I want to say three of technically we had all of these before. So one of them is folder backup [00:54:00] and this is the thing that goes through OneDrive. And you may recall I said some computers. I have three folders, I can backup up some. I have five on this computer, I have three. So there's an example of this thing not being up to date. So it's just a front end to the backup. It's really sync, but Microsoft calls it backup a folder, backup capabilities of OneDrive. There's something called apps. You look nice, this addresses the app. I can restore apps. Sounds great. No, you can't restore apps. So if you do a certain variant of the reset, this PC function, you can retain your store [00:54:30] apps, right?

(00:54:30):
These are mostly the modern apps, but really any apps that you acquired through the store, not desktop apps that you downloaded from the web, which I think for a lot of Windows users is still a big chunk of that stuff. We do. So what this adds is the ability to remember where you have pinned those apps. So if you're pinned to the front page of the start menu or to your task bar, this will actually, I believe I haven't tried it yet, but my understanding is it will bring those things back that that is new. Not a big deal, but it's new [00:55:00] Windows settings and preferences sync. You probably know that this featured debuted in Windows eight has been significantly detuned over time. It's worse in Windows 11 than it was in 10, which was worse in Windows eight. It is not any better in this release. And who Caress? And then what I don't quite understand, this is just built into Windows today but and tied into your M S A, your Microsoft account is credential sync and this is wifi network passwords and other passwords, whatever that means. So if you use [00:55:30] Microsoft Edge and God help you, I've told you not to, but if you do, those things are synced. Your passwords and all your other browser data are synced through your Microsoft account. So

Richard Campbell (00:55:39):
They're just trying to be a password manager now. Are they The new last

Paul Thurrott (00:55:42):
Pass.

Richard Campbell (00:55:43):
That's right.

Paul Thurrott (00:55:44):
Apple's

Leo Laporte (00:55:44):
Doing kind of the same thing. Chrome does that. I think everybody's kind of getting into that business probably recognizing that

Richard Campbell (00:55:51):
Normal we want everyone. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:55:53):
Exactly. Normal people are not using password managers still to this

Paul Thurrott (00:55:58):
Day and maybe its us [00:56:00] to do a good job. Yes, exactly. Exactly. I have no problem with that. I think that's fine. I agree. It's

Richard Campbell (00:56:04):
Fine. Getting people to use different passwords on every site is more important than maintaining an ecosystem of password

Paul Thurrott (00:56:09):
Managers.

Leo Laporte (00:56:10):
It's kind of the same reason that they do this backup thing too, right? Where you automatically are uploaded to OneDrive and stuff because they realize people are

Paul Thurrott (00:56:21):
So there's going to be more forcing of M S A and stuff on. We're going to talk about this in our future episode. I'm sort of working my way through this stuff, but this is all part of a Yes. So [00:56:30] the pros and cons of this are, yes, for most people it makes sense for this stuff to happen automatically they're going to be protected. That's necessary for normal people. On the other hand, I don't like Microsoft shoveling this down our throats. It's

Leo Laporte (00:56:42):
Annoying to advanced users. Exactly.

Paul Thurrott (00:56:44):
Yep. And if in Windows 11 22, 2, welcome away,

Leo Laporte (00:56:48):
Welcome to the Macintosh. Shut up

Paul Thurrott (00:56:51):
Leo. But

Leo Laporte (00:56:53):
That's always been Apple's policies. We know better than you. Exactly. Richard,

Paul Thurrott (00:56:58):
Right? Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were [00:57:00] saying, I'm saying no, I

Leo Laporte (00:57:00):
Didn't mean it's time to move. No, no, I meant if you want to be in a nanny operating system,

Paul Thurrott (00:57:06):
This is part of that. If you want to know how you don't know how to do your own work, you should be in the Apple landscape. Okay, so I don't always agree with Apple does either, but I also get the feeling that adults are manning the helm there and that something smartly happening. This is like an insane clown car of stupidity. I don't even, why would you trust the kids again? Isn't it these people, there's a title, so [00:57:30] I just this thing, look, I'm going to have to write about it. I'm going to have to use it. I'm have see what this is not solving the problem. And interestingly, and this is completely coincidental to this, someone on Twitter asked me a week or two ago, Hey is there something like, is it called not Timeline, time Machine. Time Machine. It's a Mac thing, time Machine and Mac. So Time Machine, if you look it up, this thing debuted a million years ago and the idea was that you Oh yeah, yeah. For what it was. Absolutely. You plug in external storage and it does these kind of [00:58:00] overtime backups. So it helps do things like

Leo Laporte (00:58:02):
It actually says when you plug in an external drive, you want to use this for time machine. Yeah. And you say yeah and you forget that you're backing up completely.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:09):
That's right. That's right. But of course this is the way we used to compute. You had a laptop, you had an external US B drive or fire driver, whatever you had back in that day. And to access this backup, you have to be there with the drive. You can't be out in the world and like, oh my God, the system went south. I believe you can use Time Machine to also do a full backup if you wanted. Bring the whole system there. That's [00:58:30] right.

Leo Laporte (00:58:30):
You can restore

Paul Thurrott (00:58:30):
From time machine. Yeah. So

Leo Laporte (00:58:33):
And incidentally, that's a perfect example of handholding users, but you can also not use it for a long time. I said, oh, don't use Time Machine, just use a regular backup. It's better for a variety of reasons. Now I just go, yeah, I'm going to have time machine on because it does versioning. You can go back and time on a version and do my own backup and

Paul Thurrott (00:58:56):
You're killing, you're cutting to the chase of my, sorry, my [00:59:00] point. No, no, it's fine. It's fine. Literally. So someone asked me, is there something like Time Machine on Windows? Now I assumed that this person not knowing what Time Machine was, it was not asking me that exact question. What they really meant was I want something that is modern that I could do backups and then bring everything back. And in Windows we used to have something called Windows backup. Ironic because this new thing is opened as backup and Windows backup was a image-based backup system that would do a slice and time backup of the entire system and you could restore it to [00:59:30] the entire system. Windows also has a tool that almost no one knows about. It's still there, it's buried. In fact, it's buried more in Windows 11 than it was in Windows 10 called file history, which is that file versioning thing.

(00:59:42):
And this is for local computers. You had to have a separate drive for this attached to the same computer. So much like timeline, time, machine, sorry. It would just do automatic version backup. So you had a document maybe at 113 versions of it you'd be like, oh, I deleted this major section. That's nice. I didn't even know that existed. Ui, [01:00:00] that's nice. No one does and the UI was terrible. It was desktop based, I want to say probably. No, it almost certainly debuted in Windows seven possibly visited, I think seven. It doesn't matter. Anyway, these things are both Windows backup gone, I believe Windows, I knew it was slated for

Leo Laporte (01:00:16):
Removal when they

Paul Thurrott (01:00:18):
Added Legacy, when they used name parentheses. Yeah, exactly. It was like the Windows seven for a while It was Windows seven backup. These tools are antiquated and like Time Machine, which still relies on [01:00:30] an external drive. It's just these are tools from a different era. So assuming what this person meant rather than what he asked, I answered the question differently, which is there's really three things you're looking at when you want to restore your computer. And there's a tip in here that I think is going to be valuable for everybody. You want to restore the windows. Windows, the operating system. You want to get Windows back to some factory fresh state. So this is built into the system. It's wonderful. It's been there since Windows eight. I don't know why I keep trying to guess when things debuted, but PC Restore, [01:01:00] it's called reset this PC these days. There's different options you can do with it, but it sits there and it keeps itself up to date. So if you've upgraded Windows, it'll upgrade you to the bring you back to the new version of Windows and you get that kind of factory fresh, whatever the thing is. Is that

Leo Laporte (01:01:16):
The reset my pc?

Paul Thurrott (01:01:18):
Yes, that's right. I like

Leo Laporte (01:01:20):
That. That was a nice thing. What we used imaging for in the early days was, oh, I'm going to make an image of this build so I know I can get back to

Paul Thurrott (01:01:27):
This point. So two problems. [01:01:30] One, your PC maker has almost certainly modified the image, right? So that means whatever crap where your PC maker has installed will be reinstalled. By the way, even if it isn't over a couple of reboots windows, you're still going to get some of it back. It's no way to completely erase that. But Windows infamously, I installs its own crap where now it's a nice little benefit of the operating system, right? You get crap where right out of the thanks so much. So here's the tip, if you don't want any of that, download a Windows, windows seven, [01:02:00] that would work too. Actually download a Windows 11 ISO and make your own install media and that won't give you the PC maker crap. Or you can just using reset this pc, have it download the version from the cloud that will achieve the same thing.

(01:02:16):
When you install it though and the first screen is set up, you get this thing that everyone just skips by. It says Language to install time and currency, format and keyboard or input method. So for us in the United States, that's English us and us. Across those three choices, [01:02:30] change the top one. Is it the top one to English world what? And then install what and what you'll get. Why would I want that? Because you will get no crap where and what you won't get into the advertising screens in the Windows setup experience, right? So it tries to sell you when Microsoft 365.

Leo Laporte (01:02:48):
So is it just in the language to install, not in the time and format. It is

Paul Thurrott (01:02:53):
The time. And I'm sorry, it's the time and currency format to English world. If you're in Europe exchange, the

Leo Laporte (01:02:58):
First one, I'm looking at your screenshot [01:03:00] by the way, this is a thro premium worth subscribing for just this article alone. So language to install, you leave English United States, but time and currency format you make English World. Is that right? The second one,

Paul Thurrott (01:03:17):
That's right. The second one. Now

Leo Laporte (01:03:19):
How interesting.

Paul Thurrott (01:03:20):
Here's what you're going to get. The out of box experience, as we call it, the light blue series of wizard screens will be much shorter. No advertising. They're not trying to sell you on anything. [01:03:30] They don't know how to sell you because English world is not a place. So that's fun. The downside to this is when you get into the Windows desktop, your start menu is going to be almost completely empty. There's not going to be almost anything there.

Leo Laporte (01:03:44):
Be French, I'm okay, right?

Paul Thurrott (01:03:47):
Yeah. The thing is all the apps are still there. If you go into all apps that list, but this

Leo Laporte (01:03:52):
Is what I complete, then I can put what I

Paul Thurrott (01:03:54):
Want. I think this is what a lot of people want. Now, once you do get to the desktop, first thing you should do, by the way, go into settings, [01:04:00] navigate to time, language, set it back to us or wherever you are, US English in my case, right? Be sure to do that. So that's one. That's the oss, right? You want the OSS as clean as possible. One of the problems with an image-based backup is you're only as good as the backup mention.

Leo Laporte (01:04:15):
You say you're going to get an error when you do this, right?

Paul Thurrott (01:04:18):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:04:19):
So just ignore that. Just say Skip.

Paul Thurrott (01:04:22):
It's like you can try again or skip. Skip. It's a skip it.

Leo Laporte (01:04:25):
Something went wrong. Ooh, b e

Paul Thurrott (01:04:28):
I would say something [01:04:30] went right. I don't

Leo Laporte (01:04:35):
Know how to sell you stuff. Look at this bog pristine Start menu. There's nothing in it.

Paul Thurrott (01:04:42):
Alrighty, so that's one of three. So Os there you go. There's your oss, right? There's one thing built into Windows, but you can make it a little bit better. It's up to you can do whatever you want. A couple of months ago I wrote a big article about OneDrive, Filey, this folder backup. By the

Leo Laporte (01:04:55):
Way, I'm sure Microsoft's going to fix this now that you've mentioned it.

Paul Thurrott (01:04:59):
Maybe, [01:05:00] sorry. I feel very strongly that anyone working with a computer, you could be on a Mac, Linux, I don't care what it is. Every document you work in, every file related like a document, like file should be synced to the cloud. Because if you wake up one day and turn on the computer, nothing happens. You're not going to lose any of it. It's all synced in the cloud, right? That's right. Windows backup is kind of acknowledging this. They're trying to push people to using their folders. I don't happen to do that myself. I think a lot of power users might [01:05:30] have their own ideas what they want to do, but however, whatever system you use, if you want to use the thing built into Windows with the folder backup or you want to do your own thing, just make sure that you're not a statistic.

(01:05:40):
That don't be that guy who gets the backup religion after you lose something, right? So use OneDrive or use Dropbox, use whatever you want. I don't care, but I use OneDrive. It's built in and I pay for it. So that's good. But the third part of it is, and this is the incomplete one, is applications, right? We've talked a lot about the Windows package manager, which is Win get and there's a graphical front end called [01:06:00] Win Get UI that you could also use. It automates updating the apps. That's important too, but win get or Wing Get UI can help you install all of the apps you need using a script that just bulk installs 'em all one after the other. It's beautiful. The incomplete bit is it doesn't do settings. Configuration sync. So what I mean by that, and this is the thing Richard, remember maybe I was asking about this a week or two ago. When you talk to the person behind Chocolatey, which is because I was kind of looking for something at that point, [01:06:30] you'll have to go into each app one at a time and just kind of sign in or do whatever. It's it's

Leo Laporte (01:06:35):
Specific to the app. There's

Paul Thurrott (01:06:36):
Really no way around that with an image-based backup, obviously you'd get everything back. But the thing is this is a clean install of Windows. It's a clean install of these apps and then it's a fresh copy of your most recent data blasted down whatever part you want sync. You don't have to sync all of it by the way, keep it in the cloud, but sync part of it, which is what I do. It's not perfect. It's [01:07:00] not exactly time machine, it's not exactly Windows image backup. But these are all modern solutions. These are all cloud-based solutions by the way. And this whole process from start to end for me is about an hour. Wow. Yeah. That's not bad. It's not bad at all. I use,

Leo Laporte (01:07:19):
We have

Paul Thurrott (01:07:19):
A logo. I

Leo Laporte (01:07:20):
Just want to say we have a logo. No. For this particular segment of this show, I

Paul Thurrott (01:07:28):
Don't even remember what I said anymore,

Leo Laporte (01:07:29):
But [01:07:30] in fact, well in fact Richard said, oh, that's the title, the clown Car of Stupidity and here it is, Microsoft Clown Show Corner. Welcome.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:42):
Sure. And that just drives into a tree basically.

Leo Laporte (01:07:47):
No, this is good. It is a little more elaborate

Paul Thurrott (01:07:50):
Frankly. It is.

Leo Laporte (01:07:52):
I write all of my oss, I have, it's a notion actually a list of things I do to set it up and it takes a while. I have to say [01:08:00] a package manager though is the key

Paul Thurrott (01:08:03):
And

Leo Laporte (01:08:03):
On Linux and Mac partly it doesn't come. It's not native on the Mac. You have to use a third party tool on Linux though not only does a package manager keep track of what you've installed, it updates it automatically. Does win get do that too. Can I run Win, get periodically and get the latest versions

Paul Thurrott (01:08:18):
Of those apps? Yeah. Alright, let's talk through that. So I, in previous shows, talked about Win get. I talked about Windall if you will. App, which is a website [01:08:30] that where you can generate the script so that you go to that site and you search for every single app you use and it will generate a script. You'll add it to the queue, add it to the queue, and it generates a script and save that to your computer, save it in OneDrive. That's the first thing you're going to sync right? When you install it. Win get will not automatically keep it up to date, but you can of course run win, get from the command line to do that. But instead of doing that, use an app called Win Get ui that does automate the process Nice of updating those apps. [01:09:00] Yeah, and by the way, you could use that app I believe, I don't think I've done it this way, but you could just start with that app and do the same thing I just described, but just use that app. It's kind of ster. I like the script.

Leo Laporte (01:09:11):
This was solved like 40 years ago with ux. I've finally gotten around to it on Windows. You're

Richard Campbell (01:09:18):
Still fighting with the manifest part,

Leo Laporte (01:09:20):
Right? Yeah. That's really

Richard Campbell (01:09:22):
How does an app describe to an installer, here's

Paul Thurrott (01:09:25):
What I need. There's also this notion that when get, I know there are critics of [01:09:30] the Windows, the Microsoft store, but I always prefer to get the, well no, that's not true. I often prefer to get the Microsoft store version of an app. If you were using Firefox for example, I would actually get the web version because it has a couple of features that are not in the package store version. But if you're paying for an app, for example, Photoshop Elements or I also pay for Affinity photo. This is the most liberal license imaginable. You don't have any limits on how many PCs you can install it, use it on. It's wonderful. So [01:10:00] it's something you can safely blast on a PCs and not worry about when install, sorry, wind Get, which is the Windows package manager works with two repositories, one of which is the store, one of which is just their win get repository.

(01:10:15):
You can choose which version of an app if it's in both places to use and that might be something you need to think about and know about. I found that, for example, installed Brave Manually for some reason when I install it through the, I don't [01:10:30] think it's the store, it must be the Win gets repository, it gets out of date and won't update on some cases. There's something weird about it, so I just don't do that one. Maybe it's fine now and I just haven't noticed, but this is something you'll need to play with. You may find with Win Get ui for example, some apps it will say, Hey, you have an update, do you want to install it? You say yes and it's like can't do it. There's certain apps for some reason that just don't work well. In those cases you can go to the command line and just update it that way or just go to the app and update it that way. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:10:59):
It's funny, you should have [01:11:00] mentioned the Manifest because there's actually a podcast about package management called the Manifest. Really? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:07):
Okay. Nice.

Leo Laporte (01:11:09):
And to be fair, while Linux did get package really early on in year two, partly that was because of library dependency issues that were hairballs that were really a nightmare keeping track of what this one uses, this library, this and keeping track of all that. So it did solve a real problem.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:29):
I see this [01:11:30] as a natural evolution of the path that Microsoft went down with DUIs and then a later understanding that maybe some things are better off, especially in the admin space being command lines and tech space and early version being, I don't know, exchange 2003 maybe where they said we're or seven, whichever version we're rewriting this from scratch. It's going to be all based in, it can't be PowerShell, is it PowerShell? I think all the commands were PowerShell and the UI is just a G I front end to all of those [01:12:00] commands. There is no super that was

Richard Campbell (01:12:01):
In the IS S administrator i S six.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:04):
That's good idea. Shell that

Richard Campbell (01:12:06):
Generated PowerShell. But everything was controlled by a

Paul Thurrott (01:12:08):
Powers show and Server core was part of this thinking. You got to get past, one of the whole points of NT back in the day was to kind of beat Unix and at the time we really felt like the G U I was a big part of that and it did make Windows server more approachable, right? I mean we can make that argument got it into small businesses in the nineties, et cetera. But as these things mature, there's some goodness to be had [01:12:30] if you go back to kind of what we'll call the old way of doing things, whatever. So anyway, what I would like to see is a Windows backup app like the one Microsoft just put out instead of that piece of junk that was a front end to the three things I described. Right? Right there. Good save app configuration in the state. This is something could, this is a problem Microsoft could solve.

Leo Laporte (01:12:51):
I think part of it is because Microsoft has this kind of dual personality with regard to Windows. They still think there are home users [01:13:00] and Well, I mean I know there are, I'm being facetious, but that's very, I mean this is something a admin or a business IT professional gets, understands, knows the need of and probably is cobbled something together anyway.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:15):
There's no reason this system can work for everybody because the G I front end would serve.

Leo Laporte (01:13:20):
Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:13:22):
The tech space command line interface would be good for those kinds of powers, but also be scriptable and automatable and that would be the whole point of it, right? And [01:13:30] anyway, we're slowly moving, we're getting there. So it's not, like I said, not perfect. It's not exactly what that person was asking for. It may not be exactly, I know there are people here who are like, oh, I don't know, I back up to an S or I do whatever you do. People do different things. But this is a very modern, like I say, cloud-centric way of doing those tasks and it really doesn't take that long

Leo Laporte (01:13:52):
And they don't by way have to be mutually exclusive. You can do of the above. I do.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:57):
Exactly. You could have, I'm sorry, [01:14:00] that was the point you made and I said you took it away from me and I forgot to say it. I'm sorry. That is the final point. That's absolutely true. So you could still use, I should say before I get to that file history, I mentioned earlier, file history is a local solution. OneDrive has file versioning too and it syncs everywhere. So you can get to old versions of your files from any computer. This is the point, don't lock it to a hard drive and make sure it's everywhere. That's the whole point. But [01:14:30] you don't trust it. It's really nice. Maybe you don't like it. You can do both and that's the point. Now of course, we don't have anything built in the windows that really is both, but you could use a third party backup utility, whatever it is. Maybe like I said, you own a nas. Maybe they have a PC backup.

Leo Laporte (01:14:43):
They do function. Most

Paul Thurrott (01:14:43):
Nasa, there's absolutely no reason you can't do both. So if you don't trust it or if you don't like it or you're not sure about it, keep doing what you're doing, give it a shot.

Leo Laporte (01:14:52):
This comes from the fact that you and probably Richard and I run many machines are constantly getting new machines that [01:15:00] we need to get into the same state as our high review.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:03):
At least a dozen computers a year. You just can't take the time. It needs to just be so they're an idiot lose.

Leo Laporte (01:15:11):
We have unique needs obviously.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:13):
No, I know, but

Leo Laporte (01:15:14):
This is good for everyone. Everybody could really benefit if you are not yet a member of Paul's premium version of throt.com, this is alone a reason to subscribe. Roll your own

Paul Thurrott (01:15:28):
Windows Time machine. Almost certainly I [01:15:30] will. I'm probably going to do a hands-on Windows episode about this exact topic

Leo Laporte (01:15:35):
That gives me a little opening

Paul Thurrott (01:15:38):
And I think I'm going to roll it into a discussion about this Windows backup thing because that that'll be the opening for that.

Leo Laporte (01:15:45):
That might be a good reason to subscribe to Club Twit as well. Seven bucks a month and you get ad free versions of all our shows. You get the Great Club Twit Discord where you'll see such fabulous things as Joe Esposito's [01:16:00] stickers,

Paul Thurrott (01:16:02):
Which

Leo Laporte (01:16:02):
Is very good at that. You also will get stuff like shows we don't put out in public. I don't want to put stuff behind a paywall. That's not the intent. It's just that we want to do things like hands-on windows and frankly, it's hard to get advertisers to support it, but since the club supports it, they pay for it, so they get access to it. And we put a few of these, maybe that'll be one of them, into the public via YouTube. I think this is going to be important. So [01:16:30] if you want hands on Windows, hands on Mac tit Linux show, if you want all our special events, if you want add free versions of the shows and you want Paul Otz Clown Show Corner, which might be a better name for hands on Windows twit tv slash club twit, that's the place to go. You are listening to Windows Weekly with Paul Throt and Richard Campbell. Alright, now that was kind of a great little digression from [01:17:00] the middle of it

Paul Thurrott (01:17:01):
Sure was, yes. Something

Leo Laporte (01:17:02):
Larger, but I'm glad you did it. That was really, really good. I thank you.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:06):
Yeah. Oh right. Oh yeah. I almost skipped over one myself. So Windows copilot almost certainly coming in Windows 11 version two, that's going to be the big event, right? It's all going to be, I don't think that's going to be the big event, but it's probably be part of it. It'll be part of it. It's an AI event, right? September 21st. Yeah, so using Windows copilot as an individual. [01:17:30] I can say it's unimpressive. It is most, but not, I think we've all tired of it by now, right? Like, oh, that

Richard Campbell (01:17:37):
Was fun. Yeah. You see the numbers reflect that.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:39):
Yeah. I don't think that someone who can't imagine you're a normal person, like a non-technical person, and you cannot figure out how to put dark mode on, right? If you can't figure that out, I don't see you bringing up a copilot and typing out, typing to on dark mode. I just don't see it happening. I mean, maybe I'm wrong. Prove on me I see ai, [01:18:00] how to do it with typing. That's how I do things, right? I'm that or can you make me

Richard Campbell (01:18:08):
For that to become voice too?

Paul Thurrott (01:18:10):
Yeah. Which by the way was something that came up in your copilot conversation on runner's radio, which is, and you walked into something that I believe is true will be true, which is today we talk about typing back and forth is a text and it's chat. I actually think the future of this, and I think you sort of said this in some ways, would be the person talking [01:18:30] to the computer and the computer writing it out and optionally saying it too, of course. But I actually think that mixture of interaction is a better one than just typing

Richard Campbell (01:18:41):
Well and more saying the point of that being, there are phrases you can say that represent many clicks and moves and so forth that can be automated fairly well. They make this spreadsheet into a PowerPoint deck.

Paul Thurrott (01:18:54):
Yes.

Richard Campbell (01:18:56):
The simplest thing in the world to say and into the applied version of it. [01:19:00] It's like that's a lot of work. It's a bunch of steps.

Paul Thurrott (01:19:03):
The binging chat stuff reminds me of the early Infocom games, the Zork and adventure and all that stuff. It's like you were in a

Richard Campbell (01:19:10):
Room of twisty passages all alike.

Paul Thurrott (01:19:13):
Yeah. Could you turn on dark mode? And then the problem was these things had a parser and if you didn't say it exactly right, you weren't going to turn left and walk down the path. It would just say no. But there was a slight turn of phrase that would get you there. And this was true of later graphical games like [01:19:30] the Sierra Games, like Kings Quest and those games. Same problem. AI is exactly the same thing, honestly. It's just

Richard Campbell (01:19:35):
A large language bottles.

Paul Thurrott (01:19:37):
Yep. It's right. It's not just a little table of things. It's a giant thing. But you still run into that issue. I think people are going to spend a lot of time refining a prompt. You'll do. In other words, I want to create an image. I always use a purple unit, unicorn flying. There's space and you get some stuff and you're like, okay, that's close. It's not exactly what I wanted. And then you refine [01:20:00] it, you add some things to it, you do it again, right? I think this is going to be, in the short term, a very typical interaction. One of the things that happened with voice assistance, which those that survive will turn into these AI things, right, is they started being able to have conversations like you would ask it to do a thing and it would say, yes, blah, blah. And they say, and now, and you didn't have to do the prompt phrase. You didn't have to remind them of the context. You could just continue down this path. You're

Richard Campbell (01:20:25):
Describing the thing that chat G B T doesn't do. You request something of chat [01:20:30] G B T, it never asks you a question for clarification, it just

Paul Thurrott (01:20:32):
Tries to do it. That's right. And you can't really do a follow up. All you can do is repeat what you said, but add more information. And I think over time, this is how this is going to develop. But until it does, it's easier to do that with voice. I think. Unless it's complex. I don't know, you can copy and paste, but anywho, so to date, windows copilot to me has been silly. But there is something called the binging Che Enterprise service, which is available today, excuse me, I'm getting all excited. It's available today [01:21:00] from Microsoft 365 customers, commercial customers I should say. It's also available through the Edge sidebar if you use that browser, God damn you. And it includes all those backend data protection services, commercial enterprises and governments, et cetera would expect. So I've not tried it, but this may be a more useful step up than the basic junk that appears in Windows copilot. [01:21:30] So they're already testing that now. I think you have to be in the dev channel for right now. We will come to the beta channel because Windows copilot is in the beta channel too. At

Richard Campbell (01:21:36):
The same time, I still think about what Stevie said at Build and just this whole idea that Windows is in the perfect context for more language-based user interface than just about anybody. If they can get to a point where they're leveraging Windows connection to third party applications to also control them if they can get Adobe to play ball so that you could use Windows copilot that Command [01:22:00] P

Paul Thurrott (01:22:01):
Creation, I feel like that was part of this vision. I think

Richard Campbell (01:22:04):
It was part of the speech. I just don't see how they get

Paul Thurrott (01:22:07):
There.

Richard Campbell (01:22:09):
Unfortunately, on the upside of an M 365 copilot like we talked to with Carolina was, it's all controlled by Microsoft

Paul Thurrott (01:22:15):
Their own. I made this guest to Raphael, Brad, I don't remember, but about the event, which was I sort of blurted out something about developer and they're like, well, they're not going to advance, and I don't say developer set for this event. And I said, well, hold on a second. What they might announce is some capability [01:22:30] that's coming later and then Ignite happens in November, and then they release the developer APIs for that. They're the first versions or whatever. In other words, the Microsoft graph makes sense when you have APIs that a third party can use to access this in their own solutions. These AI things make sense for Windows UIs and Microsoft 365 app UIs. But honestly, you want to give third party developers the ability to link into this stuff too. This is how Adobe might get into it. By the way. It's how Adobe might use it for something else of their own creation. Although Adobe seems to be [01:23:00] going down their own path, but whatever. So I don't know anything about event other than what I've said. I'm not revealing anything or I'm not trying not to reveal anything. I don't know. But I do think that this AI event will have some element of the future to your point, and I wouldn't be surprised if the implementation of those futures starts with some developer stuff at Ignite in November, just guessing. That's fair.

Richard Campbell (01:23:26):
Yeah. We need them. Developers are useful for some things.

Paul Thurrott (01:23:30):
[01:23:30] Well, until AI takes the job,

Leo Laporte (01:23:31):
As long as they're for 40, that's all I care

Paul Thurrott (01:23:34):
About. Thank you. I didn't want to point that out. I thought it was obvious, but yeah, you're right. I wish I had the energy of a 21 year old

Richard Campbell (01:23:45):
Youth is wasted on the young.

Paul Thurrott (01:23:46):
That's right. Exactly. I D C, like Gartner weighs in every quarter with their estimates of PC sales, PC and market share, all that kind of stuff. And for some reason, maybe because the future rarely [01:24:00] goes the way I D C says it's going to go, they also talk about the future, the rich history of predicting the future incorrectly. Maybe someone's listening to

Leo Laporte (01:24:11):
Watching, not this factoid perfectly.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:13):
Yeah, well, no, but by the way, they talked to all these companies and everything, but this is the company that predicted the year that Windows phone was going to overtake the iPhone, for example, right? God. So with that little asterisk in place, they've had to revise their estimates for this year [01:24:30] because, and this was not just them to be fair to I D C, everyone thought by the end of this year, this rebound, this post pandemic rebound would occur, and it is not happening. Lenovo talking. We had a

Richard Campbell (01:24:41):
Decline in PC sales before the pandemic

Paul Thurrott (01:24:44):
Too. We had a seven year drought of steady decline. The best year the PC market ever had was in 2011. They sold 344 million units after that. Seven straight years of decline rescued [01:25:00] by the pandemic, sort of. But people forget this 2019, it actually was a tiny bit of growth. It is sort of reverse plateaued, if you will, two years when gangbusters. What

Leo Laporte (01:25:11):
Drives it do you think? Is it a new version of Windows? Is it,

Paul Thurrott (01:25:16):
Okay, so obviously obvious,

Leo Laporte (01:25:19):
The pandemic's an outlier. I am not

Paul Thurrott (01:25:21):
Going to, yeah, forget the pandemic is, but what drove what happened before a couple things, right? iPhone happened in 27. The iPad happened in 2010, but the iPhone [01:25:30] was not available. Everyone in the world's 27 people forget this. It was only available in the US and only on at t, right? What happened over many years, it wasn't three, five years. It was many years was Apple brought the iPhone to many, many markets, many, many carriers. This is something that happened over time. This is how it wasn't

Leo Laporte (01:25:45):
Really the iPhone four that I think that iPhone really started to become a dominant platform.

Paul Thurrott (01:25:49):
IPhone four was I think the first version on Verizon, for example. So even within the United States, it was a while before we started. Exactly. Yeah. So that's the trailing factor. I think this [01:26:00] push to mobile and this notion that a pc, which in 2005, 2010, whatever was where most people did everything related to personal computing became this device that they only used for work-related productivity tasks that required a big screen and a keyboard. They were doing email, they were doing browsing, they were doing gaming, they were doing whatever social media on these mobile devices. And over time, the whole world filled up. Now everyone has a phone. Even in Third World Nations, there were people with smartphones basically, or low end smartphones. [01:26:30] There are people growing up now who will never use a PC because they can do everything, micro transactions, whatever, on these other devices. So I think that, well, no, I don't think One of the things I said during this time period was like, I'm going to be curious where this levels out, because people talk about the post PC world and what they think is apocalypse, it's going away. And that's not what that means. Even Steve Jobs probably would've admitted to this. There are always going to be PCs. The question is how many PCs, right? The question's going to be what percentage?

Richard Campbell (01:26:59):
Well, inevitably it's always [01:27:00] more.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:02):
So what we found, and I'd have to go look at my, I'm not going to be able to find the graph now, but if you look at the graph of how terrible things were for a while, it started in 2019. It went huge. 2021 was the best year the PC business has ever seen, except for 2010 through 2012, because of the pandemic. They literally sold everything they could sell. There was nothing left. There was component shortages. They couldn't catch up with demand. [01:27:30] They bought anything. People were buying Chromebooks. It looks like a computer.

Richard Campbell (01:27:35):
They just needed something that worked,

Paul Thurrott (01:27:36):
Right? I got to work. I'm home. I'm stuck. I can't go outside, I can't talk to anybody. I need a computer. So this kind of becomes the question again. And if I d c is right, and by the way, Lenovo, HP of both said very similar things, small rebound in 2024. So we are going to level off again, and we'll see what that looks like. We'll see where we are. [01:28:00] But you have to look to future growth. Where's the future growth going to come from? And I got to say 2024 to 25, there's a couple big things happening guys. One of them is Windows 10 is going out of support, and that's going to trigger a commercial PC upgrade cycle. And that's going to be very interesting. That's going to help the market a lot

Richard Campbell (01:28:20):
Mean I would push back and say, it's not that unlikely. They're going to extend that. The amount of companies committed to 10 is huge. Some are going to pay for the extended [01:28:30] support and some are just not.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:31):
You are 100% correct based on history and facts. But I'm going to say, I don't know. We'll see. We never

Richard Campbell (01:28:38):
Let that to get in the way.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:39):
I dunno why that has to work its way into this argument. We'll see. But AI is the other one right now, Lenovo, if you go back and look at their earnings announcement from this past quarter, their PC business is still the biggest part of their business. Like Apple, they try not to be a one product company. So they have this other stuff going on. Those things have seen whatever. [01:29:00] Those things, I don't even care, but they've seen enormous growth. They're doing fine. They're keeping the company in better shape than it would've been otherwise. But they look to the future and they can't talk to you specifically about it, but AI is going to drive these future workloads and future upgrade cycles,

Richard Campbell (01:29:14):
And I really see it as an alternative user interface. That's another way to get work done. You're just describing it.

Paul Thurrott (01:29:21):
Rather

Richard Campbell (01:29:22):
Than figuring out how the mouse works, figuring out how the toolbar works. The thing is, describe what your intended goal

Paul Thurrott (01:29:27):
Is. This hasn't always worked [01:29:30] out. I will point people to Windows eight and the new form factors that arrive with that. New hardware platforms like Windows rt, which ran on Nvidia arm hardware, and let me just look at the chart. Let's see. How did the thing, oh, that's when the downturn started. So that could be coincidental, but it's possible that Windows eight also played a factor that was a very disliked version of Windows. People were not fans. I had normal people that I knew who bought new computers, not technical, and said, so how do I put Windows seven on this thing? It's like, oh, you don't. [01:30:00] I mean, I'm sorry, but it's like, you've got to be kidding me. Now over time, they fixed it, right? I mean Windows 8 1 1 or whatever it was called. Eventually they got it back. It was a start menu, start button, start our task bar rather. Desktop widgets

Richard Campbell (01:30:12):
And slide outs and everything kind

Paul Thurrott (01:30:14):
Of option. We got there and then Windows 10, but we'll see. So I would say this combination of factors suggests that we've hit rock bottom, I guess this year and we'll see how we go. [01:30:30] So that's Windows.

Richard Campbell (01:30:35):
It was time for the 365.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:37):
Yeah, an hour and 40 minutes. Well, it's Windows Weekly. I mean, there you go. Fair enough. Alright. We didn't talk about this last week. I don't remember the timing of this, but Dropbox, which is the third party online storage service, announced that they were getting rid of their unlimited cloud storage plan.

(01:30:58):
Wow. I think this is [01:31:00] tied to the same thing that for the same reason Pixel pass thing that no one knows anything about or Netflix prices, the prices for this stuff, it's just expensive for them. People were abusing it, which is silly. What do you think people were going to do with a Unlimit storage? Of course they're going to put all their movie rips on there, whatever. But you go back and forth on this kind of thing. It's like unlimited wireless access to your carrier. What do you really use? Does anyone need unlimited? Really? We all have different needs and they all

Richard Campbell (01:31:27):
Come with asterisk anyway. That's right. It's like when we [01:31:30] say unlimited, we mean two terabytes, and after that we're coming

Paul Thurrott (01:31:33):
For you. And if you're T-Mobile, you have 18 tiers that all have the word unlimited in their names, and they all have different kinds of stories.

Richard Campbell (01:31:39):
They all have a list of limits.

Paul Thurrott (01:31:40):
Exactly. So Microsoft, I didn't actually know they did this, but one drive for business plan two was their unlimited storage plan and it is going away. So this is something you would add to a Microsoft 365 commercial account. [01:32:00] I think I'm right when I say all Microsoft 365 accounts on the commercial side, get one terabyte of OneDrive storage. I believe that's true. And now you can just subscribe to OneDrive for business plan one, which has been there too. It just is a standalone service for $5 per month for storage. Now can get, they don't call it Microsoft 365, but it's OneDrive for business, just one drive for business. So you're not even using Microsoft apps anymore, web or otherwise. [01:32:30] I don't know what they do for paid storage upgrades. Microsoft has gotten a little bit better about this on the consumer side. They used to not have anything by the way,

Richard Campbell (01:32:40):
But now they pitch it relentlessly, especially if you're close to that a hundred meg or a hundred gig limit.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:45):
I am within a hundred gigs of my one terabyte on my primary account over there because of all my, are you

Richard Campbell (01:32:50):
Waiting to get pitched? You kind of should fill it up to see if it says stuff you're already spending. You've got a terabyte. How mean are they For the spenders,

Paul Thurrott (01:32:59):
There's [01:33:00] a tip in here somewhere or an idea maybe, which is that I pay for Microsoft 365 family, which means I have six accounts that each have one terabyte of use of storage. And some of those, or most of those are used by people, but I think at least one's free. And I wonder if I could use that to archive stuff too, and no

Richard Campbell (01:33:19):
Kidding,

Paul Thurrott (01:33:20):
Lower the impact of my primary. I'll look into that. But anywho, Google does a better job with this where the, that's worth, if you are a Google Drive customer, I can't speak to the quality of the service, [01:33:30] but you can get a two terabyte tier. I don't remember where it goes from there, but they have various tiers. It's much simpler than I think on the Microsoft side.

Richard Campbell (01:33:38):
Yeah, pricing is hard.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:39):
Much better, I should say. And speaking of Google, remember back in the day when we were talking about AI and how it was going to cost a lot of money, and Richard and I think had both had heard different numbers from people and are actually the same number I should say, and then they finally came out and said, look, Microsoft 365 copilot, it's going to cost $30 per [01:34:00] user per month on top of whatever you're paying for the underlying account. A lot of people were like, oh, and look, we can have the conversation. We did. We had the conversation. A

Richard Campbell (01:34:09):
Nice stock price at the bump at the time.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:11):
Yep. Because as Richard, I think correctly explained at the time, this actually makes sense. I mean, it sounds like it doesn't, from my standpoint as an individual, I'm like, what are you talking about? 30 bucks per month? I don't, yeah,

Richard Campbell (01:34:22):
A dollar a day for performance improvement.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:25):
Yeah, well, or you allow one person to do the job of two [01:34:30] and you're spending 30 bucks a month and not a hundred grand a year or whatever. Whatever

Richard Campbell (01:34:34):
That got wrong.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:36):
So that's the math there. Not surprisingly people like, oh, coincidentally, no, it costs them the same too. Google, which had announced at Google IO back in May that they're generator of AI service for workspace, which is their version of Microsoft 365 this week, announced that it will cost wait for it $30 user per month on top of the,

Richard Campbell (01:34:59):
So Microsoft has anchored [01:35:00] the price that everybody has to

Paul Thurrott (01:35:00):
Run to. Now, I know the cynical will say, oh, Google priced app store fees, just like iTunes. This is what they do. It's like, yeah, this is what it costs. AI is expensive. These people aren't gouging anybody. This is AI is expensive.

Richard Campbell (01:35:17):
Yeah, it takes a lot.

Leo Laporte (01:35:18):
It is weird that it's exactly the same price as microsite.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:22):
Well, I mean, right now I think you're

Richard Campbell (01:35:23):
Going to see a lot more of that, right? They've anchored in a place where nothing bad happened. So now they're

Paul Thurrott (01:35:29):
A safe number now [01:35:30] and now others that want to do the same can charge the same,

Richard Campbell (01:35:32):
Right? Probably they're more than they thought they would get. Is that

Leo Laporte (01:35:35):
Kind really backhanded collusion? I mean, you're not supposed to set prices, but you're allowed, I guess to look at the competition's price and set yours accordingly, I guess.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:46):
But we can't prove they did that, right? I mean, right. I believe that this is the cost. This is where it kind of makes sense for them. I think it really is. I'm

Leo Laporte (01:35:53):
Sure there's a spreadsheet somewhere where they say, see, it all adds up to $29 and 97 cents.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:59):
Certainly [01:36:00] the staring,

Richard Campbell (01:36:00):
The number of users saying, are we going to get there for the costs?

Leo Laporte (01:36:04):
That's the other thing. I mean, it is. It's a supply demand question. Yeah. Maybe it costs you $30 to make it, but are people going to pay $30 to use it?

Paul Thurrott (01:36:14):
I don't know off the top of my head, and I suspect no one does, but maybe someone could look it up. How many paid seats there are for Microsoft 365 commercial? I want to say it's in the hundred something range. A hundred hundred something million range rather. Sorry. Yeah, something like that. [01:36:30] A hundred and whatever million. There are 10 million customers, users paying to use Workspace 10 million.

Leo Laporte (01:36:41):
Wow. That's not a huge number. That's small.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:43):
That's not a big number. If anything, we

Leo Laporte (01:36:45):
Use it. We're more

Paul Thurrott (01:36:46):
On Yeah, I do too. Honestly, it works great. That's,

Leo Laporte (01:36:51):
I'm not paying anybody for anybody to use duet. 30, 30 bucks a month.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:56):
No, no, no. But I think this speaks to that part of the market, [01:37:00] which is new businesses, small businesses, startups. If it

Leo Laporte (01:37:04):
Did something specifically that our business needs, I might do that. For instance, we are using Claude, which is Ros ai, and I don't know what we pay for it, but to do show notes for a podcast, Anthony Nielsen, who is our AI genius, has tuned the prompt so that it does really good show

Paul Thurrott (01:37:24):
Notes. I keep ruining Richard's end the book thing, but Richard will talk about this as well. He has other podcasts

Leo Laporte (01:37:30):
[01:37:30] And for me, 30 bucks for one person in the company who does this, or even if all the editors did it 150 bucks a month, that's worth it. That is worth it.

Richard Campbell (01:37:42):
If you don't have to get a lot very much benefit, it's a dollar

Leo Laporte (01:37:45):
A day. Right? The

Richard Campbell (01:37:47):
Thing is, it leads you to one shortcut if it takes one thing off your plate, anything like that, that always covered.

Leo Laporte (01:37:53):
But there's, there's also this intersection of the loss of interest in using Chad G B T for general purpose [01:38:00] stuff.

Paul Thurrott (01:38:00):
No, now you're paying for it for the things you need it for, right? Tool for the job.

Richard Campbell (01:38:04):
Let's get away from the existential conversations with software and into real

Leo Laporte (01:38:08):
What it do that I need done. Yeah. And is it cheaper than Human

Richard Campbell (01:38:12):
PowerPoint look better? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:38:13):
And

Richard Campbell (01:38:14):
Spreadsheet set up. Correct. I would

Paul Thurrott (01:38:15):
Say tied to this is this notion of the other side of the coin, which is the consumer side. And will ad supported binging chat or whatever make any sense, will chat G P T or Dolly, which I think [01:38:30] both have, or at least one of them has a paid tier. Will those things ever make sense as businesses or will they have to be sort of subsidized somehow by the other things that that company is doing? I don't know. Battle, it's going to be a while before AI is inexpensive enough to make sense as a at

Richard Campbell (01:38:47):
Supports service At the time, I'm sorry, we're in this race to figure out if the amount of infrastructure they've dedicated to making this thing work makes sense.

Paul Thurrott (01:38:54):
That's

Richard Campbell (01:38:54):
Wouldn't be surprised if stuff gets turned off. It's just a lost opportunity. Cost [01:39:00] purposing it in something else.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:02):
There are theories, I might call them conspiracy theories, that Microsoft is doing that in some places with Xbox Cloud gaming a service that does not make money, it's just uses a trailer service for games basically. Maybe we should turn that off. And we can't say that that's what they did, but people have seen things they weren't seeing a year ago, which is how come this thing's telling me it won't work? [01:39:30] Please try again later.

Richard Campbell (01:39:31):
Right?

Paul Thurrott (01:39:34):
Well, we'll see. And then you know what? I should have looked up these numbers, I apologize. But Nvidia announced their revenues the other day and you don't see these kind of figures much. Their profits went up 843%. That's no big deal. We see that sometimes at Amazon, plus or minus because of the nature of that business. But their revenues went up 101%, which means they doubled. And [01:40:00] you don't see that ever. So Nvidia, if we just go by, the earnings of the most recent quarter is now the biggest hardware company on earth. Now, before anyone says anything, I know that's not true, but by revenues, it is bigger than Intel, bigger than a m d, bigger than Qualcomm.

Richard Campbell (01:40:18):
And really for making one set of chips

Paul Thurrott (01:40:20):
And by making one set of chips that they did not plan to make, but rather they were a tiny little graphics card company for PCs and oh, what an interesting coincidence. [01:40:30] These GPUs work really well for AI and now the whole world needs us.

Richard Campbell (01:40:33):
Yeah. I don't know if they were a

Paul Thurrott (01:40:34):
Wonderful thing to fall

Richard Campbell (01:40:35):
Into. They were always a big player in the space,

Paul Thurrott (01:40:37):
But they were hundreds of millions of dollars. They were big. They were one of two players in that space for sure. They were big. Well, here, let's put this in perspective. Gaming, which is now its second biggest business, was 2.5 billion in revenues in the quarter. Wow. Data center, 10.32. [01:41:00] That business is up 171% year over year. I can't do the math on that. What is that, three and a half percent almost, or whatever. Yeah, I think it's actually, that is the math. So yeah, there you go. I mean, they would've been a $3 billion company there. Other businesses are in the hundreds of millions range. So call the rest of the company 3 billion, their data center business, the AI business, in other words, really Right, is three times the size of everything else they do. Yeah. It's powerful combined. Yep. Big. [01:41:30] So that's impressive. I saw that there. I get used to used to big numbers. So you report big tech earnings, you're like, yeah, whatever. Whatever. Billion. It's this

Richard Campbell (01:41:40):
Billion. Billionaire. Billionaire.

Paul Thurrott (01:41:43):
I was like, oh, maybe they're the third biggest now. No, they're the biggest interest.

Richard Campbell (01:41:49):
And with market cap to match. Right?

Paul Thurrott (01:41:51):
Crazy. Yeah, I know. Well, they tried to buy arm, remember? Yeah. What kind of a monopoly might that have turned into

Richard Campbell (01:41:59):
The kind [01:42:00] the F C T C pays attention

Paul Thurrott (01:42:01):
To? Exactly. And did. And they squashed it the way. Yeah. Yep. Alright. Where are we? Here's something I had hoped to see in a headline, and it's not what I wanted, but it was close, which is Edge is deprecating features. Oh, nice. But they're good features. Wait a minute, it's brand new. How can you deprecate what? It's not that

Richard Campbell (01:42:25):
New anymore. It's been a few

Paul Thurrott (01:42:26):
Years. Yeah, we forget about this, but time passes. [01:42:30] Microsoft Edge is a product like teams that I think has been kind of bloated with features. And what we forget is the original vision for Edge was that it would have these unique features that were not available in other browsers. And some of them were honestly really cool, really good. Now, granted, every one of these, I'm about to name is something I wrote about only for the book and used only at that time because I don't have a need for this stuff. But I feel like some people [01:43:00] do have a need for this stuff and I feel bad that they won't get it now. And I will admit that probably no one even knew this stuff existed. This is the third example of that. So Edge had the following feature or has today the following features, and these are all going away.

(01:43:14):
Math solver, picture dictionary, citations, grammar tools, and kids mode. Yep. I remember Kids Mode. Well, the one that always kind of struck me, and God, I got to run Edge to look at it. I hate doing that. You welcome [01:43:30] everybody is the grammar tools one. And so there's also features that are still going to be there that people kind of don't know about. Read aloud. So you'd have to, I'm on the wrong page to do this, but let me find a page where I can read an article actually. So if you go to Reading Mode and Edge, which by the way another feature that Chrome sort of has, but it's really about reading mode plus ads. In addition to reading something aloud. You got all these neat [01:44:00] tools. Oh, you do? I'm sorry. They're still there. There's language translation in there, right? There's all these kind of cool, I'm reading this voice ops reading a lot and all that stuff. So this stuff was all in there. And as you were reading, the grammar tools would do things like color, underline all the nouns and purple and all the verbs and red or whatever colors you wanted, that kind of stuff. People who had maybe dyslexia or reading disabilities, whatever kind, or we're just learning to read, maybe learning to read in a certain [01:44:30] language. Actually, some of these were really valuable. Picture dictionary was goofy picture dictionary.

(01:44:40):
It was very odd to even find it. But in a reading view, you might come across a word where there was a little picture above it and if you hovered over it, it would define the word, which is like, so telephone was one I could get to work. What is a telephone? How does electricity work? [01:45:00] But I give 'em credit for trying with the stuff, the stuff they've added, the other stuff that bulky blah blah, blah stuff. I probably said this before, but there is a model which I know they'll never use and there are probably good reasons for it that I think Visual Studio has, if not perfected, at least shown the way on, which is you create this thing that is thin in light and has certain built-in capabilities, and then you let people build onto it using literally something called extensions and you create this customized version of the product.

(01:45:28):
That's exactly the version you need. [01:45:30] So maybe you're a C-sharp developer, you get all that stuff. If you're a web developer, a lot of that's built in, but you can download additional stuff. If you're a Flutter developer, you get Flutter and Dart and maybe some other extensions that help you refactor code or whatever it might be. It's kind of amazing. And that is what Ed should be, right? It should be that thin light brow they promised. Listen, there's all kinds of ways to advertise when you first run. Here's the marketplace where you can choose. Are you a productivity worker, are you a gamer, are you whatever. [01:46:00] And then you can get those features. And if you don't want them, you don't have them. And they're not blogging up the UI and they're not

Richard Campbell (01:46:07):
Taking up resources. We understand, right? They were going to let us control our digital effluent. Now

Paul Thurrott (01:46:12):
It's all effluent.

Richard Campbell (01:46:13):
It's a possibility. And then they went down that path. That effluent is just too valuable.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:20):
I know, and that's why they'll never not do it. Well, no, but that's the thing. That's it, right? I mean, it's there for a reason. And by the way, we [01:46:30] keep talking about Corey Doctor. I don't know that we can talk about him enough. I follow him on Medium. The guy is, he is a team. Did you hear him on twit two weeks ago? He's fantastic. I I'm going to listen. Highly recommend it. Yeah. So the thing he has gotten so right is obviously is this and certification as I'll call it on this family friendly podcast. And the reason it's so right, is that you apply it, you can look at anything that you use and apply it and it's like, yep. Every single time [01:47:00] you get locked into something could be a TV streaming service, could be a office productivity app, it could be an operating system, whatever it's, and it's cheaper free in the beginning.

(01:47:10):
You get hooked on it. Maybe you need extra features, maybe you're paying for it now and they just keep making it worse and worse. And what you do is you look at like what are they doing here? Is this for me or is it for them? And when the answer is it's for them, it's always for them, then it's certified, right? And it's exactly right. You could see it everywhere. And Edge is absolutely [01:47:30] in this category. Windows 11 is right. Why would there be crap where links in the start menu? Is it because some people like to discover new apps? No, it's because those apps are paying Microsoft. It has nothing to do with that.

Richard Campbell (01:47:40):
Well, and they never made us the offer. The offer was, Hey, part of your M 365 offering with this stipend, we're going to manage Edge for you. We're going to keep all this stuff under control. You're going to see where folks are going. You're going to see the affluent they're producing. You can choose what to do with it. Empower a family.

Paul Thurrott (01:47:59):
They had

Richard Campbell (01:48:00):
[01:48:00] All of the ingredients to go the other way.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:02):
Hey us

Richard Campbell (01:48:03):
Five bucks a month

Paul Thurrott (01:48:05):
And we'll

Richard Campbell (01:48:06):
Clean this up for you.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:07):
There's a short-term gain versus long-term losing of customers calculus that's not occurring. Do you

Richard Campbell (01:48:14):
Really want to be grouped in with these companies that are all being scrutinized how

Paul Thurrott (01:48:20):
Many times turning

Richard Campbell (01:48:21):
Their users into a product?

Paul Thurrott (01:48:23):
How many times do you want Windows, windows 11 inter edge to be compared to malware? I mean [01:48:30] at what point does Satya Nadella come down and say, stop

Richard Campbell (01:48:33):
And what are

Paul Thurrott (01:48:34):
You doing?

Richard Campbell (01:48:35):
This is the same mocking we had of Google with the do no evil

Paul Thurrott (01:48:40):
And of Gmail man scanning your emails, which by the way, they don't do now. Thanks Microsoft. But you

Richard Campbell (01:48:46):
Could have been the kinder, gentler tech giant and then you just became like everyone else.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:50):
Yeah, it's too bad. Why would you quander that? They really did have a moral authority there for a while. Yeah. At least they appeared to And it's gone. [01:49:00] It's too bad

Richard Campbell (01:49:01):
Without even trying. In the alternative, at least if you had tried to make a subscription model around this, I

Paul Thurrott (01:49:08):
Would submit that they still could. You can position yourself as the moral alternative and not actually be, look at Apple, you can look like, oh yeah, no, I've made this case for years. They market their pious very well. And the problem with any faith is that you have to believe without having any [01:49:30] evidence that what they're saying is true. I mean, yeah, apple, Microsoft was always, well, Microsoft in the Satya Nadella era, I'll call it was always a better company than Apple. But at now they're shooting for it. They're everything they can to reverse it. And it's,

Richard Campbell (01:49:49):
You're just sacrificing the high ground. And for what

Paul Thurrott (01:49:52):
I know, I don't know. I don't know. We asked Chris Capella about this a couple of years ago. I think, why don't you just [01:50:00] provide us a subscription service attack on the Microsoft 365? If you want that, you'll remove the crap from Windows and I'll pay you five bucks a month or 10 bucks a month or whatever. And he's like, well, that would be an implicit admission that what we were doing is bad. I'm like, no, this is what everyone does. I pay Netflix extra not to have ads. These are just options. Give us the options Kindle with, what do you call it, special? What do you buy a Kindle? You get ads, but you can also pay them some

Richard Campbell (01:50:27):
Additional fee and it goes away.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:29):
No ads. [01:50:30] It's an option.

Richard Campbell (01:50:32):
What's YouTube bread or YouTube premium? They're all these same things. It's like, Hey, is this noise bothering you? Bring out your credit card. Solve it.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:42):
Yeah, so they've resisted this. Maybe it's hard to put a dollar amount on this. I don't know. But I don't feel like they get much out of these interruptions and I feel like they're starting to lose people and it's just an opinion. I guess. I don't have any facts. You mean

Richard Campbell (01:50:59):
We've also [01:51:00] got the capitalist model says if somebody builds a better mouse trap, we'll go there and it's just none of them are. So there's nowhere to go. It's crap where in all directions.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:10):
Yeah. My wife and I work for 40 minutes every morning and I broached this general topic, I'm just going to call it the Cory Doctoral world, whatever the ification thing and how it applies to everything. And I said, there's a series of articles I could write that fall. And I'm like, lemme just get through this in 10 minutes. And we got home and I'm like, I'm so sorry. [01:51:30] I was not even done. I'm like, it goes in so many different directions. It's everything from people are getting tired of playing, paying for subscription fees. Is there some version of this where I had a cloud of my own where I have, in my case two homes and I keep a NAS in each one of them and they're syncing up and my phones are backing up to them. Could I avoid all these people, these companies? I mean, I'm not ready to do that. And I'm not saying yes, but I'm saying there's a conversation to be [01:52:00] had there and you could apply this to music, to videos, to games. It goes on and on and on.

Richard Campbell (01:52:06):
And then we've created a great incentive for them to make it just crappier and crappier and craper until you pay them.

Paul Thurrott (01:52:11):
Right? Well, okay. I don't know. I'm sorry. This is a big topic and it's,

Richard Campbell (01:52:17):
It's not like you're ranting or anything. Goodness.

Paul Thurrott (01:52:19):
Well listen, this stuff, this impacts us all on some level. It just does. Everything's like this. I go to a [01:52:30] petal healthcare network in Pennsylvania. They're fantastic. My insurance covers it when I go to the lab. It's their lab. Same company. They don't cover that, which we found out after we went to the lab. Are you kidding me? No, we're not kidding. Insurance. Insurance is

Leo Laporte (01:52:44):
The clown car stupidity when it comes to this stuff. I mean, so anyways, it's

Richard Campbell (01:52:48):
Everything. I've always been staggered. We have one car insurance company in bc. They have to insure everybody. You have to buy from them. But because they're government,

Leo Laporte (01:52:58):
Oh, it's all government, okay. [01:53:00] Yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:53:00):
The best thing of all is I've been through it enough times now. I get into an accident in the US and I watch people lose their mind.

Leo Laporte (01:53:09):
Oh my God, we have to exchange information. What percentage of accidents in the US non serious, horrible accidents have involved some conversation about don't tell my insurance company I I'll just pay for this. I bet you

Richard Campbell (01:53:22):
It's double. And also I need to call a lawyer before I talk to my insurance company. And then I'm sitting in a system where [01:53:30] every time it's like if it's my fault, they're going to tell me and we're going to make a deal.

Leo Laporte (01:53:34):
I've always

Richard Campbell (01:53:35):
Fantasized fault. I'm never going to hear about

Leo Laporte (01:53:36):
This again. I was driving to get it. It happens all the time in Northern California. Gardeners don't tie their tools down. And the rake was in the road. Yeah, they was flying off, flew off. I hid it. Insurance company said, well, you should have seen it. I said, it came out of nowhere. I did see it. It was too late. It was a javelin coming. I saw it go through my windshield. You should have avoided hitting that. I tried. Believe me,

Richard Campbell (01:54:00):
[01:54:00] Yeah's, my super huy human reflexes.

Leo Laporte (01:54:02):
So they didn't pay for it. Years

Richard Campbell (01:54:04):
Of video

Leo Laporte (01:54:04):
Game. It's why people have dash cams in the US so that we can prove to our insurance company wasn't not just in the us. I saw a bunch of those. Russia has 'em like crazy last trip. Yeah, well,

Richard Campbell (01:54:14):
The fact that you're emulating the Russians is a sign you on.

Leo Laporte (01:54:17):
Right. So you don't have those in bbc, huh? I didn't realize. I

Richard Campbell (01:54:23):
Know I have a dash cam on my car and the only thing I've done with it so far is given away the SD card with the person in front of ME'S accident.

Leo Laporte (01:54:30):
[01:54:30] Aw, that's nice of you.

Richard Campbell (01:54:32):
That's great. Hey, here you go. Here you have a copy of your accident with their person to have a great time.

Leo Laporte (01:54:39):
So I mean obviously you have national health, but I didn't realize you had as well, so what is it national or is it's basically,

Richard Campbell (01:54:47):
It's province wise. It's provincial.

Leo Laporte (01:54:49):
Provincial car insurance. How about home insurance? It's fire insurance.

Richard Campbell (01:54:54):
No,

Leo Laporte (01:54:54):
No, that's not for that. That's weird that they nationalized or provincial car [01:55:00] insurance of all things. Well,

Richard Campbell (01:55:01):
Because it was required.

Leo Laporte (01:55:02):
Ah, I get it. It's required here

Richard Campbell (01:55:05):
Too. There's plenty of people that argue against it and say we'd be better elsewhere, and then you actually look elsewhere and go, it doesn't look better.

Leo Laporte (01:55:11):
Well, we have this problem here in Northern California where we are in a red flag warning today the quality is 140 because I don't know if there's a fire, but it's not good. It

Richard Campbell (01:55:22):
Must be smoke somewhere. Somewhere

Leo Laporte (01:55:23):
There's smoke and that we with 40 mile an hour winds and high 90 temperatures, [01:55:30] and of course we buy our own fire insurance and it's getting to the point where insurers won't sell you insurance,

Richard Campbell (01:55:36):
Just can't sell it because it can't make any sense.

Leo Laporte (01:55:39):
They did nationalize

Richard Campbell (01:55:41):
Flood insurance on the flood plain.

Leo Laporte (01:55:42):
Fema nationalized earthquake insurance.

Richard Campbell (01:55:45):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:55:46):
They had to because nobody would no insure a private insurer would issue. It

Richard Campbell (01:55:50):
Doesn't work. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:51):
Okay.

Richard Campbell (01:55:52):
It's an interesting dynamic. It's like this is mandated, so it has to be provided to everyone, and that makes sense. [01:56:00] Social construct.

Leo Laporte (01:56:01):
Yeah. Okay. Paul, I'm sorry, operator. You can talk about

Paul Thurrott (01:56:07):
Xbox or something. It's okay. No, I put us down this path. This is my fault. Your fault. Just a couple more browser related things, because these just happened to happen this week. Airf Fox one 17 is out. A couple of new features, but kind of separate off to the side of this is they have something called Firefox Relay, which is that kind of private email service where emails redirected and masks [01:56:30] where things are coming from, et cetera, et cetera. So if you are a Firefox user especially, but even if you aren't, Firefox is also trying not, or Missoula also trying not to be like the one product company. They've tried various services is a premium version you can get for 99 cents a month. So I don't anticipate using it or anything like that, but something to look at. And then I wrote the greatest headline ever written for Vivaldi, which is Vivaldi refactored. Its chromium web browser, and you're never going to believe [01:57:00] what happened next. My wife told me that long titles are good for SS e O, so I went to town on that. But the basic idea here is that they looked at a lot of people that use Vivaldi had complained about performance of various aspects of the browser, especially opening new windows. They wrote a new React. They use React for a lot of the ui, I guess kind of a react based

(01:57:28):
New, I don't call it, it's called portal [01:57:30] windows. This is a new, more efficient way to run code. So when you're opening Windows and so forth. So a lot less ram, a lot less C P U better performance is supposed to be pretty fantastic. I don't know that this is enough to get someone to switch to Vivaldi per se, and I don't know how to compare to the performance of this thing to other chromium based browsers on desktop, but depending on what you're doing, they're saying 37 to 64% improvement in speed. That's pretty damn good. Those Apple

Richard Campbell (01:57:55):
Numbers,

Paul Thurrott (01:57:55):
Big numbers, apple numbers. So something to look at. Remember in the [01:58:00] family of chromium based browsers out in the world, the one that Vivaldi is, is the one that is the super personalized version. They also have mail, and they have mail and whatever else. Is it newsfeed? I think like an R Ss S feeder components calendar, probably. It's a big busy browser. You can customize it however you want, but I find it a little busy. But it does all the good chromium stuff that you want. And if you're into personalization, [01:58:30] it's probably a good choice.

Richard Campbell (01:58:32):
Cool.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:35):
I am into more of a minimalistic type thing, but everybody

Leo Laporte (01:58:38):
Does wrong is the opposite of minimal Boy.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:42):
Yeah, that's right. You're right. On the UI standpoint, I would say Brave and Vivaldi on the opposite ends of that stuff.

Leo Laporte (01:58:49):
Yeah. Well, brave has a lot of cruft in it too,

Paul Thurrott (01:58:54):
But it's easily removed and they tend to adopt these kind of modern UI features [01:59:00] way late, if ever.

Leo Laporte (01:59:01):
Right. Have you settled and brave now? This is finally,

Paul Thurrott (01:59:04):
Oh yeah. I've been using it for over a year now. Yep. Straight up.

Leo Laporte (01:59:08):
I'm still a Firefox guy. I believe in diversity.

Paul Thurrott (01:59:10):
No, that's cool. That's the one I wouldn't try to talk you out of. Yeah, love people. I actually use Crumb's fine. I'm like, yeah, is it?

Leo Laporte (01:59:16):
Is it really? No. In fact, I'm nervous about all chromium browsers because of this new Google Topics thing. I just don't know.

Paul Thurrott (01:59:24):
None of them are doing it. They're all stripping it up good. No, there hasn't been one. Well, except for Microsoft hasn't said [01:59:30] anything, but we don't know

Leo Laporte (01:59:31):
Edge

Paul Thurrott (01:59:31):
Opera. Val, brave and brave of all. We're not doing it. Good.

Leo Laporte (01:59:37):
I am ready. I don't know about you. Well, I'm ready for brown liquor. But before, and I noticed you started early, Richard, but I think

Paul Thurrott (01:59:46):
Now we're wrong it late now. It's

Leo Laporte (01:59:48):
Late. I know it's It's not

Paul Thurrott (01:59:50):
Early. It's really late. It must be 10, almost 10 30 now. Let's

Leo Laporte (01:59:53):
Hustle along here and get that Xbox segment under our belt.

Paul Thurrott (01:59:57):
I'm not doing that for Richard. We're going to go slow. [02:00:00] We're going for a

Richard Campbell (02:00:01):
New record in the

Paul Thurrott (02:00:02):
Like of this show Xbox Head, Phil Spencer, who's actually titled now is Microsoft Gaming. C E o. Phil Spencer spoke with, he's a ceo, Euro Gamer. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (02:00:13):
Wow. They really are just making up titles up there these days, aren't

Paul Thurrott (02:00:16):
They? Now we have c e O of business units inside of business units, sir, it doesn't matter. Who cares? So he gave a really good interview with Euro Gamer. I really recommend anyone who caress about Xbox read this. It's a really good thing. I'm just going to pull out two parts [02:00:30] of it. One is that he said, because Microsoft recently had to raise the price on Xbox, and that's kind of across the board, right? Hardware in certain markets, not all markets, I think in the United States, they actually haven't raised the price of consoles yet, but the services are all going up and all that kind of stuff. And his basic take on this is these prices are never coming down again, this is not a inflation era thing that we reversed like this is forever. So sorry. But he also talked about the mid-season refresh [02:01:00] issue, right?

(02:01:01):
So if you think about this generation of Xbox consoles compared to the last, the original Xbox One was later followed up by something called the Xbox one S, which was probably cost reduced, but it was size reduced as well as beautiful machine. It looked like an Apple product. It was really nice, white. And then there was an Xbox series, sorry, an Xbox one X, which was black and also smaller still I believe. Really elegant looking thing. And each of these had improvements [02:01:30] over the predecessor, not just size and cost, but just capabilities. And for the Xbox Series X and Ss, they released two consoles together for the first time. The SS has half the storage or did in the beginning, five 12 versus a terabyte. But the big thing was graphical capabilities and thus performance, and I don't remember the exact details there, but the way they would describe this very vaguely, and it hasn't proven to be a hundred percent correct, was that you could do 1440 P at 60 frames per second on the SS and [02:02:00] four K or 60 frames per second or on the X.

(02:02:07):
And I think what people wanted was for the series X to be the PlayStation five killer, and I don't get that. So in my mind what they need to do, I don't know if they would call it a Z or something, but basically make a version of the X with double the storage. Again, we need to go up to two terabytes. It's overdue because of all the games are huge, but also guaranteed four K at 60 [02:02:30] at least, and a lot of games at 1 24 K, and he is not interested in that at all. I'm surprised by this.

Richard Campbell (02:02:40):
I wonder if it's just hardware costs. It gets expensive to push that many frames down the wire

Paul Thurrott (02:02:45):
And tied to this, I think these things frankly aren't selling very well, not compared to Sony. It may just be a

Richard Campbell (02:02:52):
Cost. I also wonder about how many people have displays with HTM I two or display port 1.3. Can they actually [02:03:00] take on a four K 50 f p s signal if he knows that data and says, okay, we're only getting X many percent of the market. How many of you have a TV that can do this?

Paul Thurrott (02:03:11):
This is the HoloLens argument. Until we have a big enough jump, we're not going to do it. But even, I think this came up last week or two weeks ago, this even the 360, the Xbox 360,

Richard Campbell (02:03:22):
The one they're closing the store on that one, yeah,

Paul Thurrott (02:03:24):
Yeah. Had midseason replacements, if you will, cost reduce, yes. But they also added [02:03:30] 10 80 over time. It was seven 20 in the beginning, but it was

Richard Campbell (02:03:34):
Also a standard that you could buy the screens on, right? Like 10 80 P 60 F P SS screens were readily available.

Paul Thurrott (02:03:43):
I just think there is an enthusiast market out there. I'm wrong. He knows more than I, what am I with the guy that runs Xbox?

Richard Campbell (02:03:49):
And you've got a much stronger argument there, which is shouldn't we be setting the high watermark? Shouldn't you be encouraged by those screens? Shouldn't those screen manufacturers be subsidizing this product? I don't know the answer [02:04:00] to there, but

Paul Thurrott (02:04:03):
I feel strongly about taking a leadership position on this thing. I know there's been a lot of bad news around Xbox, especially the stuff that's come out of the FTC hearings and so forth where they basically had to come out and say, look, we're losing this race.

Richard Campbell (02:04:16):
We're not going to win it for a while. There's no version. I will throw the game angle at it too, which is that the cost of art for these high-end machines in the high resolutions is staggering. It [02:04:30] just costs so much to produce these games. It's why they don't innovate in that game space. You're committing a hundred to $200 million to develop a game. You need to make a billion

Paul Thurrott (02:04:40):
Plus song. But

Leo Laporte (02:04:43):
I got a theory. I have a theory reading the article, and his point is how would having more mid seas and replacement help creators or players? To me it feels like this is a direct quote. We are creating a ton of [02:05:00] complexity for creators and players in something that used to be very simple. The difference between Microsoft and Sony is Microsoft makes PCs, right? So Microsoft may well think Apple has this issue with iPad and Mac may well think, no, we want two roads, a simple, clean, easy road. You want to play a game, you buy an Xbox. If you're a gamer, you buy pc. If PC's

Paul Thurrott (02:05:24):
Marketing that, but that's not true. So I got two points. The original Xbox was literally based on a pc, [02:05:30] and one of the things they lost as they went to Power PC and then to, they just kind of lost the PC architecture could have made it like a pc, but with plugin components, you could have improved the graphics in the

Leo Laporte (02:05:40):
Processor. They have that. That's the point is they have that, but they don't, the market for a console is for people who don't want to screw around with that stuff.

Paul Thurrott (02:05:49):
So back in the day, you would buy a console and for the entire life of its generation, it would not change from a technical perspective. Games would work on every version of the console. Even if they were cost reduced [02:06:00] versions, there were no improvements, right? One of, with the Xbox 360, they improve things over time. And so you have games that can run in 10 80 p, not just in seven 20 P. So that's like an improvement. Everyone gets to share with the Xbox One, they had three different versions of it, and by the time we got to the X, we were getting into the four K territory, not all the time and not very 30 frames per second, whatever it was. But for people who did buy in at that time, maybe they upgraded from a 360 or they had the original one, and now they're like, yeah, now I'm going to get an X.

(02:06:28):
You have these advantages [02:06:30] that you get by doing that with the series X and X. They did it from the beginning. They're like, look, we're going to make two tiers. We're not going to do a better tier later. We're going to do two right now. But what happened was, now it's three years later, I think right about three years later, everyone is targeting the ss. Why would you even take the time to make a special version of the game for the X? It's harder to do that. And the market is tiny. Yeah. And that's what they kind of lost, because these two things [02:07:00] sit side by side and are always in market together. You don't ever replace the little one you always have. It's always there. So that's what they all target. That's the volume

Richard Campbell (02:07:09):
Center, and it represents the largest market. So that's what you built to it. Self fulfills.

Paul Thurrott (02:07:12):
If this thing replaced the S three years down the line, which is what happened last time with the one developers would've started targeting it because that would've been the thing everyone was buying. Some people would've upgraded, some people would've stayed, and they could still play the same games and they wouldn't look as good. But look, this [02:07:30] is just a debate. The truth is no one really knows. They've experimented different

Richard Campbell (02:07:34):
Ways. Again, the gaming industry itself, once we got to this generation of machine, you couldn't make a game that fully utilized

Paul Thurrott (02:07:40):
It. I think these things should be componentized and should be a little bit more like PCs, where you could have the benefit of the PC to some degree.

Richard Campbell (02:07:48):
Now you're even lowering the minimum bar.

Paul Thurrott (02:07:51):
Okay, fair enough. Well,

Richard Campbell (02:07:54):
Thing to do is build exactly one. Sony's got it right with the PSS five. There's one.

Paul Thurrott (02:07:59):
Okay, I [02:08:00] think we're going to get to this place eventually really with consoles, and it'll go away. We don't need 'em anymore. But Sony previous gen did a pro version of the PSS four, right? That had better capabilities. Did that bifurcate the market or something? Maybe

Richard Campbell (02:08:17):
The games built to the minimum, just the pro ran cooler and quieter.

Paul Thurrott (02:08:21):
Well, no, but it also could look better, right? That was, I think I'm not,

Richard Campbell (02:08:25):
Now you're playing up scaling games and let's say that if you want modular solution where you can maximize [02:08:30] your experience, become part of the PC master race, man, leave your cow consoles behind your control. Work on the pc. Anyway,

Paul Thurrott (02:08:37):
I didn't mean to give you that in. I appreciate that you took it, but fair enough, fair enough. Okay. Okay. And like I said, look, I'm just talking. I'm just Phil's Spencer, what he's doing. Who am I?

Richard Campbell (02:08:51):
Question. I'd love to have access to the demographics if he has access.

Paul Thurrott (02:08:54):
Do you have anything to look at this data? Yeah, and just to wrap this up, ballers Gate three [02:09:00] has been, I don't know, when did that come out? This year, right? This year. Not

Leo Laporte (02:09:03):
That long ago. Weeks ago. Yeah. No, no,

Paul Thurrott (02:09:05):
It, yeah, it coming to the

Leo Laporte (02:09:08):
Xbox ball. Come on, everybody's

Paul Thurrott (02:09:09):
Playing. No, this is not my kind of thing. No, it's not. Are Germans, are there German zombies? No Nazis, but they are aliens. I should have said Nazi zombies. It is coming to Xbox Series in X N s by the end of the year. So I don't know. I felt like they sort of said it was coming at some point. I thought that was [02:09:30] what they had said originally. It's coming to the PlayStation

Richard Campbell (02:09:33):
On pc, like a smart person.

Paul Thurrott (02:09:36):
It

Leo Laporte (02:09:36):
Actually, because it's basically Dungeons and Dragons and it's click move, click move. You turn based, you probably could play it on a console without too much. The combat is not. Yeah,

Richard Campbell (02:09:48):
It's always interesting to see what the user interface adaptation looks like.

Leo Laporte (02:09:51):
Yeah. I think they'd actually work in a console.

Paul Thurrott (02:09:55):
Well, it's going to on a PlayStation too, by the way. So yeah, it's huge. It's coming. [02:10:00] I'm sure

Leo Laporte (02:10:00):
I can't get into it. I

Paul Thurrott (02:10:01):
Keep trying. That's why we two terabyte drives. Yeah. Oh is huge. Yeah, it's big. Very open world. And this is, like I said, one of those themes throughout the show, things that keep going up in price, everything Sony announced that it will be raising the price of its PlayStation Plus service. This is sort of analogous to game pass. And depending on, no, they're all going up. It's about 33 to 35%, [02:10:30] depending on which tier because they have an essential tier, an extra TER, premium tier, et cetera. So that's the world we live in. Sorry. And that's it. Is the Xbox. I have an Xbox related thing in the back of the book,

Leo Laporte (02:10:46):
So we're not done yet. But I do want to take a breath, a breeze because we're about to get into the back of the book.

Paul Thurrott (02:10:54):
I'm

Richard Campbell (02:10:55):
Going to go crack the window here. I think the c o two levels

Paul Thurrott (02:10:57):
Will get a little hot.

Leo Laporte (02:10:58):
Yeah, go ahead. Open a window.

Paul Thurrott (02:11:00):
[02:11:00] Richard looks, it's

Leo Laporte (02:11:01):
All open window. I'm not going to open a window because my air quality index is now 154. So yeah, the

Richard Campbell (02:11:06):
Air in your office is better to the

Leo Laporte (02:11:08):
Air outside. It's creepy outside. It's got that feeling. They call it earthquake weather, but now I think it's more like wildfire weather. It's not good. Yeah. Alright, go open our window, Paul. You do whatever it is that makes your breathing easier and get yourself a cpap. I don't care. But we will return in a moment. You're watching or [02:11:30] listening, you can do both windows likely Paul Ott and Richard Campbell back in the book time. Paul Ott is ready. Go ahead Paul.

Paul Thurrott (02:11:40):
Yeah, so two tips. One is that Microsoft in partnership with Free CODEcamp is now offering something called the foundational C Sharp certification. It's 35 hours of C sharp training hosted on Microsoft Learn. It's free. So if you want to get going with the fundamentals of the C Sharp programming language, you can [02:12:00] look to

Leo Laporte (02:12:00):
That. When are they going to have a Haskell foundational certificate? That's the one.

Paul Thurrott (02:12:05):
I think there's a Pearl. Pearl. Really? Certainly. There's a pearl course. Yeah, it's a curse there. It's a

Leo Laporte (02:12:12):
Much better word for it.

Paul Thurrott (02:12:14):
I believe

Leo Laporte (02:12:15):
There is. Are people really learning Pearl today?

Paul Thurrott (02:12:19):
Sure.

Leo Laporte (02:12:20):
Wow.

Paul Thurrott (02:12:21):
Maybe. I don't know. Not me. No, I didn't say Pearl. Did I say Pearl anyway?

Leo Laporte (02:12:25):
Said Pearl. You mean Python? Probably Python.

Paul Thurrott (02:12:27):
I probably mean Python.

Leo Laporte (02:12:28):
Python, yeah. Pearl [02:12:30] Pearl. Pearl kind of took a left turn at Pearl five and turned into rock.

Paul Thurrott (02:12:35):
You know what I happened.

Leo Laporte (02:12:36):
You meant Python. I

Paul Thurrott (02:12:37):
Know. Sometimes I say things and I'm like, it didn't sound right.

Leo Laporte (02:12:41):
How's the digital decluttering going, by the way?

Paul Thurrott (02:12:43):
Yeah, so that's been going great, but I wasn't going to talk about that per se, other than the fact that I've been busy archiving all my videos. I think I mentioned this last week, but actually I should just look. What do I have today?

Leo Laporte (02:12:55):
Paul's been going through his old hard drive and finding all sorts of classic Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott (02:13:00):
[02:13:00] I found some stuff they don't

Leo Laporte (02:13:02):
Mind that you release. These are from Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott (02:13:04):
No, not at all. So what's amazing is I have gotten, I dunno what you call it, it's not a copyright strikes. It's basically a thing where it's just a note in the console. It says, Hey, the owner of this copyright is exerting their rights to this video, but they don't care that you're using it all. If you go go nuts, they're not going to,

Leo Laporte (02:13:25):
You can't, oh, they're not even demonetizing.

Paul Thurrott (02:13:26):
No, they don't care. They're like every single one of 'em is like, it's fine. Just to

Leo Laporte (02:13:29):
Let you know we own [02:13:30] this, but go ahead. Yep,

Paul Thurrott (02:13:31):
It's fine. Interesting. That's all good. Look at these. There's a great video of me on a local newscast in 1996. Are you

Leo Laporte (02:13:37):
A computer expert?

Paul Thurrott (02:13:39):
That's what it says. Top

Leo Laporte (02:13:40):
Story at five. High tech theft. Oh wait,

Paul Thurrott (02:13:45):
So I looked this story up, you can Google this. So in 1996, Eves were stealing intel. It was actually Pentium CPUs and memory cards from Intel and selling them on the block market, whatever that means. They arrested the guy. But [02:14:00] you could look this up today. There was a whole conspiracy behind this. This is like a big story behind this. It was actually turned into a big thing that I didn't know anything

Leo Laporte (02:14:06):
About. And you were at the time where you working in the bank? Or were you by

Paul Thurrott (02:14:09):
Now? I was a published author by this point. I don't remember how I got this little talking head gig. I also did some hand modeling in here. You'll see in a moment. Oh, I got to

Leo Laporte (02:14:18):
See this. Lemme skip ahead a little bit. That's good. There's the

Paul Thurrott (02:14:21):
Hand modeling, nothing of value whatsoever. Look

Leo Laporte (02:14:23):
At a 4 86 DX two baby. This is

Paul Thurrott (02:14:25):
All we had to show. I'm like, is this the newest thing we had? This was already out of date. By the [02:14:30] time this show was up,

Leo Laporte (02:14:31):
Why steal it? We asked Paul Ott published also computer expert can computer expert. Why people are stealing these chips. And what did Paul say? Here he is. Oh, look at you, Paul. You're so cute. They shut, boy, they did some lighting on this thing. They brought in the lights. Wow.

Paul Thurrott (02:14:53):
That was one of the many things I pulled out my little,

Leo Laporte (02:14:55):
Was that it? That thing right there? Was it?

Paul Thurrott (02:14:59):
Yeah. It's nothing. It's nothing. [02:15:00] So stupid little video. But the point is, I now have two over 225 videos. I'm probably going to have over 300. I would imagine by the time I'm done with uploading, I got

Leo Laporte (02:15:08):
To get this because I want this as the thumbnail for the episode. Oh boy. Paul, the right computer expert. Why did it, we asked Paul Thoro past.

Paul Thurrott (02:15:19):
You were wondering why I'm on this podcast. There it

Leo Laporte (02:15:22):
It's, it's proof

Paul Thurrott (02:15:25):
Channel 15. I also have the one where I won a Neil Award at some point and I refuse to go [02:15:30] to the award ceremony. So the c e O of Penton picked it up for me and he knows so little about me. He said that I was busy working at Microsoft and couldn't pick up the award.

Leo Laporte (02:15:41):
Well, thank you for Wow.

Paul Thurrott (02:15:44):
It's not, thats prestigious of a journalism award. Oh yes it is. You dick, but whatever. It's okay. Anyway,

Leo Laporte (02:15:53):
Paul's not here. He's busy working at Microsoft. He's assistant to Steve Berry. The

Paul Thurrott (02:16:00):
[02:16:00] Yeah, exactly. He's right. He's getting coffee for Steve. Getting

Leo Laporte (02:16:03):
For Steve. Wow.

Paul Thurrott (02:16:04):
Okay. Anyway,

Leo Laporte (02:16:06):
This

Paul Thurrott (02:16:06):
Is fun. I'm sure he was a good guy. Guy.

Leo Laporte (02:16:08):
I'm not sure you're glad going through this stuff. This is really fun.

Paul Thurrott (02:16:11):
Wow. There's a lot of stuff in there. It's nice Windows phone fans. We'll find a lot to cry over lot in there. And then the Apick is the making of aka, which I mentioned, I dunno, a month or two ago. So this is that interactive documentary about the making of the game. Ker Teca, which was the second game. What's his name? [02:16:30] Jason? I've forgot his name. What is Romero? Nope. Carm. No, no. Geez guys. Come on. Jordan. Jordan.

Leo Laporte (02:16:39):
Oh, Mechner. The prince of Per Game

Paul Thurrott (02:16:41):
Being Prince of Persia. That's right. So this guy has actually written a book about each of those games too, if you want to just read about 'em. Those have been out for a little while. But the interactive documentary means there is literally an interactive documentary thing with a timeline and blah, blah, blah, but whatever. But from a gameplay perspective, pixel perfect versions of the original games on different [02:17:00] consoles by the way. Or different platforms, prototypes of the game, including one called Death Bounce, rebounded, which was almost the game. It has new features for modern day. So you can save anywhere. Rewind, select chapters.

Leo Laporte (02:17:12):
This is on Xbox

Paul Thurrott (02:17:13):
Director's commentary. It's on Xbox. But also,

Leo Laporte (02:17:16):
Oh, I've seen these. This is so cool because buying a game and a documentary about the game,

Paul Thurrott (02:17:21):
It's actually multiple games. It's also a remastered version of the game with different content and commentary

Leo Laporte (02:17:27):
Sheets. I love this idea.

Paul Thurrott (02:17:29):
So [02:17:30] 20 bucks, you can get it on Xbox, you can also get it on pc PlayStation or Nintendo Switch if you want. And there are more of these coming. This is the first in the series and they're kind of hinting, well, they didn't say what it was, but this series of interactive documentaries at the second game, whatever will ship before the end of the year. So sometime soon they're going to say what that is. We don't know yet. But the point of this is to bring back these classic games and to kind of interact with the people that made them right, which is really

Leo Laporte (02:18:00):
[02:18:00] Cool. And you get to play. I love this idea. I think this is a really

Paul Thurrott (02:18:06):
Incredible,

Leo Laporte (02:18:06):
Incredible, it's not just this too, there's other games, right? I haven't seen other games. Not yet. No, not yet. Oh, just maybe I saw the news that they were going to do some other ones. It will be. What a great idea. I love that.

Paul Thurrott (02:18:18):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:18:19):
So look for, can you look at the Xbox Store? Is that where you would get it? Yep.

Paul Thurrott (02:18:24):
Yep. Nice. Other platform. You can get it on Steam if you're a pc, what do you call it? Pc, master Race, the PlayStation [02:18:30] Store, whatever that's called. Whatever the Nintendo has, God knows how,

Leo Laporte (02:18:34):
Speaking of the master race, what's coming up on run as radio? Mr. Richard Campbell,

Richard Campbell (02:18:40):
Paul already referred to this, I'm so

Paul Thurrott (02:18:42):
Sorry,

Richard Campbell (02:18:43):
But published today was the show called Getting Ready for M 365 Copilot with Carolina Kera, who's a finished lady who leads a consulting firm that's helping companies get prepared. So she's been involved with early days of M 365 copilot. They're really [02:19:00] still in the case study mode where they're only allowing access by large companies. I think this sort of build of the narrative of good things they can do with it. The big emphasis on this, there was the two aspects. And again, I think Paul mentioned this, which is helping you use the suite better because face it, there's way too many icons inside of M 365. You can't learn 'em all. And the idea that I could say, Hey, I need to achieve X and it'll give me a path to what apps to use is interesting. But the larger [02:19:30] conversation was the indexing of your company, of having this machine learning model with access to all of your documents and all of the emails and chats and so forth that can sort of lift up what your company already knows. You just couldn't find it. And that leads to this issue of how much secret stuff your company has. That's only protected because people can't find it. And now the tool's going to find it all,

Paul Thurrott (02:19:59):
Whether you wanted [02:20:00] it found or not. Yeah, exactly.

Richard Campbell (02:20:02):
And so this led to this whole data governance conversation about we need to start tagging for security and so forth. Yeah, this tool works the way it's supposed to. It's going to surface all kinds of information. Maybe you're not quite prepared.

Paul Thurrott (02:20:15):
D word. It occurred in the podcast, which I was sort of like I said to you earlier, I was saying out loud, delve, ve is

Richard Campbell (02:20:23):
A good word. I made that reference a few times. So this, how do we stay out of the uncanny valley, right? It's like, hey, [02:20:30] let me show you how we've harnessed corporate surveillance for fun and profit

Paul Thurrott (02:20:34):
Delve was like the dentist from Marathon Man. Yeah, let me know if this is little too invasive. Is it safe? Is it safe? Is it safe? Is it safe?

Richard Campbell (02:20:44):
They've made a few attempts to make the graph available to us in a useful way and it hasn't gone well. And then part of me just looks at this, this is another way, but by making it goal driven where you're kind of describing what you want to achieve and then the tool comes back and says, [02:21:00] Hey, let me show you how I can help you achieve that. Maybe we can make it more acceptable. I don't know the answer to that. It was a fun conversation to have.

Paul Thurrott (02:21:08):
Is it safe now? Is it whiskey is the other question.

Richard Campbell (02:21:14):
That is a good question and an excellent one. And I'm following the tradition I seem to do when I'm in strange and far away lands. And so being in Denmark means finding a Danish whiskey and not that hard to do. The Danes do make a set of whiskeys, [02:21:30] and the one I selected today is the arrow whiskey. And lemme just pull up my notes here.

Paul Thurrott (02:21:36):
Are we going to make a reference to the Windows arrow? It's translucent. Well, and I

Richard Campbell (02:21:44):
Also had the experience where there was a Jean-Michel Jarre concert based in Denmark called Arrow that was done out of Alburg. But no, this is actually on the island. [02:22:00] It's on the island of Aero, which is just to the southwest of Copenhagen. You have to take a ferry to Sobi to get there. Little farming community essentially. And in the town of Acobi is the aero distillery where they grow their own barley and malt it themselves, like they're doing it. The old Scottish method more than the Scots do anymore. I love

Leo Laporte (02:22:25):
The bottle.

Richard Campbell (02:22:26):
Yeah, it's a beautiful little bottle. They kiln dry it with air power. [02:22:30] So the Danes are famous for their windmills, and so they use electric kilns to dry it. And then they have a four stage mash processes, which is a little excessive. Most distilleries only do three stages, but they're maximizing the extraction from that. One of my favorite comments in their plans was the mash that's leftover, which is typically used for animal feed. They call it Friday sweets because I mean they make such small batches [02:23:00] there that they typically finish a mash run on a Friday and ship that out to the animal feed. And apparently the cows really like

Leo Laporte (02:23:06):
It. Oh, I bet they do. There's no alcohol in it, is it?

Richard Campbell (02:23:10):
No. Now then they go through their fermentation process and they have their own yeast treatments and they raise it to be wart and then they do it double distillation process, but they call it a closed loop bottle. So they use a large copper pot still for their low wine stage where they get to about 30% and then it goes into a column [02:23:30] coffee still, and they lift it up to about 88%, which most whiskey bakers would call too high, like a very high level of distillation, but it makes quite a light spirit. They age. Most of their whiskey is aged straight up in sherry, cast some PV or px, some LaRosa. But they've also experimented with European oak, specifically Hungarian Oak. And they grow a few oak trees on [02:24:00] Arrow itself. So they've made a couple of special additions with new Dana show, but typically you'll get cherry casings. They come in around 55%. That little bottle that you like the most, that's a 500 mil bottle, not a seven

Leo Laporte (02:24:14):
50. And it comes

Richard Campbell (02:24:15):
In about 130 us.

Leo Laporte (02:24:18):
That's called pocket.

Richard Campbell (02:24:20):
So many things. Danish. It is small, but

Leo Laporte (02:24:23):
You can't get it here, can you? I assume you

Richard Campbell (02:24:25):
Can't. No. And even tough to find in lots parts of Denmark too. So I found a couple [02:24:30] of places in Copenhagen that have it, but it's hard to come.

Leo Laporte (02:24:33):
Wow.

Richard Campbell (02:24:35):
There are a few folks making whiskey here in Denmark, but it's small batches, which really appeals to me. But I thought the arrow, it was gorgeous bottle and a gorgeous story on a little island that most people have never heard

Leo Laporte (02:24:47):
Of. Well see. Now I have two reasons to go to Denmark. There you go.

Richard Campbell (02:24:51):
They have, apparently they have a great whiskey tour. I have not taken it, but I think I'd like to take the fairy to soy and go down there and just take a look at this very [02:25:00] artisanal approach to making whiskey

Leo Laporte (02:25:03):
Nice. I'm just imagining the cows eating the Friday.

Richard Campbell (02:25:07):
They're Friday sweets. They're

Leo Laporte (02:25:08):
So happy. They're just, this is tasty. This the best mals I've ever had. Richard Campbell is in Copenhagen. And then you're going to go to New Zealand

Richard Campbell (02:25:21):
Deadline's next week. Then we'll probably do one from either the old house that we're just about moved out of or the new house that we're moved [02:25:30] into. And then one in Australia, one in New Zealand, another one in Perth, and then I'll be home for like five

Leo Laporte (02:25:40):
Minutes. He's a traveling man. Ladies and gentlemen, our very own Richard Campbell run as radio.com for his podcast run as radio and T net rocks. You do T net rocks weekly or no?

Richard Campbell (02:25:52):
Yep. Donnet Rocks out every week. And here at the Developer Fest, we've been recording some dotnet rocks in an Airstream. They have a converted Airstream trailer [02:26:00] for us.

Leo Laporte (02:26:01):
Oh, that's my podcast dream. I always wanted to drive around the country doing the show in an Airstream. That would be so cool.

Richard Campbell (02:26:10):
I'll tell you, the acoustics in an Airstream, not awesome. Little tricky. Little tricky to

Leo Laporte (02:26:14):
Work that shiny aluminum.

Richard Campbell (02:26:16):
Yeah, that's shiny, very reflective aluminum. But we use the defines doing our best to try and manage that.

Leo Laporte (02:26:21):
Well, you sounded great today, and I thank you. Even though you were in a tiny little Copenhagen box, you get a house. They're

Richard Campbell (02:26:29):
Using the Airstream [02:26:30] for karaoke right now, which is a plague poised upon civilization. And so I was happy to be back at a hotel meeting room with poor air quality.

Leo Laporte (02:26:41):
Go have a breath of fresh air and a arrow whisper. Safe travels, man.

Richard Campbell (02:26:46):
Absolutely. So far, so good. Thank

Leo Laporte (02:26:47):
You. Richard Paul Thro is@thro.com. Do become a premium member. It's really worth it. T H U R R O T t.com. He's also got a great book, two [02:27:00] books@leanpub.com. There's the Windows Everywhere book, which is about the history of Windows through its development tools. And then of course, the field guide to Windows 11, which includes Windows 10 built right in just like Windows 11. All of that. You set the price well worth buying Lean pub.com. We do Windows Weekly from the beautiful Twit Eastside Studios every Wednesday, 11:00 AM [02:27:30] Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern, 1900 U T C. We'll be back next week, good Lord willing. And the creeks don't rise and the fires don't hit us. So tune in and watch us do it live. If you want the freshest version, if you're watching live at live twit TV or listening, we've got audio and video streams. Chat with us live at irc twit tv.

(02:27:51):
That's open to all, and you only need a browser to access it. IRC twit tv and of course, club Twit members know they get the special access, [02:28:00] the discord behind the velvet rope where you can hang while you're listening to the show after the fact. On demand versions at twit tv slash ww, there's a YouTube channel. Of course, the best thing to do is subscribe in your favorite podcast player. Just search for Windows Weekly. We've been doing this now for how many years is it, Paul? 1516. I think it's 16 this year. Holy cow. Or 17? 17. Holy cow. So if the podcast player you're using does not know about Windows Weekly, slap it upside the head, [02:28:30] it's probably too young. That would be the problem. We're not that young. We've been here for a while. PC experts, Richard Camo and Paul Thora. Have a wonderful week and we will see you next time on Windows Weekly.

Jason Howell and Mikah Sargent (02:28:45):
It's midweek and you really want to know even more about the world of technology. So you should check out Tech News Weekly. The show where we talk to and about the people making and breaking the tech news. It's the biggest news. We talk with the people writing the stories that you're probably reading. We also [02:29:00] talk between ourselves about the stories that are getting us even more excited about tech News this week. So if you are excited, well then join us. Head to twit tv slash tnw to subscribe.