Windows Weekly 848, Transcript

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

Mikah Sargent (00:00:00):
Coming up on Windows Weekly. Leo Laporte is out. I am subbing in today, and we have, as you might expect, Richard Campbell and Paul Thurrott here to talk about the Microsoft event. No, no, no. It was not the surface event. It was kind of the AI event. Then we talk about what the heck is going on with Windows 1123 H two. We see a smile suddenly appear on Paul's face. It gets really kind of wild there for a second. Plus, we follow up on the news [00:00:30] of Panos Panay leaving Microsoft and joining Amazon. We talk antitrust. We talk Dev and ai, including Amazon's decision to buy Anthropic and maybe play catch up to what Microsoft is doing. Of course, we hit Xbox Corner and round things out with our tips of the week, including a whiskey from New Zealand, because that's where Richard Campbell is right now. Oh, it's so exciting. Stay tuned for this episode of Windows Weekly

Speaker 2 (00:00:59):
Podcasts you [00:01:00] love from people you trust. This is TWiT.

Mikah Sargent (00:01:10):
This is Windows Weekly with Richard Campbell and Paul Throt. Episode 848 recorded Wednesday, September 27th, 2023, the era of a grinning poll. This episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by our friends at IT pro TV now called ACI Learning. Keep [00:01:30] your IT team skills up with the speed of technology. Visit Go dot ACI learning.com/twit. Twit listeners can receive up to 65% off an IT Pro enterprise solution plan after completing their form. Based on your team size, you'll receive a properly quoted discount tailored to your needs, and buy lookout, whether on a device or in the cloud. Your business data is always on the move, minimize risk, increase visibility, and ensure compliance with lookout's Unified platform. [00:02:00] Visit lookout.com today. It's time for Windows Weekly. This is the show where we talk to two of the most wonderful Windows watchers in the world. I am Micah Sergeant Subbing in this week for Leo LaPorte, who will be back next week, but until then, let us go to ti. There we go. TI in New Zealand, it's Richard Campbell. Hi, Richard.

Richard Campbell (00:02:29):
Hi. [00:02:30] Yeah, back down on the family farm. I gave you the pan. Yes, it really does look like Hopton. Peter Jackson didn't have to build a set here really, but I got in last night. We got a few days here to spend time with family. My cousin who runs the farm is turning 40.

Mikah Sargent (00:02:46):
Oh, congratulations. And happy birthday. Yeah, it does look lovely. Absolutely. Now, Paul, I don't know if you have green pastures outside your door, but hopefully I saw that [00:03:00] you were in the midst of a move. Hopefully that's going well. Where are you coming to from? Where are you coming to us currently?

Paul Thurrott (00:03:08):
I'm still in Ji, Pennsylvania. There is in fact a field over there. You can't see it because it's pine trees plus there's a wall. Yeah, we're moving. I mean, we won't actually move until November. It's kind of a family thing, so we're sort of prem moving now, getting the stuff out we can just so it's not a mad rush at the end. I

Mikah Sargent (00:03:30):
[00:03:30] Have to commend you on that. That's incredible that you're not moving until November, but you've already started doing the move because I'm very bad at that and saving it up until the very end is so stressful. So good for you.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:43):
Yeah, I mean, we did this in, when was it, 2017 when we moved to Pennsylvania, but we also moved from that home to this place back in, I guess it was March, April, beginning of April, I think. Yeah, beginning of April, and that was a mad dash and we will never do that again. [00:04:00] So

Mikah Sargent (00:04:02):
Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:04:03):
I'm lucky we didn't get hurt

Mikah Sargent (00:04:04):
The last time I did a mad dash move. I ended up stressing out myself so much that I got Bell's Palsy and for several months I couldn't move. I think it was the left side of my face, so I don't like moving. I like to be settled.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:18):
No one likes moving. Yeah, no, I'm not happy about this. Came out of nowhere. We were going to extend the lease here for a year, but came up. Yeah, opportunity comes up.

Mikah Sargent (00:04:30):
[00:04:30] Speaking of opportunities coming up, you had a golden opportunity to be in person at Microsoft and you got to hang out with Mary Jo Foley at the event. That was very

Paul Thurrott (00:04:42):
Exciting. Yeah, that was nice. Yeah, we went to dinner and cut up. I don't talk to her as much as I used to. Right. I mean, this show was a nice reason for us to talk every single day for a long time. It was great, and I feel bad about that. That's kind of a personal failing, I think her and I both share. But [00:05:00] yeah, it was really, really nice to catch up with her. And I don't know, the last time I was in New York, I think it was December last time I went to a Microsoft event was almost four years ago, which is incredible. Unprecedented, stupid. Anyway, yeah, it was a little bit like going back to high school a couple of years after you graduated. You recognize some people, you filled a lot of place. It's weird.

Mikah Sargent (00:05:27):
Did it all feel small? That's what I remember

Paul Thurrott (00:05:29):
From back. No. [00:05:30] Well, the space they in was actually pretty nice, pretty big space. But the event felt a little small, and we should talk about that.

Mikah Sargent (00:05:36):
Yeah, I mean, we had been calling it the, not you, but sort of internally we'd been calling it the surface event.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:44):
A lot of people did,

Mikah Sargent (00:05:45):
And you kind of argue that it wasn't really the surface event. So outside of maybe some beers you shared with Mary Jo Foley, what did Microsoft have to say there? And especially in light of Panos [00:06:00] pane, I don't know. Not playing a piano or something. How

Paul Thurrott (00:06:04):
Did it go? Yeah, I think that has to play into a little bit. We'll talk about Panos I guess, later in the show because there's some follow ups to a bunch of the Blockbuster news that happened last week. And just remember, not that anyone would forget this, but if you were, I don't know, in a space capsule last week or something, panels Spinney suddenly was leaving Microsoft, not clear why we sort of argued pushed or jumped. [00:06:30] There's been a little more data since then. We'll see. I think there's more story. There was a massive Xbox.

Richard Campbell (00:06:37):
I'm pretty comfortable with my jumped position. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:06:38):
Yeah. Okay. Interesting. There was a massive Xbox leak that may literally be the single biggest leak in Microsoft's history as far as divulging internal and third party information. It's incredible for me. It's still ongoing. I'm still writing about it. Every couple of days. I write another kind of a mashup [00:07:00] of information based on, we'll talk about that later. And then of course, the Microsoft Special Event, which as you said, everyone's like, oh, it's a surface. I'm like, yeah, it's not a surface event. The question I will ask, and this is sort of semi rhetorical because no one here knows the answer to it really, probably maybe Richard might actually is Microsoft does typically have a surface event in September. I think this happened after the show last week. But regardless, there was a news story I think in Business Insider or Forbes or somewhere saying [00:07:30] that Panos might've jumped ship because of a number of things, one of which was Microsoft cutting back on surface, and they had massive layoffs and windows and surface back in March for sure.

(00:07:44):
But also just cutting back, they have gotten a little experimental, a lot of extra devices, maybe more than they need. They're kind of all over the map. He was forced to reign that in, and maybe this was going to be a surface vent. It would've been small, frankly, but whatever. [00:08:00] And maybe they took the slot and said, we're going to turn it into something bigger and we'll tack on a couple of surface things at the end, which we'll get to. So that's a little bit of speculation, just kind of in the buildup to this event. You can't go

Richard Campbell (00:08:12):
To that venue less than a year in advance.

Paul Thurrott (00:08:15):
Yeah, it's a beautiful place too.

Richard Campbell (00:08:18):
So if you think in terms of last September, they were planning a bunch of hardware and they were planning their usual surface event

Paul Thurrott (00:08:25):
And check

Richard Campbell (00:08:26):
He hadn't shipped yet. So

Paul Thurrott (00:08:30):
[00:08:30] It's possible. How would you know? Yeah, they had a plan for this to be a bigger thing. Maybe we would've gotten the new laptop, the new whatever. So we can only speculate. But yeah, Richard knows more than any of us about the requirements for space for shows and all that stuff. So yes. Yep. It makes total sense.

Richard Campbell (00:08:48):
Yeah, immediately paint the picture of what would I be thinking about in September of 22? Well, not large language models,

Paul Thurrott (00:08:57):
That wasn't That's true. That's absolutely were around, but [00:09:00] they weren't important. And it wasn't Microsoft Central strategy until November. Yeah, right.

Richard Campbell (00:09:06):
Well, not really until January. Right. We

Paul Thurrott (00:09:08):
Got Well, yeah. Okay, fair. But yes. So from Panos perspective with regards to the timing and all this, that kind of makes some sense pushed or jumped. We can debate I think a little of both maybe. I don't know. But yes, but it was very clear in the lead up to this event, once the invites went out, this is [00:09:30] about ai, regardless of whatever it might've been in the past in this other future, it was an AI event and it was clear from the products they mentioned before the event. And then of course in the event that it was what I would call client side ai, not because the AI is necessarily running on the client all the time, but because it was more about AI products, sorry, client side products and services. So binging and Edge Windows 11, Microsoft 365, that was the extent of it.

(00:10:00):
[00:10:00] This was not Azure and developers and all kinds of other stuff before the show, given the little that we knew, I had written something up about what I expected to see, and I wrote something very lengthy, and I'll compress it to something very short, which was that I expected this thing to be, we're going to share a common backend for all our co-pilots, all the co-pilots we're talking about today. And [00:10:30] Mike, well, actually you guys were both not here necessarily for this part of it last week, but I had discussed Stevie Batis at Bill 2023, but this past May and a couple of things you said is the three ways they'll deliver ai, which is the big part of it. But he also specifically said that even though it's not branded this way, that Binging Chat is one of the co-pilots, right? So there's a copilot in Windows.

(00:10:54):
Windows copilot. There's a copilot in Binging slash Edge, which is Binging Chat, and there is a co-pilot [00:11:00] in Microsoft 365, Microsoft 365 co-pilot commercial only at that time, that has shifted a little bit. So my belief was that we were going to go into the show and they were going to say same backend, same developer model, and we reached out to third parties and here's some third party stuff. So there's going to be a bunch of Microsoft products and services that are going to integrate into all these copilots across those platforms and third parties. And what we got was it was right there. So [00:11:30] we got a copilot rebranding. It is the same common core to all three, but now they're just calling it Microsoft copilot or Copilot. So there's no such thing as Windows copilot anymore. There's a product in Windows called Copilot, right?

(00:11:44):
There's no such thing as copilot inside Bing. But Bing Chat is, copilot is based on copilot, and then Microsoft 365 copilot because as Richard likes to say, naming is hard, is called Microsoft 365 copilot because seriously, what the hell? But that's fine. That's fine. So I was [00:12:00] right about the common backend. They decided to rebrand. Honestly, the rebranding thing was kind of the biggest news, which I think we can all admit is not much news. And there wasn't much in the way of Microsoft or third party plugin information. That wasn't new. That was new. They did mention Adobe, so great, really, because Adobes got wanted to see, right? But Adobe's also plugging into Google, they they're plugging into Google, [00:12:30] is it do it? Or Bard? I don't remember. Oh,

Mikah Sargent (00:12:34):
Google Bard. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:12:35):
They're plugging in. That makes sense. You got to be where the users are. You can't just be in your own stuff. So Adobe's doing the right thing, I think, for them. But I thought from that perspective, I thought there was going to be just a lot more, especially

Mikah Sargent (00:12:53):
Because, sorry to interrupt, but chat, G P T has so many plugins already that you can use [00:13:00] with its system.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:01):
And yes, by the way, those plugins are common to the Microsoft thing. So the one thing there was an open, well, I don't know how open it is, there's an open AI standard, I guess we'll call it, or an open standard for these plugins that will work across Microsoft copilot and open ai. Got

Mikah Sargent (00:13:16):
It. So they just didn't demonstrate too many that were, they

Paul Thurrott (00:13:18):
Didn't talk about any of that stuff. Branded

Mikah Sargent (00:13:20):
Official.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:20):
Got it. I think they wanted to keep it a kind of a consumer marketing kind of event. So they didn't talk about developers, they didn't talk about plugins Ignites coming [00:13:30] up in November. I think that's going to be the place for that. So I did expect more of that kind of thing with regards to those products. Bing Chat, it's actually called big image creators picking up chat gt, no, sorry, Dolly. Three image creation capabilities, which is basically going from a Warner Brothers cartoon to Pixar at quality level. It's like photographic quality. Amazing. That stuff honestly was insane. I hadn't heard about [00:14:00] that. And then a few days later, chat beat or open AI started talking about Dolly three as well. So this is something that's coming down the pike. Interesting. On the window side, we're going to get really deep in the window stuff. This is my weekly therapy is a combination of confusion and new features, some of which are AI based, some of which are not.

(00:14:21):
We can go through that, we should go through that stuff. But just from a high level first, Microsoft 365 copilot, we already [00:14:30] knew the commercial bit of that. They revealed there was a consumer one coming too and got really vague on it. So commercial version of Microsoft 365 copilot launches in general availability. Mark, November 1st, it's $30 per user, $30 per user per month. So it's a paid thing. It's expensive. Microsoft 365 consumer. Yeah, we're not talking about that. So it's in a very limited private preview. Now, invite only, and [00:15:00] we heard from different people. We talked to people at the show from Microsoft 2024, and they don't want to talk about how or if they're going to monetize it.

Speaker 5 (00:15:09):
And this video, we're going to learn how to pronounce.

Paul Thurrott (00:15:11):
Okay, so British guy. So we'll see on that, right? They have said explicitly they're not going to charge for AI capabilities in binging. There'll be ads, right? They're not going to charge for AI capabilities in Windows, which is kind of interesting. [00:15:30] And there have been reports since then. I don't have a link to any of this, I'm sorry. But there have been reports that Microsoft is using what I'll call a mini me version of their AI in Windows. I saw that to keep the cost down, right? Because the full model up at the cloud is just super expensive per transaction, and you're going to have a bunch of Windows users. They just don't want to have a crazy bill for the next three months because people are screwing around with it. And Microsoft 365 consumer, we'll see, [00:16:00] the expectation there for me is that they will charge for it in some way, either by raising the cost of the existing subscriptions or by adding a tier that adds the ai. So we'll see. I think we're going to have to pay for that Speculation. To

Mikah Sargent (00:16:14):
Clarify, there's Windows copilot on Windows 11,

Paul Thurrott (00:16:21):
But then there, no, actually, hold on. There's no Windows copilot anymore. This is the big news. Oh, that's right. There's one copilot. It's Microsoft Copilot. Yes, it is a common [00:16:30] copilot across Bing and Edge. Edge because Bing's in it, windows 11 and Microsoft 365 as well, right? So it's a common co-pilot. Now, on each of those platforms, there are capabilities built on top that may not be present in the other ones. I think the binging Chat stuff is in Windows. The image creation stuff is or will be in Windows. Microsoft 365 copilot in particular will have a really wide range of functionality that will be unique [00:17:00] to the individual apps and to the services, and will vary greatly, I bet, between commercial and consumer. Because commercial has the Microsoft graph and all of the internal Microsoft, I'm sorry, corporate data that your company has. It's a very different situation. Microsoft 365 consumer, I would imagine is going to be a little closer to what we see in Windows and binging consumer stuff, broad internet capabilities, just basic. And then maybe I will have to speculate past that. I'm sure there'll be [00:17:30] specific things that are common between commercial and consumer, because you need help in Word, whether you're using either one to write a document.

(00:17:42):
Some of this is just educated guessing because they haven't said some of this explicitly. But the important thing that I took out of this was that my idea of a common core was correct, but they actually rebranded it. So that's the copilot. That's just called copilot.

Mikah Sargent (00:17:56):
If you had to guess, do you think that the [00:18:00] common core copilot that's coming to Windows 11 will not interact with, for example, Microsoft Word on Windows 11, but instead you'll have to use the Windows 3 6 5 copilot to interact with

Paul Thurrott (00:18:16):
Microsoft Word? I don't know. That's a good question. Great question though. Yeah, it is a great question. One of the problem, this is kind of like a sidebar to that because you've reminded me of it, is we often talk about how many features Microsoft added to [00:18:30] Microsoft Teams in particular over two years or whatever it was, three years. Microsoft 365 has added exponentially more features, and it's very, very complicated keeping up with what they add every month. It's actually calmed down recently, but for 2, 3, 5 years, I dunno, long period of time, it was really hard to keep up with that every month. And if you really get granular on it, it's very frustrating to me. So for example, I'll just give a simple example. I'll make it up. It doesn't matter. I don't remember when or how this happened, but at one [00:19:00] point, Microsoft added a translation, an audio recording translation feature to Microsoft Word, asterisk.

(00:19:07):
Asterisk because when they added it, they only added it to the version on the web, and it was like that for years. So if you had word on the Mac, word on Windows, word on mobile, this feature was not in those products. It was only in the web product, which I think most people kind of don't use, right? And I would argue that, I mean, there are different ways to do things, but [00:19:30] if you're going to do something in a logical way where you have a plan to bring it to Windows and Mac and mobile maybe depending on the feature, on some schedule, that's okay. But this happens with every single feature they release for every single thing that's part of Microsoft 365 over many years where a feature will arrive for an app or service or product, whatever, it's on only one platform and then may never appear anywhere else or will eventually appear someone else.

(00:19:56):
It will only appear on one of the mobile platforms and not the other, or the reverse and not the other. And [00:20:00] it's very confusing. And so the feature I just mentioned, it's possible actually by now, it is in the desktop version of where I have to look, but it's hard to know. So when you ask, is the Microsoft Word AI thing going to be accessible through Windows? I say to myself, it should be, but I've been saying that for five years or whatever with Microsoft 365, so I hope so, right? You want to be able, yeah, I mean those things should integrate, but you

Mikah Sargent (00:20:29):
Almost [00:20:30] think that they won't because it'll help 'em differentiate. And if they are going to monetize the consumer version, then you almost want it to be,

Paul Thurrott (00:20:39):
The problem is, I don't know if Black sheep is still an acceptable term or whatever, but the outlier here is the Windows version of copilot because there's not a lot specific to Windows in this product. It's really lackluster and it's a problem. Microsoft 365 [00:21:00] copilot nailed it. It's a ton of functionality. They have such a long runway, they're going to be adding new features. That thing for years, just like I described before, the copilot stuff, it's going to be amazing. The binging Chat stuff, same thing, really, right? There's all kinds of improvements you can make there. They just announced one with the image creation stuff I talked about. I think that thing also with the Windows stuff, it's like, ugh, there's like six to eight commands that are specific to Windows,

Richard Campbell (00:21:28):
But then you've got the Windows [00:21:30] apps, right? You've got the Yes, that's true. That is true. Those are sort of AI enabled, but nope, that's true. Always argue that the Windows play is the ecosystem. That's why the Adobe thing keeps coming up because if Adobe comes to play and does the Stevie Batis plan of inside and beside and so forth, the rest of the ecosystem will come along. The idea that you'll now describe a task and [00:22:00] the tool will help you select the software to execute it. There's a huge first mover benefit to that.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:07):
That's right. And so far, I would say the way they've discussed this is that productivity tasks, hello ai. I would like to do something. You typically think about that in the context of Microsoft 365, but then again, Microsoft 365, it's not a closed ecosystem, but it is an ecosystem, and Microsoft's going to build it for their own stuff. And [00:22:30] because this is an extensible model, of course Adobe could become part of that. But then again, you have some arbitrary set of applications installed on your computer and you ask Windows now, Hey, I need to do this project. This is what I need to do. And it's like, okay. And it's like if all those things are plugged in through Windows, then it should be able to grab things from whatever apps, no matter where they're from and depending on what you have. So yeah, I would say Windows is the obvious integration point for a lot [00:23:00] of

Richard Campbell (00:23:00):
People. Well, it's the broadest one. The question is Microsoft more interested in the broad ecosystem or in selling their own product? And I think if I was on the Windows team or doctor,

Paul Thurrott (00:23:12):
I would tell you that

Richard Campbell (00:23:13):
Where if I'm on the Windows team, I've lost relevance. I'm no longer the focus of the company anymore. M 365 makes more money. This is my play. This is

Paul Thurrott (00:23:24):
The chance to step back into the spotlight. That's right. Yeah,

Richard Campbell (00:23:27):
I agree. And to rally a bunch of companies around [00:23:30] you, that's really interesting.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:34):
That's

Richard Campbell (00:23:35):
Relevant. Again, what if an operating system actually mattered because it had a role to play in facilitating work?

Paul Thurrott (00:23:43):
Just reminded me. So we talked about Pane leaving Microsoft. So one of the interesting side effects of that is that he was in charge of Windows and Surface broadly. Microsoft put out a statement explaining what was going to happen. And it was very confusing. In fact, it was so confusing [00:24:00] that everybody who writes about this stuff, except for Mary Jo Foley apparently got this wrong. And now when I read this statement, I'm looking at it now because I need to understand this. I got it wrong too, by the way. And I can see why, because it was poorly written. It made it sound like they were splitting Panos Pans responsibility between multiple people. And you can look at that as positive or negative. This guy [00:24:30] was so good, he could do it all. Or maybe there was a strategy change. Maybe this AI thing came along and they were like, man, we need to focus on this and the individual product things don't matter as much.

(00:24:41):
And my, I don't know, it's speculation frankly, but educated guest based on what I'm reading here, based on what I know about Microsoft is that Windows as a product group was sort of demoted in the ranks a bit, and this thing was put in on top of it. So we have more personal computing, which is a literal [00:25:00] business unit at Microsoft. I think those are going to change. I think there's going to be a reorg, but there's a team now that's going to build a silicon hardware like chip sets and probably hardware systems. There's a hardware, sorry, and devices. Those are all the same thing. Anyway, that span Windows client and cloud for an AI world. And this team has a bunch of people from Surface in it, right? People we know Steven Batis, Ralph Groan, right? Nice. This team is going to report to the person who is directly responsible for more personal computing, [00:25:30] which was the guy who was the person before B spa, which is Raje Raje Jar.

(00:25:36):
That's not his actual title, but he's basically in charge of all that stuff. So there's one team, and then you've got this other team that's sort of like they've had experienced teams like this before. Joe Fure was the big person you would think of in terms of this kind of stuff. But this other team is going to build experiences at Blend Web Services and Windows for an AI world. And as people I've never heard of in this far, they will directly report to a person I've never heard of, and [00:26:00] it's going to be called the Windows and Web Experience Team, but then there's use of Medi right Now, this is the guy, he's been at Microsoft since the nineties. I first met him in 1998 when I went to the N NT 5.0 technical workshop. That product became Windows 2000. I asked him where Dave Cutler was, and he told me he was working on 64 bit stuff in his words, and he has bounced around the company over the years.

(00:26:24):
I can't believe he's still there. But he went to Bing, M S N Windows live over the years Xbox for [00:26:30] a long time. Bing. Most recently, he was the guy that led the public presentation to the binging chat stuff back in February. He is taking on the responsibility of leading Windows and surface businesses with our O E M and retail partners. Now, a lot of people read that and said, oh, Yusuf Meti is taking over Panos Pan's job. That's not true. He's a marketing guy. He is actually going to be responsible for a team that works, that works [00:27:00] across Windows and surface with Microsoft's PC maker and retail partners. These are the places that sell PCs to customers.

(00:27:11):
He's not in charge of Windows and Surface. And by the way, everyone can do this for yourselves. Go back and watch that presentation and watch what he says in the very beginning when he introduces his boss, the guy who runs Windows and Service, there's a part where he actually says that, and I wonder if they didn't do that on purpose because this thing was deliberately, [00:27:30] but was quite vague. So anyway, I think Microsoft, no, I don't think Microsoft is clearly pivoting on ai. I think their corporate structure is going to show that soon. I think that little thing I just read through, which I know is brutal to listen to in audio, but if you read it and you kind of look at it, you might see the beginnings of a new corporate structure or at least part of it for the company. I think these three major business units they have right now are not how this thing should [00:28:00] be and will be structured very shortly.

(00:28:02):
So we'll see how that goes. But that's my guess. And I think what we, no, I know what we saw was literally the kind of consumer slash client side focus of ai. What does this look like for people? And it is those products. I mean, it's Bing, it's Edge, it's Windows, it's Microsoft 365 commercial and consumer. So that's what we saw. Oh, and I should say it's also surface, right? Because Microsoft does [00:28:30] sell Surface PCs still. They sell fewer of them than they used to. That's an interesting little thing that's happening here. They got rid of most of the weird ones and the non-essential things like headphones and stuff. And they announced two PCs in the livestream or in the non livestream, I guess that you guys saw. And then two more surface devices, one of which was a PC separately, which I thought was kind of weird, but okay, whatever.

(00:28:55):
Only one of those PCs matters. It's the one Richard's been waiting for. It's the Surface [00:29:00] Studio Laptop two. This ties into an AI story we have later in the show. So I'll just blow through that right now. Actually, this thing comes with a 13th gen, I think it's H series, but whatever series it is, mobile processors, a mobile generation processor with the 13th gen chips, Intel provides an add-on N P U that you can put on the motherboard only on desktop. So as of today, the current generation of [00:29:30] Intel chip sets core chip sets since 13th. There are mobile and desktop variants. The desktop variant, none of them have an integrated M P U. They will, that's the 14th, John. But with the 13th Gen desktop, you could actually buy, I don't know anyone that sells this, but you could make a motherboard that has a socket for it and add the M P U to it, and you could have your M P U not on mobile, but this thing is on mobile and it does have an M P U.

(00:29:57):
What the hell's going on? Well, Intel for Microsoft only [00:30:00] apparently is doing exactly what I just described. They allowed them to make a motherboard that accepts the M P U socket, and they're putting a socket on the board. Nothing ships with an M P U, I believe it is the only, and will be the only 13th gen laptop ever to have that capability. Very interesting, right? At least they have something to announce right before the show. I'll just blow through something that was coming up later. Intel announced Speedier Lake, the 14th gen of these chip sets that as per their schedule for many, many years, [00:30:30] they announced in the fall usually around I F A, which was earlier this month for desktop, and they start selling those desktop systems in time for the holidays. Then in January, they announced the mobile version and they start selling those products in February, March, et cetera. Those products were all expected to have this integrated M P U or what I think Intel might call the AI engine integrated into the S O c. So it's not a separate chip anymore. It's everyone gets it. You can't, as a PC maker, not get [00:31:00] it. You're all getting it.

Richard Campbell (00:31:02):
Same way. MACO processors just became part of the chip.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:05):
And so when they announced it, when they announced it, I was like, oh, it's kind of curious. It's a little off schedule, but maybe because of the Microsoft event. Something something, I dunno. But here's what I missed because this is on me. I didn't look into this too deeply because I'm waiting for January. That's the thing that's important to me. I'm not buying a desktop pc. Who cares? That is not what they announced this year. For the first time with Meteor Lake, they announced the mobile [00:31:30] generation of chips. That's what they announced. Really? That is what's coming out. So they are shipping these before the end of the year. They're not shipping them in January. They're doing it now. The desktop version is what's coming next year. They have never done that. So they swapped it in recent memory, they swapped 'em around, and I think, honestly, I don't know why they, I mean they should always do. They should ship. They should do this in August and ship the mobile thing. So we have back to school and holiday.

Richard Campbell (00:31:58):
I wonder if you're literally just looking at the legacy [00:32:00] of once upon a time you sold desktops, first laptops weren't after.

Paul Thurrott (00:32:03):
That's right. Yeah. Tradition.

Richard Campbell (00:32:05):
It has been true for years, but they were only just finally recognized. Push this up.

Paul Thurrott (00:32:10):
I don't want to drag this up, I'm so sorry, but I am a huge, I'm so intrigued by things that are traditions where you just do things and you don't even know why. And if you press someone on why they're doing it, they can't answer the question. They don't even know. We've always bore that. I bore the hell out of my wife every morning when we walk, and I [00:32:30] brought this topic up today and she told me a story, which was something she had read with this woman, always cut the end of a ham off before cooking it. And so someone said, why do you do that? She said, I don't know. My mother did it this way. So they went to the mother and said, why do you do that? And she said, oh, I don't even know. My mother did it this way. So they went to the great grandmother still alive. They said, how come you did this? And she said, oh, I had this really small pan. It's the only way I could fit the ham in the pan. Yes. So everybody for generations just kept doing this without any understanding of what the purpose of it. [00:33:00] And yes, to Richard's point about Intel, and I mean we as people, human beings, I think we get stuck and we've always done it this way.

Richard Campbell (00:33:09):
And plus, you're also an incredible vast cadence. Like you moving deadlines around is not a trivial thing, right? The broader picture of what's the logical order, what will have the best impact on sales, just doesn't come up compared to, I haven't got time to think about this. I got to get working on the next gen,

Paul Thurrott (00:33:26):
Right? Right. Nobody wants to do the thing where they, [00:33:30] and we'll just pretend it's Intel. The only thing that matters here, but no one in Intel wants to be the guy that says, Hey, I have an idea. You're right. We should switch that schedule. And what I'll do is I'll take the bullet and I won't release a product for 18 months. Right? No one's going to say that. No one's to do that one wants. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. Be the person who suggests that in the first place. And then you, they're like, why do you? And that probably contributes to all of that. So nobody wants to do it. Alright, so there's the event, right? So we had copilot across Binging [00:34:00] Edge windows, Microsoft 365 added the consumer piece, fun, very vague. And then one Surface PC with an M P U. Okay, cool. We know we're going to get more of those next year. So that was the event. That was, it was a crisp Bower.

(00:34:14):
We're going to talk about Windows a lot, and I don't want to get into the schedule stuff, the drama that's coming up, but I will say there are a lot of new, they described this update, which they've now shipped in preview form. So yesterday was week D [00:34:30] of September, so it was the day Microsoft ships, their preview update use of many promises would be the biggest update they've ever delivered for Windows 11. That is absolutely accurate. A lot of new features. So copilot and beta, the Windows backup app, AI powered, well, that's not the case about that. The start of the new file Explorer, the buggy slow new version, which is horrible. Volume mixer, Pasky support, which frankly should have [00:35:00] gotten more press, a lot of changes to settings. Windows 365 integration where you could log into your computer or log into Windows 365 and go right to it. Kind of cool. And then quick switch between cloud PC and local pc. There's some new stuff they never discussed or tested anywhere. Instant game support in the Microsoft store. I

Richard Campbell (00:35:23):
Remember when you would see all these things in the insider program before the game. Where were they building this? Why did we [00:35:30] never see it in the insider stream?

Paul Thurrott (00:35:32):
I'm going to do my best without laughing or choking on myself to explain to you how people at that show from Microsoft, explain this to me. I asked this question. We asked multiple people this question, and it basically boiled down to that continuous innovation nonsense they're talking about. We just keep looking at, there are so many different ways to provide value to Windows customers we're just always, they basically try every way imaginable, right? They're [00:36:00] being responsive, Richard, they're not being wow irresponsible. I don't know.

Richard Campbell (00:36:06):
We never had time to put it into the insider pipeline. We built it so

Paul Thurrott (00:36:08):
Fast. Exactly. I mean, you don't want, why would you want hurt users to make them? Wait? We just want to get it out in the world. Anyway, there's a bunch of AI enhancements coming to apps including paint. So today we got a feature, they never tested the insider program called Paint Co-Creator. It went live today.

Richard Campbell (00:36:30):
[00:36:30] There has to be another channel somewhere.

Mikah Sargent (00:36:35):
There's a secret channel. Somebody, yes, somebody has access to the Easter Egg Channel. It's called,

Paul Thurrott (00:36:41):
What do you call it? Clip channel. My favorite app is getting an automated capability that they never tested. There's AI enhanced tools in Sniping tool, which they actually did say, and I don't know if they ever tested it, but that will do O C R basically on an which would text on it, that kind of thing.

Mikah Sargent (00:37:00):
[00:37:00] Okay, I have a thought. So you mentioned how you felt like this was more a consumer marketing event than before. Sure, they can say that they're doing it for this and that, but isn't it nice that they can save all of these arguably fun features so that the journalists who are trying this stuff early who report on it aren't able to reveal these fun new features? Because I look at the paint and I'm like, oh, that's [00:37:30] pretty exciting. And so since you all didn't get to try it an insider and talk about it ahead of time, now it's just brand new and people can be excited

Paul Thurrott (00:37:38):
About it. No, that's fine. But then I would say to you, that's great. Announce it in September and release it in November. And then you get your little announcement and we have time to test it. I keep guessing, I have to guess. I keep saying this is speculation, but it's very clear that Microsoft has turned on a dime over the past year with ai. I think what maybe people don't understand [00:38:00] quite yet is they turned on a dime several times. And what I mean by that is a AI is going to be the focus of the company. And it's like, no, seriously, AI is going to be the focus of your part of the company. Figure it out. And so all these parts of the company were like, okay, what can we do for ai? And then with this event in particular, they're like, look, we got this slot.

(00:38:19):
We're doing a consumer thing. Figure it out. They really jiggered around with the Windows release schedule, which we're going to get to soon to make this all come together in the [00:38:30] way that it did. And I think what they were doing was this stuff just came in hunt and we're going to throw it out in the world because we want to have something to announce. We want people to believe this is a big thing. And then there's the nefarious thing I will get to, which is the real reason. But they are desperate for people inside of Microsoft Groups, inside of Microsoft to come forward, which something that shows off.

Richard Campbell (00:38:52):
This reminds me of the internet tidal wave when exactly H put out the letter and said, oh no, it's about the internet. Every team [00:39:00] has to deliver something. And that's why to this day, SQL Server can output html. I'm not saying everything they built was a good idea, but they all had to do, it's right. There's a wrap. There's a map reduce function happening here in January. For the first time ever, Satchin Adela made that level of proclamation to the organization and the whole organization exploded. They all went in different directions to experiment, and now the reduce function's happening as they're trying to bring it together, make [00:39:30] it real in some kind of plan.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:31):
And by the way, one of those things is this copilot rebranding. This is how fast Microsoft moved this year at the beginning of the year, at some point, maybe November, who cares? They said internally to everybody, Hey, our stuff's going to be called copilot except for that first thing we're putting out, but don't worry about that. Everything's going to be called a copilot. Figure it out. So Microsoft 365 said, all right, we'll make a Microsoft 365 copilot windows. Said, okay, we'll make a Windows copilot. And then it's only few months later, internally [00:40:00] they're like, you know what? Actually, forget those things we did. It is going to be a copilot. It's going to be one co-pilot. We're changing the branding again. They announced the branding in May and then killed it in September. That's quick. I mean, for a company like Microsoft, this is a battleship move in that thing like that.

(00:40:16):
It's kind of incredible. And I know most people go rebranding. Who cares? No, this is big because this really sets the stage for this as a platform for this is the next wave, this is the next wave, this is the next decade [00:40:30] or whatever. We're going to see at least over the next two, three years, an unbelievable tsunami of new features based on AI that are going to land across this ecosystem. And it is very important that they get that right. And they could have gone to market. The old Microsoft five years ago would've gone to market with all these stupid other brands, and they're like, no, we're going to rein this thing in. It's copilot deal with it, and I know we announced it. Don't care. Fix it. We're just going to start calling it the new thing.

Richard Campbell (00:40:59):
Yeah. The question [00:41:00] is, are they going to ease off on wiggling the wheel? We can only take so many and so can the team. I think as I listened to you describe all these pieces like, gee, I wonder how much of an obstacle Panes was.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:15):
Yeah. I think

Richard Campbell (00:41:16):
A situation where he was not on board with all of this and it was messing with his plan and he shunted aside, like being pushed to the second day keynote.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:25):
Well, I mentioned Windows down a level that meant he was down a level because Surface was never [00:41:30] at any level, and he was on the S L T, the senior leadership team at Microsoft Windows gets knocked down a level that looks like a demotion. It's not fair to him, but it looks like a demotion to the outside world. Is he on the S L T anymore? Honestly, why would he be? You want the guys above him doing the AI stuff on that team, not him. And I think that played a role. Again, speculation. I want to be clear, a hundred percent speculation, pushed or jumped. I think that played a role for him because he was very aggressively career oriented, success [00:42:00] oriented, publicity oriented. This guy who could not speak publicly, would not stop speaking publicly, would never let anyone take his place, and he never got any better. That last, I think the

Richard Campbell (00:42:11):
Pressure was on him and he found a home. Whoa,

Mikah Sargent (00:42:14):
Quote, he never got any better.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:17):
He didn't. That's the thing. Terry Morrison, when he took over for Windows was a horrible speaker. Horrible. But by the time he was out of there, he was pretty good at it because Microsoft has an incredible system for training people in public speaking internally. [00:42:30] This is important. You can't get up as an executive, a leader of a business and screw up. You have to be good at this. He was never good at it. He wasn't good on day one, and he was not good when he left. In fact, like I said, his last appearance at Build was his worst ever. He was unhinged. That was crazy. It was

Richard Campbell (00:42:47):
Off script.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:48):
Yeah, it was crazy. That guy who does Surface now, he came out, spoke eloquently. Concisely. I love him. Immediately I walked up to him and introduced myself. It's like, I'm so happy to meet you.

Richard Campbell (00:42:59):
And admittedly, [00:43:00] he was on script, right? Oh yeah. There's a handful of Microsoft, Microsoft leaders that can speak off script. I mean, Guthrie does this brilliantly. He doesn't do very often these days, but he invented Unplugged,

Paul Thurrott (00:43:14):
Right? A lot of people didn't like this guy, but Steven Elop was like that, and I loved him. And that was true when he was at Nokia. It was true. When he came back to Microsoft as part of the Windows phone stuff, he would just stand there and talk about, he knew everything about every single one of those products. You have to remember, it's a dozen phones. [00:43:30] They all vary by some tiny little changes. And he was like, he had no problem,

Richard Campbell (00:43:35):
No problem. Bomber was good at that too. But these were guys who deeply knew their stuff and they would do this unplugged effect, this sort of lean back on the counter, what do you want to talk about? Let's go

Paul Thurrott (00:43:46):
Throw it at me. I can answer anything. I mean, it's beautiful, and those guys are rare and they should be celebrated. But Panelists was not one of those guys. And I don't mean he should be.

Richard Campbell (00:43:57):
I don't expect anybody to be good [00:44:00] off the cuff. That's his own skill. And Microsoft's great at writing really good scripts and training the snot out of you to be on time. Exactly.

Paul Thurrott (00:44:09):
To work ear marks, make sure every single bit of marketing, Mr. Do. Do you think he thought he was? Yeah, I do. And I do, because I know there are people out there to this day who think he was fantastic. I definitely do think he historical record shows otherwise, yeah,

Mikah Sargent (00:44:21):
He certainly led with confidence even if it wasn't informative. But yeah, and my few presentations [00:44:30] that I saw him do, he always seemed confident in what he was

Paul Thurrott (00:44:33):
Saying. Interesting. Okay. Yeah, no, everyone comes away with these different reads on him. I didn't like his style at all personally, but I've already beaten that to death. So I, well, I think we're going to learn more over time. I said this last week, but as of now, I still think it's this combination of factors. The thing I said about him losing prestige and power I think makes sense. Obviously I said it, I think it makes sense, but I mean, knowing what I know, that makes sense to me and [00:45:00] we'll see. And we'll also see how these internal machinations play out and what if there was a reorg, like I suggested there might be or we'll have to wait and see. But the point here though is that Microsoft, in a very short period of time, unleashed an unbelievable amount of software here. And it's an interesting reminder that this company is capable of that because honestly, the Windows team has been walking around like the Three Stooges for [00:45:30] the past year, bumping into walls and smacking each other on the head. They have no idea what they're doing. And there's still plenty of that going on. We're going to talk about that at length, believe me. But

Richard Campbell (00:45:40):
There are plenty of times we felt like Microsoft was not capable of that. It's interesting to see this version of Microsoft being this,

Paul Thurrott (00:45:49):
Yeah, still being possible. That should make us all very happy. And I got to say, look for all of the, I don't know where I put this in the notes, maybe it's here. No, it's later. But for all of the [00:46:00] kind of terribleness that is true of Windows 11 and how they did it and how the functional regressions and all the nonsense, here we are two years later

Richard Campbell (00:46:12):
And the mission has appeared, right? That's

Paul Thurrott (00:46:15):
Windows. It is a matter of circumstance that you now have a motivation to be better, but the leadership is gone. And maybe that has something to do with, look, we can speculate, but as a Windows enthusiast, [00:46:30] and I literally based, I'm closing next year's, 30 years for me of this. And it is nice to have Windows back because Micah, even in your occasional interactions with me, you've seen how frustrating it can be to deal with this team that doesn't seem to know what they're doing or have any direction, doesn't care about details. And I'm not saying any of that's going to change, but all of a sudden there is this thing. And so now there's a lot to talk about. And that is wonderful for me. And [00:47:00] I think it should be wonderful for anyone who cares about Windows at all. It's just wonderful. There's really good things happening here. So we're going to get into some of the dirt and the drama. Don't worry, I'm still that person, but there is a whole list of wonderfulness that is occurring with Windows right now. And I know some people Copilots Blow. I don't care. We're not going to use it. That's great. You can turn it off. Don't worry about it.

Mikah Sargent (00:47:22):
Alright, I think we should take a quick break while we all try to reckon with this idea that the era of a smiling pole [00:47:30] is upon us. Okay, great. That's a little grit. Oh, okay. Sorry. A grinning. A grinning pole. Hold the hand over the pause button, but you will see. Let me tell you about our first sponsor this week. This episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by our pals at IT Pro tv, which is now called a C i Learning. IT. Teams significantly benefit from training from a C I learning. They kept all the fun and the personality of IT pro tv, [00:48:00] but now they've amplified this with robust solutions for all your training needs. You can let your team be entertained while they train with short format content and more than 7,200 hours to choose from. Plus, it's on demand, which allows teams to train when they want to.

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Paul Thurrott (00:51:05):
Well, I've taken a few pills. I think I'm going to be okay. Good. Good.

Richard Campbell (00:51:10):
Look, I know this whole thing bothers you, the craziness around Windows 11 updates, but under the circumstances, this is unavoidable, right? The fact that there's been a complete sea change in what's important in Windows in the past few months. Of course, the updates. Oh

Paul Thurrott (00:51:30):
[00:51:30] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, sure. The problem is this has been going on since Windows 11 arrived. I mean from the very get go.

Richard Campbell (00:51:37):
But I think originally it was neglect. It seemed like a couple of intern teams going. There was a few different folks who were updating stuff. What's interesting now, I mean back in the Gates days, we used to internally, I hear people, they talked about the io. So if Gates was paying attention,

Paul Thurrott (00:51:53):
Would you please stop paying attention to us? Exactly, yes.

Richard Campbell (00:51:56):
It was kind of terrifying. Suddenly [00:52:00] there's a new eye of so on and it's on this team, and so everything's being shaped.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:07):
It's probably on every team, honestly. But yeah, windows, I sort of wrote something to this effect. It's shot back windows into the spotlight. It's not the only thing in the spotlight, right? But they've not been in the spotlight to this degree, I don't think, since Windows eight, frankly. [00:52:30] And of course that didn't go well. But

Richard Campbell (00:52:33):
Yeah, you had a force of personality that was part of that, that was largely wagging the whole company. And that's move changed.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:42):
People forget this, but the Titanic launch was fantastic. The rest of the thing didn't go so long. Oh my goodness. You kind of lose track at the beginning that it was Maje. It was a

Mikah Sargent (00:52:53):
Beautiful ship.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:55):
I have

Mikah Sargent (00:52:55):
A point of clarification because earlier you were talking, and I believe [00:53:00] Richard, you said that Windows is not, the team is looking at copilot maybe as a way to be in the spotlight again, because 3, 6, 5 is where all the attention is. But now there's the suggestion that Windows 11 has the I F R on it again. So you're talking about external versus internal attention, whenever you

Paul Thurrott (00:53:24):
Mentioned earlier internal. It's all internal. Okay. All internal.

Richard Campbell (00:53:28):
And that's the issue is that [00:53:30] as they've been trying to be a cloud company, which was the right thing to do, and one would argue when they pivoted towards cloud, there needed to be the same kind of powerful statements is we will all focus on cloud. And it wasn't really,

Paul Thurrott (00:53:45):
It was hard for Windows, right? I mean, Microsoft 365, which was Office 365, which was office is the poster child for taking a traditional software business and turning it into a subscription-based [00:54:00] cloud service. And they were hugely successful. Huge Windows, windows server did the same thing with Azure, right? And then Xbox is doing this right now. This is the big part of the strategy. The next console part of that big leak is this hybrid cloud console and cloud gaming, of course through Xbox Cloud gaming. So what about Windows? It's like what about windows? Windows is left to load of the corner. What about us? We used to be wicked important.

Richard Campbell (00:54:27):
Remember we used to, that was the problem with the cloud plays. [00:54:30] The alternative to the cloud play was the Windows play. And so had to be a loser. It

Paul Thurrott (00:54:35):
Had to exactly be deemphasized because look, the reason Microsoft is the second biggest company in the world by market cap today is because of all of the Wall Street excitement overall, every single time they talked about cloud, Azure growth, whatever it was, this predates Nadella, but let's just call it the Nadella era, is marked by this rapid expansion of their stock price and their value, and [00:55:00] a lot of it was just smoke and mirrors. It was the not fake it until you make it, but talk about it until you make it because they were always going to do it. This isn't fake, it's not Elizabeth Holmes, but I mean they were always going to get there, but they talked this thing up for so long that by the time this thing was a serious business and growth had slowed because of course it can't go on forever. Apple's

Richard Campbell (00:55:21):
Doing it too. Can't be double digit growth forever. All

Paul Thurrott (00:55:23):
Of a sudden now you're like, see we did it. And while she's like, eh, you're getting kind of boring. I mean you got to have the next thing and God help 'em. [00:55:30] This thing fell right in her lap and literally fell in her lap. This is, and

Richard Campbell (00:55:33):
Every team has a role unlike the cloud.

Paul Thurrott (00:55:36):
That's right. AI will lift windows in a way that Cloud did not. And so suddenly they're back and they have a role and they're going to fight. I think this is, again, we're speculating a little bit, but I can ask a very pertinent question there. Where will those integrations come? Obviously it will come in Microsoft 365, but Windows can make a really good case, should [00:56:00] come too. And I agree with that. I don't

Richard Campbell (00:56:02):
Know. And having these two teams, I'm not going to say fight for this, but both push this way. There's no downside for Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott (00:56:09):
No, no. And it's common back and Yep. No, this is great. This is great. I mean, look, objectively, honestly, the thing about Microsoft 365 compared to Windows is that a superset as far as audience goes, even back in the day, office had a bigger audience than just Windows because not everyone [00:56:30] was on Windows. And that's even more true today because of mobile. So Microsoft 365 could make a great case. I don't know what the numbers are, but the potential addressable market for this product is much bigger on Microsoft 365 because it spans everything than web, mobile, devices, other platforms and Windows. And Windows is Windows, right? I mean, so there is that natural advantage they have and they're already got a leg up because they've been doing the closet stuff for a long time, but whatever, you know what? [00:57:00] It's a new world and I can assure you that adding AI background, removable and paint is not going to beat Microsoft 365 or scare them in any way, shape or form. But I like to see 'em trying. It's cute,

Richard Campbell (00:57:15):
But if all the best products in out in the field all applied to this interface to allow these large language models to interact with their software could have something superior. [00:57:30] Effectively, you have the M 365 plays and the walled garden play all the apps from the same place, all the teams sitting in the same room kind of effect, and you have the open ecosystem play.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:42):
Look, the very fact that there's been a directive from On High, which they have telegraphed now publicly through this copilot announcement, guys, this is going to be a common backend. It's going to be the same for all of you. You are going to work together. This isn't Windows eight doing their own app platform. That's sort of like the Windows phone [00:58:00] platform. It's like, no, you are going to work together. That was exactly the kind of leadership, frankly, that that group needed and didn't get from up high. They did their own path and they screwed the pooch forever on that one, and we all know how that ended up. So it's over anyway. So yes, I would just say, so Richard

Richard Campbell (00:58:20):
And I, preble all this whole preamble is to say the updates aren't that bad, Paul.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:28):
The updates themselves are not that bad. [00:58:30] I'll tell you what, I will cut to the chase here. I will. I just want to preface this by saying I don't remember exactly when Richard joined, probably last November-ish, something like

Richard Campbell (00:58:38):
That. I was flirting with you guys towards Christmas. You only got the committed January.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:44):
So you have gotten the luck or damning of having to be here to watch me in real time, cope with them changing the way they update windows every single month for the past year. So unfortunately you have been party to that. And I'm sorry, [00:59:00] I didn't mean to turn this into a group therapy session, but that's the way it's worked out for me.

Richard Campbell (00:59:08):
I mean, I'm in a good place for that because I have worked with so many of these teams and I've had these experiences where it's like, Hey, I mentioned to you one time, it's like this feels like a group of interns that happens.

Paul Thurrott (00:59:20):
Oh yeah. And then you find out, oh God, it is. I was talking to Richard before the show and everyone's different and Richard has a very positive [00:59:30] kind of outlook, which I frankly am very jealous of. I wish I was like that and I have a hard time doing that, so I'm going to try to do that, but not today. So I guess I'll summarize this concisely for a change, and I'll just say, remember that this year, every month, basically from January through August, it was like, what are they doing? It's a little different. They finally not consolidated. [01:00:00] They finally settled on the week D schedule. I just mentioned the preview updates used to go out in week C, who cares? But now they're week D and week D kind of makes sense, right between each week. B, cool. That's when the preview updates go.

(01:00:13):
We're going to get new features almost every month. We did, I would say from January to this month, the only month we didn't get a new feature, if I'm not mistaken, was August. I think actually also January because they weren't working in December. So actually it was February till [01:00:30] now, only one month. And sometimes it was one feature. I think it was July. We got one feature, nothing major one time we remember got a little slide of switch in window settings sometimes We got a bunch of features every quarter. We got these moment updates, right? Moment updates are a collection of new features all released at one time. This thing that we got yesterday in preview form is moment four. And by the time August rolled around, actually I guess it was July, Microsoft Remember had released that white paper and said, this is how we update Windows.

(01:00:57):
And Richard correctly just jumped right on the fact, did you [01:01:00] notice this is a 1.0 document? Yeah, they just made it up. They've been updating Windows and updating the way they update Windows since July, 2015, technically January, 2015. And they just now figured it out. Literally, this is how this has gone down. So that's been my life for the past several years and I thought, I hoped with the release of this white paper, it's out there, it's public, maybe they're not going to screw around with it anymore. And you know what? They've screwed around with it. And I will just say that I have been saying for a while now, that moment four [01:01:30] for Windows, windows 1122 H two and Windows 1123 EH H two are the same thing that this is what's coming up. They're going to release the preview version in September and the final, the public non avoidable version in October, and then it's Microsoft.

(01:01:49):
So November, December, January, we're going to get updates, right? So we're sure on File Explorer, which is coming in hot, really buggy performance issues, et cetera. And that is, again, I'm [01:02:00] trying to cut to the chase here, but July, August, whenever they announced that Microsoft also told us they were going to release Windows 1123 H two as an enablement package. And that should have been the clue. That should have been the clue because an enablement package is a very small thing. You do have to reboot, but it's nothing. It comes right back and it basically flips a switch internally. And what has happened is that in the background over the past month or two, they've actually been loading new features onto your computer and the enablement package does what it says. It turns 'em on. [01:02:30] And you know what? That doesn't make any sense because we were talking about this in August.

(01:02:35):
This thing is, it wasn't ready. And then September came, we're like, this thing isn't ready. What are they going to do? What's going on here and what's going on here? And we thought, this is thanks to Zach Boden at Windows Central. He reached out to some of his sources at Microsoft and said, what is this thing you just announced this update at this event, and it's not 23 H two. You're saying that 23 H two is now going to come a little later in the year. And that on [01:03:00] the schedule that by all rights is the 23 H two schedule. You are releasing this other cumulative update, monthly update first in preview form yesterday and then in final form in two weeks, not final, you know what I'm saying? Public form, that is something else. It has a bunch of different names. Its names are Legion, it doesn't matter.

(01:03:21):
It's the September, 2023 Windows 11 update bazzle above whatever you want to call it. And it is almost literally [01:03:30] every single thing that was going to be in 23 H two, and then you're going to release 23 inch two in a month or two. So why? And here's the reason. Microsoft turned on a dime with ai. Remember I said they turned on a bunch of dimes. Here's another one of the dimes. They changed it. And the reason is those moment updates, those cumulative updates, those are mandatory. You have to take it. If you're on Windows 1122 H two, you're getting it. You cannot avoid it. And they want everyone to have this. If they put this out as 23 H [01:04:00] two people would say no. And that's not what Microsoft wants. They're literally forcing this thing down our throats by making it the biggest ever update to Windows 11 is not a new version of Windows 11.

(01:04:13):
It's a random September update that for some reason, but not for some reason, right? For a reason. Microsoft's reason, everyone's getting it. And then two months are going to go by. So one month goes by, not really one month, but the next month comes, the public version hits, [01:04:30] and then one more month goes by, maybe two we'll see, but probably in November they're going to ship 23 H two and 23 H two is an enablement package that changes the version number and adds one more new feature. That's all it is. It literally is everything that it was. Plus, well, everything that it was minus one new feature was just released yesterday in preview form. That's it. Windows copilot will be in preview in 23 H two. It's not going to be finalized or anything like that. It will be in preview probably for a long time, frankly, right?

(01:05:00):
[01:05:00] Because not really there. And that's the kind of, to get to what I just said, I wrote three enormous articles because I was trying over a period of time, starting the day of the event, stretching into the next week and then going into the following Monday to understand what the heck are they doing at this late stage of the game? And it is what I just said. There's no doubt about it that his sources at Microsoft [01:05:30] have told him exactly the reason it makes sense, it is happening, we're all getting it. And then 23 H two will be a nothing. It'll be the thing that switches the version number in the above box that no one even knows still exists in Windows. And then one icon will change our new task bar and that's going to be it. So the schedule for everybody, just the actual schedule is this Microsoft yesterday released the fall update, the September, 2023 windows, whatever you want to call it, [01:06:00] as part of, it's not past Tuesday as part of the week, the Tuesday release.

(01:06:04):
So it's preview form, you have to go get it, you're not going to get it automatically in two weeks. On Patch Tuesday in October, I think it's October 10th, off the top of my head is the day that everyone, will it be mandatory? Everyone's getting it. There's no waiting for it. There's no staggered release schedule or whatever. Although some features will be staggered because Microsoft and then over the next month or whatever after that, they'll stagger release some [01:06:30] of the features. And then either in November or December they'll just release something called 23 H two, which will be kind of a non-event unless they add stuff to it in the meantime. But right now, the only difference is that by default, windows 11 has a button on the task bar for chat, which is actually an interesting front end to the consumer version of teams in Windows 10, this feature was called Meet Now, and it was a front end to Skype.

(01:06:59):
So in other words, when you [01:07:00] click on it, the app doesn't run, you actually get this other UI and I got to tell you something, it's too bad because that little front end UI was really nice. It's actually a neat little app or front end. It's not a full app. You could get to the full consumer teams app from it. No one ever did because no one ever ran this thing. So I think what happened is people clicked on it and they were like, eh, no thanks. And no one ever ran it. And so after two years of that, they decided to replace that icon with the copilot icon, which is the new [01:07:30] default icon, and there will be a pinned Microsoft, they're now calling the consumer version Microsoft Teams Dash free, which is the consumer version of teams now. And the expectation to date has been that this will run that app instead of running this front end experience, except for one little thing, it's Microsoft.

(01:07:51):
Just yesterday they released a release preview build. It has this feature in it, and there is in fact a new front end that's [01:08:00] still working on it. So even though it's an app UI or an app icon, sorry, it will still launch some kind of weird front end instead of the full app by default. Anyway, so I talk schedule. So the other part of the schedule is the Windows Insider program. So for the past don't know month or two, the beta channel has been testing 23 H two. I think they still are. They've never said, so we don't know. But the release preview there,

Richard Campbell (01:08:26):
Another channel we don't know about

Paul Thurrott (01:08:29):
Had

Richard Campbell (01:08:29):
These other products in [01:08:30] it.

Paul Thurrott (01:08:31):
Oh, oh, secret channel. There could be, actually, lemme get back to that because that's an interesting point. The fall update or what used to be 23 H two moved into the release preview channel. I think it was Friday last week and then yesterday I think or the other day it got a new build that has this new teams thing in it, meaning that is now 1 23 H two. Okay, so you [01:09:00] asked about a different hidden channel or something. The beta channel, if I'm not mistaken, is the version of, is the channel in the Windows Insider program that actually releases two builds each week? Each time is a drop, not one build and there's one build that has new features enabled and one build that does not, and that's an enablement package switch. It's the way they've been testing the way they're going to deliver 23 H two.

(01:09:22):
And also by the way, it's something they've been doing with Windows 10 for a while now because we don't talk about Windows 10 that much, but when Windows 10 got boring [01:09:30] and they slowed down development and there weren't a bunch of new features, they used to do the system where the H two release would be the big one, relatively speaking. And then the H one release that would follow six months later would be the small update. Those small updates for the past several versions have all been enablement packages, not resetting the compatibility clock or the support clock or anything like that. So it is a system. So anyway, if there's something hidden and it actually heads out to the public [01:10:00] beta channel would be where I would look.

Richard Campbell (01:10:03):
Now you bring up an interesting idea. There's these AI enabled apps and things and they're clearly just, they're coming out dropped. So they obviously have been tested somewhere. I wonder if they were in the enablement package just disabled for the vast majority of people. If you were in the secret club when you got that update, you saw these features.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:22):
Yeah, windows Weekly listeners, if any of you out there were privy to these, this is like a conspiracy call-in show. [01:10:30] Listen, all I'm saying is UFOs are real and I was impregnated by one. So this happens. Congratulations. I know I'm very proud, but you

Richard Campbell (01:10:38):
Can't argue with the fact that they're dropping a bunch of software none of us have seen before.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:43):
Well, and by the way, there were a little hints of this all year, right? I don't remember the details of the time periods anymore, but this year you and I and Leo and maybe Micah, depending on the timing, have talked about a feature that's like this thing just came out of nowhere. They never tested this. They did this with the new OneDrive. Remember [01:11:00] last November and October when that thing first appeared, they never tested it. It just showed up in stable.

Richard Campbell (01:11:07):
They did test it, we just weren't with it.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:11):
I would like to believe that they tested it. I mean maybe,

Richard Campbell (01:11:16):
And we don't know how big these updates are. I'm telling you, I suspect there isn't another channel that just, it's just feature flag. It's off.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:24):
There's definitely like a flag situation, right? We see in browsers, definitely.

Richard Campbell (01:11:28):
It's such a great way to do [01:11:30] that's just use this channel and then for your secret club of friends, you push the switch for them so they can play with the feature.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:40):
Yeah, I mean, I'm old fashioned. I like the idea that I signed up for something and I'm going to test something and then I test that thing. Not that they play mind games with me and see if he notices you. He definitely

Richard Campbell (01:11:51):
Had updates where we wondered what was in this update. Again, there's always something visible, but nothing significant. I just wonder what's been invisible.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:00):
[01:12:00] Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (01:12:02):
Especially drive you plug in and if you haven't then knows that you're part of the secret club.

Richard Campbell (01:12:09):
It's easier to do this than it is to build a whole other channel.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:14):
No, in fact, I struggle with certain things. The way that Microsoft builds software and has built software, by the way for decades, this is not brand new or anything. This notion that is like a build trunk and then they have these branches that they go off and these things are serviced [01:12:30] similarly identically or differently depending on what they are and blah, blah, blah. And that when you look at the way that 23 H two relates to 22 H two, you see that this thing is, it does not reset the compatibility clock. It also, but actually no, it does. It actually does support, it resets the support time table interestingly, because it's two years out from the first one, but it wouldn't otherwise, it certainly it won't require that staggered [01:13:00] kind of C F R style release because nothing has changed Internally it's the same. It's built off the same source code.

(01:13:09):
It's not a fork of the source code, a branch as Microsoft would call it. It is 22 H two, it just has a different name. So we had Windows 11, version 22 H two, and then some build number for each of the things over time. And then this one says 23 H two, but really it's just a continuation of the build. It's just the same build, [01:13:30] major build. So anyway, that's as I understand it today, my therapist is going to this month. I will say when we were at the, I should add too, I didn't mention this when we were at the event, Mary Jo and I and Chris Hoffman and others asked every person from Microsoft who could get our hands on, and Frank Shaw is in charge of communications. What's going on? You just said this thing, it doesn't make any sense what is actually [01:14:00] happening.

(01:14:01):
And I don't mean this in a mean way, but the fact that each of 'em had a completely different answer was humorous. But the one thing that, and none of 'em knew the answer really, none of them were like, this is it. They're like, yeah, I don't know. Including guys in the windows. But the one thing they all said was, oh guys, you don't have to worry. John Cable is going to write a post. This guy, right? He's the [01:14:30] guy who explains every release of windows basically to the public blogs that windows com. So he comes up at least once a year, sometimes twice, and he's going to answer all your questions and they're like, okay, when's that coming? I'm like, ah, maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe Monday. Anyway, came out yesterday. And honestly it's worth looking at. It's like I said, blog set window, windows.com.

(01:14:53):
It's called How to Get the latest Windows 11 Innovations. And he links to the use of me announcement post about the [01:15:00] fall update and all the new features. But then he just basically kind of explains what's happening here. And among the things that he says is that Windows, so this is another thing we have to deal with. Annually Windows, no one gets this, right? This is my semantic perfectionist thing. There's something coming called the Windows 11 20 23 update. People are going to call Windows 11 version 23 H two. [01:15:30] The Windows 1123 update. Those are not the same thing. The update is the thing you install to get to 23 H two. So he mixes and matches that too, like everyone from Microsoft does. But sometime in the second half of this year, and there's only a couple months left, Microsoft will release this thing now using the dates that he supplies for other things.

(01:15:54):
I have said earlier, I said this earlier, it will be November or December the [01:16:00] earliest could be Patch Tuesday in November, frankly, where this you will as a Windows 11 person on 22 H two will get this enablement package and one new feature. So that will be a big one. A couple of things we should talk about. So John Cable's post is worth reading, copilot, right? The big excitement only available in North America and parts of Asia and South America right now. So everyone was, Microsoft's been talking this thing up for six months. [01:16:30] Everyone who lives in Europe, you don't get it. What's going on there? And Microsoft does not say this, but Microsoft told us it is in fact because of the D M A, that digital market authority, new law and the gatekeeper stuff. So they're working with EU regulators to figure out a schedule where they can get the send and maybe make changes to it like they offered to do for teams like they are going to do in Windows with the Edge integration stuff. This will be a different product in the European, not the European Union, the European economic [01:17:00] area, which is not just the eu, but also parts of or what I think of as Eastern Europe that aren't in the eu. I think this will apply. I think it applies to the uk, well, large parts of Asia, Australia, New Zealand, bunch of it. So copilot, the marquee feature of this fall update slash 23 H two is actually not available today. Sorry, it's not in those places.

Mikah Sargent (01:17:27):
Being a global company is hard.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:29):
Well, especially [01:17:30] today. I mean it was bad enough with, what was that? The European privacy law. I'm sorry, the data retention. Yeah, bad enough, right? That was a big thing. This is way worse. This is way worse. EU just went to Apple today and said, guess what? You have to open up all your ecosystems now.

Mikah Sargent (01:17:48):
Yeah, I saw that.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:51):
We'll

Mikah Sargent (01:17:51):
See how that goes.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:52):
Yep. I

Mikah Sargent (01:17:53):
Can's

Paul Thurrott (01:17:54):
Going to say Apple, it's not going to go well. Process. And the other thing is, [01:18:00] if you're a business probably or an individual who has hardware, I don't know how this could even happen. I suppose it's possible, but if you somehow are on 21 H one, that's the initial release of Windows 11. You actually said no to 20 H 2, 22 H two, you can update of course to 23 H two, but that's going to be a full operating system install. How do these, you called it a full operating systems swap swap. What

Mikah Sargent (01:18:25):
I don't like that.

Paul Thurrott (01:18:26):
I love when they use language. They've never used it ever. It's a version upgrade. [01:18:30] It's what every feature update capital F, capital U used to be, which was October would come, the new update would arrive. It would take a long time to install. You'd reboot and it would be sitting there for 20 minutes, 30 minutes longer. It would take a long time, but it

Richard Campbell (01:18:44):
Pop up a very friendly dialogue. It's like we're making sure we don't lose your file.

Paul Thurrott (01:18:48):
Exactly.

Richard Campbell (01:18:49):
Is there a possibility you could, yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:18:52):
I never even thought about that. Now I'm scared.

Paul Thurrott (01:18:54):
Thank you for putting that in my brain. Why did you say that? Also

Mikah Sargent (01:18:57):
Calling it a swap is terrifying to me too. What are you taking [01:19:00] away?

Paul Thurrott (01:19:01):
I don't know where that language came from. Yeah, very strange. I mean, technically that's sort of what's happening, right? Yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:19:07):
That to me is the extension of support. I mean, that's Microsoft committing money to the product,

Paul Thurrott (01:19:13):
Right? Yeah. Well, I mean it is, but this schedule was kind of preordained with the initial release of Windows 11 because depending on, I think it's two years, right? I mean two years is the point. So it's an interesting thing if you're on 22 [01:19:30] H two, which is most are, I'm sure, I'm sure the vast majority are. This is just you've just installed or will in October installed this humongous update and then November, December will arrive and you'll see an update. It'll say, Hey, you're getting a new version of Windows and the thing will reboot so quick, you won't have time to turn around. You're going to be like, what is this? I thought this was going to be a big deal. And

Richard Campbell (01:19:51):
The implied in that is that if you don't take this update, you don't get support.

Paul Thurrott (01:19:56):
Yeah. I mean they're going to force it on you, right? I mean, [01:20:00] basically, yeah, it will happen. I mean, unless you turn a computer on,

Richard Campbell (01:20:04):
There are ways to block it, but the implied part of this is no, we won't support that version anymore. That's

Paul Thurrott (01:20:10):
Right. That's right. Yeah. So anyway, this is, why do I stress over this? Part of it is a mental, but part of it is I write a book. One of the things that, and listen, in writing a book, I am basically putting myself in the same position, the same shoes as anyone [01:20:30] who supports users in any organization or in your family or whatever it is. And the thing is, up until Windows 11, if you had some version of Windows, you could say, go do this exact thing and it will always be the same. And you cannot say that now. And it is very hard.

(01:20:49):
I use OneDrive, I still use it. It's still true. There are three different OneDrive interfaces today you could have in Windows 11, and there is no way to know which one you're going to have, what the, [01:21:00] it is not good When I look at this stuff and I kind of blew through it, but there's a big list of new features that just arrived in preview form and will arrive in two weeks for everybody else. Not every single one of those is going to arrive at the same time for everybody. Microsoft Classic. And I just said co-pilot's not coming to Europe and elsewhere. So there's a lot of caveats now and that's not how my life works. I want to definitively [01:21:30] say, do this and it will work.

Richard Campbell (01:21:31):
Yeah, there's

Paul Thurrott (01:21:32):
No way to do that. This makes it very hard. I'm not just a weirdo. I mean I am, but it's not just that. This is breaking my ability to accurately describe and concisely describe something to people just as it is a problem for anyone who supports users of any kind. I think this is a huge problem.

Richard Campbell (01:21:55):
Do you think, this feels to me like feature flags run amuck. They've done so [01:22:00] much of feature flags, different features,

Paul Thurrott (01:22:03):
They throw confetti in the floor and they're like, if the purple ones are up, then you get this feature. I mean, there's no way to know,

Richard Campbell (01:22:09):
Don't know. But the more ly, they don't get to it. Consensus go, this is the version, and now everybody rolls up to it. It's almost like there's feature flag orphans out there. They're just stranded in a test version.

Paul Thurrott (01:22:23):
When I heard that 23 H two is going to be an enablement package, I thought, thank God, because for once in this [01:22:30] damn things product cycle, I can finally say definitively, I know that if you're on 22 H two, you're just going to get it and you're going to have all the features. And on we go. And I was like, for a few months in the fall, it's going to be great. I can update the book, it's going to be fine. But now I have to come up with a whole strategy, not to mention timing for this, because if I put out a bunch of stuff and I replaced whatever it was there, most of the people reading this book will look at this and say, that's not what it looks like. It's something [01:23:00] I actually have to think about and I do. I'll be publishing something about my plan this, but it is a nightmare. And again, there are people that I don't know why you care about this. And I'm like, I don't know why you're reading my stuff, but you always cared

Mikah Sargent (01:23:14):
About

Paul Thurrott (01:23:14):
It. If that's your question, what are you doing here? Are you an, but again, it's not just my personal predilections,

Richard Campbell (01:23:22):
It does sound like the small update is the perfect time to ship the book because everybody should be on that and it should be the mud and consistent

Paul Thurrott (01:23:29):
Moment. [01:23:30] Yeah, well it's going to be a little later than that, but yeah, anyway, I do have a plan, but it will be before 23 H two ships for sure. Yep. So anyway, there you go. That's WTF is happening with Windows 11. Alright, and

Mikah Sargent (01:23:48):
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Paul Thurrott (01:25:42):
Well, we talked about Pano spin, right? So it's official. I think Bloomberg kind of broke that story last week and it's true Dave, in fact, they wrote that story before Dave Limp appeared at his last Amazon devices event, right? Surprise, I forget what day that was. Tuesday maybe [01:26:00] or last

Mikah Sargent (01:26:00):
Week. Yeah, I think it was Tuesday. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:26:04):
Dave Lim's great. I mean very different style from panels spin. It's going to be very interesting. The Amazon events to me have, especially in recent years, has been most notable for, I keep using this word, but this kind of tsunami of product that comes out of that company. It's astonishing.

Mikah Sargent (01:26:20):
It's ridiculous. And spaghetti project after spaghetti project that they make you buy and then have you test for them, don't get me

Paul Thurrott (01:26:27):
Started. And then sometimes get rid of very quickly. I give a little credit for that [01:26:30] and also obviously the problems with that, but

Richard Campbell (01:26:35):
Amazon's also talked about the fact that their LX plans have not gone well, that it was supposed to generate revenue through sale. It just hasn't.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:44):
That

Richard Campbell (01:26:44):
Was a preamble for seriously cutting budget.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:46):
Yeah, we're going to talk about this because we're going to talk about the AI stuff they did announced at this event and about that alternate future that I always sort of thought Google would do where they did this for and I'm sure they will really, right? But [01:27:00] it's weird to me that Google hasn't taken the assistant and made that their focus of AI because it's voice control and that always made more sense to me than people typing on a little keyboard or whatever. That's kind of weird, but that's, Amazon has developed this ecosystem great cost and it definitely has users. They haven't turned their hardware into a profitable, successful business, which is why panel space is perfect for it.

Richard Campbell (01:27:28):
Anyway, [01:27:30] there's a corollary to all of this, which is a large language models disrupt all these voices because the L l M is better at taking people's statements and realizing

Paul Thurrott (01:27:43):
Value. Right? No, you're right. What I meant was the user doesn't have to know this. It uses the voices, the front end, the whole back end could change or it could access both or whatever.

Richard Campbell (01:27:54):
But the tech companies do need to know about this and it's very disruptive. It's a chance to reboot the business [01:28:00] entirely,

Paul Thurrott (01:28:01):
Right? So Amazon is going forward with elect and Google has just not like Microsoft is like, we've got do it. We've got borrowed, we've got these other things. I mean, they're just doing all kinds of stuff. So honestly, I'd have to go back and really look at IO again to remember, but I don't know. That assistant was a big chunk of this stuff. I don't think it was. Yeah, I think so.

Mikah Sargent (01:28:22):
How I remember, yeah, that's a good point. Bard really did take the show, I guess. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:28:29):
Yeah. So we'll see. [01:28:30] But it, it's just different approaches. And then of course I am sure Richard and Mary Jo and some others have as well, but I've heard from so many Microsoft employees about Panos and Amazon used to be the first landing for a lot of ex-Microsoft executives. They would go to Amazon first and then they would kind of burn out there pretty quick because the culture there is very different and it's very frugal. And of course Microsoft has [01:29:00] actually gotten there now, but it's kind of a slap in the face to what you're used to when you come from Microsoft. I heard from at least two different people who said, this company's going to chew him up and spit 'em out. He's not going to fit in there. He's not like that. And we'll see, because I don't know, I really don't know.

Richard Campbell (01:29:22):
There are some Microsoft execs that have done well at Amazon. I think of guys like David Treadwell.

Paul Thurrott (01:29:27):
How about Charlie Kindle, who basically started the [01:29:30] business we've been talking about. That was something he brought to Microsoft and they said no.

Richard Campbell (01:29:34):
Yeah, but it is the exception. I think most don't last.

Paul Thurrott (01:29:42):
Most don't last. That's exactly

Richard Campbell (01:29:43):
The number of less than a year back at Microsoft is astonishing.

Paul Thurrott (01:29:47):
Yeah, that's right. Or they move on to Google. Actually Google seems to be the, OR Meta. Actually, meta became the big one. Meta as we were recording this show, meta had an event and released a bunch of new products including a [01:30:00] bunch of AI stuff. And a lot of that was just Microsoft guys, which I think is kind of interesting. So there have been different. A lot of Microsoft guys ended up at Google, like I said, including Mark Lukowski who just left in a huff, by the way, under very bad circumstance and kind of burn bridges the way he does. And then a bunch of guys, once I met a lot of the M R X R guys, all that stuff, a lot of them ended up there and they're shipping product now. Not that anyone's going to buy any of it, but at least they're trying and I appreciate that. So anyway, [01:30:30] Amazon, I wish Panos luck. I really do.

Richard Campbell (01:30:34):
You would see something, and I think Amazon, the Kindle product is untouchable. It's phenomenal. You can question the Alexa product line and when they've certainly made a bunch of them, it's in

Paul Thurrott (01:30:47):
Stuff. I like that it's in stuff.

Richard Campbell (01:30:50):
Yeah, it'll be, but no laptops unless,

Paul Thurrott (01:30:55):
Okay, so that's an interesting point. Someone asked me the other day about this, why do they [01:31:00] ship so much of this stuff? And it's like, guys, they got to have something that you use it with, right? Google has the assistant, Siri has the phone, they both have phones rather, and there's billions of users. That's straight up. Microsoft's strategy with Cortana was to put it on phone first where it makes the most sense, but then use the billion strong Windows user base to drive that usage and that it didn't work for all the obvious reasons. But it's interesting to wonder maybe if [01:31:30] they had kept Cortana around, if that wouldn't have been a good brand. Although I think we all agree co-pilot's an awesome brand, but Cortana would've been better front end than binging, just from a perception perspective, I think. Agreed. You're so right. Yeah,

Richard Campbell (01:31:45):
I mean, I always thought the tie to the video game was problematic. The character in the video game was pretty sexualized,

Paul Thurrott (01:31:53):
And by the way, went insane. That's right. If you want to talk about the original AI hallucination, [01:32:00] play Balo four or five or whatever that was, I don't remember anymore. That's what happens. In fact, the new game is kind of about resurrecting her reputationally, if you will, whatever kind of like 2010 was about Dave and 20 think we didn't have enough

Richard Campbell (01:32:17):
Problems with the science fiction effects around ai. You literally named your product after a video paper.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:23):
Yeah, she was an AI construct. That's how they describe her. [01:32:30] Anyway, so Panos is off good. I'll be interested to see. Well, he will be the guy leading next September's event, but he likes to be out there. I wonder if they're going to do more interim announcements for a change. Who knows? We'll see,

Mikah Sargent (01:32:45):
We

Richard Campbell (01:32:46):
Shall see. He's got to have some time to get his feet under him, understand the new ecosystem, look at the product lineup

Mikah Sargent (01:32:52):
And time to be told no a few times.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:54):
Yeah. Well, you know what though? Amazon doesn't say no a lot with this stuff. I mean, [01:33:00] there's no doubt he got pushback on whatever product plans he had this year. Like Amazon, like I said, they released a lot of product. I mean, if his goal is to invent new form factors and whatever, this is honestly his best chance.

Mikah Sargent (01:33:14):
I misunderstood. I thought you meant going from Microsoft to Amazon was hard because they are more lean.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:21):
They are as a company. I did say that. I'm sorry. Sorry. No, that's correct. They are a more kind of austere, frugal company. But the [01:33:30] part he's going into, right? My God and Richard's right, last year a lot of information came out from Amazon in particular about how much they had invested, we'll call it dropped in a toilet and lost, we might call it too, but with very little payback. But they're still trying. And that's the thing that I think is kind of amazing,

Mikah Sargent (01:33:50):
But you do have to give 'em credit. Yeah, I give 'em credit for that. They do continue. I thought for sure the echo frames were no more. And then at this event they were like, you know what? We're still doing those things [01:34:00] and now we've got a new function,

Paul Thurrott (01:34:02):
I thought. And they're also, unfortunately, there's a very common practice happening these days where online services are getting more expensive. And one of the kind of ways that can happen is you take services that used to be free and you make them paid. Microsoft did that with some Microsoft teams premium features for example, that used to be we're sort of free a little while there. Amazon's going to be doing that with some of their services because I mean, of course it's easy to get disgruntled at that, but [01:34:30] remember, these companies aren't charities. They're trying to make money. So they're trying to figure out a business model that makes sense. We'll see.

Mikah Sargent (01:34:42):
Alright. Yes. What else?

Paul Thurrott (01:34:43):
Just real quick, we don't have to beat this to death, but I've been writing a series of articles about that Xbox League and the couple that have happened since the last time we spoke is that, God, I find these things fascinating when the PS five, so it's hard to remember back, but the Microsoft [01:35:00] and Sony revealed their next generation consoles kind of in tandem, and they had announced that they were doing them and then in, I think it was March the following year, the year that they eventually shipped 2020, right? The pandemic. They both came out with their specs releases. This is the specifications of these consoles. And they were very close frankly, but the PSS five did some things that the Xbox wasn't going to do, most [01:35:30] notably through IO throughput. And it was like a dramatic advantage for PS five as first announced.

(01:35:40):
In fact, I believe that this is why the direct storage technology happened. I'm not saying it wasn't happening already, but I do not think it was going to ship in the Xbox series X and Ss originally. But because the throughput on the PSS five was so high, they had to do something. I think they released it early. So anyway, that was one of the things that came out of [01:36:00] it. But it's fascinating that at the time everyone in the Xbox leadership team was beside themselves with joy because they came out first and when Sony came out with theirs, like, oh, we're all set. Everything's going to be great. They're like, after seven years of starting off a generation with a price and performance and messaging disadvantage to PlayStation, Phil essentially said, I can't help myself. I woke up this morning with a sense of dread and now I'm soaking in it and I'm so proud of [01:36:30] our team.

(01:36:30):
He was really happy, unfortunately for Phil Spencer and the rest of these guys, the way the things went down in real life does not mapped to this at all. The PlayStation has a huge lead over Xbox in this generation, hopefully isn't as bad as it was with Xbox One, but not good. And they went into this thinking, we're going to win this one. They actually, they saw what Sony was doing and they're like, we're going to win. And I just don't know how they came away with that reaction because if you look at the specs as announced [01:37:00] that day, a lot of 'em were very similar by the way, like identical. But the throughput stuff, one of the big things that both Sony and Microsoft were trying to get rid of with this generation of games, it's not just four K 60 frames a second. That's important, but it's the lag time when you go to load a new level or something that with the weight screen or whatever you want to call that. And Sony explicitly promised no waste screens. I believe people have told me Microsoft did too. I can't find that. But

Richard Campbell (01:37:29):
It's [01:37:30] not up to them. The game developer has to decide that, and it's however the game developer does things,

Paul Thurrott (01:37:35):
Right? I think the idea though is that if you have this underlying power in the console, you shouldn't ever have to worry about it. Shouldn't

Richard Campbell (01:37:41):
Have to. But it all depends on how the dev implements the game, the idea that the manufacturer would mandate that it's insane.

Paul Thurrott (01:37:51):
Well, I mean, consoles are close. Systems supposed to be a clean experience, et cetera, et cetera. You're right. [01:38:00] No, but you're right. I've told the story so many times, but it's so relevant here. When the Xbox 360 was coming out, I visited their campus and saw it early. At the time it was like these two power Mac G five towers next to each other with a hand controller attached to it. And Microsoft had announced the console. It was this beautiful little white thing, and this development station was like the size of a Volkswagen. And I remember I asked the guy, I said, how are you going to get that inside that? And he said, oh no, we've got guys working on it. And I'm like, yeah, [01:38:30] oh my.

Richard Campbell (01:38:31):
They're running, they're running emulators and emulators are just not efficient. So you throw a lot of

Paul Thurrott (01:38:35):
Horsepower. But the other piece of the Xbox 360 was new to that day, we forget these things, was that they were going to allow game makers to update their games. This has never happened before You shipped a game and your game was the game, and that was, it

Richard Campbell (01:38:48):
Came on dvd.

Paul Thurrott (01:38:49):
Yep. So this was a big advance. And of course, the way my brain works, I was like, whoa. I mean, hold on a second. That mean that a bunch of these guys are going to release really poor [01:39:00] quality games that will need to be updated with massive updates all the time. And he's like, no, we have a system in place to prevent that. And if you're an Xbox guy, you are nodding your head knowingly right now because day one, multi hundred gigabyte game updates are not just a thing. They are the norm normal. And giving third party developers too much latitude sometimes maybe isn't the right approach.

Richard Campbell (01:39:23):
But when you're coming from half a dozen big companies and you either get their games or you don't, you're going to suck it down. [01:39:30] Fallout 76 needed those patches, man still need.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:34):
So the other thing, I didn't write this in my article, but with regard to the PSS five versus the Xbox, you got to remember back in March, 2020, it was only one Xbox. It was the Xbox Series X. They didn't announce the SS until very late in the game. In fact, it was a little secret at Microsoft. I don't think the board of directors even knew about it up until very close to the launch. And that console is lower powered. I think it's G P U I dunno if it's C P U and GPU [01:40:00] or just GPU U, but it's not as high powered obviously as the series X. That's the flagship. So the series X and PlayStation five are close except for in IO throughput. But the Xbox Series SS is not. And unfortunately, when you announce these things to the world and you give developers, you're like, listen, you need to hit both these specs again, left to their own devices. A lot of these guys are like, well, we're just going to target the S because it has to work on both. And

Richard Campbell (01:40:30):
[01:40:30] Anything on the s

Paul Thurrott (01:40:32):
I think that played a big role in the delta in quality between Xbox and PlayStation games in this generation where PlayStation more often hit four K 60 frames more often, or maybe always had no weight screens. And I think that's part of the real world problem. And unfortunately, Phil Spencer and those other guys who were so joyous over this, they knew that, right? And how do you not immediately know that that's what's going to happen? I dunno. [01:41:00] And there was another, oh, so this one made the round. Can we

Richard Campbell (01:41:04):
Talk about how is the Xbox leak timing suspect? I mean, as soon as the Activision Blizzard deal is clear, it's going to go through. And let's face it, part of the way they got that deal through was to tell 'em how poorly Xbox was doing, how weak their gaming story was. And then they dropped this massive document mysteriously appears. And you can see they have incredible plans. They're just a larger group of things. They love it.

Paul Thurrott (01:41:29):
I love [01:41:30] the way your brain works, and I think the same way, but the only thing that stands against that being true is they leaked a lot of third party information, which hurts their relationships, right? There are going to be game makers who say, you know what? We were going with you day one, and now we're not. We're going with Sony. We can't afford this kind of thing. And I think that was a huge embarrassment for them. It also creates a PR problem, which is like, okay, but these documents were [01:42:00] true as of whatever data, this is not necessarily what we're doing now. And you face this thing where the awesomeness of what's coming undercuts what you're actually doing now. And you might actually have better things in some cases that are going to be coming on a different schedule, the same schedule. We talked about this notion that the next Xbox could be based on arm, which is crazy. So yeah, I hear you and my brain goes right there. But no, based on some of the stuff, and you could see [01:42:30] it, and Phil Spencer publicly and internally talking to his team, we really failed our partners on this one. This is bad. And the F T C and Microsoft both admitted it was Microsoft. It was Microsoft's fault. It wasn't deliberate. It was a mistake, but it was, yeah, I mean, honestly, this was, yeah, I think like I'm right with you, but the timing, yeah. Oh, for sure. I was crazy. Well,

Richard Campbell (01:42:56):
And however it was, and perhaps the people who did leak it against [01:43:00] the will of the company, we're thinking that it's like we don't

Paul Thurrott (01:43:03):
Have this much. Yeah, though that's a big motivation of people who leak. That question comes up from time to time. Why would anyone tell you anything? And it's like, well, these people believe that my heart is in the right place, and that they don't think their own company is doing a good enough job of telling you how great they are. And maybe this could help with the public perception or whatever. So yeah, that could absolutely be the case, because honestly, the plans that leaked are exciting. [01:43:30] If you're an Xbox fan, this should excite you quite a bit. So that's neat.

Richard Campbell (01:43:37):
But hurting partners is serious.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:39):
It's bad. And the other one I've written up so far is about Nintendo. And this one was widely reported around, and this one has been poo-pooed by everybody. If you don't think that Microsoft could buy Nintendo, and I mean literally it could actually happen, you might want to go reread this bit of it because it could happen. They have incredibly close relationships. [01:44:00] Everyone's like, oh, Microsoft couldn't buy a Japanese company. I was like, Hey, I don't think you know how that works. Actually, they could. It's just that Nintendo has seen great success on doing their own thing. And at the time of this discussion, it came up because Microsoft was going to buy TikTok. Remember that insanity? And I was so against this.

Richard Campbell (01:44:22):
They were being pushed by the government to do that. I dunno, they well,

Paul Thurrott (01:44:25):
But part of what comes out internally is actually, there was a big group at Microsoft that really wanted this to happen because they wanted [01:44:30] this to be their consumer play.

Richard Campbell (01:44:32):
There's only so many social media platforms that ever come up for sale. So the fact that it was possible, why wouldn't

Paul Thurrott (01:44:37):
You? That's right, exactly right. Yep. That's exactly how those people phrased it. And there's a guy who was in charge of Microsoft commercial marketing under Chris Capella who wrote Chris and Phil Spencer, the guy in charge of Xbox, and said, guys, I don't know what this TikTok thing is, but please explain to me why we're not buying Nintendo. It seems to me that our play with consumers if we're [01:45:00] going to be successful is games. It's not TikTok. And they were like, yep. And then both of them, well, Chris was very circumspect. He kind of said, yeah, I like where your head's at, blah blah, blah. Some positive stuff. I know there've been rumors and everything. And then Phil was like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He didn't stop talking about it. He was like, yeah, no, we've talked about this. We want to do this. And people kind of went off on the how excited Phil Spencer was and how pie in the sky this seemed. But honestly, if [01:45:30] Nintendo does another we you type thing, that could happen. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:45:36):
I'd just be interested to see how the Japanese government would respond to that.

Paul Thurrott (01:45:39):
Yeah. Well, China is any guide. It will change some laws and make it impossible. I don't, which is what happened at TikTok, and that's why Microsoft left. And Oracle sucked up the remains of that. And we are where we are today, thank God. So yeah, interesting stuff. Anyway, there's a lot more. I'll definitely have three, five, I dunno however [01:46:00] many are, but this is a lot more to come in this and this league is just, God, it's the gift that keeps on giving. It's fantastic. Oh, it really is amazing. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:46:10):
Some of the stuff in there is pretty wild. We had someone on Tech News weekly last week kind of going through, not just what the kind of hardware stuff being the big leaks, but some of the other conversations that took

Paul Thurrott (01:46:23):
Place. To me, it's the conversations that are more interesting. And I know a lot of these people, [01:46:30] I think Richard was talking earlier about this Windows 11 thing, and all of a sudden you see a certain amount of competence here and how nice that is. And I like Phil Spencer, and there are little things like it didn't go after mobile in a strong way, which I think is a strategic mistake. But when I see Chris Capella and Satya Nadella and others and Microsoft talking about gaming and how aggressive they are and how aggressive they were before Activision ERs, there were huge hints that they were going to do something like this. They were talking [01:47:00] about buying Warner Brothers interactive, or Zenax, which they eventually did buy, and Nadella said, buy both. I both. Let's do both.

Richard Campbell (01:47:11):
Why do we have to pick?

Paul Thurrott (01:47:13):
Yeah, you don't have to pick. We can buy both. I mean, that says to me a lot about the commit, because they can talk, anyone can get on a stage and say things, right? But when you talk internally like this, this is real.

Richard Campbell (01:47:24):
And it's exciting when we get the inside view and see that they are an aggressive company trying to do things.

Paul Thurrott (01:47:30):
[01:47:30] You don't get that a lot on the outside. You really don't. You can't. Not these days. He's

Richard Campbell (01:47:34):
The c e o of a trillion dollar company.

Paul Thurrott (01:47:36):
I know, but come on, bomber would go out there, beat his chest like a gorilla. You got some intent there. Sat nadel, like is he an AI intent or an AI construct or whatever? What's going on with this guy?

Richard Campbell (01:47:46):
Well, they sent him to c e O school and he speaks very carefully.

Paul Thurrott (01:47:51):
Yes. A little too careful,

Richard Campbell (01:47:52):
Carefully, Frank. He moves stock prices very easily.

Paul Thurrott (01:47:56):
No, that's true. Yeah. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:47:57):
The s e c can go after him. He cannot make [01:48:00] speculative statements.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:01):
Sure. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Alright. Mean, boy, I'm a big fan of transparency. I think part of the issue I have with Nadella is that purpose

Richard Campbell (01:48:14):
Do, he will do an RD debrief insiders, but even when he stays on screen, he is not a casual person. And so to see him rights is really interesting because [01:48:30] normally that facade does not break.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:32):
Yeah. Where were you when you were wearing a suit, Mike, was it like a C V SS or something?

Mikah Sargent (01:48:37):
No, it was a Kaiser permanent day pharmacy.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:41):
Well, okay, like a C V S? Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (01:48:43):
Exactly. Like a C

Paul Thurrott (01:48:44):
V Ss. Yeah. Okay. Well, you strike me as more casual and Sacha Nadella, but you did wear suit to a pharmacy.

Mikah Sargent (01:48:52):
It was right after work, so I had to run inside and everyone

Paul Thurrott (01:48:58):
Seemed confusing after Labor Day. Really?

(01:49:00):
[01:49:00] We're never going to get through this show. Nope. Okay, so there's so much going on. It's crazy. So a couple of antitrust things, and dear guide, you thought this was over the UK C M a provisionally approved Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard proving my point that if Microsoft came up with a nonsense solution, the nonsense regulators at the C M A would utterly fall for it. And it looks like they did so sometime in October. Yeah, [01:49:30] they're just going to do it now. Here's the thing we forgot. They're not the only insane piece people in the world and the F T C just today revived their battle trying to unwind the Microsoft Activision Blizzard acquisition before it happens, which they can't do. So they have two choices When they want to go after a company for antitrust violations, they can go to federal court, which is what usually happens.

(01:49:56):
You sue them in federal court. Federal court like they did [01:50:00] with Google, and actually that's the D O J, but they now in court, they just did with Amazon. Okay, cool. Or they have this internal process they can do, and sometimes the internal process happens, and then if they're successful, they go after the federal court version typically. And by typically, I mean a hundred percent of the time, if they lose in federal court, the internal thing disappears. And that's what originally happened back in July, I think it was when all this went down, they closed their internal case. Well, they just reopened it and yikes. So [01:50:30] why would they do this? No one knows. And what do they hope to achieve? I can tell you categorically, they cannot prevent Microsoft from acquiring Activision Blizzard. They can't. So the only thing they can do, and they have said this, they would try to unwind it after the fact. They would divest Activision Blizzard from Microsoft after they've acquired it, which is what some people want to do with Meta and Instagram and WhatsApp or Google and double click and [01:51:00] whatever.

Richard Campbell (01:51:01):
Well, and one would argue that's what happened to Ma Bell back in the day, is they broke the company up and spun it off into different pieces or Imperial oil. Yeah. I

Paul Thurrott (01:51:09):
Don't know if it came after a No, you're right. I'm sorry. Yeah, that apparel is fine. Yep, yep, that's true. I'm trying to think. I was going to say there are successful examples of that happening, but actually that might be the only one. And it is a big one.

Richard Campbell (01:51:23):
It's one. And the joke, of course is that they rolled back up again ultimately over 20 years.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:27):
Yeah, that's right. That's right. [01:51:30] That's exactly

Richard Campbell (01:51:31):
Right. There are such a things natural monopoly.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:34):
Yeah. So geez, I thought I was done kind of dumping on all these people, but yeah, I guess I'm not,

Richard Campbell (01:51:45):
I don't know why you keep going back to get spanked again.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:49):
Well,

Mikah Sargent (01:51:50):
After a while, you have to wonder.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:52):
Yeah, so the ftc, we knew this was coming because Ft C and Amazon were holding talks of the summer. They broke down. Amazon wasn't able to come to [01:52:00] settlement terms. The Ft C this past week sued Amazon for monopoly abuse. They say that Amazon has two monopolies, both related to e-commerce, that they serve each other and are sort of an unholy alliance of virtuous cycle. And that there are cross monopoly abuses going on, most of which are related to their internal systems for using partners to sell their products, et cetera, et cetera, forcing them to use their whatever it's, and not setting prices. All

Mikah Sargent (01:52:28):
Amazon logistics.

Paul Thurrott (01:52:30):
[01:52:30] Yeah, all that great Amazon stuff. Let's not waste too much time on this. I wrote a huge thing about this today. I will just say this upfront. I think everyone knows this. If you listen to me at all, God help you. I'm sorry, but I am a big proponent of the need for big tech to be regulated all around the world. I think that every single one of these companies needs to be examined, all of their business practices and that adjustments need to be made. And that what the EU has done with the D S A and the D M A is a beautiful template for what should happen worldwide. [01:53:00] And we could kind of take it on a case by case basis. What are the monopolies? How are they abusing them? Who are they hurting? How should, what's the resolution? Yada yada. I agree with you on that.

(01:53:10):
The way they did it. We could spend the rest of our lives on that. But I look at Amazon and I think to myself, okay, you're going to go to a court in the United States and you're going to tell people we're going to sit in a jury that if you are successful, if you beat back this company, you will get your products a day later than usual. Things will cost more. [01:53:30] You're going to lay out this thing where it's like we live in this comfort society. And I'm like, I don't know that this is what people want. And I know that we often kind of vote against our own best interest. I know from my readers that when I rail against things like Apple's crazy app store fees, which are arbitrary and are 10 times higher than MasterCards, that a lot of people, some people believe that they should be able to do whatever they want.

(01:53:53):
It's their platform. And that there's a whole conversation to be had about short-term impact, long-term impact. [01:54:00] You don't know the innovation that's being prevented from happening because of their policies, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm trying to apply this to Amazon, and I got to be honest, Corey Doctor who I love, wrote an editor in the New York Times that I actually utterly disagree with every sentence almost. And I'll just give you one example because again, I don't want to beat this to death, but he was talking about how, and actually Jeffrey Fowler at the Washington Post did a nice interactive [01:54:30] version of this where you search for something on Amazon and then you can highlight on the page all of the things that are ads. And it's most of the things. But see to me, everyone who goes to Amazon and searches knows that it works. Like every other search engine, they're going to be sponsors, results, sponsored results at the top, and you scroll down and there's real results. And they know that they have to look for the rear results and they have to skip over the ads and they just kind of do this. And the one thing no one mentioned is that there's a little button up at the corner that says Search by [01:55:00] highest review or whatever, that the default view is the sponsor view.

(01:55:06):
And by the way, you can get in, I'm my app picked today is an extension that we will turn off all this sponsor thing is Amazon search results. I mean, there are ways around it. My wife hated this example. I compared it. We go to a restaurant every Friday called Notch. We love Notch. It's a great restaurant. They have a nice menu and every Friday they hand us the menu, but on top of the menu is the specials. And so the specials of the sponsored [01:55:30] results, honey, it's just like that. It's the thing that happens before the thing you want to see. The thing about specials is it's the stuff they need to get rid of. Fish is perishable. A lot of fish on there. They had sushi one night and the next three days they had sushi specials on there. Maybe they got a good deal somewhere from a fishmonger.

(01:55:50):
If it's fish, it's not always fish. Don't why I'm using fish, but whatever it is. And sometimes if we're lucky, it's something I really want, it's not what I expected. It's not what I was [01:56:00] looking for. They're able to get rid of something, save some money, overcharge me for it, and I get something I don't usually get. And it's kind of funny. And she's like, it's not the same thing. And I said, no, it's the same thing. It's exactly the same thing. She says, people are paying for those. I'm like, people are paying for this. This is essentially, it is the same thing as a paid advertisement. It driven by money need that if we don't get rid of this, we're throwing it away and we're losing money. It's the same thing as being paid to do it. It behooves us as a business [01:56:30] to save and or get money for doing this thing. It's the same thing. I said, do you hate notch now because they told you this? She's like, no. So again, what's the problem? I almost kind

Mikah Sargent (01:56:39):
Of want her to appear now and shout at the camera. It's not the same thing. But I

Paul Thurrott (01:56:43):
Honestly team Paul for this one walked, I don't have an, she walked twice today. She walked into this room and over there she goes, another thing about that notch menu thing that you're wrong about. And I was like, I love that you're doing this, but I'm telling you I'm going to beat it back every time because, [01:57:00] but the reason Amazon is in trouble and notch is not, is that notch may prefer one fishmonger over another and impact our little local economy a little bit. But Amazon is a worldwide economic superpower, and when they make a decision, they can really hurt people and companies, right? Yeah. It's scale. It's all about scale. And that's the monopoly problem. The behavior that you have as a scrappy startup is awesome, but when you're Microsoft or Apple or Google, it's not [01:57:30] so good. It's illegal. You can't do that stuff. So these are the things people need to understand about antitrust. That's the hard thing. So is Amazon breaking the law? Of course. Are you kidding me? It's a matter of degree and in many ways, but yeah, of course they are. But I also kind wonder about the net consumer impact Act then maybe I'm thinking short term, right? I

Richard Campbell (01:57:56):
Don't know. When you comment this from a Sherman Act pro point of view, it says, is there consumer harm? [01:58:00] That's

Paul Thurrott (01:58:01):
The usual. And a lot of people would say, I'm sitting here at three o'clock in the afternoon on a Friday, and I, oh God, I need a cable and it's here on Saturday morning.

Richard Campbell (01:58:12):
Or if you're in Seattle, it's there within the hour.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:15):
Yeah, yeah, exactly right. And yeah, I mean this is like saying, look, I know that some people in China committed suicide because they were making iPhones and they couldn't handle it. And that place is a sweat, sweat box or whatever this phrase is, [01:58:30] and it's a horrible human rights disaster. You're going to not buy the iPhone. Have you tried the phone? I mean, really? And then same thing, Amazon abuses their workers. I think we all accept this. Amazon, no doubt stacks the deck against partners and suppliers and small sellers and all that kind of stuff. They do everything that all these horrible huge companies

Mikah Sargent (01:58:52):
Do saying is humans are bad and we just need to be.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:57):
Well, companies are made by humans. Humans are bad. Companies are bad.

Richard Campbell (01:59:00):
[01:59:00] Well,

Paul Thurrott (01:59:01):
According

Richard Campbell (01:59:04):
Val, unfettered capitalism has consequences. So we fetter it.

Paul Thurrott (01:59:09):
That's right. That's what regulation is. The fettering of capitalism.

Richard Campbell (01:59:12):
Exactly. There you go. What's in the box needs to be on the packaging. You have to say what you did, how you doing it, all of these things.

Paul Thurrott (01:59:24):
We were talking about pharmacies. I once described c v s as a candy store that has a little pharmacy [01:59:30] in the back and to c v s candy is sort of like the ads are to Amazon. It's like this really easy way to make more money while still doing the thing you purport to do in the back. Now

Mikah Sargent (01:59:41):
Paul, about that candy thing and c v s being, I just have a district. No, I'm kidding. That works. There we

Paul Thurrott (01:59:47):
Go. Paul, another thing about your stupid analogy, you're a jerk.

Mikah Sargent (01:59:51):
Yeah, it is. It's a

Paul Thurrott (01:59:52):
Big old candy store

Mikah Sargent (01:59:52):
And you're stupid. A big old candy store with medicine in the back. Yeah, it's like a movie theater. The concessions [02:00:00] make all the money. So really

Paul Thurrott (02:00:02):
Concessions are also, there's more candy to CVS than there isn't a movie theater. There is. That's

Mikah Sargent (02:00:05):
True. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (02:00:06):
Right. There is Why do they have so much candy? Why is there candy when I got gas, why would I want food around where gas is? And also candy is not food. Okay.

Mikah Sargent (02:00:16):
For travel that you get the, I got to disagree with that one if I'm traveling. But certainly the c v s thing, I'm still on board. I'm on board with your restaurant.

Paul Thurrott (02:00:26):
It's like I came here to get my diabetes medicine. I think I'll grab a Snickers bar [02:00:30] on the way out. And for some reason it's the size of a brick serving size one.

Mikah Sargent (02:00:36):
Oh my

Paul Thurrott (02:00:38):
Crazy

Mikah Sargent (02:00:39):
Old man shots at cloud. We're getting into

Paul Thurrott (02:00:42):
Some erritory. Yeah. Okay,

Mikah Sargent (02:00:44):
That's

Paul Thurrott (02:00:45):
That's very diminishing. I feel like this is a valid complaint. It's nothing to do with Windows.

Mikah Sargent (02:00:51):
Maybe that's what it is. What I meant was the cloud as in windows in the cloud. No, those were all fair, fair [02:01:00] observations. But we're running out of time, so we got to get back to the show.

Paul Thurrott (02:01:05):
I know. I'm so sorry. Alright, let's blow through Dev and ai. That was a lot of this stuff. Maybe we should could focus on the ai. So we already talked about Meteor Lake and how they reverse the schedule, right? So that's very interesting to me. Someone in the Discord a long time

Richard Campbell (02:01:20):
Ago, meteor Lake, it's still weird to me. The Meteor Lake wasn't in the machine. What are you doing if you're going to announce a,

Paul Thurrott (02:01:27):
This is very typical Microsoft, right? They're never on the latest thing. [02:01:30] Although they did get into Intel, geez, to do this special thing. One of the weird little notable things about Surface in recent years is the sheer number of custom things they've done with hardware makers. They create their, what are they called? SH one, the arm chip set is created in partnership with arm, I'm sorry, with Qualcomm, but they market it as their own thing. They've done special versions of a M D processors for Surface and they partner with Intel on different things [02:02:00] including this new thing where like I said, to my knowledge, and I believe this is true, the only and will ever be the only 13th gen mobile laptop with an N P U add-on. It's unprecedented, but it's also last gen because Microsoft, so they probably worked on it for a year. They knew this was coming. Who knows? It's too bad. Amazon bought Anthropic for its AI capabilities [02:02:30] for 4 billion. This company, this kind reminds me, remember Microsoft lost double click to Google and as a booby prize, they bought a company no one had ever heard of called a Quant, which then they then wrote off two years later for several billion, I don't remember the exact number.

(02:02:50):
Microsoft has OpenAI. Google has been doing this, they've been doing this AI stuff for a long time. They've been curiously conservative about putting it out in the world [02:03:00] and Amazon, I get the feeling they're a little behind and I think this is their attempt to buy to catch up, which is a great strategy for a monopolist right's, what they all do. It's one of the, it's got to be in the top five. What do we do? We've got to catch up. Acquisition. I don't know anything about this company. I'm just throwing it out. An AI story.

Mikah Sargent (02:03:21):
Yeah, I know a little bit about Claude but not much. And where there's been conversation about each [02:03:30] of the different big tech companies kind of being behind in AI as we saw first open AI on its own doing what it was doing. Then of course Microsoft quickly caught up. Google is really playing out in the open and then we have seen, well not seen, but there've been plenty of reports about Apple's internal team working on stuff. Amazon really was kind of in the dust.

Paul Thurrott (02:03:53):
It felt like quite quiet. So something someday will disrupt Google search. It will probably be something [02:04:00] ai. And one of the interesting things about this is there's been disruption in our industry many times. It usually does come from an outside forest. I guess it's not typically an entrenched dominant party that comes up with something new and awesome, but whatever. It could happen, I suppose. And that's interesting because honestly, most people would probably, the good money is probably a bet on Google here that they'll be fine and they'll maintain their monopoly and their dominance in search and all that kind of stuff. But [02:04:30] Microsoft has a chance. Amazon for sure. And OpenAI. OpenAI is that outside disruptive force, aren't they? And all of this company that started as this cute little mom and pop cookie making company that we never need to make money is very aggressively going after the money and just got evaluated at doubled their value, I believe from just six months ago. We'll see, this is when you see big tech moving this quick. We just talked about that with Microsoft is a reason this disruption could leave. A lot of companies [02:05:00] behind that today are sitting pretty

Richard Campbell (02:05:03):
Well. I would also argue that Amazon is one of the few that has the cloud resources sufficient to run really large scale LLMs. They just didn't seem to be interested in doing it.

Paul Thurrott (02:05:14):
So this is going to sound like a weird comparison at first, but back in the day, if you will, when PCs were PCs and they were the only thing in the world, you had software, windows and apps, and then you had chips, and those chips were made by Intel usually, but also a M D and that was the whole thing. But [02:05:30] the way that Chip building works today is almost nobody owns their own manufacturing capabilities anymore, right? Apple doesn't. They go through, I always say it wrong, T S M C or T M S C, whichever that is, tms, Taiwan Semiconductor, Samsung has some capacity there. Intel is trying to become a fab maker. They're trying a different thing. The world is a little bit different. And the interesting thing about OpenAI is that they are [02:06:00] to ai, what Apple is to chip making. They have this really innovative thing, but they can't exist unless they have an infrastructure to run this stuff on. That's why they partnered with Microsoft in a very one-sided partnership. I think that Microsoft was so desperate to get, they agreed to.

Richard Campbell (02:06:20):
I'm sorry, which way is it one-sided

Paul Thurrott (02:06:24):
In open AI's way because Microsoft does get, well, Microsoft's get access to capabilities, [02:06:30] but they don't get exclusive access and they're giving a lot of the stuff that runs off of Azure benefit other companies,

Richard Campbell (02:06:37):
But the meantime, they're paying for Azure. They

Paul Thurrott (02:06:39):
Paid for it. No, I understand. This is the Microsoft wins even when they lose scenario. No, I understand it. What I'm saying is

Richard Campbell (02:06:46):
Open AI in the process

Paul Thurrott (02:06:47):
Or giving

Richard Campbell (02:06:48):
Master credit.

Paul Thurrott (02:06:50):
Yes, the form of Azure credit that will be part of their,

Richard Campbell (02:06:53):
We'll give you this money now, give it back to us that we own you. I think it was a pretty good deal for Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott (02:06:59):
Is that the Blimpy [02:07:00] model? I'll gladly take a hamburger today for the company store model. No, you're right. No, you're absolutely right. I'm sorry, but I guess what I'm saying is OpenAI retains its central open AI nest without having to give away the farm. So the point simply was OpenAI can't exist and can't be what it is right now without a Microsoft, Amazon or Google. That's kind of fascinating to me. Anyway. They could be the great disruptor. And then do you allow this company to disrupt [02:07:30] you when they're so reliant on you? It's kind of an interesting question, right?

Mikah Sargent (02:07:35):
You turn the screws because it is taking over

Richard Campbell (02:07:39):
And that seems to be happening in the meantime. They're not making enough money. They are short of cash and they are making sad noises,

Paul Thurrott (02:07:45):
Right? That's the valuation, by the way.

Richard Campbell (02:07:47):
Yeah. Well, and back to, based on this current deal, Microsoft now has 49%.

Paul Thurrott (02:07:53):
Yeah. Which under the terms of deal, it's the most they can have. Well, I don't think they can go above 49. I believe that's the point. [02:08:00] I think the way

Richard Campbell (02:08:01):
They structure it now, do you wait for the bankruptcy and buy them in receivership because

Paul Thurrott (02:08:05):
You can't buy more, but Microsoft is relying on this as well, right? I mean, Microsoft needs this for this AI push. I mean, they're codependent. It's not,

Richard Campbell (02:08:15):
What

Paul Thurrott (02:08:15):
Do you call that? A relationship of shit? Yeah, it's right. It's the unhealthy version of a, there's a term for this, like the lamp prey eel that hook on our shark

Mikah Sargent (02:08:26):
Takes away the garbage. Yeah. What is that? I can't think of what that's

Paul Thurrott (02:08:28):
Called. What is the term? I can't [02:08:30] believe. I can't think of this. Oh, someone's

Mikah Sargent (02:08:31):
Going to say it.

Paul Thurrott (02:08:33):
No. Co-dependent is the negative one. There's a positive,

Richard Campbell (02:08:35):
Positive one. The symbiotic.

Paul Thurrott (02:08:37):
Symbiotic. That's sym. Symbiotic. Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

Richard Campbell (02:08:42):
Benefit,

Paul Thurrott (02:08:43):
Huh? Yes, right. Mutual beneficial.

Richard Campbell (02:08:45):
Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:08:47):
Yep, yep. Anyway. Will it turn into a codependent or is it now

Richard Campbell (02:08:52):
It feels more dependent than symbiotic. I was going

Paul Thurrott (02:08:54):
To say it's a good conversation. Yeah, it sure does. They're not going to promote it that way, but okay, [02:09:00] Amazon, like we already talked about this. I guess basically enough generative AI features coming to, I think that's smart for them. I think this, it could be good money after bad. We could debate that too.

Richard Campbell (02:09:12):
A lot of these original machine learning models that did language back in the series days and so forth, which is a whole 10 years ago, they need to be replaced by. That's the logical thing to do. The question is, can you shrink the L L M down enough to make it running the device or are you making it even more cloud dependent? It already was,

Paul Thurrott (02:09:28):
Right? That's the real [02:09:30] reason that iPhone 15 runs hot. It's all, I don't know. No one has thought of that. It must be Studio Bott is not a big deal. This is a Google product that's basically their version of GitHub copilot. It's only in preview, really early preview, but it's now available more broadly than it was before. This will be something they add to the Android studio tool that you can ask you questions and get code samples, et cetera, et cetera. All those expected things. And then we talked about [02:10:00] Rust a few months ago. Microsoft is moving some kernel stuff to Rust. The programming language, now they're moving device driver development, and that includes the low level W D M stuff, the newer kind of framework based, what's it called? W F M, probably whatever the different ways to do drivers. I don't know anything about drivers, but this is again, going after the key ways in which malicious code could get into a computer and getting people off of c c plus bus, which Mark Zivich has been very, [02:10:30] very vocal about the need for that to be in maintenance mode, not new code,

Richard Campbell (02:10:35):
And pushing hard on the ecosystem to say, Hey, we're just going to write the drivers for you. You guys suck at it.

Paul Thurrott (02:10:40):
Yeah, right. That's actually a big chunk of it too.

Richard Campbell (02:10:43):
We had that whole story on the printing side of this, because this is where Print Nightmare came from. They both won't build level four drivers. They're not going to build them. And so Microsoft's fine. We are building them. Oh, we're also going to make it not optional. You have to use level four

Paul Thurrott (02:10:58):
Drivers. [02:11:00] In some ways I like it.

Richard Campbell (02:11:03):
I mean, it'll decrease the number of messages about buying ink, which is a feature, but it'd also be a question of what features in a device are going to be surfaced. Because often devices have a lot of advanced features that they have to really,

Paul Thurrott (02:11:18):
Yes. Although, man, I know we're not anywhere, still nowhere close to the paperless office or whatever. But I would think most people, and every time I say a general statement like to say from the guy in the back of room, I use printers all the time. [02:11:30] Most people aren't printing a lot anymore for the most part. And maybe our needs for printers aren't as complicated as they used to be. If I need a print for some, I dunno, I wouldn't even do this for a flight anymore. But if you needed it for some reason, thing spits it out, it's like, whatever. I don't care if it's a thousand shades of gray or a hundred shades of gray or color or what, I just need the stupid thing and I don't care. The output is not the final thing. It used to be, right? The point of printing was that was how you communicated with people. Now it's all digital. [02:12:00] PowerPoint was printed. Things are

Richard Campbell (02:12:04):
Where these devices were commodity and consistent and uninteresting. That shouldn't be an area of innovation anymore.

Paul Thurrott (02:12:11):
Yeah, exactly Right. Richard, I don't remember if you were around for the Unity, but I think you were, but oh, maybe it was two weeks. I'm

Richard Campbell (02:12:18):
Abundantly aware of it.

Paul Thurrott (02:12:20):
All of us end up being abundantly aware. The guy who runs Unity, by the way, is a former Xbox executive who was around during that. Mark Maddock, I think his name is, or Mark, [02:12:30] something like that. Unity came out with this new runtime fee for its game engine that a lot of independent developers said, if you do this, we're going out of business. You've just destroyed our business. This can't make sense. And so they were just like, guys, guys, we were kidding. We're really sorry. You misunderstood. Yeah, they pulled back on that. So whether or not the changes they made actually address everyone's concerns is not, I actually don't know, [02:13:00] but they will be a Unity personal offering that remains free with no runtime fees, and they're capping actually it's reverse cap. So there's a cap on how long that is the case. It used to be a hundred thousand dollars in revenues. It's going up to $200,000. So if you make up to $200,000 a year in a game using the Unity engine and you're in Unity personally, you're not going to pay them anything.

Richard Campbell (02:13:23):
I think I said when this first came out, I have a sneaky suspicion they're anchoring high

Paul Thurrott (02:13:28):
And I think you're So now they'd level set [02:13:30] where they want it to be and that's right. Yeah. Okay. That might be the

Mikah Sargent (02:13:34):
Simplest. Yeah, you did. I remember you bringing that up. Yes. It was sort

Paul Thurrott (02:13:37):
Of, I think that's

Mikah Sargent (02:13:37):
About right. Yeah. Okay. No, we won't do that much. We'll just do this much. You can all agree to that, right?

Paul Thurrott (02:13:44):
Yeah. And then finally, I assume most people are now familiar with this notion of PAs keys because PAs keys suddenly are everywhere. And the thing that's interesting about that is two F a where you use a device [02:14:00] as a second form of authentication was on a real slow boil for a very long time. In fact, there are still services I use that do not use two F a, which blows me away. But you're starting to see two F a implementations everywhere. Even Apple has, I'm sorry, Pasky implementations. Apple uses Paki, apple uses them like Apple does everything. A little weird, but they do their own thing. And GitHub was one of the first to kind of announce their support for this, and now it's moved along. It's actually generally [02:14:30] available and it will be, wait, are they going to force PAs ski on you or just two f a?

(02:14:34):
Maybe it's just two F a. I can't remember. They're going to force one of them on everybody. But this is just obviously a way to keep these code repositories that are in GitHub safe. Right? So pasky are great. Their implementation is fantastic. It's my favorite. The one I hit the most is Google's, which is how I know they didn't do it right, because I keep hitting it and I Seriously, did you get it right? And the Google passkey experience is I hit something with an account and it says, [02:15:00] alright, do you want to enter your password or do you want to enter a passkey? And I'm like, I want to enter your passkey. And it's like, okay, put in your pin or your fingerprint or whatever he has in Windows below. I'm like, okay. And it's like, all right, nice. Now I enter your password. What? Yeah, skip that. And then they're like, Hey, do you want to use a paske? And I'm like, yeah, I already have a Paske. And I'm like, okay, you want to use a Paske? Here you go. Oh, you already have a Paske. Alright, we're all done here. And it's like, dude, you just wasted five minutes of my time. The point of this is for this to go right through. And that's Google. So GitHub good Google, bad passkey. I think Google [02:15:30] will adjust. I

Mikah Sargent (02:15:31):
Was shocked to have to say because one password is the password manager that I use and I had set up Passkey support. It now supports passkey as well. Oh, nice. Okay. And so when I got my new iPhone, I needed to log back into my Google accounts and I was shocked that it's a horror show. Well, no, no. I am used to being a horror show. Like how you described this time I launched to log into Google and then one password prompted said, do you want to use your pass key? I said Yes. [02:16:00] And it logged me and I didn't have to do anything else. I'd have to type in a password. Oh, it worked.

Paul Thurrott (02:16:03):
Oh, it worked.

Mikah Sargent (02:16:04):
It actually worked as expected. So I don't know what was different.

Paul Thurrott (02:16:07):
Oh, you know why it worked though. You bypass Google by using something else. That's

Mikah Sargent (02:16:10):
What I

Paul Thurrott (02:16:10):
Mean. I know you were signing into,

Mikah Sargent (02:16:12):
But yeah, it was amazing. Google's

Paul Thurrott (02:16:14):
Own UI is exactly what I just described. It's insane. And I hit this multiple times every single day I have a bunch of Google accounts and unfortunately, I mean I try use different browsers. Honestly, that's the best. Yeah, it's crazy. It's like you should use a Paki. I am using a Paki. I will agree with you. [02:16:30] It's like you windows hello authenticate, and then you type in your password and then it says, okay. Oh, you already have a Paki. I know I told you that. I

Mikah Sargent (02:16:37):
Just said I had a

Paul Thurrott (02:16:37):
Paki. I know I have a Paki. That's why I'm

Mikah Sargent (02:16:40):
Trying to log in

Paul Thurrott (02:16:40):
Google Paki, Google say crazy. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (02:16:43):
So when it works as it should, I was impressed at how quickly it all logged

Paul Thurrott (02:16:49):
In. And by the way, Passkey support is one of those new features in this Windows update that just came out. Passkey supports in Windows now. Nice as it should be

Mikah Sargent (02:16:58):
Another thing to make Paul Grid

Paul Thurrott (02:17:00):
[02:17:00] A couple other things. Yeah, it happens. Richard says, see me smile. I'm often happy around him. So given all the Xbox League stuff and everything else that happened, there's only a couple of minor Xbox stories to speak. Sorry, the first one regards a Cuphead anniversary update. So Cuphead is, that was a huge hit a couple years ago. It's that

Mikah Sargent (02:17:24):
Incredibly

Paul Thurrott (02:17:24):
Difficult game cartoon style game. It looks like at one of the early Mickey Mouse things or maybe an early Warner Brothers cartoon. [02:17:30] Really fun looking game. It is one of the hardest games I've ever played and I hate how hard this is. And I really felt like they made a big mistake with that because they could have attracted a much broader audience. It's so hard. I don't know if they ever fixed it, I walked away from it, but they're doing a, it eventually kind of went cross platform, but there's an anniversary update coming that's going to be Xbox only because this product actually was an Xbox exclusive when it first launched. So that's kind of cool. I don't know. [02:18:00] They don't say or do they say? I don't believe they say no, they do. Okay, I'm sorry. They do. So it's an automatic download for owners of the game so you don't have to pay extra parts.

(02:18:10):
Sorry, that's what I was looking for. It will be on Xbox and Windows. So when I say Xbox only, I mean Xbox platform, not Xbox Console. I've talked also about Microsoft at some point deprecated and then is getting rid of something called the Xbox Console Companion app for Windows. This was something [02:18:30] that actually debuted back with Windows eight. It's a really out of date app, but one of the things it did was let you go in and look at all of your save screenshots and video clips from the Xbox console and you could look at them, but you could also download them. So if you wanted to use the computer to maybe edit video or something, you could do that and then share 'em. Microsoft has long since replaced that with an Xbox app, which is fantastic on any number of levels. It's actually a much nicer app.

(02:18:54):
It's modern, but it doesn't have this feature. And so when they got rid of the Xbox console companion [02:19:00] app, I was like, hold on a second, am I missing something? How do I get to my save screenshots and video clips from my pc? And the answer was you, the only thing you could do was go to your console share to something that would bring it to your pc. And I don't remember the exact options, but there was ways to individually push clips to your PC from the console. Tedious. I want to go to my console. Yeah, it's tedious. So Microsoft announced a little while ago that they're going to allow you [02:19:30] to on the console, configure those things to save to OneDrive, which is, this is a win-win. This is a good example of a win-win. It's a win-win for Xbox Gamers. What some of them will want I just described. And it's a win-win for Microsoft. It uses up a lot of storage and then you can pay for extra short chance.

Mikah Sargent (02:19:46):
That's so true. That's very clever.

Paul Thurrott (02:19:47):
That's smart. No, it's fine. By the way, there's nothing wrong with a win-win, right? We both benefit, there's nothing wrong with it. So I guess they've been testing this in the insider program and [02:20:00] it turns out that little scenario it just said it's going to be a little tilted more one-sided to you, not to Microsoft. They are going to delete uploads to OneDrive after 90 days automatically. They're not going to save them indefinitely. And yeah, that's fine, right? I mean it's still out there in like Xbox Land. I don't know what you call the storage allotment that you get with your Xbox, but you do get one and you'll know you ran into it when one day you go to take a screenshot and it says, Hey, you ran out of space. You don't have any more room for screenshots. [02:20:30] And I assume, and I've had to bulk export stupid on the console or delete, right?

(02:20:39):
And whatever it is. So I guess you might still have to do that kind of thing, but if you choose to save directly to OneDrive, I believe what you'll be able to do is not hit your Xbox storage and then you could just offload these things to a computer and not worry about it. Which is I think honestly, I think this meets the needs. I'm not really sure. A lot of people are trying to archive, well, you know what? [02:21:00] Some people are, but I was going to say not going to archive game footage necessarily, but yeah, probably some people do. So want streams you'll be able to, it's good. Yeah, it's all good. Anyway, this feature's not, I don't believe it's public, but their work yet in stable. But a bonus

Mikah Sargent (02:21:16):
Xbox update in September. Oh wait, this is September.

Paul Thurrott (02:21:20):
This is September. Oh, I'm sorry. Actually they must have actually released it. Yes, I'm sorry. They did release it. Yep. It came out in a bonus update. Yeah, usually we get a monthly update, which they would've called [02:21:30] the September update. Excuse me, I thought this was in the side of program and that's, sorry, it's part of, that's right. It's part of the bonus Xbox. I'm turn my Xbox on since March. I'm a little disconnected. Oh

Mikah Sargent (02:21:39):
Wow. You really are busy, Paul.

Paul Thurrott (02:21:41):
Yeah, I'm trying to break an addiction here. Seems to be going pretty. Yeah, I

Mikah Sargent (02:21:48):
Was going to say, you're doing a great job. Sounds like. Well, up next we do have the back of the book, the tips and picks coming up on Windows Weekly. Alright, [02:22:00] it is time to head into the tips and picks of the week. First of course is our tip of the week.

Paul Thurrott (02:22:09):
So look, I am critical and I stress over this stuff and I've been freaking out about how Windows 11 updates, but I got to tell you, the thing that gets lost in all that is I do think that Windows 11 is where it should have been a couple years ago. Right now, I think with this fall update slash 23 H two, we are finally in a good place. I'm not saying it's perfect. [02:22:30] File Explorer, blah, blah, blah, there's some issues in there, but if you are a Windows 11 user, this is the time to kind of get going on this stuff because not only do you want to install this update, which you could wait on if you wanted to wait two weeks, you could get it in October, but you also want to go to the app store because a lot of those app updates that Microsoft is promoting, the stuff in paint, in photos, in Clip Champ, in Stepping Tool in the Microsoft store actually are all arriving via separate app store updates.

(02:22:58):
And I think [02:23:00] everything they updated are announced rather is available. Some of them may be features that are cfrd, meaning they come out over a period of time. So you check today, it's not there but you check tomorrow it is there or something like that. That's unfortunately the way a lot of things happen these days. But this is the time. And then we talked before about this notion of back in August if you wanted to look forward to what 23 H two was going to be, wanted to get in the beta channel. I'm now curious what's going to happen to us in the beta channel. I have three PCs [02:23:30] in the beta channel and normally, well in every case in this case I configured them so that they go back to stable once that release comes out. Now, I don't know what that release is.

(02:23:41):
It is probably 23 H two, but even the release preview channel has pushed forward to 23 H two. So one thing you might want to do is get in the release preview and that one you will be able to get out. That one kind of occurs, although this push into the 23 H two actually contradicts what I just said because a lot of people would've [02:24:00] been in 23 H two as of last week because Microsoft announced that first fall update preview build, and now they're testing 23 H two features, which again points to the fact that these things are the same thing. But if you want to just kind of stay on the leading edge, well the semi leading edge I guess, and test what's coming right down the pike and be able to get out of there in probably a November timeframe, the release preview is not a bad way to go.

(02:24:23):
And I haven't done this yet, but I believe the build you get now, you'll get that new teams app or will eventually get it. [02:24:30] It's in there. It may not be enabled, but you will get it. And there's a little front end I was talking about that you're showing. So if you look at chat today, if you're not running yet on 23 H two or the fall update, there is a front end called chat, which looks a little bit like this or a lot like this, but this is the new front end that's going to be in the teams free app that's coming in 23 H two. Same. It's a simplified front end where you can easily make calls and meetings and stuff without having to launch the full [02:25:00] app, which is fun or not, I don't think it's going to go anywhere, but honestly it's pretty good.

(02:25:06):
I feel bad for them. They kind screw things around with Skype and using the teams brand and it's not the same teams and it's confusing. And I think most average consumers would look at this and be like, I'm not in a team. I don't know anyone who uses teams. I don't need this. So we'll see. But that's all out there. So my tip is to, if you're staying up to date where you want to be [02:25:30] has shifted and the things you need to do have shifted. And then the app pick is actually for my wife, I told you was not happy with my Amazon comparison and made a big point of complaining about all the featured and sponsored stuff and how tough it is with ads and you don't know if they're bots and blah blah blah. And she has her own ideas about that stuff. But I said, it's got to be a browser plugin for this. And there is, it's called Amazon Ad Blocker, shocker. And it removes the sponsored content from amazon.com, [02:26:00] search pages and other pages and it works pretty good. I just installed it this morning, this just happened. But I've been going to Amazon, look, I've been comparing it against the incognito or private mode, whatever browser and yeah, it seems to do the trick. So if you're not savvy enough to figure out an ad on amazon.com, get it. Just get this, this will do

Mikah Sargent (02:26:25):
It. Get rid of the chef special on Amazon Cloud

Paul Thurrott (02:26:29):
Special. [02:26:30] Exactly. You don't want the fish.

Mikah Sargent (02:26:33):
You don't want the

Paul Thurrott (02:26:33):
Fish. You can

Mikah Sargent (02:26:35):
Hand

Paul Thurrott (02:26:35):
It back. You took it. Why did you take it?

Mikah Sargent (02:26:39):
Throw the special aside. Look at that menu. I'm sorry. Is that

Richard Campbell (02:26:42):
Yesterday Sushi? Is that what you're eating? Okay,

Paul Thurrott (02:26:45):
Well seriously, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. I bet that was the special. There you

Richard Campbell (02:26:50):
Go. At some point it cooked fish.

Paul Thurrott (02:26:54):
That's right. Yeah. I've never seen cooked sushi. That's interesting.

Mikah Sargent (02:26:57):
Switched it from, well yeah, they switched from [02:27:00] fresh sushi to deep fried sushi.

Paul Thurrott (02:27:03):
Deep fried,

Richard Campbell (02:27:04):
Actually it was curry and then the third day

Mikah Sargent (02:27:07):
Soup on the Yeah, exactly.

Paul Thurrott (02:27:10):
We have a new fish sauce we're putting on everything.

Mikah Sargent (02:27:12):
There you go. At the end of the week it's a fish sauce. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (02:27:15):
It's a weird black color.

Mikah Sargent (02:27:17):
Alright, Richard Campbell, tell us about run as radio

Richard Campbell (02:27:21):
Fifth time back for Sandy Usia. And a really fun conversation that came from a talk sheet did a while back where most folks have shifted their SharePoint [02:27:30] instances now to the online product, but not everybody can do it Often we've done some customizations and things that just aren't going to run in SharePoint online and you don't want to give 'em up. And so you still have an on-premise SharePoint instance, but if you've used the online version, there's some awesome automation features of things that don't exist anywhere else. And what Sandy shows is how you can get some of those features into your online product. And specifically with Power Automate, you can pay for the premium version of Power Automate and it'll rapidly pay for itself [02:28:00] and you can have access to those capabilities back onto your on-prem instances. And so we ran through a few of the things that folks really, really like and online and wish they had an on-prem.

(02:28:10):
It's like here's how you do it and just gave 'em some ideas on how to take advantage of that. So you want 'em all to be up in M 365, but it's not always possible. The things they've done to limit the customizations, especially for older versions of SharePoint, have kind of made it tough. We actually had a great conversation about the idea that SharePoint 2019 [02:28:30] is probably the last of the on-prem versions, but it's being turned into sort of a SaaS implementation too, where you're going to get rolling updates and stuff. So the SharePoint guys are trying to find a way to continue to support customers who want to run things on-prem while still having their modern model, great conversation, how folks can take it in. Sandy's just a great thinker in this space.

Mikah Sargent (02:28:51):
Awesome. Alright, run his radio.com and now it's time for the Brown Liquor pick cover the wink.

Richard Campbell (02:29:00):
[02:29:00] And you enjoy this part here, Mike. I appreciate that. But I'm in New Zealand so I figured I should probably talk about a New Zealand whiskey and there are a few, the whiskey industry in New Zealand is small, goes with the size of the country. There's only been maybe a dozen or so distilleries over time and for quite a while there were none In 97 there was a distillery down in Southern in Dunedin, which [02:29:30] is in the south island called Willowbank that shut down in 97. Today they're up to 10. They're not large. A tiny little one in the particular one I'm going to talk about is one of the most recent ones only started back in 2017. It's called is actually an area, it's south of Auckland in a somewhat rolling hills, kind of more jungley area than where we are right now. And of course it's there for one reason. The water, this is a very volcanic island, north island of New Zealand. And so [02:30:00] there are great aquifers that is phenomenal water in pono and that's why they put the distillery there. The barley itself comes from three different farms down in the south island. So the barley is New Zealand grown cool.

(02:30:15):
And then they malted here on the island and then and grind grist it. They do have Scottish stills that they have imported. The guy behind all of this is a guy named Matt Johns and Matt is from the uk. [02:30:30] He worked many years at Glen Ji and tele Barine and he decided that he wanted to raise his kids in New Zealand and so came down here and ultimately spent an awful lot of money establishing this distillery. So they do their finishing in bourbon cast, specifically Jack Daniel Kat because there are not the same restrictions for making whiskey in New Zealand. In fact, there's essentially no rules While he is follow the Scottish style, I'm using only barley and aging [02:31:00] and oak. They don't have the same time limitations. So normally you can't call it whiskey unless it's been in the barrel for at least three years. It's not a requirement here, although you do tend to age that long.

(02:31:11):
But we're also dealing with a more humid and warmer climate. And so aging rates are going to be higher and it doesn't make sense to hold them for quite as long. You're going to get a fair bit of heat in the summertime. You always have the higher humidity so that you're going to battle with alcohol levels. You're actually going to lose water from the barrel and the alcohol levels are going to rise when [02:31:30] it's that humid. So I think they'd have to manage the cooling a fair bit. So the result is a very mild whiskey. It's not old, it hasn't been in the barrel for all that long. So the colors are fairly light and they don't do a lot of treatment to it. It comes up kind of fruity and citrusy with still a strong alcohol note. This is not the most impressive whiskey you're ever going to drink in the sense that it's not that big if you like that big rich Avalara Bunda flavor.

(02:31:58):
Okay, we're not there. This is [02:32:00] not a sherry cask. This has not been in for 15 years. This is a younger, lighter, sweeter sort of lightweight whiskey and it's a fun drink. There's nothing wrong with it, but if you can find them, they run about $60 us, which says they are exporting it to the us, but I could not find any for sale anywhere down here. It's about a hundred Kiwi dollars to pick a bottle up, easily available. Very small production, only a few [02:32:30] tens of thousands of bottles. So it's a cool drink. There are a few others, but this particular one struck my fancy and I recommend it if you can find it.

Mikah Sargent (02:32:38):
Cool. Yeah, I like all the branding. They're really selling me. I don't drink, but they're really selling me with it. I was like, oh, I want to try that. The volcanic. Oh yeah, I dunno. It was working for me. That's a really cool, for sure.

Richard Campbell (02:32:53):
Often we're buying whiskeys for friends like you. For someone who's a fan of whiskey, this is an unusual whiskey. It's not going to be [02:33:00] easy to find. If you can get one, that person's going to covet that bottle. And it comes with a remarkable story of a very young distillery in an interesting place.

Mikah Sargent (02:33:10):
Very cool. I was going to say at a very remote place,

Richard Campbell (02:33:13):
Very remote and remarkable that the internet is held together as well as it had. Don't jinx it.

Mikah Sargent (02:33:18):
Alright, knock on wood. As we come to the end of this episode of Windows Weekly, now comes a time where I tell you about where you can watch the show, find it, et cetera. [02:33:30] We record Windows weekly, roundabout 11:00 AM Pacific every Wednesday. You can tune in at twi tv slash live to watch the show live as we record it. Or if you'd like, you can get the version that's all packaged up neat and tidy by our editor, Kevin, by going to twi tv slash ww. When you go there, you will find buttons to click to subscribe to audio or subscribe to video, and then you'll get to choose your provider. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube. I used to say Google [02:34:00] Podcasts, but that's about to go away so you can get it at many. I know you're right too soon. Subscribe again to audio or video formats, whichever one works for you.

(02:34:12):
You can also, if you would like help to support the ongoing work we do here at twit and bringing you these shows every week by joining the club twit tv slash club that will get you to twit tv slash club twit. I don't know why I [02:34:30] said that URL twice, but head there and you can join the club starting at $7 a month, $84 a year. When you join the club, you get access to some pretty great perks. First and foremost, you get every single twit show with no ads, just the content because you in effect are supporting the shows. You also get access to the Twit plus bonus feed that has extra content you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes before the show, after the show. But also Club Twit events get published there. So when you join the club, you're going to end up getting [02:35:00] access to a huge back catalog of great stuff.

(02:35:03):
You will also get to join the best social media network on the internet. It is the Club Twit Discord. It's a fun place to go to chat with your fellow club TWIT members and also those of us here at twit, many of our hosts are in there regularly responding during the show, also after the show at times before the show. So we'd love to have you join. And while the price starts at $7 a month, $84 a year, it's not a tiered subscription. We just heard from some folks who said that they'd [02:35:30] like to pay more than $7 a month. So we've given you that option. But if you pay $7 or you pay more, you're going to get everything that I've mentioned here, as well as some special club TWIT exclusive shows. There's the Untitled Linux Show, which is a show all about Linux.

(02:35:48):
You will also gain access to Paul RA's Hands on Windows program, a short format show that covers Windows tips and tricks. You'll gain access to my hands on Apple. No, I always [02:36:00] do that Hands on Mac. The reason why is because I cover more than just the Mac. It's iPhone, it's iPad, it's everything. But Hands on Mac is the name of the show where I've got short format tips and tricks as well. And we also have Scott Wilkinson's Home Theater Geeks in the Club. A fun relaunch of that show with lots of interviews, great tips, product reviews. Oh man, it's it's great stuff. And the newly announced, newly [02:36:30] launched, it's in the Club. It's all about ai. It's AI inside from Jason Howell here at TWIT as well. So yeah, all these great shows that you can check out at twit tv slash club twit. Join the club and help us keep making the stuff that we make for you each week. Alright, it's time for the plugs and the goodbyes. Let's start with Richard Campbell. Tell us what we can expect from you.

Richard Campbell (02:36:58):
Well, of course Run is coming [02:37:00] out every week. In fact, next week show will be episode 900. And I'm not going to say it was drunk. Congrats drank, but definitely pulled a buddy of mine, Dana F in. And we just chatted a bit about Making Tarley. That's over Run Ads Radio. We're in full swing for Dev intersection, which is the first week of December in Orlando. You can go to dev intersection.com to take a look at that. And of course, T Net Rock still tick along talking about T net development.net rocks.com.

Mikah Sargent (02:37:30):
[02:37:30] Awesome. Thank you Richard and Paul Throt, tell us about where folks can find you.

Paul Thurrott (02:37:35):
What do I have? Well, thro.com obviously the main site I'm most active on Twitter, I'm going to keep calling it that. Also at throt bookser@leanpub.com, the Windows 11 field guide, which is about to get a massive update for fall update slash 23 H two and Windows everywhere of course. And I've been working to [02:38:00] fix our YouTube channel, which I had let languish for a long time. So we've got about 300 videos up there that are just Microsoft oriented insider type things. And then of course, first Ring Daily, the podcast I did with Brad is there as well.

Mikah Sargent (02:38:17):
Awesome.

Paul Thurrott (02:38:18):
Alright, I'm out there.

Mikah Sargent (02:38:19):
Yes, you can find them. You can find him. I am at Micah Sargent on many a social media network. We're head to chihuahua.coffee, C H I H U A h oa.coffee where I've got links to the places I'm most active [02:38:30] online. Check out the different shows I do on the network iOS today, ask the Tech Guys Tech News weekly. And of course, as always, I thank you both for letting me join you this week. Leo Laport will

Paul Thurrott (02:38:42):
Be back. Always good to see you, man.

Mikah Sargent (02:38:43):
Thank you. Thank you. And Leo Laport will be back next week, so if you were missing him, don't worry. He'll be back soon when the cows come home and

Paul Thurrott (02:38:53):
It's like the Windows XP screens ever, isn't

Mikah Sargent (02:38:55):
It? It's just perfect. It's just perfect. Wow. [02:39:00] Sorry for the folks listening. We're just looking at a beautiful paddock and yeah, I dunno. It's gorgeous. It looks like

Paul Thurrott (02:39:06):
It's, I expect to see like a unicorn go galloping across the lawn.

Mikah Sargent (02:39:11):
Certainly a rainbow will appear all of a sudden. Folks, thank you for tuning into this episode of Windows Weekly. They will see you next week, and so will Leo the Port. Bye-bye.

Lou Maresca (02:39:25):
Come join us on this week in enterprise tech! expert Co-hosts and I talk about the enterprise world and [02:39:30] we're joined by industry professionals and trailblazers like CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, every acronym, role plus IT pros and marketeers. We talk about technology, software plus services, security, you name it. Everything under this sun. You know what? I learned something each and every week and I betcha you will too. So definitely join us. And of course, check out the twit TV website and click on this weekend Enterprise Tech subscribe today.