Windows Weekly 850
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul OTTs here. Richard Campbell's here. Yes. Richard's going to bring along some of perhaps the most over-hyped whiskey in history, and he'll explain y. We'll also talk about Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X. Is Windows on arm finally going to be usable. 23 H two is released in the preview channel. We'll talk about that. And yes, the Microsoft Activision acquisition is just around the corner. Plus a letter from the I R S. It's all coming up. Next on Windows Weekly podcasts you love from people you trust. This is tweet is tweet. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thora and Richard Campbell. Episode 850 Recorded Wednesday, October 11th, 2023. Emotional support Whiskey Windows Weekly is brought to you by Melissa. More than 10,000 clients worldwide rely on Melissa for full spectrum data quality and ID verification software. Make sure your customer contact data is up to date this holiday season.
(00:01:15):
Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free at melissa.com/twit. And by cashflow delivering rich media content up to 159% faster than other major CDNs. Join Cashflow, the world's fastest cdn. Your website visitors will love cash flies lag free video loading, hyper fasts downloads, and friction free transaction processing. Learn how to get your first month free cash fly.com/twit. Listeners of this program, get an ad free version if they're members of Club twit. $7 a month gives you ad free versions of all of our shows plus membership in the club. Twit Discord, a great clubhouse for twit listeners. And finally, the twit plus feed with shows like Stacey's Book Club, the Untitled Linux Show, the GIZ Fizz and more. Go to twit tv slash club twit and thanks for your support. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show. We cover the latest news from Microsoft. He's back in town, baby, and I don't don't even know what town I'm going to have to adjust the lower third. What town are you in,
Richard Campbell (00:02:27):
Richard Campbells? I'm in Dura Park. Madeira Park, British Columbia.
Leo Laporte (00:02:31):
Madeira. M E D E I R A. Like
Richard Campbell (00:02:35):
The Portuguese wine. Like the wine.
Leo Laporte (00:02:37):
Okay.
Richard Campbell (00:02:37):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:02:39):
He's got a beautiful
Richard Campbell (00:02:39):
View of the ocean for
Leo Laporte (00:02:40):
Kids. Paul, what do you have a view of in your home? Two cats a coach.
Richard Campbell (00:02:52):
My favorite pictures of yours from Macey are the trains, to be clear. Oh yeah. The train is right by, there's a big standard trees between me and the
Paul Thurrott (00:02:58):
Train so I can hear it. I see the trainer
Leo Laporte (00:03:00):
Coming down the track. That's paul thora thora.com. Richards, of course,
Paul Thurrott (00:03:04):
Run his radio.com and
Leo Laporte (00:03:07):
They are both at their normal domiciles if such a thing exists where they have
Richard Campbell (00:03:14):
Are more normal than others. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:03:17):
Welcome home. So
Richard Campbell (00:03:21):
I
Leo Laporte (00:03:21):
Guess I've put it off as long as I can. Let's talk about Windows. Love it. I think it's you're enduring enthusiasm for Windows Enduring
Paul Thurrott (00:03:32):
Binds us together.
Leo Laporte (00:03:33):
That's it.
Richard Campbell (00:03:35):
Life believe. Wow.
Leo Laporte (00:03:38):
What's new in Windows Land?
Paul Thurrott (00:03:40):
Yeah, so we've been waiting for Qualcomm to announce their nuvia based CPUs and to see whether they in fact make a big difference or not. And if they do, maybe windows and arm is going to be a thing. And if they don't, we've just wasted the past. I dunno, what is it? Six years of our lives,
Leo Laporte (00:03:59):
Something
Paul Thurrott (00:04:01):
Like that. So we'll see. But they gave a little teaser. They're having their annual Snapdragon event earlier than usual. It's in about two weeks usually. It's in used to in December. I feel like maybe it was November at least once, but it's going to be in two weeks this year. And among the things they're announcing is something called the Snapdragon X Series of chip sets, which is the new name for this newbie based chip that they're ranking.
Richard Campbell (00:04:29):
Could be a chip set, could be a social media site. I don't even know.
Paul Thurrott (00:04:33):
Well, so speaking of that kind of thing, the C P U, I guess this is the name, not a code name actually went under the name Orion, but of course it's spelled like O R Y O N O Yon. And if you look up the marketing information about it, they're trying to promote the fact that this isn't technically based on anything ARM did, because we really don't want to pay those licensing fees. I don't think that's the truth, but what I don't care. So we'll see. This has been, lemme think about that. This has been potentially the longest waiting game in the history of Windows. Now Longhorn was a long time too actually.
Richard Campbell (00:05:16):
Yeah. Longhorn never came out, right? It was Vista.
Paul Thurrott (00:05:20):
Yeah, there you go. Right, but okay, fair enough. That's true.
Leo Laporte (00:05:26):
Anyway, we'll see.
Paul Thurrott (00:05:27):
So they're going with the Snap Dragon X brand. I don't have the complete list of CPUs that they've made for PCs in my brain, but you'll recall that the very first one, if I'm not mistaken, was the Snapdragon 8 35, which was just a cell phone chip. I think the second one was a Snapdragon eight 50 and the last couple have been like eight CX something, something who caress. This is the Achilles HA is a strong term. Now it's not that bad anymore, but this is the final major piece of the puzzle for windows and arms. So there's a lot riding on this and they're using all the right language, right? Quantum leap forward in performance and power efficiency. One of the problems we had seen with previous Snapdragon chip sets for PCs is that they did improve the performance, but they also had some issues with power management, meaning the battery life went downhill.
Richard Campbell (00:06:16):
Well, and this whole thing, this is the point of going arm, right? The battery's supposed to last all day.
Paul Thurrott (00:06:21):
Yes. Right. Well, so that first gen chip set, you could get 25 hours of real world battery life with it. And the reason it was real world is because you spent that 25 hours trying to get a window to open the performance was really bad
Richard Campbell (00:06:32):
Or figure out what apps ran it. All right. The cross compiling thing has been an issue.
Paul Thurrott (00:06:38):
Presumably
Richard Campbell (00:06:39):
We're better at it now. I know the net team has worked really hard on it. Yes.
Paul Thurrott (00:06:47):
I suspect the other side of the coin has also been working on it. There's been a lot of talk about this stuff, this stuff. We'll see. So we'll see. Anyway, this is very interesting. I
Richard Campbell (00:06:57):
Want this machine. I don't know this, but I'm still held in out because that Surface Studio two is awfully dear.
Paul Thurrott (00:07:06):
Yeah, I've read enough about it. Now to understand why you're waffled on it and probably aren't going to do it,
Richard Campbell (00:07:15):
Know, know what, for better or worse, it may be cliche, but the latest Dell Xbs for easily a thousand dollars less every bit of machine without the dumb and a higher resolution screen. I'm sorry, I like four K screens.
Leo Laporte (00:07:30):
Is this running on Qualcomm?
Richard Campbell (00:07:33):
No. Okay.
Leo Laporte (00:07:35):
On Qualcomm. I just want to make it clear that these two stories have not merged
Paul Thurrott (00:07:39):
Aside from a developer box. Every Qualcomm based PC has been a thin and light laptop kind of thing.
Leo Laporte (00:07:46):
So the hope is
Paul Thurrott (00:07:47):
To get it right and then we can have all kinds of different Qualcomm based PCs and we'll see. So two weeks. Two weeks to go and we'll know
Richard Campbell (00:07:54):
Happy with one.
Paul Thurrott (00:07:55):
Well, we won't know. We'll know more details about the chip set. We'll see.
Richard Campbell (00:08:00):
And it would be cool if they announced the chip set and then have a machine sitting beside it. It just seems unlikely.
Paul Thurrott (00:08:06):
Well, that would be awfully quick, wouldn't it?
Richard Campbell (00:08:09):
Yeah. Well,
Paul Thurrott (00:08:11):
They have partners I'm sure they're working with. Lenovo will probably have something. We'll see.
Richard Campbell (00:08:17):
One of the industry doesn't say, Hey, we have an engine. Here's our new engine. It's in a car.
Paul Thurrott (00:08:25):
Look, ai. We'll, we're going to talk a lot about AI with regards to Windows, especially soon, but this is the dream for the PC industry, and it started off as thin, light fan, less lots of battery life, get all those best attributes of a mobile device into Windows. And honestly it's evolved to what could we do with AI and still have all that stuff. And I will say, if they can get the performance thing right, Qualcomm is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this little wave.
Richard Campbell (00:08:51):
Well, you talk about needing an N P U, that would be scenario.
Paul Thurrott (00:08:55):
Yep. Yeah. I mean they have more experience with NPUs than anyone else in the chip set business
Richard Campbell (00:09:00):
Started MP
Paul Thurrott (00:09:01):
Themselves our side of the fence. So I'll just say, okay.
Richard Campbell (00:09:06):
Okay.
Paul Thurrott (00:09:06):
I hope so. Two weeks, we'll see what happens. I love you, Rob. So there's that and then Patch Tuesday was yesterday.
Richard Campbell (00:09:14):
Yeah. That's why all my machines rebooted last night.
Paul Thurrott (00:09:17):
Yeah, that's right. Yep. And you may recall that we have been on a very steady schedule since the beginning of the year. That week. D of one month is the preview update version of the Patch Tuesday update that usually comes out two to three weeks later on past Tuesday. And that did not happen. And Microsoft, seriously, I give up because I have spent this year banging my head against the wall positive. I finally had the schedule down and they just keep screwing with it. And seriously, seriously. So all I can say is on the Google actually made an announcement about this. There were a couple of months this year where the Google monthly pixel update did not come out on the exact day that everyone was expecting that world imploded. And Google finally said, look, we're just going to release these things when they're ready, so stop looking for a day. We're not doing that anymore. And I guess I'm trying, I'm really trying. I don't think I took enough medication today, but I'm looking at it and I'm trying to see it this way. Maybe this is just Microsoft saying don't worry about the date. It will get there eventually. But this Patch Tuesday update was just a set of security fixes. There were no new features.
(00:10:29):
The preview update that shipped two weeks ago still stands. You can still install it in preview form if you want it. And based on what just happened, because literally unprecedented, I don't know how else to say it. This has never happened ever, ever, ever. There's no way I can predict when the stable version of that preview update will occur. This is the one with all the new features, some of which are delivered in C F R form, meaning randomly you might not get them all right away. This is the stuff I've been complaining about all year long. That will happen at some point between now and the end of the year, probably asterisk, asterisk. And so will Windows 11, version 23 H two based on what they've said. But no promises anymore with dates. There's no way to know. Tied to the unprecedented nature of this non preview version of the past preview update, windows 11, version 21 H two, the original version of Windows 11 is now out of support. So they actually took a version out of support without bringing one into support, which is what should have happened normally by now. This is the date that 23 H two would've been released under the normal schedule. So right now, for the first time ever, we have one version of Windows 11 that is supported. We also have one to some number of versions of Windows 10, of course, including long-term servicing, et cetera, et cetera.
(00:11:58):
But as far as Windows 11 goes first time, well, okay, technically there was only one version of Windows 11. I guess we only had one in support. So maybe this is technically the normal situation. Anyway, unusual. So here we are. And then as far as 23 H two goes, again, it's not, I wrote this down, I shouldn't have, it's not even worth guessing, but if you are in the release preview channel of the Windows Insider program, you will eventually get 23 H two. Again, it's a little bit CFR based, so sometimes you get a bunch of the features, but not 23 H two. Sometimes you get 23 H two without all the features. That's why I was resetting machines, remember. And I now have at least a few machines that have 23 H two and all the features. And in fact, I think I have a third now because right before the show I did it not every reset, I just checked Windows, it was updated and it offered me Windows 11 comma version 23 H two. So that's happening. If you're in the release preview and you check the box to get out of the system when the real thing ships, will it happen again? I'd love to say yes. This is what I'm looking for is certainty. But because nothing works the way it's supposed to anymore, I can't even say, I can't even say I
Richard Campbell (00:13:14):
Love that. You're even more confused about this.
Paul Thurrott (00:13:16):
Yeah, when you thought it couldn't get any stupider.
Richard Campbell (00:13:18):
Right. The rest of us aren't confused. We're not paying attention.
Leo Laporte (00:13:23):
You're paying attention now.
Paul Thurrott (00:13:25):
That's the case. Just when you thought
Leo Laporte (00:13:27):
It was
Paul Thurrott (00:13:27):
Safe to go back into Windows updates.
Leo Laporte (00:13:29):
Frankly, I think not paying attention is the solution to many of life's ills.
Paul Thurrott (00:13:34):
That's right. Yeah.
Richard Campbell (00:13:35):
Machine rebooted stuff has moved around.
Paul Thurrott (00:13:39):
If I didn't care how much simpler would life be? It's a fair point.
Leo Laporte (00:13:44):
I often just wake up and go, what happened?
Paul Thurrott (00:13:49):
Yeah, sure. This is,
Richard Campbell (00:13:51):
I call that Wednesday.
Paul Thurrott (00:13:56):
I usually get up at about seven and so many times in the past three weeks, I'm going to call it, I've just woken up at six and just walked out in here and just started working because I don't know what's going on and I freak out.
Leo Laporte (00:14:08):
Wow.
Paul Thurrott (00:14:08):
Yeah. It's like it's a burning problem.
Leo Laporte (00:14:10):
Well
Paul Thurrott (00:14:10):
Done. It's a mental problem is what it is, but it's caused, it's not my fault.
Leo Laporte (00:14:16):
Right. This is, are you somewhat robotic when you walk into the room and sit down? Is it like I we work,
Paul Thurrott (00:14:21):
I will work. Well, I don't know. Does a robot care into the wall as you walk
Leo Laporte (00:14:24):
Down the
Paul Thurrott (00:14:25):
Hallway? If so, then yes.
Leo Laporte (00:14:26):
Only when kick play humans.
Paul Thurrott (00:14:28):
Yeah. I'm
Leo Laporte (00:14:29):
Incredibly coordinated. No play makes ball a dull boy.
Paul Thurrott (00:14:33):
It's like I throw my back out and someone's like, how did you do it? And I'm like, I got out of bed. It wasn't anything heroic. It was just me.
Richard Campbell (00:14:42):
That's the line. Right? What do you miss from your childhood? Not hurting.
Paul Thurrott (00:14:46):
Yeah. Not hurting myself all the time. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. I miss not waking up one day and having a bruise on my arm for some reason. I don't even know. I don't remember hitting it, but apparently a big purple thing on my arm is going to be a thing for a while.
Leo Laporte (00:14:59):
So yeah, there's a lot
Richard Campbell (00:14:59):
Of stuff that you have multiple machines around you, just like I do. So the
Paul Thurrott (00:15:02):
Best thing
Richard Campbell (00:15:03):
About Patch Tuesday is seeing how each machine has reacting. I know you're going to say
Leo Laporte (00:15:07):
It's the inconsistency. It's like a clock shop at noon. It's so exciting. They're just off. Well, no. So
Paul Thurrott (00:15:15):
I've done this, I've shown my wife, look, here are three computers in a row. This one has this, but not this one has this, but not this. And this one has something else.
Leo Laporte (00:15:22):
Good.
Paul Thurrott (00:15:22):
And it is a wonder that I am not insane at this point. But I mean, trying to understand it is maybe my problem.
Leo Laporte (00:15:29):
It's AB testing, right? I mean, let's, right. I mean this
Richard Campbell (00:15:31):
Is when you're both A and B.
Paul Thurrott (00:15:34):
Yeah. So we're literally going to discuss AB testing in two clicks here. So let's get to that by
Richard Campbell (00:15:41):
The clock scenario in this room. Is somebody calling me on teams?
Leo Laporte (00:15:44):
Oh yeah. Stuff
Richard Campbell (00:15:46):
Everywhere. Used to be
Leo Laporte (00:15:47):
Skype. Right? In
Richard Campbell (00:15:48):
Fact,
Leo Laporte (00:15:49):
I could still haunt Paul's dreams by playing the Skype.
Paul Thurrott (00:15:51):
Oh God, please. Okay. Speaking of a real need, here's something for you. OSS makers out there. All of us, not all of us, a lot of us use multiple kind messaging slash chat apps. Now we can't. What are we going to do? People we know use different things. I need one thing that if I'm on this call on Zoom that I am marked as busy in those other locations. I need that. Oh, wouldn't
Leo Laporte (00:16:13):
That'd be nice. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:16:14):
What a feature. Right?
Richard Campbell (00:16:16):
No,
Paul Thurrott (00:16:17):
I know.
Leo Laporte (00:16:18):
Everything would be better if people would just have APIs and publish them and everything in an A P I. In the old days on Apple, I don't know if this is the case on Windows, but there used to be this O S A architecture that you could have Apple, was it Apple Talk built in? No. Apple Script built into every app. They'd all be scripted
Paul Thurrott (00:16:41):
And then you could script it.
Leo Laporte (00:16:42):
And this was a standard, I wish it was. Not everybody did it, but at one point, one five minute period in 1989,
Richard Campbell (00:16:53):
I needed a window.
Leo Laporte (00:16:54):
Yeah. So is there anything like that Windows? There's no overarching
Paul Thurrott (00:16:58):
That will never No,
(00:17:00):
No, there isn't. And we've touched on it. We've skimmed the surface of this a few different times over history. There was a beautiful moment in time, I think I brought this up in the past month or so, that Microsoft was going to write all of their server apps back before there was a cloud in PowerShell. And then they were going to just build a G O I on top of that. And the idea was that there's not going to be anything this app can do that you can't do from the command line. And that would've enabled, it was PowerShell, it would've been automation and scripting and all kinds of other awesome things. And I think they released one version of Exchange maybe that did that and might have
Richard Campbell (00:17:33):
Been i s admin was the one they rewrote the I admin for 2008 R two. And it surely generated PowerShell
Leo Laporte (00:17:45):
Scripts under the hood.
Paul Thurrott (00:17:47):
There you go. And now nobody cares.
Richard Campbell (00:17:49):
And so the great thing was now both the gooey people hated it and the PowerShell people hate it.
Paul Thurrott (00:17:54):
Yes, that's right. Perfect.
Leo Laporte (00:17:58):
Yeah. PowerShell would be great if everything had PowerShell Script ability.
Richard Campbell (00:18:05):
Jeff Sno made that come true inside of Microsoft, that almost everything.
Paul Thurrott (00:18:08):
Yeah. So the other thing that touches on what Leo just said is Microsoft recently agreed, although apparently this is not good enough that they will allow businesses in the UK to install and purchase Microsoft 365 without teams. And they're basically doing this plugin model that you were talking about, which would be as easy as integrating teams. You just integrate with an open interface of some kind and Teams is one of the apps that can hit that interface. And Slack could build to it, others could build to it. And if the whole thing was just built like that, we would've such a beautiful world with me and we don't. So I don't expect that to ever happen across the board for everything mean, especially not in Windows.
Richard Campbell (00:18:47):
Well, the close piece right now is the Phone Link app, which I mean, all I wanted from the Phone Link app actually was that it took my SMSs so I could answer SMSs from my PC rather than pick up the phone.
Paul Thurrott (00:19:02):
We can kind of type a normal person
Richard Campbell (00:19:04):
And then it also shows me the photos that are on the phone so I can move those around. That's what I wanted from it.
Paul Thurrott (00:19:09):
That's
Richard Campbell (00:19:09):
What it's doing.
Paul Thurrott (00:19:11):
It sort of does that.
Richard Campbell (00:19:12):
Yeah. But it also insists on seeing every other messaging app, but not giving it ways to respond to it. You can never get it to zero because it also throws in all of the Google news stuff and the M S N stuff stuff. It's still marketing to me
Paul Thurrott (00:19:31):
Was the, by
Richard Campbell (00:19:32):
Making it look like text messages.
Paul Thurrott (00:19:33):
This was the dream of Windows phone, right? The Messages app was going to do ss m Ss and M M S and Skype Central Facebook Messenger actually did integrate very briefly advantage.
Leo Laporte (00:19:43):
That is an advantage that Apple has because they make Mac, OSS and iOS and so messages is the same on desktop and on
Paul Thurrott (00:19:49):
The phone. Well, but they're still not doing what we're asking for. You should be able to swap up messages for your favorite app, WhatsApp or whatever. Still work across
Leo Laporte (00:19:55):
Wouldn't go that far. But
Richard Campbell (00:19:57):
Yeah, this is the walled garden we're talking about. Why wouldnt you want to
Leo Laporte (00:20:00):
Tolerate why Wouldn use messages? Whatever could be wrong with you.
Richard Campbell (00:20:03):
Well, and if you're known to use non iOS device, we will SS m s you in the saddest way possible.
Paul Thurrott (00:20:09):
Yes. Right.
Richard Campbell (00:20:10):
And by the way, make the rest of all the iPhone users angry at you.
Paul Thurrott (00:20:15):
Well, that used to happen to me. So group chat with the people in my circle at the old house, if one of our neighbors would write these a thousand word misses in text, and then I would like it and it would say Paul likes and then spew the rest of as part of the reply thing. And everyone else would be like, oh, what is this? And it's like, yeah, sorry. I'm using a pixel over here. That's what Apple does to my texts. Google Semi fix that problem, by the way, like the pixel, if you're using a Pixel or the Google Messages app on any phone, I believe it sends a sort of native thing to the iPhone. You still don't get the color. Super important. But anyhow, yeah, interoperability. This could be a career right here just talking about this stuff. It's unbelievable.
Leo Laporte (00:21:00):
It's really sad because it, it's commercial interest that keep us from having what every customer, what users, what do we
Paul Thurrott (00:21:08):
Call it when commercial interests get in the way of the needs of the
Leo Laporte (00:21:10):
Customer? If only there was a term certification.
Richard Campbell (00:21:16):
Yeah, Cory Doctrine got that right.
Paul Thurrott (00:21:19):
It's
Leo Laporte (00:21:19):
Sad. I wish he hadn't because now I see it everywhere.
Richard Campbell (00:21:23):
Once you know
Leo Laporte (00:21:26):
It's
Paul Thurrott (00:21:27):
The glasses from they live pill. Once you see it, you cannot look away. I've been red pilled. It's everywhere. Okay. I've introduced it to my non-techie friends and it's like immediately. Yep. Everything. Yeah,
Leo Laporte (00:21:40):
It's all that way. Everything. We got a letter at least it's really up in arms from our house insurance company that said you can have no trees or shrubs within five feet of your house because of the wildfires around here, and you need to send us a video going all the way around your house proving that. And so
Paul Thurrott (00:22:03):
Putting the onus on you.
Leo Laporte (00:22:04):
Yeah. So she calls 'em and says, well, comes clarification are plants, trees are shrubs not in the dictionary. And the lady says, I don't know, send us a video. We'll tell you. It's like, well, we kind of would like to know now. So we were doing landscaping anyway. We were hardscaping for that reason.
Paul Thurrott (00:22:24):
Maybe we also would expect the service we're paying for maybe to come here.
Leo Laporte (00:22:28):
Oh no, don't go crazy. It's going to get harder and harder in areas like this to get
Paul Thurrott (00:22:34):
House insurance between
Leo Laporte (00:22:36):
Earthquakes and forest fires. California is screwed. Sure.
Paul Thurrott (00:22:42):
Maybe you're better off not living in the water than you'd also need flood insurance.
Leo Laporte (00:22:45):
Yeah. Maybe you're pretty high above the water table. It looks like though. You're looking down at the ocean, right
Richard Campbell (00:22:52):
Richard? Yeah. Yeah. Well, the boathouse is right by the
Paul Thurrott (00:22:55):
Water. The
Leo Laporte (00:22:56):
Boathouse. Oh, you're killing me, man.
Richard Campbell (00:22:58):
That's your guest
Leo Laporte (00:22:59):
House. That's where you're staying. Oh, okay. I'll be your boat.
Richard Campbell (00:23:04):
Have we planned in if the lower floor sub merges as the water level rises, can we still use this?
Leo Laporte (00:23:09):
Yeah,
Richard Campbell (00:23:10):
No problem. We got that worked out. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:23:16):
The certification of the world.
Paul Thurrott (00:23:19):
Yep. Literally everything. Literally
Leo Laporte (00:23:21):
Everything. Okay. So
Richard Campbell (00:23:24):
A couple of
Paul Thurrott (00:23:25):
Windows Insider points is mostly minor. A new dev bill just landed as we started the show. Nothing new here per se. New copilot icon, which is the copilot icon you've seen if you've moved to 23 H two or whatever. And Windows Spotlight is apparently going to be the new default wallpaper in Windows 11 moving forward, or that's a point. They're testing that there. So that's super. I had a
Richard Campbell (00:23:49):
Big old Forza ad as my login screened. Oh no, really? It's a picture of a blower crank, which is cool. It's it feel like cars. You have a motor and then you realize it's an ad for force. Oh, so you're saying my wallpaper is going to, you
Paul Thurrott (00:24:16):
Can still change it. Here's a question for you guys. This is rhetorical by the way, but still think about this. Microsoft introduced a setting sink in Windows eight. They made it worse in Windows 10, by which I mean they took away settings where it synced. And then in Windows 11 they made it worse again. And one of the key things that they've removed from Windows 11 setting sink is what? Wallpaper sink. Wallpaper
Richard Campbell (00:24:37):
Sink. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:24:38):
Why would they do that? Can you think? I have an idea. I'm curious what you think. Do you think that might be the most common thing someone might want to sink
Richard Campbell (00:24:46):
Between their
Paul Thurrott (00:24:48):
Old PC and their new PC is their wallpaper?
Richard Campbell (00:24:50):
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:24:50):
So why would they get rid of it
Richard Campbell (00:24:52):
Selling that space? What is Spotlight? That's the ad
Paul Thurrott (00:24:55):
Spotlight. It's the Bing. No, well, it's two parts to it. So Spotlight started out as a thing on the lock screen, which is what Richard's talking about. And it's a picture from Bing. So a nice Bing wallpaper. Those are beautiful. But then they have little ads in boxes and some of them are just
Richard Campbell (00:25:11):
Little things built the picture,
Paul Thurrott (00:25:13):
But some of them are actually ads like, Hey, have you tried Edge? It's awesome. At some point they moved Spotlight in or didn't move. It's still there in the Lexington, but they added Spotlight as an option for the desktop wallpaper. I don't think you get ads there, but you do puts a little extra weird icon on the desktop, which I'm not a big fan of, so I don't use it. I I don't think, I don't really think about it too much, but apparently not. Apparently in the Canary Channel, they are testing, making that the default. You boot in for the first time, new pc or you reset your PC and instead of the standard photo that would be there pitcher, you'll have Windows Spotlight, which is basically a slideshow, a daily slideshow between different binging sourced photos. But I don't think it has the stuff. I don't think it has ads. I don't think it has.
Richard Campbell (00:26:07):
It doesn't have the full ad yet. It's just related to a product they want you to know about.
Paul Thurrott (00:26:13):
Yep. And who knows, maybe the ad part's coming that would maybe explain it, but Oh, so what's your guess though? So in your guess was they stopped or sinking wallpaper because they wanted to sell you something, which is a good, actually, that's a good guess too. They
Richard Campbell (00:26:27):
Wanted the default to be Spotlight. I mean so different setting your property call back edge repeated.
Paul Thurrott (00:26:32):
That could be, my guess was that setting sync is something they have to store up in the cloud somewhere. And if they had to store your wallpaper, it's possible you had multiple versions of that wallpaper. They must've been abandoned wallpapers and setting sinks that no one ever used that are just sitting there untouched, but they can't get rid of it and they have to replicate it.
Leo Laporte (00:26:51):
That's bad. Maybe that stuff was taking up a bunch of space.
Paul Thurrott (00:26:53):
That's my guess. You
Leo Laporte (00:26:54):
Could just put a pointer though. You could just put a link. You don't have to put the actual image. Oh, we're going to get to this
Paul Thurrott (00:27:01):
Exact topic about how Microsoft does things in the cloud and why they do things. Because who knows. You know what I mean? It is not transparent. It's completely opaque. There's no way to know how they do it. Dunno.
Richard Campbell (00:27:12):
Yeah, there's all kinds of de-dupe strategies on that thing. Possibilities there. But hey, I've been using Desktop Earth as my wallpaper for the longest time. I like being able to see what the weather looks like on the place I need to call next.
Leo Laporte (00:27:25):
That's nice
Richard Campbell (00:27:26):
Having look at the
Leo Laporte (00:27:26):
Desktop. Is that an app?
Richard Campbell (00:27:29):
Yeah. See
Leo Laporte (00:27:29):
I've got binging on my binging Bing. I like the Bing wallpapers. They're nice.
Paul Thurrott (00:27:33):
But lemme look at Desktop Earth. Is that in the store?
Richard Campbell (00:27:37):
Yeah. Remember just cover the store
Leo Laporte (00:27:40):
Desk
Richard Campbell (00:27:41):
Top. Just
Paul Thurrott (00:27:41):
A search. Bing like everyone else does. Leo and you'll find it
Leo Laporte (00:27:46):
Or something. Google Earth. Google Earth. Google Earth. The first three links are all Google Earth and there's
Paul Thurrott (00:27:57):
The wallpaper. It's a certified to me,
Leo Laporte (00:27:59):
Here it is. Anca me, ANCA me. Why is it giving me a QR code to
Richard Campbell (00:28:05):
Use Edge? Stop
Leo Laporte (00:28:06):
It. I don't want
Richard Campbell (00:28:08):
To use Edge. I are you helping? Right?
Leo Laporte (00:28:11):
Don't help me.
Richard Campbell (00:28:13):
All these things are like I had something I wanted to do. Would you quit putting stuff in
Leo Laporte (00:28:16):
Front of
Richard Campbell (00:28:17):
What I'm trying to do and
Leo Laporte (00:28:19):
Why would I scan a QR code on my desktop computer?
Paul Thurrott (00:28:23):
Somebody in the Discord has said this sounds like something
Leo Laporte (00:28:27):
Startup could address.
Paul Thurrott (00:28:28):
And that's a good point. I know a guy who works at startup. Brad and I actually talked to his boss today because Starbucks 30th anniversary is coming up. Brad's boss is also named Brad, which is hilarious. And I don't want to ruin the eventual interview that you can read, but one of the things he talked about was the problem with this kind of thing, which is that we've moved into an era where people don't want to pay for anything. One of their little cost benefit analysis for any utility they might write is A, can we do it? And B, would anyone pay us for this and pay us back for our work? And this setting sink thing is an idea I put in Brad's head who put it in Brad's head and maybe it's they're looking at it. So I did try to make this happen. It may happen, but if it doesn't, the thing people need to understand is that a lot of customers go back to startup and they say, I don't know why you charge $7 for this thing. I don't know why you charge $5 for this thing. I don't know why. And it's a big problem because people just think everything's free now.
Leo Laporte (00:29:29):
Nothing is free. Did we just have this conversation by the way? I see that I have a little icon in the bottom of my
Paul Thurrott (00:29:38):
Yeah, your using
Leo Laporte (00:29:39):
Spotlight pre, which is the pre-release of Binging Chat. So it suggested, say I ask it to write a joke, my coworkers would find funny. You're my coworkers. You want to hear the joke? Here's a joke. How do you know if someone is using Microsoft Edge? They tell you every five minutes that it's better than Chrome. God, dear God, that sounds like even the jokes are ads now. Oh God, that is God, that's so awful. That's not a joke. That's an ad. This is where software's going. Oh my God.
Paul Thurrott (00:30:13):
And
Leo Laporte (00:30:14):
That's what we use AI for. Okay, so
Paul Thurrott (00:30:19):
I promised something about AB testing. The beta channel has moved on. This is the one that they were doing AB testing, right? So every week or whatever the cadence was for builds, they would actually release two builds. One build would have all the new features, one would not. Now of course we know in the stable world so to speak, which isn't all that stable frankly, out in the shipping supported world, Microsoft delivers features randomly sometimes via something called C F R, the controlled feature release technology. It literally means you will randomly get it at some point. It's not based on some known compatibility issue with your computers. Nothing like that. It's completely random and people have been complaining about this ever since they switched to this model. Well, I've got good news. They're switching away from AB testing. They're just going to have one build for the beta channel.
(00:31:05):
No worries anymore. Oh, one little thing though. They're going to use CFRs to deliver the new features to those build. Just kidding. So you guys are screwed. It's the same exact problem. We're just not going to have two different build numbers. Hilarious. So that build came out with no new features and just that little bit of good news, bad news thing. So it's like the rug being pulled out from under you I guess. And then in the Canary build, which again, we keep hoping maybe this is going to be Windows 12 and nothing, nothing. Nothing is happening. They were updating quick settings, which is that Windows key plus a thing down in the corner with all the quick settings and it will scroll like the start menu does meaning you see those little dots on the side and if you have too many little tiles, you can have multiple pages of tiles. That's exciting. And they're renaming Xbox Game Bar. It's a game bar. Not probably because Xbox is being deemphasized, but because Game Bar is a way to record screenshots and videos and it works in non Xbox games, you could be playing a Call of Duty from Steam or something. It doesn't matter what you're playing. So I think maybe they're just trying to make it more generic or whatever.
Leo Laporte (00:32:10):
It sounds like a fun place to hang belly up to the game bar. I'd like to do that. Yeah, the
Paul Thurrott (00:32:14):
Game bar. Yeah. Nice. I like
Leo Laporte (00:32:15):
Let do that.
Paul Thurrott (00:32:15):
Yeah, PAC Man in one of those tables.
Leo Laporte (00:32:17):
Pacman. Yeah. Yeah, there you go.
Paul Thurrott (00:32:19):
Put your beer on Pacman and play the game. Do
Leo Laporte (00:32:21):
They still have those? I played a lot of Pacman in those too.
Paul Thurrott (00:32:25):
I mean, I haven't been in a Chucky cheese lately, but probably I don't
Leo Laporte (00:32:32):
Actually.
Paul Thurrott (00:32:33):
There is a Chuck E Cheese for adults, isn't there? What's that sports bar thing for
Leo Laporte (00:32:37):
Dave and Buster's?
Paul Thurrott (00:32:38):
Yeah, thing
Leo Laporte (00:32:39):
That's a fun one. They might have it there. That's a fun one because you bring the kids, they do have fun things for the kids. Then you go to the bar off and they give you a gallon of pina colada here and they
Paul Thurrott (00:32:50):
Give you an Uber ticket too because
Leo Laporte (00:32:51):
What
Paul Thurrott (00:32:51):
Are you
Leo Laporte (00:32:52):
Doing driving home from this place? Shut. Anywhere. Done. Let's go. Hey, I'd like to take a little break right now if you don't
Paul Thurrott (00:32:59):
Mind
Leo Laporte (00:32:59):
And talk about our fine sponsor, no jokes about Edge today we're going to talk about Melissa, the data expert, the contact quality data expert. How about that? In a
Paul Thurrott (00:33:17):
Nutshell,
Leo Laporte (00:33:19):
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Richard Campbell (00:36:20):
What could go wrong?
Leo Laporte (00:36:22):
Oh, I'll
Paul Thurrott (00:36:22):
Tell you what could go wrong.
Leo Laporte (00:36:25):
Don't scare me man. Don't scare me. No
Paul Thurrott (00:36:28):
Hot off of its successful intervention in the Activision Blizzard debacle. The UK C M A has
Leo Laporte (00:36:33):
Turned its attention
Paul Thurrott (00:36:35):
To Microsoft and Amazon Cloud licensing. And I got to say, actually Activision Blizzard needed to be looked at. I was hoping it wasn't going to be from a room full of baboons, but cloud licensing needs to be looked at as well.
Leo Laporte (00:36:50):
This
Paul Thurrott (00:36:50):
Is something Rich know a lot about. Just licensing in general, Microsoft licensing. It's amusing to me when that these people who are not probably technical are going to try to figure this out. I think this is interesting and I'm sure what it's really about is whether they use their licensing to harm competitors, not a general licensing issue, but if you know anything about Microsoft licensing, you know that or anything really about eli, I guess it's this wasn't written to help anybody. It's definitely written maliciously.
Richard Campbell (00:37:26):
I mean there are definitely parts. The primary job of a EULA is to make sure you don't actually own anything but are no different than the agreements you sign for your credit cards that you signed for a cell phone. They are designed to obfuscate. They're complicated for a reason. It's useful.
Paul Thurrott (00:37:44):
That's right. They're written by lawyers, right?
Richard Campbell (00:37:46):
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:37:47):
And
Richard Campbell (00:37:47):
Lawyers, guys. I do the intent to obscure.
Paul Thurrott (00:37:50):
That's right. People on the product teams who were like, yeah, I don't know this, we had nothing to do this. Obviously that's not, but it's designed to protect the company. True. Right? The point of the big point of it is just to protect them against any legal challenge. But I'm sure the UK C M A, well actually, they would look at something that went after consumer harm. That's not what this is. This is about whether their licensing model prohibits the companies that use Microsoft or Amazon Cloud services from having better deals with other companies or working with other companies, that kind of thing. It's really looking into whether or not
Richard Campbell (00:38:25):
Question one is what other companies, there's only two cloud rivals. Amazon and Microsoft, when you talk about this is
Paul Thurrott (00:38:33):
An organization
Richard Campbell (00:38:34):
That, from that, from UK perspective,
Paul Thurrott (00:38:36):
They think cloud gaming is a market. Richard, I'm sure there are.
Richard Campbell (00:38:39):
When I first saw this piece, my thought was, is this a vengeance play for humiliating themselves over the Blizzard
Paul Thurrott (00:38:46):
Thing?
Richard Campbell (00:38:47):
Like fine, we can't get to play with Blizzard, let's go here.
Paul Thurrott (00:38:54):
I can't
Richard Campbell (00:38:55):
Deny
Paul Thurrott (00:38:55):
That that's a possibility. It's possible.
Richard Campbell (00:38:59):
At the same time, this is worth scrutinizing. This is clearly a duopoly. So it is worthwhile to put a little heat on 'em to say, I'm not so much that you maybe stopping other people over the market, but are you colluding?
Paul Thurrott (00:39:16):
This will actually come up again in the show. I keep saying stuff like that, I apologize. But there is also this thing where, I don't remember the regulatory body, it was probably the eu, but at some point in the past couple of years, went to Microsoft and said, actually it was cloud licensing said this is unfair. It prevents your customers or partners from doing something, something. And they said, you know what? You're right. We probably got caught up in it legally as about protecting the company. Our intent was not to harm these people we're going to fix it. So they actually kind of proactively said, look, we'll do. Right.
Richard Campbell (00:39:48):
Well, and there in lies, the real question is how often does that scenario happen and just never makes press.
Paul Thurrott (00:39:54):
Yeah, that's right.
Richard Campbell (00:39:55):
And again, the only problem with this statement is UK C M A, if it was the eu, you'd be fine. It's like, you know
Paul Thurrott (00:40:03):
These guys, right? That's exactly
Richard Campbell (00:40:04):
A professional group of people are going to evaluate a couple of the largest companies in the world to make sure they're doing right. Good on you. Thanks. That's a good service. And you said UK C M A and it became a joke.
Paul Thurrott (00:40:18):
Yeah. This is problematic on a few other levels, but one of my big issues here is, and I don't mean this in a don't know sarcastic or mean way, but with the UK leaving the eu, it has entered a different realm of regulation, if you will. I mean there were major markets in the world like the United States and the EU and China and whatever else. And those are what I would call the Tier A markets that you need to worry about from a regulatory perspective. Even if the UK was completely on the ball and they're about as far from it as they can be with the C M A. I mean, I don't know. You're not doing the right thing. It's like, okay, well we'll just not do it there. How does that sound? It's kind of
Richard Campbell (00:41:01):
An answer. I mean, you're talking, it's the uk so it's 67 million people. It you'd be giggling if it was New Zealand, right?
Paul Thurrott (00:41:11):
Yes, yes. Right. That's right.
Richard Campbell (00:41:13):
Well,
Paul Thurrott (00:41:13):
Yeah, in New Zealand is one of the late to the game countries that okayed the Activision Blizzard deal. It was like, that's
Richard Campbell (00:41:21):
Great, thanks.
Paul Thurrott (00:41:22):
No, we'll hang that on the fridge. Thank you.
Richard Campbell (00:41:23):
We're really excited.
Paul Thurrott (00:41:25):
That's cute. That's cute. We were waiting on that.
Richard Campbell (00:41:29):
I mean, I would argue it's, it's a markets, when you talk about Western world, it's a market
Paul Thurrott (00:41:34):
Size,
Richard Campbell (00:41:35):
But it's no 300 million in the eu.
Paul Thurrott (00:41:42):
That's what I meant. That's what I'm
Leo Laporte (00:41:43):
Sorry. I didn't mean to suggest they were not important at all, but
Paul Thurrott (00:41:45):
They're just the next level down. That's all.
Richard Campbell (00:41:48):
Yeah. So again, it was why is this even the news, Japan,
Leo Laporte (00:41:52):
I
Paul Thurrott (00:41:52):
Appreciate them. There's a nationality thing going on here where we're going to flex our muscles here a little bit and we still matter and I get it, but I do think this thing needs to be looked at.
Richard Campbell (00:42:05):
Yeah, I agree. And again, if it was you doing it, I wouldn't even blink like Yep, thanks. That's a useful service. That's what we pay you for. Part of this is, I wonder if they're just trying to reestablish themselves. You kind of had to
Paul Thurrott (00:42:17):
Reinvent. I do think there's an element to that.
Richard Campbell (00:42:20):
Yeah,
Paul Thurrott (00:42:20):
I do. Yep.
Richard Campbell (00:42:22):
Again, one of the ways you'll be credible here would be the UK C M A to be working with the EU on it.
Paul Thurrott (00:42:28):
That's right. Which they should do. But yes, I mean I'm sure a lot of identity was lost when they got subsumed into the eu, although they did it in the loosest possible fashion, didn't adopt the currency, et cetera, et cetera. We'll see. Anyway, this is a tough one because yes, it's like, yep, Amazon and Microsoft license Cloud licensing. Yep. Should be looked at. Absolutely. You can't even see a like, oh, that's too bad. That's too bad. I dunno. What they'll do is force Microsoft to go through a French data center, how they seem to solve problems.
Richard Campbell (00:43:03):
Well, I would argue that primary data center is in Ireland.
Paul Thurrott (00:43:06):
There you go. Which, well, maybe they'll take control of Ireland. That will be fun. That seems like a good idea.
Leo Laporte (00:43:14):
Did you see the Activision Bobby Codick is having an event?
Paul Thurrott (00:43:18):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:43:19):
What's that all about? Is that like his farewell? No, because he's still going to, or no, he is his. It would be his farewell.
Richard Campbell (00:43:28):
Yeah, that deal's gone through. He's supposed to be exiting. It's supposed to be,
Leo Laporte (00:43:32):
They hired James Cordon to host it.
Paul Thurrott (00:43:36):
Yeah,
Leo Laporte (00:43:36):
That's so weird. It was internal.
Paul Thurrott (00:43:39):
Well, there's your UK angle. So see, we care about the UK still. I got James Cordon to host this stuff, right?
Leo Laporte (00:43:47):
Kodak fielded arranged. So this was an internal only all hands meeting. All hands
Richard Campbell (00:43:52):
Got to be his exit.
Leo Laporte (00:43:54):
It's got to be goodbye, right? Yeah. It's going to close Friday.
Paul Thurrott (00:43:58):
Is
Leo Laporte (00:43:58):
That the official,
Paul Thurrott (00:44:00):
That's not official, but it is the rumor.
Leo Laporte (00:44:02):
Yeah.
Richard Campbell (00:44:03):
And what's his severance? 300 million.
Leo Laporte (00:44:07):
Yikes. And
Paul Thurrott (00:44:10):
As he's going out
Leo Laporte (00:44:11):
Is waving goodbye, he says, oh, and by the way, guitar Hero's coming back, my
Paul Thurrott (00:44:19):
Legacy, another company that can, is
Leo Laporte (00:44:20):
That sad? That's his legacy guitar hero.
Paul Thurrott (00:44:24):
That's actually not his legacy. Leo. I would point to the workplace problem.
Leo Laporte (00:44:27):
Oh that, yes,
Paul Thurrott (00:44:30):
But he did. But you know what,
Leo Laporte (00:44:32):
You can say that. No, it's true. And certainly of his victims probably think that. But he did bring home a 72 billion.
Paul Thurrott (00:44:42):
That's right. Deal. And by the way, he was also, without knowing anything about the company, because honestly, who pays attention to these corporate structures for companies like this, he was at Activision forever.
Leo Laporte (00:44:51):
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:44:52):
He wasn't just there for the past five years or something.
Richard Campbell (00:44:55):
He's one of the founders.
Paul Thurrott (00:44:57):
He was there from a long, long time. The duration,
Leo Laporte (00:45:00):
This is from Windows Central. James Corden famous. He's famous. He used to have a TV show. So he was drove in the car and they sing a song.
Paul Thurrott (00:45:09):
Isn't he the lead singer and queen now? Oh no,
Leo Laporte (00:45:11):
Wait, I think so. Cordon asked how Coik and a B K leadership will retain its culture, which Coik repeatedly hope.
Paul Thurrott (00:45:20):
He said, wait
Leo Laporte (00:45:21):
A minute, no. Repeatedly described as magic and special during the discussion.
Paul Thurrott (00:45:26):
Yikes. Well, actually he's had some problems himself on set, hasn't he? Or behind the scenes rather. Oh yeah. I've heard
Leo Laporte (00:45:33):
He's maybe got
Paul Thurrott (00:45:34):
A techer. I think all these guys have, everybody has, honestly, all these talk show hosts have issues. Everybody has. I
Leo Laporte (00:45:39):
Whatcha going to, do
Paul Thurrott (00:45:41):
You give
Leo Laporte (00:45:41):
Somebody a lot of money and power
Paul Thurrott (00:45:45):
And they act badly?
Leo Laporte (00:45:46):
Yeah, they act badly. What a surprise.
Paul Thurrott (00:45:49):
I
Leo Laporte (00:45:49):
Can't believe he asked Kodak about the culture of Activis Blizzard.
Richard Campbell (00:45:55):
Just somebody who has no idea what's going on.
Paul Thurrott (00:45:57):
He like, we're going to have to live on, it's
Leo Laporte (00:45:59):
On my card here. I'm going to read it.
Richard Campbell (00:46:01):
His people should have said like, don't mention the culture.
Paul Thurrott (00:46:05):
There's no culture. There's no culture. And
Leo Laporte (00:46:06):
I think he's probably paid to mention the culture. Yeah. Okay. Alright.
Paul Thurrott (00:46:12):
We'll get back to Activision, I promise.
Leo Laporte (00:46:15):
Yeah, yeah. We haven't discussed it. Google, I
Paul Thurrott (00:46:17):
Took almost personal exception to this because I follow this stuff very closely. If you know anything about online accounts and two f a and El pass keys and all the different hardware keys, which apparently now are just a little blip in time for most people. You know that certain companies do a great job of this and certain companies, and some companies were early to this game and some are kind of late to this game. And Google has actually done a pretty good job. Not a great job, but a pretty good job with Sies and they just advertise the fact that they're going to make sies the default on their consumer accounts like Gmail accounts and good for them. That's so cute. But you know what the thing
Leo Laporte (00:46:53):
Is? Bless their hearts. No, but the thing is just,
Paul Thurrott (00:46:57):
I want to inject a little bit of a truth to this story. You can't not sign into Gmail without a password. You have to do it at least once on every device that you own. That's not true of a Microsoft account. Years ago they enabled passwordless. You can literally delete your password from your M S A if you want to. I haven't, but you can. And anyway, the point is, when I sign into my M S A on any device for the first time, I have never entered my password. It goes right to the two f a and that's it. And so unfortunately good for you. Password list. Yay, yay Google. But it's not there. They still haven't done it.
Richard Campbell (00:47:38):
I
Paul Thurrott (00:47:38):
Don't understand promoting that. You're not leading anything. I did it
Richard Campbell (00:47:43):
My first password list run as I think it was in 2020 and it was pretty rough back. It has only really today we just take it for granted at
Paul Thurrott (00:47:52):
Least. Totally take it for granted. And actually if you move back and forth between MSAs, which are consumer accounts and what Microsoft calls terribly a Microsoft Worker school account, what used to be an a d account, you may notice there's some interesting difference in the way that Microsoft Authenticator handles those. So for example, on an M S A, you'll often get a dialogue that says this is the number, the number 20 is important, and you go to your little phone and you do your fingerprint in your face or whatever it is, and then you have to choose one of three numbers. You hit 20 and then it works. And then on the work and school side, they actually do it the opposite. The phone will give you a code and you go to the computer or device, whatever it is, and you actually type that thing in on the other end. So it's almost like they're experimenting, which to me with what to me is kind of the same thing. It's a little additional extra. I don't know what that is. It's like 17 bit security. I don't know what that is, but whatever. Anyway, it's still evolving, I guess is my point. I'm not sure if one of those ways is better. It's weird. They do it differently. Google does not do this.
Leo Laporte (00:49:02):
Don't do it.
Richard Campbell (00:49:03):
I used a line the other day, actually, I was talking to a senior Microsoft president is identity the third rail at Microsoft because it does seem to be smashing some careers, but there's new leadership in that space. That's why the new name Entra
Paul Thurrott (00:49:17):
Are
Richard Campbell (00:49:17):
Doing some good things. No two ways about it. I've got some shows coming in that space. The number prompting thing is a good idea. It stops people from accepting. I told you. Accepting.
Leo Laporte (00:49:29):
Exactly. You have to think.
Paul Thurrott (00:49:31):
Right? I
Leo Laporte (00:49:32):
Love, it's
Paul Thurrott (00:49:32):
Like the third light on a car in the back of breakdown.
Richard Campbell (00:49:36):
Well, it's also the one, if you don't see the number, you can't answer it correctly.
Paul Thurrott (00:49:41):
Well, a friend of
Richard Campbell (00:49:42):
Mine who's a
Leo Laporte (00:49:43):
Cisman, who was
Richard Campbell (00:49:44):
Dealing with an older gentleman who was literally account was under attack and while he's talking him through the guy accepted
Leo Laporte (00:49:52):
An
Richard Campbell (00:49:53):
Authentication request by the attacker,
Paul Thurrott (00:49:56):
It's like, I think I figured out what happened, Bob, the call is coming from inside the house.
Leo Laporte (00:50:03):
The number thing just
Richard Campbell (00:50:04):
Creates this complexity where it's like it's asking me what number it is and I can't see the number. Well then don't answer it.
Paul Thurrott (00:50:09):
Yeah. U a
Leo Laporte (00:50:11):
C should do this anyway.
Paul Thurrott (00:50:15):
So actually
Leo Laporte (00:50:16):
Just some technical questions. So what Microsoft's doing, and for those who don't know, everybody knows, but for those who don't know, you go on Windows and it says, would you want to prove this? Your phone? And it says, we're going to send a message to your phone, a notification and to your authenticator or whatever. But usually it's a phone, right? I mean, it has to be smart enough to show this number and it says the number's 72, and then your phone, it pops up and you get a choice, the numbers, and you click it and then
Paul Thurrott (00:50:46):
It's like a little capture almost. You have
Leo Laporte (00:50:48):
To
Paul Thurrott (00:50:48):
Pick the right number,
Leo Laporte (00:50:48):
But it's very easy. It's very straightforward. Is that single sign on? Is that what s s O is?
Richard Campbell (00:50:53):
No, no.
Paul Thurrott (00:50:54):
That's
Richard Campbell (00:50:55):
Multi character authentication.
Paul Thurrott (00:50:56):
Right? Single
Richard Campbell (00:50:57):
Sign-on is once I have that token, now it can move,
Paul Thurrott (00:50:59):
It passes through. It's a pass. Single sign on is a passer. So Windows when you sign into
Leo Laporte (00:51:04):
Windows, but without the number, it would be single sign on.
Richard Campbell (00:51:08):
No, no.
Paul Thurrott (00:51:10):
It really explain to me. No, it's about taking the authentication and applying it and paying it forward. Actually website
Richard Campbell (00:51:17):
Use it more places.
Paul Thurrott (00:51:18):
So in Windows, when you sign in for the first time in a new pc, you do the thing we just described. So you've used two f a or m f a, right? To prove that you're, you didn't type in your password. Passwordless, hey
Leo Laporte (00:51:30):
Google. And
Paul Thurrott (00:51:31):
Then you get to the desktop. And so some of the things that pass through are automatically, although you can change, this is your OneDrive account automatically signs in and syncs up with your OneDrive, your store, Microsoft store signs up with that account, get all
Leo Laporte (00:51:43):
Your apps. I'm signing everything now.
Paul Thurrott (00:51:44):
Basically your apps are all your mail and calendar app is all signed in. It's
Leo Laporte (00:51:47):
A password. And in future Windows, hello? Will log me in unless the machine I'm using doesn't have Windows. Hello? Which
Paul Thurrott (00:51:52):
Windows? Hello? Actually now use Password does support
Richard Campbell (00:51:54):
Password.
Paul Thurrott (00:51:55):
Yeah, you could do Windows. Hello? Actually Windows. Hello for Passkey. Sure you can do. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:51:58):
So once, in other words, this is a single time authentication. It's effectively two factor except it's one factor. It's the thing you have, you don't have to know anything.
Richard Campbell (00:52:08):
Well, there's more factors going on than now we get into the whole authentic.
Leo Laporte (00:52:14):
Just to explain, there are three possible factors for authenticating. You are who you say you are, something in your head like password,
Paul Thurrott (00:52:21):
Something technically on your phone,
Leo Laporte (00:52:22):
Something you are eyes or fingerprints. But you have your phone
Paul Thurrott (00:52:27):
And hopefully you're assigning in or a computer and you're using Windows Hello or Face ID or a fingerprint or whatever it is to, it's
Richard Campbell (00:52:36):
Also to the
Paul Thurrott (00:52:37):
Device.
Richard Campbell (00:52:37):
The device identity is relevant to the equation. So if it's a known device, you've used it before.
Paul Thurrott (00:52:41):
That's something
Richard Campbell (00:52:42):
The location of the device
Leo Laporte (00:52:44):
IP you're
Richard Campbell (00:52:45):
Coming from,
Paul Thurrott (00:52:45):
That's
Leo Laporte (00:52:46):
Something you have. That's all something you have. That's one. But
Paul Thurrott (00:52:50):
It's something secure that you have and it's
Leo Laporte (00:52:53):
You have
Paul Thurrott (00:52:53):
To authenticate to get into
Leo Laporte (00:52:54):
It. You are kind of making an assumption. Will it not work if I don't have face or touch id?
Richard Campbell (00:52:59):
Well, it will. The app
Paul Thurrott (00:53:00):
Also requires it too though. You can't get into the Microsoft Authenticator app without authenticating, using face or touch.
Leo Laporte (00:53:06):
Okay. So
Paul Thurrott (00:53:08):
I have
Leo Laporte (00:53:08):
Physically authenticated.
Paul Thurrott (00:53:09):
There's multiple layers. Yes.
Leo Laporte (00:53:11):
Yeah. So that's the second factor already I've authenticated to the
Paul Thurrott (00:53:14):
Microsoft
Leo Laporte (00:53:14):
App. Just because
Paul Thurrott (00:53:16):
You got into your phone doesn't mean you get into authenticated. It still makes you do it every single time. You still have to go
Leo Laporte (00:53:21):
Through it. Got it. Okay. So that is too
Richard Campbell (00:53:23):
Factor. But as someone who travels, lot geof factors matter.
Leo Laporte (00:53:28):
They pay attention to where it's coming from.
Richard Campbell (00:53:30):
Absolutely. So this laptop is the same laptop, it's signature same. But now I'm in Perth and it's like, well, that's weird. I'm going to ask you a couple more authentication requirements.
Leo Laporte (00:53:39):
Okay. A good, that's an unreliable geolocation. It's doing it by IP address. Most laptops don't have G P s built in. Yeah, but
Paul Thurrott (00:53:48):
Amazon's coming from Amazon will sense that you're somewhere else and say, Hey, we're going to ask you a couple of questions. And then you're changing your password. Sorry. I mean, it's better than the alternative, right? It's they're trying to do something. I appreciate that.
Richard Campbell (00:54:03):
Well, and the important part that's been happening, and I got the show coming on this, is that they're centralizing that whole mechanism, the sophisticated ones, so that it doesn't matter what accounts you're using or what approaches you're using, it works
Paul Thurrott (00:54:14):
Consistently.
Leo Laporte (00:54:15):
The main point is it is secure and more secure than simply a password.
Richard Campbell (00:54:21):
That's right.
Leo Laporte (00:54:22):
Actually, my main point, the main point was Google still
Paul Thurrott (00:54:24):
Makes you type in your password in its Passwordless world, and I'm getting tired of their marketing nonsense.
Leo Laporte (00:54:29):
Yeah. Well, I think honestly, most people faced with PA Keys because the way you could do it, I just tried it when I logged down on my Google accounts on this computer, and then I tried to sign in and said, well, you could use your Paki scan, this QR code with your phone, but it's not the only way. Well, it's one thing, and most people I think are just going to say, well, yeah, but I
Paul Thurrott (00:54:50):
Have a password
(00:54:51):
Manager, so
Leo Laporte (00:54:51):
I'm just going to enter the password.
Paul Thurrott (00:54:53):
Yeah,
Leo Laporte (00:54:54):
Okay.
Paul Thurrott (00:54:56):
I have yet to run into a Chromebook or a Windows pc or an Android phone or an iPhone where I had to not type in my Google password. I've never been offered the Pasky, the first time, it's never
Leo Laporte (00:55:06):
Oh, you've always had to type in the password.
Paul Thurrott (00:55:07):
Yeah. So hopefully that changes. I'm just saying
Leo Laporte (00:55:10):
It doesn't remember that like it does with Microsoft. It doesn't remember it.
Paul Thurrott (00:55:14):
Well, no. Once you've done it, you should technically be able to use your pass key from there on, but Right.
Leo Laporte (00:55:19):
Well, so that's what Microsoft does. You have to authenticate authenticator before you can use it. Yeah. But
Paul Thurrott (00:55:24):
Microsoft always does it right. Every time Google will actually prompt you and then you can say, try another way and then go through a menu and eventually you can get to a thing where you can use the pass key maybe. But it never does it on the first time ever. And that's my issue. It's
Leo Laporte (00:55:39):
Try it now because I
Paul Thurrott (00:55:40):
Want to not
Leo Laporte (00:55:40):
Know that password better know the password. It seems to do a better job now. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:55:45):
Sorry, what does,
Leo Laporte (00:55:45):
Just try it now. I think this part of this announcement that Google has made is improving, is an improving its pasky
Paul Thurrott (00:55:54):
Thing
Leo Laporte (00:55:55):
Because believe me, I is dopey and we talked about this yesterday with Steve and I think it's
Paul Thurrott (00:56:01):
Already dead in the water
Leo Laporte (00:56:03):
Because nobody uses it.
Paul Thurrott (00:56:05):
Oh no, that's brand new though. This is just happening. I think it's going to be okay.
Leo Laporte (00:56:10):
Okay. So
Richard Campbell (00:56:10):
It's going to happen, looking at what it's taken over the past few years for Microsoft to get where they are right now. It went through a bunch of twitches. It's not,
Paul Thurrott (00:56:17):
You're still looking for the promise of five G. Give it a second.
Leo Laporte (00:56:21):
It's brand new. So now because it's a new phone, I had just had to re-add my authenticator, my Microsoft authenticator to this and went through several steps including the two-factor, which I use a authenticator for that. Right. So now if now I can use it to log in, like a new setup on Windows, I don't have to have a password. I could just say authenticate through the phone.
Paul Thurrott (00:56:46):
I mean, technically you'd never needed it,
Leo Laporte (00:56:49):
But
Paul Thurrott (00:56:50):
You could use, I mean even before the Microsoft Authenticator app, it would send a code to your phone. You could do it that way if you wanted. That's not super secure. But it's better than sending a password maybe.
Leo Laporte (00:57:01):
But you're saying even with Google's pass keys, you still have to enter a password every time.
Paul Thurrott (00:57:07):
One time,
Leo Laporte (00:57:08):
One time. Well that's the same with Microsoft. I just had to enter my password
Paul Thurrott (00:57:10):
Now. It isn't, you never have to type it with Microsoft. Never. Not once Password to get
Leo Laporte (00:57:13):
My authenticator working, I had to put my address.
Paul Thurrott (00:57:17):
Okay. You have to authenticate it some way, but you literally do not need a password to the Microsoft account ever. You could delete it.
Leo Laporte (00:57:22):
Oh
Paul Thurrott (00:57:22):
Yeah, they let you delete it. So
Leo Laporte (00:57:24):
How would I authenticate this Microsoft Authenticator? Boy, I can't, okay,
Paul Thurrott (00:57:28):
So you want me to, I mean,
Leo Laporte (00:57:29):
Well no. Okay. You're telling me there's some way that I could make, it seems like an endless loop is my problem. Everything. At some point I can
Paul Thurrott (00:57:37):
Answer this question. Give me a second. I got it. Microsoft has secondary forms of authentication. You could send you an email, it could send a text message to your phone, you could send an email to a backup account. There are secondary forms.
Leo Laporte (00:57:51):
That's increasingly how people are doing it is, sorry, I see this a lot in social networks where they say, here's your email address. Okay, we're going to send you a link, click the link and you're in.
Paul Thurrott (00:58:02):
Right?
Leo Laporte (00:58:03):
How many
Paul Thurrott (00:58:03):
Times have you gotten that little message and then the link never appears,
Leo Laporte (00:58:06):
Ain't that.
Paul Thurrott (00:58:07):
And you're sitting there waiting for it and you're like, okay, I guess I'm not doing this right now. And then it finally shows up like an hour later for some reason God knows what happened there. And then you type on it, it's like, no, this expired,
Leo Laporte (00:58:18):
Come on. Is all of this better than a password? Is that the point is they're trying to replace passwords? Yes. Okay.
Paul Thurrott (00:58:23):
Yeah, because passwords are easily broken into, and if that's your only form of authentication, but email really
Leo Laporte (00:58:30):
Secure.
Paul Thurrott (00:58:31):
I know, I know. Listen, it behooves you as a user to ensure that everything you're doing is as secure as it can be. Right? So it's on you to use some hopefully form a biometric sign in on a phone, right? Or on your pc, if you have Windows, hello on a Mac, if you have that fingerprint thing, whatever they call it, touch id. And that is where you access your email and it's kind of protected behind that umbrella of security, right? That's like one stage. But people are lazy and people don't like to sign in. But if you do use it, look, if we're going down the path where you're using an authenticator app, in particular Microsoft Authenticator, because very specific form of authentication for Microsoft accounts.
Leo Laporte (00:59:16):
Yeah. Look, I have to sign it.
Paul Thurrott (00:59:20):
Of course you do. And you have to type in your damn password, like I said.
Leo Laporte (00:59:22):
Well, let me see. Lemme see. Let me see. Let me see. I want to see if I do because I have a PAs key set up with this account. Ah, see sign in with your PAs key.
Paul Thurrott (00:59:30):
Yeah, but you've already done it, but all you do was sign out. It's on the computer. The PAs key's tied to the computer. It's built into the authentication. No,
Leo Laporte (00:59:36):
No, I have
Richard Campbell (00:59:37):
No, no, it's tied in my iPhone.
Leo Laporte (00:59:39):
So
Richard Campbell (00:59:40):
I have to do it on the iPhone.
Paul Thurrott (00:59:42):
So if this is happening, then great. Then they've, what I
Leo Laporte (00:59:45):
Thinking is that not a password? Yeah, that's what I'm
Paul Thurrott (00:59:48):
Thinking. I literally tried this as recently as this morning, so I'm not,
Leo Laporte (00:59:53):
I just did it. So I just did it. So I scanned that QR code, I use my, it did want me to do the face ID on my iPhone, which you should have to do. And now, which I should do. And now Pasky
Paul Thurrott (01:00:03):
Has
Leo Laporte (01:00:03):
Welcomed me
Paul Thurrott (01:00:04):
And what it should have done is added a PASKY to that computer. Now
Leo Laporte (01:00:07):
It's now saying you can create here. Yeah. Yes,
Paul Thurrott (01:00:09):
There you go. Which is exactly what you want. That's good. So it only took them. Alright then I'll reset what I said. If it looks like they are
Leo Laporte (01:00:15):
Fixing it,
Paul Thurrott (01:00:16):
It just took them two years longer than Microsoft. So good. That's fine.
Leo Laporte (01:00:20):
Ultimately that was my point. But this is a big story because it hasn't worked until recently. You don't want to reset password.
Paul Thurrott (01:00:25):
But the thing is, what bugs me is PAs key or not just talking to f a an authenticator apps. Microsoft did do this two years ago. Why wasn't that a big story? I mean to me that, and I experimented with it on a secondary account, but like I said, I'm not going to delete the password from my primary Microsoft account for probably suspicious or what do you call it? Stupid reasons, the whole, but you can, if you want to, you can get rid of it. You will not have a password. That's something you can do. That's
Leo Laporte (01:00:58):
All I'm saying.
Paul Thurrott (01:00:59):
It's a good thing. Alright, let's move on from this. I promise we'd come back to this theme. So Microsoft has stepped back from their plan to basically double charge OneDrive users for photo storage when they share photos with others. This was somewhere, this is very similar. Yeah. Paranoid reasons. Exactly. Thank you Mike. Sometimes you're paranoid and sometimes you're right. Sometimes you both. This is where I was saying we don't understand the underlying mechanism. There was a possibility that the way Microsoft did cloud storage behind the scenes that we would never know about that this data was replicated and that was part of the rationale for
Richard Campbell (01:01:41):
Well, and why would we want to know? Right? That's their problem.
Paul Thurrott (01:01:43):
Well, because they're charging us for it
Richard Campbell (01:01:45):
Only because they
Leo Laporte (01:01:46):
Decided to do something
Richard Campbell (01:01:47):
Then every other provider,
Leo Laporte (01:01:49):
I just don't
Richard Campbell (01:01:49):
Understand.
Leo Laporte (01:01:50):
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (01:01:51):
Anyway, they're not going to do it anymore. So people complained and they said, you know what, I'm sorry we made a mistake. We're not doing this.
Leo Laporte (01:02:00):
So
Paul Thurrott (01:02:00):
Here's the thing, and I need everyone to gather around the little virtual fire pit here and pay attention to this bit because it's important and it's true. There is a lesson that we need to learn here. And that lesson is that Microsoft actually listens to feedback,
Leo Laporte (01:02:14):
Not
Paul Thurrott (01:02:14):
Through the insider program. That's hilarious.
Leo Laporte (01:02:17):
But if they
Paul Thurrott (01:02:18):
Hear from their about things that they've done out in the world, this has happened repeatedly. They just walk it back. In fact, if anything, they walk it back almost too much. They're a little too eager to please in my opinion. But this is the type of thing that I think is important to take note of because when Windows 1123 H two comes out and people start noticing all the advertising for backing up to OneDrive all the time everywhere, which we'll talk about a little bit in the back of the book today. You need to understand that it is on you to complain to Microsoft. They listen to customers. They really apparently don't listen to insiders at all, but actual customers using the shipping version of the product. Yes, they do. Listen,
Richard Campbell (01:03:04):
It is part of the mantra inside of Microsoft is that come with customer data and well, there's a little bit of a hyperbole in your insider response. They are sensitive to only a little, they are sensitive to the influencers. The famous story around this, this was actually a Steven Sinofsky story and I was in the room. He had a bunch of influencer types parties and things like that. And he was talking, this is in the win seven timeframe and were talking, he was talking about i E nine
Paul Thurrott (01:03:35):
And
Richard Campbell (01:03:36):
He said, how many people here use bookmarks and the whole room put up his hand because we all use bookmarks. And he said, so we've got the Dr. Watson data. We know how much bookmarks are used across the spectrum for browsers a minute.
Paul Thurrott (01:03:52):
They still call it Dr. Watson data. Well, everything's referred to by its original data. We're
Richard Campbell (01:03:58):
Talking about it more
Paul Thurrott (01:03:59):
Than a meeting and outlook as a schedule plus this
Richard Campbell (01:04:01):
Is just Oh wow. 15 years ago. And he says, how many people do you think we see across the board? He goes one 10th of 1%.
Paul Thurrott (01:04:10):
It's literally you guys in this room.
Richard Campbell (01:04:11):
It's all of you people in the room and it's nobody else. And they thought, you know how much work we're going to do in the bookmark manager for the next version of ie. Nothing you
Paul Thurrott (01:04:19):
Yeah, exactly. And by the way, we're renaming this conference room to echo chamber. Yeah, no, that's right.
Richard Campbell (01:04:27):
As much as we can, we can talk about synopsis in a bunch of different ways. Guy wasn't wrong about that Very clearly there's a danger with influencer types because we do approach things differently.
Paul Thurrott (01:04:39):
Yeah, right. Yeah, fair enough. Yes. So this OneDrive issue is not something that would've come up in an insider program. They never test one try features with insiders. That's crazy. But it is something that impacted people. And they sent out emails and people saw this and they were like, what is this? What are you talking about? You told me to share stuff with this account and now you're going to go back and bill me after the fact because this is using storage somewhere that why would I even know about this? So anyway, that's just good news. And then like I said, you got to pay attention to this because this is important in our space to understand. Microsoft really does care what you think. Like I said, a little bit too much maybe, but we need to stand up collectively as a community when they do things that are bad. And I've been discussing a bunch of that stuff this year, so
Richard Campbell (01:05:33):
Well the point being if you press on them, you'll get results.
Paul Thurrott (01:05:37):
That's right. I can press on 'em. It gets nothing. They look at me like I've got, I don't understand. Why wouldn't you want to see ads all over your operating system? I don't know. I'm trying to get work done. I don't know. And then this actually, this could have gone under the, well, whatever the Microsoft story is something that people think of as an app in Windows 11 and 10. But actually it's also a thing on the web and it's got a huge redesign and honestly it's kind of cool looking. That is it's apps microsoft.com and it's really just a kind of a web front end. This is, I think they use the
Richard Campbell (01:06:11):
Default. I see. Question about this. Do you look?
Paul Thurrott (01:06:12):
Yeah.
Richard Campbell (01:06:13):
Why can't the Xbox look like this?
Paul Thurrott (01:06:15):
I know, I know.
Richard Campbell (01:06:16):
This is good, right? It's got a little gallery effect. It's got a detailed dive. It has. Obviously you're able to do this.
Paul Thurrott (01:06:24):
I know, I know. Well, they could do it on the web. The Xbox is a resource constrained in the ways that the web isn't apparently. Because I know there's something so weird just about the Xbox dashboard. That's been true since, well, since forever actually. Remember the Blades UI and Xbox 360, they switched from that over to a Windows eight style panorama experience. And ever since then, the dashboard has just been the biggest pig and they can never seem to fix it. And
Richard Campbell (01:06:57):
Here's my question. You can run Starfield
Paul Thurrott (01:07:01):
On
Richard Campbell (01:07:01):
An Starfield. I know. I'm pretty sure you can run JavaScript
Paul Thurrott (01:07:07):
Play simulator, right? You can't run a flat UI to choose apps. Apps. I know it's been a weird problem for a long time.
Richard Campbell (01:07:17):
It's so strange.
Paul Thurrott (01:07:19):
Yeah. Let's see. Okay, yes, so we got a couple of AI things. I almost said HP things. That'd be something first with the sauce. So there was an interesting report in the Wall Street Journal, which has apparently returned to journalism this year, which has been fun. Don't get
Richard Campbell (01:07:39):
Too excited.
Paul Thurrott (01:07:40):
Well, there's been a couple of good reports for them lately. They were the ones that broke the news on, what was the other thing? Oh, the Chromebook thing. And Google changed their policy on support basically doubled it. So anyway, they came up with a report based on multiple sources who say that GitHub copilot, which is that for individuals is $10 a month loses on average $20 per user per month. So raising the SS N L bank joke to new levels, how do we actually make money? And it's through volume, but I think this points to why maybe Microsoft 365 copilots going to be $30 a month.
Richard Campbell (01:08:21):
The math works perfectly, right? They charge for losing $20, charge 30.
Paul Thurrott (01:08:25):
Yeah. AI transactions are expensive. And I would think, I mean GitHub copilot among copilots so to speak, would be maybe the most efficient of the group.
Richard Campbell (01:08:38):
Well, it's one of the oldest.
Paul Thurrott (01:08:40):
Yeah,
Richard Campbell (01:08:41):
It was originally built on three. They may have
Paul Thurrott (01:08:43):
Upgraded.
Richard Campbell (01:08:44):
The only reason I think this number is like this because the user count is low.
Paul Thurrott (01:08:49):
Okay. Okay. Interesting.
Richard Campbell (01:08:51):
There may be a volume angle on this, but the other point I would make is you are collecting money on this already. You're not that far away from raising the rate, but I think GitHub's current billing strategy is all messed up. Stop working from,
Paul Thurrott (01:09:04):
Didn't
Richard Campbell (01:09:06):
Start moving into enterprise.
Paul Thurrott (01:09:08):
So let's see,
Richard Campbell (01:09:12):
Find you things being owned by Microsoft, they would be better at enterprise and they're struggling.
Paul Thurrott (01:09:18):
Yes.
Richard Campbell (01:09:19):
So
Paul Thurrott (01:09:19):
I got an email from GitHub today, which I assume was an attempt to counter this news, which was that based on new research, the impact of AI on GitHub with GitHub co-pilot and GitHub copilot chat, 85% of developers feel more confident in their code quality code reviews are more actionable, 50% faceted. Without copilot, 88% of developers feel less frustrated and more focused in their I D E. And you know what? You don't see in that little announcement a dollar sign because the thing that's not helping anybody, it
Leo Laporte (01:09:51):
Might be preparatory to raising it by 20 bucks. You see how much value you get. Maybe you should pay $50 a month.
Paul Thurrott (01:09:58):
Yeah.
Richard Campbell (01:09:59):
These are all silly numbers. When you think about what a developer is paid, you don't have to save very, it's worth
Leo Laporte (01:10:06):
It. That's a half hour of their time. It's a month.
Paul Thurrott (01:10:11):
It's crazy. You know what? This is very much like Azure pricing. When Microsoft first came out with Azure, well first of all it was in preview and you didn't have to pay for it, but remember what they said was, listen, we're going to send you a bill every month. We're not going to bill you, but we want you to see the bill and we want you to tell us what you think of, think about
Richard Campbell (01:10:28):
How much it costs
Leo Laporte (01:10:29):
Us. We're still
Paul Thurrott (01:10:32):
Well because we're still trying to figure out how do we charge and how does it make sense for you? How does it make sense for us? It's
Leo Laporte (01:10:39):
The equivalent of this memo, I think. Yeah,
Paul Thurrott (01:10:41):
I think so too. I think we have a very talk about Microsoft licensing. We have a very standard model here at Microsoft. We're charging people for things. It's the per user per month thing, and we throw out a number. I don't think they fully even understood how much it would cost them, frankly. And it's not their fault. I'm not saying it's their fault. This is brand new, and by the way, the prices are going to go down over time. Of course. That's the plan. Well, I
Richard Campbell (01:11:10):
Would argue that DIV is kind behind the ball on this. They've been selling annual, it used to be called M S D N subscriptions, but it's not anymore or studio and things like that for a thousand dollars a year for decades. And they largely haven't raised their prices and they're not utilization based in any way. The
Leo Laporte (01:11:35):
Journal says some users are costing $80 a month,
Paul Thurrott (01:11:38):
80. So what?
Leo Laporte (01:11:39):
Charge 'em a hundred dollars a month?
Paul Thurrott (01:11:41):
Well, that's like any service, right? It be worth it. You have the guys who take advantage of it, the guys who sit there and never use it, it's like a gym membership or whatever. What this is
Leo Laporte (01:11:47):
Is preparatory, and I am still suspect on the Wall Street Journal, but this is preparatory
Richard Campbell (01:11:52):
To a slew
Leo Laporte (01:11:52):
Of articles. You're going to start seeing about the energy costs of ai. And as the journal says, AI doesn't have the economies of scale of standard software because it can require new calculations for each query. Yes. So
Paul Thurrott (01:12:06):
Forget about AI for a second in the transition from on-prem service to data centers in the cloud computing,
Leo Laporte (01:12:13):
There's
Paul Thurrott (01:12:13):
Also, there was an unknown there for Microsoft and Amazon and whoever else in the beginning. It's like, well, we have to invest in new ways here. We have to build new data centers and multiple regions and there were data protection laws in Europe and elsewhere. We have to have certain things in certain places. And you go into it with this kind of historic understanding of how much things cost. And those rules don't apply
Leo Laporte (01:12:35):
Anymore. No, not with AI
Paul Thurrott (01:12:36):
To this new thing. And I think that AI has done this to the mixture again, I think
Leo Laporte (01:12:43):
By the way, cryptocurrency did the same thing and
Paul Thurrott (01:12:47):
Everybody
Leo Laporte (01:12:47):
Bitched
Paul Thurrott (01:12:48):
About it. That worked out great. So whatever,
Leo Laporte (01:12:50):
One of the things great of crypto was able to do is move from proof of work to proof of stake, which saved a lot of energy. Is there a similar savings somewhere in the way AI works that could, I mean, they're obviously going to be looking for that. I just saw an article that said, by 2027, AI will use as much energy as the entire Netherlands uses.
Paul Thurrott (01:13:08):
So we're literally going to talk about this very, this is kind
Leo Laporte (01:13:11):
Of the point of this
Paul Thurrott (01:13:12):
Section today. Okay, go ahead. I shut up. No, no. We might as well just, I mean just some of the things that are happening. So given how expensive AI is for the companies providing it, you run into this problem, well, how much do you charge? And so copilot on 365 and duet AI for Google Workspace are both $30 per user per month on top of whatever the subscription is. And so those things were announced still kind of early in the game, but I think they have a little slightly better handle on how much things cost now. But those companies either are or are working to have their own chip sets that can be more efficient in the cloud. They're working to have AI chip sets on devices that will provide some better together benefit when you can do a lot of ai, I'm sorry, on device processing of LLMs and whatnot.
(01:14:00):
And that maybe there'll be some savings there once we can push some of the workloads down to the client. So that's part of it. And then in the Microsoft space specifically, we understand the outcome of this. They're working on AI chip sets possibly with a M D, but that's just a rumor for their data center. And then of course their PC makers are all implementing AI chip sets and NPUs whatever they're called in various ways on D off D, different schemes, whatever. So the goal here is that maybe they like Xbox sales, they lose a little bit in the beginning, but hopefully over time you cost reduce and it becomes profitable and then maybe wildly profitable. I don't
Richard Campbell (01:14:46):
Know. One would argue that right now they're level setting. These are the first prices for large language model
Paul Thurrott (01:14:53):
Products. It's a moving target, right? More and more people come onboard all the time. They start starting to these things more and
Richard Campbell (01:15:00):
More at LLMs are still in a very much brute force phase.
Paul Thurrott (01:15:04):
Yeah,
Richard Campbell (01:15:04):
That's right. There hasn't been a lot of right sizing and sophistication yet. There's things to be done. But again, we're already debating cynicism versus wisdom in the chat as it is, you've got to anchor your pricing. This W S J story, this serves GitHub brilliantly.
Paul Thurrott (01:15:27):
It's
Richard Campbell (01:15:28):
Great story.
Paul Thurrott (01:15:28):
Otherwise how spastic would Microsoft look? GitHub copilot or Microsoft 365 or whatever. If they said, okay, here's the pricing. And then three months later they said, boy, people are using this a lot more than we thought. It's more we're going to raise the price. And then three more months go by and like, oh my God, actually here we go again. And I mean in a way, this helps them get ahead of this a little bit maybe
Richard Campbell (01:15:55):
Because probably exactly what's going on. I hope so. The same time is like this, we should be using utilization pricing anyway, so they should be structuring this as a threshold, but right now they're just gauging the market. Hey, charge you 50 bucks, we still use it. Great. We'll charge you a hundred bucks.
Paul Thurrott (01:16:15):
It's very speculative. I
Richard Campbell (01:16:16):
Mean
Paul Thurrott (01:16:16):
Even in
Richard Campbell (01:16:16):
My percept, you start pushing back, can I give you two tiers? There's room for playing.
Paul Thurrott (01:16:21):
Exactly. Yep. That's right. And the stuff I, one of the other strategies I forgot to mention was we haven't really talked about this a lot, but the information has a story about Microsoft investigating ways to create smaller versions of AI, if you will, for certain use cases. So they don't use as many resources. Do you need the power of the entire internet for certain types of things? Maybe not. If so, that would be particularly beneficial on things like binging where it's just ad supported and doesn't make any money or all the bing stuff, image creation, et cetera, et cetera. And you could limit bandwidth. A lot of the ais do this. You get tokens and you can speed up a transaction and use up a token or you can just let it go and see how long it takes and who caress. And if it's not important, you don't have to pay anything.
Richard Campbell (01:17:11):
But there's definitely this efficiency part comes later, right? Yes,
Paul Thurrott (01:17:15):
Problem. They've trying to
Richard Campbell (01:17:16):
Push this thing over the line for a while. And now
Paul Thurrott (01:17:19):
When Microsoft added the ability to bold text to Microsoft Word, it didn't raise energy costs at their data center. They didn't have the, it's like we'll bold that a little while. Just hold on, just give it a second. We'll bold later. I mean it's just a different world of
Richard Campbell (01:17:33):
Well, and arguably not a particularly efficient one, right?
Paul Thurrott (01:17:37):
Well, because it's brand new.
Richard Campbell (01:17:38):
Well, and also the LLMs, these very large machine learning models and we're never designed for efficiency. That's not what they are. So it's interesting to think there's a number of strategies that exist in that space to say we can optimize this. We can reduce the language that it doesn't need to be that big, especially for optimization areas like programming. We can increase sophistication of the pre-processor, the prompts generator again to target more efficiently. There's a bunch of things that can be,
Paul Thurrott (01:18:08):
Oh my God, across the board efficiently. I mean there are dozens and dozens that
Richard Campbell (01:18:12):
We we're in very much the brute force phase right now. And this is an excuse to adjust pricing. That's right. And to give the margins to work towards.
Paul Thurrott (01:18:23):
And that's why doing it this way with a little leak to the Wall Street Journal
Richard Campbell (01:18:27):
Perhaps absolutely serves well
Paul Thurrott (01:18:29):
Might be the best approach because otherwise they would just look crazy. They'll be like, we don't know what's going on. And that's not what you want to look like when you're supplying the AI that people are going to drive their businesses side.
Richard Campbell (01:18:40):
Let me throw you a larger philosophical conversation here. We used to have the old used, you felt like you were buying a software you never did because you signed a EULA that said you are buying a license to use the software. And it was once a year or every other year, 18 months, whatever it may be. And then we moved over this monthly pricing model and it makes people more anxious really about the billing. Now you're becoming cell phone companies where I don't really find out what my bill is until the end of the month and you don't wonder what the hell happened as opposed to that periodic once a year, once every other year. Oh, it's going to be that much paid
Paul Thurrott (01:19:13):
Something predictable.
Richard Campbell (01:19:14):
Yeah, exactly. Well, and you paint a dance as opposed to paying after the fact where it's like,
Paul Thurrott (01:19:20):
I paid for this year, I'm good until next year.
Richard Campbell (01:19:22):
Exactly. And so maybe what we're really starting to feel here is the lashback against this model entirely. The company likes this model because it evens out their cash flow.
Paul Thurrott (01:19:32):
Well, this was the promise of cloud computing to begin with. I pay for the bandwidth I use and what I'm not using it. I don't pay anything. It's
Richard Campbell (01:19:39):
Beautiful.
Paul Thurrott (01:19:39):
So there's the other side of it too.
Richard Campbell (01:19:41):
And so now you get back to this $30 a month or $10 a month is a flat rate and you use it a lot and you're getting a deal and you don't use it at all and you're just paying them for nothing. So if you not an income consumption based utilization,
Paul Thurrott (01:19:55):
It's a little bit like you have a cell phone plan and you have a gigabyte of data
Richard Campbell (01:20:00):
You
Paul Thurrott (01:20:00):
Can use in a month. And are there people on earth who it's the 21st of the month, they've hit that limit and they're like, I guess I'm done for the month. Maybe there are, I mean maybe
Richard Campbell (01:20:12):
Right? Or you learn to taper off, whatever that may be. I mean, especially when we're talking about developers in theory, this is all stuff that's making money anyway. I'd like to see that my people are using more co-pilot and getting more results for it. That means they're increasingly productive. And so why wouldn't I pay more for that? Because my results did reflected. I mean all of these forces are working at once. I think that the developer tooling side in the Microsoft space has not moved fully to the SaaS model as it is. Most of the folks that I talked to are still buying annual or less than annual stuff for the developers. They're not really in a monthly cycle. Some parts, some parts aren't and much less they're actually consumption based that's not there either.
Paul Thurrott (01:21:02):
And not helping matters. This AI stuff has just exploded this year, right? I mean the types of capability, we'll talk a little bit about Adobe stuff that's going on, and they've released so many new features across their entire product line. These were the types of things they would've released over years before each one of these little things would've been the major feature this year in Lightroom or Photoshop or whatever. And this year it's like here's 150 things in every single one of our products, and it's really hard to keep up. It's kind of astonishing.
Richard Campbell (01:21:34):
And one would argue these large language model interfaces make it easier for us to surface all of that stuff too. That should be beneficial as well.
Paul Thurrott (01:21:43):
Yeah.
Richard Campbell (01:21:45):
Hey, I want to dig into your article about is AI saving the industry or effectively destroying it? The parallel I see is we had PCs before the internet, but would you use a PC without the internet today?
Paul Thurrott (01:22:02):
But the parallel also is we now have smartphones and so would you use a PC today? What I mean by that is that in the seven stages of grief or whatever that occurred after Microsoft made their Bing AI announcements, I eventually came to this notion that if everything is ai, then nothing is ai.
Richard Campbell (01:22:25):
And
Paul Thurrott (01:22:25):
What I meant by that was it's just level sets everything. In other words, in the case of Google versus Bing, Google has 97% usage share whatever it is, and binging has nothing. And so now they both have ai, it's a couple of years later, then that means Google will have 97% and they will have nothing. Because if you both have it, you're still the thing that you are.
Richard Campbell (01:22:47):
And
Paul Thurrott (01:22:47):
So people use you, right?
Richard Campbell (01:22:48):
That's not actually what's happening. Microsoft appears to have a lead at the moment, which is an opportunity to get
Paul Thurrott (01:22:54):
No, I'm talking. It's just over time. I don't mean, so my guess has been that when dust settles, Google will retain their dominance in the cloud and Microsoft,
Richard Campbell (01:23:05):
I mean therein lies the question. And I think Microsoft's play is if we're ahead, we have a chance to grab market share that we'll probably never get a chance to again, because we haven't to over the past a year. So
Paul Thurrott (01:23:14):
Maybe
Richard Campbell (01:23:14):
Now is the time.
Paul Thurrott (01:23:15):
So if we push this forward to the PC space, what's happened over the past 20 years? Is that 20 years? Yeah, 15 years, whatever it's been is that the iPhone happened and the smartphone revolution happened. And if you were to go back in time to literally 20 years ago, everything we did online and digitally, whatever would occur in a pc, everything. But now we have all these other devices and so people split their time or in many cases they just use a phone, right? So
Richard Campbell (01:23:40):
Well, one would argue the smartphone is the most personal of computers. Yeah,
Paul Thurrott (01:23:43):
Absolutely. You take it in your pocket with you. Absolutely.
Richard Campbell (01:23:46):
It's the one that gives you cancer. It's excellent.
Paul Thurrott (01:23:48):
I know. But seriously, so productive.
Richard Campbell (01:23:50):
So
Paul Thurrott (01:23:51):
In the time that you have left, you'll be so efficient. But the thing about the pc, and I actually like this because honestly I'm really about productivity and efficiency and all that kind of stuff. It has forced the PC market to focus on the remaining strengths of that thing, which are all around productivity. There's times where you need a big screen, a real keyboard, and a mouse, and you're working with something complex like a Photoshop or Excel or whatever, or you're, you need
Richard Campbell (01:24:19):
More than one thing at once.
Paul Thurrott (01:24:20):
Yeah. I'm not going to write on a little thing. I don't care how young I am. I'm not writing a book that way. I'm sorry. So I like that because Microsoft went off the deep end with Windows eight. They tried to be like, look, we're like mobile device too. And then they kind of came back to the desktop. Within S 10, they've been focusing on the things that this thing is good for. So the sort of rhetorical question I guess I'm posing here is given that the mobile was ahead of the game with NPUs to begin with, we already see incredible AI advances that improve those things we were already doing on our phones right across digital photography is a good example. Like Google was showing off at their event, the ability to tap and delete things in the background, that kind of thing.
(01:25:05):
Google's talking about having the first local L L M on a device of any kind personal technology device with the Pixel eight pro, which is kind of exciting. And they have all these ideas about improving how responses work in text messages and yada yada yada. Okay, fun. But I guess what I'm saying is most people have a phone, some people have a tablet, some people have a pc. They use those devices for very specific things. All of them will have ai, all of them will have access to AI services in the cloud and AI capabilities on the device. Microsoft is racing to add these things across their stack. And I guess what I'm sort of saying is I think at the end of the day, so to speak, as they would say in the uk, in other words, when the dust settles that the relative positioning of each of these platforms remains the same. We'll still use PCs for those complex tasks
Richard Campbell (01:26:01):
Because we want the big screen in the interface
Paul Thurrott (01:26:03):
And now we'll do it better with ai. But you'll be doing the fun stuff better with AI on your
Richard Campbell (01:26:08):
Phone. Really, the question will be, can these large machine language models perform better on different devices? One would argue, okay, I can run this on my phone, but my battery life is now 15 minutes.
Paul Thurrott (01:26:23):
I hear you. I dunno the answer. Listen, cell phones, before the iPhone used to last for days, one of the greatest achievements of Apple with the iPhone was not the graphical user interface or any of the capabilities was getting people to accept really crappy battery life.
Richard Campbell (01:26:39):
Yeah, that's
Paul Thurrott (01:26:39):
Charge all the time. Watch it last a day. They have a phone. Well, the phone lasts two days now, but people kind of accept this things. They love this thing so much. The stuff that they love about it is so much better than the things they can't stand about it. The PC unfortunately, remember when used to personalize computers with little, you could make your PC look like a Mac using window blinds or whatever. And it was a big thing for a while and it's not a big thing now because we do that stuff on our phones. When we turn to our pc, we're working and honestly, I mean I'm into it, but it's not fun for most people and they're not screwing around with stuff. They don't really care. They just get in,
Richard Campbell (01:27:23):
Get the job done. Your question, is our other devices going to be more effective with these new interfaces Once the voice version is nailed, is it just going to be an earpiece?
Paul Thurrott (01:27:32):
Let me reword that a little bit. Will the AI advances be so compelling or so powerful that it might cause people to use the PC more than they are right now and thus use the other mobile devices maybe less?
Richard Campbell (01:27:47):
It's entirely possible because it's
Paul Thurrott (01:27:49):
Possible. But that's like saying is Bigfoot possible? It's possible?
Richard Campbell (01:27:51):
No, no, no. Come on. At least we have a few big, it's not like I have a big foot in this room and I actually have several PCs.
Paul Thurrott (01:27:58):
If anyone does though it
Richard Campbell (01:28:00):
Could be you. I am literally
Paul Thurrott (01:28:01):
You're in the right place. Yeah,
Richard Campbell (01:28:03):
It's a
Paul Thurrott (01:28:03):
Little squashy up there. That's all I'm
Leo Laporte (01:28:05):
Saying. It's an interesting question whether mobile or desktop is the natural place for this to happen or
Paul Thurrott (01:28:11):
If the shift is enough on the PC side that it could actually drive a shift in usage back to the way that it kind of used to be. Well, it
Leo Laporte (01:28:19):
Depends what you're doing. I mean, for instance, now chat, G P T, which is running on my iPhone, I can talk to it and some people are already getting this. I'm keep waiting for it. But you can do that on your phone. No, on my phone. I'm talking about it on my phone. But that would be something that would lend itself. Look, Cortana died on the desktop. I don't think we want to talk to our desktops. I know
Paul Thurrott (01:28:40):
That's right here. A couple of things to think about. First of all, mobile devices are getting more sophisticated, right? With the Chromebook and the iPads. Now this thing could be a fun little consumption device, but you also as a keyboard, you could do stuff and it could become sort of a light productivity device, which might be enough for most people. So that's a little bit of a threat right there. You
Leo Laporte (01:28:58):
Might make the argument that AI is going to save iPads, frankly. Okay.
Paul Thurrott (01:29:03):
I mean, yes. I mean I'm not
Richard Campbell (01:29:04):
Argue that that happens. The ability to compute a large language model on the device is important. Then that big old Nvidia card in your PC is the best solution.
Paul Thurrott (01:29:14):
But I'm just trying to think of what would people do with this stuff. So Google has this magic eraser feature, which is really powerful right now and it's getting even more powerful. My problem with it is I'm 50 something years old. I look at my phone, it's really small. I'm trying to tap on the little guy and it's hard to do, but most people can kind of handle that. And the thing is,
Leo Laporte (01:29:34):
This is not for you. This is for young people. Well, no, no, I understand. But yeah, I would want to add people frankly to my picture. But
Paul Thurrott (01:29:43):
No, the issue is a solution I might have is not a solution. I could use Photoshop and do the same thing. Photoshop has wonderful AI magic things going on, but that's not a solution for people. And the thing is that's kind of the point of AI isn't it gives you access as a normal person
Leo Laporte (01:30:01):
To
Paul Thurrott (01:30:01):
These kind of expert features. And if they figure it out, if you watch that Google demo, very interesting. They tap the car and it correctly fills all the little holes. It's not smudging, it's not bad hair in a portrait mode. It's like literally working. That eliminates the need for powerful desktop tools for most people. It actually makes those PC use cases in some ways less necessary
Richard Campbell (01:30:27):
For the average case. Yeah,
Paul Thurrott (01:30:29):
Exactly.
Richard Campbell (01:30:30):
Experts are experts and really machine learning do is raise the average ability.
Paul Thurrott (01:30:37):
And I guess what I'm saying is, so Lenovo did their recent earnings announcement, I think back in August or September. They were like, yep, AI is going to be drive the wave. HP had an event in New York last week or the week before that I actually went to and they were talking about this coming wave of NPUs and PCs and they're going to become personal companions and this is going to be the biggest upgrade spike since the rise of the internet in the 1990s. And will it, I mean listen, I guess I sort of have a stake in it. So maybe I'll say I hope it does, but really I just care about the PC as a platform and I hope it does. On that note, I don't know,
Leo Laporte (01:31:17):
Can dumb Leo ask a question? I thinks
Paul Thurrott (01:31:20):
It's
Leo Laporte (01:31:20):
Enough time between my last dumb question.
Richard Campbell (01:31:22):
No, we are just going to have to go with the Leo we got, is this going
Leo Laporte (01:31:24):
To be an
Paul Thurrott (01:31:25):
Authenticator Again, I don't really,
Leo Laporte (01:31:28):
You talk about going to be equation a model on the device and I'm confused. So for instance, I can run stable diffusion locally. I can even run it on my phone, download what they call a model and it's 1.6 gigabytes and run it on my phone and create. You have
Paul Thurrott (01:31:47):
A G P U. It does stuff better if you have an M P U, it does stuff even better. So that's what
Leo Laporte (01:31:51):
You're talking about running a model locally
Paul Thurrott (01:31:53):
Or is
Leo Laporte (01:31:53):
There more? Are you talking creating a model at
Paul Thurrott (01:31:56):
Google's pixel event, right, which was what last they talked about the Google Pixel eight pro will be the first phone that will have a local L L M.
Leo Laporte (01:32:05):
This is why I'm confused. It'll
Paul Thurrott (01:32:06):
Be used
Leo Laporte (01:32:06):
For How is that different from what I just did with stable diffusion on my iPhone a year ago or not a year ago?
Paul Thurrott (01:32:11):
You had to add it yourself. Come on Leo. It's built in.
Leo Laporte (01:32:16):
Actually the big thing I guess is and from consumer's point of view is on device or do I have to call the cloud? Is that right? And
Paul Thurrott (01:32:23):
Therefore
Richard Campbell (01:32:24):
Get your
Leo Laporte (01:32:24):
Right.
Paul Thurrott (01:32:25):
Yeah. And I think honestly the real story here eventually is going to be better together, which means it will do what it can on the device, which always has to be a subset. And they said this specifically LLMs are a tough thing to talk about at a consumer event, but they said, look, obviously we're simplifying this thing. That's the point. But you do as much as you can on the device. So what are the types of things you might want to do on the device without having to have the latency of the cloud? Well, auto fix when you're typing right? Auto fixx after the fact where it actually, you complete the sentence and it goes boop and it just fixes the whole thing. More intelligent replies. We already have Gmail does this and text messages do this, but it's dumb, right? It's basically just a table of responses matched to some keywords they might see in something you typed. So you can say thank you for that and you just have to button and it does it, but this will be more intelligent. It'll actually be context to aware, that kind of thing. The photography features are an obvious one as well. So
Leo Laporte (01:33:24):
You're never going to
Paul Thurrott (01:33:25):
Have something on your phone or your PC that's completely isolated and offline and just as good as chat G P T. But that's not necessarily the point. And for Microsoft and Google and these other companies, anything you can do locally that takes the stress off the data center in the cloud, it's better together for them too, right? I mean this is smart for them
Richard Campbell (01:33:46):
Possibly. I mean in the end, they're in the business of selling cloud. They're not strongly incented to give them copilot running slowly on our local machines.
Paul Thurrott (01:33:54):
No, but they're incented to have it not be a cost center, like something that costs 'em every single time. Well, it
Leo Laporte (01:33:58):
Costs more than they
Richard Campbell (01:33:59):
Charge.
Leo Laporte (01:34:00):
I mean if they could charge and make money on it then, but maybe I have an archaic way of thinking of this. So again, I need clarification. Okay.
Paul Thurrott (01:34:12):
But you know what bugs me about this scenario?
Leo Laporte (01:34:13):
I go have lunch, I don't
Paul Thurrott (01:34:14):
Have more about this than I do. And now you're just messing with this.
Leo Laporte (01:34:18):
I'm not messing with you. I have legit questions. He
Paul Thurrott (01:34:20):
Walks into a cafe and he is like, so tell me, do you have different kinds of cheeses?
Leo Laporte (01:34:23):
Yeah, it's France. Tell me all the ice you flavors come here for 40 years. Yeah, we have cheese. They're 28 flavors. What aren't they one for everything. And then you have, and I'll order vanilla. Thank you very much. So there's something that goes on called training where it's big and this has to happen usually on a cloud machine you need a lot of TPUs, you need a lot of data space storage. That's the training and that builds, that's a huge data. I'm doing all of the internet and I'm building a model. And then one of the things Google talked about was how we're getting models smaller and smaller, small enough to put on your phone,
Paul Thurrott (01:35:00):
But there's sub models,
Leo Laporte (01:35:01):
Right? But they're not training on the phone. They're training in the cloud. They always
Paul Thurrott (01:35:03):
Will. I thought you were going to ask me where they were training. My belief is they're trained before they get to the phone and then there
Leo Laporte (01:35:08):
They shrink the model
Paul Thurrott (01:35:09):
Updates that occur over time. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:35:11):
And that's why for instance, when you talk to chat G B T, in the old days it would say, I don't know anything after 2021. I'm sorry, I'm ignorant you
Paul Thurrott (01:35:20):
Memento.
Leo Laporte (01:35:21):
I dunno, nothing. I think Google may be even trying to muddy the waters a little bit. So now we have these npu, that's what Microsoft calls 'em Google to cause 'em tensor. We have these AI capable chips which are similar but not exactly the same as GPUs. But that's the chips you use to do training, right? Or do you need them for processing the model? You do it for the model as well.
Richard Campbell (01:35:47):
It's just less processing to operate the model. But what we're finding with large language models specifically is that the operating resource is high too. It's not as high as training the model, but it is high.
Leo Laporte (01:36:00):
But then thats on the phone, that's on the user. A
Paul Thurrott (01:36:02):
Lot of radiation.
Leo Laporte (01:36:03):
But that ends up being on the
Richard Campbell (01:36:04):
User. The phone could hold them. Yeah, nobody's meant to get a large language model running on a phone as far as I know. Certainly not any of the big ones. They're big.
Leo Laporte (01:36:13):
How big?
Richard Campbell (01:36:14):
The terabytes
Paul Thurrott (01:36:16):
Wicked big.
Leo Laporte (01:36:19):
But see, it's interesting. Apple has put itself, I think unwittingly maybe they were smart in a good position because these M one chips and M two and these new chips have,
Paul Thurrott (01:36:30):
They've
Leo Laporte (01:36:30):
Been
Paul Thurrott (01:36:30):
Talking NPUs for
Leo Laporte (01:36:31):
Years. And
Paul Thurrott (01:36:32):
If you could find it, I'm sure someone knows exactly what it was, right? So someday five years ago or something, Google talked about some new Aeries chip set for some iPhone and said, yeah, this part of the die is like an N P U. It's like a neural processing thing. It's for ai. And everyone's like, and it was like, okay, they're going to show us what it's for and then they just moved on and never said anything about it again. We were all like, okay, but what's the point?
Leo Laporte (01:36:53):
Well, that's part of my confusion is like which end of AI are you doing?
Paul Thurrott (01:36:57):
What
Leo Laporte (01:36:57):
Exactly are you doing
Paul Thurrott (01:36:59):
In Apple's case? I don't know.
Leo Laporte (01:37:01):
Well, and Apple always wanted do everything on device. That's like their big word on device of course,
Paul Thurrott (01:37:06):
Because this market privacy
Leo Laporte (01:37:08):
And
Paul Thurrott (01:37:09):
What happens in your iPhone, but really
Richard Campbell (01:37:11):
Morely because they missed the cloud opportunity. They didn't get there.
Leo Laporte (01:37:16):
They have on-device hardware, that's pretty darn good.
Paul Thurrott (01:37:18):
And they have a developer, a p I called AI kit, which allows third parties to attack it. And I'm sure they were hoping with HoloLens and Microsoft that some awesome AI thing would come out and never did really, I don't think. I don't know. But they also do their own things and all that stuff that Google just showed off. You can guarantee Apple's going to be doing the same thing within the next couple of years and they're in a good place because their chip sets are probably ideally suited to handle those things, those tasks, right?
Leo Laporte (01:37:47):
Apple and Google are in this race for computational photography,
Paul Thurrott (01:37:52):
Which is what most
Leo Laporte (01:37:53):
Talking
Paul Thurrott (01:37:53):
About. They both very explicitly use that term, which I find to be fascinating. And they both do a great job, honestly. So every event almost one will leapfrog the other in some way and then next year comes and the opposite of that. We'll see. But this ties into my central point, which would tie it back to this original story, which was this stuff's been happening on the phone longer than it's been happening on the pc. I mean, I don't know. I think this is a HoloLens or a mixed reality when you have a headset on and you can't bring that to a museum and walk around a dinosaur skeleton and see the dinosaur, but you can with an iPad or a phone and yeah, it's not as sophisticated, but you have it with you all the time. And I think that's still always going to be,
Richard Campbell (01:38:37):
This is where the point was originally, why PC versus smartphone? We like the PC because of the bigger screen. We like the smartphone because it comes with us,
Paul Thurrott (01:38:46):
But
Leo Laporte (01:38:46):
Also the PC can do more. So you can do, if you're a data analyst and we're seeing more and more, that is a big part of business these days that you might do on a PC using larger models.
Paul Thurrott (01:38:58):
But that's a great example because it's so specific, it's so complex and it requires expertise,
Leo Laporte (01:39:03):
But you're not going to do it on a phone.
Paul Thurrott (01:39:04):
It's not the type of thing. We'll see what the Pixel nine looks like, Leo,
Leo Laporte (01:39:07):
What the PC is. It's the truck, isn't it? I mean that's what the PC is. There is,
Paul Thurrott (01:39:11):
Yes.
Richard Campbell (01:39:12):
And I do think you guys are, there's orders of magnitude scale here. I mean, you're not going to even necessarily do that model on the pc. You're going to do it in the cloud
Paul Thurrott (01:39:20):
Where your data Yeah, that's a good point too. Yep. Yeah, and look, honestly, from Microsoft's perspective, I appreciate the push they're making here for their PC banker partners mostly to put AI into Windows. I will point out that not so long ago there was a big special event about AI and did you walk away with any awesome new AI features coming on the pc? No. And that's a huge problem because I thought that was going to be the focus of that event and I'm like,
Richard Campbell (01:39:47):
I think essentially a naming event. We're now making Microsoft copilot,
Paul Thurrott (01:39:51):
Which is, I'm so glad I traveled for that. But the point is it's okay that they have an event for that, but I feel like we're getting to the point now where you need to show something where people, what's the killer app for AI and the pc? What is, I can tell you it's not background blur in a Zoom call. So what is it? What would make someone spend 1500 bucks or whatever on a new computer to get this thing? How do we go back to Windows 95 where we're standing in line outside of a store at 12 o'clock in the morning, like it's a Call of Duty launch
Leo Laporte (01:40:24):
And
Paul Thurrott (01:40:25):
Waiting to buy software that will install in floppies under what would make us do this?
Richard Campbell (01:40:30):
I think one would argue we haven't seen a killer app in ledge language model since Cha b t gave us existential angst over Christmas.
Paul Thurrott (01:40:38):
Well,
Leo Laporte (01:40:38):
But you just talked about Adobe stuff. That might be a killer F for
Paul Thurrott (01:40:42):
Some. Yeah,
Leo Laporte (01:40:43):
I think that's for creatives. What has happened here. What you're telling me is AI is such a broad umbrella. There are many, many different uses. The way an AI proves, well, it just would be used differently. If you're using something that Discord wants to know, can it be used on a HoloLens or a Vision Pro? Of course, but that's processing external input and making sense of it, almost
Paul Thurrott (01:41:06):
The point isn't it? If it's going to be everywhere, why would you use that thing?
Leo Laporte (01:41:11):
You're either using it or not. You would do heavy lifting, you would do different stuff. Yes, if it can write a pivot table for me, I'm happy.
Paul Thurrott (01:41:22):
So my point is the fact that you can't have something auto tow write a pivot table for you doesn't matter because if you do need a pivot table, you're still using a pc, right? You're not doing that on your iPhone. So the difference is you might need an expert, you might need a class, you might need to watch a YouTube video, whatever it might be. I mean the goal here is that AI makes it easier and it lets you do it, and there's no doubt that's cool, but it doesn't,
Leo Laporte (01:41:47):
It's too highly, you're saying
Paul Thurrott (01:41:50):
No, no, it just doesn't change the equation. You're still using the PC for certain things. They're the same things. If there was some killer app where for some reason I can't even imagine what it could be, but it will only make sense on the PC or only work on the PC and it could drive more PC usage and drive upgrades, then celebration,
Leo Laporte (01:42:08):
Then what is it? What
Paul Thurrott (01:42:10):
Is that thing? No one
Leo Laporte (01:42:11):
Ever
Paul Thurrott (01:42:11):
Come with it. Argue.
Richard Campbell (01:42:12):
I would argue that large language models are better served on the PC because they do need to be fact-check because they are creative devices that you need to interact with and the phone just doesn't enough real estate to do that. If you want to ask a large language model for information it doesn't have, and it spits out a confident answers that's incorrect and you send it onward a phone is
Leo Laporte (01:42:34):
What you're saying, Paul is
Richard Campbell (01:42:35):
Chance to get it right.
Leo Laporte (01:42:36):
The new and exciting uses of AI are all on mobile, smaller devices.
Paul Thurrott (01:42:40):
No, no, no. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to suggest that. What I'm saying is that as a society or as a people, as a race or whatever, we use certain devices for certain things. Phones are used way more than computers. They just are. Some people have tablets too, and they use 'em for whatever they use 'em for. Some people use tablets as species. We don't have to get into the weeds here, but most people, the personal computer is a phone. It's not a pc. And the PC is like this work thing. And so what I'm saying is AI happens, it's an explosion. It occurs everywhere. There's so much. Every product and service we use is enhanced with AI across every device we use. And now it's two or three years later, and here we are. We're pure brains and we have, we're floating above the ground, whatever it is. And I'm saying when the dust settles, we'll still be using phones most of the time and we'll still be using PCs the exact amount of time we're using 'em today or less
Leo Laporte (01:43:31):
For the same kinds of things. There are these other
Paul Thurrott (01:43:32):
Factors.
Richard Campbell (01:43:33):
Now, I would argue with large language honors will be more heavily used than the PC because the things that large language models are good at are better served them.
Leo Laporte (01:43:41):
You're going to writing,
Richard Campbell (01:43:43):
Coding,
Leo Laporte (01:43:44):
All of those things are better served. You can do photo editing on your phone, but Paul's not going to do it. He's going to use Photoshop,
Paul Thurrott (01:43:49):
He's going
Leo Laporte (01:43:49):
To do it.
Paul Thurrott (01:43:51):
But the big here is these devices are getting more sophisticated. We're not that far. You can right now with the new iPhones, plug them into an external display. You can plug them into a doc and you could plug them into a external storage and record videos to it in four K. If all you really need is a bigger screen and a keyboard and a mouse, then I'm telling you this phone is probably borrowed enough to handle that.
Richard Campbell (01:44:16):
I don't know that it is. Just because you have an M P U on board doesn't mean it's an equal M P U to
Paul Thurrott (01:44:22):
The junk. No, but again, I think we we're almost splitting hairs in a way because nothing we're saying is universal. I don't mean all people, I mean,
Richard Campbell (01:44:30):
I do think we're missing order of magnitude differences. You're talking about a couple of thousand compute units in an M one versus 70,000 in a 40 90. They're vast different.
Paul Thurrott (01:44:46):
Okay. I mean, we'll see,
Richard Campbell (01:44:49):
The model is similar and without a doubt we're going to shrink the models, but it's like stable diffusion is a hugely
Paul Thurrott (01:44:55):
3000
Richard Campbell (01:44:56):
Times smaller than an L l M model.
Paul Thurrott (01:44:58):
Alright. But again, just to bring it down to stupid level, for me, the question remains, will that be enough to shift the pattern of usage between these device types?
Richard Campbell (01:45:09):
No, but wasn't the question, the real question was what's going to benefit from this work more? And the kinds of work you do on a PC like writing and code work
Paul Thurrott (01:45:21):
Will benefit more
Richard Campbell (01:45:23):
Elements and there's relatively few things that work as well on a phone.
Paul Thurrott (01:45:29):
Yeah. Well, I don't know. Again, like I said, I did go back to that Photoshop magic eraser example. Most of the people who are just people, not experts, they're not creative professionals, whatever, but they keep an old copy of Adobe Photoshop elements around or whatever. Every once in a while or all the time they want to bring in their little collection of photos from their phone and edit things and do whatever. It's, and as those tools get better on the phone and as those people die, frankly, there'll be fewer reasons for average people to use a computer for those tasks. And also the iPad in particular, but Chromebook too. I mean, as these things get more sophisticated, there are these alternate platforms that are
Richard Campbell (01:46:14):
Similar to, you're all playing a volume game. They also don't edit photos all day long. No,
Paul Thurrott (01:46:19):
No, I know. I'm sorry. I'm just trying to keep it super simple as an example of the broader, that's all. I don't mean people actually, I think most people don't edit photos at all, frankly. So yes, I'm just using it as an obvious example.
Richard Campbell (01:46:32):
But what's interesting to me with the talking to folks that are working heavily in LLMs is that many of the things that it's great at are creative things that need those logging devices.
Paul Thurrott (01:46:43):
You know what people do? Do? They categorize photos.
Leo Laporte (01:46:47):
And what's happened is we've moved
(01:46:48):
From using Google photos and server-based categorization to local categorization, whether it's on a PC or even on a phone. But remember I told you about Myo one of our sponsors. I just now let it tag everything,
Paul Thurrott (01:47:02):
Right? And how does that work?
Leo Laporte (01:47:04):
Great. And it's all local. It's not in the cloud. So that's a big shift. And in fact, as big of
Paul Thurrott (01:47:11):
A shift as it was from, you had some device, which was probably a digital camera back in the day, you plugged it into a wire, put it on your pc,
Leo Laporte (01:47:19):
Then you use P organizational and started typing and tags. Picasa
Paul Thurrott (01:47:22):
A great example.
Richard Campbell (01:47:23):
Jim, what's interesting about that tagging scenario, Leo is like Facebook did this ages ago and we all got creeped out by it, right?
Leo Laporte (01:47:30):
That's different because it was on Facebook. Yeah.
Richard Campbell (01:47:34):
The whole thing is it's acceptable. We want automated tagging.
Leo Laporte (01:47:37):
I'll go one more step
Richard Campbell (01:47:38):
In control of it. It's
Leo Laporte (01:47:40):
Local. I'll go one more step, and I think this Myo is a good example for this. My myo works on both my desktop and my phone. A lot of the work I do on the desktop, for instance, I think probably most of the tagging's happening on the desktop, but then propagates to my phone, there's a symbiotic relationship and it doesn't even matter where the AI happen.
Paul Thurrott (01:47:59):
Is there a sync that occurs? So
Leo Laporte (01:48:01):
You've done a lot of I don't even think about it. Well,
Paul Thurrott (01:48:03):
No. I mean between the devices. In other words, if you do most of that work on the
Leo Laporte (01:48:06):
PC and then you're
Paul Thurrott (01:48:08):
On your phone, does it benefit from all the work that occurred? Yes. There you go. So now your phone, it's
Leo Laporte (01:48:12):
A symbiosis.
Richard Campbell (01:48:14):
I would argue that what Myos pulled off is making you comfortable with that capability. The thing that Facebook,
Leo Laporte (01:48:19):
Because it's local, and by the way, it's a lot better than Facebook because it does. I mean, like I said, swimming pools. I mean, I didn't ever think of categorizing swimming pools. Google Photos did that, which was cool.
Paul Thurrott (01:48:32):
Sure.
Leo Laporte (01:48:34):
And the fact that it is local and is on my desktop and my phone means I don't care where the workload is
Richard Campbell (01:48:43):
Because you trust them.
Leo Laporte (01:48:45):
But also in terms of horsepower, I don't care because if I have it on a desktop at the desk, well, it's interesting, I was uploading some photos to Facebook actually, and some of them were not on my phone. This
Paul Thurrott (01:48:58):
Leo Laporta
Leo Laporte (01:49:00):
Facebook user for some a little uncomfortable, it's a new Leo.
Paul Thurrott (01:49:05):
I don't know what's happening. Where is
Leo Laporte (01:49:06):
The Leo? It was because of this horrific thing in Israel and the amount of misinformation, an active disinformation that was propagating on x, I really wanted to keep an eye on, well, where are people talking? And Facebook is really deprecated news. They don't want you to be sharing news anymore, but you might be sharing news about your family in Israel. And so for that reason, I thought, you know what? As much as I am kind of creeped out by meta, I mean it's not like I have anything that's private anymore anyway, and I need to kind of keep an eye and watch what's happening there. I think there is something happening there. It's also because old and us olds really like Facebook. I got to tell you.
Paul Thurrott (01:49:50):
That's for sure.
Leo Laporte (01:49:52):
It's
Richard Campbell (01:49:52):
Where your social graph is.
Leo Laporte (01:49:55):
As
Paul Thurrott (01:49:55):
My kids often point out, they only get notifications from Facebook because I put them in photos and they're like, well, dad's at it again.
Leo Laporte (01:50:01):
Exactly. Hey, this whole conversation about AI is so great and I did want to point our club members to our new show, which we do in the club, Jason and Jeff Jarvis, AI inside the show tomorrow, 1:00 PM Pacific, 4:00 PM Eastern will be with Dan Patterson and disinformation is actually going to be the topic. He's an expert on that. So that will be just a little plug. If you're not a member of Club Twit, ad free versions of all of our shows available at twit tv slash club twit, $7 a month gets you inside the Discord, gets you all these special shows. Paul does a Hands-on Windows show, which is
Paul Thurrott (01:50:37):
Really
Leo Laporte (01:50:37):
Good. Have you finally finished Clip Champ?
Paul Thurrott (01:50:40):
I did. Yeah. It was only three
Leo Laporte (01:50:43):
Episodes, but you know what, that's three great episodes if you want to know about
Paul Thurrott (01:50:47):
Chat. It was like when the Bradys
Leo Laporte (01:50:48):
Went to Hawaii. Sometimes you go and you do a thing, tweet tv slash club tweet. It helps us out a lot. Keeps us on the air and we thank you in advance. I just want a little plug for that still more to talk about with ai. Think Dropbox. Yes. I don't mean or
Paul Thurrott (01:51:05):
You want to
Leo Laporte (01:51:05):
Talk about Firefly. We did mention this. Honestly, both of these. I would
Paul Thurrott (01:51:08):
Just say very quickly. So for creative professionals, I'm sure you're already up on what's going on with Firefly and Photoshop and how they're indemnifying and using their trusted data and blah, blah, blah. So they're touting that. They're like the fastest growing AI image generation model with over 3 billion images generated 1 million in the last month alone. And they have an annual event called Adobe Max at which they announced approximately 1500 new AI features across
Richard Campbell (01:51:37):
The whole
Paul Thurrott (01:51:37):
Stack. And by the way, there is more coming from Adobe this month. It's not just the stuff that happened yesterday. Today, it's not even worth discussing. In a way, I guess the way to say it is when OpenAI moved to Dali three and then binging image generator used that model for theirs and the quality level went up, they are doing the same. So they've just done that, but they also have two new additional model one just for Vector Graphics, right? The first generative AI model for Vector Graphics, an illustrator of course, and then something called a Firefly design model, which I have to say this one gives me a little pause, but it's for creating an Adobe Express, which is a free product by the way. The ability to create templates for social media posts, marketing assets and that kind of stuff using generative ai. And it's like, here we go. We're going to get the GA I based advertising is coming down the pike
Richard Campbell (01:52:33):
And I appreciate that they're doing targeted models. It's not just art,
Paul Thurrott (01:52:38):
Right?
Richard Campbell (01:52:38):
Graphics and social media making the model smaller and more precise.
Paul Thurrott (01:52:43):
There's going to be, and there is, I mean already is, but going forward there's going to be even more of this. We have to as people, as customers or consumers or whatever, kind of see what companies are doing with AI and sort of rate it and determine if it's valid or not. These are really good use cases. Adobe is a company that I didn't, I guess never considered, and they are tackling this thing head on and they're kind of kicking ass frankly, I think
Richard Campbell (01:53:09):
In their own not little, their own gauge market. Their value W is threatened, right? They call their product Creative Cloud for a reason, and if they are not on board with this, they can only lose market share.
Paul Thurrott (01:53:20):
Now that said, here's an example of maybe the other side of this maybe, which is Dropbox. So Dropbox, to me, it's cloud storage obviously, but primarily I sort of think of them as plumbing. I don't look to my cloud service provider for services per se, other than the obvious, right? Storage. But they're applying AI to their clients basically. And they did some back earlier in the summer. They're adding more now. That's going to happen over time. So it's things like summarizing text-based files, summarizing audio and video content, helping users find relevant content using search with natural language. So Leo had made the point earlier about using that tool, Milo, is it called to my Leo Tag people sponsor my Leo, sorry. Yes. So Google Photos for example, or now I guess Dropbox soon you're searching for, it could be a document, it could be a picture, my son Mark in Rome, that kind of thing. And have the results actually be only pictures of him in that place. And you could even have more complicated natural language searches. So they're working on stuff like that. It's like, okay, I
Leo Laporte (01:54:37):
Guess so. I guess, so one thing I've noticed
Richard Campbell (01:54:40):
With Miley, you're doing O C R
Leo Laporte (01:54:42):
On texting pictures so I can search for
Paul Thurrott (01:54:44):
Yes, which is another thing
Leo Laporte (01:54:46):
You see on,
Paul Thurrott (01:54:46):
Yes.
Leo Laporte (01:54:47):
O C R is ai, right?
Paul Thurrott (01:54:49):
Tried actually. So yesterday there's a famous taco stand in Mexico City called Los Koss. It's famous. It's on all the TV shows and YouTube things you see about the city. But I wanted to look up some of the items on their menu. It's all in Spanish obviously. So they have items like you can get tacos made of eyes and brains and cheeks and Oh, boya, all different head pieces. So there's the kind of common meets and then there's the kind. A lot of people would be like, Ooh, I don't dunno what that is. And I tried to actually search for in Google didn't work. I searched for the term KEA knowing that I had a photo of this menu and it did not come up. Oh,
Leo Laporte (01:55:28):
That's impress. I did
Paul Thurrott (01:55:29):
Eventually find it, but that's a hugely useful
Leo Laporte (01:55:32):
Thing
Paul Thurrott (01:55:32):
To do, right?
Leo Laporte (01:55:35):
So
Paul Thurrott (01:55:35):
Yeah, I mean
Leo Laporte (01:55:36):
The only reason I bring it up is it's a way AI has already entered our lives.
Paul Thurrott (01:55:42):
Oh my God. Yep.
Leo Laporte (01:55:44):
And I think eventually we're not going to even really make the
Paul Thurrott (01:55:49):
Distinction.
Leo Laporte (01:55:50):
Yeah,
Paul Thurrott (01:55:51):
Yeah. Well that's fine because maybe isn't even ai, right? I mean checking or grammar, checking language
Richard Campbell (01:55:58):
Models. It's just software. Just more software. Yeah,
Paul Thurrott (01:56:02):
There you go. Yeah. It's capability basically. Software
Richard Campbell (01:56:06):
Is still eating the world.
Paul Thurrott (01:56:08):
Yeah, right. That's right. Now literally through our data centers,
Richard Campbell (01:56:12):
But OneDrive has been up to this stuff for a while too. It feels to me like Dropbox are responding to what one
Paul Thurrott (01:56:19):
They all have to do it. And actually that was part of that article I wrote about PCs versus whatever. It was like one of the phrases you can use and I did is it's table stakes, right? You can't not do this if you're a box or Dropbox or whatever these companies are. You can't be the one that doesn't do this.
Richard Campbell (01:56:36):
But also argue that we have a generation of folks that are using these storage mechanisms that aren't concerned about folders and hierarchies and organizing data. And if you don't make your search good enough, they really can find their stuff.
Paul Thurrott (01:56:48):
That's right. Yeah. I did a Google takeout of my Google Photos collection a while back and I just copied it to a laptop. It's 577 gigabytes or something. And it is organized in, it is not organized, actually, that's just the best way to say it. It's not organized. And that's why, because when you go to Google Photos, there are no folders. It's just
Richard Campbell (01:57:11):
Whatever.
Paul Thurrott (01:57:11):
You just search, you search. That's all you do. You can navigate by time in kind of a manual way, but you search and it usually works pretty good.
Richard Campbell (01:57:21):
Yeah. I mean if they're going to start indexing stuff by OCRing texts inside of video and things like that. More power too. Anything that helps me find my stuff,
Paul Thurrott (01:57:31):
I know it's incredible. Appreciate. That's great. I really think that's Do I
Richard Campbell (01:57:34):
Appreciate that OneDrive itself keeps popping up in the corner of my screen to show me things I don't care about. Please
Paul Thurrott (01:57:39):
Don't get me started. It's little
Leo Laporte (01:57:41):
Early. A little early. Let's go away. Hold onto that thought.
Paul Thurrott (01:57:44):
We're going to get to that.
Leo Laporte (01:57:47):
Get to it. Alright. You are going to get, lemme take a little break. We do have another advertiser, believe it or not. And we should really acknowledge that and celebrate them.
Paul Thurrott (01:57:58):
But that was our AI
Leo Laporte (01:57:59):
Segment, right? Anything more? Yeah,
Paul Thurrott (01:58:01):
That is it.
Leo Laporte (01:58:01):
Okay.
Paul Thurrott (01:58:02):
No, that's the Kit
Leo Laporte (01:58:03):
Xbox tool coming up some brown liquor. I'm sure it's funny. Where were we?
Paul Thurrott (01:58:12):
We
Leo Laporte (01:58:12):
Were in Green Bay, Wisconsin,
Paul Thurrott (01:58:16):
And the bar was well
Leo Laporte (01:58:18):
Stocked with Crown Royal and Lisa said, what's the deal with Crown Royal? I said, we're near Canada baby.
Richard Campbell (01:58:24):
That's
Paul Thurrott (01:58:24):
True.
Leo Laporte (01:58:25):
We were next door,
Richard Campbell (01:58:26):
Little Ginger, a very happy,
Leo Laporte (01:58:28):
They even had Green Bay Packer. Crown Royal bottles. Yeah, it's a cross border exchange, a cultural exchange. Our show today brought to you by,
Paul Thurrott (01:58:39):
I am sorry, I should never
Leo Laporte (01:58:40):
Do that. You don't talk like that. I hate that. Actually they do in Green Bay, which was really, really weird. Lisa said, does she have a Canadian accent? I said, no, dear. That's how they talk here. Our show today is brought to you by Cash Fly. Yeah. For over 20 years, cash Fly has held the track record for high performing, ultra reliable content delivery, serving over 5,000 companies in over 80 countries. Organizations consistently choose cash fly for scalability, reliability, and unrivaled performance. You know when organizations do that, we do cash flies. R C D N, cash flies Revolutionary Storage Optimization System. Oh, if you have website, this is, or any kind of content like ours, this will ensure your holiday season remains jelly. The SS o s storage optimization system creates private partitions on the cashflow drives that are yours dedicated entirely to you, providing a hundred percent bandwidth to ensure your content remains king.
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Mobile content optimization offers automatic and simple image optimization. That means your site loads faster on any device. It's the only C D N built for throughput. You can deliver rich media content up to 10 times faster than traditional delivery methods, 30% faster than other major CDNs flexible month to month billing. This is nice too, because usage of this kind of spiky, right? So you may not know. What you don't want to do is pay for the max every day. So what you can do is have flexible contracts until you figure that out. And then you get discounts. Once you're happy, you get a discount for fixed term, but you get to design your contract when you switch to cashflows. What we did, it was really helpful, especially in the early days when we didn't have any idea what's this going to cost? With cashflow's Elite managed Packages, you get the v I P treatment, you get a dedicated account manager that'll be with you from day one, ensuring a smooth implementation and reliable 24 7 support when needed. They've been fantastic. Twitch's been using cashflow for over a decade, believe me, we've been approached by many others. No,
(02:03:19):
We love Cash Fly for October. Jumpstart your journey with cashflow, a complimentary free month awaits or give it a whirl with a free five terabyte account. Go to cash fly.com/twit. That's October only. So quickly, cash fly.com/tot. You've heard me say it a million times. Bandwidth for in this case, windows Weekly is provided by CLY at C C H EFL y.com/twi. Thank you. Catch y. Now back to the show, Paul, Richard Campbell, Paul Ott, and more great stuff. This time we're going to talk a little bit about developers, developers, developers, developers
Richard Campbell (02:04:12):
Or not just one developer.
Leo Laporte (02:04:14):
I don't want to make you do anything. Of course.
Richard Campbell (02:04:17):
There was one little developer story, well actually I didn't write about this, but Net eight RC two is available final RC final release next month. Okay. Yeah. The week of November 14th is net com. So that's virtual events, et cetera, et cetera. RCT is the usual last
Paul Thurrott (02:04:38):
And the very regular cadence on the pre-release milestones. So bang, bang, bang.
Richard Campbell (02:04:42):
Preferably annually. Yes.
Paul Thurrott (02:04:44):
Yep. But the thing I did write about it was C Sharp Devkit is now available in generally available, so it's like a non preview version. This is for Visual Studio Code, and this is the extension that adds kind of a fuller set of C sharp capabilities to Microsoft's coding editor. And it supports a subset of the, I guess I callem workloads that one might do in full Visual Studio. You're not going to write your next great Windows form app in official studio code.
Richard Campbell (02:05:16):
You don't, yeah, you don't get the designer that way.
Paul Thurrott (02:05:19):
Right. But it's good for web apps, asp.net or whatever they're calling that these days, or what do you call it? Blazer? Probably. Blazer or web, I think.
Richard Campbell (02:05:26):
Yeah, or any other kind of web development too. I mean the
Paul Thurrott (02:05:28):
Big web dev
Richard Campbell (02:05:29):
Dev kit brings the
Paul Thurrott (02:05:30):
Table Maui though, right? Yeah.
Richard Campbell (02:05:32):
M always visible that way, but that's
Paul Thurrott (02:05:34):
Also interesting.
Richard Campbell (02:05:36):
It's really to me it's about the project management side. We have this concept inside of Studio called a solution, and largely it's just a file set of file and some hierarchy. And really code didn't have any visibility to that. So it was very hard to have a mixed dev environment with some folks in Code and some folks in studio. And this makes it easier,
Paul Thurrott (02:06:01):
Right? It does add a little bit of solution support, I guess Code is typically like a folder based solution for projects, which is standard in the web developer world, but not typical in,
Richard Campbell (02:06:15):
But yeah, if you've got a studio shop and you've got some folks who don't want to live in studio, they want to live in code now your life's a little easier. Yep.
Paul Thurrott (02:06:23):
Yeah. Yeah.
Richard Campbell (02:06:24):
So that's cool.
Paul Thurrott (02:06:26):
And that's it. So as far as Xbox, actually we do have a bunch of things this week finally. And the big one is, yeah, there were reports that Microsoft should be closing this Activision Blizzard acquisition on Friday. So in two days from now on the 13th,
Richard Campbell (02:06:44):
They don't need to extend anything again.
Paul Thurrott (02:06:47):
We'll see. There's also a rumor that occurred during the show. I just saw it when Leo was doing the ad read that the EU is not going to reexamine their approval of Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard. And there was a chance they were going to because it looked like they might've changed the terms a bit when they did their eu, sorry, UK concession, but we don't have an official statement on that, so it's kind of hard to say. So my expectation was that they were going to do this in July, but yeah, maybe in two days,
Richard Campbell (02:07:22):
October is enough.
Paul Thurrott (02:07:24):
Yep. October's close enough, close enough.
Richard Campbell (02:07:25):
Well, and the fact that that KO's planning the party is sort of sounds like we're good.
Paul Thurrott (02:07:32):
And then to the Bobby Kotek stuff and the internal happening at Activision, one of the things that came out of that was he said, they said that the two big blockbuster games of the season for Activision Blizzard, call of Duty model warfare for three in Diablo four will not be coming to Game Pass
(02:07:47):
This year. When the Activision goes through, they're starting to talk a lot about Game Pass, which is kind of fun because Activision could not have given two craps about this thing before or any other subscription service, frankly. And they make billions on some of these games including Call of Duty with their traditional release model. But Microsoft's kind of changed things up and we'll see how that impacts these games because that's a big revenue driver for them around this time every year. And if they put it in Game Pass, how does that change things? And actually
Richard Campbell (02:08:20):
The other side is what if you only sold it in Game Pass? How many more game passes would you sell?
Paul Thurrott (02:08:25):
Right? So somebody in the Discord chat, I forget, I apologize, I don't remember the name. Asked a question really upfront like two hours ago, literally about Game Pass. And the question was whether concerning developer payouts and was any information about that specifically in the recent Xbox leaks? And if so, is it, is Game Pass bad for devs? Is it subsidized? What are they doing there? So there was nothing in the memos that spoke to how Microsoft pays different types of game makers or pays four different types of games in Game Pass. There was nothing specific, but there was a fascinating bit that came out of, it was a March, 2020 presentation that Phil Spencer gave for on behalf of the Xbox team to Microsoft senior leadership team. And there is Newman, sorry, sorry, I forgot your name there. He came out of that meeting a little confused because it was very clear that they didn't understand the video game market at all. So he wrote this long memo where he said, it looks like I'm going to have to explain what game publishers are and how this works. And so he kind of stepped through that. I'm not going to bore you with that, it's ridiculous. But he basically said the Game Pass was about distribution that back in the day when you used to develop software and put it on a disc and put it in the store, those were your distribution vendors. So
(02:09:48):
Now it's online, it's easy, they can do it directly in some cases or they do it through the console makers or through Steam or whatever the online stuff is. The distribution point Game Pass in his view was additive. And he wanted, and this is again, you got to remember, it's like three and a half years ago, he wanted Game Pass to be a place where triple A game makers put their stuff on day one and to drive that Microsoft has since ensured that all of their inhouse games day one come out on Game Pass. They're the only company that does this. No one, no one, not one has agreed to do this. Only they have. But his argument was that Netflix disrupted video. And if you think about it, you're a movie maker or you're going to make a TV series, where's the money coming from?
(02:10:34):
What makes sense? So now you see Harrison Ford and Meryl Streep and whoever you can name Ronald Reynolds are making things that go to Netflix or Hulu or whatever. And why is that? And frankly, a lot of it has to do with money. So it's money, but it's also audience. The pandemic kind of helped this notion that people aren't going to theaters as much as they used to of course. And this is a way to reach a mass audience. And Phil Spencer wants that to be true for Xbox Game Pass, and they've kind of lived the message by putting their own Triple A games on the platform. So the question is, as this worked, and the answer is no. And part of the problem is, see, once you move to an online distribution system, a lot of these company are huge, right? Activision Blizzard is huge, ea, Ubisoft, whatever the company is, a lot of them have their own, they start their own services.
(02:11:26):
So EA has their own subscription service. Ubisoft does Ubisoft plus those two companies have partnered with some of the bigger players. Ubisoft partnered with Amazon, a EA has partnered with Microsoft. So as part of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, you gain access to EA play rights. All the titles that are in there, Activision Blizzard, Bobby Kotek, whatever, I can't explain it, decided to go their own route and they just do their own thing. So their model is sort of a subscription, but for things like they've changed it up over the years, but things like Call of Duty, back in the day you would buy a game, call of Duty and then for 60 bucks, and then over the course of the next year you would buy these, something just exploded in my kitchen, I'm sorry. And then you would buy, I'm going to have to go see what that was. Something
(02:12:14):
Happened, but
(02:12:17):
It's probably not the Russians coming through the wall, but it sounded
(02:12:20):
Like it.
(02:12:22):
Sorry, I lost my track of thought. What they would do is sound load, right? So four times a year they would sell you these DLCs and then they were like, the problem is not everyone's buying all the dlcss. So we'll have an annual thing. So you can buy the game for 60 bucks and then you can buy all the DLC at once for 60 bucks and you'll get it over the next year. It's 120 bucks. And people are like, that's a lot of money. And I don't know, blah, blah, blah. So now they kind of build it game 70 bucks and you get the whole thing and you get all the dlc, and it's just kind of the way it is now, but it's sort of a subscription model because you are buying it every year in many cases. When the game is successful, it's not something that applies to all of their games.
(02:12:56):
So as far as what they're paying them and what's the real value of Game Pass, it's evolved, but honestly the Netflix model is pretty good. They're still trying to attract AAA and failing, meaning the new Ryan Reynolds movie would go to Netflix instead of the theater or to some other service. So they're trying, they still want that, but it's also a place for what, I don't know if the right term for this is, but it's like catalog content. So they've gone to a lot of developers and said, Hey look, you've made 20 games over the years and only one of them is current. Let's take the other 19 and put them on Game Pass. And here's the idea, you will make money from this. You will, it might not be a lot, we have no idea, but it will be more than zero. And zero is what you're making now.
(02:13:38):
And is there a value to that? When Netflix first started, and it was like they were still shipping DVDs in the mail mean, but then they had this online service. The stuff that was on Netflix was terrible. It was all B movies and lower than B movies. It was terrible. And it's something that improved in quality over time, but it was a way to distribute B movies from the eighties, the nineties, whenever. Let's face it, no one was buying these things on, no one saw them anywhere. It was a distribution point, there was a volume of content. And Game Pass has absolutely achieved that. But also I would say through the acquisition of so many studios, Microsoft now has much better quality content there as well. So honestly, there's a value there. So no, I don't know what they pay, but basically Microsoft has looked at the world as it was the world that it is the world that is subscription, Ubisoft EA are examples of two companies that are just making their way in the subscription world on their own big enough to do it. We talked about Steam
Richard Campbell (02:14:43):
The original
Paul Thurrott (02:14:45):
Great, and they have their own model. It's just a different thing. It's the biggest online store in Windows, like we were saying. And they don't do ads, they don't do promos.
Richard Campbell (02:14:55):
I would argue Sea's problem now is that it's Gabe Newell and his friends, it's still a properly held company. At least Gabe's a billionaire. None of those guys are trying that hard anymore.
Paul Thurrott (02:15:06):
No, they're not trying hard at all. Which I can tell you from the absence of Half-Life two episode three, which is a 25 year old Frank of mine, they'll never
Richard Campbell (02:15:14):
That's
Paul Thurrott (02:15:14):
And damn them for that.
Richard Campbell (02:15:17):
Yeah, because making online subscription based games was worth so much more money. The team that was making, they
Paul Thurrott (02:15:25):
Just dropped everything and moved.
Richard Campbell (02:15:26):
They made Dota two and they're still making more money annually on Doto two than they would make on a single release of half-Life.
Paul Thurrott (02:15:34):
I'm just saying Art still should take precedence. Seriously
Richard Campbell (02:15:37):
Agree. And I'm sad, I wanted that story to be grounded out,
Paul Thurrott (02:15:40):
But for Xbox Game Pass, think about how it's expanded. It began just on the console, it expanded to PCs. There's an ultimate one that spans both and adds this cloud gaming thing, which not great, but a way to access the games you already made in many cases on more places. So Xbox Game Pass just by itself is another distribution point, but they've kind of expanded it out to multiple distribution points. So the value is there. I don't know what they pay them. I can't say it's good.
Richard Campbell (02:16:12):
And you're paralleling Netflix and the other subscription servers for media to the video game industry, and I totally buy that, but I would argue the most sophisticated version of that would be the M C U with Disney. So you have your marquee blockbuster, iron Man and Avengers and so forth, and then in between you have the Winter Soldier and the Falcon, those kinds of miniseries that were only released on Disney.
Paul Thurrott (02:16:35):
I wonder
Richard Campbell (02:16:38):
If it could be Blockbuster games that you pay additional for, but because you're also on Game Pass and you get these interstitial games, these smaller things.
Paul Thurrott (02:16:46):
I do wonder in the case of the M C U that once the theater market collapsed, whether this entire ecosystem doesn't make any sense anymore because it relied on these tent pole movies that were humongous billion
Richard Campbell (02:16:58):
Plus
Paul Thurrott (02:16:59):
Whatever. And now you don't really have that. And it's like, now we have cute little TV shows like Lokey two or whatever, and you're like,
Richard Campbell (02:17:04):
Okay, but these miniseries are also making money and they can tell stories, more detail, and you build a fan base.
Paul Thurrott (02:17:11):
Well, I mean, you're serving the fan base. It's such an ideal thing for people who love this stuff.
Richard Campbell (02:17:15):
And that's the whole thing is then they drop these little nuggets in the big blockbusters that unless you'd seen Seconds seasonal, Loki, you didn't know what that was about. That's the part of the fun of being in the club. Now I wonder if we couldn't go down that path. The closest thing I would say to that today is Assassin.
Paul Thurrott (02:17:36):
I'm wondering is what? Oh, Assassin's Creed. Interesting. Okay. Why?
Richard Campbell (02:17:41):
And just because it's a thread through all of its different games.
Paul Thurrott (02:17:46):
Oh, I see. Right. I'm sorry. It's a coherence series of games that has
Richard Campbell (02:17:50):
Coherence, a stretch related.
Paul Thurrott (02:17:53):
Well,
Richard Campbell (02:17:55):
The problem is that each of their games has to get bigger and more expensive. And we're at this problem now where it's too expensive to make the Blockbuster game.
Paul Thurrott (02:18:03):
So unfortunately what they do is we have movies like Godzilla versus King Kong or that kind of schlock, and the video game version of that is the guy from Halos in Fortnite this week or whatever. You have these little crossover episodes. It's like,
Richard Campbell (02:18:18):
Oh, the thing is, you could do it badly, but hey, if I smaller, if I had a big brand and I'm not going to bet an A class game and all of the marketing against that wants to do an experiment, but they still want to use the brand. Now I do. That miniseries effect a littler game. That's only,
Paul Thurrott (02:18:34):
Yeah, so expanding Xbox Game Pass the way they did is smart for Microsoft too. Part of the idea here is that Xbox was a console and now it's this stuff. So it behooves Microsoft to expand this ecosystem, obviously
Richard Campbell (02:18:48):
I've noticed. But it's also Game Bar instead of Xbox Game Bar, right? They are think game bigger
Paul Thurrott (02:18:53):
And it makes it more attractive to game makers. I would think The biggest ones can ignore it. Huge. They don't care. But for everyone else, which is 90 something percent of the market, this could be or could be more attractive as it expands out. And if God help us, we ever get mobile game stores going on Apple and Android or whatever, and then all Betts are off, Xbox could become a very viable ecosystem.
Richard Campbell (02:19:19):
But what if it makes more sense for you to write your game and just to serve it on Game Pass? You take a portion of that payment than it is to try and sell it any other way.
Paul Thurrott (02:19:27):
Right? That's my point. But the problem is, I can't say that it is, but I think we can, for example, there's been, one of the big stories with streaming is over the past couple of years there's been a lot of blockbuster releases. I'll just pick on Netflix of highly high quality meaning and or with highly rated or well-known actors, movies and TV shows that are really kind of crappy, right? They're actually, they're super well-made, but they're
Richard Campbell (02:19:57):
Not
Paul Thurrott (02:19:57):
Very
Leo Laporte (02:19:57):
Ryan Gosling and The Gray Man, something
Paul Thurrott (02:20:01):
Like that. I might, I've not seen that one, but Ryan Reynolds in anything or Gal Gado anything,
Richard Campbell (02:20:07):
Don't mock my Deadpool man. Holy.
Leo Laporte (02:20:09):
I'm
Paul Thurrott (02:20:10):
Just saying. And so the question here is obviously it was worth it to those actors. Obviously it was worth it to the director or the movie studio, whoever did this. The question is, did it make sense to Netflix, did it work? Did they drive more usage? Did they make more money? And honestly, I think the jury's out at best. And I think honestly, those movies did not do great for them. But I don't know, I just dunno.
Richard Campbell (02:20:33):
It's a great question. But it does open a room for things other than just blockbusters that you can do.
Paul Thurrott (02:20:41):
Yes, and God, seriously, we need, that's honestly, before Covid, that was what was wrong with the theaters. It was all Marvel movies, right? They stopped making mid-level movies, they stopped making little
Richard Campbell (02:20:51):
Romances when doing video games. You had the same problem. You had the billion, the half a dozen to dozen, billion dollar titles a year and indie games and nothing
Paul Thurrott (02:20:59):
If you're suggesting that Call of Duty in any way impacted the world negatively. I'm just going to have to take a stand on that one. But yes, you're probably right.
Leo Laporte (02:21:07):
Are you still cold Turkey on? I
Paul Thurrott (02:21:09):
Have news on that front. I turned on my Xbox for the first time since early March, the other day, two days
Richard Campbell (02:21:15):
Ago ago. Wow.
Paul Thurrott (02:21:17):
Four hours
Leo Laporte (02:21:18):
Later. Yeah, yeah,
Paul Thurrott (02:21:19):
Yeah. It took a long time. I updated Call of Duty. I pre-purchased or pre-ordered the next Call of Duty because it's all classic maps but redone and they're the best maps. This is like the high point in the whole series. I have not actually played a game on it yet.
Richard Campbell (02:21:33):
I guess
Paul Thurrott (02:21:34):
I, I
Richard Campbell (02:21:34):
Will had to unplug for months. It's got a lot of updates.
Paul Thurrott (02:21:37):
That took a little while. I noticed the dashboard wasn't any better despite 18 updates to that. So anyway, yeah, I am going to look at the new Call of Duty. I have to and I'm going to do it on the next button.
Leo Laporte (02:21:54):
It's his job. It's his job. Stephanie just got to live
Richard Campbell (02:21:57):
With it. Those phones,
Leo Laporte (02:21:59):
All those phones,
Paul Thurrott (02:22:01):
You'll never believe what happened next. Nothing. I didn't play any games, but never saw him
Leo Laporte (02:22:04):
Again. We never,
Paul Thurrott (02:22:07):
There will be a Call of Duty, Marta warfare, three beta coming. I hopefully before we go to Mexico, actually there's only two more days. We'll see soon, right? I think that's happening soon. Oh, you're
Leo Laporte (02:22:16):
Not going to bring your Xbox to Mexico?
Paul Thurrott (02:22:18):
No, I am not bringing my Xbox.
Leo Laporte (02:22:19):
Do that. That would be crazy talk.
Paul Thurrott (02:22:23):
Okay. Diablo four coming to Steam, not coming to Xbox Game Pass. Hilarious. But that's two different things, right? That's a standard. It is
Leo Laporte (02:22:33):
A BL game though, which is funny. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (02:22:36):
Yep. Owned by Microsoft. I mean, Nokia released some Android phones right before they were bought by Microsoft. I mean, whatcha going to do? Whatcha going to
Leo Laporte (02:22:44):
Do?
Paul Thurrott (02:22:44):
No. Xbox puts some games on Steam too, by the way. There's some partnership there. Fours of Mortis brought is out. This is the new version of the racing game. It's on everything with an Xbox label on it. So PC game pass, blah, blah, blah, whatever.
Richard Campbell (02:22:57):
My lock, it's even my lock screen.
Paul Thurrott (02:23:01):
It's on. That's how you know it's there. And then two Sony things. So Sony yesterday, I think announced a smaller PSS five in the sense that A, I don't know, the planet Uranus is smaller than the planet Jupiter. It is smaller, but it's still really big version of the PSS five. Not one
Richard Campbell (02:23:20):
Of 'em put it on its side.
Paul Thurrott (02:23:22):
Yeah, it's not cost reduced. It actually costs more. And you can get it optionally with an optical drive. So now instead of having two models, they have one model and then sometimes they bundle 'em together, but you can buy it separately. That's cool. And there's nothing wrong
Richard Campbell (02:23:34):
With that. What would you do with the optical drive? Exactly. What is that?
Paul Thurrott (02:23:37):
Play? Blu-Rays pretty much. I mean, you could go to a store and buy discs. I don't know who would do that, but you could. I still don't understand why it looks like a station station from a Star Trek movie. I dunno. Okay. Honest to god, Uranus is a lot smaller than Jupiter says. Thank you doctor. Scientists shut up. Anyway, they're two big planets. That was my point. I meant Saturn, I guess. I don't know. It doesn't matter.
Richard Campbell (02:24:02):
No, no, you were right Uranus. And
Paul Thurrott (02:24:04):
They're still big. They're both big guys. Let's just big fine.
Richard Campbell (02:24:07):
Uranus is a very significant axial tilt. So that's why I said
Paul Thurrott (02:24:12):
Thank you for having my back. And then there will be a PS five cloud streaming service coming out of Sony later this year. Before the end of the year, there was already something through. If you have PlayStation Plus, which is one of their, well actually I think they're only now a subscription service. You can stream older PlayStation games, but this is going to be the first time that you'll be able to stream like current gen games. And it will only be available to PSS five owners. You won't be able to stream the new games to the old console, which interestingly is something Microsoft does allow, right? So if you have an Xbox One and you play, you have a game pass, sorry, you can play Flight Simulator, which is not available on that platform. It's only available on Xbox Series of ssn X. And that's kind of a cool thing that Sony's not doing js, but that's fine. It's $18 a month, 160 bucks a year. It's starting later this month in Japan. Europe's coming after that. And then the end of October for North America. So Canada and United States, I don't know Mexico, but at least Canada, the United States.
Richard Campbell (02:25:15):
Hey,
Paul Thurrott (02:25:15):
Yeah, that's cool. And there you go. Well, that was the most
Leo Laporte (02:25:20):
Thrilling, exciting, and a provocative Xbox segment we've had all week. Okay, well that
Paul Thurrott (02:25:29):
Really took the air out of my
Leo Laporte (02:25:31):
Brain. Fine. Just, Hey, we are going to do the back of the book next. What do you say you're listening to Windows Weekly? Paul Throt, Richard Campbell. It is now my duty to hand you over to Paul Throt. So he may do with you as he wills Paul.
Paul Thurrott (02:25:49):
Yeah, I don't know how much I got into this last week, if at all. But as part of, it's sort of a combination of me working on the digital decluttering stuff and then getting ready for 23 H two, so I can write about it in the book. Getting that on all my PCs. I've noticed really bad behaviors on the part of OneDrive in Windows 11. And this is something that's kind of escalated over the years. It goes back to the original version of Windows 11 where you had to have an M S A to sign into Windows 11 home. And if you sign into Windows 11 home with an M S A, which you had to, it would auto configure folder backup in OneDrive. And then the story for Pro was that if you sign into pro you in the beginning didn't have to use an M Ss A, but then starting in 22 H two you did.
(02:26:35):
And you were given the choice supposedly to configure folder backup or not. But I found, and right now it's actually getting worse. About two thirds of the computers I configure. I'm never given this option. I don't see it. It's just like home. So folder backup is becoming sort of mandatory for everybody. I recommend for people who don't want to use this feature, I don't to the first time they hit the desktop, go and turn it off. But I've noticed in 23 H two, some new behavior that's just escalating, like I said, I've seen this now in at least three computers. I explicitly disable OneDrive folder backup, use my computer. Usually the way I notice is I'm doing something like I delete something from the desktop and it says, Hey, when you delete from OneDrive, it goes to a recycle bin in the cloud. So just make sure you're okay with that. It's like, I deleted this from the desktop, not from OneDrive. What are you talking about? And sure enough, it has silently enabled folder backup at the background for me. I hope this is a bug, honestly. I'm hoping, hoping, hoping it's a bug. But there
Leo Laporte (02:27:39):
Are other, it's trying to help you, Paul. It's your friend, it's your friend, it's your buddy. It's trying to do the good thing. It's
Paul Thurrott (02:27:44):
Like throwing a motorcycle helmet at someone who's driving away without a helmet. It just doesn't make
Leo Laporte (02:27:50):
Any sense. Wow. Wow.
Paul Thurrott (02:27:52):
It would be cold.
(02:27:54):
But there's other stuff happening in 23 H two. So if you are browsing and file Explorer in any OneDrive folder, not any OneDrive folder, any OneDrive folder that's within or is desktop documents or pictures. Lemme say that again. If you don't have OneDrive folder backup enabled and you are browsing within the local desktop documents or pictures folders, you'll get a backup. Now prompt in the File Explorer window that you cannot get rid of. Now, I'm hoping there is a registry edit that will fix this. No one knows what it is right now, but right now it's just kind of an annoying thing. But it's worse than that. There are actually backup now ads all over the system. And the one I'll point out is that if you go into the Settings app and go to personalization background, which is where you configure the wallpaper, and if you have an image, it will prompt you there to back up your Pitches folder,
(02:28:48):
Which by the way is not necessarily where that wallpaper is. And they do not back up wallpaper to your Microsoft account. So I don't know what it's doing there, but okay, so I wrote a big article about this. I explained how you could work around each of these things except for the one that you can't, the prompts in File Explorer. And then the weekend happened and I got bit on multiple computers with that thing I was talking about where now I've seen it on three. And I finally wrote an article about what I did to fix it. And by fix it, I don't mean fix it, I'm sorry, that's not even the right word. It's really a workaround because I can't stop it right now from silently turning on folder backup. What I can do is ensure I'm never using those folders one way, by the way, to switch to a different folder like a cloud storage service that would fix it.
(02:29:33):
Google photos, I've been testing that. I Google photos, not Google, Google Drive, which like Dropbox or whatever has an installable app and it integrates to the file system just like you would expect. Works great. That's fantastic. There's that thing doesn't prompt you about anything. It just works. It's nice. You could do that. But what I finally did with OneDrive, because I have a lot of data at OneDrive, but it's also my most important data. My photo collection is there, and my documents archive is there. Also the documents I work on daily, like my current work document, everything's there. That's why I use OneDrive. So I just said, I'm going to ignore the OneDrive folder structure. And by the way, you can delete the desktop and documents and pictures, folders to your hearts to light in OneDrive, and they will keep coming back like Freddie Krueger or something. So don't worry about that, just make a folder in the route I called mine Paul, because no imagination. And I put all my stuff in there. I created my own documents, photos, whatever folders I have, and I just use those folders. And you
Leo Laporte (02:30:30):
Shouldn't have to do that. That is awful.
Paul Thurrott (02:30:33):
I cannot agree more. It is the worst. So
Leo Laporte (02:30:36):
My, there's no box that you could say check that says just don't use one drive.
Paul Thurrott (02:30:39):
Oh my God. So here's the possibilities, first of all. One is that the auto enabling of folder backup is a buck, right? That could be true. 23 H two is not finalized. I'm using it in release preview. Maybe it's broken. Microsoft people could complain. Remember the OneDrive story from before. If enough people complain, I bet they step back from this cliff. So if you see this stuff and you don't like it, there's something you could do. And I'll do it for sure. And then the other alternative is that either through registry hacks, for lack of a better term or third party utilities, we will find ways to turn the stuff off in the registry. It's just not in the ui. And maybe we'll come to the UI over time, I don't know. But right now it's not. And I'm hoping someone will figure this stuff out. So Raphael or whoever you are out there, please look at this because OneDrive has been annoying. It's super useful. I mean, the service is fantastic, but in Windows 11, it's gone from annoying to pathological, and I'm just trying to work with it. I'm trying to do my best. It's like dealing with a person who has dementia. It has good days and bad days, and I am worried about the future.
Richard Campbell (02:31:47):
It definitely slams into this hole. I really don't care what you need to do. I need to show you this right now.
Paul Thurrott (02:31:53):
This is the literal definition of this, right? Exactly. Yep. If you've stopped even pretending to kill, it's gotten bad. So
Richard Campbell (02:32:01):
Frustrating. Look at then.
Paul Thurrott (02:32:02):
Yep. But again, I'm just being pragmatic here. Whatever. I mean, I just want to get work done here. I don't want to be badged all day long. It doesn't stop a lot of the other bad behaviors. I mean, I spend a lot of time configuring Microsoft Word to save files locally instead of the OneDrive. I want to put those things someplace specific, and I always do. And man, word throws up little warnings all the time. That stupid little bar at the top, you'd be a lot safer. You put it in OneDrive. It's like, I've been using this product for 10 years. What's going to be going to OneDrive to shut up? But you can't turn that off either. So someone asked about Windows 10, I don't know, I'm sorry. Some of this I think is tied to the changes to making the file explorer in Windows 11 that it may rely on functionality that's only in that version of the product.
(02:32:47):
So you might not see some of it, I don't know in the settings up in Windows 10, I don't know. But it certainly OneDrive on Windows 10 supports automatic folder. Sorry, folder backup. I don't know if they're forcing the issue there as well. I'm sorry. I'm not sure. Okay. And then App pick of the week is Microsoft OneDrive. I'm just kidding. Is Microsoft Teams. That's a weird one too for me to recommend in some ways, except for one thing, they just came up with that new version and the new version of Teams is a significant advance over the initial version in so many ways. It's smaller, lighter through, et
Richard Campbell (02:33:25):
Cetera, et cetera. Do you ever get whiplash, Paul? Just trying to
Paul Thurrott (02:33:29):
Justify my existence. Yeah. Listen, I'm just treading water until the waterfall comes. I don't even know what to do anymore. My God, it's certainly gotten worse over time, right? So why am I teams good? Microsoft teams, but Teams is good? Yeah, no, it's much better. And I say this in the spirit of people have to use teams in some cases like I do,
Richard Campbell (02:33:50):
A lot of people do.
Paul Thurrott (02:33:51):
I've always hated that pig of an app. It's gotten worse and worse over time. The new version is a significant advance. And here's a stupid little thing. One of the major problems I had with teams until the new version was that it would never remember my audio video settings. So I'd have a speaker microphone or something wrong almost every day. And actually that works. Now that just works. And I always said like, guys, I don't understand why there was a little button in teams that says, these are my preferred devices. If they're present, always use them. You shouldn't even have to think like that. But now you don't have to worry about it. It just works fine. So that stuff's great. It takes up a lot fewer resources. It's better looking if that means anything to you. I wish I could say the same for the new Outlook app.
(02:34:35):
So if you're a consumer and you're coming from the mail calendar apps, which the mail app was ridiculously bad. The calendar app was fine, but it's an okay upgrade. If you're coming from the work version, like the real version of Outlook, I'll call it. This is not an upgrade at all. It's like someone replaced your Ferrari with a clown car. I don't know what's going on here. It doesn't even support offline usage. It's crazy. So the fact that they've already put this out in the world is a little strange. But the good news is you don't have to use it yet. And for people using Outlook for work related reasons, the real outlook, I think it's going to be as long as even a couple years before you have to switch to it. So cross your fingers that they actually fix all the problems before then for you. No, they keep
Richard Campbell (02:35:21):
Breaking outlook. It's just going to drive adoption
Paul Thurrott (02:35:23):
Back. And it doesn't help the fact that there are at least five different versions of the app called Outlook, all of which are hilariously different from each other. And we could talk about that someday. Maybe we should. But we'll do an episode of HandsOn Windows called What is Outlook?
Leo Laporte (02:35:38):
What many things to it was just like Outlook going, what am I? Hey, breaking news, I guess. Ach an elli just got around to opening his mail. And as happens sometimes when it happened to you, he's got a letter from the I R s saying, Microsoft owe additional 29 billion in back taxes.
Paul Thurrott (02:36:04):
Oh, that's going to hit
Leo Laporte (02:36:05):
The bottom
Paul Thurrott (02:36:05):
Line.
Leo Laporte (02:36:06):
Microsoft says it's going to appeal.
Richard Campbell (02:36:09):
You think
Leo Laporte (02:36:10):
29 billion.
Richard Campbell (02:36:11):
That's a lot of
Leo Laporte (02:36:12):
Lawyers. The
Paul Thurrott (02:36:13):
First thing he did was he pressed that button on the intercom and he says, could you bring Amy Hood into the
Leo Laporte (02:36:17):
Office immediately, please? Yep. Who hasn't
Richard Campbell (02:36:20):
Been filling in their T four,
Leo Laporte (02:36:22):
Right? This showed
Paul Thurrott (02:36:22):
Up. How much do you make every year? Is it 29 billion? Because if it isn't
Leo Laporte (02:36:27):
The dispute, according to Microsoft concerns, the company's allocated profits between countries and jurisdictions. Oh, the old overseas, the old
Paul Thurrott (02:36:34):
Offshoring, they were playing the Irish game.
Leo Laporte (02:36:37):
The Dutch wrap around with the Irish
Paul Thurrott (02:36:39):
Handoff
Leo Laporte (02:36:40):
Between 2004 and 2013, companies set up to 10 billion in taxes. The company's already paid are not reflected in the proposed adjustments. And they're going to contest the notices hilarious through administrative
Paul Thurrott (02:36:54):
Appeal and show going to get an email from the UK saying, good news, bye. Good
Leo Laporte (02:36:57):
News. But you can buy it. But your chaps in DC want a little bit of b sh. So that just broke in their eight K, which they just filed. So Microsoft's eight K must have been, do you think they, the rest of us do a letter and you go, oh God, it's from the i r S. This could be good news. Yeah, I actually just give it to my wife so that Me too, honey. Honey, we got a letter from the irs. This looks like bad news here. Take it. Just slide it under the door. And you know what she does? She says, yeah, we're going to send that to our accountant. Yep.
Richard Campbell (02:37:38):
I'm pretty sure the IRS will send it to Brad Smith,
Leo Laporte (02:37:40):
I'm sure. Yeah,
Richard Campbell (02:37:44):
The largest companies in the world and may have phoned them.
Leo Laporte (02:37:47):
29 billion is a significant amount of money. I think that AI costs us going to have to go up a little bit. Wow.
Richard Campbell (02:37:54):
But maybe we're talking about the I R S anchoring high,
Leo Laporte (02:37:59):
Right? Would you accept 18 billion? What is Mr. Richard Thomas? Richard Thomas was of course, John Boy on the Wow. On wonderful show. Goodnight, John. Boy. No, Richard Campbell, what is coming up on run as radio? Richard,
Richard Campbell (02:38:20):
This morning I did a show with Kelly Shortridge, who's a security specialist about her book on security chaos engineering. So what the heck are we talking about here? This is actually, you got a Netflix reference in it. Because back in the day when Netflix first moved onto the web, they were so large, you basically couldn't test it. There's not enough internet to do testing. And so it was engineer and Cockcroft and those guys who came up with this concept of chaos engineering, where they literally wrote software that would randomly shut off services just to make sure the system could recover. There was almost no other way to test. And there's so many interesting advantages to that just because it does unusual things. You're always just, you're thinking about the usual approach. And Kelly's book really digs into this idea from a security perspective. And it is about attacking assumptions, just going through the chain of authentication and connection and stuff that your system counts on.
(02:39:16):
Say a cookie and say, well, what would happen if that changed? Just introducing that chaos into the equation and seeing how the system would respond to that. So it was a really fun conversation just because it makes you think about, it's the old Mark Twain quote. It's not what, so all of those little assumptions you have about that token will always be there. That authenticator is always there. Those kinds of things. And as soon as they aren't there, how does your system recover? Or how does it respond? What is it exposed? That's where the breaches come from. So it was a really great approach to, once you've got the fundamentals down and you've got your perimeters and your zero trust working and so forth, how do you get better? And that's where the chaos engineering equation comes into play.
Leo Laporte (02:40:05):
Can't wait. Run his radio. Run his radio.com. And now you all have been good. You deserve a little treat. As always. At the end of the show, I'd like to put a little cherry on the top. Richard's brown liquor pick of the week. It better be a cherry and it better be a hard cherry.
Richard Campbell (02:40:24):
Yeah, you don't want to, I've been avoiding this one for a while. You
Leo Laporte (02:40:27):
Know, I'm kind of surprised to see this to be perfect. No, no. Be honest. I'm actually glad you're doing this because this is one, I think people, if you saw the name, you're like, what is this moonshine? What am I? No, no. I think at least out here. It's when people venerate like the Virgin Mary. Okay, there you go.
Richard Campbell (02:40:46):
Arguably inappropriate. So we're talking about Pappy van, wink,
Leo Laporte (02:40:49):
Pappy baby. We know it so well out here. We just call it Pappy,
Richard Campbell (02:40:55):
And it's one of those, I seem to be having a run lately of whiskeys you cannot buy. This certainly falls into that category. It's nowhere to be found. Well,
Leo Laporte (02:41:04):
This is the 23 year. This is
Richard Campbell (02:41:07):
The 23 being the hardest to find, although not my favorite either. But
Leo Laporte (02:41:13):
Yeah, I was really disciplined. No, I think I probably had a regular Pappy, probably 15, but I was underwhelmed. For all of the attention it gets,
Richard Campbell (02:41:23):
It's overhyped. But let tell you how it became like that because it's part of the mythology. Part of the story is very fascinating. It's actually hard to dig into the real narrative behind Pappy because it has been completely overhyped and overwritten about, I mean, for starters, it is a great story of American bourbon. So Julian Van Winkle ssr, who they called Pappy
(02:41:49):
From his teenage years, 1893. He's 18 years old, and he is a liquor wholesaler for the WL Weller and Sons company. These are old school bourbon makers and is not as uncommon in that era of 15 years or so. Later in his thirties, he and another salesman for WL Weller, a guy named Alex Farsley, they actually buy WL Weller. So they take it over, and these are liquor wholesalers, so they are buying and bottling elsewhere and push it out and buy 1910, they buy the distillery, which is in Louisville. So Arthur Stitzel comes along with it. He's having financial problems, and so now they're all working together. He had been a major supplier for WL Weller in the first place. So these guys have been selling stuff. They already had a relationship letting how these things happen. Then of course, prohibition comes into play, but they managed to negotiate with the government to remain open as a distillery because they're producing medicinal whiskey.
Leo Laporte (02:42:51):
Wait, what?
Richard Campbell (02:42:53):
There was a set of distilleries that were able to convince the government that they made whiskey for medicinal purposes and so they didn't have to close
Leo Laporte (02:43:05):
Limited production. I know. What exactly did this help? What
Paul Thurrott (02:43:10):
Conditions was this the treatment for? It's like one of those animals, people bring on planes, but it's like something,
Richard Campbell (02:43:17):
I really have a lot of sobriety right now and whiskey fixes
Paul Thurrott (02:43:21):
That. My emotional support whiskey,
Richard Campbell (02:43:23):
Exactly.
Paul Thurrott (02:43:23):
It is, yes.
Richard Campbell (02:43:25):
I mean, and in my list of things to do for this show is to do a whole show just on prohibition because it is, oh,
Paul Thurrott (02:43:31):
You're fascinating.
Richard Campbell (02:43:32):
And the municipal with diesel will fall on that plate,
Paul Thurrott (02:43:34):
Especially the loopholes. I think that's very interesting.
Richard Campbell (02:43:38):
And this distillery fell into that and during that time, they merged, the started calling, its Weller. They also had a heads up that prohibition was going to end, so they started billing a distillery. So prohibition ends in 33 and by 35 they built a brand new distillery in Shiley, which is a suburb of Louisville where they're primarily manufacturing old Fitzgerald, which is a whiskey that still exists this day, although the brand has moved on. Stit and Farsley both die in the forties. Van Winkle runs the place by himself until the sixties, and then he passes it on to his son, Julian Van Winkle Jr. Who operates it until he's at his eighties as well. And then the third generation, Julian, the third takes over. Now though whiskey was not rare, popular in the seventies, other high balls and so forth came in. We've talked about this before.
(02:44:30):
And so they were struggling and actually sold the whole organization to a company called Norton Simon. But part of that agreement was that Julian was able to still buy the aging barrels, the barrels that were still sitting in the distillery. So the distillery was going to be run by a different company, but he had all these barrels light up. So it's like, well, let me keep using the barrel spaces and I'll just buy the barrels and resell 'em. I would argue the story of Pap van Manel really hubs around Julian ii because at this moment he sold his distillery, but he still owns a bunch of barrels. Well, actually doesn't even own the barrels. He has the right to purchase them, and he is getting them bottled elsewhere, and he's just selling the product right now. Norton Simon, you've never heard of it, ends up in a series of mergers.
(02:45:15):
Eventually by the nineties it becomes United Distillers. Those are the folks that both had still distilleries in Ireland and Scotland today is now Diageo. They're doing a barrel storage for other folks as well. In fact, by the nineties, they shut down the distillery entirely. They're just doing barrel storage. The barrels are starting to run out. So now we're in the nineties out, they're getting low, but stuff's getting old and Julian's trying to figure out, can I sell old bourbon? Most bourbons not aged longer than five or six years. Here he is with these twenties. So in 1994, he makes the first Pappy Vanwinkle. It was an old name. There was real old Rip Van Winkles, a few others, but to make Pappy with his grandfather has a picture of his grandfather smoking a cigar on the outside of it.
(02:46:09):
He had a saying, and it was always bottle less than you can sell, leave him wanting, remember, he doesn't own a distillery. He doesn't have all of those expenses. He's picking the best barrels out of Thatit cell barrel house, getting them bottled and selling them out immediately. Now United Solos becomes Diageo. They eventually, rehabil is still the distillery in 2014, but that's secondary to the point. Okay? When he gets to 1998, he makes an addition. The first Pappy 23, and he puts it into the World Spirits Championship where it scores an unprecedented and never duplicated. 99 out of a hundred, that is the mythology was the 99 out of a hundred for the 1998 World Spirits Championship. But it was also not to last. He was out of barrels. And so by 2002, he cuts a deal with the RAC company, which is the Buffalo Trace Distillery.
(02:47:11):
That's when this brand moves there and they actually now start new production and barreling. Now, Buffalo Traces makes a huge number of whiskeys, and again, we've talked about things like Blanton's and Elmer Tea and e h Taylor Weller. That's where w l Weller ended up. Eagle Rare is there, Buffalo Trace and so on. And they also make rums and Jits and so forth. It is a big production facility, and so they're very organized and they have famously three mash bills on how they make their whiskey. And Pappy Van Winkle falls at the Bash Bill three, which is a wheated whiskey, which wasn't originally, it used to be a rye whiskey, but now it's a wheated whiskey with a high amount of wheat, like 15% wheat, pretty high. We don't know exactly how much. W h Weller has exactly the same, the same mashville. And by the way, I've drank a lot of Weller. I've drank a lot of Pappy. Really not a lot of difference between the two. Interesting. So the new version of Pappy Wan Winkle comes out in 2011, and that's the Pappy 15, which is a barrel strength. Bourbon comes out at 53%, very high for bourbon, retails about $120, and it's a hit. It's not a 99 out of a hundred hit, but remember that whiskey does not exist anymore.
(02:48:38):
The new 20 comes out a couple of years later, retails for about 200 bucks, and it's 45%. It's actually the lowest, lowest, and then the new 23 at 48% retails for about $300, not that you can buy it for that price. So it's not actually the same product. Right. They had to standardize to fit the Buffalo Trade production line. Those last spit fill bottles are highly prized that were sold in the nineties from about 94 to 98 last year in December, a Pappy 23 from the 98 edition sold for 52,000 us. I'm telling you about a whiskey you can't buy. It is mythological. In fact, it's also highly hacked at you can sell an empty Pappy bottle on eBay, a hundred bucks and then interesting with whatever, put the zeal on it and try and resell it. So hey, don't buy whiskey from eBay, please. It's
Paul Thurrott (02:49:36):
Just common sense life advice really. Yeah.
Richard Campbell (02:49:39):
10 years ago, a game I used to play in the northeast running from Kentucky up to as far as Boston is going to little liquor stores in the backwoods that are old, that have been around a hundred years, which you find up there because they often were still on the allocation from the happy folks, and they would have a bottle every sot that they were selling for retail. That is over. You just can't find this stuff anymore. But we can't tell the story of Pappy Van Windle without talking about the heist. There's a movie. They made a movie. Oh, what's the name of the movie? The Heist. I have to watch it. So here's the story behind the movie. In 2013, the Buffalo Trace Distillery filed a report with the police about over 200 bottles of Pappy Van Winkle being stolen from the distillery. It didn't take very, within a year or so, they had figured it out.
(02:50:38):
It was an inside job. It was a guy named Toby Inger who worked for the distillery in transportation and delivery, had not just been stealing Pappy. He'd been stealing everything. It turns out that bourbon facilities are not particularly secure, and he would relabel barrels for disposal and he'd dispose of 'em except they were full of eagle rare. And he had discovered that while the Pappy stays in locked cabinets, the hinges weren't welded in. And so he'd knock the hinges out and just take some bottles with them every so often. And so when they finally caught up with him, he had every kind of whiskey from Buffalo Trace STS of it and was quietly selling it on the side. Actually, not all that quietly. He was also selling steroids on the side. He was big on weeded. Most criminals are not that bright though. Prosecutors went after them as a crime syndicate, so they really threw the book at them. They provided evidence to show that he'd been stealing from the distillery starting back in 2008, three to 2015, when they finally caught up with them. Here's the one that's going to get you, are you ready? 200 plus bottles of Pappy stolen because they were taken out of bond without properly being taxed. It's now a legal whiskey
Paul Thurrott (02:51:49):
And
Richard Campbell (02:51:50):
You can't guarantee the quality on it, and they all have to be destroyed. What,
Paul Thurrott (02:51:57):
If
Richard Campbell (02:51:57):
Anything, it should be worth
Paul Thurrott (02:51:58):
More?
Richard Campbell (02:51:59):
Well, I would totally agree. Make a deal with the government. Pay the taxes. Don't guarantee the quality because you really don't know what he did with him. What's handled by a guy who likes to combine steroids and marijuana, so he can't be that, right? Who knows? They may have been overheated. They're certainly mishandled. You don't know what you're going to get, but they're certainly covered in mythology. But all that stuff, everything he stole, ordered to be destroyed. Hey, you want to taste it? Look, you're not going to find it. It's always go to a bar. You've got to to a bar.
Leo Laporte (02:52:31):
You
Richard Campbell (02:52:31):
Can enter the auction. You can check with bars. They'll never put it on the menu, but you can
Leo Laporte (02:52:35):
Ask for it if you go to a fancy place, especially in the Napa Valley, some of them have Las Las Vegas. Pappy Vegas. Vegas, yeah, they'll give you, but
Richard Campbell (02:52:45):
If you want to know what it tastes like, you like
Leo Laporte (02:52:47):
Shot for a couple hundred bucks or something. Yeah.
Richard Campbell (02:52:49):
If you want to know what it tastes like, go find yourself a bottle of WL Weller, the Weller 15, the Weller Reserve. It's a
Leo Laporte (02:52:59):
Pappy 15
Richard Campbell (02:53:00):
All day long. Same mash, very much the same style. It's really
Leo Laporte (02:53:05):
Not that different.
Richard Campbell (02:53:05):
And it's
Leo Laporte (02:53:06):
From Buffalo Trace too, right?
Richard Campbell (02:53:08):
It's all the same distillery. It's the same Nashville, it's the same Rick houses. It's the same barrels.
Leo Laporte (02:53:14):
Interesting. It's interesting, but is it the same bottle? I think we can all agree. It's not, it's ugly. I don't like it.
Richard Campbell (02:53:21):
Yeah,
Leo Laporte (02:53:22):
No, I don't like it.
Richard Campbell (02:53:23):
I mean, it's fine. And they're making all kinds of special editions and so forth. These are profitable, right? This is the same thing that's happened to running shoes where you make as many different brands, small watts, remember right from the very beginning, Julian ii, he figured out, don't make less than what people want, so that you create the sense.
Leo Laporte (02:53:47):
That's why I always deliver less than what people want. It just really is a life strategy. It's why we keep all of these shows to under an hour.
Richard Campbell (02:53:55):
Yeah, and I'm not going to say anything good about the movie Heist
Leo Laporte (02:54:01):
Telling a great movie, but it's a good story
Richard Campbell (02:54:05):
Story. And they obviously had to adapt it for the movie in the Criminals, but it felt like, I can't tell the story of Happy if you don't talk about the Heist, because the fact that he was stealing all the other booze, nobody cared. That was fine. It was only when a bunch, because there was so little of it that they could 200 bottles, he was stealing whole barrels of eagle rare, nobody noticed.
Leo Laporte (02:54:31):
I think just saying Pappy Van Winkle is fun. I think that's half of, I know. To me that's half of it too. It sounds like it's this backwards moonshine stuff. Pappy,
Richard Campbell (02:54:42):
But it is his very old bourbon,
Leo Laporte (02:54:45):
Pappy and his brother slappy buffalo trace distillery.com. Pappy Van Winkle, get the 23. It'll only be a few grand.
Richard Campbell (02:54:57):
I would argue you'd get the 15 if you can find it. It's the only barrel strength. I think it's got the most flavor of the bunch, and it's a heck of a lot more. So get
Leo Laporte (02:55:04):
The 15. Well, that's good advice. You saved us a little money there.
Richard Campbell (02:55:09):
But again, try the Weller first, the ER reserve. Try that first. You'll find it'll be easier to find a very comparable of the 15.
Leo Laporte (02:55:17):
Interesting
(02:55:18):
That there is. Richard Campbell, he is the star of Run as Radio and Net Rocks run as radio.com joins us every week for Windows Weekly. Paul Throt on your left, he is of course theGuy@throt.com. It'd be funny if he wasn't, but anyway, T H U R O t t throt.com. Be a premium member. You'll get, I think all of the articles we described today were premium, so you need to be a premium. That's where it is. And while you're at it, you might want to get a copy of Windows Everywhere, his latest book@leanpub.com or the Field Guide to Windows 10. I think last time I looked subscribing to the premium, get you the Field guide, I think. Am I wrong? So
Richard Campbell (02:56:02):
Right now, the way it works, you get the web version, but we have a new newsletter called Windows
Leo Laporte (02:56:06):
Intelligence, and if you subscribe to that, you do get Windows 11
Richard Campbell (02:56:09):
Field guide. That's
Leo Laporte (02:56:10):
What it was. Yes, Mr. Ott. Mr. Campbell, thank you so much. We do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern. That would be 1800 UTC for the next couple of weeks. Anyway, until we go to Standard Time, you can watch us do it live at Live twit tv. There's live audio and video there. Chat with us live in our discord for Club TWIT members. And if you're not a Club Twit member, there's an IRC channel at IRC twit tv after the fact. The show's available at twit tv slash dub dub for Windows Weekly, and there's a YouTube channel called Windows Weekly. But the best thing to do, find a good podcast player and subscribe because that way you'll always have a copy
Richard Campbell (02:56:53):
So you
Leo Laporte (02:56:54):
Can listen at your leisure. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Richard. We'll, have a great week. We'll see you, Paul. You're going to be still at home. You're not going to Mexico next week?
Richard Campbell (02:57:04):
I'll be in Mexico next week.
Leo Laporte (02:57:05):
Okay. Paul's on his way. Where will you be? Porto.
Richard Campbell (02:57:12):
Oh,
Leo Laporte (02:57:12):
Porto. Nice. Porto,
Richard Campbell (02:57:15):
Porto,
Leo Laporte (02:57:15):
Portugal,
Richard Campbell (02:57:16):
Right? Yes.
Leo Laporte (02:57:18):
Damn, you don't get to rest much, do you, Richard? Wow. Well, I look forward to it.
Richard Campbell (02:57:25):
We'll
Leo Laporte (02:57:25):
Be in Portugal and Mexico next week on Windows Weekly. I hope you'll be where you are, and we'll join us. We'll see you then. Bye-bye.
Lou Maresca (02:57:33):
Come join us on this weekend, enterprise tech expert. COAs and I talk about the enterprise world, and we're joined by industry professionals and trailblazers like CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, every acronym, role plus IT pros and marketeers, and we talk about technology, software plus services, security, you name it, everything under the 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.
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