Windows Weekly 860 Transcript

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

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly, the last episode of 2023. But boy do we have a surprise for you, a very special visitor as we look back at Microsoft's year 2023 and ahead to 2024, with a friend from the past. Windows Weekly is next. This is Windows Weekly, with Paul Theron and Richard Campbell, episode 860 for Wednesday, december 20th 2023. An unexpected visitor Windows Weekly is brought to you by CashFly, delivering rich media content up to 159% faster than other major CDNs. Join CashFly, the world's fastest CDN. Your website visitors will love CashFly's lag-free video loading, hyper-fast downloads and friction-free transaction processing. Learn how to get your first month free at cashflycom.

01:08
It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we cover the latest news from Microsoft, last show of 2023. Paul Therata's here. Richard Campbell is here. It's the most wonderful time of year. Happy Pointe Saturday, everyone. We have placed poisonous plants around the studio. Don't eat that ball. Oh sorry, in honor of Pointe Saturday, my ugly shirt. I was going to wear the Microsoft one, but I wore that a couple of weeks ago. I'm here to delete your cookies Is that from Google.

01:43
I think Lisa made it for me With her bare hands. She knitted it, but hello you two, paul, I don't want to be that guy, but didn't you promise that there would be something special today?

01:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Did.

01:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I yeah, like, is Chris Cappicella here, or something like that? Oh, there is something like that. What? Yes, I'm ready, you have the switch.

02:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Shall, I press the switch.

02:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You have the con as we say Okay, I do not know, it's fader four, let's turn on fader four. Mystery guest. Would you sign in, please? Fader four.

02:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hello, this is like a really bad episode of the dating game.

02:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's hello. If I press Q again, will she go away? Yes, okay, just curious. Mary Jo Foley, oh my God, it's so good to see you, thank you.

02:46 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
I see all of you.

02:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just for the record, I have begged this woman for a year to come on the show again, and then the other day she's like hey, how about if I come on?

02:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my God, really that's awesome.

02:58 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
But then he said when you come on, though, you have to wear a Mark Risenovich mask.

03:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That would be funny.

03:04 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Mark Risenovich mask.

03:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That would be funny. It probably is a special run you'll have to wear Well.

03:11 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Mary Jo, how are you? I'm good, nice seeing you.

03:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So listen. Since it's been a while, I thought we'd go back through all the old show notes and just talk about the stuff that you missed, Do you mind?

03:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah 111 episodes ago.

03:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I'm only going to catch up all at once.

03:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How long has it been since you've been called? Actually, I don't remember.

03:31 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
My last show was the last week of October 2022.

03:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so it's been a little more than a year, yeah, and how are things at your new employer, which is a research firm right, or an analyst?

03:44 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Right Directions on Microsoft. Yeah, the best Microsoft watching firm.

03:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very, very good and you're happy. Everything's going well, yeah.

03:54 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yeah, I've spent a lot of the past year, I was said to Paul I'm learning a lot about licensing. Maybe I could do like hidden gems about Microsoft licensing, yeah.

04:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, we're not doing that. You know what? Actually, we're running a little short on time, I'm sorry.

04:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I made a whole run as on the topic with her. Nobody wants to talk about licensing.

04:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Licensing learnings this week on Windows. We're like that's exciting, oh neat. So you write mostly, you do a podcast for them, or what do you?

04:22 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yep, we're doing a blog. We have our own blog now, nice, nice, and I've been writing other content for them with them, and it's been you know what? I thought I knew something about the enterprise. I didn't until I went there. I'm like, oh, I knew nothing. Wow, I knew nothing at all about the enterprise.

04:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you were our enterprise, you were our enterprise person. So that's a little disappointing.

04:45 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
I know, I know, but you know what?

04:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I mean I had.

04:48 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
I had a good basis for it.

04:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, at least that You're selling yourself short. I'm sure you were fully up to speed.

04:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
One of those things that the deeper you go, the more you find.

04:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's the problem. Yeah, it's an endless.

05:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Indeed it's licenses all the way down.

05:03 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
It sure is.

05:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How neat. So this is. This is the podcast. You have the blog Really great, and I bet you're having a lot of fun without us.

05:15 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yeah, it's. It's been really, really educational to see the questions that come in from enterprise customers and just the things they're struggling with. It's it's just as a journalist you're always looking for the new, new, new and then you see, oh, they're stuck on, like all versions of windows. You're trying to figure out how to stay compliant and governance and all these topics. As a journalist, you're like, oh no, I don't want to talk.

05:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't want to, I don't want to. I was just like how do I non-rudely say how boring?

05:44 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
No, but it's, but there's actually a lot there.

05:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's the day to day. You know real life thing.

05:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The organization I've ever dealt with has one trouble app, like one app that won't run the latest. Anything requires SQL Server 2012, requires net booing network like something, and it's just and it's essential to the business. And then, and no two companies are the same, it's just, it's impossible it is.

06:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, mary Jo, welcome back. I guess, paul, did you prepare something special for our special guest, or we just could do the same old same.

06:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's pretty much the same old, same old, but it's also the last year show of the year, last live show of the year. So I thought we should you know our. Actually Mary Jo suggested that we should do the thing we used to do, which sort of look back, look ahead, you know fantastic stuff. I love that. She's got some back of the book stuff.

06:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I do as well, so it'll be kind of fun, all right. Yes, our back of the book looks robust today.

06:44 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
It does. Are we going to have beer and liquor? It's pick.

06:47 - AI song (Other)
Oh yeah, beer and brown liquor. It's going to be a real life.

06:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, the way the Scots like to drink, it Big beer.

06:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not like a Pennsylvania supermarket. It has beer and hard liquor.

07:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow. So we're going to go to the package store of Windows Weekly's the packy, yeah, the packy. So kick us off. I see the Ted headline says our national nightmare is over. So, mary Jo's back.

07:17 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
I was back. No, no no. Not.

07:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Mary Jo, that's not what that means. No, I, you know this is sort of a side topic. Surely you folks have noticed that the national discourse has gotten a little extreme and I've noticed this spillover into our world, right, that I don't mind. Maybe I brought this up a few weeks ago, but everyone is like, so like, like about everything. You know this has been a bug in Windows 11 for over a year. I I feel like this has been in Windows 11. I mean Windows forever. I don't think I think this predates Windows 11, but whatever where you're working in some applications and window and file explorer jumps to the front, right, there's only two reactions to that statement. You say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I have experienced that and I thought it was me. Like, I thought maybe I did something wrong, maybe I was typing and I hit some keek thing and it made fingers something, yeah. But then you have the couple of people are like yeah, that never happens and it's like I can have news for you.

08:17
Yeah, it does happen. Like it actually. It's not like something that's some configuration problem. Like it literally is just it's a bug in Windows, like it's. So anyway, they fixed. They fixed it in a preview update that went out the other day, actually, but it had been last week, and that means it will be in the non preview stable version of Windows 11 starting in January. They've they fixed it. We don't all have it, but if you are reluctant to install these preview updates, I would say maybe give this one a shot, because this is a good one. Yep, it's a bad, it's a bad problem.

08:53 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
So what happens is you're just working in another app and suddenly file explorer jumps out and opens. So I've never had that happen. I'm just gonna see You're one of those people.

09:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I am one of those people.

09:03 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
So, Windows.

09:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Windows has long had kind of what I would call like a focus problem. You know where anything could happen and the you know you're typing as it's supposed to, knowing when you're typing, you know typing a password or something that happens to me all the time I'm in a website, some other thing jumps to the front. You're like come on and now you don't even know where you were because it's, you know, blocked out or whatever. But the file explorer one is very specific.

09:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a, it's a bug with file explorer, obviously, but no, and I've renamed a file by accident in the process. I have deleted a file by accident in the process, like or two, and you don't know which one you deleted. Like what? Yeah, and the nightmare.

09:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now this will not solve all of the other very real problems with file explorer, including performance and reliability issues, which I also see all day long, every day, because I'm doing that photo, photo console, a consolidation thing, where I'm dealing with lots of files and like, literally between lunch and the show I was working up on the laptop on that, it happened twice. I had a force quit. You know, as we say in the magic world or whatever you know, task manager, kill, uh, explore that easy twice in just that short time span.

10:13 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
So that stuff that's not getting fixed, not anytime soon, but I haven't been on the show since they changed file explorer so I haven't had the opportunity to rant about Joe They've been.

10:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
they have changed it twice since you've been on the show.

10:28 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
I just the first time I really noticed the change. You know me, I never noticed visual changes. I like open file explorer and I'm like what has happened to file explorer?

10:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I like that you've noticed something.

10:40 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
I did. And then I thought I can get around this by setting tabs, so I can set each of my folders as a tab. But every time I have to do something, reboot or something goes wrong and my machine crashes, all the tabs go away and then I have to do it all over again.

10:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this is a micro, this is kind of a Microsoft one on one. They'll fix that in a future release. So remember when virtual desktops finally arrived in, I think it was Windows 10. There being a hidden feature in Windows for a long time that was the same issue To reboot, you like, hey, my virtual desktops all disappeared. Okay, we're going to bring those back. It's like, okay, can we name them? Yeah, we'll do that too. But over time they sort of add those features. So I would imagine that with notepad you know this because he is notepad notepad does that session state remember feature right? I wouldn't file explorer to do the same thing.

11:25 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
I know.

11:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I bet it happens.

11:27 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
By the way, a great change to notepad.

11:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You don't hear me say that often the state thing is fantastic yeah yeah, yeah, I actually turned that off, but I understand why you would like no, but I know we haven't talked about notepads since October 2022. Right, we're talking about notepad within five minutes of right now, because it's actually one of the topics.

11:48 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Excellent. I'm glad I came on this episode so yeah, very exciting.

11:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's the notepad episode.

11:54 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
It is. It's a notepad kind of. Christmas.

11:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
A cull in with your notepad tips and with the audience.

12:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
When I shut down all the machines before I left the house, because you know the power is going to turn off, that's to have them off. And I had a couple of notepads open because I pop it open, write some notes and leave it and sure enough, that hung the shutdown. I said for shutdown because I know it's going to save the content anyway when I can get power back up. There you go, nice.

12:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, thank you for joining us, Mary Jo. It was a great time.

12:25 - AI song (Other)
Thanks for having me, I'll see you again, or how do you want?

12:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
to say Nice All right.

12:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you want to move on to? I do yes, windows 11 and Microsoft 365.

12:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh nice, yeah. So Microsoft. Anyone who kind of follows Windows probably knows that with each new release of Windows whether it's a new version of Windows 10 in the day or Windows 11 now Microsoft will release a list of features that they are deprecating and oftentimes also released a list of features they have removed right from this version of Windows. But this has changed, just like the updating scheme has completely changed. After Microsoft said a year ago, hey, we're just going to update you once a year, and then updated us 15 times in 12 months, they were actually deprecating features very aggressively now and in a way they have not ever really done in the past.

13:17
So I have the. Let me see if I can find the number of this, because I wrote this in here somewhere, but I rather than delay this. But yes, so last year, in 2022, they deprecated two features in 2023. Actually, now it's 17. When I wrote this, it was 16. They've deprecated one since I wrote this post, so they don't do that once a year thing anymore, right, and we have theories about why this may be. I think it might actually have to do with some of the regulation stuff that's coming in the EU, especially where they have to give people choice over what they can do in Windows and so forth, and I think just from a support cost perspective they're like we're going to set chop and this stuff up Well in a bunch of our security related right TLS one to one point one.

14:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, All the things like these are all vulnerability things.

14:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, even WordPad had security issues associated with it, and you know you just can't support that stuff forever, right? So yeah, it's been kind of interesting. I wrote this because I saw something about some the legacy console mode was being deprecated and I was like, huh, they just deprecated, like you know well, nope or a WordPad and tips, and then they had a list when they released 23H2, but I'm like also like Cortana was deprecated. So I went and looked it up and it's like no, they've deprecated like dozens of these things. So I think this is just going to keep happening. I think it's the, you know, the Yang to the updates Yin, yin, yin.

14:49 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
I was going to ask you if you feel like it might be the new regime and charge of Windows who are watching number two those kind of things like they're like. This is a mess, let's clean it up.

15:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, so, yeah, this back until about a year ago, I would say Microsoft and Apple were on the opposite extreme of this. I think a lot of people would agree. Maybe Microsoft's a little too slow getting rid of legacy, you know features, and Apple was maybe a little too aggressive, you know. And so they're obviously leaning much more to the Apple side of this fence right now, and I don't I don't have a problem with it. Honestly, I'm not suggesting that there it's too much. When you look at the things they're deprecating, typically there's a newer, more modern feature that replaces it, for one thing, I mean not taking away functionality and again, of course, I've got the security hat on here.

15:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like you're taking away things that are dangerous.

15:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's fine. I think it's fine, I think it's good. In fact, if anything, it's overdue yeah.

15:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And maybe just be catching up here like that. They've heard a bunch of stuff and it's going to. The pace is going to drop. But I, with MJ, I do think Windows is in this new place where it's no longer the center of the company and any changes to it immediately decals the CEO, and a new team has started to assert itself and is trying to write what they think the product should be.

16:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I just agree with the updating half of this, but honestly, the deprecating part, yeah, I think this is fine, yeah.

16:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Still some experiments going on.

16:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and then let's see. Last week we would have talked about, I think, dev Canary, some other builds that I don't remember, but the Windows Insider program released its last build of the year probably Thursday, I would imagine, since we didn't talk about it to the Beta channel. It is the last build of the year. I should say Nothing, nothing all that surprising in here, in that most of this we've seen in other channels. You know, voice access, which is an accessibility feature, which, by the way, is the replacement for one of those features they deprecated. Right, the old voice recognition service. That's probably not the exact name.

16:48 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
I think it's speech recognition Speech recognition.

16:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Thank you Right. That debuted in Windows Vista. That now, well, will soon does in this beta build. Support multiple displays, those 365 features we talked about before, and then the notepad feature functionality I just alluded to. This is new to me. Maybe this is somewhere else, but I hadn't seen this. So notepad, in this version, supports and edit with notepad right click option when you're in file anywhere, like on the desktop right, so you can right click something and edit it with notepad directly without having to go through open with whatever if it's a supported file type. And then also that character account display, which was not new to me. We talked about this before.

17:29
Yeah and still like, but not a word count, because that not a word count, because it's hard to do word count and I know that because I implemented it and, seriously, if I can do it, you're Microsoft. Stop embarrassing yourself.

17:39 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
So what? But they are doing character count right, Character count, yeah Great.

17:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They should do both right. I mean it should be a should be side by side, right, you can click it and have it. You know, toggle to the other end, it could be. There's all kinds of things you could do there.

17:52 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
And discord. I see people saying they love tab notepads. So I'm going to tell you I don't love tab notepads. Yeah, I don't either. I wish I could turn the tabs off. I wish it was an option. I thought I was going to love it, but it's. You can't. I don't think right.

18:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you can't. You could do like a. Well, actually, I think you can. I don't like it either if that helps, but I think you could just do. Nope, you can't. No, you actually control and opens the tab, all right. So there's another example. Like I bet this that happens over time. Right, and they'll. They'll give you that option.

18:20 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yeah, I hope so. I really did think I would use that a lot, but instead I get really confused, like what tab am I in? Well, then it randomly opens empty tabs and I'm like no, I'm way over here.

18:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, as a compulsive idiot, I will tell you one of the among these stupid things that I do while I'm using a computer is I will close documents and files and windows compulsively and then realize they need to go back to that thing. And I do this all the time and it's I'm too late. I'm not even going to try to fix this, but I do this all the time. And what I've noticed with the new notepad is because I'm constantly opening like a set of certain files, a lot in this case related to the book it opens. I keep opening the same files over and over again. So I have an opad window that has like eight tabs and seven of them are one file, the same file Like it should not.

19:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It should know that it's already open and not open that again or prompt you or something, but it doesn't, and so that's kind of a weird little and for developers I do, disabling a new feature or something you building on day one because you set anyway, but the assess that the file is already open and only open that one. That's definitely a later feature kind of thing. It's a good idea but it does take some thinking, yep.

19:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think we're going to get that there too. Actually, I'm not like upset about it, it's just you see it and you're like, okay, you know, how much of a development do we really need? Yeah, you understand what happened, but it's like, whatever, it's not, it's not a huge deal, but I, I do configure it not to open and not to save the session state and if I open seven tabs of the same document, close the thing and open it. They, you know, they're gone, except the third of the seven will be like hey, did you want to save the change? She's like oh, I don't know. You know like I don't know what, the new one, I don't know.

19:59
Anyway, okay, and then I just threw this in here because we don't really have a formal Microsoft 365 section today, because it's the only story, but this was just announced as the show started and it's in this random tech community blog post. It's really about teams extensibility, not just via apps, but also now a you know, copilot plugins right, for those people in Microsoft 365, copilot. And they revealed in this post that teams now has 320 million users. Right, and I think it was. It was 300, right? Was it the last number? We got Something like that?

20:32 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yeah, I think what we got yeah, it was 300.

20:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I don't I don't have this in front of me because, again, it just happened. But they also revealed that there are now over 2000 apps in a team store and over, and we don't get to see these, but enterprises have built over 145,000 custom line of business apps for teams as well. That's ensuring that this thing will be with us for the rest of our lives.

20:57 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
I know they did. Actually they did save this number. I just looked it up during their earnings, but I don't remember it being a big deal.

21:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It must have just kind of been under their radar. I might have. That's the type of number I would have forgotten and or I would also point out, serene is the VP of product management for teams Like.

21:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's actually a very senior person right in the blog post, so it's worked late in the year and it's taken this.

21:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, by the way, writing a blog post to that blog, especially because there is a Microsoft 365 blog which is far more well promoted and so forth. This is a basically supportmicrosoftcom. I mean, it's kind of it's interesting. This is another one of my long standing pet piece, microsoft. You have too many places where you put stuff. You know, if you have an announcement to make about Microsoft 365 or teams or whatever, maybe it should be one place.

21:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And it's a it's a really extensive post. Like it's really an analysis of what they've done in the past year, as well as talking about what's going to come in the next year. Like it's, this is one of the roadmap posts.

21:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's kind of important. He drove into a very dark Microsoft campus yesterday today, turned some lights on in the building he works in, someone else was there and he started typing, you know, and he's like I think I'm going to let this take its own form here. I'm just going to go nuts, because I'm pretty sure that campus is mostly empty right now.

22:17 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yeah, people are good yeah.

22:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What is it like? Five days, yeah, five days before Christmas, right yeah.

22:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, well, and he is low, he is in Redmond, so I suspect he typed it from home. But yeah, interesting, and this almost reads like an internal email about how we did this year. Yeah, maybe it's just been polished a little to be put in the public. I'm not sure why, but I mean I'm not happy because this is good info, like they did a lot this year, yep.

22:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's a great post. It would have been a great post on the Microsoft 365 blog, which is where I looked for it first, yeah, but yeah, it's not there.

22:54
Interesting Yep. Speaking about this is also semi related in the sense that this should have been promoted more widely. Actually, now that you guys are both here, I will ask you now publicly we all know the whole story about Co-Pilot and the rebranding and the extensibility story and how plugins will work across chat, gpt and Co-Pilot and wherever Co-Pilot is right. So in Windows 11, in Bing, in Edge, I guess, in Bing and in Microsoft 365, right, you can write a plugin that targets Co-Pilot and or chat GPT and it should. It will work everywhere, right? And I believe the last time they discussed this was Ignite, where they did not say they're available, just that this capability is now available, right, right, does that sound okay? Do either of you recall either, or recall Microsoft announcing that actually those plugins are now available, or some are now available? Do you really like, don't you think, that the very first one? They would have said hey, there it is, we did it. Here's the first plugin. Does anyone remember this?

24:04 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
I think it was somewhere. Maybe you know how we went to that September event where Microsoft talked about. Co-pilot in New York. I think they talked a lot about plugins there and I think shortly after that there was a Bing blog post about it, it was okay, I don't remember this, but I agree with you. I didn't really notice them until they just announced this song one. Yeah.

24:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, right, which is how I found this out. So, before we get to that, I just want to say, real quickly, when you think about it, when you think about a platform of any kind, whether it's Windows or Teams, which now has thousands of apps, right, this is the legitimacy point. Right, microsoft has, super aggressively, in one year, planned, announced, orchestrated, released and rebranded twice a Co-Pilot platform for AI, assistance or whatever, whatever you would call this thing, and a big part of it, a big part of it being legitimate, is this extensibility bit, right, the plugins, extensions, whatever they call plugins. So Microsoft, like Mary just said, microsoft announced a new capability, as they described it, to create music, now with Co-Pilot, using a partnership with a company called Suno I had never heard of, but if you go to suenoai, you'll see what they do is make music. And they said you know the way you enable this is click on plugins.

25:23
And I'm like wait, click on plugins. What are you talking about? Is that a thing? And yeah, if you go to notbingcom, necessarily, although maybe it's there, but go to co-pilotmicrosoftcom, preferably in Edge, which is a sentence you will never hear me say again Sign in. You have to sign in with Microsoft account. You will see that there are several plugins available today, including Instacart, kayak, clarna, which is a shopping service, I guess Open table Shop Search, which I assume is theirs or is probably just that. One's probably just built. These are open AI plugins. These are open AI plugins. Oh, interesting. Okay, so you have also co-pilot plugins which apparently are separate.

26:05
Okay, interesting so, but there's surface now here, yeah. So all I'm saying is I think this warranted a bigger or an actual announcement.

26:17 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yeah maybe it's because they're soft launching it.

26:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, this feels soft launching for a reason yeah okay, I know, have you tried the song one?

26:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. I couldn't get it to come back. It should be a soft launch, I think, Like it's it told me it would come back in a few minutes and it's been a day. Yeah, so it has not. Yeah, right on the song.

26:39 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
I actually asked it to write a little song about Windows Weekly, the podcast and I have to say it wasn't something I'd like to share with the group. No, no, no, it wasn't that great Well actually okay.

26:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now this time it came right back. It came back with lyrics, okay.

26:57 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yeah, it comes back with lyrics Like and then the little slider button that's under plugins it shuts off, even though it says it's using it, which is kind of strange right, no, that's kind of funny. So I think it's not really working right. This is working a little bit better.

27:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But where's the? How do I hear it?

27:11 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
That's what I couldn't figure out.

27:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because it's been a while since I've seen your face, but every year in and my thoughts and memories, memories. The snow is falling, the lights are shining bright. I can't wait to catch up and hold you tight. Hold you tight, merry Joe folio. Finally home for Christmas. Home for Christmas Now, oh, and then it says I've submitted.

27:30 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
It's supposed to play music for you, somehow right.

27:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It says I've submitted your request to create a song about her. It will be ready in a few minutes. So that's what I got yesterday and it never came back.

27:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'll just bring it right back with lyrics. I like the lyrics.

27:42 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
I got the lyrics, yeah.

27:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, this says you need to click on the audio icon below the lyrics to listen to it.

27:50 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
But I tried to do that.

27:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't have an audio Wait, wait, wait, I see it. It was a thing, this thing.

27:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's just an emoji. Oh, that's an emoji. Oh yeah, I see it. I'm not saying nothing.

28:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It also says you can visit Suno and play the song there.

28:04 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Well, we're just waiting. You might have to join Suno.

28:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How long will it take to create the song I'm asking? That was one of the buttons Searching. Yeah, the time depends on the genre, the style, the complexity, the skill of the producer. According to web sources, the four to five days.

28:24 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Four to five days wow.

28:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
However, oh no, they're talking about a regular song.

28:28 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
I could write a song in four to five days.

28:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I could write a song in four to five days.

28:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a powerful tool that uses artificial intelligence to generate songs in minutes. You can expect your song to be ready in less than 10 minutes.

28:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, okay, by the way. So interestingly, when I signed into my account on sunoai my Microsoft account the songs I tried to create yesterday are now there.

28:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Ah, so it did render them eventually, but the one I just made is not here.

28:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's been a while. I like this one for Mary Jo Foley. We're gonna, it's gonna be a wonderful holiday tune. Excellent, everyone will be singing, unless I'm missing something.

29:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't believe you can create an instrumental song which is kind of what I would really wanna use as far as lyrics, I think that's what it was supposed to be right, wasn't it?

29:07 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
It was supposed to be.

29:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know, but my first attempts were all instrumental songs, and one of them has an opera lady singing in it, which is terrible. And opera lady.

29:16 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Not what I'm looking for. Yeah, I stand by my point. I think it's a soft launch because it's not really written.

29:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, well, anyway, it's nice they turn on the plug because, if you're right, richard, these look like the open AI plugins.

29:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, there's clearly two sets there's a co-pilot plugins and there's open AI plugins. They both are, and then they've also thrown into the category teams extensions like this, Right, yeah. Oh, right, they've also that would be a stretch.

29:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Notice that you can enable three at a time. Oh, that's a limit.

29:50 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yeah. Well hey, this is free.

29:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I paid 20 bucks a month for open AI's chat, gpt, so free, you know, I don't care.

30:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And we are going with the holiday season and this time last year everyone's getting an amort of chat GPT. So I think it's important to line up the tools for people to get a substantial with software and over another holiday season.

30:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Am I crazy to think that the real future of AI is gonna be running it locally on your system? Maybe not, but I just feel like.

30:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it's hybrid, but, yes, I think, running it locally. Honestly, this is Apple's one contribution to this space, was it's built in. That matters a lot, and the more you can do locally, the better it's gonna be.

30:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And well, I don't know if it'll be better, but it'll be better for them. I mean, I don't think sustainable, I think it will be better.

30:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just from a latency perspective, right?

30:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean assuming that stuff is local what you need, yeah except for that part where the guys, the folks that are leading this, are all cloud companies.

30:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, yeah, there's some motivation problems, well, but you know, okay, but here's an interesting thing that may be true of Apple eventually, but it's true today of Google and Microsoft. They're both building AI processors yeah, for both spaces, right. And the tensor processor that Google has on their phones is related in some way to the tensor process right, they have the data center, I mean.

31:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I bet there's some interesting overlap there, yeah, and I think there's gonna be a race for standard interfaces so that your code runs well on that device as well, but at least initially, it's going to be the vendors. You know who runs tensor best on Android Google yeah.

31:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have to say, though, when I bought my new laptop, I bought it with as much like four terabytes of storage and the fastest NPU. This is the Apple M3 Max and a fast NPU, because I think I hope it's my dream to run these models locally. By the way, right now, I think that's what you told she must be obeyed anyway.

31:42
Yeah, I think that the problem, of course, is gonna be these models are ginormous and you can't and they're not open. Many of them, so the one LMS, are. There are many other models that aren't. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point too, and it may not be LMS that win.

32:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's lots of local, especially open source.

32:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like the lots of local I'm, using Lama, which is Facebook's, which was initially leaked, and then I think they opened it.

32:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is Microsoft. Is it Microsoft Fi2?

32:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess you look at the models I have on here. I'm using something called chat GPT for all.

32:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You should be using Windows AI Studio.

32:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Or I could use that if I had been to use a Windows machine.

32:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You do have a Windows machine in your hands, with an NPU, and it's called a Mac.

32:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's true. In fact it runs Windows quite nicely, so I can do it all in the it's a Visual Studio actually.

32:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yes, it's a Visual Studio Code extension or plugin. What do they call it there? For some reason, every product has to have a different name for this. Yeah, brad was bugging me about this today. I've never even looked at it yet. But yeah, you can try that. I think open source may, in a way, be kind of the future of all of this right?

32:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No or no, it's hard to know.

33:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
At the same time, you do have like how are people using this and what tools do you want to put in the hands of anybody, versus doing a little gatekeeping for safety? Right, right, yeah, yeah. These are the models that have we're trying to keep the porn at bay, leo, that's all it is. We're trying to keep the porn at bay. Do AI porn? Now we're talking, yeah.

33:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this has quite a few available models Mistral, open, orca, mistral Instruct. Some of the differences are what is this thing? What is this? It's called GPT4ALL.

33:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's an open source client for a local model Falcon Turbo ChatGPT3.5, turbo ChatGPT4.

33:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You have to that actually you don't run locally. You actually have to have an API key for that, right? So I've installed some models. The 3.5 Turbo is local, is it? Let's see, I didn't think so. No, you need an API key. You need API key for that as well. Yeah, so those are. Neither of the ChatGPTs are local. A lot of these Orca 2 is trained by Microsoft Can be run locally, cannot be used completely. Orca 2 is trained by Microsoft, cannot be used commercially. And Orca 2 full is 6.86 gigabytes. They're pretty big. That's tolerable, I think, all that big.

34:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I mean that's. Parabytes are big, gigabytes are big.

34:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Once you got to get up to call a duty size before we start calling it big underneath gigabytes.

34:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
These are all in the gigabyte, but these are all models.

34:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
These are all mostly yeah, but that gives you what you need just to release kind of experiment and figure out what's going on.

34:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then I'm adding to it. I'm adding documents, because I'm trying to make create my Lisp expert on this thing. You know, when you laugh at me, it hurts me, it hurts my soul, aw, no.

34:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And you're the one that brought it back on Windows Weekly. Buddy Just saying, and Lisp just saying.

34:53 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Always has to be one.

34:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And we've talked about this before, but it's like this is the return of the expert system.

34:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is. It's so funny yeah.

35:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's so weird.

35:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like a class in the past. I have a new friend who works at an AI company. He's kind of an AI genius and is working at Google and Microsoft and I asked him. I said, well, if I wanted to learn how to code some of my own? He uses Python, but he studied Lisp in college and scheme. I said can I do it in Lisp? He says nobody's writing code anymore. Leo, you let the AI write the code. It's all about prompts.

35:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, your code is now his prompt shape.

35:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He said don't bother learning the code fundamentals. He said just get better at prompting. And of course you have to be able to read the code and integrate it. But basically you're more of an editor. You're an editor. That doesn't mean I don't want to get you another one of those old symbolic machines from the 1980s. Oh, you know how slow they are compared to this. Oh man, are you kidding? It's really sad. So any who the reason?

35:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
they die. We track this. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

35:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm just going to turn off my mic now, it's okay. No, no, I don't.

36:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just Okay, do an AI on a Mac and I don't know what happened anymore.

36:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm going to put on my to can go home. Bye, see you later.

36:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I think we talked about the inter Intel Meteor Lake stuff last week, right Last week, and I don't know if I brought this up, but since the show I did write an article about this because I talked to an old friend from actually from Microsoft who now works at Intel and he told me a bunch of things and the big deal with Meteor Lake was they did the mobile chips at first.

36:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, that was the thing.

36:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was the thing. But actually there's no desktop chipset, so something they did at first is is all. So the fourth-teenth gen which they're not calling it really, although it is the fourth -teenth gen there will only be mobile chipsets. They consolidated down from three kind of SKU families U, p and H and now have two. So P is gone and P was that one. They only had for the 12th and 13th gen when they started doing hybrid chipsets. There's a new GPU, arc GPU, which, by the way, is actually optional, so you can ship Meteor Lakes with the old, whatever the irisexy graphics. You can also do a dedicated GPU, but ARC is their version of kind of what Apple and Qualcomm do, where this is all in die together, and so this chip has CPU section, gpu section and P section, etc.

37:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right they're emulating the M1.

37:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, right, exactly. But yeah, I was very interested because remember I brought this up a couple of times it was curious to me they were going to do mobile first, but it's mobile only and the point here is they want to get MPUs out into the world and anticipation.

37:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I would also argue listen, you use the mobile chipset, obviously for ultrabooks, and she also used them for all the mini PCs too.

37:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, right, and I don't have this in front of me, but actually I had kind of forgotten this. But all of Intel's chipset families UH, whatever have multiple derivatives. And there was a, I think it. No, it's not this one, it was an all in one computer I got this year that had a. I think it was a K process. I didn't look it up. What is this thing? It's a desktop chipset. It may not they skip generations, I think, but it was designed specifically for small form factor computers where you know thermals are an issue, but it is a desktop class chip. But anyway, they announced UNH series, meteor like chips this past week or whenever. That was most of the. The most part is actually the eight series, which are the higher end ones, so these are going to be kind of high end, premium computers, gaming computers.

38:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
For first of any generation set you go high end because the people who wanted it, the people who pay the premium, this is how you pay off. The guy sets Um yeah, right.

38:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the other thing and I have to follow up on this the guy I talked to told me that they were also updating the Evo brand, which I don't think people understand. But, um, evo started as a brand for Intel. It's another way. You can have a sticker on your computer, right, you can have an Evo sticker. Everyone loves us, oh boy, yeah.

39:08
So the Evo brand started as a way to kind of certify that the computer met certain qualifications, you know, performance, battery life, uptime or a instant wake speed, et cetera, et cetera. And it came about not not coincidentally right after Apple announced the M one, because they wanted something they could show people and say look, this will give you the best possible experience, right? Um, I don't believe it has updated, has been updated since then. But now it has been updated. Um, this guy told me it really hadn't been. But there's a whole set of specifications now related to the MPU and some other factors. So there's a there's kind of a more stringent, um, uh, set of specifications or qualifications that PC makers have to make, uh or meet to have their computer be qualified as Evo. Now, and this I think it's third, probably third gen they don't really call it that, but I think it is a new spec for these ultra core, ultra chipsets.

39:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So kind of interesting. So now you start thinking about well, what would this look like plugged into an ATX board? Like anybody who's using a desktop PC, for the most part, it either it's archaic or you're a custom. You like building your own machines, yeah, and you want to pick a high end cooler. You want the extra space Maybe you're into the Blickey lights inside your case, like you do you so, and these larger chips lend themselves to like a daughter board mount and a big cooler which then says hey, now use your smart firmware to crank the gigahertz.

40:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm actually wondering if they won't in fact be modular is not a great word, but let's just say modular in this sense that just like you could add a math coprocessor back in the year 86 s days or whatever that maybe it's going to be like that. I'm also he. I should say part of the whole schedule thing is that next year, when we wrap around the fall next year, they're going to be back on schedule. So the 15th gen will have both types of chips and we'll see. So there won't be a desktop version of this, and I got in questions from people said well, I mean, what about us? Like we use desktop chips? Like what if we wanted to do this? I've never seen this out in the world, but there are essentially what you're saying.

41:05
There are these kinds of data cards for MPU, as you can add to thirteenth the gen desktop Intel CPUs, but you have to have a motherboard that supports, you have to have all this stuff. I'm not, I don't even know how you would get one, but it is a thing. The computer, richard, that you just bought is notable because it is the only, I believe, thirteenth gen Intel mobile CPU that has an MPU and that's an add-on. It's an add-on, so the daughter will order. Yeah, yeah.

41:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just wonder if the motherboards are going to evolve to a dot eight like ATX, and ATX. Mini are all you need. There are macro like giant ATX boards, but for what? Like it's kind of insane yeah.

41:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, maybe for this now, right, who knows, I mean I, I don't know.

41:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I almost wonder. Like this flashes to me, like S 100 bus, like what if the chipset was on the bus? Everything was on the bus. Yes, Exactly.

42:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I express you know three point whatever or something could be, yes, this was the whole computer, right?

42:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and then it's just like switching. You know, when we talk about sustainable machines, like what if that backplane is sufficient and not your change in chipsets?

42:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Interesting. You could even replace the backplane and put it, plug it into everything else. It would be good to do a new backplane.

42:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Exactly so, if you really want to right now you know, reality for me, as a guy who builds a lot of his own machines, is, once I've seated Ram and a CPU on that motherboard, that's it for that motherboard. After two years moving anything on that, it's going to break, it's going to become less reliable.

42:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like yeah, I mean my God, I, who I mean other than they. Well, I would guess you could add Ram I, assuming you didn't.

42:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Even though I'm really careful playing with pins and whatsoever. So I'll often, when I'm ready to upgrade the machine, I'll take that entire assembly out, I'll build it around a new chassis for a neighbor. Here you go, and I'll actually have the kid build the machine right. So we'll change out the fans because they wear, but the cooler stays on Ram. I always max the Ram anyway, so that's not to do there. So, given new power supply and new drive in a new case, they've got their own machine three, you know, a couple of gens old. Because as soon as you unseat any of that stuff, see as you play with it, all it's wrecked. You just, you're right, the machine will never be reliable, right. And and I just wonder if we can't get to this sort of long duration machine where you just change out parts, you know, as long as they're actually changeable.

43:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was just looking at framework. I was just thinking about they have a bigger, I think a 16-inch device now and I'm like maybe why not a desktop right? Same same idea.

43:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and it really comes down to will the manufacturers make us the backplane board Like? That whole mindset is interesting and it's sort of the it falls into the right to repair. It falls into, you know, sustainability replacing minimum that's necessary for future features. Like it's interesting.

44:04 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
You know what you're reminding me of surface hub. Remember when they were going to have the chassis able to be pulled out and replaced.

44:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, and then the pandemic happened and just kidding. Yeah, what's the good?

44:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
idea. I mean surface hubs exist, but they did not sell the way. They did not become the product of Microsoft expected right, no Surface hub, yeah, but you know they're a place for projectors.

44:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What she, yeah, what she's describing is something that could be applied to all the one computers too, because the important well, not not a PC's case, but the important part is the screen. Right, if the rest of it was a plug in kind of a module, you could replace all the guts and still take use, you know, make use of the screen which is what we do with many PCs mounted on Visa.

44:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
100 miles, right? Yeah, it was like that's pretty normal. We pick your screen and some interface pieces and what some machine just bolts onto the back of that in with four screws and you're done.

44:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this thing behind my head is a HP all in one that you can kind of carry around like a briefcase, because you know and but that was that 20 inch, I remember it. Yeah, and it's interesting because you can use it if the computer for fails or whatever it works as a display too, right, you can, which is something all all in one should at least do. That should be the failback. You know, if the iMac dies, you can at least use it as a beautiful screen. Yeah, unfortunately you can't.

45:23
I've decided to say you should, but you should.

45:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think I'm testing. Let's play this right now, okay.

45:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not my rack here.

45:36 - AI song (Other)
What's happening, my thoughts in the movies. The snow is falling, the lights are shining bright. I can't wait to catch up and hold you.

45:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is almost a spoken words. Everybody, I'm going to hold up my led up keyboard. Bring us the concerts. People hate that. I wouldn't say this is great. Maybe needs to continue, but that's too bad, it's a gen one, exactly. In 1980. And then throw it in the trash.

46:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It sounds exactly what in 1980. We would have thought the music would sound like in 2023.

46:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Exactly. Is this new age music? Is that what I'm listening to?

46:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have tweeted it if you want a copy for yourself. I only tweet once every 20 years, but this is my holiday tweet to all of you.

46:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Since you've been gone, they don't call them tweets anymore, by the way. I also refuse to acknowledge that.

47:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I exed it on shitter.

47:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's it. So you do know the new terms, I know the new terminology. I choose not to use it, just don't care.

47:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Exactly, exactly, so it worked. I mean, I guess it's pretty cool right.

47:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The capability is cool, that song in particular. Plus, you can't really. What you want to do is have a conversation with the thing where you say, okay, now turn up the tempo a little bit. Here's the net.

47:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm going to go back, oh you can. Oh sure, I'm going to go back and Make it jazzy. Okay, let's do that, let's do it.

47:46 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
And how you do that with the images. You can be like, Okay, change the background, Change this.

47:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Change that. Can you make that song jazzy?

47:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I like it, but more jazz hands.

47:59 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yes.

48:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay, you can mix it out on a little industrial electronic music yeah.

48:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's going to be fun Disco. I want to EDM Make it a rap song.

48:09 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Rap Christmas song.

48:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, you know it can only do one thing every 10 minutes, so just you know.

48:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, exactly. You're lucky it's taking that little amount of time.

48:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, that's awesome.

48:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They ask why didn't you post on Mass? And I would have, but I didn't get. Wait a minute. I'm sorry, but I can't change the parameters of your song once it's submitted.

48:28 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Oh see if it's a start over, that's what we're talking about.

48:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll have to start over.

48:32 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
I know it's all going to be different. That's good. Maybe that might be a plus.

48:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mary Jo Folly. Alright. Alright, yeah, they didn't offer Mass and I would have shared it on Mass and I was just trying to do the thing, Only fans or an offered to me on Mass and I on the other day by the way. Well, we'll fix that. I deleted every every time. Just report it. Not good, just report it. I saw that and I don't get it. I killed a bunch of accounts. They all came from Mass. It's on social, where they don't have a whole lot of moderation, but we fixed it, oh good.

49:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh good, I wasn't complaining, I was just oh sorry, since you're the guy that runs the server I get for free. I'm just wondering Can we do some live customer service? Yes, right now. Yeah.

49:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I just thought of it because you said Mass. Okay, I'm going to fix this. So I'm going to copy that prompt and add it, but make it jazzy and upbeat Anything, or you want rap, would you prefer rap?

49:33 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
No, I would not Do a rap. Do a rap, christmas, come on.

49:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do it, and who do you like?

49:40 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
It's the 50th anniversary of hip hop, isn't it?

49:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so it is it's like that Run DMC song. That's in the beginning of Die Hard, but have it be about Mary Jo.

49:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, I just said, but do it in the rap style of Run DMC. I'll get back to you in 10 minutes. Yeah, mary Jo, do you have a Twitter handle anymore? I couldn't find you.

50:01 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yeah, I'm still at Mary Jo Foley on Twitter. Okay, yeah.

50:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sorry, I didn't.

50:06 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
No, it's okay. I'm also on threads, but I still feel like threads isn't quite ready.

50:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, none of this is ready?

50:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's not even slightly ready. They don't have an AP, I can't auto post to it. Yeah, I mean it doesn't exist.

50:21 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
I mean I you know they are going to do some things I like on threads like supposedly make it easy to import your followers and things like that. If they get away with it, so it'll be good.

50:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That would be good. I know that's the problem. Starting over from scratch is a nightmare.

50:36 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yeah, I know, yeah, yeah.

50:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And nobody wants to build a social graph anymore. I mean, that's the one thing. Threadsright was Right. You could import your graph from.

50:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Instagram. Yeah, one thing they got wrong is they spam it all over Facebook and Instagram now and I get threads, posts in between my photos and Instagram. It's like guys, it's already bad enough with the ads. Yeah, if I wanted to look at text, I'd be somewhere else. No, it becomes pre-insertified yes exactly For your enjoyment.

51:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay.

51:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Anyway, to wrap up the hardware, I was surprised to discover there is already an Intel or Ultra based Chromebook. Right yeah.

51:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Chromebook Chromebook isn't it?

51:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, but Chromebook has this new Chromebook plus spec right, which are the premium devices, which in the Chromebook space means like 500, 700 bucks. They're not that bad. I don't know the pricing of this one. It's an ASUS.

51:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It has a high performance machine that won't run any software. This is good, oh so you're a Chromebook creator. I am now going to dedicate the rest of the year All I had to do was own one to- look Well, except it's gotten better. We've actually gotten quite a bit better.

51:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Anyway, yeah.

51:47
Good processor, fast RAM, lots of high speed M2 SSD storage, high resolution screen, DCI, P3 color space. We don't know yet, but it's going to be under a thousand and that's the thing. Like this computer in the PC space would probably be 13, 1500 bucks. 8 megabyte, 8 megapixel front facing webcam. Can I run Windows on it? You can run it in. There is a parallels experience. It's not as good as on the Mac. You don't get all that kind of fun stuff you get on the Mac like coherence and whatnot. But yeah, you can. You can run it that way.

52:21
You can run Windows 365.

52:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, there you go, you go. Anyway, just sort it out.

52:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
there it's not going to be just PCs. Okay, I'll believe you, I'm surprised. All right, so now, at Mary Jo's request, and it was a good idea. I'm not sure I would have thought of this explicitly, but this is the last show, last live show, right, we're doing this year. So maybe we should take a look back and take a look forward, like what do we expect to see next year?

52:52 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yeah.

52:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Next year is implementation year. Yes, we have been hand waving the snot out of co-pilot for the past nine months.

53:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Corey Doctorow, who coined that term in certification, has been in the news a lot this past year, not just for that. He's written another book, right. But he was talking about AI and he described it as a bubble and I saw this in a headline. I said, oh, is he going to jump the shark here? But no. So he's a smart guy and the way he kind of described this is that I think bubble, I think a bubble is crap, like everyone moves to this one area and then it crashes and it goes away. But he says, no, sometimes bubble bubbles leave useful things behind. Yes, and AI will be that kind of bubble, right? And the question is going to be what degree will AI actually impact us all, whether it's productivity or creativity, like Leo's trying to do with the song or programming, whatever, like what's the actual impact? There's going to be some delta between the hype and the reality, right? What's the phrase you always use? The trough of despair.

53:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, the Gartner, you know, peak of overplated expectations.

53:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, but maybe it could be like the recession where we're heading for that, but it actually kind of evens out. We're okay.

53:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I would argue that every one of the AI winters left behind useful residuals, just the folks that created that AI moment, which were mostly scientists getting funding. The winter came when they could get funding more because they'd run their course yeah, available. And then the engineers came in behind. So, look, this has been the year the engineer tried to get their hand around, but the scientists are done right Hand around. Yeah, hinted, as already said, like generative AI has run its course. If we're going to do, we're going to go somewhere else, but that's just like oh well, look, the cement works. There's nothing new to do with the cement, so let's move on. The folks are actually built bridges with it.

54:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was going to say hold on a second. That's like a Isaac Asimov Foundation moment, because the truth is, there was cement that was made by the Romans that is actually better than the cement we're using today, and this is something we lost you know, we now know that it's only because it interacts with salt water and creates internal crystallization.

54:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, but that's you know. We're getting too far off on the metaphor here.

55:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But, you know what we do, but with a supply to say, I know we do yeah.

55:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is a rap song dedicated to Mary Jo Foley. I like to think of it as Christmas with you.

55:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the brightest rap song ever made, which is ironic.

55:34 - AI song (Other)
But you wow, which one was worse. I like it much better.

55:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This one is more aggressively worse.

55:44 - AI song (Other)
Christmas with you. The happiest of this, mary Jo Foley. Welcome home, that's the same, oh, oh ladies and gentlemen, the machine made that.

56:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it sounds like it is the auto tuning a feature Like how do you auto?

56:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
tune, I think, a song by the jets from the 1980s. You know those guys? Or like the guy, god, what are those bands?

56:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
cut those terrible, terrible bands, all the boy Sounds like yeah, yeah, it sounds like in in excess. No, not in excess.

56:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, you think it in sync, in sync, that's the one yeah, backstreet boys.

56:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I said in the style of front DMC. I think it missed a little bit.

56:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they must run.

56:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I put that one on on, masted on, for those who care. It's a, it's on our tweetsocial. I am Leo at Leo on tweetsocial, if you, if you want to, you know, add it to your collection, which I really think you should.

56:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean this is turning into the worst KTEL album ever made. I just like it. It's like KTEL, but we couldn't get licenses to any of the music. It's elevator music, so we get this stuff instead and it's like, oh God, what's happening.

57:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think if you listen to it I'm just thinking four or five times It'll, it'll become.

57:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you know it'll become this would be construed as a war crime under the war crime Played over and over I volume. They played this at Waco. Didn't they drive him out of the building? Isn't this what they might?

57:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
when the US military was in Nicaragua, and they play this to to Norea.

57:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they get a good, they're over and over.

57:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, please make it stop.

57:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, all right.

57:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So that's not just something to look forward to going in the next year. All right, but I'm sorry, marjor.

57:47 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
I want to say something on co-pilots, because I was talking to Richard about this and I'm like so burnt out on them so I almost feel like I know I almost feel like their PR strategy worked against them as it as time went on. So they started out by pre-announcing a million co-pilots. Like a couple of them shipped, most of them didn't ship Even this, like Microsoft 365 co-pilot being generally available, it's not really generally available.

58:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I know it's crazy, yep.

58:14 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Right Security co-pilot never shipped. One drive co-pilot never shipped. Sharepoint co-pilot never shipped. So sorry to interrupt.

58:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But, richard, did you tell her what we were told about all the co-pilots inside of Microsoft, did you?

58:25 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
There's hundreds right, there's hundreds of them there's 117 was the count we got. So that tells you how many you're going to get announced next year. No so that was the thing.

58:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, there was an agreement that maybe we needed to slow this down and reverse a little bit.

58:41 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Good, there were too many.

58:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But this was Uncle Sacha telling his entire company, every team look at this technology and see how you're doing. Yes, every team responded.

58:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But they had to respond right.

58:54 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
It was a requirement.

58:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, even on the eve of Ignite, one of the teams I can't really say it was as a matter, but one of the teams finally, finally, someone complained up the chain and said guys, we are about to announce two co-pilots that are literally identical. We cannot do this, stop. And someone pulled it. You said you're right, actually let's not do this. But this thing existed through the chain all year long and they had the announcement right there, the product name, they had everything and they were like stop, we really need to think about this.

59:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It hadn't hit that top tier yet, right? Each product team went inward, and this was a really good idea, from Sacha's perspective too, because everybody did something a little bit different. Like you're discovering what these things are capable of in all these different islands of creativity. Now, whether or not you put it into a product and put it in front of people, that's a different conversation entirely, and the answer is generally no. It's consolidate the innovation. See where we've got, because, like, why, where can we have the most value? Why in the world would you have a share point, call a pilot, when you have M365, right?

59:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So maybe Mirajow next year will be good news for you, because well, I would even say, even as recently as Ignite though that final branding consolidation where remember? You would actually ask me. I think it was after September. I had written something and you said where did you get this?

01:00:14 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
And it was like I saw something he wrote and I'm like, okay, I want to know where you got that from. I'm not saying you plagiarized it, I'm trying to figure out. Where did you find that?

01:00:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
wording and they eventually explicitly announced it at Ignite, which was that, not the naming part. But you know, microsoft Copilot is the foundation. This is where the extensive modeling all starts. You build off of that with Bing and Microsoft 365, windows, whatever and compatible with open AI, and she's like where did you see this? And I'm like it was at the September event. It was.

01:00:44 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
But then here's the other problem. I know this because I write a lot about the enterprise in my job. All the enterprise Copilots have nothing to do with that, right Like the Copilots, and Dynamics are not the same at all as the Copilots and Microsoft 365.

01:00:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I think it's notable. They've never fabric Copilots?

01:01:03 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
not the same at all, Because you don't necessarily.

01:01:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Honestly. I think that well, aside from the general use the internet, I'm out in the world doing whatever stuff. When you think about it, from a company, you're inside of an organization, whatever it is, and you're doing on some project, whatever it might be, you really want it to be that cut down model that we've been talking about. We want that part of the Microsoft graph that matters to what we're doing right now. We don't want the whole internet and I feel like the smaller you make it and the more finite that's data set is I mean, they're all finite technically but you know you the more accurate it's going to be right. Yeah, that AI will work better for you in an organization or maybe, some days, an individual, because of the smaller data set.

01:01:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, but you want from an internal Copilot to the company. Data is with, say, I don't know when it doesn't know. Yes, true, only derive information from the sources that it has.

01:01:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The way I described AI to the guy at the gym who asked me about this and about Microsoft and how they were going to do in the future, I said AI is wonderful for summarizing things, but if you ask it what one plus one is, it might respond with G. Right, you know, it's just. It's really bad at certain things.

01:02:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It is. And the one I did for the for the Rotary Club was I asked chat chat to write me the comparing contrast. And omelette made with chicken eggs and with caramel eggs, yikes, and it just went to town. I recommended the second one and you were like this sounds good, a camel egg omelette, very special yeah.

01:02:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, Well gamey, well gamey yeah.

01:02:42 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
So I think next year there's going to be a lot of people buying co-pilots Like I think Microsoft's earnings are going to be super interesting next year to see how fast that grows. But also they're going to have to start shipping some of these things announced and like making them real, right, yeah.

01:02:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, Microsoft 365 co-pilot alone needs to expand pretty dramatically as far as small businesses and consumers yeah.

01:03:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But only if it's useful. I think they got to cook it for a while. I mean, you're also waiting for you know, just like we have a chat GPT with the lawyers, abusing it and getting yourself with the court, you're going to have somebody bailing business failure on the software.

01:03:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So both of you will know that I have spoken about how hard it has been over the years to keep track of Microsoft 365, because every month they would come up with this giant blog post.

01:03:31
And if you just look at something simple like Microsoft Word which is funny to describe as simple, but there are multiple versions of it, and then there's thousands and thousands of features, and then there's this matrix of where those features kind of are so web, mobile desktop, two versions of desktop, right, and they'll announce a new feature for Microsoft Word in November 2021, whatever year and it's dictation and the ability to take an audio recording and make a script from it. It's only in the web version. It's still only in the web version. It's kind of a weird problem. And when I look at the Microsoft 365, sorry, the Microsoft Copilot features they have announced for Microsoft 365, I guess I'm not sure how to say that and you look at the individual apps, like here are the features we're doing in Word, here are the features in Excel. They kind of read like that feature, don't they? They're like a bundle of things that they would have maybe released anyway.

01:04:24 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yes.

01:04:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, so it makes it kind of hard. So now you're saying hold on a second. You have a standalone Microsoft Office product which you don't even want to sell, but you kind of have to. You've got the Microsoft 365 subscriptions where all the new features go, but now not all the new features, right, because now we have this other subscription that sits on top of it, and now what you're saying is to get these other new features, I need this second subscription, right? Like, we're kind of no, we, they are kind of, uh, burfricating the market even further and it makes it harder to know where features are, because that feature, that AI feature maybe, is only going to be on a Windows computer when you have two subscriptions and you have an MPU or something. Right, it's gotten even harder, it is.

01:05:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But it's also a new product that's going to be built separately for the foreseeable future. Eventually it gets bundled in. Eventually language understanding and software becomes a normal part of software. If you stop calling it a separate feature, it's just software, that's right. And then by the way, support was special, Like you know, once upon a time it was, it was on the box it actually said this is not. This software supports mice.

01:05:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, actually, what you're also describing is the standalone version of office, right, so there will be an office 2020 or whatever that, what 25, whatever the next version is, and it will be some level set that before was features that were part of the subscription, and our 10 2019 or whatever the new one is.

01:05:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's the new normal build pattern, as you test the features as part of the subscription and then you cut a version.

01:05:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Honestly, given the churn we see today, I mean I'm fairly technical, I'm a technology enthusiast, even I'm getting kind of burned out on like all the churn. It's like guys, can we slow it down for a second? I mean, at some point I need to get work done with this product too. I'm not playing a video game Like I need to, you know right and you're speaking truth out there.

01:06:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like the dotnet, people are struggling with somebody version every year turns out to be a lot, I know.

01:06:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And does it warrant. It is a great. I mean I platform like dotnet you could make a very good argument from. Maybe it's every other year, guys, you know.

01:06:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, that's what a lot of people you know. Then they made these LTS versions long. I know what it's like. Why don't?

01:06:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
they just all be like that. Just do one of your three years and have it be LTS or whatever With you.

01:06:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And it's again. I think we're all learning here. It's an experimentation. Remember when we got a new version of Windows 10 every 15 minutes?

01:06:49 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yeah.

01:06:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And we bound it to software features too. Like I had developers trying to tell IP folks I need you to upgrade our version of Windows 10 so I can deploy my app.

01:07:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Why is there a 3D objects entry in my file manager I can't get rid of? Why is there a photo gallery entry today that you can't get rid of part? You know you can get rid of both, but not in the UI.

01:07:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And it's. We keep presuming there's a plan when they're just bigger stuff out, right yeah? I was not thinking there was a plan about eight months ago. That was the whole line. It's like we're not organized enough to be as evil as you want us to be.

01:07:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, I bet if we could call that office it would. The phone would just ring. There's no way.

01:07:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Don't know, really don't know.

01:07:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't see the hardware following seriously until the killer app exists and we talked about this right, this notion that maybe the killer app wasn't a killer app but was rather, did we talk about this, yeah, and to being a host capabilities, yeah.

01:07:47
Different people. You know different people, like latch onto the one thing, but I always think of you know normal, non-technical people, my mother, my wife, whatever, and I think you know not that they would ever be caught dead in the computer section of a Best Buy, but I'm, you know it's again, I'm imagining it. What would it take for someone like that to want to upgrade? Right, yeah, and it's, it's got to be.

01:08:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This competitive advantage, like one of the arguments here is those original companies that jumped, that were able to get the early bits of M365 and their logos are plastered all over Ignite. Right, is they're going to be spitting out these case studies that say 30% in, you know, performance improvement, more work done. I've certainly seen this in software development. Right, like the numbers are now coming back. Pms, I know that are showing these folks are checking in more code and they're fixing it. Let they need to fix it less often when they work with GitHub. Copilot Like these are real productivity gains. Well, we're going to. This is what you expected. 24 that for office folks, for info workers, yeah.

01:08:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There you go, but yeah, it has to be real, right, it's a little. It might be a little harder for the office stuff, just because Everyone does different types of work and they have little specialties, or whatever we might have to screen test this, it could be the only way.

01:09:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like, let them go for six months and shut it off and listen. That might be the only way to know for sure is when people will refuse to work Until they miss it when it's gone.

01:09:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's a great test. By the way, sometimes I'll go back to a previous version of a product and do I miss stuff? And if you don't, someone wrong there.

01:09:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I said in IT we call it the screen test. It's like anybody use this report. Shut it off and listen to the screen. No noise, okay, leave it off.

01:09:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
At Microsoft. The screen test is we just randomly deliver software and don't tell anybody. You have three computers that all have different configurations, even though you did them exactly the same.

01:09:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I just thought don't think this is going to happen as quickly as we hope. Until the moment you have that competitive advantage. Yeah.

01:09:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I would say I don't know. In my case and Mary Jo would probably agree I think she kind of expressed this earlier I would be okay if it slowed down, right? Yeah, I think we were on like a runaway train this year.

01:10:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah Well, microsoft wanted to get into the Gestalt Right Like, let's face it, everybody knows what copilot means, though They've hijacked that word. Yep, absolutely. I think Satchett's taking this very personally. This is his first really leading a brand new product. It's true.

01:10:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's so high profile.

01:10:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
By choice, they've chosen to make it this high profile.

01:10:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think them waking up to be this aggressive is more impressive than if someday they actually start doing Ignite again with tens of thousands of people. It's just as unexpected like it's neat as falling Microsoft as long as we all have. It's been a while.

01:10:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We'll see what happens with events in 2024. That's a whole other conversation, yeah.

01:10:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I know, I'm just comparing it, things that kind of went by the wayside there for a little while.

01:10:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But are we going to get a new version of Windows next year?

01:11:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
At least they're going to say, admit there's going to be yeah, I would say that Intel, releasing these chips the way they did, says yes to that question. The only question is whether what we call it Right.

01:11:11 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
I don't think they can call it Windows 12. I agree, it makes no sense.

01:11:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was spending this whole year waiting for Windows 12 and then reading what Zach wrote a few weeks ago. I thought, this debate makes sense Rebranding now after you've talked to AI incessantly for a year and added it to Windows 11 and then say, okay, now we're moving on to the next thing. It's like now you've got like three versions of Windows to support. Where do you cut off the AI features? Right?

01:11:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So you just call it co-pilot.

01:11:40 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yeah, right. That's the thing I'm really confused things if they did that, but I can see them doing it.

01:11:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Might as well, right, well, I mean, that's what Stevie Bates compared it to, right, the orchestrator, this kind of AI everywhere, notion, where the great example of an orchestrator we have today is the Windows shell, you know, and it's like, well, and Sachin Della didn't mean this literally, but he said you know what, if what he said, co-pilot will become like the start button, right the place we start to do everything, you start with this prompt. So to me I mean being pedantic about that I think, oh yeah, we're going to go back to Amistos and start typing again. That's what we're going to do, that's how we're going to interact with the computer.

01:12:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But he didn't really mean it that way, emacs, baby, it's the future.

01:12:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Make sure you it's a Ford slash, not a backwards slash. Don't screw it up or you delete the entire file. Did you just run fdisk? What are you doing? So you know, but but I think the point was simply that everything's going to change, right, because apps have been changing for a long time. I mean, I think in a lot of ways, ai will cobble together that, whatever services and apps are necessary to achieve this thing you're doing, and that becomes like an app, but it's, it's not the app that we can think of today, right?

01:12:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Not that anybody wrote a book on the future of Microsoft that he described this concept of an intelligent agent a long time ago. So you've got software that can understand language and it's looking at what's in your inbox and what's on your schedule. It should be preparing, preparing information for you as you sit down to work. Was that software called Gmail, man?

01:13:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I miss him.

01:13:20 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yeah, I think. I think it has to be called Windows 11 something, or it's definitely not 12, especially because they just announced extended security update availability for for 11. I mean Windows 10 to go with Windows 11.

01:13:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I just don't think they're going to, and, of course, now that I've said that they will, but yeah, you know what?

01:13:39 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
they could do. They could have Windows 11 side by side with some new Windows thing called Windows something, larry, and if you get the new hardware with the new AI processors in it, you get that version, but everybody else doing normal work and who's like regular people keeps running Windows 11.

01:13:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
One of the arguments I made a million years ago was that Microsoft could have shipped two versions of Windows one for consumers, one for businesses that ran exactly the same software but had very different UIs, where the super version could be very friendly and, you know, simple and whatever. And they never did that. And I, and honestly I think one of the and they and the reason they don't do stuff like that is because training right, you want, you don't want something to be sitting there at work and they've learned how this system works. They go home and like what is this? It's completely different.

01:14:23 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Like even Windows didn't want it either.

01:14:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, 10 to 11 is to me is not a big deal, but for some it's a bridge too far right and they get to do that again, right.

01:14:32 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yeah, I don't know. It'll be interesting to see how the branded what it looks like yeah Right, I think they're definitely is going to be a version, some new Windows in 2024 and how, if they call it new Windows or don't call it new Windows, whatever.

01:14:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But speaking of which I and you have both of these products listed in the notes. But, dear God Microsoft, can I help you with something? Don't call anything new.

01:14:57 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yeah.

01:14:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can't put new in the name. It's not new outlook, it's not new teams, it's just teams is just please stop. I know there are too many outlooks. I get that I'm at the lead of the charge on that complaint, but seriously, this thing that is new now will not be new in two months. And stop, you know.

01:15:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think 12 is a fine name. You're not going to be able to use 13, just like you couldn't use nine, right? So I think they're going to go 12 before they really do.

01:15:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Or you say just the thing we talked about with 10, just call it Windows, just call it the number's.

01:15:28 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
They almost did that right.

01:15:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's what 10 was supposed to be, and then Apple got all up with you with a new version number and all of a sudden they got to do something. I think the version number thing and the routine release of new product is a requirement. I think if the customer expects it, the shareholder expects it.

01:15:45 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
OEMs want it for sure.

01:15:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
OEM wants it, so there needs to be a call, something you can work in the market.

01:15:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah, remember the new Surface Pro, that product that was not called Surface Pro 5. Right, I learned that lesson very quickly.

01:16:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's not been another one of those naming Because it actually hurts sales. Yep, stupid, I think it. Yeah, I don't know, I'm going to go on the side of it. I think it's going to be Windows 12.

01:16:09 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
You do huh.

01:16:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Wow, yeah, I mean it might be AI edition. Sure yeah.

01:16:14 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Oh yeah, windows 11 AI edition.

01:16:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There we go, I like it, and then we'll all call it 12 because it's less letters to get it the same result.

01:16:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
See, though, that the word AI might scare some people off, I mean yeah, or even just turn them off Turn them off Right Because of all the hype yeah. Yeah, remember, there are still companies who ban chat GPT, I mean because of the loss of data. So I think that's maybe not going to be in the name. Yeah, in fact I think it's probably going to be an option.

01:16:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think you got to keep them simple. I honestly I don't even home in Pro, or you know at least they kind of Pro was a weird word, you know, honestly, but it was yeah Too complicated. They want to thrills, remember, with all the product additions.

01:16:59 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Windows me. Come on, what about that one?

01:17:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Windows Home Basic. Like I'm a home user, but I'm even more basic than that. Thanks, you know great. Do you drool you? Want basic. You want home basic Windows for idiots.

01:17:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Windows for dummy, yeah, yeah.

01:17:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was in the licensing section for the repository that as an MVP of access to, and they literally have every variation of every version available to you, and she must be. I was looking over the shoulder because it was actually for her machine and she's like why? Why are there so many as well? These three were made by the EU. Yeah, exactly, these ones are made by Well.

01:17:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's the Korean versions, there's the N versions and Europe and KN. And there's a version we don't see out in the world. I mean, there's a whole set of education skews and and the key of skews and Yep.

01:17:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a lot it is I don't know, I can imagine them changing.

01:17:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It Still doesn't compare to Microsoft 365, just saying, but there are a lot of them, yeah, yeah.

01:18:01 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
But speaking of new teams and new outlook, they're coming.

01:18:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm going to guess the consensus is the same for everybody here. The new outlook not great for businesses yet but they'll, you know they'll get it there. The new team seems like it's kind of a done great right, like it's been pretty yeah, well received Right.

01:18:20 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
It's got a lot of problems still. Well so we use it internally at directions on Microsoft and we've had all these weird things about sharing screens come up, where if someone's sharing a screen, other people see a black box or they can't share their screen, and it only is happening in the new teams and if you go into the forums you see other people are having this.

01:18:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So there's still some things that need to be, but they're not popping up ads in front of your face as much as they used to. I really like that, that's.

01:18:47 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
It looks almost the same as the other team doesn't it?

01:18:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
One of my workstations. Now, when I run the teams new teams, client all windows are just come out black.

01:18:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Whether it's a share or a share. Okay, that's what you're saying.

01:19:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The web client works, but the magnifying and it's like I've done nothing. It must have updated itself. The three things seems to be uninstall it and install it again. Really, turn it off, turn it on.

01:19:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, the new teams, you know significantly fewer resources used, which is great Performance. They move. The big thing to me is it remembers my AV settings right, which the old teams every almost not every morning, three times a week I'd have to. You know you're on the wrong mic, you know it's like I haven't changed anything Like why does this thing keep changing? They seem to have gotten on top of that. So to me that's, that's a big deal.

01:19:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I wonder if that was because of updates, like every time it after you trash all the details, it almost like went back to the initial state.

01:19:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That could be, yeah.

01:19:44 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
New outlook, though I've been forcing myself to use it and it's got problems too, Like I think it's fine for consumers today. Yeah.

01:19:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't think you'll hear any business. Users are like oh yeah, no, this is it, I can't wait.

01:20:00 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Businesses are like running screaming from this like scared and it's not ready. And Microsoft knows it's not ready. They're going to do a very gradual cutover from the old outlook for Windows 21.

01:20:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I think the whole methodology these days, right, the whole toggle between you and old is you know, are you fine with this or does it frighten you? And then they instrument the snot out of it. There's a lot of people are switching.

01:20:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't think it was a good night it was before ignite, but there was a. The outlook team did like a chat thing online where they talked about the bar. They need to meet for it before they'll even consider. You know, forcing, you know, business users to do this is years away. But they have a list of. This is like we got all the feedback. The only thing we can't do is that old kind of calm plugin thing is not happening.

01:20:42 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
You're never going to do that.

01:20:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Never getting that. But I mean basically all the features people are asking for. Yeah, we're going to do all those things and then we'll give you at least a year and then we'll make it optional.

01:20:52 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Is it still there still? No, it is. It is there now. Okay, it wasn't.

01:20:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Until it was, it wasn't, that's right, that's right, yeah, but we really are hitting the you know dice and ask it was easier to put Wi-Fi everywhere than it was to have make a good offline client. Right, right, you sit down in the airplane, have Wi-Fi. Even if it isn't working, that's fine. You can still write your email. Looks really connect-ish. Yeah, right, and we'll get there eventually.

01:21:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah.

01:21:21 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yeah. So those two things I think we're going to have a lot to think about, and we got to talk about loop.

01:21:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What's the state of loop?

01:21:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Loop, and only I. Now. I finally got my tenant configured so that loop shows up as an option to install, but actually installing a loop is still a nuisance. You can get to the client side. The browser version of loop is enough, Right.

01:21:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a Microsoft store version of loop that appeared without any announcement to this day. This was months ago, right, yeah, and I assume you could connect it to a business or an MSA account.

01:21:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you have to set it up into your tenant and if your tenant is properly configured, then the loop will just work. And, by the way, they you probably configured me in setting a series of group policies with that are assigned to a group that you then put members into. And it's disturbing that I memorized this because I've done it like six times to try and make it work. That's how that works. Yeah, but they. There should be a button Give people loop.

01:22:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah Right, it's just enable loop. Exactly.

01:22:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And why does it? You know I don't have to enable word. Why do I have to?

01:22:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
enable loop. I mean, you feel like this is going to happen eventually, but I it's, I don't. I know it's like out, it's released, but it still feels very incomplete to me. Yeah. It's a pretty raw product.

01:22:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Really.

01:22:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know we use notion, you know as we're doing for the notes. It's mature, it works great it's. It's seems really thin and light to me, the syncing capability and this thing is almost magical, Like I, it blows my mind how well that works. Yeah, I know it was a high bar.

01:22:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I've got yeah, I'm now try hitting between notion with you one note, which is all my old notes stuff, right, loop, which is my new note stuff, and I down consciously like moved all the whiskey notes over to loop, yeah.

01:23:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just to keep get used to the interface and the one thing I do, I limit it regularly right.

01:23:09
One of the things I would really like about loop, the one of the reasons I would want to go to it other than you know, I also have the one drive stores in the back and yada, yada and all the things that come with Microsoft 365 is it uses a Microsoft Word style keyboard shortcuts for applying styles to text. You know, in a loop is a notion, is a very different thing. You kind of have to do a slash command and then after the fact is the kind of a bulky menu you can do to change things.

01:23:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just I've been using the loop mobile client. It'll make you hate yourself.

01:23:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh no, I do. I can't, I can't use it. I literally deleted it from my phone. It would never. All I had was a list of it was one page of text. It was just waits for, you know, the machines at the gym. That's like guys, there's nothing to sink. It's been sitting there for months but it's like something went wrong, you know you're playing office tenant problems yeah.

01:23:55
So now the software won't know what I'm talking like. I look at my phone Okay, this is what the way I need for this machine. Put the phone up there. I'm like whatever thing Go to the next. I look at it go, something went wrong. You're like what I just? How did anything go wrong? I could have taken a screenshot and it would have been fine, Like guarantee you.

01:24:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a tenant handshake problem like that. It's terrible. And this is the same problem that outlook struggles with right. It's like the. There's a set of rules living inside of the operating system related to security and authentication. Yes, Override everything.

01:24:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the, the. The slow boil that led to loop was a. They created yet another platform. You know, we just talked about teams and co-pilot is a other examples of that, and this had to be right. You know, there's a, there's a whole model of components and whatever it got two way Right and you know, I think, I mean I think of it as this goofy little note taking app, basically, but it's a much bigger thing than that and if this thing works out, this is what will obsolete. You know, word processing and no taking, a dedicated note taking apps, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a lot riding on it, but man, it's been years, hasn't it been like three years it is.

01:24:59 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Is it three years? I remember when we first were talking about using it. Yeah, it's like two or three years, I didn't take a look it up.

01:25:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But I I remember using like a really, really early version of it with almost no UI and just being like I don't understand what this thing is, but it was so you know.

01:25:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So basic, and it's the same problem as teams and a bunch of other products, which is, I think, it's actually trying to be three different products at once, and one of them is a no-shoot competitor.

01:25:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and it was very disappointing when we first got the kind of end user UI like this is. This is notion like you made, notion like my dear God. Do we need another notion? That's what this is. It's notion and it is more than that. Right To be fair again, but but from the end user perspective.

01:25:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If we were all team centric, then you'd be using loop components in team Inside of team. Another interface approach, right?

01:25:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and I'll get. I'll get those down to outlook If you wanted to. Exactly, I don't know.

01:25:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is, this is 21st century. Uh, object linking and embedding, that's what this is.

01:25:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And someday I will open Microsoft Word and it will say would you like to change the default document format to be a loop component or something?

01:26:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And it's like yeah, they won't tell you, you just will be yeah Right. Why does it look weird? It's different somehow.

01:26:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it the same format? I mean, is it it's?

01:26:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, it's. No, it isn't. And this is something that Microsoft has had problems with over the years, the notable example being one note which you know when you it has styles like Microsoft Word and if you copy and paste it into Word document elsewhere, the the thing you get looks very different from what it would look like if you had word, if you had started with word like even though they kind of look the same, they're not. It's not the same thing, it's not rendered the same way. Even word on the web versus um word on a native app on your desktop is different, like it's. I know it saves the doc acts, et cetera, et cetera, but that that thing you're looking at, the thing you're working in, it's very different.

01:26:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Uh, let me take a little break. You want to talk to me about Activision Blizzard?

01:26:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, I think a break before Activision Blizzard, because that will give people a chance to gear up. But they're selves in the proper mindset and all of that, uh. So good news Activision Blizzard is next. Mary Jo, you missed the entire drama, from beginning to end.

01:27:12 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
When you say she missed it, she told me privately.

01:27:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was like I said something about Activision Blizzard and she goes, who she would have hated it.

01:27:18 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
She would have hated it. The best part of my new job is we never, ever write about gaming.

01:27:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it would have been a nightmare for you.

01:27:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It would have. Actually, that's what you said. You said you said you've expanded, you do more gaming news. I'm like, no, I don't, but it's been all active Like this year has been like an insane year of.

01:27:35 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Activision Blizzard. No, I know for you it's been a big story this year. For me it's been a big relief not to rate it better. She knew. She said I'm glad we both enjoyed it.

01:27:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is on the way Our show today brought to you and I mean brought to you quite literally by our good friends at Cash Fly. You've heard me say it many times Bandwidth for Windows Weekly is provided by Cash Fly at CACHEFLYcom. For over 20 years, cash Fly has held the track record for high performing, ultra reliable content delivery, serving over 5,000 companies, including ours, in over 80 countries. Organizations consistently choose Cash Fly for three reasons Availability, reliability and unrivaled performance. We get all three from Cash Fly. Cash Fly's revolutionary storage optimization system something we've been using for a while Now. It's available to everyone Ensures your holiday season remains jolly. The system creates private partitions that are dedicated entirely to your use on the Cash Fly server. So you get 100% bandwidth to ensure your content remains king.

01:28:41
Zero cash misses. Keep your content data primed closer to your customers, maintaining optimal speeds, ensuring quicker content delivery, no matter where your customers are. You can't beat a 100% cash at ratio. Let Cash Fly supercharge your images. If you've got a website with images on it, watch your content sort of new heights of efficiency and performance. Jump on board with Cash Fly's smart image optimization service. Give your audience a seamless, lag free experience they deserve, on every size screen, and you know the advantage of Cash Fly. By keeping your content on the edge, cash Fly can make sure that your delivery speed is instantaneous. Add Cash Fly's video on demand cash layer to your mix. If you're doing live video, you'll see a transformative reduction in loading times. You'll say goodbye to the buffering blues immediately and permanently. Drive your cash at ratio to 100%. That's Cash Fly's VOD cash.

01:29:36
There's so many reasons to use Cash Fly, from low latency video streaming to over a million concurrent users. Lightning fast gaming, which delivers downloads faster, with zero lag, glitch or outages. Mobile content optimization, which offers automatic and simple image optimization so your site loads faster on any device. Cash Fly's the only CDN built for throughput Deliver rich media content up to 10 times faster than traditional delivery methods and 30% faster than other major CDNs. And the billing is great. It's flexible month to month as you're getting to know what your needs and demands and bandwidth uses are, and for us it was very spiky, very inconsistent, so it took a while for us to figure it out. But then, once you do, you get fixed terms which give you even bigger discounts. Basically, bottom line, you design your contract.

01:30:28
When you switch to Cash Fly With Cash Fly's Elite Managed Packages, you get VIP treatment. Your dedicated account manager will be with you from day one, ensuring a smooth implementation and reliable 24-7 support when you need it. People come to us all the time saying could we be your CDN? I always say, oh, we got the best. We have Cash Fly. We've been using Cash Fly for more than a decade and I can tell you right now we wouldn't have it any other way.

01:30:53
Jumpstart your journey with Cash Fly. Get a complimentary first month, or give it a world with a free five terabyte account. That's nice, that's something new. Go to cashflycom slash twit. Cashflycom slash twit. This holiday season, I've been focusing on gratitude and Cash Fly is one of the partners who's been with us almost since the beginning. I'm so grateful for Cash Fly. I'm so grateful for their support of everything we do here at Twit. Thank you, cash Fly. Back to the panel and the subject that Mary Jo Foley did not want to talk about, but sorry, you've got to talk about it Activision Blizzard. Do it? Can you keep it short for her please, guys?

01:31:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, so no, no, no, no. This is just a kind of a question for that look back, a look ahead thing. Obviously, look back. This is big year with the Activision Blizzard controversy and drama and final approval and all that stuff. But how do you guys see this impacting Microsoft or Xbox, I guess, specifically like next year? What changes with the business? I mean, this is just more games, more studios.

01:32:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't think it's going to be a lot in the first year, just because that's the nature of Acquisition, especially once this big oh, it's going to take a while. I mean, if you think about the major properties like do they move World of Warcraft to Azure? Does that even make sense, like Blizzard has actually built their own cloud infrastructure at this point?

01:32:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh my God, you just reminded me LinkedIn.

01:32:21 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yeah, I was just going to bring that up, just canceled their migration to is it Azure it has to be Azure. Yeah 2019, LinkedIn announced okay, we evaluated all our options Like they had a choice right, Exactly, and it turns out the people on this.

01:32:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Want to see this.

01:32:41 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yeah, but now CNBC had the scoop on this. They contacted them. They said, hey, how's that migration going? And they're like, yeah, you know what? We're not doing it now, because this was great the reason they gave. There are so many other customers that want to get on Azure and we're letting them have priority access.

01:32:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They claim they're not, they didn't.

01:33:01 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
They claim they didn't cancel it, that they're just moved to the back of the line.

01:33:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, that's legit If you have working infrastructure right now. You think about how much Azure is under. I agree, Because of open AI.

01:33:12 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
I agree, but come on, this is just an excuse.

01:33:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So here's this, you guys are uniquely positioned, by which I mean are old enough to remember this one. It's like the Microsoft announced when they bought Hotmail they were going to move it off of free BSD, and never did. They had to rebuild that thing from scratch. You know they couldn't.

01:33:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's just not that simple and it's just no protocol Also not simple.

01:33:35 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Right. Yeah, they've been using all kinds of open source tech at LinkedIn their whole lives, even before Microsoft bought them. So to suddenly just switch to Azure, it's not that simple, right.

01:33:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The way it's going to come around is, as LinkedIn's own and Blizzard's own infrastructure starts to age out, they're looking at replacing millions of dollars worth of equipment, and they can't use the same purchase order system that the cloud's already got in place, and so now you're going to have to figure out how to buy your own hardware when they let's face it, the major cloud vendors own a conduit of hardware acquisition, and so at some point, three to five years from now, you're going to look at it buying this hardware, and then you look at it, with it was running on Azure, you'd already have the hardware. You know that's what changes the dynamic, but you're not going to do it for political reasons. You're going to do it because it saves money.

01:34:31 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yeah. Here you go yeah, yay.

01:34:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hmm, yeah, I don't remember the numbers anymore. It's not because it wasn't traumatic, I didn't even look it up, but I did an analysis of Activision Blizzard's financials over a year holding into Microsoft. Like, how does that impact things? It does obviously impact things, but more personal computing is still the smallest of the three Microsoft business units by far. Like it doesn't really. It doesn't make that much of a difference. It really contributes mostly just to the health of the overall platform. I think and we'll see but I bet this is gonna be the worst year Call of Duty's had in forever.

01:35:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, it helps them in a terrible version.

01:35:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, so I think they toss it out the door.

01:35:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, if you're talking about the big things they've got to try and take on now, it's like can you fix the culture, Like Bobby's actually out the door?

01:35:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So can you fix the culture? That's the next story, richard, that is a. I'm glad you mentioned that. So lost in the drama over the acquisition was the fact that the reason the acquisition came together was because though I think it was the Wall Street Journal broke the story about all the awful workplace allegations against Activision Blizzard by women, and then they released all this internal information that Bobby Kotick didn't just know about it, he was leading the charge and he's a horrible human being. And blah, blah, blah and Phil Spencer went public and said, yeah, this is not okay, we're gonna reevaluate this relationship. And Bobby K called him and said well, maybe we should talk about some things you know, and that that turned into-.

01:36:05
Talk about my golden parachute, yeah, so I had actually kind of forgotten about this in a little, in some small way. But just the other day Activision Blizzard settled that suit and you know there's money going out the door at center center. But I made the. You know we knew he was leaving by the end of the year but I was like, conveniently, this will be just in time for Bobby Kotick to take off. And that's exactly what happened.

01:36:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Aka, he gets away with it. He's gonna get to walk away with a giant pile of money. That's right, and Microsoft is paying everybody else.

01:36:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, what they're doing. Yeah, this was, I'm sure, was a known the cost part of the fee.

01:36:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, we're gonna have to do this right. But you know, and one would argue, there were challenges in the culture at GitHub as well and they've been trying to address those and that's an interesting problem because at the same time it's like it's a lot of the same people and it's also you make a certain product a certain way. Like culture changes slowly. It's not a trivial thing to do, but not allowing criminal behavior shouldn't be a cultural conversation. Right.

01:37:18
And one thing I can count on the other Microsoft over the past few years is they do not allow criminal behavior.

01:37:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, although I mean, they've certainly had their own high profile versions of this with Gates and what's the name? Alex Kipman. What's the kind of a problem like?

01:37:33 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
this. They're also all out. They're gone now.

01:37:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, like the bigger thing here is, it's not continuing.

01:37:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, oh yeah, for sure, yeah, yep.

01:37:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is it your sense?

01:37:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that Sacha just has zero tolerance for that kind of stuff and is just-.

01:37:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, he tolerated it for some number of years.

01:37:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, you know, I don't think the Before he was CEO, though, oh well, kipman was under him.

01:37:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And let me-, no, no, since he's been CEO. This is not an epiphany by a corporation trying to be kinder gentler. Yeah, this stuff wrecks the share price, that's right. Get rid of it, right. This is not what current society tolerates. It has to go. You cannot hide it Right. You will always get caught. You will always have a PR disaster. Just be on top of it. It's simpler and it's cheaper. I'd like to think of it for the right reasons, but they don't need to be doing it for the right reasons. It's actually economically wise.

01:38:26 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Good for business.

01:38:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, good for business to just cut them, because covering it up doesn't work. You always get caught.

01:38:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's inevitable yeah right and God, the whole way that they really rode the cloud to such big success stock price wise, market cap wise, et cetera. You don't screw that up.

01:38:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and they're analyzed. The point there is no single individual, even Bill Gates, so valuable that it's worth covering it up. Yes, exactly right, there's no such thing. We have piles of money. We can afford it. Just get rid of it. Just do the right thing and continue. Yep Well, the right thing happens to be good for the share price, right? I don't even know if I can feel right about any of that.

01:39:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would say it's even good for business, if your business is an unhealthy climate for women. You're missing out on 50% of the population. You're losing so much brain power, so much quality.

01:39:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's even worse than that, because this culture extends out into the games themselves. People are being harassed online Exactly and AI.

01:39:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You make the whole thing horrible, like I mean you know, yeah, I watched a great study of how the camera angles are different from a female, from following a female camera and following a male character. It's like literally embedded in this software. Yeah, good stuff, that's good stuff, and we wouldn't even talk about armor, that's all.

01:39:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can tell whether it was drawn by a man or a woman. Usually.

01:40:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Putting the breast back in the breastplate. I think that's the yeah that would be the first. It just seems to me this is it's easy to say, well, the culture's changed, or it's good for the stock price, but it's just the right thing to do also right.

01:40:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You would hope that that was sufficient. I don't know that it is, but it doesn't matter, not in business. We've created sufficient economic incentives today.

01:40:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But now, if you get, If it's a happy coincidence, we'll take it. At least they're doing the right thing.

01:40:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm not gonna hope that hard. I'm just liking that this seems to be the policy and they seem to follow it fairly well.

01:40:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right. So this is a notice, I think right. Yeah, so, semi-related to this, microsoft confirmed that Bobby Kay will be leaving the company on December 29th I think they had said Brit bigly before it would be the end of the year. So he'll get his platinum parachute or whatever this piece of human garbage. He has been there since the early 90s.

01:41:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wanna say Like very early on I didn't start the company right, but he no, no, that was like Dave.

01:41:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Crane and those guys from Atari, but this was the second gen of, but he's been there ever since. I mean he's gotta be the longest.

01:41:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He's the last man standing of. He's gotta be right. That took it from the Atari folks and grew it here.

01:41:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
In Boston we have things like the oldest continually operated restaurant in America and the oldest continually operated bar. That's what he is.

01:41:27
He's the oldest, continually operating CEO of a video company. Yeah, and like those places a little musty, yeah, so, but as part of this announcement, they also confirmed and this is actually very interesting, and actually Mary Jo, you would find this interesting, don't fall asleep Is they are not keeping this place open as a separate subsidiary like they do with some businesses like Mojang and GitHub and et cetera, including some in LinkedIn and also some game studios like Bethesda. Right, this is gonna be. These things are gonna be integrated into Xbox, like this will become part of the company.

01:42:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah. So, and there lies the question mark, which is is this because of culture? Because they didn't do it for Bethesda?

01:42:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right, I don't know. That's a good question.

01:42:15 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
So they can lay people off.

01:42:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, okay, so as part of this, that means that the existing executive staff is coming to Microsoft One of those people they had already announced remember they did like a leadership change announcement month two ago whatever One of the women from Activision, I believe, was part of that. But anyway, they're gonna roll these people in, lulu.

01:42:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Masservi, the Chief Communications Officer, is leaving.

01:42:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, yeah, but I will see we're gonna have to look at the See what you need to do the Vice.

01:42:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Chairman and Blizzard and King is departing. Number of Activision and Blizzard executives will part in March. But yeah, otherwise the big deal I think is gonna be the same Like employees though, right.

01:42:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So we'll see, because this is I don't know how many employees Activision Blizzard has, but I'm guessing it's more than a dozen, and they're probably all over the world. And you know, how do you? I don't know, we'll see. There probably will be further cuts. This is actually one of the things we should have talked about this past year was all the layoffs, right? There's Microsoft.

01:43:15
Microsoft has moved from a model that was very partner-centric. They were not unique, but I think they were one of the biggest examples of the kind of the partner culture the antithesis of Apple, right, and by the time they moved to what became Microsoft 365, a lot of those partners were no longer needed, really, right, and so Microsoft tried to accommodate the people who used to service those customers out in the world to some degree, but at some point it became. Well, microsoft is administering your exchange server. Isn't that better than third party? We're not sure about you know, are we doing it in-house? Yeah, okay, but a lot of their sale there's high-profile people you know about Microsoft kind of indiscriminately laid off this year, but also their whole like sales and the product support people. I know a bunch of people who were laid off this year, and it's including some working people.

01:44:08
It seems incredibly random.

01:44:10
Yeah, and that's what's weird about it? Because that was the argument I made in my own little art of pen when they were laying off everybody, which is I went. I finally went over the heads of three people to go to this vice president and say you just laid off the guy who was the liaison we had with Microsoft and the person responsible for us doing best of tech at every year. And he said I had no idea. And I said I know, that's the problem. You're just looking at a spreadsheet and laying people off. Yeah, you know, and I got in trouble for this, but you know, the point was it was so arbitrary. It was also like one of the two people I deal with directly at your company. You just laid off, you know, and it's like that's when a company's too big.

01:44:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If they don't know yeah, they have no idea, they just fire them.

01:44:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're filtered by salary and term. You know how long you've been here. Give me that little bend diagram and then you know no, it's not good, but that's what this feels like this year at Microsoft.

01:45:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And, of course, we're jumping back to the previous unit that you bring up a great point, which is at the beginning of this year. We were told to expect serious economic downturns in the last half of the year, and so that was the excuse all these companies were making to tighten the belt, so to speak, because it was going to get rough, as they posted record quarter after record quarter, exactly After and in the middle of all this AI stuff, I started asking every court well, how are you going to pay for this?

01:45:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then finally, two quarters ago, we're just going to pay cash. We have such huge profits that we can afford 10 to $15 billion a quarter to build out our AI infrastructure. Oh yeah, my company does the same thing. That's fine. I can afford 10 to $15 a quarter, you know, based on my profits. It's just astonishing how much money this company makes.

01:45:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and what's? The Activision Hire is about 13,000 employees. Yeah, it is Okay, that's pretty significant. Actually, that's a several percentage points increase. Yeah, okay, but let's face it, they need a new strategy around Xbox for gaming. They need to do something. I'm very excited, you know as much as I was not a huge fan of your Xbox section, I have come to appreciate how smart Game Pass is from Microsoft. Right that Microsoft is next Netflixing gaming. Yeah, hey, a monthly subscription, lots of games, that's right, you know. Stabilizing cash flow, because I've had so many friends of mine that work in the gaming industry where you have this crush to ship in October.

01:46:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Gaming.

01:46:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've probably turned into a game that doesn't work in October, so it'll be patched by spring For everyone but Microsoft, basically, although they had a little bit of this with Halo and maybe a few other games, gaming was very much like Windows and Office used to be. You'd have a big bang, release every three years, whatever, and then you'd have some lean years, you know, for a. It could be a game, franchise title, like a Call of Duty type game, although that was annual, or whatever the game might be, and it has not worked out for Microsoft. But think about it. I mean, microsoft figured out subscriptions in the 90s, right? How far back does software assurance go? They must have always had their eye on the consumer market, right.

01:47:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And there is no bigger. The transformation of Office is the ultimate one, right. I mean, that was a thousand dollar bill every three years and suddenly now it's 30 bucks a head per month. I know it's a solid thing, and then want to do the same thing to gaming and we're probably going to like it. Yeah, I don't want to say no, I can't.

01:47:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I won't do this for whatever reasons, but yeah, I think for most people having it's that Netflix thing, Like you said, you have this here's my choice.

01:47:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What's the new title? Yeah, Right. And if you watch any of them, then finally cancel it. But if you watch a few of them, you're happy. The main thing you don't decide is do I need to plunk down a hundred bucks? That's the math.

01:47:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean you can look at your Xbox to send your your year in review. Mary Jo, I'm curious what was your biggest game?

01:48:01 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
My biggest game, the CA.

01:48:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, but you could look at that.

01:48:05 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Enterprise licensing. That's what I was saying.

01:48:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, geez, enterprise licensing simulator probably is a game. Yes, yeah, you could look at your stats and say like this yeah, I paid 10 or 15 bucks a month, depending on the SKU, and that added up to whatever amount. And here's what. All the games I played yeah, no, I made money. I'm not made, but I spent less than I would have if I had actually bought those games. Right, sorry, you don't make money.

01:48:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It doesn't pay for itself. I don't mean to like that, but it's and that's why we can't sell an Xbox, to save it a lot.

01:48:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, which is a? Is that? Where are we in that one? We'll get to that soon. That's good. That's coming up in my Xbox segment, which is pretty short today, by the way, mary Jo, okay.

01:48:51 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Thank you.

01:48:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's my.

01:48:53 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Christmas wish.

01:48:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There you go. You want to talk Google Epic Cause. I guarantee you that one's going to come back around a few times next year Like this is not done Right, yeah, I'm going to.

01:49:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I put that aside. I was going to write about that over the weekend, but yeah. So a couple of things related to Google. The first is that they settled a Play Store state suit. I read one of the most poorly. I woke up in the morning and I read the paper on an iPad. I'm not 80, but I it was the most poorly worded. It was like US States and I was like, yeah, how many US States? And I kept looking where's the number? All US States, every US state, and Washington DC and Puerto Rico.

01:49:33
The attorneys generals of all of these places sued Google for their unfair practices with the Play Store, which is yet another little kind of chink in this armor here. And you know they're going to pay us into a settlement fund, so people are going to get money back. They're going to open up blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever. The thing that's interesting about this is they actually agreed to this in September, which is before the Epic suit went to trial. They were doing horribly in the trial. The judge basically pulled Google aside and said stop, yes, go make a deal, I'm not even going to put this in front of the jury settle, just settle, you know.

01:50:08
And they met and didn't settle. And we talked about you know, we ever kind of theories about why that might be and Google lost big, except what really happened. Well, what's really going on, richard, I guess is maybe the way to ask that question.

01:50:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I know I mean it is all back end stuff. It's like go ahead, make the deal, make people get out of the press, because inside the actual agreement are things like the alternative store only works for a year. Yeah, there's a list of conditions that if I was a developer trying to figure out where to put my app, there's one place, the Google Store. You put it anywhere else, you're committing suicide.

01:50:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and I right, and the thing is I make this case for Apple and Google that their goal is to delay the reducing of this 30-15% fee for as long as possible because it's completely unreasonable and it's so much money. And this agreement lowers the amount Google makes per transaction to like 26%, not 2.6% like they deserve.

01:51:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's very silly, but it's crazy. There's a point of there's litigation, there's PR and there's business and you do whatever you have to to get the PR piece done with there's plenty of quiet litigation. You can do for as long as you want, but as soon as it becomes noisy, just settle and then kill it on the back end. Create those conditions, find the solutions, act like oil companies. You know which. You know I don't want that, but this is, if you're. This is big business. These are gigantic companies and they make a huge amount of money and I think they're really there. That's what they're doing now. Like we, they looked incompetent. We're like where's your Brad Smith? I know, I know, I think they have a Brad Smith, except he may be an even meaner. Like he's actually.

01:52:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If they do, it's not Kent Walker, Unless he's talking a really good game, Because that guy to me is just committing suicide in court.

01:52:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't quite understand what's going on. I think, and almost I think, it was like oh, look at this, look at this, look at this. Well, they're knife, and I'm on the other side.

01:52:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, evil, evil always wins in the end because good is done, ideally something. Yeah, ok, so that's too bad, and then we don't have to talk about this too much, but Adobe is giving up on their $20 dollar yeah.

01:52:32
Adobe just spent the past year talking about nothing, nothing but AI, and ignoring Figma, and then a bunch of antitrust regulators were not too happy with this. They finally woke up. By the way, there is an issue here, I will say, with antitrust, especially in the UK, europe, whatever where the companies announce what they're doing and then a year goes by, and a year and a half goes by, and then finally they're like you know what? Actually, we're not going to let this Right, we're not going to let you do this. It's like, guys, we've been talking about this for almost two years, what are you doing?

01:53:02 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
OK, crazy, crazy theory what if Microsoft buys Figma?

01:53:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yikes, Now is that better.

01:53:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, I was going to say well, yes.

01:53:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Because Figma being acquired by Adobe is. Adobe is going to kill it because they have competing profits.

01:53:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Actually no they were going to kill XD.

01:53:20 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Microsoft is a huge user of Figma. No.

01:53:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So would they kill designer? Is that what you're saying? Does this replace designer?

01:53:29 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
I just remember when it was announced Adobe was buying Figma. I'm like, oh, I thought Microsoft was going to try to buy them.

01:53:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was kind of surprised. Adobe paid a premium. They offered $20 billion, which is much more than it was worth.

01:53:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And now they're paying a huge end, I think a billion Billion bucks.

01:53:44 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Also, microsoft may not be looking to buy another big company, since they're just.

01:53:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was going to say I think they're on the hot seat right now.

01:53:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I would also argue you can do a stock swap. You don't have to keep paying cash.

01:53:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh sure, right, and your prices will go up. The same regulatory head wins that Adobe had probably, though they do yeah. They do?

01:54:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know.

01:54:04 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Oh, they're not a design company. Well, no, not exactly.

01:54:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Adobe dominates that market right, so Adobe was literally removing a competitor. This is a. It was absolutely the feel of it. It was it. I mean, it's a classic monopolist kind of tactic, right.

01:54:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's right out of the label. Kcma did something right. Is that what you're hinting at? Ok?

01:54:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I would worry this a little differently. I would say they took their sweet-ass time to get to this point, but seriously, they could have done this like nine months ago.

01:54:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like listen. The question is, was there backroom conversation and we only hearing about it when I go to the front room? Yeah, we did. You see, a may ping them on the day and say this isn't going to happen it could be, I was right.

01:54:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So Adobe just had their backs their big annual shows, max, and I think it's what October probably somewhere in there, september, october Never mentioned figment even once, basically, and that was actually maybe retroactive. They were retroactive. That was telling. Maybe they, yeah, they knew.

01:54:59 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Well, I mean, they can't either too Right Like, and I suppose, talk about future plans if you haven't actually got the OK to buy the compass.

01:55:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, that's true too, yeah, ok.

01:55:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah Right, and then they become speculative. This FCC has, it's just that.

01:55:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Adobe, like the rest of the planet, has been AI, ai, ai, ai all year long and they did, honestly, they did their own great little ramp up and did a great job with it, Yep, but it kind of overshadowed the figment thing, in fact you know, and real question is have they wreck figment in the process, which is entirely possible?

01:55:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah Right, you know how much of the team has been demolished. You know they. If you're really, if you're looking at acquisition going a long time, you're not liking where it's going. You believe at least the good people do.

01:55:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think there were. I mean, a lot of them are holding out for the big payoff, right? Yeah, exactly Now they're like Now it's over. So we're just trying to figure that out. By the way, that's another side story. It doesn't really impact us.

01:55:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It would be plenty of damage because of that, right, I mean that they failed acquisition, especially after that much time going through due diligence and so forth, scrutiny and shuffle and so forth. Like right, yeah, they're shattered, it's not the same company anymore. We'll see what happens, but I got to think there's another conversation going on that we didn't surprise at all. It was Microsoft.

01:56:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You could buy Canva guys. They're still there to say yeah they are yeah.

01:56:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, Adobe was doing it purely defensively. Microsoft wouldn't be doing it for that reason.

01:56:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah Well, this was the argument Gates made against acquiring Slack. He's like you know. We could eliminate that competitor, but why don't we do it the fun way? Why don't we just destroy them? You know, we'll make our own, make our own profits. That's billed a challenge. We have everything we need. What are you buying? We don't need anything they have, you're just getting rid of them.

01:56:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Slack also said no, they did try to buy them. They did. Oh, they did. Okay, slack gave them the fingers like no, we're not going with the man.

01:56:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We could do it, yeah, but they might have. I mean, eventually gave them an offer you can't refuse, if you know what I mean.

01:56:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, they went with the man, just the other man, Mark Benioff.

01:57:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Exactly, but they ended up but you know honestly, but that's like we would like to never be promoted and you'll never hear from us again. Could you, could you do that for us? Like, yeah, that's all we do, you know? Like that, I mean, I don't, I don't even understand that company. You know, they're actually kind of cool in a random way, but Salesforce like the, but they left him alone.

01:57:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
right, that's the, I guess probably what the founders wanted. Stewart's gone. I mean he left, he took the money and ran.

01:57:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I always tell it, ever since Richard told the story about Centauri buying a bunch of ski makers in the United States and Scotland and so forth and how, what was the one that the makers Mark? They went to them and said you got to age, this stuff. I mean, the thing is like sometimes good corporate oversight and lead to advantages Like that was. I tell this sorry, I've told so like a hundred times now. It's like this is you always think, oh, the big corporate who sold his sucks and everything? So hold on a second, hold on a second. Have you had this Cause? It's excellent, yeah, and you know, and they never would have made it on their own.

01:58:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, and it's very much. You know, we often say Koretsu in the negative form of Koretsu, yeah, but actually sometimes Positive form of Koretsu, yeah. Listen, we know a lot about aging whiskey in stone buildings over longer periods of time, and here's how you do it.

01:58:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And here's what you have A lot of money, whiskey and stone buildings. It's like what's you know? The perfect climate. Let's make this happen.

01:58:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know. But also Mark was very much a startup kind of, you know, was the family owned business and only had so much money and in came the giant things. Well, that's always see this year build that there Don't worry.

01:58:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
When, when my little publishing company, windows NT magazine, was purchased by Penton, the promise was oh, all the money issues are over, and it's like, yeah, but you guys are still. You're going to be here still, oh, you're leaving. Oh, that's interesting. And, like you know, the money issues didn't go away. You know they. They were just handled by people eight, you know, layers away.

01:58:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, Well, like it's, it does transform, but you do. You can do initiatives, and certainly one of them was the seller age makers, mark.

01:59:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, all right, so we'll see what I have. Figment I don't know I will see what happens. We'll see this figment. What a figment is to Adobe XD? As what the what's? The Epic game gaming library Fortnite.

01:59:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, the gaming developer library.

01:59:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The Unreal engine is, to losing my words the most popular one that screwed up your licensing this year. You need to know that Now it's sent to their military, those guys. So it's a minor. It's a minor competitor, but they could be popular at their own size, right? I mean, there's no reason they can't do what you need. You need to thank you, jesus. All right, I lost it there.

01:59:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, would you get that little ball from?

01:59:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
there Every time is Santori time.

01:59:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Give you taste the darkness baby.

01:59:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love the darkness. You're turning me into a drunk, Richard, but I think you know.

01:59:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
MGI sent them both whiskey advent calendars.

01:59:57 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Oh nice.

01:59:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And I've been drunkenly trying to keep up with the advent.

02:00:00 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
I'm going to tell you I started the videos behind it.

02:00:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not working good. It's not working good, I don't remember.

02:00:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I figure, if I do four day for four days in a row, there you go I will be there.

02:00:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I can. I can lots of little pictures of small bottles from my friends.

02:00:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, I do. I drunkenly touch Richard.

02:00:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're not the only one. It's a wee dram 25 wee drams.

02:00:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We have beer coming up, and whiskey too, and an Xbox pick of the week.

02:00:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, we do, yes, we do.

02:00:29 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
An enterprise pick of the week.

02:00:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very, Joe Foley. If you want to go away for the Xbox segment, you can go feed Sirajic. How is Sirajic, by the way?

02:00:40 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
No, he is fine. He was a wild man right before the show started and he's been knocked out ever since, which is great.

02:00:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, he's gotten used to it.

02:00:50 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
He saw me pull out the focus right in the mic and he started jumping around like he used to. I'm like, oh, he remembers, he remembers.

02:00:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Cats never forget, do they? They don't All right, well, I'm sorry, but speaking of never forgetting, you got to do it.

02:01:04 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
It's part of the show.

02:01:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Time for the Xbox segment. Little Pauly Therat jumping around, you said it was going to be short. That's okay, it is short, take your time.

02:01:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, you want me to do it now. I'm sorry, I took a break.

02:01:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I took a little break and then we're back.

02:01:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, we did a fake break, sorry, I was going to sit there and type in an email. I'm like I have time.

02:01:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a fake break. I'm sorry everybody, although Mary Jo took it pretty seriously Go ahead.

02:01:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, she just said she left. You left Right, see. Okay, it wasn't just me.

02:01:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, maybe it's the Xbox segment.

02:01:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know, there was a wonderful leak of internal Sony information, which included their fears about the Xbox platform. Now that they own Activision Blizzard, right? Or, in this case, when this was written, what would? What would this be like? You know, this is the Somnia breach, yeah, and it's. It looks bad for them, but this is the point, like. In other words, we need to try to leave frog this at our own ways, right? So Sony, like Microsoft, has been expanding into PC games in a bigger, bigger way every year.

02:02:06
Sony is working to improve their PS plus stuff, which is kind of their Xbox game pass slash, cloud gaming stuff. Sony already has a great lead, I would say, in exclusives. Right, this is their kind of go to thing. I in fact, the thing I was just writing to somebody was they were complaining that they're. You know, I'm not going to be an Xbox guy unless I see Xbox series X and S exclusives. I'm like that's not what Xbox is, right. This is a different kind of go to market strategy. Microsoft's is the same. This is the Sacha de Della thing I would say is you know, meet your customers where they are.

02:02:41
And in gaming, what that means is literally, if you're on a console, a PC, a mobile cloud, you know, whatever it might be, whatever device, their goal is to make sure that they can get as many of their games to as many of those places. So if you're looking for, like the thing Sony does, which is make something exclusive now to the PS five, I mean, I'm not saying it won't happen, but that's not the general strategy. This has worked very well for Sony in the console market. Microsoft is kind of looking past the console market because you know they didn't win it. Basically. Right, I think if you would, if they had won that market, we wouldn't be talking like this. So they're, they're basically just looking at like what they think this will, this acquisition will mean to them really, and what they can do to counter it. And honestly, I think Sony is screwed. No, I think they're they're.

02:03:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
they sold three times the number of PS fives yeah you got you got it, Not margin right, you won the market that doesn't make money.

02:03:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's the thing, and especially for Microsoft, right? You know, nintendo infamously almost always profits from hardware Almost immediately. They do a good job at that. Sony, usually, over the course of lifetime of a console, will get there. Microsoft has never gotten there.

02:03:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was one of the things that came out of the mix. Is that because their R and G is so expensive, or they don't want to charge enough for their consoles, or I?

02:04:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
don't know I don't know.

02:04:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think Sony has the upstream manufacturing capability, so they're able to because they're an electronics company. Yeah, which?

02:04:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Microsoft doesn't have. Yeah, yeah, that could be.

02:04:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But either way, you know Microsoft sticking to the knitting. They are a software company, that's right. That's where they get their margins. Yeah, exactly your hardware at cost.

02:04:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah. The reason why I think right, yeah, but it's the problem is they've never been able to sell it at cost. They haven't even broke, even like they've never made money ever.

02:04:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So, yeah, I think their cogs perspective, they charge enough for that, but then they have support problems and all of the other things and it eats into. But the other side of this is do you make games well enough to be profitable? And that's, I think, something they're still working on. Really what they're doing. If anything like who should be afraid steam yeah, that's what they're going after is will be the distributor.

02:04:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So steam too is you know their single platform right, but the advantage Microsoft has is they span platforms or that's you know again the goal. I think steam's okay, I think they're going to be doing you know the steam is. Steam is that came out too. Steam is in the lake. Steam is the biggest store in Windows, which is, you know, on one hand you might say, yeah, obviously it is, on the other, like really that's kind of interesting, like I, so that's a healthy business.

02:05:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's also privately held right, like. The thing that's crazy about Valve is how few people own Valve.

02:05:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And how many of them came from Microsoft as a percentage, right? I mean yeah, so there's a baby Microsoft, right?

02:05:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
there. Kind of interesting, except they're not like they've stick to their knitting, they've kept their number of owners tiny, like there's no reason for that company ever IPO. They make a fortune to work on what they want to work on. You know it's. It's an amazing business that is quietly just cash in it.

02:05:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But you know what that's. In a way they're a very successful example of that. But that's sort of what I was saying about Figma. I don't know anything about this business, I don't really care, but it's possible that in their world, at whatever level of success they have, that could be very successful, right and profitable and so forth. And you know, I don't really know that business.

02:06:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
but they were a young. They're a younger company, built doing an innovative thing that a lot of other people do.

02:06:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, you know at the market leader and say we could do this better because, dear God, photoshop is a battleship of three million concentric parts, none of which were made by the same company and none of which were made by the same company and once your software can drive, you have problems with versioning Exactly Right In too long.

02:06:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I mean, I'm fascinated that the strategy seems so very different. Now, yeah, what happens with the hardware long term? What happens when the majority of PS5 players have game passes, because that's the best way to get games from my PS5? Yeah, you know, that's a different world now, because that means Microsoft be paid every month and Sony years. Yeah, yeah, when you sell the hardware once Windows is, in a way, right.

02:07:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean people run on Microsoft's platform and they use other apps and other. You know, I mean that's, that's an ego, that's one way to look at an ecosystem, I mean.

02:07:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean arguably looking bigger, right. It's just a good question of you know. Why'd you buy Activision Blizzard if you're not going to make games?

02:07:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, you are. But again, the goal is to put them out and put them out on game pass.

02:07:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

02:07:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a different way. It's a different way to do it.

02:07:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I just don't know that you can charge it. Are you going to have enough game pass to offset the value of blockbuster? Let's blockbuster billion dollar products. That's a lot of game pass, right.

02:07:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can tell you that you know low, low 100 million somewhere in there.

02:07:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

02:07:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not huge right, but that's anyway, we'll see. I don't know.

02:08:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean because eventually the bean counters come to play. It's like how many people are allowed to develop this game if this is the cash flow?

02:08:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We already have examples of games that were developed to fruition. Also TV shows, right Movies, and then someone pulls the plug and says, yeah, it doesn't matter, it will cost us less. Now to say, no, yeah, we'll have to sell the money we spent then to try to market this thing and have it sell nothing Exactly.

02:08:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Crazy. It's a crazy world, I'm wondering. This is the risk they're taking with this model. Yes, it is Flattening the revenue is that it'll be stable, but will it be enough? You know, and the bigger issue here is if they up the hardware again or VR really does take off, Like if any of those things happen where we now have to spend hard and innovate on game development.

02:08:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
VR takes off, microsoft is screwed. Yeah, because that's the one thing they have not paid attention to.

02:08:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And they're in last battle Now. I wouldn't bet on VR because it really has to take it off, but it's going to be disruption sooner or later.

02:08:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't remember. It was Mary Mary Jo's back, by the way, leo, if you want.

02:09:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know, but I'm giving her the option to bail completely. Oh, I see, oh, I see where it went.

02:09:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You don't have to feign interest in this topic Meanwhile you guys are stretching it out as long as possible.

02:09:17 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yeah, you are. I'm like what happened to a short segment here, all right.

02:09:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So where's your gong, mary Jo? Where's your gong, I know.

02:09:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
When Google canceled Stadia it was sad on a number of levels. It was at the time, I think, the best game streaming service. They did a great job technologically with the controller being directly connected to the service. This is a feature Microsoft we know from a leak. We keep mentioning that they're going to copy that Good, they should. It's a great idea. But they also kind of supported the existing body of users and what I thought was a pretty good way, and among the things they did for them was allow them to transform whatever transition this controller into a Bluetooth control that will work anywhere that takes Bluetooth controllers Right. So originally that transition period was going to run out December 31st this year, but now they're going to extend the deadline to the end of next year. So if you if for some reason you're holding on to a Stadia controller and you haven't converted it, you can do so. You'll get a year. So you'll have another year and speaking of taking a year.

02:10:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you for the Xbox segment. We are now let's see ready to go to the back of the book, aren't we? Before we go to the back of the book, can I make a little plug just to our friends? I'm seeing a lot of new people, a lot of new faces in club Twitter. I'm so grateful to all of you. Welcome.

02:10:45
I won't name names because there's so many of you, but we are now up to 9,521 members, which is up about 1500 members since we started really begging. So I and I'm not a I'm not a person who likes to beg, I don't want to, but I do want to let you know we have a great year ahead of us with lots of great content. This is going to be one of the most interesting years ever in technology and we'd like to be here to cover it for you. We can't do that without your help, and it's easy, because all it is is seven bucks a month joining club Twitter. You get ad free versions of all the shows, you get the club Twitter discord, which is so much fun, and you know a great place to hang, and there's animated gifts, apparently.

02:11:33
I think he's talking about the Xbox segment, not about this pitch for club Twitter. There's also, by the way, conversations in the discord about more than just the shows. You know, yeah, you can chat about the show, but we, for instance, we're doing the advent of code. We have a very active group about two dozen people who are doing the advent of code. We're talking about that. We're talking about AI. We even have an AI creator in here. We have a, we have a mid journey in here. There's a lot of stuff. There's a Minecraft server.

02:12:03
My point is we try to give you benefits. The most important benefit from our point of view is that seven bucks a month makes a big difference in what we can do next year. We'd love to have you be part of the club. There's also special programming, including iOS. Today We've moved back into the club. Rosemary and Micah are going to do some interesting things next year with iOS today. So again, twittv slash club. Twit. Please join if you can. We'd love to have you in the club and it's going to make a big, big difference in terms of what we can do in 2024. That's it I'm going to say now. I'm going to give you back to Paul. Mary Jo Foley man I like saying that and Richard Campbell for our back of the book. Starting with a tip of the week, paul, the Xbox segment was long.

02:12:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I spent 90 minutes recording the answer. What's this last week to make up for my mistake?

02:12:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you had to redo it. You had to redo it, yeah, well, thank you for doing that, and I think my members really appreciate it. It's great, that stuff is great.

02:13:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The tip is super quick. Microsoft is having a big sale, mostly on Xbox and Surface type stuff. It goes through well. It actually depends on what you're looking at. So a lot of the deals end on December 24th but some of them select surface success rates I think is part of it go until the beginning of January. So it's called the Google Microsoft countdown sale.

02:13:25
It's kind of the countdown to the end of the year, but there's also content. You know the movies and TV shows, the selfies, stories, etc. Etc. But big sale, big end of year sale. So not so much probably for a Christmas president or holiday president at this time, but maybe just something for yourself. You know, save 16 bucks on an Xbox controller or whatever, or 19 bucks actually on a regular controller. So a lot of good stuff there. Not a fire sale, but, you know, whatever Good. Also, I've been working and working and working on this kind of digital decluttering thing. I've been consolidating my photo albums. I've done them up through now 2012,. I'm working on 2013 now and one of the big issues I had because I have tools for deduplication, which we talked about I had tools for automatically pushing.

02:14:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We want to see Sriracha. Forget it, paul. There's a cat, a big old cat. Hello, sriracha, we missed you. All right, go ahead, paul. Sorry, I just wanted to say hi to Sriracha. I don't. I'm sorry. He made a song, yeah. Oh wait a minute.

02:14:27 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Okay.

02:14:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm getting to work. Go ahead, paul.

02:14:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sorry, me or her, what's going on? You Continue.

02:14:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Continue Please. I beg of you Please.

02:14:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
One of the issues. I use a great tool to auto sort files based on metadata into folder structures right, and the problem is it only works with certain metadata, and what I found is that video files that you take with your phone do not have date taken metadata. They don't have media created that it, which very few applications support. Yeah, so I found something called what is it called? Media Sorter? All one word and it does everything. So actually you could just use this one tool to sort all of the media, no matter what format it is, into these, whatever. You could rename the files or sort them into different folder structures, and it's fantastic, it's free and it's fast and, my God, I wish I'd had this thing too. Two weeks, two months.

02:15:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is where, another place where you could see a new generavay yeah Technology coming place, like all the faces in this sort by that, yes.

02:15:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There are so many legacy tools that were written to something very specific and what I've never. Maybe someone knows of something like this, but I've never found a tool that says tell us the metadata you want or tell us the set of metadata you want, we'll just use that. And you got to be careful with image files, especially because you could get the file from you, copied it to desktop and it has that date. You want the. You know, you want the real original date created.

02:15:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So anyway, re-tagger right.

02:15:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's level of all of your tags.

02:15:59
It's the best. So, anyway, this tool is awesome for this. It works really really well. It's just kind of cut down on the workload dramatically. And then just two quick kind of bonus picks for mobile, because I just started using these.

02:16:11
Over the past week, firefox mobile was updated to support extensions again. I think they used to have extensions back in the day, but they revamped this extension infrastructure. There were over 500 of them now. When they went live with it last week I think it was 450, it's over 500 now and it's like everything you would expect from desktop basically. So something to look at if that matters to you. You want those extensions. Firefox is pretty impressive now on mobile.

02:16:37
And then I had to look this one up. I was shocked by this, but a DuckDuckGo for Android has supported a tracking protection feature which is basically well. It's exactly what it sounds like for quite some time, but it's been in preview. So they contacted me and say this thing's out of preview. And I was like I thought this was out of preview. So here's what happened. It was built in Two years ago. They released this in preview to a limited audience. One year ago. They expanded it to anyone who wanted to turn it on Now it's just available to everybody. So there are a lot of good reasons to use DuckDuckGo on Android as well, and this is one of them. For sure. So another, I guess mobile browser we'll call it to look at Too funny.

02:17:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here we go. Mr Richard Campbell, I think you might want to do a little something for Run-As-Radio.

02:17:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, I'm up and then under the category of Microsoft naming things poorly, what do you think Azure Art guest configuration is even about? Like good luck, huh, yeah, so it's so bad even Microsoft's renamed it. If I call it machine configuration for Azure Art, does that tell you more? A little more, a little more.

02:17:49 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Arc is so confusing. I'm still confused by Arc.

02:17:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Arc is a management tool. It's messaging your resources on premises in the cloud, across the clouds and so forth, and so what machine configuration for Azure Arc is is actually a set of templates for how you prefer your virtual machines to be configured, wherever they may be running. So if you're moving, if you want to move a VM up into Azure, it's going to apply the security constraints you've predefined. So, rather than every virtual machine having to have its own configuration and then have to be security validated and validated based on rules for your organization, you can put together a set of policies those are stored as templates and then you can apply them, and at the same time, it can also tell you when you're out of configuration if there's drift. We have cool tools like desired state configuration, that'll actually show are you in sync with the current configuration if we provide updates, how do they roll on to it, so forth.

02:18:51
Which Arc is all very good at? It's just named so badly. Nobody knows what this stuff does, but Jody Boone is a young woman at Microsoft who is in the center of all of this. She's been helping with the naming, but she knows this stuff cold, and so we were able to go through this. Hey, you have the. We all have these problems, Like if you're in that, in that system, and role of trying to shepherd a bunch of virtual machines wherever they may be. Arc can do it all. You just need to know what to light up and to get to this place where it becomes easier and easier to manage them, rather than each, each new one being an N plus one problem through you to struggle through. So, yeah, she kicked ass. It was a great conversation and how they recommended. If you're in this problem space, you're going to care a lot about what this tool can do for you.

02:19:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
My screen just turned orange, which is my way of saying I hate the winter. I'm just going to throw that out there.

02:19:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean Solstice is a PONNUS friend. It is Like for the next day or two. Thank goodness it's been bloody dark.

02:19:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's today. Actually, I think it's today, God. All right, how about you do a little? I forgot. What do you do, oh Brown? Well, wait a minute. Now We've got an enterprise big of the week.

02:20:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We got to do this in order. It's time for Mary Jo. Slowly, I'm just doing something fun together.

02:20:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's together. I don't have a two box of the U2. All right, paul, just if you would just duck out of the frame and now Wow, I mean, I don't mind listening.

02:20:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wait are we?

02:20:24 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
going to do an enterprise pick.

02:20:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, an enterprise pick of the week.

02:20:29 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yeah. So this is a very self-serving enterprise pick of the week, but I think it will be of interest to our listeners who care about enterprise tech. So there's two things that we have on directionsonmicrosoftcom that you can get for free, and let me tell you that's kind of a rarity. Our business is charging people to help them with licensing and understanding contracts and negotiating with Microsoft. That's how we make money. But we also have some free stuff, and one of the free things is we have a blog that I got going this year, directionsonmicrosoftcom slash blog, and one of the features on our blog is called Answer this. So there's a forum you can go to in one of these entries If you have a really complicated licensing question, an enterprise tech question.

02:21:20
You're like we have X number of licenses of this. Do we need more? If you describe your scenario, we will help you for free and as long as you let us post this in our blog post, we won't identify you or your company. It will just say, hey, here's the answer to your question and it's free, so check it out. It's called Answer this on our blog and the other one.

02:21:41
It's coming very soon. I thought it was going to be today, but maybe in the next day or two, we're going to be posting a link for you to be able to download something we've been working on all year. We've created a giant co-pilot matrix where we're listing the enterprise Microsoft co-pilots, what we know about the licensing, what we know about the pricing, how they work, who they're for all in one handy dandy chart that you'll be able to download for free. So stay tuned to directionsonmicrosoftcom for that. If you want to have this awesome tool that we're going to update regularly, since they keep changing the branding and the pricing and the naming. It's something we'll be updating probably every month at least. So, yeah, very nice.

02:22:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you'll never run out of stuff to talk about there.

02:22:29 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
No, we will not, you're right.

02:22:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Really, I'm glad you're doing it too, because I've been trying to keep track of them.

02:22:36 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
It's impossible. It took our whole team of analysts working together to do this.

02:22:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know that Microsoft knows.

02:22:44 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
No, they don't. I don't think they have this. I don't think they have this asset.

02:22:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe they'll use yours. That would be funny, I know.

02:22:51 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
We were looking to see if they had it and I'm like I don't think they have this Wow.

02:22:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, too complicated. Normally it's complicated, yeah, yeah, I think they have this asset out?

02:23:00 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yeah, they do.

02:23:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, thank you, mary Jo. We missed your enterprise picks of the week. Thanks, yeah, you know what else? We missed your beer picks of the week. But I think we're going to do a kind of a joint enterprise there as well. Let's start with the brown liquor.

02:23:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's going to put the whiskey into the beer as kind of a bomb thing. Yeah, yeah, it's a boiler maker, it's a boiler maker.

02:23:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
One of these whiskies that I'm going to talk about two different whiskies because they're both in the same facility is very well suited to a boiler maker, or a nog, as somebody suggested as well.

02:23:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love nogs. I'm all in the nogs. I'm all up yeah.

02:23:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Listen. I mean, I like whiskey. I think you know that, yeah.

02:23:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think so.

02:23:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I'm pretty good at telling stories about whiskey too. Yeah, I think so.

02:23:44
And a couple of shows ago. I thought you know I'm going to go talk about Fidic 12 because Fidic 12 is like the original staple single malt. If a bar has any single malt it has Fidic 12. If you're going visiting family and they have a single malt it's probably a Fidic and I want to just give it respect because it's the original. You know, grant and Sons really define the concept of the single malt. They turn it into a marketing thing and it went on from there and of course I was going to talk about Glen Finick.

02:24:11
Having toured that distillery, I had to talk about Balvenia the following week, because they're literally on the same grounds and I generally know a fair bit about these things. Like I write a lot of this out of my head but then I go fact check myself right, because do I remember correctly, is there other details? I can go into Double checking years and I just landed in a rabbit hole. Like Grant and Sons have been up to stuff that I never knew about and that's what today's distillery is. To say distillery is another Grant and Sons distillery called Kinnevee. Now is it really a distillery? That's an interesting question Because in 1990, when Balveny was rocking it, this was their second brand that really went big on the single malls when Whiskey was ascended again.

02:24:57
In the beginning they needed to build another distillery. They didn't have a lot of room so they literally grabbed the property next door and they built a set of stills directly adjacent to Balveny. In fact, they had three wash stills and three spirit stills and they pipe for the most part just pipe it straight into Balveny production just to try and keep up with the man, because they were so, so busy. But as they got things under control and actually grew the primary distillery some more, they started doing experiments with this other set of stills and doing separate ageings with them as well, and so they created a new brand called Hazelwood for the Hazelwood Single Malls, which is not to be confused with a new product. They're now making same group, which is now a blend called Hazelwood, and Hazelwood actually comes from the name of the Grant family estate. It's called Hazelwood, so that's where the name came from. So through the 90s they made a few of these and they're fairly hard to find. They didn't make the production lots were very small, they were typically only sold in Scotland and they're largely off the market now Around 2011,. So after 20 years or so doing this, they went quiet for a while and then they rebranded in 2013 to call themselves Kinnevy, and that was around the time that they started making more blends. So now they were starting to produce some blends and we'll talk about this a little bit more further on but only the stills were separate.

02:26:18
They all of the mash work, all of the barley work and so forth was done in Balveny. Now it was different barley, it was a different grass. They treated it differently, but they would get it up to the wash stage and then they would pump the wort over to the stills in Kinnevy and distill it, and then they'd feed it back into the barrel system in Balveny, but they'd rack the barrels a little differently and had them all. So is it really a different distillery? It's kind of just directly connected to it. But they made a few unusual whiskies along the way, and if you go research the Hazelwood collection, there's only a half a dozen of them and they typically only have a few hundred bottles of each, sometimes less priced, anywhere between about $1,200 and $1,7500 per bottle, and you have to be a member of the Hazelwood collection, which just to sign up on a form, to even have the option to buy them, and if I was going to recommend one, if you're looking for one, to get me for a present perhaps.

02:27:20
The Spirit of Scotland 46, which is a $43.6 ABV, runs about $1,500. There's only 500 bottles in the world. Now wait, didn't you say this whole thing started in the 1990s? How did they make a 46? They've been around for 30 years. How odd.

02:27:40
So in 1990, this is how this whiskey called the Spirit of Scotland came to be 1994, grant and Sons that's the larger collective entity that is Phidic and Malvenian, so forth made a Spirit of Scotland 500th anniversary edition. Now, what was the 500th anniversary? It was the 500th anniversary of the first recorded reference to Scottish whiskey in 1494 on the Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, and so Grant and Sons, anticipating this, had taken a few of their best barrels from their stills and had put them aside. They made an 18-year-old, they called the 500th anniversary edition. They priced it very high and it didn't sell particularly well and they kept a bunch of. They actually relayed it into barrels and put it away again.

02:28:29
This whole Kenneve thing happened and in 2022, it was 40 years, 6 years old, and so they re-bottled it now as the House of Hazelwood's Spirit of Scotland, 46. In between these times, in 2019, they created another brand they called Kenneve Works, where they made weird whiskeys, things that would not be considered Scottish whiskey. They did a run just a few of them with mixed mashbills. So they did a triple distillation that was aged in bourbon casks for five years, which is very like Woodford Reservish. They did a mixed mashbill in Scotland like heresy 89% malted barley, 11% rye in Virgin American oak for three years again very bourbon-y and then they did another mixed mashbill with more barley and less grain, but then mixed it in with European oak. And they only sold them on Amazon. You can find a few at auction. Don't bother, they were just experiments. It's weird. The whiskey you have heard of that's part of this entire system is Monkey Shoulder.

02:29:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a terrible name.

02:29:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So Monkey Shoulder is the name for a pain that maltmen get. So when you're turning the malt, the strain of the shovel, of lifting that malt, turning it over, gives you a monkey shoulder. Well, well, well, a monkey shoulder is made by Grant and Sons. It's actually made in the Kinneve distillery and it is a blended malt. Okay, not just a blended whiskey, a blended malt. So there's no grain alcohol in it, it's just a blend of malts, typically Phytic, balveny and what comes from the Kinneve stills. It's the third best-selling Scottish whiskey in the world After Johnny Walker and the McCallan. It's about $40. And it's very drinkable, but it is a blended malt.

02:30:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's kind of made for. That looks like from the website, mixing like.

02:30:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Boyle and the Pure. Yeah, no, it's a party. And they say if you want to make a whiskey, nog, make it with shoulder and listen, drinks fine, throw a couple of ice cubes in it. Like there's nothing wrong with this whiskey, it's perfectly drinkable. But it comes from the same distillery that also wants to sell you a $1,500 bottle of only one of 500 limited edition 46-year-olds. And so is it really a distillery? It's interesting, right. And then the thing is, I'm not to the bottom of the crazy Grant things yet. There's more, but I'm going to take a break. I think that was enough. But because Kinneve was directly tied to Balveny, I thought it was important to tell a story alongside it's really interesting.

02:31:15
Plus you get that double combination of. You can build very rare old whiskeys, but you can also make a super popular blended malt. They're used in the same system.

02:31:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is whiskey. I mean, is whiskey like port or something Like it gets better the older it is, or is there a point beyond which you do?

02:31:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
not wish to. That's a phenomenal question and it's very challenging to answer it. I have on a couple of barrel tours with a master distiller thief directly from a 50-year-old that drinks like tar, oh, ok.

02:31:45
I was going to say I was like thick vinegar, yeah it gets very strong and so they're typically used in small proportions, right, but it says 46 on the bottle. That just means it's the youngest thing in there, although in the case of that particular addition, which was already a blended addition because it's actually a blend Spirit of Scotland it's all 46 because it was all barreled at the same time. But most of the special editions and I didn't get into some Balveny, but like one of my very, very favorite whiskeys is their Ton 50-09, which they only do limited releases every few years of, and there's often 50 in the Ton 50-09, but they don't even put a year on it because they only use a little bit of 50 for the flavor of it. No, it's not certain that whiskey gets better with age and it's not like you put it in a barrel so you know 12 years from now. That's going to be amazing, you don't know. You barrel it up and then you check it at interval every few years and you're looking for flavor profiles.

02:32:41
And one of your dangers is the alcohol level is dropping over time. Depending on where it's laying in the barrel rooms it may be going faster or slower, but if it falls below 40% you cannot sell it as whiskey, and so barrel men often will see a particular production run some years in getting low, getting into the below 50, and they'll get rid of it. They'll offload it to McFail or one of the other bottlers because it isn't fitting the flavor profile, what they want to make and they want to sell it while it still has some value. But sometimes they go really well and sometimes you'll do a flora and fauna bottle, like the ASIO does, where this is a special addition.

02:33:25
You don't know it's taste, you have to feel for it and it's like it's part of the magic of this whole process is that the climate matters. Those barrels breathe over the year, warmer in the summer, cooler in the winter, more wood absorption versus more expiration it depends. And so seasons matter. Different years have different effects. It's never certain where that barrel sat in the barrel room matters, what that particular lineage of the wood matters, and so you can't be certain. And the genius, the absolute genius of a single malt whiskey like a McAllen 12 or a Balvenie 12 is that it tastes like Balvenie 12 every year they made that. They selected the barrels to make an assembly that tastes like McAllen 12. How do you do that? Those guys are geniuses, yeah.

02:34:22 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Man, I thought I could wax poetic about beer.

02:34:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know it's amazing, isn't it? Beer is just beer, but whiskey is like beer.

02:34:32 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Barrel age tube and all the same constraints and complications, but yeah.

02:34:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And they'll take beer barrels and the Lage Whiskey that's right and by the way it's beautiful. It's beautiful yes.

02:34:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mary Jo Foley, in honor of your wonderful appearance here, I have written a song. No, I would like to I'm a first-nepot at 4.53 pm. No, we want to get a beer of the week. It's been so long and people miss it. It has. What have you been drinking it?

02:35:05 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
has, well, probably a little of everything, but I have the perfect beer for today. Okay, very unique beer. Here is the can. She's got it right there, she's got it right there. Wow, look at that.

02:35:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And she is prepared.

02:35:21 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
It is a beer from a brewery called Back Home Beer and here's Sriracha to help out, when you touch the can Back Home Beer. If you can see the can.

02:35:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a goza.

02:35:36 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
It's a pomegranate goza. Okay, so here's the story of the spirit. There is a woman Her name is Zahara Tabataba I'm sure I'm pronouncing her name wrong. She's Iranian American. She is starting a brewery in Brooklyn. She's already a contract brewer and this is her brewery, but she's she did a Kickstarter and she raised the most money ever for any brewery with her kicks. Wow. Yeah, her beers are very unique. Like a lot of people make gozers, but this one is what you say, dozers, gozers. Gozers. Not dozers Weak here.

02:36:17
They're. Yeah, they are weak beers, but they usually have like a salty ending to them. They like that's kind of their characteristic, right? Sorry, sriracha, we missed her. We used him too. Don't worry, we're glad to see you. This beer is called Yelda Queen. Yelda night is the winter solstice in Iran, and so this beer is meant to commemorate the winter solstice which is here now in the United States. And what she does it's very unique is she uses ingredients from her home country, like she uses black limes and she uses Persian salts to make these beers based on recipes from ancient recipes, from beer from Iran. So she's taking a modern twist on ancient recipes. Keep your eye open for these guys, because they're they're really, really popular in New York right now. Like everybody's looking for their beer. It sells out immediately. It's called back home beer and this particular one, yelda Queen pomegranate, goes there.

02:37:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Perfect beer for tomorrow night. I was wrong.

02:37:25 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Tonight is today's the solstice, the 21st, the 21st is the solstice.

02:37:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, it's the longest night of the year, so get a six pack. It's a very light beer, so you could drink a six pack.

02:37:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's going to feel like an eternity Four percent, lovely.

02:37:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What a nice story too. Yes, falkal Yelda night goes there with pomegranate and sea salt. Well, mary Jo, it's been very wonderful to have you back on the show.

02:37:55 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yeah, it's been fun, thank you. Thanks for having me back.

02:37:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We do miss you. I wish we could get you back more often, but I understand. Thanks, things are going so well at directions on Microsoftcom. Everybody should check her out there, and she does have a podcast.

02:38:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
She graduated with a cool kid. She's gone.

02:38:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's with the cool kids now, that's for sure.

02:38:14 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Now I get to a podcast about licensing like for hours on end, it's like a whole new world.

02:38:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If that's what you need, you know who you are and you know where to go. Mary Jo Yep Foley, it really was nice to see you and a great surprise, thank you very much. Yeah, it was great to see you and everything's going well and you're happy in your Brooklyn.

02:38:33 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yeah.

02:38:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not Brooklyn Manhattan.

02:38:35 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Manhattan, yep, still here, same place, as you can see from my background. Same exact everything.

02:38:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But we're so glad to see you again.

02:38:43 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Yeah, thank you very much, merry Christmas Mary.

02:38:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Jo, thanks, and the same to you, richard Campbell and Paul Therrott. This is our last episode of 2023. We are going to adjourn for the week and then next week it'll be a best of episode. So if you're subscribed to Windows Weekly, you'll get that automatically. Oh, mary Jo, they've made you a lovely Joe has great stickers in our discord and he's made you a lovely, lovely wreath. Your windows weekly 2023 gift.

02:39:15
Mary Jo is here. Oh, that's sweet. Well, we really really like having you here and we hope you have a wonderful 2024. Same to you, gentlemen, next week.

02:39:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
at best of, we will be back January 3rd, if my I mean, I'm just going to sit here on Wednesday for two and a half hours. Anyway, tell me how to do anything else to do? I don't know why they're not calling Hello.

02:39:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
January 3rd. Come back and join us without Mary Jo, sad to say, because she's going back to work. But Richard Campbell will be here. He is, of course, the host of Run as Radio and Dotnet Rocks at runasradiocom. All Therot at therotcom is that's his home on the web. Become a premium member for the great extra content and, of course, his books Windows Everywhere. Mary Jo says you've been gone. He's written two more books. He's insane. He is insane.

02:40:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The Windows 11 field guide is over a thousand pages now.

02:40:13 - Mary Jo Foley (Guest)
Oh my goodness, that should count as two books.

02:40:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's so easy to use. Go to leanpubcom and get yours. You set your own price. We will be back on January 3rd, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern time, 1900 UTC. I say that because you can watch us do the show as we produce it on YouTube live. That's youtubecom slash twit, but of course you can always get a copy of it after the fact audio or video at twittv slash ww. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. Our favorite thing is, if you subscribe, get it in pocket casts or whatever podcast app you use, and you'll get it automatically every Wednesday afternoon after we finish the show. Thanks Paul, thanks Mary Jo, thanks Richard. Happy holidays to you, merry Christmas. Merry Christmas too. Yeah, have a wonderful week off and we'll see you two weeks from today on Windows Weekly. Bye, bye guys, thank you, see ya, merry Christmas. Merry Christmas, merry Christmas, merry Christmas.