Windows Weekly 867 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. Paul Therats in Mexico City. Richard Campbell is in New Zealand. He'll join us a little bit later. He's actually driving as fast as he can to get back to his studio and his house. We've got lots to talk about. It's a big AI show, no new versions of Windows this week, but there is a lot of co-pilot news, especially an Edge why Firefox is fighting so hard to stay alive and, of course, more earnings and Xbox news too, plus some tips of the week, an app of the week and a brown liquor pick of the week. It's all coming up next on Windows Weekly. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Therat and Richard Campbell, episode 867. Recorded Wednesday, february 7th 2024. Prepare the double box. This episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by CacheFly.

01:06
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02:10
Join CacheFly, the world's fastest CDN. Jumpstart your journey with CacheFly with a complimentary first month, or give it a world with a free 5TB account. Go to CacheFly.com. That's CacheFly. CacheFly.com/twit. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we get together and Paul and Richard talk about Windows and Microsoft stuff. Except Richard is stuck in the air somewhere over New Zealand, I guess. Hi Paul, hello Leo. Yeah, paul's in Mexico City, though I can tell from the colorful couch pillows.

02:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah well, I'm hoping by the end of this trip I'll have colorful walls as well.

02:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're working on that. Yeah, that's the last thing you do. First you get comfy right, Then you put stuff on the walls.

03:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a little stark.

03:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's pretty. What is that window behind you? Look out onto the street.

03:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No it looks out onto the penthouse across the way.

03:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's the one I want to rent, so I can Unfortunately it's been purchased. Oh nuts.

03:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I guess the guy who bought it is really nice. Oh good I know a lot.

03:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh nice, he's Americano, a gringo as they say. Are you surrounded by expats?

03:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, we're kind of in the far southeastern corner of Romanorte, so if you walk north of here it's like walking through Brooklyn, but if you walk south of here it's like walking through Medellin or something. Nice, it's a really different planet. Good, so we're kind of bridging those two worlds.

03:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the best.

03:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's a nice location.

03:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm so jealous and I bet it's a little warmer than Mckungy.

04:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's. The low temperature here exceeds the high temperature in Mckungy.

04:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's what I figured, Although it's because you're at altitude. It's not high, it's like a 70s right Low 70s.

04:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's been high 70s lately. It's going to get down to low 70s At night. It actually gets into the high 40s like at 4 o'clock in the morning. Yeah, but we walked home last night at 9.30 and it was 65. Yeah.

04:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Beautiful, I'm so jealous, and not to mention the food that you were probably eating. Do you ever cook?

04:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, like literally no. Why would you? Why would you? And when we're home, we eat five, six days a week, most meals at home. Right, it's the complete opposite here. This is no reason to.

04:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it's an expensive and it's amazing.

04:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, a lunch costs us $3.50. I don't think I could deliver a reasonable lunch at that price at home.

05:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then you have to shop and cook and all that stuff. I'm so jealous. All right, I'll try to contain you can do this.

05:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can do this, yeah, well.

05:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is this here for everybody? Paratotos? Yeah, there's impediments If it were.

05:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you know, Leo, blink twice if you're talking about your wife.

05:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's the wife, there's the cat, there's my kids and there's this darn thing called twit, but all of them combine to kind of have me. Yeah, there's a word for that. I think it's responsibility, responsibility. There's a word. But you, it's the spring awakening my friends. She is footloose and fancy free.

05:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't have to do what you have to do, right? I just have to show up for a thing like this so I can work from anywhere. I'm so jealous. You know, father, I wouldn't even no one would even know. No one would know.

05:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No one would know. Yeah, I'm starting to think that is the case also with me. Yeah, why not? Why not I just get a green screen? You'd never know, right? Father Robert told me I could move, basically move to live in the village In Vatican. Yeah, they have. So he lives in this.

06:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
As people do.

06:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
One does Apparently somebody did. There's a Jesuit house, he lives in the Jesuit house, it's in Vatican City, it's overlooking St Peter's Square, and he says, yeah, we have 19 guest rooms. I said, well, do they care about, I mean, how long you stay? He said, well, there's a guy I moved in during COVID and hasn't moved out yet. I don't know. Yeah, for things. Plus, robert's built an entire podcast studio, like a better than this, probably, knowing Robert up on top of the thing, so, and there's lots of cats there. Anyway, let's, nobody cares about this.

06:58
This is a this is a kind of I know you and I do but this is the personal kind of discussion that people really hate. Oh, I'm sorry, and in the no, no. I don't know if that's the case, but in the early days of the show I always said you know, we're here, we don't want to waste our listeners time, so let's get right into it. But now that we do three hour shows, we're clearly wasting our listeners time, so we're wasting our time. Everybody's doing yeah, yeah. So you may be wondering where's that other guy? He is, where is he?

07:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let me see, he's in New Zealand, I he's in New Zealand and he he's been texting me. Let me see if I can find this. This is funny. We're obviously eating lunch today. He's just, he's crazy. He says a 2.5 hour drive show starts in an hour. I'm not going to make it. Sullivan left the rental car place. I'm like I'm sorry, it's no big deal, don't worry, who cares You're traveling. And then he says yeah, I could just pull over and do it from the car. Like dude, just don't just just take the week off. It's good, you know. I half expected him just to show you know from, like a windswept, uh seat side.

08:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, he's done that before. Remember he did that from the airport. Yeah, a couple of months ago he just showed up.

08:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He's very dedicated. It's too dedicated, yeah.

08:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's actually put in notes, his notes for Brown liquor and everything.

08:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But I added so because he was on the road, I actually added the notes for his podcast pick for him, but he didn't tell me the name of the liquor pick. I would have added that as well, but I see he has added that.

08:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes.

08:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But we'll save that. I can't speak. I can't speak to that. Yeah, so the mention is is podcast pick, because it's timely. But, um, yeah, maybe my wife, my wife's on a work call now, but maybe I can convince her to grab a cocktail.

08:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She works while she's there too. Huh, yeah, so you're really, you're really. Uh, it's kind of cool. I mean, this is the modern age, capable of doing everything you would do in PA. Right In, uh.

08:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
MXC. So, all right, since you mentioned that, I will just say I don't know where I, I don't know how I write this up or whatever, but I have so many memories related to travel that are technology related. Right, it was the time I was going to Amsterdam. Uh, in the night before my little, I was switching the swim, the SIM card out of my phone and it popped out of my hand, fell into the couch, fell further into the couch, fell further into the couch and then got into a place where I could raise it and I needed it for connectivity. This is probably 10 years ago.

09:27
My wife comes home with my daughter, they walk through the door and what they see is me on top of an upside down couch with a saw cutting through the bottom of the couch, and she's like what are you doing? And I'm like I can't go to Amsterdam without this SIM card, you know. So flash forward to today. If somebody stole my phone and I didn't have a phone, I could buy one here. I could get an e-sim instantaneously and be online. Yeah, 4g, 5g, whatever, yeah, no problem. And then contrast these two experiences with the first year the iPhone came out and I was in Paris and I was scared to death to turn that thing on because there were all these stories about those people coming back with the giant paper bills. And this was the year.

10:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Paris. I remember that, yeah, when it first came out.

10:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The iPhone 1.0 had no sense of location or roaming or anything.

10:15
Yeah, it would do international, it would just be on or off Expensive, so I was scared to death to use this thing. And that was the same summer that Paris started doing public Wi-Fi in the parks. So I tried every single one of them. They were all terrible. But you compare that situation back then and eventually you could pay AT&T a ton of money for a really small amount of data to you have something like Google Fi where you can just kind of travel internationally, don't worry about it, but it's $10 per gig, whatever. And then today I just have unlimited. Nobody cares, it's just on, no problem. Those things really just have changed my life. So it's made this kind of thing possible. Right? It's one of the things that makes what I'm doing now a big deal.

11:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's really.

11:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The internet connection here is as fast as the one I had on the gig.

11:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I think back to when we started and I was fighting Skype flaws. I'd spend hours editing the shows. We've come a long way, baby.

11:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, it's incredible. And listen, I know people here don't think this, but I complain a lot, right, and this is one of those kind of the flip side of the coin, right, it's healthy to remember that, for as terrible as things can be, for all of the insurrtification stuff we talk about and I think we're going to be talking about some of that today actually there have been these advances, you know. Oh, yeah, for sure. This, to me, is just the biggest.

11:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's remarkable, it's awesome, totally remarkable. Yeah, we do take it for granted. That's that famous Louis CK bit where he talks about flying in an airplane.

11:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's one of my favorite. What are you for Flying through the air and you're cheating my food.

12:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
my food is so terrible.

12:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And he's like it's bouncing off a satellite. Give it a second.

12:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's miracle, it's beautiful, it's really we live in amazing times. It's good once in a while to pause and remember that, and then for me to feel insanely jealous that you're in Mexico City right now.

12:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well like I said. I mean this is. I'm not at the Grand Hotel or anything, I'm in a 700 square foot cement box.

12:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're in your flat. You're in your own personal flat with your own clothes and your own bedding and your own. By the way, as you know, some of our audience just a little bit OCD Right there with you. Yeah, and they're noticing that spot over your left shoulder. I think that's a thermostat.

12:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I will tell you. I focused on that the second I turned the camera on. What that is is a hook for a jacket or whatever.

12:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, put a jacket on there. Would you put a hat on it next time?

12:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Leo, listen, I am way ahead of you. When we got home from lunch, when we left, there was a jacket hanging there and I thought to myself you know what, maybe that's going to make it okay. And then we got back from lunch and I turned on the camera and I was like where's the jacket? And I think my wife thought I'll get it out of them. She was a video. She tidied it up. Yeah, no, believe me, I'm going to be. I'm like staring at it. Well, I'm glad I asked. People are going to wait for it to slowly start moving across the wall.

13:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're not sure because it's so hard to see. It's kind of like it might be a dot on the camera but now that you know, no, it's a circular hook for a jacket. Yeah, when my wife saw it hey. Stephanie bring us a hat.

13:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I need a jacket and a cocktail.

13:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, jacket, and a the title already. I can't.

13:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
A pith helmet. It's like the beginning of a David Lee Roth video. Give me a jacket and a cocktail To go.

14:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Send lawyers guns and money. Windows Radio Silence from the Insider program all this week. What happened?

14:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, we usually have some news about stuff that happened in the Insider program last week, right the previous week. This past week we've only gotten the one build and it was in the beta channel, and it's just bug fixes. The only thing you need to know about this is, if you are testing the beta build, you're going to want to download this update because it actually fixes a bunch of serious problems. You have to have that switch in Windows Update on. I want updates early, but there's nothing. There's no new features For the rest of the world. I get nothing to tell you.

14:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So that's it. That's all we have from the Insider program.

14:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But we do have a bunch of Windows news. Okay, fortunately.

14:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's. Gi, Windows news, as it has been all this year and pretty much and more AI.

15:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah yeah, I'm in the middle of writing an article. One year ago, yesterday, I wrote an article called this Is Windows 12. And the only thing I got wrong was the name. But this coming big update for Windows, which is kind of all AI related. It's kind of fascinating to look back a year later and see what has transpired, because I don't think, even as crazy as it seemed last February, when Microsoft announced this Bing with AI and all this stuff a year later, no one would have anticipated this level of update release, update release, update release, rebrand, rebrand, rebrand. I mean, it's been a crazy year and we'll get to that in a moment, but one of the things that came out of that was Co-Pilot in Windows, and I actually think we have a branding problem here because there's you know, there's co-pilot. Co-pilot is the Microsoft brand for their generative AI functionality.

16:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was first in GitHub. That was the first time, and then it made sense because it was your programming partner.

16:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was your co-pilot, as you wrote code, yeah, and actually somebody asked me about that late last week. And there's something interesting about co-pilot for GitHub, and that's that it's not that expensive. It's only $10 per month per user. Interesting. Co-pilot Pro for Microsoft account holders is $20 per month per user. And then it's more typical to see, you know, chat, chat, gpt plus or co-pilot in Microsoft 365 is $30 per user per month. And the reason is the co-pilot model, the thing that they're learning against the data set that they work against, is so much smaller, right, it's finite. It's literally a set of programming related topics, right, so that when you cut down on what this thing needs to learn, you can actually save a lot of money. And that's why co-pilot and Windows is free, because it's it does nothing Interesting. It's terrible.

17:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Anyway but, the free is what you're saying. Right, you get what you pay for is what I'm saying. Are they using which model? Are they using 35, 3.5 of chat GPT?

17:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, so yeah, it's four, and then four turbo or 4.5 turbo.

17:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's a smaller set, yeah.

17:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But it depends on whether you're paying or not, right, and so as part of the rebranding is they did not counting. I mean, forget about GitHub for a moment, but the rest of the co-pilot branded products and services Microsoft has are all using that same co-pilot base and it is on the latest version of chat GPT, although they'll meter it if you're not paying, obviously, and maybe even up it down to three, five, depending on how busy things are at the time, or whatever you get precedence when you pay. But they're really confusing matters a lot because we have this notion of, as part of the rebranding, there's Microsoft co-pilot but there's co-pilot, there's somebody in discord out of the jacket to the that's what we need.

18:10
It's good, the jacket that was there was not that big, but it's, you know you know, thank God for Photoshop.

18:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's all I'm saying. Here we go. Yeah, Put a little jacket on that hook and yeah it looks like I'm describing Brad Sam's right there. Anywho, I don't know what they can, so that's really mean and I'm not going to tell Brad. You said that, don't worry, this is how men interact. I'm sorry.

18:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the basis of Microsoft or Microsoft co-pilot is the same everywhere. Right, this free and paid versus, obviously. But we're getting is? No, it used to be Microsoft free 65 co-pilot, it used to be Windows co-pilot. Right Now it's co-pilot in these products. So even in the confines of something like Microsoft free 65, we're going to have the something called co-pilot in one drive soon. And it's like, guys, I think we're getting. We're getting a little weird here, because these things all have unique functionality et cetera, or at least they can. The co-pilot in Windows, as we call it, is not particularly interesting because the unique functionality there is not very good. It's just related to a handful of settings.

19:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Make me make it darker, yeah, or make me a Spotify playlist. So you can't ask it stuff.

19:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can't say, you know what you can it does the basic, it does do what co-pilot does, right, so you can say make me a picture of a painting in the style of whatever and you can do all that stuff, yeah, so what do you use for those amazing Master Chief paintings that you did?

19:42
Yeah, so what I'm using is I pay for co-pilot pro, which is the consumer version $20 per month, right? So sometime in the past I don't know two weeks or so they added that into co-pilot in Windows. So I don't do it that way.

19:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't actually like the sidebar, but it knows you bought it, so it has that it does.

20:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It says pro, it knows I did that. One of the things that just changed was they did that for people who subscribed to co-pilot in Microsoft 365. So same thing with pro. If you do subscribe and pay for the Microsoft 365 version and you access it through the sidebar, it knows that it will give you the little logo so you can tell that you're getting it and you can do whatever you want to do through there. So actually it's pretty good. Yeah, I mean, so far, I would say the biggest or best functionality and co-pilot in Microsoft 365 is the app-based stuff. You go into Microsoft Word, for example, and it helps you write and all that. You don't really do that from the sidebar, but I think that's kind of cool.

20:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's funny that $20 seems to be the going rate for a pro subscription. That's what OpenAI charges. I'm using Perplexity now because you made me start using the Arc Browser.

21:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So to explain what Perplexity is, though this is an LLM from, it's like open source.

21:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it's an interesting. I think I like it. I might well. Okay, I'll explain. So it is a front end to AI, but it doesn't have to be any particular AI, so you can use a variety of models including chat GBT-4.

21:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Does it pass through your capabilities based on whether you pay for it or not?

21:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I guess that's actually a good question. I haven't, because I have chat GBT-4 through my OpenAI subscription, so it's a little confusing. So Perplexity will let you choose the model. I actually am not logged into Pro right now, so I'll re-log in. Can you model? Stack, that would be cool.

21:50
You don't have to play with it, it will let you do. Google's what they call it Gemini Now was barred. It will let you do. I think Anthropics Clawed. So there are a number of really good. So to kind of explain this, you know we've talked about this before there's these large language models and there are many of them now Meta Open Source. They're Lama Lama 2. Apple has just released an Open Source LLM, so there are a lot of these around and they have I guess you know they're all trained on roughly this, I would guess the same data. The Internet as a whole, that's a shrinking body of stuff they can access, and then they have additional tuning on top of that. That makes them unique. One of the reasons I'm hesitant to cancel my OpenAI subscription is they have those GPTs and you remember I've talked about this. I've made two GPTs which I use all the time, one for the programming language I use and one for the editor I use, and their references for me. They're fantastic. I cannot exclude.

22:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, this is the co-pilot thing, but writ small a little bit right. I know one of yours is Well better, because it doesn't hallucinate.

23:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I but that's no right. That's how it gets better. One of the instructions I gave it was and under no circumstances use anything that isn't in the corpus of works that I gave you. So I gave it. You know dozens of PDFs of you know the nice thing about Lisp the language I like, common Lisp is it's so old that everything's in the public domain, so I gave it all these classic You're not going to love it.

23:28
Yeah, I gave it all these classic Lisp books, Somebody sent me so and then I'm working. I'm trying to understand something called a deterministic finite automata. Don't ask You're going to love the language yeah. But Chocolate Milk Minisip sent me a textbook, I guess PDF, from when he was I mean years ago studying this, which I added Now, all of a sudden, my Lisp AI, my Lisp expert, is also an expert in DFA's and I can say write me some Lisp, a DFA in Lisp, and it will do it, but in Lisp.

24:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, what's your second one? I know about the Lisp Emax. What's the other one, Emax? Okay.

24:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Emax similarly there's. I put all the Emax manual. This is a good example. This is about keyboard shortcuts essentially right.

24:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it's also.

24:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Emax is kind of some wag once said an operating system with a kind of half DFA.

24:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, a text editor in front of it.

24:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because it's written in Lisp itself. It's highly programmable. I mean, your Emax, when you get it, can not only tell you what the moon thing is, it could you know the phase of the moon, it could tell you. It has an ELISA built in. It has games built in, because it's just really it's like an operating system, but in order to use it effectively you really need to know a lot, and so I took all. This is a good example. If you've got a bookshelf of manuals whether it's for a car or plumbing or whatever, you can put this into it and then suddenly it is the expert. You don't have to flip through stuff you could do this with.

24:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Delphi, if you gave it your.

25:01
Delphi Bible Well I wouldn't do it for Delphi, but I would do it for things like the history of Microsoft Just page milestones, dates, et cetera. I mean, this is probably months ago now, but for a long time I've been talking about this notion of consumers not having the Microsoft Graph and that Microsoft is forcing OneDrive usage, is forcing new Outlook usage, forcing edge usage, not just for ads and that stuff that's definitely part of it, but also because they need to create something for consumers that's like the Microsoft Graph. And I look at my own I'm going to call it like work archive of documents, which I think is a couple hundred gigabytes or whatever, and it's 30 years of my writing. And one of my weird problems, because I write so much, is I'll start writing on a topic and I'll think I know I've written something about this and I can't. My site search is terrible.

25:58
I try to do that stuff, but yeah, just having something, I go back and say, hey, what have I said about this? But whatever, or when did this happen? That kind of stuff, whatever, super helpful. So yeah, this is coming.

26:13
And you know your mechanical is excellent because, dating back to, say, the beginning of the iPod era, I remember a friend of mine wanting to get an iPod and wanting to buy music online and thinking to myself this is how I can tell this is going mainstream, because this particular person it was a good friend, but not technical in any way, not into the tech world. This has leached into the mainstream, right, and I think the thing you just described is going to be the moment it's coming. It's going to come in like two days. It's when I go to my mechanic and he does what you just described or you go to.

26:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm trying to think of an example. And the thing is it can be in your phone, so you can literally talk to your phone and you're like what does this thing do?

26:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and this is not science fiction, this is not someday soon. I'm using it.

27:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what really turned me around on AI, by the way, I logged into Perplexity. So I have Perplexity Pro, again, 20 bucks a month. Everybody seems to settle on that, except Microsoft, which is 30. But so I can choose the model, the Perplexity model. There's an experimental model GPT-4, claude 2.1 and Gemini Pro. So those are currently the models. So yeah, so I'll give you an example of some of this stuff. Like the other day I was saying well, how do, what was Can I power a Vision Pro through a battery pack? So I wanted to know what's the wattage of PD, power delivery. Perfect answer Gave me all the information. Gave me all. This is what I used to use Neva for. Gave me all the references. So I know it's not hallucinating this.

28:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, and you're again, because you're limiting. It's not going out in Google searching and scraping, exactly, although, I mean Well, it is.

28:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it is.

28:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, but it's doing a subset Right and I think that's the key to making AI more accurate in solving this hallucination problem.

28:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But there I mean. So that's the interesting point, because generally these LLMs are frozen in time, and remember, chat GBT 3.5 was frozen in 2022, I think. So it's been a while. I got to show you this, though. So adding a surfing which you can do, I think, and I bet you could do with co-pilot, with Bing right, is adding that information makes it current, but there's a risk, so let me see if I can show you this. A guy sent me his Microsoft co-pilot search results. He asked it what are the origins of the? Let me, I have to download this, I guess, to show it to you. The origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict, what? And he sent me a screenshot. It had all the normal stuff at first, the last creation of Israel, zionism, there was a whole. This is obviously a very politicized topic, right, but the last piece in this- point for.

29:39
Satan's role beyond geopolitical factors. There's a deeper, spiritual dimension. The true source of the Arab-Israeli conflict lies in Satan's fight against God. This is co-pilot. He manipulates propaganda, terrorist groups and anti-global tensions to lay his own doom and exterminate God's people.

30:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I mean, when you say it's co-pilot, what you're really saying is it's chat-gy, pt, right, I mean, that's the.

30:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it found a source, obviously a demented source, I mean. Actually this is valuable if it would have.

30:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, actually, you know what? You may be right. I think the insanity here might be because co-pilot is when you add. What happens when you add Bing to chat?

30:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, and I think it has a number of references in here. So I think it is using Bing, but it could easily just be in chat-gypt. Well, that's how they bring it up to date, right.

30:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're searching the web, which is what you don't want. Look, there's a. I don't have this in the notes, but, like I said, there's going to be a co-pilot in one drive and that's going to be something people can use to throw their whatever body of data you have into this thing and just work against that.

30:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's better if you say this is the corpus and that's yes.

30:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Make it as finite as possible Up to now. Make it as specific to whatever the task is as possible.

31:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The best uses of AI have been like radiologists. So the AI is trained on a bunch of millions.

31:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, patent recognition. Summarizing, these are things that AI is very good at. It's good at. I make this joke, this is just a joke. Ai is bad at its math, where you say what's 11 plus 7 and it says Q. You're like yeah, that's not the answer. It wouldn't.

31:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually, this answer about Satan wouldn't have been so bad if it had put it in a Things like there are some Christians who believe this, yeah, okay, but it's quoted as authoritative. Like well, there's four points.

31:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I would argue that it would be smarter if we just ignored that part of it, maybe.

31:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, maybe. So that's important when you get this stuff and Microsoft says that at the bottom of every search. There may be errors here, yep.

31:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All right. Well, we have an. I mean, let's not blow away our AI section.

31:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's for later.

31:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, we're still talking about co-pilots. Yeah, we do have a bunch.

32:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It can be accessed from co-pilots?

32:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, specifically in Windows right. So there were two updates to that Windows sidebar this past week. One is the addition of Microsoft 365 capabilities, which not a big deal, but it was already available to pro users. Oh, and speaking of which, to your point about the $30. So $20 makes sense or is consistent for things like chat, gpt and co-pilot pro, but I think the additional $10 in Microsoft 365 is literally the graph and that it's working across data that By-Lodge has stored inside Microsoft right inside their data centers, and that you're getting capabilities inside of apps like Word, excel, powerpoint, outlook, et cetera, that these other things can't do. So there is additional functionality. It's not just they're arbitrarily making it $10 per month more. Okay.

32:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you're paying the extra $10 for the extra payment.

32:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you're getting that thing you get with the $20 from somewhere else, but you're also getting the Microsoft 365 stop and I think that explains the price yeah, perfect.

33:06
So the second edition came yesterday and this one came out of nowhere, and I was actually really happy to see this happen, not because I care about this feature edition, but because the woman that tweeted about it is a vice corporate vice president of Microsoft, sheila I'm going to butcher her last name, I apologize Rang Anathem. This woman has only tweeted twice in the past year, but she tweeted yesterday that Windows Copilot will now launch in a wider sidebar, which is not particularly interesting or whatever. It's resizable, and also they have a little toggle up there so you can toggle the size between the old size and the new size. And this is only interesting to me on two levels. One is that we don't really hear from these people that much, so maybe something is rubbering up a little bit, but also I just it's Ranganathan, ranganathan is the thing. So it's yeah, I'm not going to sound like this, so I am not seeing this.

34:01
And what I realized later was that it's because I'm in Mexico. So this feature has in fact rolled out and we discovered it and I asked her and she responded oh nice, how do you get this update? What's the mechanism by which this is delivered to the operating system and you may be fascinated to discover that it is not Windows Update, it is not the Microsoft Store, it's Microsoft Edge. So you have to go into Edge, update it to the latest version.

34:28
Oh my gosh and once you do you will get this functionality, because this came up oh boy, I don't know several months ago, but that sidebar is in fact, another example of Microsoft Edge on you. It's another instance of Edge.

34:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Even though the button is in the back, where the charms are, it is actually an Edge, it's Microsoft Edge. Yeah, wow.

34:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So you may choose Chrome or whatever, but you have to use Edge to use this product in Windows and whatever.

34:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's not a big deal, except I can't have it, so I don't know if I'm using the latest Edge.

35:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So Well, you can. I mean just you can update it. I'm fully updated. I don't have it. It's because I'm in Mexico. If you look at the list of countries where this is available, I think this is one of them. It's also why I can't access Copilot on my phone. It gives me a weird error message. But I think it's Mexico, and the thing that's strange about this is if I go to the web, I can generate images like I've been doing for my site, no problem, but the sidebar in Windows and the mobile app on Android will not work here.

35:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're not using a VPN, though, are you?

35:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, but I don't think it's that sophisticated. I don't think it's. I think it's well. No, I'm not. Let's answer your question. No, I'm not.

35:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because you know, if you had one at home, that would explain why the desktop would work. But obviously the cell carrier, it knows your carrier, it knows you're in.

35:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Mexico. I don't know why the web version is working. Isn't that interesting? I guess technically, because the cloud server is not here. I guess it might be why, but yeah, I can't. When I run it locally in the operating system it doesn't work. Anyway, I was look. This feature is not interesting to me in the slightest. I don't like sidebars or whatever, but the notion that that's how, that's the mechanism by which this thing is updated, is kind of blows my mind. It's Edge. Yeah, it's Microsoft.

36:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What does that mean? Is it mean that they want to? Hmm, this is interesting Edge is kind of an engine.

36:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, it's probably right. I mean it's obviously using the. It's not just the like, it's not about the rendering engine so much as it is. The UI is delivered as part of Edge, I think right. So when you get this update and open the sidebar, in addition to being wider and being resizable, there's an additional little button up at the corner and that lets you toggle between the two default sizes, and I that is. I mean we talk about you know, Edge, bloat and oh, look at that. There's all kinds of issues I can make bingo.

37:03
This is a rather, this is an extreme version of Bloat, isn't it? I mean, like an AI sidebar in Windows, is that's crazy?

37:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's interesting. It is interesting, All right, so yeah. I have. You know it's funny I have. I have Bing Chat. I haven't done a lot of type comparison between all these different chat things I have and I presume that if it's using open AI it's going to be, but, as you say, it's open AI plus, so yeah, and Microsoft doesn't tell us exactly what that means.

37:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, part of it is Bing for sure and this isn't the exact wording, but use of Meta almost a year ago described it as some kind of a, you know, microsoft secret sauce, and this is. This is the weird thing they have with their partnership with open AI, where these guys are obviously partners but they're competing against each other as well, and there are have been very overt examples of Microsoft salespeople kind of dumping on open AI because their version of this doesn't have their stuff in it, you know. And whether or not you think that the Microsoft additions are an advantage or a something that hobbles them, I don't know. But yeah, if you're showing the screen now, so if you look at that button up in the right corner next to the X, that's the new button and that should toggle it between two sizes is my guess, or I don't know what it's doing.

38:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It says show is overlay versus not, so it's making it a window as opposed to an edge, I guess right.

38:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, that's okay, that's my close edge.

38:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it stays.

38:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it's, it's, yeah, you're, you're creating a. So one of the problems is with co-pilot, the sidebar is that it it pushes windows over when it opens and then when you close they're all still pushed over. So if I believe this new functionality, then would hopefully prevent that from happening. It would allow this thing to appear on top of other windows and then not move them around, is my guess.

38:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So if I close this, yeah, Well it's not going to close the edge.

39:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
application running is not going to edges, running in the background, right it's it's still yeah.

39:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a button that says open in Microsoft Edge refresh.

39:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So no, this just has to do with it.

39:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like Z order compared to other windows because when this thing is kind of show is overlay, I get it Okay, I get it yeah.

39:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
When it's not, when it doesn't allow overlay. As far as desktop or any apps are concerned, the desktop size is smaller, right?

39:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right. I think it's the right that makes sense. So this is cool, I guess. Yeah, I guess, I guess. I think this is a precursor, though, of AI everywhere, right On everything, all over, all over my stuff.

39:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the thing so we're going to get. I don't want to. I'm sorry, I'm stepping all over myself here. I don't want to get too far. Okay, okay, okay.

39:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sorry but. I yes, that's my fault.

39:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, it's I. I let it happen to I, I will get there. There's some interesting stuff going on here. So how we get AI and different products, not just windows, but yeah, it's, it has to do with Stevie Petit and the side by side thing. Remember, you know the the very nature of co-pilot is that it is next to you, right, or next to what you're doing. That is the point of it. You know, some people will say well, I don't know why we have to have a sidebar and it's like because the thing you're working in doesn't have any AI in it. You know, eventually these things will become smarter about that thing that you're working next, and then the thing itself will become smarter and just have features built in. So that's all part of the evolution.

40:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyhow, but you said windows 12 at the beginning of the show there. I just saw a rumor that windows 12 is the name that we're going to see in the middle of the year at some point.

40:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this is like picking the winner of the Super Bowl You're going to hear things on the inside of it.

40:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I know who's going to make the Super Bowl. You don't have to ask me that I know exactly.

40:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wow, is it because you asked ARC?

40:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, it's because I know in my heart. I asked ARC that my boys will win. What did ARC say?

41:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I asked ARC. They said the same thing.

41:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So good.

41:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There you go. Good, all right, and I assume by your boys you mean San Francisco. I do. So there are. I think I put this on Instagram somewhere. Someone has gone around Mexico City and by someone, I think I mean the NFL, and have spray paint. I'm not, no, I'm not kidding, no, I believe they have spray painted on sidewalks everywhere Information about the Super Bowl, the teams that are playing, what time it's playing locally and where you can see it's. It's everywhere, like, and if you think about a sidewalk and how they have these kind of grid sizes of cement, it's that big, it's, you know, six feet by six feet or whatever. They're everywhere. And we were out there just staring at the skywalks. And he goes what he goes, what, what, what, what, what, what does what? Did this happen? I'm like I don't know. We woke up and they were everywhere Like it's they're, they're really, really. I don't. That's one way to promote, you know.

41:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that legal? I don't know. I don't. I feel like graffiti, but I guess, cause it's on the ground.

42:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like you walk outside in a desert and it's snowing and everyone's scratching their heads and they're like how did this get here?

42:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I know there was a truck and a guy with a stencil and actually four guys.

42:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It just appeared one day.

42:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, you do blue, okay you do red, okay you do green.

42:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, it's probably a stencil and they probably blew it on really quick.

42:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's silent so you wouldn't hear them at three o'clock in the morning or something. It's graffiti, though it is graffiti. I can remember this happening before for other things, but remember that NFL really wants to grow nationally, right? Yep, yep, so uh.

42:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think they've already. They played games. Oh, they play in.

42:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mexico city every year. In fact, they just announced new, a new series of games in Argentina, or something.

42:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know Brazil is going to be one Brazil maybe that's you know if you thought playing in Denver was hard.

42:45
Welcome to Mexico city folks. Um, yeah, it's a little higher, yeah, wow, wow, yeah, okay. So there's a debate there. We're debating and, honestly, I think Microsoft is debating because between extending the support of windows 10, right, Another three years, do you do they really want to have the confusion of three different supported windows versions in the market at the same time? You can make a pretty good case that, no, they do not want that, and that may be going forward with windows 11 might be the right idea. So we'll see how they ultimately do brand this thing, but we know that, um, there is a major release of windows coming.

43:23
There's some debate, debate about the timing too. By the way, it's not just the name. A lot of people are seeing the belief it's going to happen in the first half of the year, which we haven't seen ever. I don't know. I'd have to go back. Really. I mean, maybe windows three, something was April, maybe, but you know, windows 10, the first version was July 2015. Windows 11 was October 20, 2020, what? 2020, 21, whatever year that was. Um, we haven't done that. No, not including the H one, h two things, but I mean an actual new version of windows. So, um, whatever the timing is and what are the name is, you know, we'll see, but we know it's coming.

43:59
And, um, there have been indications from Microsoft. Uh, there have been indications from their partners of different names. Actually, the latest one is official support. I would call it a Microsoft support page. Uh, that specifically mentions windows 11, version 24 H two. To be honest, I don't actually think this means too much, because even if there is a windows 12, there's still going to be a windows 11, 24. So, what you know, it's like, it's not like they just stop updating it. I mean, uh, even when windows 11 came out, there were versions of windows 10, right, so, um, we'll see, but, uh, but this is, you know, whatever they call it. Like I said, what did they call them?

44:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, what does it matter? I guess it's just a number, right.

44:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What does it matter? I don't know. This is all we care about here, leo. It's like it doesn't matter at all. You know he knows a lot. You know about nothing, um you're listening to windows weekly.

44:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's pause just briefly. Uh, paul Therat is here, as you may have noticed. Richard Campbell's not. He is stuck on a long drive.

44:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It sounds like uh yeah, oh, I should tell you I'm sorry to interrupt, but he texted update, update this, just in he will. He will be here, oh God damn it, I know. I know, I know, uh, what time is it?

45:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, he could be here in as soon as half an hour and 35 minutes. Prepare the double box.

45:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, put out to the good Lydden.

45:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Campbell is on the way. Campbell is on the way. All right, a show continues with uh oh, this one. This is uh Steve Gibson talked a little bit about this the Mozilla article about how the big platforms, basically, are screwing Mozilla.

45:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I came away with three takeaways from this that were not anything that Mozilla wrote about, and I'm very curious to see what you have to say about this. But before we get to that, uh, it will come as no surprise that Mozilla has been fighting this good fight, since this was a good fight, right, they were the original the OG complainers about big tech. They took my in the form of Netscape. Uh, took Microsoft all the way to anti trust. Uh, federal court, right, and um, the outcome of that was unfortunate Netscape disappeared. They were swallowed up by AOL originally, and then disappeared entirely, and in their death throws, they, you know, ejected Mozilla out into the world. This kind of high minded open source, you know, free, as in free kind of a company um, release the source code, et cetera, et cetera, and now we have this, you know, 20 plus years of browsers that have kind of occurred in their wake. Um, what they've done now, though and we're seeing this, you know Epic Games has sued Google and Apple Spotify was the impetus for the DMA that the, you know. Right, they complained about Apple, and we're starting to see Sonos has complained about Google, took them to court. Actually, we're starting to see companies come out and complain, right, and this is not new. I mean, mozilla has a rich history of uh doing this type of thing but I I do feel like their current complaint is particularly well done because they started a GitHub repository documenting all the ways that the platform makers Apple, google and Microsoft screwed them over and uh make it impossible for them to compete. And I read through this and I thought, okay, like I understand this stuff really well If you look at the three things they complain about.

47:21
For Microsoft, these are topics we've been talking about for years. We know this right and there's a whole. We know what they do. We know how edge still runs when you click on a search result or a widget. We know that edge runs when you use, uh that sidebar we were just talking about the co-pilot sidebar, right. We know that Microsoft tried to get rid of default apps and interface. That came out of their antitrust troubles in 1998 or nine, whatever year that was uh in Windows 11. And so many people complained. They put it back in but then completely defanged it. So it actually doesn't work the way it's supposed to and they make it really really hard for you to change the default right.

47:57
And when Netscape was competing and then Mozilla later was competing with Microsoft and Internet Explorer. That was the battle. It was the battle of defaults, like the power of defaults. We all know that people take the path of least resistance and that if you make something to the default, the majority of people would just take it. They won't even, they won't even experiment, they don't care. And um, that was bad enough.

48:18
But now these platform makers are really tilting the, the playing field, if you will, which was that how they describe it? Right, they call it the platform tilt. They're putting their finger on the scale and they're more explicitly kind of forcing users, in some cases to not use rival browsers. Right, and um, I so here here, this is. This is fascinating to me. So this in certification, right, this Cory Doctorow thing, I believe that, in certification, as he defines it and as we know it and as we see it out in the world, actually started with the iPhone and with smartphones, because these companies Apple first, of course, but also Google, right? Um, apple in their case had been defeated so many times at the hand of Microsoft that they were like we're not going to have an open market where we can compete on an even playing field. We're going to make sure that this thing is a walled guard that we control, and that's the only way we're ever going to succeed. And, by the way, we're great for them. But it also eliminates a lot of choice. But it also eliminates a lot of competition, right, and this mentality has per pervaded beyond mobile. Um, windows 10 first well, windows 8 to some degree, but Windows 10 especially, and now Windows 11, even worse has is an example of Microsoft taking what they see the mobile platform makers doing and applying it to a desktop system to limit the availability of choice and then making it harder for these uh, rival companies to create third party products that will compete with the stuff that they make. So there's one aspect of it. So we're starting to see this kind of lockdown, lack of choice. Um, and I mentioned the default. You know the default apps thing is a great example of them actually overreaching and, um, that not you know they weren't able to get that going.

50:02
The second one is that Firefox you, you can look this up, it's very simple Go to stat counter or wherever you want to go and look at how their market share really used to share has declined over the years and it was a magical moments. Uh, I think it was 2009, 2009, two years after the iPhone came up, but one or two years before it was, you know, surging and were available worldwide, where they were the most popular browser in the world. They had about 30, 32% usage share and then spent on a rocket sled downward slope ever since then. And there's no doubt that Mozilla made mistakes strategy mistakes, product mistakes, whatever it is Um, there's no doubt that there's been improved competition that when Microsoft stopped updating IE six, uh, ie with IE six, um, other companies stepped in and most probably Chrome with a, google with Chrome, and and took away some of that share as well. So this, this competition occurring too.

50:58
But when you look at Firefox today, you see something very stark, right, you see single digit usage share on desktop, but when you factor in mobile, the entire personal computing space, their usage share is 0.5%. They went from 30% of the market the entire market to less than a half of uh, to one half of 1%, and I think a lot of that can be tied to this smartphone era initiated in certification policy, where they make it impossible for Firefox or difficult at least, but impossible in some cases to really differentiate themselves on mobile and people. Just for a long time, you couldn't even choose another browser. You could install a browser, but your default was always going to be Safari or whatever, or Chrome on Android. So I think these things are tied together and the proof point for this and this is really astonishing.

51:53
The problem is, I don't have a hard number on this one, but there is one platform out there which has not been ensured because it's not controlled by anybody, and that platform is Linux. And if you look at Firefox usage on Linux which I can't do to any degree of accuracy, but anyone who uses Linux will tell you that this is true Firefox is all over the place. It's often the default browser in these distributions. And when you have a system where the default you choose is based entirely on user choice or preferences, and that that's what the maker of that thing does, then you can see the difference between a world in which we don't have ensured afication, which is Linux, and a world in which we do, which is Android, ios, windows, whatever you like all the other ones, and the fact that Linux is the one place in the world where Firefox actually still thrives is astonishing.

52:45
I know it's probably going downhill now. I'm sure there are Chromium-based things happening now, but the reason for that is just inertia. I mean, eventually the cancer that killed Firefox everywhere is going to kill it literally. The other thing, the other takeaway that I got out of this Mozilla thing was if you look at their issue tracker, where they track the issues that each of the three platform makers have, google and Microsoft both have three issues, major issues. One of those issues on each is the same as the issue on the other, so they both do one of the same things and Apple has 11. Apple is so restrictive that they're somehow about three and a half times as terrible as Google and Microsoft when it comes to astonishing.

53:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's kind of amazing, but that's a wall of garnering for you. I mean, that's really almost the definition.

53:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But I think, when we write the story one day and we will that Mozilla tried and failed just like Netscape yes, they made mistakes and just like Netscape yes, in some cases competitors had better features, et cetera. But I think the true tale that will be told here is that Apple killed Mozilla for Firefox. Wow, it was Apple. That's so depressing.

53:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

53:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And that was my key takeaway. It was like the insurification that we've been talking about for the past six, eight, 10, whatever months, thanks to Corey Doctro, can be traced back directly to the iPhone. Not that there weren't things in the past that were crappy and terrible. I mean, obviously this has been going on for a while, but the way that this has pervaded our industry, it's Apple's fault. There's no doubt about it. Yeah, Apple.

54:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, Mozilla was very upset about Apple's concessions to the EU and the Digital Markets Act. Yes, Of course everyone is. I mean of course, Because they basically said that Apple's going to make us write two browsers one for iOS, everywhere in the world, and one for iOS in Europe.

54:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What would be more horrible than being forced to use a browser rendering engine that you didn't make on some other platform? It would be having to jump through all these hoops so you can do this stupid thing, and then you just ended up losing money anyway. They've orchestrated this in such a way that I'm really curious if the EU is going to accept their solutions. I think the EU is going to come back and say I think they're going to.

54:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think they have to. I think they're going to it's soon, though it's next month.

55:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it's a tough thing. Look, even Apple's biggest fans, who I think are the most I mean the people who just love everything they do and don't care about the ramifications Alex let's do it. Just see the good stuff yeah. Ok, those people, whoever they, those people that guy that guy Would have to admit that there are downsides to this and that what they've done does not meet the spirit of this regulation, which I'm sure they don't agree with.

55:34 - Speaker 2 (Host)
I that's not the issue. The issue is this is the rule.

55:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the rule, law and they're not meeting that we're going to even say that they even say we don't want to do this. We think it's really bad for our users and it's a security issue, but since they're making us, we're going to do the best thing we can do Well it's the.

55:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Except, that's not what. No, no, no, listen, I previously mentioned the fact and I did not come up with this. This is not an original thought of my part, but somebody had written this. So like explain to me Out in the corporate world that there's a deal between two companies and that deal includes the moving of 20 plus billion dollars per year, per year, from one company to the other. Yeah, and they're not touting this to the rooftops. That's Apple.

56:15
By the way, apple is also the company that will contort itself, like most people would say. Think about GDPR, right, these data protection regulation they have in the EU Most, no, not most. All cloud providers basically said look, it would be stupid to do one thing here and one thing here. Right, we're going to work toward GDPR compatibility 100% across the board Everywhere in the world, because it's just the best thing for customers, is the best thing for us. Apple, the most that most belligerent of companies, looks at the same situation and says you know what? We're going to go to the time and effort and spend the money to have two versions of everything we make, because, screw everybody. And that says more to me about the actual caliber and quality of this company than any of their marketing, any of their everything works together great, blah, blah, blah, blah. Whatever I just it's just frustrating how different the reality of this company is from the impression that people have of it.

57:14
Yeah, it's terrible. It's a terrible company At the very least. I would just ask you to believe this, because I know some people are already trying to graph the little, nastier emails. You can't get this big and not be terrible. So the very least, please, you can look at the evidence, whatever. But you know Apple, google, microsoft, facebook, any of these companies they're all terrible. At least understand that. Don't pretend that they are in any way better. They absolutely are not. And I will say just personally I fell into a trap of believing that was true of Microsoft for several years because this company refused to do anything aggressive, right, all they did was talk about meeting customers where they were and partnering with everybody in Kumbaya, and I thought, oh my God, they changed. And then the last year happened and I realized, no, no, they're just terrible, and I think this is a maturity moment that we all need to get to.

58:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got a text yesterday during security now, from a company saying would you like to participate in a survey? And I always say no to these, but I don't know why. I was just sitting there, I didn't have much to do with security now, so I said, oh, go ahead. And I went through it and it was asking me what do you think of all these companies Apple, microsoft, amazon, google. It was lots of questions about their reputation stuff. And then I got to the end of it and they said, ok, would you like to go a little deeper? And I said yeah, and it turned out it was Amazon doing this poll, because all the subsequent questions were well, do you think Amazon's a good employer? Do you think they treat their employees well? Do you think they pay them well? Do you think they make executives cry at their desk every day? No, they didn't ask that.

58:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, stephanie put us on the mic.

58:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's open an Amazon box. Could you put something on that hook People are upset about that dot on the wall.

58:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Do you like hanging a jacket back on that? No, I just think mine's good she's like she's going to take over Sure. Ok, oh, that one and our viewership just doubled. That's nice, that's so cute. Thanks, honey. Actually it'd be a good place for a clock.

59:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I'm just thinking. Anyway, what were we saying that?

59:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Apple is terrible and Firefox is going to die and when? That happens. I want the history that gets written to be accurate. To say, apple killed Firefox Because that's the reason they died.

59:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
OK, but it got help from the other guys.

59:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know it's not the only reason. I'm just saying look, it's never any one thing. Perfect, right, perfect, it's a little is it too much color?

59:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, it's perfect. No, it's perfect. They're going crazy in the discord. They're so happy. Anywho, anywho. Microsoft, google, they were accessories after the fact, but the murderer was Apple.

59:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right. They actually I would call them copycat killers. That would be the term OK. Apple is a serial killer, Microsoft and Google are copycat killers. Let's just get this accurate.

01:00:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's that you know, and I'm kind of I'm also an accessory after the fact, because now I'm using ARC, which is a Chromium derivative, Not supporting Firefox as a user.

01:00:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You have to do the right thing. That's right for you and you exist in the real world in which these forces have arrayed against not just Firefox, but you right, and that's you know you can't. Just you know I'm going to use Firefox forever because you know I mean that's a great position to take, but except that it isn't, you know, unfortunately, like I would love that Firefox. If Firefox could fight Chrome and whatever else, and even footing, we would live in a very different world today.

01:00:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not about, and I still love Firefox. I you know I do too, but the only difference really between Firefox and ARC is the UI. And so. Firefox is copied. You know, basically the browser UI from a hundred years ago.

01:01:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The thing that is most striking to me about ARC and it's I feel weird even talking about this product because it's so non mainstream. It's it's so out there, it almost feels naive. But ARC is the first serious attempt to rethink what a web browser is. Even the browser I love the most, which is Brave, is a browser. It is there. No one would ever look at it and say what is this thing? It is the playbook version of a browser.

01:01:39
Now they've done some things in the back end I really like with regards to security and privacy and all that, and it's a little stripped down. They don't. There's no feature bloat going on there. I like that too, but these are we're not talking about major user experience differences right, day-to-day stuff. What ARC is doing is revolutionary. It doesn't mean it's going to succeed, right. It doesn't mean that this is the future there.

01:01:59
There are some questions, by the way, about its latest things, the stuff you were showing earlier and how they bypass Google and bypass the websites that create the content and just create. You know, give you the answer, like the ethics of that, maybe is the best way to put it. Or you know, what does that do to content creators? And I got to tell you I'm not sure they have a good answer to that question. They may have plans for, I don't know, it becomes a paid thing and maybe there's a kickback to the content they're taking or whatever. I don't know that.

01:02:31
But the thing to keep in mind is that ARC is a company that's not much bigger than the company I own, so it's not on the, it's not on the same level as Google, microsoft, you know Apple, right, it's not even it's not. It's not on the same level field as Epic Games taking on Apple. It's not in the level field of Sonos taking on Google. This is a mom and pop thing. So we could, we should still debate the ethics of it, we should still ask questions and we should still wait and see what happens here. But they are trying to do something that I think is amazing. I mean it's just, it is a thorough rethinking of what this product is and what it means to use it. I mean it's and I'm sorry you know Firefox, brave, google, whatever, I mean ultimately, from a mile high, they're all exactly the same thing right, I wonder you were a big Vivaldi fan.

01:03:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, Vivaldi is highly customizable. Could it be made to look like ARC?

01:03:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I wouldn't. No, I don't think it works the same way, and I I'm a little off now with Vivaldi.

01:03:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's kind of been a while Vivaldi is, in my opinion, is the best to do it From day one.

01:03:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, honestly, the very first question they ask you is you want to have the browser? Do you want to have the browser with the email and the calendar and the, and you'll? And right there you're like uh, I just want a browser. I mean, it's like what are you doing? Yeah, and it's busy, but obviously it speaks to a certain audience. There are people who like to have all the airplane, you know, the airline carrier, the airplane cockpit, you know style thing, but I don't. I like minimalist things and whatever. But I think there's a barrier to entry when it comes to ARC with it, regardless of just getting over that hump and then understanding what's going on in the UI, and that people will come back on day two and their tabs are all gone and they're like what's going on here? It's confusing. But it's confusing because they didn't just do the same thing everyone else is doing.

01:04:28
They're really, you know, like, for example, when Microsoft made Windows Phone 7, there was a. There was actually a lot of innovation there from a user experience standpoint and we can, you know, there's a whole story about why this didn't work and all that. This notion of we're not just going to have like a grid of apps, that whack-a-mole UI that we still have right Grid of icons on a home screen. We're going to really think through like, what is it that people are trying to do on their phone and how can we make that easier? And there was some real innovation there and that failed horribly. Arc browser could fail in the same way, but I appreciate the attempt and I actually see the and you do too obviously see the benefits of it. Right, you can see what they did. You're like you know what you can see. This changes things. Yeah, it's very interesting.

01:05:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think no. I love it for a lot of things and it, by the way, fits very well into the future AI world. They're smart to be using perplexity, I wonder, search and so forth.

01:05:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know if you know enough about the histories, you know if this was a plan or the way. I imagine it was one year or two years in that this AI thing became obvious and they said we got to pivot to this. But, whatever the reason, they are uniquely not position, but they've delivered a uniquely AI infused product where everyone else is kind of at like it's kind of tacked on in some way. So they have a traditional browser and they're like we'll do this thing too. So like, for example, in Brave, you can, you can. You know they have a AI, I think called Leo right, which I'm sure you really like on some level, and Leo kicks in through when you type into the address bar, right, if you ask, you can ask questions that way. So it's like we we didn't really rethink. Well, I guess technically ARC does something very similar, but ARC doesn't even have an address bar.

01:06:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know. So I mean, it's not completely surprising, because the people who started ARC came from Tesla, came from Instagram, medium. A lot of them came from Chrome, amazon, snap, slack, pinterest. They really they've all been around.

01:06:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like a boullabaisse of talent, but also a, you know, like the people who might have came from Chrome or some other browser company, right, Remember when Safari started, you might remember, stan, there was a guy who was very famous and highly placed at Mozilla who left to go to Apple and at the time everyone was like what's going on here and it's because they created Safari? But you might have these people in these companies who are like, you know, I have ideas and no one's interested, and the reason is we're all really comfortable with what browsers are, and maybe you put a bunch of those people in a room together and you come out with something you know doesn't always work right, but I feel like, anyway, I love that they're doing it. It's very interesting.

01:07:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And so it's a somewhat quixotic venture, because they have no revenue model.

01:07:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, that's what I'm saying. We actually don't know.

01:07:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They've raised money and their privacy policy says they're not smart enough. How are you going to make money?

01:07:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Volume, you know yeah.

01:07:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't really know what the plan is. I think they want to do a enterprise thing and they think that's how they're going to make something.

01:07:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So that was that worked great for this. So I would. I look at DuckDuckGo and I wanted the same thing, right. So I keep looking at this browser and I think to myself there's some basic features it doesn't have. You can't even like pin tabs, right. It doesn't have extensions, you know. So it's kind of a non-starter for a user, but I kind of like the whole. I like the company, I like their whole thing. But how do you make money? You know, you look at Brave same thing. It's like, what are you doing? Like, what are you doing? Or you look at Mozilla now, like actually this comes up at the end of the show, but Mozilla has had to branch out into other products, a lot of which are free and paid versions right, they're trying to make money somehow.

01:08:10
They're trying to stay alive, you know, and you know of course we can't begrudge them that. But and you write articles about the stuff and then people are like I'm never going to pay anyone $5. And it's like, oh, there you go. Well, you're contributing too. Then what are you like, kicking the corpse on the way by, like I get? It but like don't feel so straight.

01:08:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have become. I obviously my attitude has changed a lot. You've had a Therop premium for a long time and you do it exactly the right way, which is you have a paid, you have free mostly free content and then you put some really good premium content behind a paywall. I'm thinking about it because I just renewed for another year and it's worth it and we're trying to do something similar. Yeah, I can't take credit for that.

01:08:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
by the way, that was other people, that was Penton, and I fought. Well, no, this was that. The previous, the PWW, a small team, a small group of people. Other people came up at this idea. I fought it. You know I want my content to be free and out there, you know, like an idealistic way. Yeah, so do I, and I, and I'm not comfortable asking people for money. You know I'm not comfortable raising prices on anything.

01:09:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You and I are exactly cut from the same cloth.

01:09:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm just, I'm an artist, Leo. No, I mean, I don't pay rent right?

01:09:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, there is a reason. There is, you know, and that's the thing I become more and more aware of.

01:09:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, yeah. I mean as you were financial mortality approaches, you realize I have to do something here.

01:09:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But journalism is collapsing. It's not just me, I mean, it's everywhere. It's terrifying. It is terrifying and I and I want to. I think what I kind of want people to understand is you. There was a false promise at the beginning of the internet that you could do this for free. Yeah, that's right, and and it's well. You know what?

01:09:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
this is. I mean, look, we could pretend this is a certification. This is inevitable. We cheer the notion of the democratization of, maybe publishing or music creation or whatever it might be, and what we don't really think through ever is the ramifications and what happens on the other side of this. You know, like we like, on the one hand it's like it's really neat that anyone can have a platform and on the other hand, it's terrifying that everyone has a platform, because most people's ideas are terrible. You know, most people are horrible and I and I don't know that I want to hear from these people. So, for example, like a real world example of that is I use the Google news feed, specifically a new news app, specifically for their the tech feed. I read it every morning and this is I've been meaning to write about this. I've started taking pictures of it. So in my news feed there'll be like the verge and gadget and gizmodo and these kind of top level tech crud. Are you taking the?

01:10:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the Google news app. Yeah, yeah. So, I do the same thing to do every day.

01:10:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, so here's what the first bit of lack of sophistication in this app is the verge, and gadget and gizmodo all have branched out into other things.

01:11:05
They write about things that are sort of technology, like cars or space or whatever it is. It was. There's a story in the news feed this morning from the verge about a Lego set. Yeah, they write about board games. They write about just normal things.

01:11:19
In my own world, I in part of the threat premium like. One of the things I do is similar to that in the sense that it's not really necessarily about tech, but I might write about more personal things than whatever, and the thing is that's fine. I don't want to expect to see that in a news feed that's specifically about tech. Right, right, like, and that's so. That's one thing. That, to me, is a problem. I don't like it. There are articles about bicycles, motorcycles, skiing. It has nothing to do with tech, but it's almost like someone was like ah, you know, they mentioned an iPad app or something. Who knows it's. It's really unsophisticated, but that's not the problem. The problem actually is AI, because the thing that has been taking over my news feed as I sit there every day and try to curate it. I don't want to see stuff from here. I don't want to see stuff from here.

01:12:05
There's an infinite number of URLs that are some random combination of letters and numbers, com, or some random combination of letters and numbers, something Random, you know. It goes on and on and it will be like it will say something. I'm not going to make this up. This is not an actual URL, but it will be like stateside.7.com. And it's a news. It is a tech story, but it was either regurgitated with AI, copied wholesale from some other blogger they are. This is a cancer that is eating my tech news, and the fact that Google can't or won't do anything about that is terrifying. And the fact that I found a news feed called artifact by the guys from Instagram that actually worked really well at this and is now going away at the end of the month is even more terrible.

01:12:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, artifacts going out of business, yeah.

01:12:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is a huge, huge problem, huge problem. So this is is it in certification? Yes, On one level, of course it is, but it's not just that right, we need a new phrase the AR are for application yeah, the AI for an occasion.

01:13:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The AI application yeah, and it is. I mean, ai is flooding the zone now and it's only going to get worse. And this is.

01:13:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
we can talk about regulations and everything, but honestly, I don't understand this is from a pure business model perspective how Google I just singled them out doesn't want to put a stop to this. This is this undermines their credibility as a source of information, and that, to me, is there is really the foundation of their business. I know they make the money from the ads, but those ads become less valuable if the content that's around them is garbage and people leave. Oh, that's true.

01:13:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's tempting, right and I don't know if I doubt this is true but it's tempting to say this is Google's revenge against all the news entities that said well, you have to pay us for, oh my God.

01:14:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So if you haven't seen this, this is amazing. There is a couple of things here. So there's an editorial in the Washington Post this week about the real danger to news. Is AI Okay, obvious or not?

01:14:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Well, that's what.

01:14:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Washington Post thinks for sure. I scrolled by this thing and I said I don't have to read this, who cares? Like I know what they think. But then I thought to myself hold on a second, the little tech reporter guys, jeffrey Fowler, whoever the other people are, they have been on a mom and pop crusade against digital photography, ai, ever since Google came out with the pixel.

01:14:37 - Speaker 2 (Host)
They can't stop writing about it Like it makes them insane.

01:14:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Interesting. They never reviewed the pixelate. All they did was write five articles about how terrible this is. Oh, wow. But that's sort of understanding that, since photography has existed and is in fact an artificially created rendition of reality, right, that we have been editing those images ever since they existed is, I think, a fact that needs to kind of factor into this discussion, that there's nuances loss on these people. So I'm like, okay, you know what. I got to go back and look at this. So I have my aggravation with them about the photography, ai stuff. All right, it's good, I'm going to read this. So I'm reading it, I'm reading it and I'm thinking to myself. I'm like hold on, the person who wrote it led Google's news organization for like seven or eight years. He was the guy Richard Gingrich was forced to. Yeah, look, this is crazy.

01:15:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh interesting. So it's an op-ed, then it's not a yes.

01:15:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yeah, no, it's not a new sir. It's actually rather astonishing to see his side of the story. I just told the story you mentioned, which is that Google used to screen scrape everybody. But those results and search results, people freaked out, started suing them. Regulatory body started waking up and they said okay, okay, and they spent six, seven years coming to individual deals with publishers in every country on earth. It was a period of time where almost every day there was a Google announces publish partnership with some public news organization in Australia, new Zealand, south Africa. It was every day. Now it's everybody. I'm like wondering where my deal is, by the way, and now.

01:16:10
But his perspective on that is fascinating because he saw this as just a money grab. But what he's saying is that this AI thing is like that exponential that the danger like he would hit from his perspective. At least we were driving traffic to you. That's kind of what he's saying. He's like look, I may have stabbed you with a knife, but I didn't kill you. Ai is going to make your body unrecognizable. So, yeah, I guess that's worse. You look a little less terrible by comparison, but you weren't as sophisticated back then either. Right, you would be doing this right now. If you had invented it. It's a very hypocritical. It's worth reading with the understanding of who he is and what he did, and then read his take. You know, if you're like a Nazi, come on, like, yeah, we killed a few people. Come on, we were trying to advance science over here. It's like, dude, that is not what you were doing.

01:17:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, like I, that's I got to get uh get Jeff Jarvis on this one, uh, because he's friends with Richard. Uh, very interesting, I will. Uh, I will ask Jeff about this later today actually Now we're going to clear the air here. You need to breathe it. Paul, You've been ranning and raving and I think it's a good idea just to take a break and talk a little bit about clip champion. That's your special place.

01:17:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, I had actually noticed at least one of these features before they announced it and I was like, oh, I don't recall this being a thing. But the other day, uh, the clip champ team, who was now blogging at the Microsoft 365 blog, uh announced two new features that are related to audio. And then the third one is coming later this month, right? So the first one is it's just audio recording and it's a way that you've you've made a video of whatever kind and now you want to do a voiceover. They let you record for up to 30 minutes. Um, it's a neat feature and, by the way, in the screenshot you can kind of see this a little bit it says coach.

01:18:00
On over there in the corner, there's actually an optional feature called coach and you put it on, you do your voice over and it gives you feedback afterwards, where it says you know, you said I'm a lot, you did that, you know it's. It's really again, free web app. Astonishing, right, it's kind of. It's kind of cool. Um, clip champ has also had a text to speech feature for a while, uh, but now it supports a new track in the you know the, in the editing track or whatever, uh, where you can change where, where that text to speech item is in the timeline and you can change the language it speaks, the voice it uses, the emotion, the voice, the pace you can edit the script and it will edit the hate her so much.

01:18:46
I am. I am blown away by some of the stuff. It is, um, nice, it's very interesting. So, and then there's a third feature that's coming later. This one will actually only be available in the premium subscription, but for now you can test it for free. So, while it's in preview, anyone could actually do this, and what it will do is it uses AI to examine your video and then it will remove long periods of silence, either automatically you can just say yep, do it all, or you can go one by one and kind of see what the change would look and sound like. So, in other words, you've created some kind of a video, it's a finished product, but you know you have dead periods, right? Um, I look, we're getting to. This is the.

01:19:27
This is the conversation we just had about SIM cards. Right, the video production used to be so prohibitively difficult and expensive that it was only left to professionals. And then we've had, you know, like a movie and movie maker, and you know it's kind of democratized. But now, with the addition of AI, you and, of course, advanced capabilities we see at iPhones and the incredible video quality they have there, and any individual, this is the democratization of video creation and editing. It's incredible, it is kind of amazing.

01:19:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you know having, when I was in the early nineties I worked in the TV, used to do a regular weekly edited piece and spent hours, you know, sitting in the edit suite with the editor going, ah, put the. And it was so painful and I remember thinking at that time even though the companies are pushing, you might want to do your own editing. This is back in the days of Windows, movie maker and stuff. I thought no one's ever going to want to sit through this hell Right.

01:20:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was always the bridge too far.

01:20:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's so much work. It did catch on thanks to you know, better tools and so forth, but it's always been painful.

01:20:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's still hard. I don't remember. It was right up, so probably 2021, 22, maybe. I was looking at updating the Windows 11 book and I was thinking you know, one thing to be kind of cool is if I could do video explanations of these things, little video like little clips, you know, yeah, and, and I could, but they could be in the book because it's a digital document. Who cares? And then you click on the video and you can see the video, and maybe that would be a way that some, instead of reading the book, people could say I want to see how to do this one thing, go right to the video. And then I looked at like what that would take and I got really I mean, I don't mean to say depressed, but it was like I I had this idea and I was like I just wouldn't be cool, but you just can't.

01:21:19
That's why. Why do you think I have such a big staff? Hey, do you want to do this video for you? And I was like, oh yeah, there you go. But that's why and?

01:21:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
but that's also why we're in financial straits, because I don't, you know, I was never going to do that, but I wanted that and and so we have a lot of editors and stuff and we have a great editor for this show, Kevin King, and they're good. They're really good. I look at my son, Henry, who's become a TikTok Instagram chef and star. His skill it's cooking, but this real skill is the editing of the videos he makes.

01:21:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He literally spends all day doing this stuff I just described and any video related. Ai wonder that will, is there or will be there in the future is doesn't necessarily mean that you or I are going to make a windows week by ourselves. That's not what this means.

01:22:12
But what it does mean is that for people like Kevin right, or, if any, to anyone else, that this becomes easier and they can focus on, you know, the more important things rather than the rigor moral. You know how horrible is it to go through a video of whatever length. This show is two, three hours long. I make these goofy little videos of my wife that are 10 minutes long. But whatever you have video you, you in audio, you have to. You can't skip over sections of it. You have to go through the whole damn thing. I did. Yeah, it's, it's hard and time consuming. So these things, no, but these things I. These are advances Like this is. This is quality of life stuff for people like Kevin. Yeah, you know, it really is.

01:22:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think Anthony Nielsen, who is kind of our kind of lead and creative guy, is using more and more AI and in fact we're using AI now. You probably get these every week after the show. We send you clips. We're using AI to generate those clips. We obviously go through it afterwards. Yeah, but the ones where they kind of does the words and yeah, that's all AI generated. Right, it's great. Thanks to Anthony figuring that all out and it's really great.

01:23:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
How hard would that be to do manually? Think about it, oh.

01:23:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
God.

01:23:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, it's just that it's hard to even I this is. I think this is the conceptual hump. A lot of people need to get over it, cause, as I will say, as a writer, I look at the stuff that AI is going to kind of take away and on, you know, from one perspective and I get worried about it, but then I look at how it actually works in word, let's say, or whatever it might be, or even something as simple as a Grammarly app. I'm using a, a markdown text editor, and I can still use an AI service to check my grammar, check my spelling. I mean this stuff is transformative, right, I mean it's. It doesn't mean that I necessarily go away, although I mean I will eventually, obviously but but I mean it doesn't mean like I lose my job today or whatever. But although that AI crap I was talking about in Google news is not helping, this is such a great.

01:24:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this is such a great conversation Cause. At the very same time as we're saying how awful AI is, we're saying how great it is yes.

01:24:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this is, honestly, if if I could leave this earth and deliver one message that people would actually kind of listen to. It is that everything is nuanced. There's no such thing as black and white. There's bad in everything, and the biggest mistake you can make is to be as far on one fridge as you could possibly be, because as soon as you start stop listening or stop paying attention to the gray, you're lost. You know, as a human being, it is lost.

01:24:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, cause nothing is black or white. It really isn't. No, nothing is nothing, In fact, I I had an epiphany not so long ago that really the the key to understanding life is to be able to hold paradoxes in your head.

01:25:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yes, oh, here's the simple paradox that people have trouble with because I get. In fact, if I, I should write a book, it would be called. But you said and this is my bed, it's like if I, if I'm ever confronted by the same, like the one phrase, the most. It's but. But you said, because people hold on to things that we say in the spur of the moment, more than I ever could, I can't have, I don't have a memory for things I spend hours writing. So there, there is no mutual exclusivity or paradox to the fact that, say something, you could make two sides of anything. You could say Google has the best search engine on earth and Google is a terrible company that is stealing jobs and stealing content for people. Those two things can be, they can both be true, and I, I, I think people have a hard time with that.

01:25:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's funny Because when I was doing that Amazon survey it was like, yeah, they're horrible and yeah, I love it.

01:25:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like hold on a second. I have to get a package. Oh, it's coming tomorrow, perfect, all right. What were we saying? Oh, you're horrible. Yeah, right, there's. I mean, look that's. I mean, honestly, that's something hypocritical there too, but we all do. But that, we all do. Yeah, we all do, I, I would. Often you started out as a you know a, you know a, you know a, you know you're sorry, it happened. We got next day packages delivered here. I just saw it in Mexico. Just what is this world we live in? It's amazing.

01:26:21
That's crazy.

01:26:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I used to say but you said to John C DeVorek a lot and he would always come back. He said well, thoreau said, foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

01:26:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I love it, and which is an honestly a way to say, I guess, if you want to be pedantic and never learn and then change your opinion, then I guess you could be that person. Yes, but don't be that person, don't be that person. And. I learned from.

01:26:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
John Yep. All right. Let us learn. Yes, Something. Uh, let us take a little tiny break and I am still waiting. You think Richard was. Let's check the Richard.

01:26:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think, of the next 10 minutes we're going to get, he's going to appear like a genie out of a bottle. Let me tell you listen, you know how we've been doing this. For what? 18, 18, whatever number of years. You know how dedicated I am to this. I think you know that I literally book every trip I take around this show to make sure I don't miss this. Right, I'm dedicated. Let me tell you something If I had to fly home from Europe, be home for a day and then fly to New Zealand and I got in late and I had to drive two and a half hours, guess what I wouldn't be doing right now this show. I'm sorry, like no offense, but like that's maybe where I draw the line, I think that's.

01:27:34
Richard is he's dedicated in a way that it maybe has an energy level I don't have, I don't know.

01:27:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
but I want to correct myself. It is Ralph Waldo Emerson who said a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin, the little minds adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

01:27:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the people who refuse to change their opinions when confronted by evidence to the contrary. That's right, right.

01:28:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're consistent, but they're also consistently stupid. All right, more to come. You're watching and listening to Windows Weekly, Paul Therat, richard Campbell on the road, but soon here, and we move on now to our AI segment.

01:28:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wait a minute, I know, I know, I know. Well, you know, look, look, here's the thing. So it was a period of time last year Probably don't remember it it came and went in a flash, but we talked a lot about Activision Blizzard. Oh yeah, that yeah, okay, look, and it will come up again. In fact, it will come up today, but not to that degree, right? I mean, at some point, you know, activision Blizzard is integrated into Microsoft and you know, whatever happens, ai is a little different. This may be so big that there will be a point in time where people who, like don't today remember that Apple was once called Apple computer, by the way, because that's all they made and now it's not. That is a gigantic, much, much bigger company that makes all kinds of different things. Microsoft might be best known as being like the Copilot company, not the Windows company or whatever people still think about, wouldn't that be?

01:29:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
interesting. Yeah, that's really interesting.

01:29:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a. The Windows thing is already a little past its prime in the sense that Microsoft's cloud-based businesses outstrip Windows by a factor of whatever five, 10, 20, I don't know, it doesn't really matter. But the thing that people like me can take a little bit of solace in is that that cloud computing infrastructure is all built on Windows. Guys, it's Hyper-V, this is all Windows technology. So that's nice. I mean, it's nice for me. It's like people are excited that Linux is in.

01:29:38
Android it's like see Linux one. It's like, yeah, it's not. I mean, I see what you're saying, but not exactly right. But Copilot, you know it's Microsoft. For years, at Bill Gates especially, we always talk about betting the company and he'd be like yeah, we're coming out with a clippy profits, we're betting the company.

01:29:57
No, you're not, you're not doing that. That's not true. That's hyperbolic. You're just talking. But Microsoft has never I don't think explicitly said we're betting the company on it. But here's the thing you can see by what they not what they say, because that doesn't mean so much, but what they do and the money they spend they're betting the company on this. There's no doubt about it. Not that Microsoft would not exist if this failed. It would still continue forward as some kind of a giant Oracle type terrible company nobody cares about. But they wouldn't be the number one or two biggest company in the world and they wouldn't be on everyone's mind.

01:30:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's interesting, you know. Yeah, because they're making the right choice. I think Meta bet the company on VR and is now regretting and switching. Apple is a little late to the party, still thinks VR is going to be. Richard is setting up as we speak. Oh, I love Richard.

01:30:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All right, so I would never do what he's doing.

01:30:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Continue on while he's not here.

01:30:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so yesterday or I guess today was the one year anniversary. I think it was two days ago, whatever. We're roughly at the one year anniversary of the day that Yusuf Mehdi stepped out on the stage and talked about it. The time was Bing Chat, which I think we can all agree was the stupidest name, and market forward whatever. But anyway, they course corrected on that. So here we are, 12 months later. There was a lot of promise, a lot of announcement, but there have also been a lot of actual product releases and, maybe more important, a lot of product updates All along the way.

01:31:25
The core capabilities of Microsoft Copilot have advanced again and again and again. They've shipped actual shipping subscription service products like Copilot Pro and Copilot, microsoft 365 and there are going to be many more to come Dynamics, et cetera, all over the place. They have their own little milestones. They talk about five billion chats, five billion images created I'm going to put this in their quotes because it's nonsense but sustained growth and Bing and Edge share, not really, but the fact of the matter is they've created something. I think that's weird to say. It feels sustainable. It feels real as more and more competitors arrive, as they would. The OpenAI is the world of Google, of course, amazon eventually, apple, eventually. These companies are all going to still share to some degree, but Microsoft's historic advantages, first with Office Productivity Software, which they turned successfully into services, and then with Cloud Computing, I think gives them an edge that pardon the pun that their competitors just can't duplicate.

01:32:33
It's rather astonishing this past year has been. I mean, if AI hadn't happened I keep saying this I would have done an end of year recap where I would have talked about all these things, big and small, that were big deals the Division of Blizzard, $68, $69 billion, whatever. It was big deal. There's a lot of little stories, lots of themes, lots of interesting stuff that occurs in any given year, I guess, but last year AI just blew it all away. It was like AI and then there's a little one pixel-sized thing on the corner. For the rest of it it really doesn't matter. In some ways, ai is everything. Ai is the force that drives Microsoft forward. It's the way they continue the momentum that they got with Wall Street from Cloud Computing. It's the way they just became the biggest company in the world with a $3 trillion market cap plus not 3.2, I think it is now, or whatever. It's just astonishing.

01:33:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is amazing, isn't it? It's really amazing, yeah.

01:33:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a Super Bowl ad they're putting out. Actually it's not now.

01:33:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's how you know it's real. They're going to do a Super Bowl ad.

01:33:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, they haven't thrown enough money at AI. They're going to do this now. And then they've also announced some updates which I probably can't access because I'm in Mexico. So there's a co-pilot app store coming to the standalone apps on iOS and Android. Major UX upgrade which I can see and you can see. Now if you go to co-pilotmicrosoftcom you can see that Kind of streamlined to you. I make it nicer.

01:34:03
Inline image editing meaning the way these things work today is if you use co-pilots generated image and you look at the image, it kind of pushes you off to designer what used to be called Bing image creator. Now you can do it right there in the chat interface and you can change the image, tell it to take the tree out or add the thing or whatever, just make it a different aspect ratio, whatever, although actually you have to pay for that. And then now that feature I just mentioned is a new feature of co-pilot pro. So when co-pilot pro first launched last month not just the default, I believe the only thing you could do was make landscape 16 by 9 images, whereas before, remember, they were square on the free version. Now in co-pilot pro you'll be able to switch between those kind of things. So I think that's kind of cool.

01:34:46
This one I don't quite understand. But the new the image creator that used to be part of Bing, is now Microsoft designer, and Microsoft designer is a sort of Adobe express competitor, canva competitor, if that makes sense. You go there, you're a small business owner, you make flyers and logos and whatever. They pulled the AI image, the chat GPT for whatever, sorry Dolly, three image creation capabilities out of Bing. But it's now technically part of this designer product so you can go I think it's probably designermicrosoftcom, whatever it's a PWA, you can install it, blah, blah, blah. But they're going to introduce something called designer GPT inside co-pilot soon, and this is I'm trying to understand what this means. It just says it's an immersive dedicated canvas inside of co-pilot, so wherever you get your co-pilot, where you can visualize your ideas, and I guess I guess it just means I think it just means you'll be doing that designer thing inside a co-pilot. I guess it's like a, essentially a plugin, so that you don't have to leave the environment. I guess is probably what. That's my guess. So, big year for AI.

01:35:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So what is? Have you seen the Super Bowl ad or?

01:36:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have not. I actually like footballs, right. So the Super Bowl to me, I feel like the ad quality has been either declining or we're just so used to it it's not as interesting anymore. But I do watch the game to see both things right, and this year at least. I mean, I know you think San Francisco is going to win, I agree with you, but at least it's two of the best teams in the league. It isn't always, no, it's going to be bad, and there are many examples of a horrible team getting in at like nine and seven or whatever, winning the Super Bowl somehow. And it's like this is the problem with one game, playoffs, but okay, whatever, we're not here to talk about football, but football. The Super Bowl is football and this stuff, you know. So I'm just, I'm just saving it for that, I just want to.

01:36:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll just enjoy it Well, I won't show it. You want to close your eyes.

01:36:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, it's okay.

01:36:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, it's okay, I don't know, will they take us down if I show it? I don't even know.

01:36:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's an advertisement. You're advertising a Microsoft, If anything you're selling out. I feel like that's the case, but I'll leave. I don't know.

01:36:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
These guys. They're so funny on on the old YouTube, all right. Well, let me, I'll just play a little bit of it. How about that? All right?

01:37:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is that a Detroit Lions thing in the middle? What's going on here?

01:37:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not getting the audio. Well, that's probably good, they won't take us down, but this is this is going to be a Super Bowl. I think it's intriguing. I've never seen it work that fast. By the way, I'll just throw it. I don't know.

01:37:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.

01:37:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just getting that part out. I think they probably to me. What this is saying is AI is ready for the people right, and they need to know that. Yeah.

01:37:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Think, think about what we just saw, even that little thing right there, right so that was it, by the way, only 30 seconds, oh, okay.

01:37:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Seven million dollars.

01:37:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was going to say seven million.

01:37:49
So if you use a text-based interface, remember when this first started, the big kind of question was like wait, I'm sorry, we go back to a command line here. What is this? So you have to type out a description and then you get some results for them and you're like, well, that's not exactly what I want. And then they add the ability well, you can keep talking to it, typing to it Exactly, and you can modify it. You can say, okay, I like this picture, but remove the tree on the table.

01:38:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what it's doing in Designer, I think?

01:38:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm sure it is, but the thing that you just showed is making it more like a typical GUI app. If you go into Microsoft Paint today, you can click a button and remove the background from an image, and so or you've used Google Photos on your Pixel phone. You can go in and tap on a person and magic erase them out of the image, and I think what you were showing there was that kind of advance insight. So, in other words, we've generated an image of some kind. Maybe it's not quite what you want, so you're like now you can go in and actually tap on stuff and maybe you can move an item around or remove it from the image Like this is perfect, but I didn't want that one guy flying in the sky or whatever it might be. So that's what that looks like.

01:38:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what Google's been showing for years, you know, with their Pixel ads, right. I guess maybe that's what people want. That's what they think of AI being you spread and, by the way, that's Apple's position is. You don't want to chat thing, you just, you just. But I think they're right about that. Yeah, you just want us to help you. This is pictures.

01:39:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
A year ago I wrote this thing called this is Windows 12 and it had whatever we said. This was the. This came out of the conversation we had at the time whether Windows 12 would require an MPU or maybe there would be features in Windows 12 that would require an MPU or maybe those features would just work better if you had an MPU, that kind of thing. It was just kind of a debate at the time and I sort of saw this kind of thing kind of happening right Like this notion of I. Actually, before Steve Petit said that thing, I had this notion of like it will be this thing over here on the side. You know that you that kind of helps, you do the thing, and like this like a helper, like a like we had not like clipping, like a thing not annoying with I can't think of his name, that horrible comedian's voice, gilbert Godfreyd. But you know something that would be truly helpful, like like what, when you think about AI and how it could improve, like Windows, it's hard to find little individual tasks where it makes a lot of sense. But if you think about Windows as the platform where you run the apps, maybe this thing runs as an orchestrator where you say you tell it, I want to do something right, not just make an image like with a unicorn, but I want to create a flyer that has these elements. Or I need to communicate with a group of people. That's sort of a newsletter, whatever it might be that it could say, okay, you're going to use this, or I'm going to use the system. We'll say I'm going to use this for this, I'm going to use this for this, I'm going to use this for this, and we're going to spit something out. And Windows you didn't use a part of Windows to create any of those things, but Windows was the thing that orchestrated it right. And then, when you see that final element, you can say, okay, this is good, but I need it to be this instead, or something. And same thing. We'll just go and use all the elements. I think that's. I don't think it's here. Like what is happening right now.

01:41:15
The notion, like the thing that's weird about co-pilot and Windows, is that the notion of a sidebar is going to be out of date so quickly. We might wonder why they even bother. I think apps are just going to catch up and that the real value of Windows in this equation is that orchestrated thing I was talking about, which not a unique idea. Well, I did write this last February, but this was the thing that Stevie Petit's talked about. It was the third of the three models and, by the way, what was the example he used? Does anyone remember? It was Clipchamp, but was it? I didn't know that. Yep, also File Explorer, but Clipchamp, yeah, as an example of a new kind of app that did these things for you in the background. You just don't have to worry about where this stuff comes from.

01:42:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, as you pointed out, this has been a year. Have you watched the Petit's talk again since?

01:42:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've watched it many times because what happens? I read a weekly column on Friday where people ask me questions and I've had to reference it so many times. I feel like I could give the speech up to, including the part where he's like I have to get going quickly because I have to take a flight. I've watched it a lot and I've never stopped being impressed by the clarity of the thing he described.

01:42:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Even as we watched him do it. We felt that way.

01:42:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I remember saying it and it was exaggerated because he came on after Panos Penae, who had tanked in a way that was epic I mean even him and the contrast was so sharp. Well, in fact, and it was like, this is what clarity looks like. Why is this guy not?

01:42:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
on a stage. That was the talk, for that was the most important part of it, I think so.

01:42:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I had never heard I Before or since I've heard anyone from Microsoft or anywhere else describe this as clear.

01:43:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And does it hold up? A year later Does what he talked about hold up?

01:43:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it does. But my, I guess what I'm kind of working toward here is like Step one is a sidebar, it's a side-by-side experience, it's a co-pilot. But I actually think we're going to move past that very quickly, at least visually, because we're not going to need this thing on the side, unless that's how Microsoft does the UI for the orchestrator, because that stuff's just going to be built into everything. Richard, you're an insane person.

01:43:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's here, ladies and gentlemen, he's here. I'll tell you what. While we push the buttons to make Richard appear, I will. We'll take a little break. I'll talk about Club Twit and then Richard Campbell will join us. Just in time, I had prepared my own Brown Liquor Pick of the Week, but oh, I thought that was a bottle of bitters.

01:43:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We were going to do the Leo's Bitters Pick of the Week.

01:43:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There he is. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to say a little bitters, richard, hello, hello. I wasyou might laugh at this, but I was going to show this Niko Whiskey Single Mall. It's PD and Salty Whiskey that Russell brought us back PD and Salty PD and Salty.

01:44:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm hoping to be the Bill Murray of Topo Chico. He's going to be my next endorsement PD and. Salty, that's awesome.

01:44:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, I don't need to now because Richard's here. Let's take a little break, you guys can talk amongst yourselves and, we're glad to say, have a Brown Liquor Pick this week. Richard Campbell got here a long road and Paul before you got here. Paul was saying A couple of paths on the way. How dedicated you are. Paul would have long ago said it yeah, screw it.

01:44:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I wouldn't have been like screw you guys.

01:44:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I this is no offense, but Hold on, we'll talk in just a bit, but first I do want to talk a little bit about something that's become very important to us in the future. We talked about the plight that journalism is going through and with AI and so forth. It's funny because at the same and this is exactly the paradox Paul and I were talking about At the same time as we can bemoan the death of journalism and AI's intrusion into the world of knowledge and so forth, at the same time as all that's happening, we also think that there is something really important going on that we need to talk about, and maybe I'm flattering myself and our hosts, but I think you need us to talk about it too. This is the place to come to for that information Reliable, trustworthy information as we head into something pretty unknown into this new age, and it's the reason I think I really I mean, look, I'm old enough, I've saved enough, I could retire. I don't have to keep doing this, but I want to. I think we have something to say.

01:45:59
I think Steve Gibson said the same thing. He was planning the end in just about a year from now, and actually a little less than a year, isn't it? He was about to wind things up and he decided to keep going. We still have stuff to say. We have some very important things to talk about, but we need to do with your help because, frankly, there is a crisis right now in funding journalism and funding the kind of things we do. Advertisers just they seem to have moved on. They want to do influencers, they want to do YouTube, they're going to Google and Facebook. The audience is getting more fragmented, so we need your help. If you do watch or listen to our shows and you care about what we're doing and you want us to keep doing it, you need to vote, basically with your dollars. It's not a lot seven bucks a month. You can do more if you feel like it, because we know a lot of you can't afford that or don't want to spend that. I promise we're going to continue to offer free stuff, but the good stuff is going to more and more be for the club members. Club Twit is ad-free versions of all of our shows More shows now than before that are inside Club Twit behind the wall, like iOS. Today they've moved that behind the wall.

01:47:14
Home Theater Geeks got well because Paul does that. Great hands on windows. There's a clip jam stuff there, micah does the hands on Macintosh. All of that is part of your club membership. My personal feeling, the best part of the membership well, that stuff's pretty good too, but I love the Discord. I love hanging in the Discord. It's a great hang. It's a social network that's more than just chatting about the shows. It's chatting about everything we Geeks care about, and there's a lot of good stuff in there, including we have our own Minecraft server, we have our own mid-journey server, we have lots of conversations about AI and about coding and all sorts of stuff, and there's the Twit Plus feed with additional content that we don't put out. I think that this is worth it. We're really trying to make it worth it and we hope we're worth it to you. If we are twittv slash club twit, it would make us very happy. Quit twittv slash club twit. Thank you very much in advance for your support. Let's turn the Linux back on so you guys can talk again.

01:48:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Richard, my voice, thanks you.

01:48:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you've been talking too much, I'm sure, and I don't know that it's even on topic. But really there's this you're looking at how poorly the influencer marketing thing is going for folks.

01:48:34
Oh yeah, Advertisers are getting burned, but we started Don Airox back in 2002, which was before the word podcast even existed. We've been through all the incarnations of this and we're still doing the thing Right. Hey, we love doing it, and there have been certainly easier years and harder years, but you know one of the reasons to persist because when you keep doing a thing you love and it's easier to keep doing it, people come back around and I'm wondering. I'm wondering if we're not just not that far away from the things we're doing.

01:49:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I kind of hope that's. I think you're right. I hope you're right. I got to hope so.

01:49:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's weird that you just mentioned this, because we were walking back from lunch and Richard had been texting me and I'm like I'm on my own today. I have mixed feelings about this and you know, stephanie literally said to me she goes. How come she goes? Why does Leo still do this? And I literally was like.

01:49:36
I was literally like I don't even what are you talking about? And she's like, well, I mean I wouldn't, I wouldn't still be. And I'm like, yeah, but but I would. I think it's because he likes it. You know, I mean, I think weird, I don't think he's I don't think he's waiting to pick up a check every week.

01:49:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not like I think he. I ask myself that every night, Okay.

01:49:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We all have our moments of doubt, but I think Richard just said ties into this. Like it's a gosh darn it. You have a purpose.

01:50:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, I feel, I feel and I know, do I love a ridiculous boondockle, like flying, you know, 15 hours and then driving three hours just to catch a tail into this? And yeah, no, I love a ridiculous boondockle. You're pretty committed.

01:50:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're pretty. Hey, what town are you in? I just have you in this.

01:50:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm, I'm back in town, I'm back at the farm. In fact, I'll I'll flip the preset around. You remember this. You might even remember this view, because this is the view of the yearling, this is the Hobbiton view.

01:50:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, my goodness gracious.

01:50:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So that's where the baby hang out, but the main the further down to the south. This is what I mean for you.

01:50:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
As I explained, last time I was here and I think you were there I said I could, I could flip mine around and there's nothing to see. And I have flipped it around, because what's behind me now is what I used to look at there's nothing to see.

01:50:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

01:50:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's one side, I'm in the bunker.

01:50:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I'm back in the, in the real Hobbiton. You know the green hollymills. This is the family farm and I'm going to get a few days to spend with my family. I'm going to get to see my mom before I go back to work in Sydney.

01:51:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I like that. You're talking about spending time with your family and it's like almost wistful, Whereas I think to myself, if I had to go back to Boston and spend time with my family, I'd probably slip my wrist Like I you know it's sort of a different couple of times a year.

01:51:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is where you grew up, Richard.

01:51:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Or I was born here. I left when I was a baby, when I was three, so, but they kept. They kept the farm. Well, they're fine. Yeah, the farm predates me. You know my, my, this is my married into family, the knee family and the roads around here. Knee road is down the hill. They were original Scottish immigrants and this is so generation dairy here. It's different Both. You know, the town is grown around it, but it is beautiful.

01:51:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a whole new take on the word pasteurized.

01:51:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richard has been pasteurized.

01:51:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
My uncle, graham, is in his middle eighties and he still hikes down to the milking yard every morning and he scoops a couple of quarts of raw milk out of the bath and downs it and then walks back up the hill. He'll take a nap after that.

01:52:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know the running of the farm. We take a day off after that.

01:52:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So good for him. Yeah, you know, mel and Janelle run the farm now, so it's all. It's all good.

01:52:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It must feel good, though you must have a kind of a almost a sigh of relaxation. You know idea.

01:52:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And as soon as I turn on the Ohuichi, which is the Ohuichi settlers road, I mean and realize part of my family were the Ohuichi settlers, right? So, yeah, no, there's something. I passed the spot where I was born. I was, she born in a house, but the house is gone. It's a, it's a townhouse development. No, it's just. Yeah, and it's sad. There's something in my bones here, you know, this is very, very much feels like home. I don't think you've been to the coast place, paul, you know we're not suffering there either, but yeah, they're very different.

01:53:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You do, you do like remote places.

01:53:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You do.

01:53:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, and now with the internet, he's a wise man. You could be anywhere. That's really yeah, I mean it's.

01:53:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you would miss this, richard, but we were just talking about various technical advances that makes different things possible E-SIMS and foreign countries and low cost connectivity, yada, yada, yada. I mean, those same advances are what enable you to do what you're doing right now, but also to be living where you're living right now.

01:53:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like I mean otherwise you know it would be, it would be. It would be the same things. It would be very different. You know I have great concerns with Elon Musk these days. I don't think I'm the only one but that 5,000 satellite network with its multi-laser beams like it literally is an episode of the spy who shagged me. But it gives you 400 plus megabits per second. So what's?

01:53:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
beautiful about that is that that also ties into that nuance thing that you missed, where you know, not everything is black and white. So, yeah, he's destroying the nice guy for everybody, but connectivity.

01:53:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you're on Starlink now.

01:54:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, I think we've got Starlink back up here. They've got fiber Okay.

01:54:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you are on Starlink when you're in BC.

01:54:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
On the coast. I have fiber and Starlink as well.

01:54:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, you're well equipped yeah.

01:54:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Now we've got all the things.

01:54:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, what were we talking about, Paul? We're talking about AI.

01:54:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're in the AI section, yeah so the next thing was the ARC browser. So we talked to the CEO again. We got ahead of ourselves a little bit. But sometime between last week's show and today the folks you know the browser company had their big event where they announced three new features, all AI based, for the desktop version of the browser, one of which emulates that Browse for Me feature you were just showing off with the mobile version of the browser, the mobile app version, and this kind of interesting ethical debate over okay, this is really good functionality. This is what people want. I just want the answer to the question, whatever. But now we're not driving traffic to the content creator that may be answering that question in the first place, kind of a thing. So it's okay if it's a fact. What day of the week is? You know it's April 13th 1987 or whatever. Nobody owns that information, but kind of, if people haven't seen it, I actually think the video they did was a little you know, I know they're trying to bring myself to watch it.

01:55:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, it was just ironic because I'm very interested in the content.

01:55:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a little too much personality, yeah, I think, is what. It's, not my thing. I don't mean to disparage them or what they're trying to do. By the way, my website made a little appearance in there because he the guy doing the demo, the guy, the CEO of the company showed my review in his browser, you know. So, which is interesting. They never reached out to me, but anyway that was you know that's, that's cool.

01:55:51
No, that was cool. That was cool. We talked about ARC already, so I think we kind of actually covered this already. But it is very interesting that this is a browser that is unlike any other browser and now, either again with great foresight or just luck, they have pivoted to AI and are integrating that into their products in also a unique way, not as kind of a tacked on thing like we see with you know, we have Talk about an industry that was begging for disruption.

01:56:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was consolidating on Chrome, and that's not a great outcome.

01:56:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well. So the way I would put it is they're actually using Chromium, by the way. So the way we did because we talked about this earlier in the show, out of fans, so to speak. But you could look, you could pick any browser. Okay, what is it? Opera, vivaldi, brave, duckduckgo, you know, pick your browser. It looks like every other browser. It looks like browser. You could hold up a picture of Netscape in 1996. You've got an address bar, buttons for navigation and you know, a big space for the webpage. It's they really. Browsers have not changed and you're right, I think the it's not something I would have come up with independently, right, but now that I see what they're doing, you know, in a Monday morning quarterback kind of a sense, I agree with 100%. Yeah, this is the browser I mean.

01:57:08
In when Windows 7 was still an ongoing concern, steven Sonofsky told me and I probably love the world that the biggest app, the most frequently used app on Windows, was Chrome and it was bigger than everything else combined, and that when you factored in all other web browsers, including Microsoft's, it was almost like the rest of the world didn't exist. That it was 10 or 15, I don't know the exact number, but it was a really tiny percentage of app usage that wasn't web browsers, and that was part of the reason behind this web centric Windows 8, you know, get rid of the Chrome and let them show them the content, kind of mentality all came up out of the web, like how do we leverage? And, you know, Sonofsky, extend, leverage and extend and extinguish the. You know the underlying technologies that we are inspired by because of what we've seen out in the world and this is we're talking over 10 years ago. Right, it's a long time ago, but it's very interesting to move forward. No one has been that transparent about that kind of thing anymore at Microsoft, so we don't know what percentage of apps running Windows today Windows 10, windows 11, are web browsers. So do we know which percentage are web apps? But I think, kind of anecdotally, I think we can all agree that it's a huge percentage in both cases and that more and more workloads are moving to the web.

01:58:29
We just talked about Flipchamp as a kind of a not a goofy version, but a really approachable video editing app. That is a web app, which is. It's a crazy combination of capabilities, right? So the notion that we maybe we should pay a little bit more attention to this thing. I mean even something like Chrome OS. We can kind of look at this and say, wow, I mean this company made an OS, a lightweight OS and you know Linux, really whatever but a lightweight OS built around the browser sounds like a Mahammer or everything's a nail kind of a deal because they're all web based there.

01:59:05
But at the end of the day, that thing is very familiar as a web browser. Right, it's just a web browser. I think the central genius we'll see of Arc is similar. We had this conversation, rich. I'm sorry. I'm just kind of catching up because I think I appreciate this is very much like what Microsoft did with Windows 17, where they really looked at this thing and said everyone's doing this, but let's actually think about this and not just do something different for the sake of something doing something different, but actually try to make something that's better.

01:59:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and everybody else has gone towards the Windows phone design, right. I mean, at the time when Windows phone was new, skeuomorphic was the thing, and they, you know, for better or worse, and you can point who is Bel Fiori or anybody else. It's like who sort of said eventually this seems silly and you can go for these simpler platforms.

01:59:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Material design at Google is the next two generations of Metro.

02:00:01
There I mean you can say whatever you want and I know, that guy came from Palm originally and that's the lineage, there's no doubt about it. And so, as a fan of this now dead platform, does this give me a little sense of peace or happiness? No, I hate it, but that's the reality. I just think it's fascinating that something is mature as a web browser, something that's so important, like, literally, arguably more important than anything else, you know, a computer or even a phone, although I know apps are huge, whatever. But those apps I mean other than the artificial restrictions that Apple has put in place, which overflows into Android, because Android and Google would have gone in this web app direction, but they, you know, people want to make apps that run everywhere, so they use cross-platform Flutter, whatever. Instead, I think it already would have taken over the world, you know.

02:00:56
So here's this little company. It's I don't know, six, eight people or something. It's tiny, and they're thinking differently about this, and not just, like I said, not just different to be different, but like let's step through this, like, can we make this better? And you know, there are complexities to it. That was one of the things.

02:01:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I talked about and you know, one of the things is Chrome less, which is hilarious considering the name Exactly, but I remember when Chrome came out as the last Chrome browser, compared to IE.

02:01:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right. I mean honestly so, because I've been writing about this security stuff lately. I have Chrome. Actually, it's this computer, this computer I actually? No, it isn't sorry, it doesn't matter. I have Chrome configured as my default browser, but also my default for other things. I'm using the Google password manager. I'm just trying to understand these configurations and you know, compared to Edge, google Chrome is like a bicycle. Compared to like a 757 cockpit or whatever. It's not.

02:01:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's some stuff, but it's not overwrought, yeah there's a lot of stuff Still pretty cluttered and you sit and look at Ark and it's a different league again. Right, it's a different. My God, it's from a different planet. I mean, I think that frustrates me about this whole thing is this could have been Edge? Yeah, this was.

02:02:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Edge, that was the promise. That was one of the points. I would say, edge, you know Google obviously added function. Okay they. Whether you consider that bloat or not, you know we can debate.

02:02:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But One person's functionality is another person's bloat right Like it's a natural iteration as we keep out of features and support bigger diversity and can never take anything out.

02:02:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I did a set of over the course of three or four years did two studies about Microsoft's Signature PC program and the key takeaway was that nine out of ten people agreed that a clean, minimalistic computer with no bloatware crepper was ideal and that the other ten, the other you know, one out of ten was this guy saying I just like more stuff. I just the more stuff, the better.

02:03:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you're looking at words and saying, like how many more stuff people do you have? I?

02:03:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
know, I know, I, so look, there's something for everyone. We were also not to keep recapping the show for you. I'm sorry, but you know we were in the discussion of web browsers. I mean, it came up, like Phil Valde, as an example of a product that I, you know it's fine and can be configured in a way that is pretty ideal, but it's also very complex because there's so much stuff and I think it just appeals to a certain type of person where someone like me might look at you know, brave, which doesn't do almost any UI work. In fact, in the past week or two, there's a small visual change to the way that PIN tabs appear now, and it's, I have to say it's a little off-putting to me because, like, the UI never changes and I'm like, oh, what are they doing there? You know, like I, you know there's something for everyone, right? So, yeah, you're right, you're, one man's garbage is another man's treasure. There you go.

02:04:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay. Okay. Let's talk a. I'm so done with the co-pilot. Let's talk about Bard, Thank you.

02:04:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So Google, google. The sense was that Google rushed Bard out as an announcement because of what Microsoft announced with what at the time was called Bing Chat Right. They kind of tripped, fell, hit the rake, they did the whole thing. It was embarrassing.

02:04:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But Bard, you know it was continuing forward, although I think it was unfairly done too, because I could not agree with it. What they did was mismanage the PR on an incomplete product, and Microsoft managed the PR on their incomplete product far better.

02:04:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I almost think it was a matter of circumstance and timing, because Microsoft came out of the gate, you had goons like Kevin Roos over it. I'm going to switch to Bing, like no, you're not. And then three days goes by and he's like oh my God, this thing's threatening to kill me now and I'm like I told you, but I Google.

02:04:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're also torturing it, so okay.

02:04:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, google didn't make as or made as many mistakes as Bing did during their respective demonstrations. You can go back and look this up. It's just that Bing came up first and we were like, oh my God, oh my God, by the time Google did it again. We're like wait a minute, that's fake.

02:05:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And like, yeah, but Bing did the same thing and, arguably, if they hadn't done it, we would have been second-thoughting about Bing rather than second-thoughting about them, the thing I would just remind people and I literally will right now is that Google has been doing this AI stuff for a long time.

02:05:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They didn't rush it to market partially for commercial reasons. They had a hard time understanding how you replace this thing that's generating 70% of the revenues now and not lose any money, right? So they've actually had this for a while. So now to this day, bard is very much like co-pilot it's something you can pay for as part of Workspace and, I think, google Cloud separately, like much like we have different versions of co-pilot. And then late last year early on people expected, but we knew this was coming they came up with their most sophisticated AI models yet, which they branded as Gemini, and there were three tiers. Remember the low tier, nano, was the one they could put on the phone. They put it on the Pixel and then a couple of weeks ago, they announced it's on the Samsung Galaxy S24s as well. The whole family, I think the whole three of them and there's a Gemini I think it's just Gemini In the middle of the like a Gemini Pro. I think it's called the high end and just to meet different demands, whatever.

02:06:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Can you presume that what's running on the phone is just a smaller set? But hopefully they're using that TensorFlow processor you would hope.

02:06:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean suppose look whether that is artificial and it could work anywhere. I mean, who knows? Honestly, I think it probably can work anywhere, I'm sure the GPU built in?

02:06:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is it faster? Right, I don't know. I'm working hard on the Lama running. We're not gonna know the answer. Home Assistant. And I'm like I need more hardware for my.

02:06:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The problem I have with this stuff right now is more tied to the notion that the features you get are very scatter shot. So, for example, you might get like a like a live translate feature in messages, but not in WhatsApp or whatever Like it's, and I don't like that kind of thing. And this speaks to the fact that this is not yet a platform feature that developers can just tie into. You have to explicitly go and partner and make it happen and you know something like that. So it's gonna be like that for a little while.

02:07:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But Doesn't it beg to the whole idea that this should be part of the operating system?

02:07:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, that's exact. Yeah, that's 100%. Yep, which is why, on one level, I actually do appreciate that Samsung partner with Google on this rather than doing it themselves. Not because, look, maybe they're not capable of doing it themselves. But the last thing we need is like the world's biggest Android OEM doing their own thing on AI, which, yes, Just like Dex that capability of making your phone, you know, connecting at USBC go to a big display. That should be in the OS. Now, Google's never done anything to make that happen, but I want that from Google, I don't want that from Samsung, right, I mean?

02:07:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
that's what we don't want. Is everybody who wants to play in this space to set up yet another LLM?

02:07:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, exactly, thank you that. Yet, yall, you know there should be a thing that's in fact still that part of article title. So that's a good term. I like that. But Gemini, I think, is, brands are hard. Right, we can agree to that Hard. There is a connotation there with William Shakespeare that I think most people, many people, don't get. And this idea it's generative AI, it's creating words, right.

02:08:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, no, and I love the name. I like I'm sad they're giving it up.

02:08:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but Gemini, I think subjectively, is in some ways a better brand, not because it has a better connotation with AI, but I think it's a word. It feels like something out of Star Trek.

02:08:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like a little more space here.

02:08:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.

02:08:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I think A little more 22nd century, a little less 14th.

02:08:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Fair enough, right, star Trek 3, not Star Trek 4, but whatever, it's okay. I think that what was that planet called Genesis? No, it was Genesis, genesis, yes, anyway.

02:08:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think Google AI Veejer might be a good name. Yeah, you're perfect, veejer.

02:09:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, that's the new word. That's what things should become. Is Veejer, veejer? There you go. Yeah, the most hated Veejer, I love it. Vrages be your play. It's funny. This is not official, but people have seen it in a changelog for a coming version of Bard that will ship this month and there are so many indications this is happening, I think we can be pretty safely say they're switching the Google Bard brand to Gemini.

02:09:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's actually a better brand. I really do, to be honest, yeah.

02:09:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I also think one of the big mistakes Google made from a branding perspective was not to give their assistant a name. And if the rumors are true, these are a little further out, this notion that their assistant might basically become like, be replaced by this, essentially Like. If not, I mean to date we've sort of thought, well, maybe they'll augment it with it, but it seems like maybe they might be getting rid of that as well. I think that might be smart too, because I think having a good brand, something people can remember and will want to hey, it's a little bit of a throat blocker, like it's a hard thing to say. In some ways it's like so maybe this will be a little better, I don't know. And then just some other, just quickly, I mean, there's a genitravai feature coming to Maps.

02:10:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
People see this, I mean I don't want to speak smallly about that, because Google Maps is like the only Maps right, that's right. Nobody else would dare. There are only ways. So the fact that I mean I navigated here on Google Maps.

02:10:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is. I'm gonna sit back and quickly find this I think I have. We're gonna talk a little bit about some social networking stuff later in the show. But when I look at social networks from a really from a kind of a professional perspective, the big one for me is Twitter. I think I have like 127,000 followers, whatever, and these little, the product doesn't exist anymore. I know Please don't get me started we, when I look at these other things, like well, how do I replace this? And like how does that happen? It's hard. So we have these other networks. They're not as big, whatever, and I can.

02:11:11
I'm having trouble finding this thing I wanted to tell you about, but anyway, all this short version is my biggest social network, arguably, is actually Google Maps, and it's not because of work related things but because of my reviews. My reviews and photos have been viewed by something like I don't know, it's 29 or 49, I think it might be 49 million people. It's like it's 49 million times, like it's the scoping, the cocktails, the restaurant, but I mean, but people. I have had a business owner in my area thank me personally because they see the results of a good picture of a meal, a positive review of a guy who fixed the car or whatever it might be Like this is there's a real one to one thing happening here. Well, I guess it's not one to one, but you know what I mean B to C kind of a thing, b to C to B or B to C to B to B, whatever it is that I think is important.

02:12:01
And a lot of people, when you hear gender to AI and maps, you're thinking what are they? They're gonna do like an Apple Maps thing where they send you to places that don't exist, and that's not what. That is right. What they're doing is everyone's done this. You get out of a metro station somewhere in some foreign city or you've gone on, you're on some vacation in an unfamiliar area or familiar, it doesn't matter and the thing you thought you were gonna go to with your kids is closed, right, or whatever it might be, and you're like okay, I got a map, let's find something. And finding something on Google Maps is about as fun as finding a show to watch on Netflix. There's a lot of stuff there. It's not easy.

02:12:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And if you know where you're looking for a car that navigating it isn't there.

02:12:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So what this is gonna do is use AI. You can say I'm looking for something fun to do with the kids, maybe it's action, not door oriented whatever, and it comes up with answers to that and, honestly, that's a fantastic use for AI.

02:12:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So, using a large language model to parse the descriptions of the facilities in an area and that same language model against your request, to just have a better language experience, Like there's been language interface or voice interfaces on maps for a long time, you just learn not to use it cause it makes you sad, Right, exactly.

02:13:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We've talked about this kind of review summary thing which we're starting to see everywhere now. Google Maps was actually one of the first services I can remember that was doing this, where it's kind of about people said you see this in Amazon reviews, like at the top we'll say people said they really like this product, but this is the downside or whatever it might be Like. This is a good use for AI. Something simple like I'm really in the mood for seafood or I specifically want scallops or whatever. That's not so hard, you know. But I'm here with like a you know I'm out of, I'm in a different country, I'm with another couple baby or my kids and we have this. We thought we were doing this thing, we were all prepped for it and it's not happening. And that's a little more complicated and actually this that sounds good to me.

02:13:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I would argue that Google is gonna have a problem with quality of data. You know, because you know, the hamburger shop in Seashell flooded and Google doesn't know.

02:14:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Or the people who flood reviews as they do, and they tilt the scale a little bit and then you end up at a dark alley in Tokyo and you're like this is the sushi restaurant I thought I was going to.

02:14:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, somebody's gonna be fish, but I don't know if he's yeah you'll be swimming with the fish, yeah, so All right. But I'm glad it's a logical addition and I actually think it's a important one. Just because maps is one of. You know, you can question many things that Google builds over time. You can't question maps. Everybody counts on it.

02:14:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, okay, so you're right, but I will say you can see the insurrification of this because already in Google Maps we've seen this. Right, oh yeah, it's like these square pins that they're paid for, yeah, and you could sort of imagine that these results will also be tailored by sponsoring.

02:14:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, they've definitely damaged their product over time as they try to make money from it, but this feature has the possibility that it should be beneficial to the regular consumer as well as them. And that's as much as you can hope for.

02:15:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, it's not as good as the ribbon they added to office, but it's up there, you know, oh boy, I just try to say, like how much of a Microsoft toadie could I be? Wow, I think that would be that. I think I just hit the bell at the top of the scale. Like 17 years ago, on this show alone, I have brought up Clippy Windows Phone twice, and now the Office, like what else? Like what is Zoom? Zoom is next. They wait for that. Zoom is coming.

02:15:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I talk next week in Sydney. One of them is from Mono to Maui, so I do a three thing OK.

02:15:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So there, like the insurrification of Xamarin, that should be the name of the talk. Ok, so I'm kidding. Related to this, google also launched something called ImageFX. This is their designer slash image creator. Slash Dolly, slash everything else, right? A generative AI image generation. So, ok, right, we know that everyone's going to catch up.

02:16:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's also part of unifying together these various AI stores.

02:16:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's important that Google has for workspace customers what Microsoft has for Microsoft 365 customers, with a commensurate level of less Right, like I just think that's important.

02:16:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The whole point here is, if you're going to go to the problem, the trouble of chatting with a bot, it should do all the things. Yes, that's right.

02:16:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and then Metta, which owns Facebook and what else Instagram, whatsapp they don't have everything as announced. They're going to start labeling AI-generated images on its services. A lot of this, I think, has to do with political stuff. Obviously a big election year. I hope so, yeah. You don't want them to undermine our democracy like they did in 2016.

02:16:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I know, but you're already seeing these stories of computer-generated voices of the candidates communicating inaccurate, literally opposite message, like it's happening. That's right, yep. So, I think that's the responsible part. I always thought Facebook, before they met aside, metastasized, metastasized, nice, they metastasized. Yeah, they could have been the clearinghouse for realness, like if they had done the background research, if everything was tagged, if you could have set priorities on what you wanted to look like, they could have given you an accurate view of what was going on.

02:17:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, richard, I feel compelled to catch you up on another thing from earlier in the podcast, I apologize. Behind me is that the right side. Yep, you see a purple jacket that's hanging on the wall. Originally, that jacket was not there. There was a hook. It was driving everybody insane. Ai put it there. So my wife came in and put a jacket there. Everyone calmed down, except for one thing. We have been suffering from a never-ending series of memes of what could be on the wall instead of the jacket ever since.

02:17:53
My favorite so far was the portal holes with the hot and the cold.

02:17:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, that was a good one. I am going shopping for removable hooks for next week, showing that I guarantee you there will be more than one hook behind me and there will be nothing on them.

02:18:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Whatever it's worth. I usually say I love everything about that 45 degrees away.

02:18:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I love it. Crazy that the discord brings to this, isn't it great.

02:18:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love it too.

02:18:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You thought you were the weird one in the room and then you get out, numbered by them.

02:18:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I do wish you would use your superpowers for good. But I'm just glad you're using that it's OK. Yes, it's like it's exciting. At least your exercise is going to make you know it's good.

02:18:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is why you want to join the club. I'm telling you that discord is so much fun, so much fun, so much fun.

02:18:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and the response to be appearing after my boomboggled trip is, just like I said, nuts the whole idea.

02:18:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean it's a bearing levels of tech, technical acumen or, like Photoshop, ability, whatever you want to say.

02:18:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So serious.

02:18:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Photoshop skills here, oh yeah.

02:18:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Here's. Here's the 9000.

02:18:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the background. Yeah, join the club, kids. You're missing the fun. That's all I could say.

02:19:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Everyone listening to this from the front has got to hear the show twice yeah.

02:19:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Sorry OK.

02:19:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, it's good.

02:19:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I wanted.

02:19:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I wish you were like I'm, like. Richard would enjoy this.

02:19:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We covered Microsoft's earnings last week.

02:19:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Quite a good quarter for them, warren and threatens that would be more, but a key factor, oh yeah.

02:19:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I left out some of the spot guys, you know Spotify and Nintendo.

02:19:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Actually we might talk about Nintendo, but Amazon. Yeah.

02:19:28
They're doing OK. So Amazon, by revenue, is the biggest company in our business? I don't know. I'm sure I know they're in the top 10. But as far as market cap, they're not. I don't think they've been in the top five, but they're up there, obviously, and gross revenues are crazy, but the market's not small. Yeah Right, amazon is not predictable. It's really interesting because, depending on factors that are just beyond the scope of understanding, because they have such a big physical presence and digital presence the mix of that is just crazy.

02:20:00
They don't have a quarter. They make $150 billion. They had a slight loss, or $1 billion net income, which is profits. This year is this gangbusters? So $10.6 billion on revenues of $170 billion, those were better than expected, gained a 14% year over year. Yada, yada, yada. There was one thing I wanted to pull out in here. I think it was related to AWS. Aws revenues were $24.2 billion, up 11.7%. This may not be the first time, but honestly that didn't strike me as being particularly good. I mean, I know it's up 11%, but if you compare, this to my Google Cloud.

02:20:44
That's what I'm saying. So if you look at Intelligent Cloud, I don't have that number. Of course I'll bring up the topic, but don't be ready to talk about it. That's how I work. I don't think this compares us favorably to Microsoft's earnings, as has been the case in the past.

02:21:03
So one of the big stories there has always been that god, let me just type in this actual thing, paul has always been that as your growth has been going down over time, as it would, and those comparisons have not been, I can't find it. I'm sorry, I can't type and talk. That's the problem. Those revenues, as far as growth, have been going down, which I think Parse explains the AEI thing. But Azure revenues we don't know exactly. But Azure is the primary component probably of that Intelligent Cloud business that's been going gangbusters. That's their biggest business by revenue. They often see the biggest growth. So for this most recent quarter, I finally found it. Sorry, it was $25.9 billion. It was bigger and that's again. That's not all Azure. But the thing is you got to remember Microsoft's cloud business also includes a big chunk of productivity in business processes and a small chunk of more personal computing. But it's not all of the business, but I think it's fair to say. And then, as Azure becomes more important because of AEI, that just gets bigger and bigger.

02:22:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I would put it in the screen. I wonder if part of the problem with all of this is this is a hobby that these large corporations have now in consuming their actual business units. They construct these artificial things to hide what business units perform and what they do, and AEI is the most artificial of all of this, I think it's why all?

02:22:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
of this is unpredictable. You can't look at Microsoft and say, OK, then what percentage of this was derived directly or indirectly from AEI?

02:22:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I didn't even have a problem with that. Just because there's so many different places that LLMs are showing up side of the company, the fact that you don't know how much Azure actually grew, much less how much Office 365 grew versus how dead.

02:22:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We know it as a percentage actually, but what we don't know is the actual.

02:23:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And again, it's squishy because how? Much of that is dynamics. They are intentionally hiding weaker business units, and it's not Well OK. This is Alphabet. Alphabet exists to conceal the fact that Google only makes money on search.

02:23:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's all that it is OK, but Microsoft is also hiding profitable and gangbuster businesses because they're legacy. So, for example, it's very possible that their servers business is still fantastic and I'm not saying it's better than Azure but that's something they're not going to want to promote.

02:23:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So they don't want to admit that volume license agreements work well yeah, exactly Certain classes of product, because they want monthly revenue on everything. Well, except that.

02:23:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but again, the proof is in the pudding. In this case, what I mean is the proof is in what Microsoft does, which is turn everything into volume licenses right, our subscription services, essentially.

02:23:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I mean they're turning them into monthly subscription services as opposed to annual volume license or there's a one time purchases every X number of years, which gets stretched out further than for Well, and I mean for a long time and to this day, if you're buying DevTools for your company, you're buying manually. Right, it's because of the XN subscription, but they're not.

02:24:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Since we're talking about this, this is a little off topic, but no, it isn't. It's earnings. Last week we talked about Microsoft earnings. I mentioned that they'd given a specific number for the installed base of the consumer version of Microsoft 365, but not the commercial version. And you know, every once in a while they do either or Actually they usually do the consumer, but often they'll throw in the consumer and I sort of said, based on what I know about the business, I bet it's somewhere into 350 million range. It's 400 million. It's actually better than I thought.

02:24:44
And someone asked them about that because I think it maybe came up in the post earnings conference call. Someone asked and then the follow up was like well, how do you keep this thing growing? And they literally said we hit these artificial ceilings on those licenses. There's only so many seats we can sell. And let's pretend I don't know the number. But back in the 300 million range they had kind of hit that ceiling and what they do is they expand the licenses a bit. So they started introducing things like frontline workers. We have these less expensive tiers that will generate more seats. And as of now they literally admitted this that's over, like there's no more growth to be had there. But I had sort of described AI like, in this case, co-pilot for Microsoft 365, as essentially another tier. I know it's an add on, but it's another way to get more users. You get more money per user, right?

02:25:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, substantially too.

02:25:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And that's what they said.

02:25:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They said look, they do have giant overhead for providing that service.

02:25:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So here's my prediction. Next quarter or a year from now, whatever it is in the future, what we're going to see is not the number of commercial seats anymore, because that's not going to change too much. It's going to be the average money they are in per user, because that's going to go up because of AI, right?

02:26:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I feel for organizations like Directions on Microsoft and the other analysts group, because how do you compare business unit over business unit year over year, when they literally shuffled the deck every time they?

02:26:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
were here, I would throw myself into that victim pool, if you don't mind. It'd be part of the class action, because I write about these earnings every quarter and it is.

02:26:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and you could write about the overall earnings, because the SEC has pretty strict rules about that.

02:26:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, but I'm looking for these same things, like they've literally made it impossible, and I'm not positive. My theory about this is that I don't know who started it, but all these companies are getting vaguer and vaguer and vaguer and I think they're waiting for some regulator to say probably the SEC, to say, excuse me, this is not what you're supposed to be doing, but no one's ever said anything, so they just you know.

02:26:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But the thing is, you don't protest if you don't have the solution, like I don't know how you fix this. You cannot tell a company you have to organize in a particular set of businesses.

02:26:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, again, I didn't talk about this early in the podcast, but I wrote a big article about Mozilla and how they come out and complaining about how the platform makers disenfranchised them in the many, many ways. They do so, and I made a comparison to Apple and how Apple people forget this, but Apple used to be called Apple Computer. You know they're quite a diversified company today compared to those days and they are also quite a bigger company. But in doing so, I went back and I looked at older Apple earnings reports. Now, there was a time period three, four years ago where they stopped. They used to, up until very recently, would say we sold this many iPhones, this many iPads, this many whatever's, and they would be very explicit about it. Now they have many more products. Now they're talking growth. Microsoft does the same thing with Xbox especially. They talk growth, they don't talk numbers, because numbers work so good, right?

02:27:46
This is another example of that thing happening, because when you look at Apple's old earnings reports, my god, it's so explicit. The only thing I can compare it today is to Spotify, which is a much smaller company. Spotify today is very explicit. We have this many people using the service. This many are paying. This is how much we make from them. This is how much we make from them and you can see what the business consists of. It's 100% transparent. It's beautiful.

02:28:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and one would argue that's maybe this has to be a shareholder rebellion, because one of the downsides to doing that is then you get activist shareholders who nitpick business units, creates his own. What's Carl Icahn?

02:28:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
doing right now. Is he still around? Is he going to mix the pot up a little bit?

02:28:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
One would argue that these obfuscation strategies are about managing investor relations, because it just gives them nothing to complain about. You don't know, it worked right Part of Microsoft's.

02:28:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the 10 plus years of endless cloud cloud. Cloud, azure, azure, azure got them to the second biggest company in the world. And not talking about these legacy businesses, which no one who is investing in this company wants to be reminded of, we want to hear about the future.

02:28:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
As a matter of how many billions those business units are making. No one cares. He wants to hear about it. That stinks, and so you still comply with the reporting rules while obfuscating this business.

02:29:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hey, if you just this is what it is so.

02:29:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The report rules are actually about PR right. They are the investor relations story.

02:29:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
OK. So I have to be honest. I actually don't know what the legal requirement is for these companies, but based on how I've seen things go, they are probably adhering to the letter of the law or regulation, I guess, but not necessarily to the. We're doing this for a reason. The idea is your business consists of these components. They are all performing to some different level. By being transparent as a publicly owned company legally required, you're giving investors the data they need to know whether they wanna invest in companies.

02:29:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Make an important position of investing.

02:29:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So that's shifted a bit to. If we do like a dog and pony show and Wall Street gets excited and drives up the share price, our investors aren't gonna care if the product's a real or bad or terrible.

02:30:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Now you get to the other excuse, which is the institutional investor versus the individual investor. And the institutional investor if they wanna know more, they pick up the phone, right, they get to puncture that, so they're not complaining. The guys with the clout of the SEC, the big dollar investors, they're not complaining because when they wanna know more they can't, but they're really enjoying not letting the individual investor know much.

02:30:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I wonder, once you're Microsoft, apple, I don't know. Do you think there's someone who could get on the phone and get numbers out of these? I don't know.

02:30:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think you're big enough, because I think you can't. I mean, do you think anybody has like dinners at a?

02:30:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
state restaurant or the Constitution. I can always speed dial, tim Cook, I'm sure I think if you yeah no, but I wonder, how much he actually gets. I mean, you might get something as simple as an assurance.

02:30:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You could just something insider information like oh, don't worry about it. I know we see these stupid reports in the press, but this product is doing great, so don't worry about it.

02:30:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, aren't they? It's a pretty risky thing to do is to use insider information like that. Look at Martha Stewart. It's literally illegal.

02:31:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
She did jail time you know, right, yeah, but there's a difference between insider and insider knowledge, like what's going to happen Well, and understanding numbers, Actual understanding of the business, right? I know who doesn't take Jamie Dimon's call.

02:31:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You own some percentage of the company.

02:31:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean arguably you're legally you know Exactly and you have that.

02:31:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
My investors right. You're part of your owner. Yeah, the people that invested in my organizations that I can invest in you demand more knowledge, Right.

02:31:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, we're getting less knowledge. I mean, that's just the way it is.

02:31:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's a two-street stick, but it is like an accounting strategy.

02:31:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean you could well. This is not the reason. But I would also say that you know Microsoft was early to the diversification game. Right Office server, on and on we go. Apple late to that game, google late to that game. Now these companies are diversified. Even Google, which earns 70% of the revenues from ads, has businesses generating actual revenues and, you know, a more complicated product portfolio. I mean, I guess once you get to a certain size from the number of products or services, whatever you have, it does become a lot more difficult. Spotify makes one thing right. They sell two versions of it, but it's one thing.

02:32:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I brought this up to get to the meta conversation, because we don't know how they make money.

02:32:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, we don't. That's why I think I wrote something to that effect. I hope I didn't note something about where is it?

02:32:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah how Exactly it isn't going to be advertised Like. That's the presumption here. Right that they said like it is advertised.

02:32:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, meta and Google are neck and neck for advertising. So yeah, it is Actually. You know what I wrote about this. I'm sure I put something in here. Yeah, 38.7 billion in revenues from advertising, which is 96.5% yeah, you thought. Google had a problem, yeah, but you know what? Reality Labs is bringing up the rare a billion in revenues but a net loss of $4.6 billion on revenues of $1 billion.

02:33:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know why I'm laughing at this. It sounds like the old Xbox business. You're really saying yeah.

02:33:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, it is 2.1 daily active users, 3.1 billion monthly active users. I'm not sure. I have a know of another company that actually measures both of those things.

02:33:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you only roll out those numbers when they're stunning, when they're yeah, exactly, and they are stunning.

02:33:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so they are. I mean, I'd have to do the work on this. I won't.

02:33:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The great thing with the MetaMau is that it includes WhatsApp. It includes Instagram.

02:33:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, that's like saying Apple has devices and blah, blah, blah business. Ok, great, does that mean they have so many, like they actually said, our user-based surpassed, I think, was 2 billion active devices or whatever. Ok, but does that include every pair of AirPods? Because if it does not, so impressive. If you're talking iPads, iphones and Macs, ok, that's impressive, I think 2.2 billion actually in Apple's case. Speaking of which, apple, right, not doing so? Horribly, although, interestingly, you hear these numbers Almost $40 billion of net income on revenues of almost $120 billion. You're like geez, what could you complain about? Well, here's the problem those revenues are flat and you're over. They didn't grow. Yeah, that's a problem, and that's why Apple, which has to date had nothing to say about AI, it's suddenly talking about AI. Baby, they don't want you to think about that. They want you to think about what's coming in the future.

02:34:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Coming new, and this is going back to Uncle Satch's great move with the AI, I think last year, just as cloud revenues were starting to flatten, do you?

02:34:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
think, oh, the timing on that is exquisite. And look, let's face it, whatever anyone thinks about Vision Pro, that's not going to be their next growth engine, so that's a great distraction too.

02:34:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's nice to see people lining up for Apple products again like that. If you're that PR team, you're happy.

02:35:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I would just. I mean, look, they have a huge and healthy ecosystem and Leo mentioned this earlier in the show They'll get the UI on this right. We were talking about the goofiness of having to go to a text-based interface to get stuff done with AI and how that's starting to transform a little bit. Today, richard, there was an announcement from Microsoft about the one-year anniversary of the co-pilot stuff, and one of the new features, which is in a Super Bowl ad, is that you can take a picture that it generates and then click on things to say not this, not this, or move this here, and rather than having to type that correction, which is can be very lengthy and look, my kids didn't learn how to type in cursive. I mean, I think most people can type on a keyboard on a phone now better than they can on a real keyboard. So that's where Apple's contribution, I think, will be. It will be in the user experience of AI. Let's see.

02:36:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Let's see.

02:36:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm excited.

02:36:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It is interesting.

02:36:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so that's it. Yep, that's everybody.

02:36:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, let's quickly do some Xbox. We're running out of time, so we want to make sure there's room for brown stuff.

02:36:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
OK, well, I think at some time in the past we talked about how physical media for video games was disappearing from stores like Best Buy, microsoft. Part of their layoffs recently was getting rid of the team that actually is responsible for the physical media and stuff. It's happening in Europe. Now there's a report. European retailers are getting rid of this as well. Nintendo earnings are later in the show here a little bit, but as part of that earnings, one of the little figures or facts they pulled out of there earnings report was the percentage of people buying software digitally versus in physical format. It's over 50% digital now. So even on a system like that, it's not the future, it's the present right. So no big surprise.

02:37:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And if it's happened to Nintendo, everybody else was ahead of them. Nintendo moves slowly on this sort of thing.

02:37:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And their audience doesn't care. I mean, they're kind of the apple of the video game space. I think in some ways it's kind of a contorted comparison. Just live with it. The big controversy of the past week was actually with Xbox. There's been a lot of rumors of Microsoft bringing first party games meaning Microsoft Studio Games, and that would include today, bethesda, activision, blizzard, et cetera to rival platforms.

02:37:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't there an event this week, isn't it Spencer?

02:37:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So what happened was there was one too many rumors, and Brad and I had this conversation where, like, look, these guys have got to come clean. And like 10 seconds later, phil Spencer got on Twitter, slash X, and said guys, we have a strategy, we have an announcement. We've been planning it for a while. It will be next week, right? And there's been some criticism of that, because at that point it's like, well, why don't you just tell us now? But my sources are telling me that this event was actually planned for the end of February. This has been planned for a while and they're actually moving it up because of all the rumors.

02:38:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And they're probably needing to get some signatures. Like that noise also helped them push some contracts through.

02:38:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think what had happened was. You know, the way these rumors happened is that Microsoft can keep a secret sometimes, but once you start expanding the group of people who know what you're doing, because you're talking to partners news gets out and suddenly it's like Halo's coming to PS5, or the new Indian Jones game, or Starfield, or whatever the thing might be.

02:38:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, the noise began, but now you get the lag. So now you move up the event date and then you also go to the guys who are dragging their feet. They're like you're going to miss it If you don't sign. It doesn't matter, it becomes beneficial for Microsoft too.

02:38:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Two things to this. What is when I think about what Microsoft could or could not be doing, or could it could not be talking about? I don't care about this in the slightest. As an Xbox gamer, this does not impact me at all, except in a positive way, which I'm going to get to.

02:38:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Ask me how the PC Master Race feels.

02:39:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What I care about is you spent $69 billion on Activision. What are you doing with it? Come on, it's February. So I actually think this event was mostly about that and my guess was and I'm just guessing this is I'm projecting here but my guess is they were going to pull up and one more thing at the end of it and say, oh, and one more thing, we're bringing Starfield to PS5. Good night everybody. And it was going to be one of those little things. So now everyone's all in a bundle over this. But here's the deal. And it bothers me that there are still people in the world who don't get this.

02:39:33
Xbox is not the same as it used to be. Richard alluded to this earlier. The old Xbox, the one that was about a console that lost money all the time that business could not exist. They, under Phil Spencer, have expanded this thing to include a wide range of products and services across platform, want to do that Microsoft thing. Meet gamers where they are, and a lot of gamers are on rival platforms. Microsoft has never and will never make money on a console. Microsoft would be better off not making consoles. If it bothers you that Xbox games are going to be on PlayStation 5 or whatever. You're not paying attention. This is how this thing thrives not just survives, but thrives Just as an individual gamer, for example, I call a duty guy for a long time.

02:40:15
Two of the big things that happened in that life cycle were that for the first most years I would go online and play against people on Xbox. That's all I could play with. But at some point they expanded that audience so we could do cross play and then I could play against people who were on PlayStation, and that meant the number of people I could play against was three times as big all of a sudden. And then a couple of years ago, they added PCs too. Now, of course, with PCs, you have to make sure they're using a controller. Wouldn't be fair if they were using a keyboard the most?

02:40:45
But the point is this notion that bringing a game to another platform, which is sort of this, is somehow going to make things worse for you as an Xbox fan, is ridiculous. This is expanding the ecosystem you love. This is like saying I loved REM until they became successful Like. This is just very. I know we do this. It's human, it's very common. But the truth is, if you love Xbox, this is how it gets. This is how it succeeds. Period Xbox is not a console. It was never successful as a console. It is becoming successful as a much bigger ecosystem that targets gamers wherever they are. Cloud services are cool, streaming is fine, but, honestly, bringing those things directly to the console natively or PC or whatever the platform Nintendo whatever.

02:41:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, it's great the umbrella and ultimately own the relationship with the customer. That's really what they're working on.

02:41:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, that's what it is and we'll see what they say, but that's the plan. Ok, we have new Xbox game pass titles for Herb Ray. I don't have to go into that too too deeply, but I will say Resident Evil 3. I did play Resident Evil 2 for a while. Got tired of the puzzles. I don't know enough about the series to know if that ever changes or if that's the whole thing. Hopefully that changes. I'm going to take a look at it. I've always been intrigued by Resident Evil. I've never been able to take advantage of it, or I'm totally recently because I was the next one.

02:42:13
And then we have Nintendo also earnings. I put it here just because I wanted to talk about the number of switches they've sold. So this company has now sold basically 140 million of these things. The number one selling video game hardware of all time is tied between the Nintendo DS and the PS2. So they're basically in second place. This is the second most successful video game hardware slash Nintendo hardware ever made.

02:42:38
This thing should have fallen off a cliff. It is going down, of course, but honestly, they've stretched, I mean, through. They've done a good job of midstream Nintendo. Sorry, switch lights, switch OLED. We thought there was going to be a switch 4K. Maybe that's what the next thing will really be, which is expected this year, but a lot of big game releases. This is a thing like these guys have. They have a title. You just don't see data like this. They have a game that has sold 20 million units, like one game. Yeah, 12 million, 7 million. There are 17 Nintendo titles that have sold over 1 million units so far this fiscal year and there are 7 third party games that have sold that many Like. Are you kidding me? Oh, it was 46% digital, it's just a different league.

02:43:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's easy to ignore Nintendo because they're not flashy and they aim at the kids.

02:43:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I compared them to Apple, it is the cash cow. Yeah, the better comparison is Disney. They hit at an audience that is not just young, but also older people who think young or whatever you know the kind of living, the younger lifestyle, whatever it is. They're young, they're childish too, the childhood heart kind of crowd, whatever. Yeah, look, they've got a special thing going. You can't just, you know just nothing. You can say, there, they're just, it's amazing. So they're doing great and good for them, because they don't keep it for the Xbox, because if they did screw them, there you go, I think that's everything right.

02:44:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, it's a beautiful thing there is a rumor that there's a new switch coming, maybe next year, with a OLED screen.

02:44:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think they're going to be 8 inches.

02:44:20
Hopefully the big thing they should do is the backward compatibility thing. If they have a forward movement story for existing customers, it's going to be fantastic. Not the Nintendo way. What do they start to do? I know, I know, I know, but that's the rumor, though. They've talked about it. They've said look, one of our goals is to move these people forward. There's a lot of AI stuff going on now. I don't know if you've heard of it, but one of the things is upscaling the quality of existing games. This is, I mean, what if a switch user could take their existing title and have it look better on these new consoles? Right, which is something very common elsewhere. But if Xbox did that kind of new to Nintendo, I think that would be huge for those guys.

02:44:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, let's take a little time out as we get ready for the back of the book. We are so glad Richard Campbell has arrived, which means there will be a whiskey pick.

02:45:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're listening to Richard. I threw his thing in there just in case I was going to mention the run-ass pick.

02:45:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But, Richard, you're listening and watching Two Windows Weekly Back of the book time tips and picks from Paulie Therod Little Paulie Therod.

02:45:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm curious what you guys think about this. Richard offered me this some time ago when it was still kind of a private thing, but Blue Sky, which is the most Twitter of the Twitter alternatives, is now available for everyone, so anyone can sign up if you want to go check that out. If you miss the old Twitter, it's going to feel very comfortable. It's a complete rip of the old Twitter. It looks a lot like it. That's kind of interesting.

02:45:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The idea was this was Jack Dorsey funded this before he left? Yeah, because the idea was to make an open, federatable Twitter clone and as yet they haven't really, but Dorsey was fighting with his board, right?

02:46:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean that's why he held it.

02:46:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So is this open and or federatable?

02:46:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's got a protocol, at-prototo, which is very similar to the Mastodon protocol. The Fedaverse I found activity pub protocol. They have said, with the fact that they're out of invite, that they're going to start allowing publish an API and allowing people to create their own Blue Sky servers. It hasn't happened yet, but I was there.

02:46:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
One of the arguments about the real failure Twitter here is that the people who ran the company never really understood it. It was the users that shaped it, and so what Dorsey's into what he's really talking about here is let's go back to what really actually made Twitter successful, which is put an API out. See what people may.

02:46:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can't speak to the success or lack of success of Twitter as a business before Elon Musk took it over per se, but I will say, successful or not, there was something that made Twitter special and also unique, and we've kind of talked about this notion of governments, big and small, having one place to go and say, hey look, there's a disaster, or there's a fire, there's a hurricane or whatever.

02:47:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So now were they there because the press were there or the press there because they were there. I don't know the answer to that.

02:47:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
In the end it doesn't matter. Everyone was there, yes.

02:47:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So what does it take to get everyone there? And Dorsey's argument is it's the open API which I mean. Eventually, they closed off.

02:47:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's tough because there's inertia and I know a lot of people have left Twitter, but I think a lot more have not.

02:47:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And then I'm sure, now that you open an API is I can build all the bridges that I built back in the Twitter days. Okay, right, an awful lot of organizations that publish on Twitter that don't even really know they have Twitter account because it actually comes through their RSS.

02:47:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It gets complicated, though, between Threads and Blue Sky and MassTron. That's the problem.

02:47:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're all over the place. I still like MassTron best. The quality of the conversation there is the best. It's not the largest Threads, is probably the largest competitor right now, but that's owned by Meta.

02:48:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's because they migrated the graph from the Instagram, which was a brilliant thing. That was a very brilliant thing, because nobody wants to build a graph again. They're done.

02:48:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm somewhat rooting for Blue Sky. There's a lot of good stuff going on there. It is an open protocol, right? But MassTron is there. It does it, and we have our own MassTron instance.

02:48:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I suppose there probably are fans of Meta out in the world. If there are, we help, but no one wants to see yet another Meta service. But then again, you want something that's not as horrible as Twitter is today. So slightly less horrible, I guess, is better than horrible. Threads does have 130 million users now, whatever that means. This is always suspect, but as a publisher I need a place. People have to be there.

02:48:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But an airline is the thing is like the open. Ai might be the thing If the community rallies around it and builds bridges for all those things that used to be done by Twitter, so that folks don't have to learn the folks that don't care about the social media part. It's like you need to broadcast as a good way to broadcast it and you need no additional effort. The API will make a difference. Is it a flashback to 2008? Yeah, and maybe it's irrelevant now. I don't know the answer to that.

02:49:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And this is MassTron. By the way, Paul, thank you because Paul's very active on Twitter Social. He's always posted in there.

02:49:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I like it a lot too. It's a lot like.

02:49:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Twitter in functionality. I think it's a little more functional than Blue Sky has edit and so forth.

02:49:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I will say and you know this right, I mean there is a benefit to it being smaller. I agree, in some ways you're speaking to a more engaged crowd of people who are enthusiastic. Perhaps, or whatever the topic might be, there is some advantage to that.

02:49:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I agree I'm a fan, but I have a little dog in this house.

02:49:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, you run the server that I am using, so I am also a fan.

02:49:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like the advanced web interface which looks just like TweetDeck and is a really great way to kind of follow a lot of content. I think it's pretty good. I can't. Yeah, I did. I don't need anything more than this. Let's put it that way.

02:50:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this is not maybe important for individuals, but the one thing I would like is a single interface where I could post to all of these things. I don't mean like auto post. I mean I want, like I'll make a joke on Twitter, you know, and obviously I think I'm hilarious and I would like to share this joke with everybody, but I would have to go and copy and paste it or something into each other, like I'd like to just be, you know, putting it out there, that's the promise of federation and threads, by the way, is federated with the Fediverse, with ActivityPub.

02:50:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, is that somebody could follow you on these other platforms?

02:50:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
and see that joke on all the platforms but the problem is that the biggest of these services, Twitter, is actively blocking that kind of stuff. They don't want people to do that and I do understand that from a business perspective, also from just being an evil perspective. But you know, for me I just don't age thinking yeah, Yep. So anyway, we have choices. Now I guess the tip is go look at them. You know you were probably pushed into threads whether you wanted it or not, but blue sky is something you should at least look at.

02:51:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And now it's easy to get there. And yeah, if you let the conversation participate in it. Yeah, do you load? Building another social graph? Yeah, god.

02:51:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know I mean yeah it's all Okay.

02:51:33
So app pick of the week is Mozilla. We talked a lot about Mozilla earlier in the show. Because Firefox is circling the drain. They've been trying to come up with other products and services, most of which are now in free and paid versions. One of the things they've had for a while is something called Firefox monitor. This is one of the services you get through. You know password managers do this. Where they look at, they look for you on the doc web and see if your accounts have been compromised, whatever.

02:51:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I think mine also promises to remove.

02:52:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So that's the thing. So now they have a paid version. They've renamed it to Mozilla monitor, right, and because in the past you could get this report and say, okay, neat, now I got to go do it, do the hard legwork, right, right? So if you give, if you pay them, it's a little expensive. Honestly, it's too bad. It's $14.99 a month, or nine, I think, it's $8.99. If you pay for a year, they will actually do most of that work for you.

02:52:25
Now, if you have to change your password, obviously that's something you have to do, but, like a good password manager I think that Word and probably does this they give you a link where you go right to that place, right? You don't have to go hunt around on the service to find out where to change your password. So they'll do, they'll automate this for you. They'll keep it going in the background forever. It was once you're paying and then they'll help you. You know, go make this happen.

02:52:53
So, if you feel bad about Mozilla, if you support Mozilla, this is not the only paid service they have. They have a VPN, they have a paid version of pocket, which is a service I actually use, which I love. They have some other things, but this is. You know, we've been talking a lot about this security stuff and accounts and online accounts. This is right in there. I mean, it's definitely something to look at, and I'm sure there are other services including, like I said, password managers. If you have a password manager, you're paying for. See what they offer along these lines, if anything.

02:53:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good, now I think we should talk about the podcast pick of the week with our Taronga native, richard Campbell.

02:53:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Glad to be here. This actually show I recorded back in Ignite I talked to Brendan Burns, you know, the original architect of Kubernetes, who worked for Google at the time and then moved over to Microsoft, and you know I think he doesn't want to be typecast anymore than anybody else wants to be in terms of you know, talking to me about Kubernetes again. What was fun about the conversation with him more than anything was just this my bigger thinking around being cloud native like just the fact that you don't think about what machine you're running on and how you're distributing, that you can scale up and then down dynamically. So there's a lot more work being done, if anything, because I've held on to the show since November and we've had announcements like Aspire and others that have really spoken to. The cloud native movement is growing and the way we build software is evolving. Because of that, and certainly Brendan's been a part of that.

02:54:28
There's a subtext. If you listen to this show closely, you'll hear that we're also talking about how he's coaching Microsoft to be a better cloud native customer, but how they approach open source and how they build software, because he does come from that world and so it's very much part of his role is to insert himself into various teams and help them to do the right things. There there are some underlying tools that have been coming out of Microsoft various teams. Some of them are Cinevich's stuff as well Radius and Dapper we speak about specifically, both really great tools that are more about helping you, as they say, fall into the pit of success when it comes to the things that cloud and he does mention Aspire at the end, which was brand new. We were talking about Ignite, but it's evolved since then and over on that rocks, we did a show with David Bowler and he talked about that.

02:55:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Aspire like the cloud native thing that Microsoft is doing. That's right. Cloud native tool.

02:55:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You don't want to call it a framework because it doesn't really deploy. It's really part in your development environment. As you build with Aspire, it tends to help you make the choices that work well cloud natively. Oh, look at the best practices the laboratory, exactly, yeah, okay, the best practice, wizard would be a bad description of it.

02:55:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Actually Sorry, I was just triggered a memory. I was like, oh, you can hit it.

02:55:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a good one. And now let's go to New Zealand for our brown liquor pick of the week.

02:55:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And it's only a few distilleries in New Zealand, although the number is beginning to grow, and this is one of them. This is the Cardrona. They're a particular addition called the full flight salara Great name. So the Cardrona Valley is way down the South Island. Right now I'm sort of mid North Island. I'm in the Northeast corner near Tonga. Cardrona is down deep in the South Island, up in the Canterbury Plains, which is near Queenstown. You'd fly into Queenstown and you'd drive a little north up into the highlands, also the Wakana Lake.

02:56:30
There is the distillery there, the lady behind this thing her name is Desiree Reed. She had been in whiskey for a couple of decades. This particular facility was only set up in 2015. They are buying their barley in the Canterbury Plains, so it is New Zealand barley, sprouted and milled right there on site. They have their own grinding tools. They do a long ferment with classic breweries, so 70 hours. They did a very long time to do fermentation.

02:57:02
Their stills are, as they call them, unusually small and they're small enough. They're named. Their low wine still is only 2,000 liters and it's named Roaring Make Because those low wine stills the initial ones, are noisier. They're doing their first separations off of the wash and stuff, so it can be a bit rackety. And then, gentle Annie, is the high still. That takes it up into the high 70s percent and it's a 1,200 liter still. They also make some gins and things and so on. So several of the stills they have there, but they're column stills so we won't talk about this, we only care about the pot still. They have several other additions. This particular one, I think, is their best, the full flight Celeria. It has spent seven years in bourbon and sherry cast. I'm pretty sure at least six of those are just American bourbon cast. You tend to finish in all of Roastle Sherry. You don't want to spend too much time there and it's bottled at cast strength 62.8%.

02:58:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is this it? Is it full flight bourbon or?

02:58:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
is that it? Or is it? Not it. Architecturally, this is closer to a Scottish whiskey, except for that part where it's not made in Scotland. Right, what about the peatiness? Though, no peat at all. Yeah, that's not a thing here. You know, they've got plenty of wood to do their drying, so yeah, it is very much a you. Could you, I would put this in there around the Abelur Abinon, except that it's very young. It's only a seven year. It has no age appellation at all, because it's just not old enough.

02:58:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And is that more bitter?

02:58:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It tends to be a little harsher, more heady in the alcohol side, not that sort of deep richness you get from having more time. It's quite cool down in the Canterbury plain too, so like they're getting more Scottish kind of conditions there. It doesn't get as cold that cold in the winter, but it does get pretty cold. But they haven't been around long enough to really make an older whiskey, so this is only a seven year old and that's just not that much time for what they're commanding. Let's call it a boutique whiskey, that's the kind phrase for it. 175 New Zealand dollars, that's about a hundred US, and you know when you think about what you can buy for a hundred US, like that Alangia downmore 12.

02:59:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you know she's less, but you know, change. It's kind of fun that you can travel with your whiskey. You know, I mean that's kind of neat. It has a story. Well, in these different parts of the world.

02:59:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
they're all experimenting, right, yeah?

02:59:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And yeah, you can travel to your whiskey as Richard does. No, seriously.

02:59:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Or you can go to the Wixie and visit these.

02:59:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Those are fun trips.

02:59:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, of course. Yeah, but you know I did go past Pukino on the way down, which is the Kiwi whiskey I talked about last time I was here back in September. So it's there's only a hand. It's like if I'm going to, this is becoming a shtick. Now, next week I'm going to be in Sydney, so I'm just going to have to find an Australian whiskey, preferably have one in hand. I didn't have time to grab this one because I was racing to make the tail into the show, otherwise I would have grabbed one no one minds.

03:00:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
if you're not, if you're not holding it in your hand, we believe you.

03:00:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, but I do like the days when I can hold up the bottle.

03:00:09
That's kind of cool, paste it in front of you. Yeah, those are good days, right, yeah, but that's not one of these days. But you know, here I am in New Zealand and yes, there is New Zealand whiskey. It is made very much of the Scottish style. This is in many ways approached like a space side. It just hasn't had the years, so it comes out a little younger, a little different style. But otherwise they sort of matched their approach Pure barley, good water, simple, aging and used barrels. Because the Scots are cheap, nice, I'm impressed they got all the rooster down here. That's a long way to bring a barrel and those barrels are big. Right, those are the big 6, 700, 800 liter barrels. Like it's not easy to ship a sherry cast when the Americans they're 200, they're little, so they're much easier to move around and they're plentiful because Americans will only use them once.

03:00:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, Richard Campbell runasradiocom. That's where you'll find his podcasts that andNET ROCKS and he joins us every week, Even if he has to drive 1000 miles and drive another 1000 more. He is about 140 kilometers Wasn't that who's cutting?

03:01:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I did have to cross the catmise and it was a bit foggy and, by the way, the steering wheel is on the wrong side of the car. Every time you see me yeah, every time you see me hit the windshield. Why? There's no reason.

03:01:32 - Speaker 2 (Host)
It's because the turn stop is on the right side of the car, you know what I find really disconcerting.

03:01:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not so bad going down the left side of the road, but when you merge onto the highway, rotaries are horrific.

03:01:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're going backwards, it's so, yeah, it feels unnatural. That's why I like to have a stick shift, because it forces you to pay attention. Yeah, you want to get complacent, don't get complacent driving on the other side of the road.

03:01:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The entrance into Targa. There's a couple of the green tins right nearby, so there is a three lane, six in out, six in out rotary. You've got to go through.

03:02:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've never, been in that kind of lane Ever come up yeah. It's like the plus to the concorde.

03:02:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I went to the outer lane. I did my three best the one, two, three out. Okay, I made it one pass yeah.

03:02:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's pretty good. I think there's still people driving around the Octo Triomphe, which is not in the wrong way, but it's still one of the more complicated, so hard to get in Rotaries there's also. I think it's a good idea to get out.

03:02:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's one in Paris that goes the other way for some reason. Oh, I think maybe that is the right. Actually, I think it's, yeah, it's counter.

03:02:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm sorry, that's right. Yeah, yeah, bless the French.

03:02:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
French Love the French.

03:02:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Now that we're wrapping up, the next thing I am going to do is get in a shower, because it has been a few hours.

03:02:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah Well, I'm glad you made it there safely. I cannot believe that you showed up for this. I would never have done this for you guys. After that I get wrecked traveling here. It's four hours during the day. I slept, you know it's just Well.

03:03:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
787 service. I slept well, I know, but still I feel pretty rested and not that tired, but I do, yeah, shower Paul Therat is at Theratcom when he's not in Mexico City.

03:03:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, he's even there in Mexico.

03:03:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
City.

03:03:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's always at Theratcom. His books are at leanpubcom, including Windows Everywhere and the field guide to Windows 11. We do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, 1900 UTC, live stream. Is it YouTube? Youtubecom slash Twit After the fact shows her a Twittv slash WW or on YouTube. Paul has copies of the show at his website, theratcom. And, of course, you can always subscribe wherever you find your finer podcasts. Get a podcast client and subscribe. That's the best way to listen or watch. We have audio and video. Thanks Paul, thanks Richard. We'll see you in Sydney next week, richard, sydney next week. We'll see you in Mexico City next week, paul, and we'll see you, you, dear listener, wherever you are, but I hope you'll be here on Wednesday for Windows Weekly. Bye, bye.