Windows Weekly 868 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 Thoran and Richard Campbell are here. Yes, richard has some nice Australian Beverage adult beverage to share with you. Paul's got some Xbox tips, he's on to a new browser once again, and we'll talk about the FTC and the Microsoft Activision merger For a little bit, maybe even getting a tussle. It's all coming up next on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love from people you trust.
00:40
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thoran and Richard Campbell, episode 868, recorded on Valentine's Day, february 14th 2024, polly Brouseris. Windows Weekly is brought to you by Collide. When you go through airport security, there's one line where TSA agents check your ID and then there's another one where the machine scans your bag. Same thing happens. Well, it's supposed to happen enterprise security instead of passengers and luggage. Of course, it's end users and their devices.
01:12
Unfortunately, these days, while most companies are pretty good at the first part of the equation you know checking user identity a Lot of times user devices can just roll right through authentication without getting inspected. In fact, 47% of companies allow unmanaged, untrusted devices to access their data. That means an employee can log in from a laptop that has its firewall turned off and hasn't been updated in months, or worse, that laptop could belong to a bad actor using employee credentials. Collide solves this device trust problem. Collide ensures that no device can log into your octa protected apps Unless it passes your security checks. Plus, you can use collide on devices without MDM, like your Linux fleet, your contractor devices and every BYOD Phone and laptop in your company. Visit collide comm slash WW to watch a demo and see how it works. That's kol IDE, comm, www. It's time for Windows weekly. Get ready kids. Everything you want to know about the world's most valuable company right here with these two, is it still the world's most valuable?
02:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I read your most valuable company here.
02:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My answer VP, most valuable podcasters Paul the rot the rot, calm Richard Campbell run his radio. Calm Rich is in focus. Paul's not. Don't comment on that. Also, for the person who emailed saying Leo's headphone pads are in horrible condition, I Got two new headphone pads which I will install during this program, he says, threatening Lee. So do not fear, your long nightmare is over. Paul, actually I'm not. John slanina was chagrined by the email. Chagrin, chagrin At what that? What at me? No at me. He takes his responsibilities seriously and keeping me in in non tattered earmuffs is, according to him, one of his responsibility.
03:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know we're trying to save money, but how about throw out the two bucks for the?
03:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Earmuffs. Good, in fact, I'm gonna start dressing in in rags and tatters and, beg you know, take a page from Joel Austin and really Really put it out there.
03:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, that rent a stadium is your, is your church, yeah, yeah.
03:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's, let's get off this subject and get on to, yeah, the subject.
03:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We've all come for windows 11 so, on that note, as I was writing up the notes today, it occurred to me that the everything on the show almost Overlaps with each other. You know, in the sense that you could pick a topic and say, okay, this is a windows topic, this is an anti topic. Is it an antitrust?
04:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
topic.
04:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, it's just it's. There's a lot of overlap, so this will be an interesting mismatch mish mash, mosh-mosh as we go forward. So we'll see how it goes. And I'm not it. I'm, in fact, I'm positive. We're not talking about the most important thing right up front. So you gotta stick around. Oh, you're gonna save the best for last. Gonna build, it's gonna build. Oh, and if anything, I the Xbox part of the show might be the biggest part of the show.
04:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We'll see even more exciting. Well, okay, let's kick it off with with 24 a H2.
04:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
H2 as we say here in the UK. So last week we talked about how there were more and more Indications that the next big version of windows would be called Windows 11, 24 h2. Yeah, this past week and Microsoft likes to Announce stuff right after we're done recording. In fact, I think they wait literally for us to get off the air, to hit the you know publish button and they made some big changes over in the insider program and in doing so Confirmed that the next major release of Windows will be 24 h2. It will be this year's annual feature update is the way they said it, which, by the way, it does not preclude there from being a Windows 12. I guess, or whatever, nor does it necessarily preclude there being a Big update before then. We know there's a moment 5 coming as soon as two weeks from now in preview forum. We'll see what that looks like. But In making this announcement they put the canary and dev channels on On the same Build stream, if you will the 2600, 26,000 series. Well, how dare they?
05:53
Yeah, so temporarily they're. They're actually getting the same builds, so they haven't said how temporary that is. We had talked in the past about how Canary might be Windows 12. I mean, I guess this in a way confirms that, in the sense that 24 h2 is what we thought of as Windows 12. It just gets more and more confusing.
06:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I thought we are at a place now where it's just version numbers are declared right. They're constantly shipping features, Just when you feel like make that a version.
06:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I would put it like there's a roulette wheel and they spin it and then whatever we and just what they announced ship whatever that day, right, because it there's no, there's no sense of precedent anymore, which I find troubling, as you guys know. So this new build that went out to the canary and dev channels includes one feature I think that everyone will be interested in, which is the pseudo command from Linux for Windows.
06:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We call them as you do. Oh, do you? Yeah, I don't know. Well, it's looks like pseudo to me, but yeah, I'm not.
07:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm gonna have. I'm not gonna even try to say that I can't. I can't even promise I could. I guess you do. Yeah, super user.
07:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
User do yeah, I don't like it. I know, no so. Listen, it's you.
07:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Don't make me a sandwich all day long, yeah, yeah, all right, so I'll try to avoid saying it because I know it's just gonna upset people.
07:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That wasn't my goal, but listen, if you were, you were gonna try to avoid saying upsetting people, you'd not be making a podcast. You know that's su do that.
07:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You do. It shimmies right through you, as Adam Ant would say any who yeah, so yes, I think I'm surprised Windows hasn't had something like this. Frankly, I know there are third party tools. I think there's something called GS. You do.
07:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and there is run as as in run address, like that was the same kind of thing. I've already an elevator privilege, but it was a little bit of privilege in the execution path. Yeah, as opposed to elevate my privilege.
07:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is a yeah, like a process that basically like, like bringing it from a session down to a process. Essentially, it's not why sort of think of it.
08:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you mean you still Depends on how it's configured, but normally it's like you. You are literally for this statement. Elevate my privilege. Yes, right.
08:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So, for example, one thing I've been working on and, my God, struggling with this past week has been Documenting the changes I've made to my win-get based bulk app install script. Right, and there's all these Options you can add to the win install install when, sorry, the win-get install command that do things like suppress warnings or suppress confirmation Requirements or whatever might be right. And as I kind of went through the list of the things I had changed and Some things I still struggle with, I got to one where I don't remember which apps, but there are, I think I want to say three or four. The apps that I install throw up a uac prompt ready, user account control, and you know no, right, that the goal of this is to automate the process. Anytime you throw something up that I actually have to manually reply to, that's automation is done, yeah, so, yeah, now I Don't have pseudo yet, but I mean, I think I might use pseudo eventually, I suppose. But no, but else will still be a prompt, right? So what I?
09:24
My solution to this and you'll love the word of solution in this context Is to just run it in an elevated terminal window, right? In other words, just run the whole thing at elevation, who cares? I am administrator, do my bidding, yeah, and I'm gonna close that window when I'm done anyway. So who cares? Right? So that kind of gets around that problem. But I do like the idea of running an individual command as an administrator and having everything else be in standard user space, right? I mean, that's the way we do things in Windows graphically, right? I? It's shocking to me, frankly, that we don't have this natively in Windows.
09:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean is another side of pseudo, which is also often that will then lead to an authentication problem sometime. Do you have an identity that that is at system user level available to us? We already have the token for that, so we swapped that token. If you don't, it's like alright, you'll give me a password. That's a prompt like you're broken again.
10:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this will. Yeah, well, you know, windows, we struggle with this stuff for a long time, right, I mean so From going from 9x into the NT world, we, you know, had to adopt this sense of users. I was just thinking about this the other day. How strange it is, in a way, right that, because of the way Windows has sort of evolved over time, we have a programs files, a program files directory in the question x86 version. But you know, some apps install per user, some apps install for everybody, sometimes an apple give you the choice Depending on the tool you're using when you get into the choice you gave it.
11:00
You know Absolutely, that's actually where I was getting. So that's kind of a weird problem, right? We, when get actually has a win, get install has an option, a dash, dash, something that I think it might be just A scope where you scope it to the user or to all users, right, and to me a that it doesn't work and Be it's not granular enough. And see, how is it that Windows today hasn't evolved past a global Program folders? There should be one for everybody and then one inside of the user account for everybody, and they should all be visible and easily accessible and Transparent. And when we install apps, we should always that those should always be the choices, right, that should just be the way the system is, but I think it's just a historical granular security is hard.
11:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You have no privileges or all privileges.
11:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That is easy, and but you know, like you said, they that still screws up too, and yeah, that's, it's very interesting anyway. So what Windows is a? I've said many times right, it's a, an archaeological dig, a various strata, and you can kind of look at things and almost tell where it came from?
12:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, when it came for, yes, the punishments of API is gone by. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So.
12:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Anyway, I'm sorry, that was a big digression for us Us. You do, I'm gonna try that. Hate that term, but as you do, this is you do as you know.
12:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, by the way, that's just how they say. You should say it.
12:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah well, who's they? Who's they extra?
12:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
gonna talk about jiff and jive, right, Like I'm not gonna see, I'm not gonna talk about that, because the inventor that it was very clear on how that is pronounced. Right to me. What? What's the definitive source for sudo or sudo?
12:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's a good question, probably Wikipedia. Let's go to Wikipedia, wikipedia.
12:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, no, I mean another words. This isn't really from.
12:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, yeah, this, I should pull this up because I can give you the definitive answer from sudo Ws. I love that you said Well it says it right there, sudo, it even says it right here, sudo, but but no one. Okay, you know, I mean that's just, we've had this discussion about how Was an alias more said?
13:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
had that song ironic?
13:12 - Speaker 2 (Host)
I isn't all of her examples were wrong because they were not ironic.
13:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But the words are ephemeral. They can their meanings change over time. And thanks in part to that song, actually, the literal definition of that term has changed, because it poses a bigger figuratively definition. Yes, and maybe maybe both, but the definition has changed and I would argue that if enough people are saying sudo, I guess it would be sudo Like sudo code yeah, like sudo.
13:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would imagine most people say that English is a that's the case living entity.
13:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's breathe and breathing. We should agree that that's the name Of the pronunciation. I guess I don't know.
13:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, I'm literally, figuratively mean the same thing. Then you could live with sudo.
13:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, I guess. I guess the question is is it offensive to someone who feels strongly about it too? Sorry, you're talking about.
14:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Linux users.
14:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look, somebody was offended by the muffs on my headphones. By the way, devin, from on a walk. He says Leo's AKG headphones are gross and need replacing. They're they're really in bad shape. I can barely watch these days. I own a pair of K2 40s and love them my third pair, in fact. Buy a new pair, leo. They're not expensive. I will tell you, devin, that, because Frugality is the message of the day here. Thank you, I Infected not buy a new pair of $70 headphones, but instead replaced the earpieces. So for your comfort and convenience.
14:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, by the way, that these cheap little Sony things that I've been wearing for decades, which I can no longer, you have to buy on the black market. Now, one thing that you can buy, because I was, they were so cheap, I would just replace them. But you can buy the little muffs, I guess the ear? Yeah, of course you can. I have a bag of them here and I have a bag of them back and I must have Boston in the United States, wherever I live now, and because they use the same Type, not the same exact set, but I don't move it back and forth. But yeah, they're easy to replace, easy to fix and I just did.
15:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And now, devin, you must join club twit for $7 a month because I've saved you 60, some dollars. By the way, chat GPT says the pronunciation of pseudo can vary, but is commonly pronounced either pseudo, which I've never heard so do, which is well, I think that's what I said.
15:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's how I would say it's pseudo.
15:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Even though or that's pseudo they don't mention as you do. But and you know what I think chat GPT is the linguistic expert, so we're gonna defer, okay, and you can say pseudo yeah which I've never do comes out of my mind.
15:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, pseudo, I think I said pseudo, yeah, I think pseudo is.
15:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Per is probably yeah, let me see what Google says. We're gonna be this one the death. You Pronounce pseudo. I think I've looked this up before. This has come up many times. According to linuxorg, would that be a definitive enough Site for you? Would, yeah, actually yes, away? Well, yep, like so many things, I learned it wrong early on. Says yeah, that's a near well-known member, but there's no hope for me to change in time. So I think I'm incorrectly saying pseudo, because pseudo makes more sense when you remember the command. So maybe SU do is not even in the in the choices. Maybe it was just I was wrong. It was wrong. So here's a lot of slash, sissidman, slash, sissidman, sudo or pseudo, I didn't know. So you what, you know what. You pronounce it any way you want.
16:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay, nobody's going to die.
16:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I just I don't want to upset anybody, and unless I do, of course, and in that case, hey, at least I've got new earmuffs, and at least, true, the world's a better place. Devon is down.
17:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let's not that we spent 25 minutes on this. Also in this combined canary dev channel build. End of support for Windows mix reality. We knew that was coming. Yep, that's gone. The copilot icon in the Taskbar will change to a little pencil when you Are copying text so that you you can visually see that maybe you could do something with that text with copilot, I guess.
17:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What I know? Why for copilot? Why not? Just that's gonna be a good idea to have an icon change because you're carrying around something in the clipboard, but only for copilot. So how word it goes away right, yeah, why?
17:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh Richard, I Don't even know how far I could. I could. I could destroy this podcast right now and spend two hours on this topic, but let me just at least it's not all in so easy.
18:06
All the icon rant yeah, no, it's not about icons, it's about the kind of haphazard way things are implemented. Right, microsoft Copilot in Windows is everything you need to about Windows today, right? And what I mean by that is that, on the one hand, it's AI they had to get it out there really quick but on the other hand, it's also how they roll things out in Windows, right, they put it out there first and then they start fixing it over time, right? So why isn't it a floating window? Why isn't it an alt tab? Why can't I put it on different sides of the screen? Why can't I? Why can't I? Why can't I? And the? The reason is they compiled it one time and it worked, and they shipped it, and then people started complaining or providing feedback, and then they, you know, over time they will update it, and so this is Windows 11 in a nutshell, right? The? What it would be three years in? And you could argue today we have that version. Maybe we should have had three years ago, like.
18:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is how things are done, so in canary make windows different, and then they found out that nobody wanted that, so now it's Windows the same.
19:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, there are co-pilot changes coming, both in pre-release and the stable version of Windows, which we'll get to in a moment. But, yeah, they're just throwing stuff against the fan, basically, which is not the best way to see if it sticks. But this is the Microsoft way of doing things, right. It's so. It doesn't make any sense. And so, yeah, copilot's icon will turn it into a pencil as a drop target, so you can do something with text, right, summarize it, explain it. Just put it into the chat window and do more stuff with it, maybe make a picture, whatever, I don't know so, yeah, I wait for us to paste.
19:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
As soon as you saw it was copied, start acting on it.
19:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Again, you talk logic, you talk reason, you talk sense. I love it. I wish you were running Windows, you know.
20:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, on the inside of that company things are so much more complicated. It's nothing like having to implement for 120 languages and 150 cultures.
20:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, I hear you, but I would just say that I would add to I'm not disagreeing, I would just say, right, and maybe that is why these things require a little more testing, you know, before you put out in the world. Now we're talking about the canary in depth channel, so they are testing it. Right, I mean it. But as well but we'll talk in a moment some of this stuff's coming to stable too.
20:28
A Year ago just what a year ago, actually, a year ago, february I wrote an article about how that I called this is Windows 12, and I wrote about all the stuff at the time Microsoft had just made their Bing announcement. Chachi PT for had come out the previous November. There was this Sacha Nadella was talking about AI, ai in all the things, which is not the way he put it, but you know, that's my, my AI summary of that statement, and I kind of went back and looked at that and I thought, you know, it's really interesting, like this stuff is all still happening, but it's still like happening, right, and I think the big difference between last year and this year is a the sheer number of things that Microsoft announced and started shipping in various forms AI related, co-pilot, branded, etc. And then we got the MP use, finally, in some semi form of volume on various chipsets across the platforms. We've got this new version of Windows, which is now, you know, 24 h2, not Windows 12.
21:26
And what does it mean to Windows? So what is what is AI going to do to Windows? What does that look like? And the interesting thing is I keep talking about Stevie petition, those three application structures inside, outside, and the orchestrated one of the elsewhere, or whatever the, however you want to call that, and I've talked about the examples he used and everything. But back in February, before he ever said it, I actually used the word orchestration, interestingly, to describe how Windows could change and that today we run apps and In the future we may run prompts, essentially where we Basically describe, whether it's graphically or voice or text or whatever, what it is we want to do, and it is the system that determines which apps or services right need to step in at different phases of the way, like I'm gonna lead you some lovely Purse fights inside of Microsoft, like oh yes, what happens to the board first right, yep, yep.
22:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But also this was Gates's vision ages ago. Yes, it's idea, you know the object-oriented Operating system was about you don't select an app, you work on a document, whatever that.
22:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But it has 100%. That's exactly right. And what's interesting to me, your you nailed that. That's exactly true. Microsoft has tried to implement this and I don't mean to say in half-ass ways that's unfair. I mean, given the technology of the day, they did what they could.
22:50
But the, the Microsoft, bob, bob, but the yes, bob, and and the ones people might really remember and really have used Were the document-centric interface in Windows 95, which is exactly what you described, that Olay, a Thing where you had a, an Excel thing inside of a word document and the toolbars would change to the Excel toolbars and it was just too complicated for most people, right? And the other big one, I think, would be the kind of you at the center interfaces most Famously implemented as the hub structure in Windows phone, where we Apps go to the background. We don't worry about apps but we say I want to do a thing, I want to share a photo, I want to edit a photo, I want to. You know, I want to do something with a photo and you would go into the picture side by the photo side, but it was called and you had connected your services to this back end and you didn't have to worry about where things were.
23:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And that was a great idea that I have people and you know there was that ritual you had with Windows phone where you sit down and may say these three identities. These are actually the same person.
23:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, you would connect right. That's exactly right and yeah, and actually one of the less are known because it only lasted the one version, I believe, but they the messages app, whatever that was called, as originally implemented was SMS and MMS and Skype, and it was and I mean Facebook Messenger, by the way ever right at the beginning, and of course, facebook was the first company that would finally said you know what this is, we need, we doesn't benefit us, no we want people to think of Facebook?
24:24
Of course we do, so that's what that was the wrench that kind of got in the way of that plan you know the this thing I just described with like the OS as an orchestration Point, will run into some of the same debates and problems. Right, there are gonna be the apps and and side Microsoft's especially office that are gonna say no, no, no, no, no.
24:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're not an ingredient, right a recipe. This product cannot exist because it impacts other people's promotions.
24:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, I would say Office has a big enough bubble of its own, and or Microsoft 365. I guess it's the right thing to call it. Hey, right, they're like I'm 35 will win. Yeah, they can do this. Yeah, but this is, you know, in many ways is a Smarter is a tough word but a more modern version of one of those. If then this, then that type situations, or what do we have like a power automate type thing in win in Windows today, where you know but we're Windows in this case, or Microsoft 365 or whatever it might be, is Doing the heavy lifting, you're a. For this to work, the user can't do too much of the, the plugging and playing right. It has to kind of occur at the system.
25:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and you would hope that, if you look at it from an ecosystem perspective, that any application installed into Windows would plug into an interface that now a lot game you would probably communicate with you would have written.
25:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm not.
25:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, because of course, M365 has its own marketplace and so there are gonna be third party tools that are going to be presented that way. I just have no. I that is a way more organized team than the Windows team. I think they're gonna win this one. And then I About. That is the graph, which I think is actually the most important source of data.
26:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't necessarily mean winning or losing, I just mean implement like happening right I actually I got that they're gonna.
26:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're gonna build more in less time and they're gonna get better customer feedback and they're gonna run away with it because I think you're right to get ahead of that curve.
26:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, this, yeah, so this has been, this has been a big fight for a long time right?
26:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, in fact they also have a monthly billing mechanism they can collect on the Windows team. Doesn't like they have all the pieces in place to out in a bit arrest.
26:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The right solution here is for Windows to assume it's rightful place as a component of Microsoft 365, which it technically is, and just make that part of the the value you get.
26:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well you know when an operating system becomes plumbing. The same way that that microcode in the CPUs become plumbing, the same way that bios become plumbing, like the OS is on its way to being plumbing, where we don't want sensation, we just want reliability. I I again, 100%.
26:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I agree with you totally. I think that you know Windows obviously has had things like, you know, default apps for default. You know this app will open this file type, that kind of thing. Yeah, we have this notion of default browsers right, which is a slightly well, it's not too much more complicated really, but it's a slightly more complicated thing.
27:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're introducing protocols and Also one that was sort of forced on them by the industry, like there's another side to this, paul, which is at what point has become any competitive?
27:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right. Well, that one I can't answer, but I get. But I'm just more concerned right now with, like, what might they actually implement? You know, remember when Cortana came to the desktop, at that time I thought I said and probably wrote that I'd be surprised if Microsoft doesn't add a default personal assistant, you know, like they have for web browsers, and you know, I think only Amazon's assistant ever came to Windows. But In an open ecosystem like Windows, I mean, you think that's, I mean that's how it should work, right? Yeah, and then if you have a co-pilot orchestrating things for you, you might, as the user be able to, or apps might do this as part of their install, say, look, these are the types of it's not just like file types, right, and some other tasks or activities like these are the types of things that we want to register as being handled as for, and arguably, great, give preference to.
28:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
When I want to edit a photo, I want to use this. When I want to, you know, edit a video, I want to use this. You know that that's sort of prioritization, because you always, you know, just right click on that file type and see how many open Wists you've got right, it's, it's horrific going into the oh yeah. So now throw that chat interface over top of that.
28:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I the thing, the advantage that office has I keep thinking of it as office still, but these things are and the end user applications and services, whatever they might be is that they actually do have enough capability that you could argue there is an end-to-end solution here for these things that I'm describing right, that a Microsoft 365. I guess there's enough there that you could do most of what we're talking about right and stay in that ecosystem Right and is an advantage to that To Microsoft, but also to, you know, corporate customers that want to just keep you know.
29:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like I'm not saying people aren't walking gleefully into the wall garden, I sure, and you know, and the, this was supposed to be the open place, right, but it's interesting to realize the open place would be windows on the co-pilot and all these different third-party apps can come to the party, but I just can't imagine that happening with the state of windows and the state of M 365, which does have a massive customer base and, again, visibility into the graph which is going to give you insight that not nobody else has. So, and and its own marketplace and its own billing mechanism, like there's so many.
29:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I hear you, but I Mozilla is going to come up again today, but last week we discussed this notion that Microsoft especially although I think Apple did this to some degree as well Contorted their desktop operating system, which today has been the Wild West with regards to these types of things, and open platform Essentially not open code but open, you know, outside applications and services and has made it more mobile, like more locked down, more like a walled garden, and I think those kind of forces are going to come into play here as well. Right this you don't walk that back, unless you are forced to right by laws and or regulations.
30:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, and I wonder about some point. We don't have a regulator clue into the fact that, once the they we've now, they're not going to create a set of interfaces that make you feel like you never need to choose an app. We'll take care of that for you. You know what apps are going to choose.
30:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know well, this is where the power of the defaults kicks in again, and I think Well, and then you brought up the whole browser thing.
30:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like once upon a time, microsoft try to say, well, there's only IE. It's intrinsic to the opposite. We use Windows, you have to use IE. That didn't go well. It did not work well. Yeah, it didn't go well. So I'm just curious what are you true?
31:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
the other thing I just want to throw it with regards to what this year looks like with AI and Windows Is well, we did just get our first generation of MPU based computers. Not really, but I mean it's shipping in volume, I guess. How does that change anything in Windows? To this day, we still only have one feature in the entire operating system that requires an MPU, but we have a dozen or more that we might point to and say hey, this is AI.
31:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, I would argue that Android is doing a better job of utilizing their internal hardware than Windows is so far.
31:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, I agree with that actually. Yeah, well, yeah, because Windows isn't doing anything. Yeah, you're right, you are 100% right.
31:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There was a Windows that would have been a win hack by now where all the vendors would be lined up and say these are the interfaces used. Here's how you get the advantage of it.
31:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, get to it Well there's a worry there that the industry has its kind of hopes set on MPU and these new ultra-core processors, kind of jump-starting PC sales again. We know that PC sales have in fact gone back up a little bit, but low bar there, and that happened before we had these things. I don't know if this is going to trigger. We're still in a wait-and-see situation there. So I'm just, oh, totally.
32:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know. Show me the killer app. For the average consumer, this is still a toy. Devs are in right. There's a non-shrim number of developers I'm talking to today. It's like if I didn't have GitHub Copilot, I'm not going to make my deadlines. That's now becoming a requirement in their productivity. I don't see that in other areas of expertise yet. But that's the degree of your looking for.
32:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a good set of advice you could offer people about the types of things that are good to do, useful to do. However, you want to say it with AI, Things that are not so good. Right, so you can get AI to tell us how to pronounce sudo or sudo or whatever it is.
33:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Be sure to end up being Wikipedia that won that one in, but okay yeah.
33:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, yeah, the new king looks just like the old king there, but none of this benefits Windows, because all of those things run in the cloud and don't require Windows. In fact, most of those things will probably always run better in the cloud because they rely on this infinite data pool we have on the backend anyway. So, and giant language models that can't help the new machine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Well, that's my little bit of a con speculation.
33:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All good news. Yeah, at least we know how to pronounce sudo now.
33:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Anyway, yes, so we got that. We got that going for us.
33:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're watching Windows Weekly. Listening to Windows Weekly with Paul Throt. Richard Campbell. It's a little rainy here in Petaluma today, but I'm sure it's beautiful where you guys are. Richard, in Sydney, australia, are you there for family or a conference?
34:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Conference, nice, doing my from mono to Maui talk today.
34:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love it. It sounds like travel, but it's not. And then there's Paul Throt who's enjoying a nice Mexican hot chocolate in beautiful Mexico. That's a Mexican iced water oh. But yeah, it's filtered. You're going to be in Acapulco when Richard.
34:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm doing Puerto Vallarta in 10 days 10 days.
34:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're going to be in Cabo in a month, so we'll miss you.
34:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, yeah, we're all going to just have different sides of the country. Yeah. I just find it amusing. There might be a point where we're all in Mexico, but not together.
34:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That would be funny. It's probably close. How long are you going to be in PV? Two weeks, two weeks. Oh, we'll just miss you. March 11th.
34:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're getting there.
34:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We should figure something out. When are you going? March 11th through 23rd? Richard's going in two weeks. You said yeah, I'm on, so you'll be there. You will just overlap Richard, actually.
35:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'll leave on the 12th.
35:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
On the 12th, so on the 11th, let's all get together.
35:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
In the airport. Are you all flying through Mexico City? I got directs.
35:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I got directs out of PV to Vancouver, which is very very nice, Very nice, oh right right.
35:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
PV. So it's Cabo and my brain. So PV is on the east coast and Alcapulco is far down. Everything's on the west coast.
35:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Pv is on the west coast, oh, cabo's into the Baja you think it can't coon, which is on.
35:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, I'm thinking of.
35:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Cabo San Lucas, puerto Vallarta, both on the west coast, on the Baja. So it's Alcapulco. Yeah, it's Alcapulco. Yeah, we're on the Baja Peninsula, yeah. Beautiful spot. Yeah, beautiful, I can't wait. That's a Monday. I'm going to be following. You will be doing Windows Weekly from your respective hovels I mean homes, but we will have, I think, my sorry, I'm not going to be, filling it.
36:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, yeah, okay. Now I think that's MVP Summit, so I'll probably be doing the show from Redmond.
36:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, you really must rack up the miles. Do you try to get it all on the same?
36:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
airline. Not that idealistic, but I fly enough that I can generally carry top tier status on two airlines in a year. Nice, yeah, you sort of mix it up whatever makes it fun. You don't really have a choice of airlines, like it's all an illusion.
36:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's the sad thing, and I think that's why these loyalty programs don't make a huge amount of sense.
36:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, plus, they've also come up with their own currency. Hold on a second Right. You used to be mileage.
36:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but it's like Paul who's always flying in the same place. Mexico has been.
36:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it benefits us greatly, actually, yeah.
36:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So, yesterday.
36:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did we do the patch Tuesday? Nope, that was yesterday, yep, yep. So anything you want to say about that, we continue on with this, yes, so.
37:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Microsoft did test putting co-pilot on in a different location on the taskbar. They want to move it to the right of everything else, basically over past the clock and the little notification bell. That's where mine is. Yeah it, oh, it is. Really. Are you in the insider?
37:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
program I don't know where I am. See, that's what you're talking about is over here this thing? I see where the charms used to be. I'm on a laptop, so I can't see anything at once.
37:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's where the charms were. So it's starting with the patch Tuesday update for Windows 11, 23h2. They are going to start rolling that out. It will start moving for people in 22H2, I guess I'm not seeing it yet on any of my computers. I have updated with the patch Tuesday update, but it's one of those slow boil things, so that is happening. I guess I don't know what to say about that, but it's all it seems creepy.
37:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm thinking what do I have on here? I'm an insider. I'm an insider. I'm on the Windows 11 Pro Insider Preview 22H2. Weird, 22h2. Wait, have a minute. Should I be on 24H2? No, that's very confusing. 23h2 is the current version. I'm on 22H2, it says here Install that February 2nd. This is very confusing. Okay, I don't know, never mind. Anyway.
38:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know what it doesn't?
38:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
matter, it doesn't matter.
38:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Listen, leo, a couple of years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, I could have told you exactly what was wrong, exactly how to fix it. Now you don't care. No, it's not that I don't care, it's impossible, it's not made in the OBLS. No, I'm not joking, it's just impossible.
38:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, so much I need to restart. That's why Let me restart. This will shut the entire podcast. Don't go away.
38:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Anyway it's.
38:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Fade to black.
38:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Everything's different. Like I said, there's no sense of precedent. It doesn't matter how things used to be. It doesn't matter how things were last month. It could be any way tomorrow. I am not going to pretend that I'm used to it or okay with it. I'm just trying to come to terms with it. It's just the way things are.
39:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Our lives are now a nondeterministic cloud of frustration. Yeah, yeah.
39:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think all my files are exactly where I left them. Sure, they are Are they.
39:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They might not be, because that's another thing to screw on with is OneDrive. They'll move those around too. Brave shipped the stable version of their browser on ARM. It's been. I thought this has been around for a while, but there's announced it, so I guess it's now in stable. You may recall, a couple of weeks ago Google announced that Chrome was available in Canary, so that will be coming to ARM soon in stable six weeks at whatever the timeframe is. So that's happening. So it's there now for Brave. If you want that feature complete, et cetera, everything in Brave on x86 is available on ARM, so that's called all native code.
40:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are you still using Brave or did you move to Edge? Yeah, I mean no, I moved to Edge. No, no, sorry, that was a slip.
40:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, I have been on this trip especially kind of multi browser because I'm testing, I'm running some stuff on security and Poly browser is.
40:20
Yeah, poly browsers yeah, I'm a browser curious, I mean. The truth is, I've always been like that when it comes to, I mean, honestly, most applications, but browsers, especially browsers, are so important. So I've been writing this series of security articles that I'm trying to do things in different ways on different browsers and see how things work, you know, just whatever. So lately it's been a lot of Chrome, which is something I don't usually use. I'm using Edge, which I hate to use, but I'm updating that part of the book Using Firefox Arc.
40:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I really love an Arc, but on Mac Arc I don't have the invite for Windows.
40:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The version on Windows isn't there yet for a variety of reasons. But one of the things you lose are your. What do they call those Sidebars, the Boosts you create?
41:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
like your custom. The Macs, the Boosts, they got names for everything. What does it mean? Oh, those spaces, yeah, yeah, yeah, spaces, thank you, I like those, so I can't.
41:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm not going to recreate the space every time. One of my issues, one of the things because of what I do is I bring up computers all the time read, solve, read and solve. You know, and if it can't sync, I'm not going to recreate manually right on every computer every time. It just doesn't make sense I can sync.
41:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I'll get it there.
41:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I love it and we'll talk Actually, we'll talk about that in a moment too. And then there are indications that Microsoft might be adding an AI upscaling feature for games. So we've talked about this in the context of things like NVIDIA has a tool set where you can bring forward an SD game to the modern world and it upscales and you can do 4K and HDR and stuff like that is awesome. Having the operating system just do this automatically for older games would be cool as well, and this is a rumor for now, but someone has found A little bit of a rumor. Someone has shown screenshots of this interface in the Settings app on 24H2 and what this could look like. So, yeah, that sounds like a neat idea for me. That to me.
42:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's kind of an argument we have so much horsepower, we're just going to brute force, upscale an app against its will. That's amazing. I like it actually.
42:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Bring it to its knees, why not? Yeah, we're just starting with the whole Windows philosophy in some ways, in the old days, we always brought forth DOS games, we had an XP. As things switch over to the NT World, this notion of program compatibility modes and running things with special settings to make it seem like an older version of the operating system. This is in our wheelhouse. It's good. Okay.
43:05
Looking forward again, I didn't know what to call this section. Honestly, it's a grab bag of stuff that are not always entirely related, but AI antitrust I could have put this in with Cloud Server, I don't know. There's a lot of stuff going on. This week there was a report on I think it was CNBC, quoting two analysts. So asterisks, asterisks, but based on various indication they're getting from their own sources that Azure, which has historically been about half the size of AWS by revenue, they believe is now two-thirds or more and is growing much faster than AWS right now and could actually surpass AWS by revenue within a couple of years, all thanks to AI.
43:51
Whatever the real numbers are, the bit that we know from public statements and financial reports and so forth is that Azure is part of Intelligent Cloud. We know the growth rate for Azure, but we've never gotten a baseline revenue number, so we can't actually say with any certainty how much money it makes. Profitability is another thing, but whatever, amazon has always been very explicit about AWS, which I think is cool and the right way to do things. But you can compare these businesses and you can look at the business overall and you can look at growth numbers. It's fair to say that and I pointed this out with Microsoft's revenues, intelligent Cloud and Azure growth were both greater than revenue growth at AWS much more.
44:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
One would argue that we'll know when Azure supersedes AWS, when AWS starts concealing their numbers, because that is the US one, oh, okay.
44:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was going to use the opposite extreme, which is, I think, equally true. When Microsoft says it did yeah, in other words, one day we will get. The way it starts is they'll say something like Azure is on an annual run rate to exceed yada, yada yada in revenues, and that number will be bigger than what AWS has been.
45:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, where from AWS will come up with a term like the amazing cloud, which is an area of product and you don't know what the revenues are for any of them.
45:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You've heard the term moving the goalposts. Right yeah, when you're not winning the game, you move the goalpost. Microsoft has dismantled the goalpost and hidden parts of it all over the field. It's a completely different thing.
45:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, and in the effort of disclosure that keeps saying things like is that a goalpost over there?
45:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, in other words it looks, and then a rabbit comes out of his sleeve.
45:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, so Microsoft has-. Even then, it's a reasonable question to say when you say Azure, do you mean M365 as well, because it does also run a cloud right.
45:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
These things are purposely co-mingled and confused and it's hard to say right. But Microsoft, in this case, has this combined cloud business. That is not the Microsoft cloud that they talk about. Right, because those are cherry-picked numbers. But if you look at their cloud-based businesses overall, if you could somehow add up the revenues and all that stuff, obviously it's humongous. We don't have to have a big number on it. The question is what percentage of Microsoft's revenues literally come from the cloud? And it's got to be north of 50%, it's got to be?
46:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I would say it's got to be. I'd be very. And again, it's like you're using revenue numbers versus customer counts or C counts. I vary the idea of what's left still in the volume license agreement and what does that represent? Yeah, it's been modernized to a monthly bill.
46:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We talked about this a little bit. I think it was last week or the week before this notion that Microsoft was asked a question during the post-johnings conference call, so it must have been last week. This person said I don't understand how this grows Like, haven't you saturated this market? This was seats for Microsoft 365 commercial. For all the lack of transparency we get out of Microsoft, they were pretty good about this one. So, yeah, we actually had plateaued. We started introducing these lower end front line SKUs and we saw a couple of years of growth there. That's starting to taper off. But now we view AI, the co-pilot stuff, as essentially a third tier and so, if you think about not a third tier, I'm sorry like another expansion of revenue on top of that. So their argument was like look, our seats aren't going to go up that much anymore, but our revenue per seat is going to go up dramatically.
47:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And that is actually always better to sell more stuff to your existing customers. It's an area efficient way to increase revenue.
47:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wall Street can be somewhat unsophisticated when it comes to certain things, right? So when Azure growth fell below 70%, it was 70% consistent for a long time, and it started 60, 50, 50, whatever the numbers were people started freaking out. It's like, guys, this is much bigger now than it was. It doesn't matter if it's not growing as much. This is what we would expect, right, and I think you can make the case for commercial seats, microsoft 365. It's like look, we've reached everyone we want to reach. We could introduce a 199-month skew, but we would just lose money on that. So who cares? We're not going to do that. It makes more sense for us to make more money per seat, and so I think by explaining that explicitly, it was almost like a little school session, like putting a little ad sitting the seat Listen, pay attention, and with the hope of forestalling the inevitable complaints and possible stock price declines that occur when seat growth goes down, right, yeah it goes down.
48:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, recognize, of course, that valuations are insane, right? Yeah, I get a sense from some folks at Microsoft. It's like they're freaked out by the $3 trillion too.
48:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so I never brought this up again. When Microsoft first surpassed $3 trillion in market cap, I noted that Apple had done it a few years earlier, but specifically mentioned that they didn't finish the day over three. It was eight months later, I believe, that they were over three and stayed over three. Microsoft actually did it within the week. That's how different the world is. It's not that Microsoft is a better company or whatever. It's just that literally the excitement over AI is so great and the promise is so there, I believe to be there. Their market cap I can't guarantee, but if you look at it today, I bet it's working.
49:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The hype is working. Yeah, it's working. Yeah, Well, the other conversation I had in this context was also and baby boomers are retiring. And many of them have not felt good portfolio Because, by golly, they're going to be keen on these top companies to keep affirming at a rational rate, especially the companies these guys grew up with and know and they're still around.
50:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is Oldsmobile something I could still?
50:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
invest in. Is that a thing? I'm a baby boomer. We're not that nutty, okay, are you sure?
50:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, leo, are you? I'm sorry, oldsmobile yeah.
50:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's true, it's true Actually you know, and besides, it looks good in your portfolio to have all that going up and up and up, that's for sure, yeah.
50:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, you know, and I have friends who were working at Microsoft in the bomber years, when it was $32 a share, and they got their MAE for a time and it was.
50:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you could hear the flatline beep for 10 years straight.
50:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's breathing down their neck. Now, though, is Nvidia. That proves what you're saying, richard, that it's about AI.
50:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh my God, of course, yeah, so uh, their market cap, was it market cap surpassed that of Amazon?
50:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they're like number three now Act irrational.
50:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's that. That to me seems irrational, but I don't want to get off.
51:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We make fun of Google for being a one trick pony. Then you look at it video go, yeah, but they're not really, because it's not just AI.
51:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They've got, they've got. They've got chips and cars. They put chips in gaming machines.
51:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Uh, crypto for a while. Single percentage points. Yeah, compared to what the whole? Thing?
51:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They just released. I'm actually wishing I had a Windows machine running an RTX 30 or 40 series, because they just released their own. Uh, chat, yeah, local, that's local, it's really local. It'll read all your documents. Uh, it's based on a llama and camera. It's a two open source.
51:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Does it literally drive up to your PC? Pc in a wooden rabbit or horse, rather Like a rabbit. I think a wooden rabbit was from the Trojan horse.
51:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is that what you're talking about?
51:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I'm just wondering what's it? What's the packaging here? Yeah.
51:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Uh, yeah, and this studio too has both the MPU and a 4060. Yeah, so I should definitely install that.
52:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'd be so tempted to. Yeah, I love the idea of a local GP. I think that's the future of GPTs is local.
52:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, yes or no, right, but you need it, depends, right.
52:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, companies might push it because they, uh, yes, yeah, local.
52:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I would call that local like this is, and yeah, right, that's right, like a private cloud, gpt kind of a thing. Yeah.
52:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's just for me. I would like to have it, so I don't have to worry if I'm online or not.
52:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I could just you know yep, yeah, I love that. That would definitely be a thing and I can trust myself.
52:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I have a focus on that for the house because I put the chat interface on the house now. Exactly, and the whole point is to be able to unplug the internet connection, and it still works.
52:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, imagine like you feed into it all the manuals for all the devices in your house, so you can I have a helpful circle.
52:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We've come. By the way. You know, I it's like saying I feel like the future of my music collection is going to be like I like some kind of a physical disc and it's going to be really hard to do playlist because I'm going to like one song on this disc and one song on this disc.
53:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, actually honestly, you probably want a high in that respect. To that, you probably do want a hybrid, because you want local, of course, but you also want to surf the net and get late updated information. Well, right, but okay.
53:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, from a smart home and implementation standpoint, like the argument is, like I for certain things, I want this just to be. This should work. If the internet is down. It should work on this local set of whatever Exactly.
53:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, maybe it can be better Not to make fun of your whole media statement. But when you count on a cloud provider to provide you with your music and they fail to renew a contract, so you remember that music that you bought. Yeah, yeah, you don't have it anymore.
53:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so those incidents are what triggers this misplaced nostalgia for physical media, but or maybe correct nostalgia for actually owning something.
53:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, whatever ownership, not a perpetuity license.
53:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It isn't actually in perpetuity, but okay, you're right, I see both sides of this. I just think you know, when you think about how much money you might spend on music in a year and you look at the cost of a subscription and the access you get to the, what's the number now? 70 million songs or whatever, except? The one I'm looking for Right. Well, let's welcome the cable TV. You know, that's.
54:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, well, that's. It's not coming back around too. It's bit by bit. We're getting consolidation this morning here we are.
54:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
YouTube TV is huge now and it's basically cable over the top table. It will recreate.
54:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, with one advantage you can today say nope and tomorrow say yes. That's true. That's the advantage of the online service. Part of it. Yeah, it's huge, yeah, it's huge. Anyway, this is I don't know if this has to do with what we're talking about.
54:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Anyway, so All right, thanks for playing.
54:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, the EU came down today I guess this morning and said that Microsoft Bing Edge and Microsoft Advertising are so small they do not need to be regulated by the DMA.
54:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're number 10. We're number 10.
54:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I've never seen big tech companies celebrate their smallness so loudly as when they don't need to be regulated because not enough people use them so funny that's nobody cares. Yeah, it's funny iMessage also fell into this. They're huge in the United States, obviously, and probably in other parts of the world, not so huge in Europe. So that's not going to be regulated there either, and that might be the more problematic of those.
55:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But this also comes into a crazy level of granularity. Right, it's like what else? What else do we regulate? Because it's small for the moment. How do you measure small?
55:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, they have their metrics. Yeah, okay, so no surprise there. Google Gemini Replace bar. We knew that was coming. I think it's just a name, right.
55:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just a name.
55:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, the brand, the high end ultra LLM, is available now. Apparently, grammarly is laying people off. Mozilla is laying people off. Mozilla has been kind of a not so slow moving car crash lately, unfortunately. That's so sad. Yeah, we talked about this last week, but since then, mitchell Baker stepped down as CEO for the second time. Wait till we finish recording. Did you make that announcement? Yeah, executive chairperson, there's a new CEO, former board member, and they've sent out a company-wide memo. I think TechCrunch got a part of it. They might be shutting down most of their consumer products that are not Firefox, including the one I recommended last week, which was that monitoring service which they announced a week ago.
56:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And yes, right, and that's beating Google to the punch, even.
56:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wow yeah, between last week's show and this announcement, I wrote an editorial, probably over the weekend, about web browsers and AI and talked about ARC and how it sometimes takes a company on the outside to kind of innovate and push things forward. The iPhone was like that. You almost have to lose to look at things differently. But it is shocking to me, no matter which browser you like or prefer or whatever, how similar they all are. It's weird to me that Firefox and Mozilla has never really innovated in this space in a meaningful way with the user experience. If you could time travel from 1996 to today and look at the web browsers and say, yeah, I mean they're prettier, but I think they operate.
57:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, the cons are a bit flatter. Yeah, I think the same thing happened to the phone Before. The iPhone phones were kind of weird If you'd get a slide out keyboard or a connector of this, a pop out, that now they're all slapped in black glass. That's right.
57:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean and look always, there's always advantages and disadvantages, but I think the compelling thing about ARC and the reason we keep bringing up that browser is that and I'm not sure I like these guys or the I'm having a hard time getting a feel for them as a company or people, but they really are going in an innovative way, I think, with the browser and looking at it differently, and you know what it needs it. The web browser is the most important app that we all use. For many of us, it's kind of the only app really, I mean, and if it wasn't for the anti competitive business practices of the two mobile providers, that would be true on mobile too. So it's interesting.
58:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think what's unusual here because it doesn't happen very often anymore is ARC just presented you something you never knew you wanted.
58:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, which is very right. Which was the iPhone too right In some ways? I mean, no one was saying why don't we have this device? Yeah, yeah, I, that's right. There you go I. I was in writing this. I was sort of talking about smaller things you could do like like. I really like the browser. Brave, right, and I like it because it's private and secure by default.
58:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's not like an innovative browser, that's what I mean. It's that mindset behind.
58:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, is that like a form of innovation? And ultimately I have to kind of say no, because two reasons. One, it hasn't changed the world right. The whole world hasn't lined up again behind them to do the same thing. And you know, I mean not to be a jerk about it, but you could take Chrome even and install the right extensions and basically get you know to where you want to be privacy and security wise. So you know.
59:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know. Brave just has a better set of defaults running against the same.
59:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah there are other things going on there. It's it's all supposed to do with the lightweight nature of that and and you know there's a lot of things that go into it, but but at a high level. I mean you could kind of do a brave with other products and I don't know, you know, maybe that's not innovation. That doesn't mean it's not valuable, it doesn't mean I don't like it, it doesn't mean one might not like that thing, but web browsers are so important. I mean I'm reading that Steven Snofsy book. He brings us up this is something that's come up again and again. You know that point in time where web browsers and web technology and web development surpassed everything else combined.
59:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Basically, and you know we can say about Snofsky, but he called the ball on JavaScript being lingua franca and we should focus on that. That's right. That's how we went about it. We can debate separately but it wasn't wrong in that basic idea. Yeah, I got to call out what Zach was saying in the discord and let me pivot on a little bit. Zach, which is like who buys Mozilla when it's this frail? And you know that concern. You know the same way that you sort of save. You know we picked up the pieces of some microsystems or that sort of thing. One of these sort of legacy of the dot com boom companies is on its knees. Somebody should scoop it up. Yahoo should buy it.
01:00:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's an idea. Why doesn't Mozilla buy it? There's an idea, mark.
01:00:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, they had any money.
01:00:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, they have some money. You know they have like, how big is this company? They had that sweet Google money.
01:00:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They could yeah. I think, I think at this point I'm starting to think ARC is designed to be acquired right. I mean, there's, no, there's no business.
01:01:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just want it to be acquired by someone that's going to continue forward with it, not kill it, like Google, Apple, Microsoft would do right.
01:01:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, well, and the real question is there's no money in browsers, right? Nobody's paying for a browser, yeah. Well but that's interesting. The money in.
01:01:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Google. The Google back sheesh that they pay you to keep it as the search engine make it the false search engine.
01:01:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's how it's a really good thing. That's how it's a really good thing. We make it initiative browsers so we can make you into the product.
01:01:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right I. There may be a business model here. This is not obvious to us because we're so used to the status quo. You know, nobody buys Windows either, but we use it every day. That's money.
01:01:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I mean it does direct revenue.
01:01:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, Well, I think mashed potato in our discord has a point. People are Ark and Firefox may just be waiting until Google finally takes this final step into manifest V3 and it's really kind of it's. It's anti, anti third party cookie stance and it's anti extensions stance and I wonder maybe not Most people?
01:02:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
aren't that sad, I don't, I don't. I think that's just gonna keep you. I promise you it's gonna be the problem.
01:02:16
Yeah, yeah. I don't think the impact of that's going to be as great as people think and I I already we've heard from browser makers and extension makers that either not going to implement it in the case of browsers and or, in the case of extension makers, it's like actually we're going to be able to work with this. We'll see, we'll see we're going to find out. Yeah, Um. So, yeah, you know, I, I I just installed Firefox again the last night. Actually, it looks on the browser.
01:02:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It looks ancient compared to arc though.
01:02:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I compared to arc. Everything looks ancient, I would say, in Windows. Honestly, not counting arc, it has the most modern UI. That looks the most correct with the Windows 11 kind of look and feel, if that makes sense. Um, but yeah, I feel bad, for I really want, I really I know.
01:03:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would like this company to thrive. I feel bad for this. I'm insanely guilty running arc because I have to run Mozilla on my no, no, no, you got to look.
01:03:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Ultimately, we have to do the best thing for ourselves and, ultimately, the job of any company, organization is to serve its customers, and I don't. Firefox has definitely been hobbled by a predacious big tech business practices, no doubt about it, but they've also made mistakes and I think they're innovating in the wrong places. I think they they walked away from PWAs for a quick second. Are you kidding me?
01:03:41
Yeah, that was like I, I, I don't. I, they've just made some stupid mistakes. I like a lot of the stuff they do. That's not Firefox. I use pocket daily. I think these other things they do email relay, vpn, the monitoring stuff To me this all makes sense. This is a. This is there. They're allowing companies like DuckDuckGo mostly DuckDuckGo to kind of eat their lunch. Basically right. I mean, products like Brave DuckDuckGo ARC shouldn't exist. If Firefox had done the right thing, this, none of this could have happened, and I, I that it's sad, it's just sad.
01:04:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and it made me maybe Baker's being pushed out because he doesn't have a good enough AI strategy. Like I don't know how you're a tech company at this moment and survive any board without a three slides on how we're all AI all the time, Yep.
01:04:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So Mitchell Baker allegedly a big part of her new old job will be focusing on AI to some degree. The new person running was like I'm apologize, I can't remember her name, she's a woman as well Just kind of doubling down on Firefox. I. That's like kind of doubling down on Berlin at the end of the war. I guess I don't. You know, like what else are you going to do? Like I, you know, yeah, okay.
01:04:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Especially since, very likely, there was a board meeting with the board said what's your AI strategy?
01:05:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And he said this is, and then, like work somewhere else, the music from Benny Hill I'm dead.
01:05:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And we're like, all right. Well, the first person says I have an AI strategy. That's your CEO, yeah, yeah.
01:05:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This will not help Windows users yet, but Arc just delivered a native Arc sync on the Mac, opening the door to it coming to Windows, because the old sync thing worked only through iCloud. Right, and this is them actually trying to be cross platform Interesting. So, yeah, I'd love to experience that. I don't have my Mac with me here, I don't use it, Anyone who cares. Anyway, we'll get there. I'm very once Arc. You know I say this, but a lot of things actually, so duck, duck go. We're going to talk about that later in the show. Couple of things missing. I could see doing that Arc. Obviously I could see so, but it needs a couple of the basics it just doesn't have. So we'll get there. I think it was during yeah, it must have been during the earnings announcement. Sundar P chi said that Google one would soon surpass 100 million paying customers. This is there. It started as their cloud subscription, cloud storage subscription service for consumers. Now it's expanded to include a bunch of additional services, extra features and things like photos.
01:06:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You expand your customer base by increasing the number of products you consider part of this week.
01:06:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, it's a good offering. Honestly, I mean, I pay for this. It's basically double the storage you get with Microsoft 365 consumer. So you know, it's kind of a it's not a bad service. I have one as well, yeah, so they did hit that.
01:06:36
But the big news there the reason I'm mentioning this is because you know who cares about Google one, really except that they're adding a tier that is going to be their equivalent of co-pilot pro, right? So they're going to have an AI tier, I think it's. What is it called, mr Butteba-do? Yeah, it's like a AI premium plan. I was like, is it premium or AI? It's both, and they're going to add AI capability, solid decor, docs, sheets, slides, whatever apps, right. So that will actually, in many ways, it's more equivalent to Microsoft 365 co-pilot, because it's well, it's kind of in the middle. It's an additional no, it's the same, I'm sorry Co-pilot pros an additional 20 bucks per month, and that's what this is going to be as well.
01:07:18
So, yeah, kind of a consumer offering. But so the premium tier, which is the one I have, is two terabytes, 20 bucks more a month to get the AI stuff. I'll look at that. When that stuff's available, I don't see any huge reason to go there right now. I guess you could. I assume you get the Gemini stuff and the web and all that or whatever, but I don't know, I'm going to wait. I'll wait for a little while. I've been pretty happy with my co-pilot generated imagery. So far that's been nice.
01:07:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you see the co-pilot generated imagery add on the Superbowl?
01:07:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I oh I, so it went by very quickly. I watched the Superbowl from Mexico, so you didn't see anything. Yeah, two points to this. We were in a bar with friends. It was packed. It was like the NFL TV broadcast, so I think it was the CBS guys talking like it was English, but the ads were Mexican ads. So they clearly have not gotten the message that these things are socially cost like $7 million a second because there was an ad for a mattress company that was local to Mexico City.
01:08:24 - Speaker 2 (Host)
That's the local one. Yeah, it was like it was crazy ridiculous.
01:08:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The ads were. It was horrible. So we watched some of the ads later. But the other thing was most of the people I would say, let's say, two thirds of the people there were Mexican, right, the other were Americans who were there specifically to watch the game, obviously outside of the country. You know, mexicans are fans of what they call football, or what we call soccer, and soccer fans and football, american football fans, are very different, right, we don't get a lot. We don't have a lot in the way of chanting in the United States, right? So most Americans can't even handle a wave.
01:08:57
But these guys it was funny to watch that they they were mostly chanting for San Francisco, which I found who knows why. I think it was easier to rhyme, but they would cheer for anything good that happened. They couldn't have cared less. Like you could tell they were not actual football fans, right, but they were chanting like soccer fans. So they would be like San Francisco, 49 is, 49 is 49. And I was like what is what is happening? Like it was, like it was so out of place, like it felt so wrong. You know, growing up, on America.
01:09:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Come home to America.
01:09:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Let me play. This is.
01:09:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I you could want to see it. Yeah, Cause this? Yeah, You'll tell you something about what Microsoft's planning. This was their super bowl.
01:09:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I, I did so. I did later watch ads, so I might, I might have seen it.
01:09:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It goes by so quickly. I saw it and I didn't realize what I was.
01:09:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They say it will never open my own business or get my degree or wear a shark backpack. But they say I will never make my movie or build something. Whoa, I probably shouldn't play the music, but I'm not too sure. They say that too old to learn something new, too young to change the world. But I say, watch me, then it's copilot, it's going to make that all possible.
01:10:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But did the uh? What did human beings make that ad? Or do you put it behind? Human beings made this ad oh okay.
01:10:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
With me and organic chemistry.
01:10:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh this, we talked about this. I had completely forgotten this was happening. Yeah, You're right, I, I, so I actually I don't think I could see that this is the long version.
01:10:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think this is what I saw. This is the minute record, which is 14 million dollars. Yeah, the one I saw was much quicker than that, so that's the cheaper.
01:10:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You put the full version on YouTube.
01:10:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's what they do, yeah, yeah. So yeah, that is much nicer than the one I saw.
01:10:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Who drove that ad instead of Microsoft? Is that Takeshi, the new cap? It's a great question. It's just like who, who? Who blew the 7 million bucks? Yeah, Well, that yeah.
01:11:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You look they're, they are going for it. You know, whatever one thinks of the branding and the too many services and how fast they're moving and whatever it's not just talk, yeah, you know, I I give them a little credit for this. I I don't agree with it all, but the long times is.
01:11:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Microsoft bought a Super Bowl ad. I think it's probably the. Yeah, it's been four years. Yeah, Sure.
01:11:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, right. So I mean there's an ad on football every game. I think the only reason the surface line continues is because that you see it every Sunday on.
01:11:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
TV, you know. You know who didn't advertise was Apple. They didn't show the vision pro. I mean, they sponsored the whole halftime, but that was more an Apple music ad than anything else.
01:11:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, well, that's, you know. That's probably a good enough exposure for them.
01:11:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just got a brand out there Just the name Apple, apple, apple, apple, apple, used to be Pepsi. Okay, sorry, I didn't mean to distract. Keep going. You're watching Windows Weekly, paul Therade and Richard Campbell yeah, arm, arm, it's an arm and a leg.
01:12:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right. So originally I thought we'll have another earnings section here. This is the only company I had. So two notable things about this company. Compared to big tech let's say our technology the earnings site typically right about numbers pretty damn small right. This is a net income. Accordingly, net income of 87 million on revenues of 824 million in a quarter, by the way, a record growth, the record results, but also only the second of the results ever, because they just, you know, they've kind of they're not really spun off, they're still mostly owned by whatever that Japanese company is, but they're going. Them being public or whatever is a new thing. So conceivably, they could set a record every quarter if they wanted to.
01:13:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
At least for a while.
01:13:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But we talk about yeah, but we talk a lot about margins and how you know, software historically much higher margins, and hardware Apple being the bizarre exception to that. You will never see margins like this company. This company's margins in the quarter 96% oh my God, this is what I imagine. There's a guy renting a space over a garage somewhere in England. He's sitting at a desk with like a blueprint type paper and he's designing chips and that's their overhead.
01:13:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Look, you thought the margins on software are good. You see the margins on the licensing.
01:13:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, that's yeah. So that's actually the other thing. And their earnings report was so dense and big for what they do it didn't make sense to me that they provided a lot more information than some of the biggest companies on earth, so much so that I had a hard time just getting through it. They make money two different ways and, I have to be honest, I'm not 100% sure I understand what the difference is. They make money on royalties and on licensing, that's like I think those are kind of the same thing, aren't they?
01:14:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, no, no. When you talk about high margin businesses, those are the ones man. Well, that's all they do, and they're, I guess they don't have to make the product and pay people to make new things. I have made some stuff and I will let you use it a little. Pay me.
01:14:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I think it seems to be working out great and, like Nvidia, right right time, right place, whatever. All of a sudden, arm is everywhere. Right, we want it in the data center, we want it in all our devices. It's in most of our devices. They're expanding into these new vertical markets, you know automotive, etc. So, yeah, I mean it's an arm world and we're only living in it. I'm surprised they don't make more money from it. Honestly.
01:14:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, my God they, given how much the point at which you raise the price enough from the licensed perspective or the royalty perspective, I think your folks go. You know I could just.
01:15:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I'm just going to fork this into my own thing. Yeah, no, for sure, it's just.
01:15:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's astonishing, I mean it's interesting, it's 800 million dollars for saying, okay, you can do a little, and you can do a little and you can do it.
01:15:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But even like surfaces brought in more money than that in a quarter.
01:15:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm not saying profitable, but more you know but for a heck of a lot more work.
01:15:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah. Yeah, it's lower margins, yeah. And then I wasn't sure where to throw this story, but I wanted to discuss this a bit with you, richard, because of your background here. So every dot net is on a yearly cadence. They release a new version of the product every November at dot net cov. Every other year is a long term servicing release every, which is three years. Right, this year is not, or this year won't be that a coming year.
01:15:58
But what they did in 2008 was they usually have some big bucket focus areas for each year. They were very vague about what those might be, but there's more information coming. And then a dot net has all of these like projects, right, maui, asp net, et cetera, and each of those groups has their own kind of pushes. So there's even things like legacy I wasn't even really dot net but, like wind forums and WPF are still considered part of the umbrella and are largely community supported now, but they all have these kind of I mean there's a wind version for wind forums, for the wind SDK that is contemporary, as well as the old framework versions, just to make it more confusing yeah.
01:16:44
So let me ask I actually got this question from three different people and I was like I have to discuss this with Richard why do they do this? Why are they rev this so much? Why?
01:16:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richard.
01:17:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Why? Well, I mean, in other words, you could have a stable version of dot net and you could add to it. Right, I mean, why is this too fast? Am I missing something?
01:17:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I think the answer for this. One of the problems that they had in the old framework was that companies were sticking to a given version for a decade, so it's the back end patching that became incredibly expensive. You find it's a vulnerability in older versions, from the older version and you have to patch all the versions that people might be using. So there's been a heavy push to get away from the 10 year utilization into the shorter term utilization so that they can keep rolling forward and simplify the surface area for patching.
01:17:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So let me oversimplify, if you don't mind. Does this just move the work from patching multiple or, yeah, patching out a date, whatever dot nets, to? Well, now you have to think about this, the upgraded cycle right. For this to make sense, upgrading from one version of dot net to another has to be as seamless as possible.
01:18:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And so the argument is by going quicker you get people, you encourage people to build CI CD pipelines, like ability to just keep building testing frameworks so that they have more confidence that the new versions are going to work for them, and to not allow that software. You know what is legacy software stuff you can't build anymore. And this was the joke. It was an eight year old piece of software running on 4.5. We found a security vulnerability. Here's the patch for it. Nobody knows how to build it anyway. Right, right.
01:18:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this thing's out running in the world. It's not something we're actively developing and or upgrading. You're right.
01:18:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Interesting. So really getting into a place where you maintain buildable code by creating circumstances so you think about it. This is what they were trying to do with Windows 10 too, the constantly new versions of Windows 10 until the system is just like stop, but you know. Back to your core question are they moving too fast? It's a lot of developers feeling that way when eight adopt dot net eight adoption wasn't that quick. It's still ongoing. It's only been a few months, and it's one of those things where it's just like it's not that easy to grab the next one and keep going. The only thing I think they've done that's very clever is there's a lot of drop in performance benefit for moving up.
01:19:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it does seem like every release improves reliability performance.
01:19:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, we talk about the Steven Taube missive. Yeah, coming in a month or so before November, before the ship. And how will write this monolith blog post about all of the performance tuning work they've done? And they're real, they're double digit number performance improvements. It's like you take your app works the same. You switch from dot net seven to dot net eight. You're this much faster and so I don't know how long that. I mean that guy is brilliant, his team's extraordinary. They can't keep doing this. There's diminishing returns at some point.
01:20:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, it seems like the types of things that would be other than I mean. Look, I mean obviously performance, reliability, whatever. It's great. I don't mean to say it's not interesting, but I mean the stuff I think that's going to be compelling about dot net going forward is going to be the AI libraries and SDKs, the you know cross, but largely those are.
01:20:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Azure libraries too. Yeah, Now we get into the. This is the political angle of this, is you're?
01:20:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
going to bring the dot net developer to that world right.
01:20:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You provide that from the dot net developers being asked to come and making those shows right.
01:20:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, good, okay All right, it's not the same team of people. I think at some point that I don't think there'd be any pushback if they came out, you know, next year in November or whatever this time next year and said look, this is a mature platform, Maybe we move to a every other year.
01:20:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I think it's. I think it can really grow out valid points like the when does that make sense Right?
01:21:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, that's what okay Interesting, I'm glad, I'm glad you kind of. I was struck by how the same these questions were and I yeah, I didn't have a good answer for why they would just do this every year.
01:21:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's so, it's like being on a treadmill, you know, yeah, and it's, and you know many features can't be built in a year. So part of what's interesting talking to the team is knowing that they've been dark building features. They're going to be able to do a year or later, yeah, Two, three, four years. There are mega features that take a long time to be built and and so they're slowly being added, but they're always continuously integrating. So it's not like they're off on a branch somewhere where the feature takes three years to build and they're never going to be able to integrate it back in. It's all in the code base, just not lit Right, and it doesn't really cost us anything. You know, if you actually care about your footprint size, you do an edit time compilation and it rips all that stuff out into out of your code base anyway. So, buddy, you know the quality of dot net has been better than ever because of this architectural approach and the way they're building things.
01:22:15
The question is how often you declare versions. It is not. You know we used to talk about the two styles of delivering software. There was the build to a feature ship slip the date. And there was build to a date, slip the features.
01:22:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So when when some guys just started talking about dot net framework which is not the dot net we're talking about, but the at some point, that will be out of support and that's going to be a good day.
01:22:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah no, no, no, no, because Windows has so many dependencies on 4.8, because SQL server has 4.8 in it. 4.8 is the standard framework and Microsoft itself is not going to be a losing itself off. But I would point out that Windows 11 ships with the visual basic runtime. That's right, right From 1999. Yeah, so, yeah, it's still there. Oh, microsoft, it's craziness of like. I just described this whole reason why you want to keep constantly up to date. But I'll tell you this the company doesn't do it, right, the Windows team and do it. There are dependencies inside of Windows that are dependent, as they're talking about in the chat there, on 3.5, on 4, on 4.5 and on 4.8.
01:23:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right. So it's not just there, it's there for third party software, it's there for Microsoft.
01:23:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There yeah Dependencies inside of Windows.
01:23:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the little screen snippet there is. You know, anyone who actually looks at Windows update will know that not only do thesenet framework updates come up a lot, they take a really long time to install. Like they're notably time consuming, and I think it just has something to do with the legacy nature of the code.
01:24:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, they're not in any way efficient and I don't yeah, I don't see that Well, and the big thing is, when we got to four, we got side by side execution. So anytime you see something involving 3.5, it's because you can't side by side, which is particularly brutal, right.
01:24:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I skipped over this by mistake, but I don't know. Sometime in the past month, Notion came out with their calendar app. Right, this was the old Cron app that they bought. Wait, you mean a big deal.
01:24:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's ridiculous, I know.
01:24:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They just well, at the time I said you know, okay, I've replaced one note with Notion. I could replace word with Notion. Honestly, why don't you guys have a little Notion suite? Well, they just bought something called skiff and skiff. There's a lot of overlap. Skiff has a docs app. That's a lot like the main Notion app. They have a calendar app right, which is obviously Notion, doesn't sell storage, but skip does. So skiff sorry, did or does. They had their own sort of. I don't know what they were using on the backend, but they had their own kind of storage tiers. And then they have an email app, right. So email and calendar kind of go together. Fun. This is very interesting. This type of stuff, these things that are smaller, lighter, less full featured, but you know, smaller, lighter, simpler than Microsoft Office, have been really interesting to me for a long time. Google docs is a big example, all the kind of open source traditional office suites like Libra Office and so forth. But Notion is the first one for me where I was like, okay, like this maybe.
01:25:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is this something like? That's the question, right, really yeah.
01:25:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it's right. So there is a market out in the world for businesses that go and do things like Google workspace and Notion and Slack, right. They're kind of plugging things together, not using one giant, you know monolithic thing like Microsoft 365. I guess the only problem in this scheme is that those people are using Google for email and you know, I don't see anyone replacing Gmail, frankly. So I don't know. It's unclear what's happening here. This might just be two small teams coming together and saying we can be better going forward together.
01:26:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, the sweet things. The question is are people looking for alternative to Google?
01:26:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I don't think so. I think they're looking, I think no.
01:26:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I wouldn't probably. Now we can play the inshortification game, right, right, which, by the way, I'm amazed that Dr O seems to be penetrating in a new level of consciousness here. Yeah, oh yeah, all us tech people have known it for ages, but I'm having like.
01:26:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, I'm happy with that. Have you heard of this? He nailed the term that was so hard to brand things correctly.
01:27:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was the word of the year, this in 2023. It should be.
01:27:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it was for me and I it's perfect, because as soon as you explain in one sentence what it is, people like, oh yeah, my God, they see it. Then you see it everywhere. I think I compared it to buying a car I'd never see like a blue, you know, buick, whatever and now they're everywhere. My God, I see I don't. So look I when I bring that up.
01:27:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just say Google Docs and stuff has been running long enough now.
01:27:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's fairly insured-ified.
01:27:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So you have an opportunity to make a new product set and the Notion guys can do that. It's earlier in the certification cycle.
01:27:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, I think it happens faster now, right, I mean? So, yeah, I would say you know, for example, I very much prefer Gmail to any of the Microsoft stuff. But one thing that they added a million years ago and I God knows when or how but there's like a side panel now in this thing and you can hide it, but I do it. There's a keyboard command I do my mistake all the time. That opens it and I start taking a note, I guess, or whatever it is, and if I go and look at this it's probably like a Google Keep thing or something. I will see the beginnings of a million email replies where I am not looking at the screen and then I realize I'm typing in the wrong thing. And that's its own little form of insurification, in the sense that they want to make it really easy for you to get to meet and contacts and tasks and keep and all these stupid names that all sound the same, and I don't want any of it. I just want Gmail, you know.
01:28:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So of course, the same old problem is like they want what's their revenue model. They have all these mechanisms around trying to get value out of you. Yeah, yeah, so the certification seems to be stuck on the online side, because the online side has this disease of just not being okay with making you just pay for it.
01:29:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The thing about.
01:29:03
Yeah, so I feel like the cure for insurification would be giving people the option to pay to not get the shit Right.
01:29:12
I mean, it's a stupid way to say it, but we've talked to Chris Capicello for years about doing this in Windows. Hey, here's an idea. How about getting rid of all the crapware and the tracking and the ads and I'll pay you ten bucks a month? They're like oh, that would send a wrong message about you know that the base Windows is bad? And it's like no, it sends a message that if you pay enough, you can have a good experience, and that's what we experience everywhere else in life. So you know, there will always be the people that have to fly in the back of the plane or can't buy a luxury car and can't pay for the premium Google service or whatever we're talking about. That's the way of the world. I'm sorry, but like I would like to get out of that where I can, where it makes sense to me, where it can afford it and I buy my way out of this, or do I have to buy my way out of this?
01:29:55
Yeah, and unfortunately our world has gone topsy turvy because subscription services, which historically had been paid for no ads right, are now doing a combination of paying and seeing ads. Yeah, sure.
01:30:09
Exactly Right, everyone's doing it. Spotify, I'm sorry, everyone's doing it. The video service is doing it and you know newspapers have been doing this for years. I hate this, like I hate it. I want one or the other, I don't, anyway, yeah, so does what? Skif? No, I'm just doing it. Notion, and SKIF and ARC and these small companies like is there a plug and play thing of the future where you kind of just pick and choose from the services, everything interoperates and because maybe I'm paying each of them a little bit of money, but I've created this thing that is not crappy in the way that some of the Microsoft stuff is, or whatever, yeah, it's just that, in order to have all the interoperability, you have a parent, and it's typically Microsoft or an Apple, or yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:31:05
Anyway. So we'll see what comes out of this. It took Notion almost two years to turn Kron into a calendar app, you know, with their own branding. So I don't know, we don't know. They haven't said anything. In fact, there was no real formal announcement, there was just an announcement on the SKIF website that had happened. And then when you went to Notion, it was a very short interview of the CEO of Notion talking to the CEOs of the other company, co-founders, whatever, and it's just completely unrelatable. It's like, oh, we moved into the same expensive San Francisco loft that you guys used to be in. Like we have so much in common. Like, yeah, no, I know what that's like, you know.
01:31:47
Like I can identify Makes me want to buy your products.
01:31:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, like it's funny because I tried Kron maybe a year ago. You know it's all right, it was interesting. I did not know, notion, that that's Notion calendar. I had no idea. Yeah, that's what? Yeah, now that I'm looking at the website, it says Kron is now Notion calendar. And, by the way, the smallest print on the website, yeah, yeah, interesting. I mean Kron's a decent calendar program. So it's clear Notion is trying to build up a complete office. What's next A? Messaging app. They don't have a right.
01:32:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I see only thing missing Now if you want to break the process or the spreadsheet, it would be run a mail service. That is a giant commit. Yeah, I wouldn't do that.
01:32:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I agree with Gmail. That's what everybody else does, including Kron, I might right, right, and that was the he's. He's, he has email, right, they do, yeah, so skip is an email.
01:32:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I believe this stuff is all shut down, by the way. Like I tried to sign in for a couple of days in a row and then I read somewhere someone said yeah, the service backend has been snipped Like, so they have they have encrypted, end to end encrypted email, so I think they got it like like proton mail or what. Yeah, Right.
01:32:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're on the path. They're on the path that they focus on. They have a calendar, so there's some overlap there.
01:33:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And they have file storage, I would say. And their docs is an overlap with just notion. And yeah, file storage, I don't I mean.
01:33:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I bet you they bought it for, not for docs so much as mail and drive. That's what you, that's what you're looking at here.
01:33:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is weird that the free tier of notion you could just add stuff to that forever and they're never going to ask you for money, right, okay? That's never made a lot of sense to me. So you know, at some point they're going to ask for money and maybe this is how they do it. They'll they'll start using this as the backend and say, okay, well, this is the the plan, so you get some amount of storage for free. Whatever it might be, we'll see.
01:33:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, very interesting.
01:33:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now, as promised, we're. When did we see the most important?
01:33:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
part of the story today, xbox segment.
01:33:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, there's a lot of big news here, so I don't remember if we if we talked about this at all last week, but we must have. There's been these indications, that rumors. I guess you know that Microsoft is going to start bringing more games to other platforms, and it bothers me. It's bizarre to me that every time this happens you get these kind of head in the sand types that you know start complaining again about we're losing our identity, that Xbox without a console doesn't make any sense. So you got to get rid of the console. You know what is. What does it mean to be an Xbox exclusive if I can play it on the PlayStation? You know there's some news about how well Sony's doing in the console market coming up, so I'll just say you know what?
01:34:42
let's make the consoles and don't worry about it, because Microsoft has never once made money on hardware in Xbox. But Snofsky book I've been referencing, he called it basically a break-even business over the course of its history, meaning it probably hasn't been profitable overall, but it's probably pretty close. You know, and the thing that makes it profitable, the thing that makes it possible to be profitable, is not the hardware that had never made money on that, it's the services, which have expanded to include multiple subscription services. Right, microsoft has spent a lot of money buying studios, not just Activision Blizzard, right, a bunch of other studios, including all of the Zernax studios. Right, bethesda, etc.
01:35:27
I assume a lot of people looked at that and thought, hmm, they must be doing this so they can play Sony's game and have Xbox exclusives. But they've never said that. In fact, they've been very clear that what they want is for Xbox to meet gamers where they are meaning whatever devices they choose to use. The vast, well over 50% of the gaming market is mobile. Of the remainder, consoles are smaller than PCs, although that's pretty close, and mobile is much bigger than those two combined though. So, activision, blizzard, they've tried to make the case. I don't think anyone paid attention to this, but it was mostly both getting a mobile play going and okay.
01:36:10
But I think really, xbox becomes that thing which Microsoft has historically been good at, which is a company that has good IP that they can license and put it out into the world, you know, and it's software service space, however you want to describe that, right? So games and game franchises and I think I assume, if we did talk about this, I would have talked about this notion that, as an Xbox gamer, opening up these games to other platforms is good for you as well. But in my case, like a Call of Duty gamer, I witnessed the explosion of gamers I could play against when they opened it up to other consoles right, cosplay and then to PCs in the most recent couple of generations. More people, more playing, more game. It's better. It's better for everybody, right. It's better for Xbox as a business, because they own these things and they're making money on it and they're being profitable, right?
01:37:07
So, long term, do I think that Xbox will eventually say no to hardware? Yes, but I also think that console hardware is on the decline. I don't just think that it is right, yeah, but then we'll say so. We'll have some hard numbers in a moment here to kind of show you where that's heading. But the current market leader is going to be lucky to sell half as many as they sold of two generations ago. I mean, it's not even close.
01:37:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There are also much more expensive devices like the X-Potato. Yeah, there's a goofy point in the console market where the hardware has got so much power in it that it's almost not possible to make a profitable game that fully utilizes that hardware.
01:37:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think for the companies that make the consoles and then the companies that make the games for the consoles, the expense of these things has extrapolated, I mean, and they're expensive in different ways. It's expensive just R&D, it's expensive to manufacture, it's expensive the whole thing is expensive.
01:38:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The process of making art at the 4K HDR is just so costly. It's Hollywood, they're actually to pass that machine on.
01:38:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Quality graphics and effects. Yeah, it's become a tough thing. The nice thing about a cloud-based game assuming we don't have to talk about latency in bandwidth is that you only need one computer to be really good. On the back end it can display to anything right, so you can turn something that might be an old computer, a Chromebook, a phone, into a viable gaming machine, assuming these other conditions.
01:38:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I mean there's an incremental cost per user, but you can play with the math around that, but latency is going to kill it and I think speedlight is a difficult to beat. Yeah, that's right.
01:38:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Short-term. There's a hybrid thing, I think it's just like an AI, where having something locally makes sense and do as much as you can from the cloud, et cetera. So we'll see what happens. I don't think, look, microsoft's not going to exit the console market anytime soon, but long-term absolutely. And maybe the other way to look at it is just if they can have enough content in the software and services bucket that can help subsidize a losing hardware range, right?
01:39:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, that would be my point Like it's always been a loser. But are you credible in the gaming space if you don't have a device in the field? Like it's in the same way that the surface line was not really meant to make Microsoft money. It was meant to set a bar for the OEMs to make better devices. Yeah, it was a case you made for. Keep your hand in this game, like if you're talking about any regrets that you might have. It's like you didn't keep a phone in the game Because now it's needed. Yeah, yeah, you know, get your costs under control and don't go too nuts on the innovation side, but stay in the game. Maintain the pipeline of being built hardware because of the risk of disruption.
01:40:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, but the big difference between phone and like Xbox is that the quality, the content appearing on the phone, was terrible and going downhill big publishers.
01:40:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, they destroyed the dev eco market. But here's my point If you don't make a console, you are behold to the console makers for your multi-billion dollar gaming business. You need to be able to defend that product space. Okay, so let me, let me Okay.
01:40:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So for many years, microsoft's biggest partners were the PC industry, right, obviously, I'm sure they're still one of the biggest sets of partners, and that was an argument, right? I mean, we, microsoft, had been asking them for years to make thin light computers with and yada, yada, yada they weren't doing it and the justification for services. Like, we're going to show them what we meant and maybe if we do a good enough job, they'll be inspired and follow us down this path.
01:41:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay, and IBM also did their whole algebraic move, like there was a push by the folks that would benefit from making those machines not just machine makers to facilitate. Okay, and I see the same way for this.
01:41:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The only okay. The issue here is that gaming is not as simple as the PC business, right? So PC PCs are part of it, 25% or so, whatever the number is, you know. Consoles, another 25%. Smartphones are probably, you know, 50, 70, whatever, some giant percent, right?
01:41:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I would rather look at the revenue numbers of each of those stacks. It's not as much. The money in mobile is much more difficult.
01:41:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, look, we know, mike hello. Apple and Google both come up with their app store numbers at the end of the year. These are humongous markets. They talk about how much they pay out. We know that the vast majority of app store revenues on both platforms is games. They're humongous, like they're humongous.
01:42:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's just the nature of mobile gaming businesses doesn't well suit the highest market cap company in the world. It's a scummy business. It's free to play, pay to win, that's right. Yeah Right. It is literally exploiting people, I hear that.
01:42:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, how would Apple is experimenting right now with will iPhone users pay for like triple a console quality games? And then what's that experience? Even like, and it's not great, honestly, you know it's there, you can see it Like, you know. Obviously, in some ways, these devices are powerful enough to run those kinds of things, but anyway, I maybe the way to say this, because, honestly, no one can come, no one's going to come up with the answer, like there's no answer. I think the one thing we can all agree on is that gaming is changing and it may. There may be a future world in which Microsoft does not need a console. That world is not today, I know. I'm just saying that.
01:42:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I would argue, like you talk about the ARC browser, like there's a new room to innovate here. The number of times you've played with, do you play on the phone versus playing on the PC, versus playing on the console? Like there's an experience being waiting to happen for a really great, you know game.
01:43:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Anyway, we try different things. I think Nintendo landed on something semi-profound with the switch that we didn't realize was a thing. So they were playing the hardware game, which is brilliant, yeah, yeah, and it helps. I mean, it helps them do things. You know, if you're sitting on a couch with a phone like an iPhone, which a gorgeous screen, like I said, you know, 4k, basically quality, graphics, whatever but you want to stream it to your Apple TV on an actual 4K, it's going to fall apart right there, like it's, and you could run a wire. But then you're running a wire.
01:43:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And now you're like well, if I'm doing that, why do I do that? I think your idea here is that I play on the phone when I want to play on the phone and I flip to the console and I want to play on the console. Yeah, if I had the right game, the right game would have a great mobile experience that allows you to pay one aspect of the game, but it's like you're going to do better for that part of the game when you play it on a bigger screen with more horsepower. You know console.
01:44:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this was the dream of Xbox play anywhere. Right, this notion that you were. It was time to go to work, so you had to put down the Xbox and take your phone with you. You could play on the bus and maybe at night you were laying in bed with your Surface, laptop or whatever and playing it there, and it was the same games you know whatever.
01:44:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I just don't. I don't think the same games are good idea. Use the form factors, make a game, the distinct play experience for mobile and distinctly.
01:44:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, I think there are games that would work, but not every game, yeah for sure. So I look. Anyway, microsoft came into last week, or this month, or however you want to describe it, I think being very clear about what they wanted to do. Strategy wise, the Activision Blizzard was a $69 billion statement about exactly what they wanted to do. How serious they were. Yeah, yep. And so these rumors have started coming out and people are freaking out. You know, we used to freak out because Starfield was that game that was going to be on the PlayStation, but now it's not. And you guys are liars. And now they're like wait a minute now. And now it's like, oh, you know, you're going to bring Starfield to PlayStation. You're liars, I know. Like, what is it we want us to do that will make you all happy? There is, we're never going to do it.
01:45:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's impossible. Yeah, somebody's going to.
01:45:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it got so bad that it was last Thursday or Friday. Phil Spencer went on Twitter and said guys, we're going to talk about it and so it's coming soon. And then, I don't know, Monday, Tuesday this past week. They issued a statement on Thursday. At whatever time we're going to come out, we're going to release a podcast, we're going to talk about this, so we're going to explain their strategy. That's tomorrow, Right? Yeah, Tomorrow Thursday. That's right Now. My. I think I must have mentioned this last. I was already.
01:45:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Thursday here in Australia.
01:45:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so tell us what it says. Look up, go to Microsoftcom. So they were probably going to do this sometime in February. And then all this stuff leaks because they're spreading news to their partners and whoever, and someone leaked whatever happened. Yeah, everyone's leaking things and now it's going to happen a little earlier than they wanted.
01:46:15
But look, we're almost. We're halfway through February. They bought Activision Blizzard. We need to know what's going on there. Guys, come on Any day. Now it's almost the 15th. There's going to be second half of the month game pass games and if we seriously going to go through another cycle with no Activision Blizzard games. So that has to be another big part. I assume that wasn't the big part of it, but the other part was hey guys, you know, we just bought Activision Blizzard. We just talked for years, literally years, about meeting gamers where they are. We bought a studio that's already making games for other consoles. It was came up during the anti-trust stuff. People were like, oh, are you going to stop doing that? No, we're not going to stop doing that. It doesn't take much for Microsoft to point to what they already have and say most of what we do is actually in other places too.
01:47:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The question is by the way, our business is cloud and we don't care what the source of consumption is, as long as you consume our cloud.
01:47:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We've had Office on the Mac for decades. We've had Office on mobile devices now for several years. We are meeting you where you are. The big question to me is a timing and where, when whatever of the Activision Blizzard stuff on Game Pass, and which first party games, franchises, whatever, are going to start moving to other platforms? I'll just point out, by the way, sony has been putting out games on PC for several years now. Is there little ecosystem freaking out over there because of this? Maybe I don't know, but we're really thin skinned in the Microsoft world. It's amazing how much pushback there is to common sense. They did not spend $69 billion in Activision Blizzard to release things only on a console that nobody is buying. I'm sorry, sorry. If that doesn't make sense to you, then I cannot help. So we're going to learn tomorrow, thursday, what that is. My expectation is. We are going to find out everything I just described, which games when we're whatever, right?
01:48:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I think they're pretty much going to say would you say we say we're going to put it everywhere? I would argue we're not going to learn anything new tomorrow, that it's going to be, but if we already knew, they've already said that you're going to fail.
01:48:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's my argument. All along has been. They've been talking about this for a long time. I don't understand what the problem is.
01:48:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I agree with that.
01:48:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'll say it again the only thing we're going to learn is maybe some specifics with regards to particular titles of timing. But yeah, I'm shipping, yeah, yeah. So look, I'm paying 15 bucks a month for Game Pass Ultimate and I'd like to kind of take advantage of that. Can I get some Activision Love here, please? Anything, nobody.
01:48:55
Well, they've managed to do some layoffs, and that leads to this yes, so that leads to the second Xbox Tram of the week and my favorite topic, the FTC. I would point you all to my new favorite AI generated graphic, which is of a baby crying on a beach, because the baby in this story is the FTC and they're doing everything. It feels like sour grapes. Oh my God, this organization, as I now call them, the Futile Trade Commission, insisting on fighting not just yesterday's battles, folks, but the battles we've already lost in court.
01:49:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I repeat, I hadn't been told by the court. Stop fighting this battle.
01:49:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There was a quote I will never forget I can't speak verbatim, but the sheer nastiness of it from the judge in this case, who said you have unearthed over one million pieces of evidence of documents that you purported where, evidence of your claim that Microsoft was going to pull Activision, pull Call of Duty off of the PlayStation. Not a single one of these documents indicates this in any way, shape or form. In fact, most of them contradict that, as do their public statements, as do the deals they have reached with other companies to ensure that these games continue on these other platforms. They're crazy. These people are insane. Anyway, Microsoft announced some number 1900 jobs were being eliminated in a new business inside of their gaming unit called Microsoft. I think it's called Microsoft Gaming. If I'm not mistaken, it is a combination of X, Activision Blizzard and Microsoft Xbox employees. It's not everything in Xbox. I don't believe it includes all of the game studios that Activision Blizzard owned that are in different places around the world. But whatever, it doesn't matter. Some percentage of that was being laid off.
01:50:48
The FTC said hold on a second. They actually issued a legal challenge saying that this acquisition should be rolled back because of this. You promised not to do this, Did they? That's very unlikely. I was the thing. I was like that's interesting. That's interesting. I want to find that document Because it's going to be out there, right? Do you have millions of pages? Yep, it's not out there, but what is out there is that that judge the same judge I just misquoted did, in her ruling, discuss such things as vertical versus horizontal mergers and what that means. It is interesting. Her understanding of the acquisition was that Microsoft was going to treat Activision Blizzard the way they did some of these other studios, like Bethesda that it would be our mojang. It would be this thing that was operated independently. That's not what they did. They actually brought Activision Blizzard into Microsoft Gaming.
01:51:40
The FTC is arguing that in doing so, they're trying to make it harder and possible to roll back the acquisition later. If anyone ever wanted to do that. Okay, I guess the thing is. The thing is you can't tell a company that just spent $69 billion that they can't lay off redundant employees. You know, look, we can argue about how Microsoft does layoffs. We could know or not know the details, but ideally you have these two businesses you're combining. There are going to be redundancies in marketing and advertising and HR and wherever else you pick the best person for the job and the other one has to find another job or leaves and it's sad and whatever.
01:52:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I have to say, though, I have to say it is fairly common for companies To make assertions during these trials and during these disputes about how they're going to run the company, and it's fairly common that they lie and then, as soon as the merger is approved no, it happens all the time.
01:52:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No no, I'm not as soon as the merger is approved they do what they want.
01:52:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I'm glad the FTC is paying attention, because in years past they've just said oh yeah, fine, go ahead, do whatever you want.
01:53:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Unfortunately for the FTC, though, all I can speak to is what actually happened here, which is this this is a very tiny, this is a tiny percentage of Activision Blizzard employees. Understand.
01:53:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But if they made the assertion during the merger discussions that they wouldn't do that?
01:53:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
then they need to hold their feet on fire. Let me complete it. Activision Blizzard was going to have layoffs if this thing fell through. Those layoffs would have been higher than the layoffs that Microsoft underwent. And Microsoft organized this new business such that, if this thing is rolled back, they can let those people go and nothing changes. They literally organized this new company such that the Activision employees are in their own little thing inside of it and that, if God forbid, this is rolled back. So Microsoft was able to come out. Microsoft actually had to appear in court and say, yeah, none of this matters, because none of it's true. And that was the end of that. I like that. The FTC I don't like anything about the FTC. Actually, I appreciate that any regulatory body is going to do some form of due diligence and all this kind of stuff. Whatever the FTC has been trying to… Not to make any accusations that weren't actually made. Yeah, I've never found any evidence that Microsoft said anything like this.
01:54:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What I did find was… Microsoft. This is from the letter Microsoft represented to this court. That the quote. So they're quoting Microsoft's representation. Hold on a second.
01:54:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wait, wait, wait. This is the FTC. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Well, since we're talking about lying… they're quoting Microsoft's representations.
01:54:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, they're not quoting. They're not quoting.
01:54:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're saying Microsoft represented. What actually happened was that the judge assumed that this would be a vertical merger and that these things would be kept separately, and that, because that was….
01:54:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, obviously haven't read the letter from the FTC. No, I did, I quoted from it. Okay, okay, microsoft, not the judge.
01:54:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, I'm looking…. Look, the FTC has a… but where's the…? So I'm sorry. My point is this the thing you're quoting from is the FTC. It doesn't link to something that you can go look at that. Microsoft did say this when the FTC started this process….
01:55:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It does. It says EF23, opposition injunction pending appeal. At 24C also, which is the judge's… I know, I went….
01:55:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wait, wait, wait, I wrote about this I mean, it's the judge who says it and the FTC. When they started this process of complaining about this acquisition, the very first thing that they did to enter into evidence was they claimed that Microsoft lied to the EU to get the EU in an attempt at the time the EU had not approved it to get the EU… I'm sorry, yeah to get the EU to approve the deal. Microsoft never did that. In fact, it was such a lie that the EU had to issue a public statement that that never happened. The FTC is the party that has been lying here, not Microsoft.
01:56:02
So the point is, regardless of who said what, what happened was Microsoft organized this business in such a way that, should it be rolled back, they can do it without hurting the business and everything is fine. So this particular complaint like most of their complaints, frankly, like they're worries about Call of Duty or they're worries about Cloud Gaming is nonsense. It's nonsense, okay, so I…. Look, we don't understand how they became this incumbent. These are representatives of the people from predatory business practice.
01:56:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is the thing.
01:56:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Why do they think it sucks Right? They're trying to pay these people to protect us against companies behaving illegally or at least in some kind of belligerent fashion toward consumers or whatever. This deal has absolutely many things that need to be looked at and were done, but they're still trying to roll it back and it freaks me out the lengths that they will go to… it seems very demanding. Make claims that… All you have to do is look at them. So yeah, like I said when I wrote about this, I looked at this thing and they said, okay, let me find this thing. What did they say? And yeah, the judge in her ruling says you know, this is not the reason she tossed aside the FTC complaint. It's not the reason, but it is in a list of things where she said this and this and this, but ultimately, what it was was the FTC's fears that Microsoft will make these games less inclusive to other platforms is not supported by evidence. Or does it make any business sense for Microsoft? It makes no sense that there's central argument.
01:57:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is about Microsoft misrepresenting what they're going to do with the company during their merger thing. Well, but you're bringing up this game thing.
01:57:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is a specific issue about the playoffs. Let me again bring up the thing that addresses that concern. Microsoft organized Activision Blizzard within Microsoft in such a way that it can be rolled aside if required by law. So the concern here is that Microsoft supposedly put this stuff together in such a way that it will be impossible to take Activision Blizzard and put it back together again, and that's not true.
01:58:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Has the court ruled on the letter from the FTC? The court doesn't.
01:58:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's no ruling on it. It's a legal complaint, okay.
01:58:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, has there been any action on the legal complaint? No, okay, so we'll wait and see how that works out. Yeah, yeah.
01:58:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's no way you could make the promise not to lay anyone off and actually have the shareholders not immediately fire you. That's not how you acquire companies. It's not a thing.
01:58:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's no version of $69 billion spent, thousands and thousands of people redundant and we have to keep them all.
01:59:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's crazy. Well, and if you made that promise, you would be fired. No one made that promise, because you can't make that promise. It's not something you can make.
01:59:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right. Well, you can cynically make the promise, hoping the FTC will prove the merger, knowing that you're not going to do it. Well, it happens all the time.
01:59:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, but if you make that promise, the shareholders are freak out. That's bad fiduciary governance. I don't, I really don't understand.
01:59:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there's a wink, wink, nudge, nudge in all of this from Microsoft. Oh yeah, we're not going to do that. But look, it happens all the time.
01:59:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
At&t did it, time Warner did it, but this wasn't, but this was not what the FTC was complaining about. This wasn't the FTC complaint. They weren't worried about losing jobs at Activision Blizzard. They weren't worried that Microsoft was going to roll Activision Blizzard into the company or not. This was never part of that discussion. They had two concerns that Microsoft was going to keep Call of Duty from Sony, which was a Sony invented stunt that they fell for completely, and that Microsoft was going to somehow control this new market for cloud gaming, which does not exist as a viable market yet and might never.
02:00:11
And that second complaint was the same one that the CMA had. Those guys were in league on that. They literally partnered to come up with these arguments and in both cases those arguments weren't always nonsense. And since this court case concluded, microsoft or it was before the, but before the acquisition was consummated Microsoft reached a 10 year deal to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation Plus. All the public statements too we're not going to spend $69 billion on this thing and keep it away from its biggest platform. We they're going to have an event tomorrow where they talk about why they're bringing stuff to other platforms In the Xbox world. What we're worried about is the exact opposite of what the FTC is worried about it is these things are not compatible. The FTC's claims are crazy and the fact that they're going after it after they lost is not just like historically unprecedented, because it is, but it's crazy. They do not have an argument that makes sense.
02:01:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm just hoping this comes down to an individual in the FTC that needs to.
02:01:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
When you really like Lisa Khan, you mean, I don't know, you guys are nuts.
02:01:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're driving me crazy. This is their job. When a company represents that they're going to run the business, the merged business, in a certain way and then does not. It's the. Ftc's job to return and say your honor, they're not living up to the agreement. Now, the only dispute at this point is what Microsoft's representations were. The FTC seems to think very clearly that they made those representations. You have yet to show me that they did not.
02:01:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You just assert they did not. Excuse me. What I said was that Microsoft responded to the charge by saying we integrated them into our business in such a way that we could separate them?
02:02:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I understand, but what were the representations they made before during the argument about whether the merged business?
02:02:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The link that you're talking about links back to the ruling from that Judge Corley. Judge Corley, where she said that Microsoft will as part of a. It was just. It was a list of.
02:02:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the FTC's responsibility for company renegs on a promise they made prior to the merger approval that if the company does not keep their promise they should not pursue that. You agree they should pursue that? Yes, absolutely, if that's what happens. So let's wait and see what the court says, because if you're right?
02:02:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, let's Okay, but let's, In the meantime, let's discuss. The court will say well, that's BS.
02:02:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They never said that. I don't. I suspect that's not what's going to happen.
02:02:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, well, I can tell you what's not going to happen, but I don't know. That's true. Okay, all right, so he's not going to roll back the acquisition because of a.
02:02:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, no, no, no, no. They're going to say to Microsoft you got to adhere to the agreements you made. I don't think that Prior to the approval, because I think Microsoft.
02:03:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Microsoft's already said that they are an explained no Microsoft has.
02:03:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't use it with the argument Microsoft's wheezing around saying, well, this isn't exactly what we. This is, this is, but it's oh, you know, blah, blah, blah, that's yeah, of course that's their argument, but I think you're assuming.
02:03:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think you're not with the quote where Microsoft made this promise and I think we'll find out in court.
02:03:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think you swear it on something. Then we can talk about it.
02:03:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I think we'll find out in court. I won't. This is I guess we will. Yeah, but here's the thing.
02:03:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But no hold on, but I don't. It's no, no, no. It's impossible to say they're lying. This is a renegade lawyer in the FTC. The FTC is a horrible agency. That's what the judge said to them.
02:03:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what the judge said, Leo.
02:03:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What did the judge say to?
02:03:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
them Like there we go.
02:03:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What did? The judge say to them.
02:03:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just I don't understand why I have to keep. So the judge has responded to this letter.
02:03:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no, no, no. Okay, so the judge didn't say that. Oh boy.
02:03:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When the FTC lied about Microsoft's representation. I know I played a lot of these. No, okay, so you're re-litigating something from the past. No, the FTC is re-litigating.
02:04:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the point the FTC brought. The FTC attempted to block this merger for very specific reasons. It had nothing to do with the future structure of Activision Blizzard. That was not a proof-requisite, had nothing to do with it. It was out of fear that Microsoft would control cloud gaming, which is ridiculous, and would take games away from other platforms.
02:04:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're putting words in their mouth. We don't know.
02:04:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I'm not If that was the complaint.
02:04:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But if Microsoft for some reason randomly said, oh well, we're not going to reorganize the companies, they're going to be a subsidiary. That is a concession made to the FTC in order to get merger approval, they are bound by that.
02:04:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, hold on a second. If the judge said the only reason I'm allowing this is because Microsoft said we are not going to integrate this company into Xbox for some reason. That's the only reason I'm going to allow this, then we could have a discussion about that. That was never part of the discussion. That had nothing to do with why this merger was approved by the judge. That had nothing to do with it.
02:05:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think there's a reasonable dispute over what Microsoft did and whether it adheres or doesn't adhere to the agreement that they made. Microsoft says no, no, that's not something we agreed to. Ftc says it's something we agreed to. I think it'll be decided in court. I think it's not. They're trying to get companies to stick to their agreements. All I know is I lived this case for two years and this was not a point of view. I know, but you're not a fan of it. This is not a point of convention no, no, no, no.
02:05:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You never liked it, but I paid a lot of attention to it and I wrote a lot about it and I read a lot of those court documents and this was never part of the argument. This was not a debate about a reason Microsoft should or should not be able to acquire this company. This is not. You're talking about re-litigating. This is what the FTC is trying to do right now. They're trying to find some little like oh, it's like wait, this is this over here and this is this over here. See, the whole thing gets thrown out. It's like no, you came here with these two ideas.
02:06:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's how you characterize it. I would characterize it as them doing their job and you would. I hope you would agree that this is their job and I would hope you would also agree that they need to do this job. These companies steamroll over consumers and other companies all the time. Listen. I'm not the and the only watchdog besides the US Congress, which is 100% of that is the FTC.
02:06:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But again, but. The steamrolling aspect of this deal would include such things as competitive and consumer harm. Microsoft's stated goal all along, and I think the thing they're going to repeat tomorrow, is that our goal is to bring these games to more gamers, not less. In fact, this is sort of Richard told the story about. Was it Maker's Mark, where they were never going to age whiskey but it took the Suntory company to come in this giant conglomerate and say guys, there's a market for this stuff here. Activision was never going to get into subscription services. They were never going to do anything like Game Pass and this is something that's going to bring those games to more people. So it doesn't mean the whole thing is okay. I'm just saying it's an example of something where, yeah, giant, steamrolling big tech company, everyone hates these guys. I get it, but they have enough money to bring these games to more gamers and it's something Activision, blizzard wasn't going to do.
02:07:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you're in favor of this merger.
02:07:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's fine. They got the merger. I'm not going to say that because I've evaluated it for what it is. It's not because it's Microsoft and I love everything they do. You know I'm not like that.
02:07:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I complain about big tech all the time. I want to defend the FTC because I think it's really important that you not cast dispersions at them, that they're not acting. Oh no, no no, just assuming they're acting in bad faith is really problematic because it's the last thing.
02:07:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm not assuming. I'm sorry.
02:08:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I want to be really clear about this. I'm not assuming this. They are acting in bad faith. In my opinion, I act. Regulation anti-trash regulars play a huge role and important role, and in the United States in particular, they've let that thing sit silent for 10 years. Well, all these big tech monopolies have occurred. This is a huge problem. There's no doubt about it. But when I look at these things on an individual basis, the FTC is irresponsible by not going after these more bigger problems that we have in big tech than this. And I guess we could look at any individual cases and say, okay, this one makes sense, this one doesn't, whatever. Historically speaking, like I said, there is no precedent for them losing in federal court and still trying to litigate it.
02:08:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think they're trying to. They've never done that before the merger. This is not about that. This is saying you made some agreements and you're not adhering to them, and I think that that's appropriate for them to do, because companies do this all the time. In the past, they haven't been held to the fire. I think that's a good thing.
02:09:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let me just explain. Microsoft answered it and their answer makes sense. Oh, okay, fine.
02:09:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's not bother you, let's go ahead. Microsoft said it was okay. No, no, no, no, no, no, never mind.
02:09:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I don't look, I don't know what's the process.
02:09:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like if the judge will now be ruling on it.
02:09:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, no, I'm sorry you misunderstand. The FTC looks sees a new story that Microsoft is laying off 1,900 people. Among those people are some people from Activision Blizzard. We don't actually know what the number is, but whatever. And they say you know, I? I thought you guys said that you were going to do what, not lay off, but what was like? What led to this? Like we, you're you're.
02:09:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a reasonable question. That's a reasonable question.
02:09:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But who do you ask? Do you do you actually approach Microsoft? No, because they hate what's going on here.
02:09:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because or do you approach? Because they're the, they're the defense in this action. You'll go approach a court and I presume a court will rule. And you know what? If the court says that you're fully full of it micro, as FTC, microsoft's doing exactly what they agreed to, then I will say absolutely you were right, the FTC had no merits. Let's wait and see what the court says.
02:10:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is. You know, the FTC like I said, try to block this went to court, lost, lost in the most egregious way imaginable. It wasn't close. I mean, you know, you got to go look at this ruling. It was incredible. They ripped the FTC to shreds. There was no evidence. So now we're going to kind of pedantically look at something after the fact and say, well, ftc, but none of this proves their point. None of this has anything to do with why they tried to block this merger.
02:10:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but they're not saying that. They're saying you made some, you made some agreements and you're not like, aren't they? No, they're saying it's saying that Microsoft made some assurances that this would not happen, and now it's happening. Now I think it's time for a judge to say well, what are the assurances Microsoft made? What did they do? Does this measure up? That's not trying to stop the merger rule, the merger back. It's just saying you got to agree when you agreed it. When a company agrees to do something, in order to get an emergency through.
02:11:02
You've got to hold their feet to the fire, but you understand that. Okay, well, we'll stop, but I mean there's no, maybe you understand.
02:11:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what they're trying to do. You and I disagree. No, no, I mean no, I mean no, we don't. There's no disagreeing on this. That is what they're trying to do. They're trying to roll back the merger. That's their aim. That's it as much that? No, that's literally what they're doing. That is the point of this.
02:11:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, that's right, I don't know right. Fine, no, it says it, it says it right.
02:11:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can read the quote for yourself. They say we want them to stop the merger. The need for injunctive relief pending completion of the administrative proceeding. The administrative proceeding is the unprecedented legal action that the FTC has taken internally to try Microsoft privately after losing in federal court In other words what are you reading the life from? What is that from? Is the FTC filing that you're quoting from, that you think has all?
02:11:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the answers. What are you? What you just said? What was that?
02:11:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the last line. It says the reported layoffs. They don't even know if these layoffs are true. They read about it in the news, right? Anyway, the layoffs. Well, we all agree, the layoffs are true.
02:12:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You ask the judge can you rule on us? That's what you do. They're doing their job. For you to apply that there's somehow being I don't want to stick to the thing you just said.
02:12:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Stick to the point. You said they this has nothing to do with them wanting to roll, but this says explicitly this is what it is. These layoffs underscores our need the FTCs for injunctive relief, meaning rolling back the merger pending the completion of the administrative proceeding, our internal trial. After losing in federal court, the FTCs, for the first time in its history, decided they're still going to try to prevent this merger from happening, even though it already happened. That's it says this explicitly right here. That's what that means. Okay, so that I'm just saying I, instead of going after Apple and Google and Amazon and whatever they're, they're trying to retry a case, not trying to. They are going to retry a case they already lost, right? That's why I'm upset about it. Yeah.
02:12:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I agree with you on that. They shouldn't be trying to reverse the merger, but I do think they should keep Microsoft to make sure it's agreed.
02:13:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
On that I agree, and I would say, my issue only is is that, as CFTC, and this is the this is what they're really trying to do? So, yes, look, I hope you know me well enough to know. Big fan of antitrust, big fan of big tech being held to the fire, big fan of reversing and certification, we talk about this all the time. Right, this particular case, though, as big as it is, there's no I well, it's already been tried, We've there's been no Microsoft made the concessions they needed everywhere in the world to ensure that this was as positive an outcome as they can be.
02:13:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The Ninth Circuit will then say you know, it's over, it's done. Stop trying to relitigate this.
02:13:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There you go, let's see, I don't know what federal court can do to prevent the FTC from doing their internal trial. I don't know Like I don't. I don't know enough about the. You know the structure of these organizations, even know if they can do anything about it Well.
02:14:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The FTC has in fact turned turned back other mergers after the merger is completed, so it's not the first time that would have happened.
02:14:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but but they've never tried to do it after losing in federal court. So that's, that's unprecedented. Anyway, I'm sorry.
02:14:22 - Speaker 2 (Host)
I didn't want to argue about that, but I but I feel like that.
02:14:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think that the point is that the Xbox section would be the yeah I appreciate it, I did. No, but I think the only thing that bothers me about this debate is that I actually think Leo and I are on the same page. I just wanted to fend the FTC.
02:14:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I really think it's irresponsible to imply the FTC is acting I don't know. Well, in general, it would be irresponsible.
02:14:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
In general, it would be irresponsible to suggest that any antitrust regulator was acting whatever. You know. In this case, because they have this motive, I I think this agency is off the rails and I think this is all political. Unfortunately, they were given the mandate by the Biden administration to go after big tech and instant and you know, look what happened in the past happened. So it's like they've just been really aggressive on anything new. And look this 69 billion. That warranted a lot of scrutiny, no doubt about it. But that scrutiny, you know, kind of came once to the test of the federal court and that this is what they're focusing on now. This sort of blows my mind and the very language of that filing we've been reading from, I think, kind of supports the notion that they're coming at this from a very uneducated spot. It's a very strange place and it's like they didn't learn the lesson of. You know, maybe if you're going to make an accusation, have some evidence. You know the FTC could have gone to Microsoft and said we'd like to have some more information about this layoff that you're doing. We want to know how many people are from Activision Blizzard. We want to know how many from Microsoft. We want to know the structure of this Microsoft gaming unit you just announced that has people from Activision Blizzard in it. Is there anything in here that keeps you from meeting the? You know your legal requirements from this ruling.
02:16:23
You know I find it weird that they just issued a legal. I don't that's what I meant by process. I'm not sure this is the right process, but I don't know. In that case, I really don't know. I just know that this agency has been off the rails against Microsoft and I don't understand it.
02:16:39
The UKCMA was exactly the same way, and the fact that these guys were explicitly partnering on those cases, I think is telling. But you know, whatever, yeah, so I have a problem with that. But look at the EU. Look at how amazing those people have been dealing with big tech in a logical and kind of legally defensible fashion and look at the change they've instituted. Meanwhile we get the FTC is worrying about some hundreds of people from Activision Blizzard in a vertical and or horizontal merger that was already approved by federal court. Jesus, I mean, there are important things happening in the world. I just doesn't feel like one of them. That's my point. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to argue the point too much. Okay, let's move on to fun stuff. Sony and their cratering console business yeah, Unfortunately, you know this is.
02:17:33
Is that really a crater? Yeah, it is a crater, sadly so. I think the console business is going downhill and I'll support that with some numbers. But this is kind of the market leader in the sense that it's like Sony and Xbox only really They've been two to three times the sales of Xbox for last couple of generations. They predicted for this fiscal year, which ends in March, and in March they were going to sell 25 million units which, after the October quarter ended, would have required a Christmas miracle. They tried to pull it off by overspending on ads and promotional sales for the product. They ended up having the greatest quarter the PlayStation's ever had. They sold I think it was 8.2 million units, but they fell short by over a million of what they, what others, expected and several million short of what they needed. And now they're going to fall short for the fiscal year which we all kind of saw coming October, november anyway. The problem is they're looking at the future and they're like yeah, this is the end game. This Sony has come out explicitly and said this is we're winding this down. Like this is they have no big franchise games coming out in the next fiscal year. There's nothing major happening. We're going to. They're going to kind of manage the end of this life cycle. So we don't know what that means to Xbox exactly because we don't have Xbox numbers. But you know, again, consensus was that Sony was much higher. If they, where are they now? They have said explicitly they're sold about.
02:19:03
I did the math and came up with 58 million, but according to Sony it's about 50 million sold through consoles. This thing we're going to see declining. You know the console sales decline from here on out. This may end up being almost certainly will end up being their lowest selling PlayStation console of all time. And the numbers go like this we know that the best one was the PlayStation 2, 155 million units, probably higher. We didn't have a good measuring way to measure that back then. I guess PlayStation 4 was around 120, playstation 3 about 88, right, and the original PlayStation was a little over a hundred. I don't see them reaching 88. I don't see them reaching, honestly, 65. I think this thing kind of peters out and then it's very expensive.
02:19:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I think you just got to a point where it's like it's not a kid's toy anymore, it's a five color device.
02:20:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The problem is like Sony has done a pretty good job over the years of reducing costs of the course of a life cycle and making more, making money on hardware right and Nintendo does a great job on this as well you speak to an important point like how many versions of PS4 was there?
02:20:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Five, yeah, exactly.
02:20:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And Microsoft's done the same thing, where they released like a new version of the console and it looks kind of new and fun, but it's really there because it costs them less to make, right, that's the point. You have fewer chips and whatever, cheaper plastics, whatever it is. But they said in this earnings release, like we're having trouble doing this, it's these things are expensive to make. And they did their. The supposed thin version right, it wasn't that much thinner, it wasn't any cheaper.
02:20:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, on the other side of this is you get you or you may. There's another generation coming. There should be a PS6, except that we can't fully utilize the PS5. Like it has a much more power than it is.
02:21:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I actually expect that. So Nintendo's this year will release a new switch, right, a new console. I think they're going to call it a switch too, or something, you know. I think it will play all the old games, it will have better graphics, and blah, blah, blah, blah it's not Nintendo's tendency, but it may be.
02:21:18
There's this. They've indicated a desire. No, they've said explicitly we want to. We're working through, but we want to figure out a way to bring games forward Like we want to, you know, cause they see what Xbox has done, I think, and they like that part of it. I think gamers would like it. They make money selling hardware. So selling people, hardware upgrade in their case makes sense. And you know, video games are like Star Wars movies Every time a new version comes up, people buy them again. And you know, I think they've got a good market for that.
02:21:44
So I think it would make sense for Sony to call something the PlayStation 6 and have it be dramatically better and yada, yada, yada, but have it be fully backward compatible, and maybe in the past they might have called it a PlayStation 5 Pro or you know, whatever the terminology might be. I don't, you know, we'll see and Microsoft's probably going to do the same thing. Honestly, we saw those rumors last year about the redesigned SNX tiers of those consoles and you know we'll see. But this is honestly, I'm not. I don't. I don't say this when I was joking earlier. If you thought I was happy about this, I was not. I mean, this is a little alarming.
02:22:24
The stuff that Sony looks to to the future that looks good, are things like active accounts across PlayStation, and then they talk about shifting to an attract, shifting to attractive premium services. Right, this is the one thing that Microsoft seems to have gotten right up with Xbox and Sony. You know they, they've had PlayStation plus and PlayStation whatever for a while, but their subscriptions actually decreased. By the way, they didn't. I should say I'm sorry, they decreased in, it was at profits, decreased in software, I think I can't remember who. Was it decreased in numbers or decreased in profits? I think it was a decrease in numbers but maybe an increase in profits because it was more.
02:23:10
They're more expensive now, or something like that, something like that. But they're, that business to me is kind of flat. I think Sony needs a big cross platform play as well, and so, after you know, it'd be kind of interesting, after all the Activision, blizzard complaints, after you know whatever happened with this generation of consoles underperforming, I think we can all agree If Sony kind of came out and became a lot like Xbox. You know, no, I mean I, they're already doing PC it wouldn't make sense for Sony to put games on Xbox, because the more. You know console because it's just maybe too small, but it would make sense to put them on mobile to have a bigger mobile play right, and that's what Microsoft has been talking about.
02:23:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So we'll see. Well, he said, nintendo hit this perfectly with the switch to make a really great yeah, yeah.
02:24:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And I mean that console also winding down right.
02:24:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But they but you're having a conversation about it. Is this the end of console game?
02:24:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, yeah, yeah, I I've always liked where consoles landed. I know you feel very strongly about the PC, for example. I feel like the future. I think the thing that will kill the consoles will just be some mobile something, something you know that I just think it's a different gameplay style.
02:24:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I like playing on my PC because I have a 43 inch 4k that I'm sitting three feet from Right, like why would I want to sit 10 feet from my 80 inch screen with a controller whose batteries are failing and I'm going to have to put a good keyboard and mouse and then I speak to the PC.
02:24:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, look, I that's like a personal preference. I mean, I hear you right. I would just say, you know, gaming overall has gone the way all personal computing has gone, which is that we used to sit in a room in front of a certain screen. That was all we had, and now we can be anywhere out in the world and play games, and just a different kind of play. Yeah, yeah it is, but I mean I wonder if it always has to be, I don't know. So I think I think mobile has kind of laid waste to the traditional markets, you know, for all these things really Well.
02:25:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean the race to the more and more powerful console hit this interesting limit when the game designers were having a tough time utilizing the thing in the first place and at the same time the market said you know, it's good enough. Four and a half inch screen.
02:25:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, I can. My 57 year old, I think I well I tell you that that four inches is about the size of a pixel to me, so that doesn't help.
02:25:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, so, but I think it's sad that you know you got that combination of forces where and I do. You know Nintendo is also one that consistently demonstrates that photo realism doesn't necessarily make up the game. Yeah, that's true, right, so I think in some ways we're getting a rationalization of gaming, like there was just a race to recreate reality on these hugely powerful and expensive and consumptive machines and the meantime fun was somewhere else.
02:26:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, Okay, yeah, I mean, I, I, I we've compared Nintendo to Sony in the past. I think there's a, there's just a. Sony has rather Nintendo has tapped into something that I don't think Sony or Microsoft could ever tap into. It's just a and it's it's a hard thing to explain. You couldn't explain it to an investor and say this is why you want to. You know, own part of my company because they would look at you like you were insane. But it happens and you look at it and you're like wow, they've done something special there. Yes, I just, you know, microsoft tried this a million years ago, remember, with the first connect, with connect and the. You know, nintendo had like the little wee guys and me's or whatever, and we had our own stupid version and it just it's just like the.
02:26:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it's both Sony and, and the rest of the gaming industry is soaked in that bro culture, and Nintendo resisted that it was the first person shooter aggressive, yeah, Super realistic. We are going to take three dimensional soundscapes of the caulking of every kind of rifle in this game. Mindset versus. You know, Mario's got a monster.
02:27:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There are articles out in the world that are from gaming publications, where they bring in an arms expert to look at weapons in a Call of Duty game or whatever, and explain to you how real or real they are not you know, or what are real, not real there.
02:27:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and it's a. There's a cultural element that shows up there in these kinds of games and in a lot of ways it feels burned out. Yes, and Nintendo, and in meantime it's like, well, the gaming's burned out. It's like then you go look over in Nintendo and go, no, it's not Right.
02:27:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's the well. This is the wall I ran into a year ago right, it was almost exactly a year ago where I said you know, I'm, I'm, I have an unhealthy relationship with this thing. It's the same thing over and over again and it doesn't feel like it's good for me.
02:28:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, it's like this. It's culturing this body chemistry that's unhealthy yeah.
02:28:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And I, I, I and you. You do it because it's an addiction, and what you forget is that you remember this used to be fun. You know and I think that's the thing Nintendo is able to capture. I look at those games and I think they're goofy. But a new Mario game comes out and they sell 10 millions of them right away, like it's. You know, there's a huge market for that.
02:28:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I had a very dear friend of mine who's never been a gamer, but her husband is. It's like I really want to play, I want to get into gaming enough to be able to play with him and I said how should I play? And steered her towards Zelda. I, I know, you know, like, I don't like. You don't like dramatic violence, you don't like photo realism, you don't like like and you can carry a switch around and frickin Zelda call the wild is just a sub.
02:28:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've never done this but for years I've been talking about. At the time it was like my wife, my daughter, just my wife, and like sitting down and say, look, we're going to together play a game like fire watch, which is just a slow boil, you know, kind of a mystery story, and it's really it's just an interactive story. You know, playing a movie it's not about reflexes and doing things at the right time, there's some puzzles and but really it's just about an unfolding story and you, you walk around this landscape and weird things happen and I, you know there's something to be said after a busy day, detuning with stupid TV, because you let your brain, brain rest a little bit. But I think there are advantages too to, you know, to playing games and to engaging a parcy of rain a little bit, you know.
02:29:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So it doesn't have to be a military shooter. No, and yeah, that that whole adrenaline rush side of game, which is, you know, can also be a release as well, as opposed to these, these talking about games like Minecraft and Kerbal Space Program, the kind of games where you tend to garden, tend to space that you have created.
02:30:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
02:30:08
Anyway, what you want from a game, there's yeah, there are kind of these horror games that probably have the same kind of a weird thing to say, but almost like a healing effect, like a horror movie, because you see things happening to other people that are terrible, that are worse than anything that will ever happen to you, and it kind of makes you feel better about your own life.
02:30:26
You know, they get kind of a weird psychology, but anyhow, yeah, speaking of Disney, disney and kind of a curious move, I think invested $1.5 billion in Epic Games, the foil of Apple Computer, disney's biggest, you know, kind of fan, and you know, I don't know what, they are partners or whatever. So that's kind of interesting and I guess the idea here is, I'm sure they looked at, well, they own Marvel, but they have Marvel and they have Star Wars and they have these big franchises and they're seeing the same thing that Netflix sees, although I don't think Netflix has been particularly successful so far. Where there's this market for video games is humongous and it's content it's kind of the thing we were just talking about and maybe we need to get into this too, and that maybe there will be future Disney franchise games and you know that you could see something like that, maybe chipping away at some of the success that Nintendo has right, so kind of.
02:31:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Maybe they're just also positioning this idea that the the world garden app store is in jeopardy, and so one would be. Why do you position yourself elsewhere as well, just to hedge your bets? It's not that much money billion and a half.
02:31:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, oh well, I mean you might have thought so. Disney maybe has been looking at this for a long time and maybe the one of the things that held them back was you know, most of the market is mobile. Yep, most of the market is these companies are taking 30% chunk out of everything that doesn't make science financially, but if it starts to fall by the wayside, oh, hold on a second, that changes the calculus quite a bit and quite a bit.
02:31:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And you get there quick, just in, so we don't have to race after the fact. Yep.
02:32:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I'm just speculating there. I don't know why they're doing it, but it's. It is interesting. 1.5 billion in Epic games I mean the ball company.
02:32:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, the small company, from a giant company that they can afford it. Yeah, very interesting.
02:32:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then I'm just going to throw this one out there, because I, when you think about Microsoft's big games, there's always these events they do with Minecraft where, like the most recent one was Godzilla's in Minecraft. No, you know, you can bring anything to Minecraft and it's kind of fun. They're starting to do this with flight simulator and I'm like I don't know what to think of this. So flight simulator, obviously super realistic, you know, that's kind of the shtick there you talk about, like gun experts looking at weapons and Call of Duty or whatever there are, you know, airplane experts looking at airplanes in this game. But they are perfect, they're, they're meant to be perfect. I don't, I can't say that this is the first time they've done something like this exactly, but they are releasing an expansion pack for Flight Simulator that is based on the Dune movies, right, because part two is coming out, I think, next month, imminently. Yeah, yeah and okay.
02:33:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And there's some fun flying machines in that version. Yeah yeah.
02:33:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So you get this new planet, obviously Arrakis, and there's new types of aircraft, those kind of weird kind of dragon flight.
02:33:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Everybody's looking for a way to promote their movie. This is clever.
02:33:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's this interesting Microsoft. I was like, yeah, all right, you know, yeah, why not All right?
02:33:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I you know again, microsoft's trying to be in the public assault. Yeah, that's a major movie brand wants to associate themselves with Microsoft.
02:33:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's better than the typical Xbox partners in the broader world, which usually companies like Monster Drinks or Doritos or Oreo Cookies or whatever Like. This is at least not unhealthy. And you know, and again speaking very vaguely, but in the sense of reaching gamers where they are, you could sort of, maybe, you know, like Taylor Swift brought in more people who watched the Super Bowl than has ever happened in history, maybe this will bring in some audience to gaming that might not have otherwise even looked at this game. Yeah, yeah, maybe.
02:34:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm sure that's part of it. Yeah, and anything that puts Microsoft on brand in front of not just the geeks, it's good for Microsoft. They've been trying to do that for quite a while, yeah.
02:34:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So that seems you know it's okay. I don't know, I think that's cool.
02:34:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're listening to this weekly Paul Therat, richard Campbell. We're going to get to the back of the book now. Back of the book time. Paul Therat kicks things off for the tip of the week.
02:34:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, the tip of the week is petition. The FTC no sorry, it's too.
02:34:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't get me started, I don't do it. You want to shield for a giant mega tech corporation. It's not a mind Okay.
02:34:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yeah, I would never Well, would I? No? Would I get paid enough? Maybe not here. Okay, I don't actually have a tip, but I do have three picks and one of them is actually kind of a non-pick.
02:35:03
So I mentioned Ducteco upfront. So we talked about some more browser stuff. This is an alternative, privacy focused browser that I think could become pretty popular, but they're moving so slow and I wish they would get kind of moving on stuff. They implemented a bookmark password sync functionality in the latest version of the desktop browser and I'm looking at this thing and I'm like this looks awfully familiar. It's because it's exactly the same way that Brave does it. Instead of having an account there's no account in the sky that could be hacked or anything like that you use a QR code, you put it on to a different device or a code of some kind, a one-time code and Dashlane works this way. The password manager if you use their passwordless version of the service and you add devices over time, and then you use another device to okay the next device, that kind of thing. This is a good system. It works great on Brave, but they don't have some basics. Still right, they don't have extension support, by the way, I don't know if you knew this Ducteco. Let me make sure I get the right browser. Ducteco has a password manager built in. Like browsers do that. They partnered with Bitwarden to create. That's how they did it, yeah, interesting. So now they have this it's not from Brave, but a Brave like, and other companies do this too Sinking capability for bookmarks and passwords, and what they need is extensions. They are Chromium based, so that should be pretty straightforward. It hasn't happened yet and they need just some basic features they don't have. You can't pin tabs, things like that Some stuff people use in other browsers. So anyway, baby steps are getting there. I do like the look of the browser. I love the company so interesting.
02:36:47
This sounds like a curious choice, but Apple this past week released in stable Apple TV plus Apple Music and an app called Apple Devices for Windows in the store. They collectively replaced iTunes, although, oddly, there's a new version of iTunes too. When these things came out in preview a year or so ago whenever that was I looked at them and determined that they were very clearly just iTunes with a new front end. They were really awful, terrible apps, and so I downloaded these things. There's a new version of iCloud too. I described that and just to look at them, knowing full well these things would just be crappy iTunes whatever and they're not actually. I mean, I'm not saying there's not any iTunes codes in there at all, but they're actually kind of thinner, lighter, better looking modern Windows apps. If you're in the Apple entertainment world and a lot of people kind of are actually I buy movies, I buy them on Apple, so these apps are pretty good. I'm surprised to say that. So this may open the door to Apple Music and Apple TV plus to a bigger audience of Windows users. Maybe they're worth looking at. I was surprised they weren't as crappy as the preview versions.
02:38:02
It feels like Microsoft helped them. They feel like modern Microsoft Windows 11 apps, like the media player app, the modern version which doesn't connect to any online services to do anything special, but it's a good example of like a modern app from a UX perspective. They have that vibe to them there. It's kind of interesting. And then Microsoft also released quietly, thank God, something called Microsoft PC Manager.
02:38:27
Do not download this or use this app. This is from Microsoft, china it's. I don't know how it got into the store. It is. It's like CC, cleaner but with a Microsoft logo on it. A lot of English is the second language stuff in there. I wouldn't dig them for that exactly, but there's a lot of duplicative UI, duplicative features across it, features in the app that are already in Windows that they use it Again, like we now, with this app, have, by my account, something like 17 different ways in Windows to control which apps run when you sign in or start up the computer. However you want to call it it is. Other people have looked at it and said you know, this thing is actually sending data back to China. There's tracking going on Like this is.
02:39:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So if you see this out in the world, don't I got to imagine this will be out of the store soon. Like this seems like nobody's. They don't know what they're thinking.
02:39:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I really it's. It's foisted as a sort of you know, improve the performance of your computer kind of thing. Other people looked at it and said actually, if you follow this thing's advice, you're going to decrease the performance of your computer Like this is not, I don't know it looks. It's terrible. It's a terrible app. Really interesting. I'm going to pick this week. Everybody Enjoy.
02:39:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's quiet and reliable, that's right, all right, should we talk a little run as run? As episode 919, emily Mancini come back for her second visit. The show we call the maximizing metadata. This has been an ongoing theme because it's we're at this co-pilot time where suddenly all the data in your organization is going to be analyzed by a large language model and Microsoft casually says every software, well, just make sure your data estate is in order, which is an incredibly huge bill to cover. Right, like, that's just not an easy thing to pull off, and so try to tackle that problem.
02:40:25
I wanted to engage with Emily she's talked in this area before really on the SharePoint side, which is also Teams. Teams is a shell over SharePoint, actually under the hood, and so just getting this routine of how we mark up our data in a way for its sensitivity areas that it's supposed to be available to you know those sorts of things, which leads you down this path of having better data governance when you are going to incorporate the co-pilots and likely things into that. But it also helps with search, helps with organization, so it's a subtle, small thing but when it done well, makes a huge difference for a company, and there was a great conversation about some of the tooling that's around and how it can really help you, as an administrator, do a better job for your company in keeping that data organized.
02:41:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's do some brown liquor. What do you say?
02:41:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Would you like to, because I, you know I'm in Australia. This was actually a gift when a friend of mine in the area is like I got this for you. And so this is the Starward, particularly their Pedro Yemenez cask, which is interesting because it's not actually bottled by directly by Starward per se. Starward is kind of a funny distillery, as many of these sort of new world distilleries are. It started in 2009 in Melbourne area. It's a state of Victoria in Australia. It's kind of a dry, warm southern part of Australia, big wine country in there. That's where the Barossa Valley is and the Yara make excellent wines in that part of the world.
02:41:57
I got off to a slow start in 2009, small distillery trying to make their way until they got an investment in 2015 by an organization known as Distill Ventures out of the UK. Distill Ventures is a wholly owned subsidiary of a company made up of I've called the Hagio, the largest liquor entity on this planet. They own Johnny Walker and a nontrivial number of the Scottish distilleries and they encourage them to go in a particular direction. One of the thing the fellow behind this guy named David Vitao, was beer maker first and so he has stuck to his beer roots a little bit, where they use both beer and distilling yeast in a darker malt. So it's quite a strong green flavor, which is interesting to me, rather than just sticking with the very mild barley approach that most people do. And small still set up 1800 liter wash still, 600 liter spirit still Because of how hot it is in the Melbourne area they actually have additional cooling jackets and things to keep the distillation process under control so they don't overheat.
02:43:04
And then they are, because they're in the wine region, they actually age in wine casts. So these are bought from Yolumba and Penfolds, wolfblast, those kinds of wineries which are all in that area nearby. Often they're those are typically French and American oak casts that have already had wine in them for five, six, seven, eight years. When the wine is drained, the barrels are, while still wet, are sold to the distillery and distillery. Then we'll put the whiskey into it for at least two years. That's the requirement for Australia to be called a whiskey, but they go a little longer, sometimes three or four years, and in this particular case, for this addition, they then finish it in a sherry cask into your proper Spanish sherry casts. That's not that strange, you know. Sherry is wine, just it's been fortified with brandy before it's barreled. Obviously they don't spend a lot of time in barrels around here, but that's because it's too warm and too dry. You know, the aging process for whiskey is really about sort of the respiration of the barrel, that the the contents warms up and pushes into the wood and cools down and pulls out. And when you have humidity is as low as you have in that part of the world, you actually lose water faster, you lose alcohol. So the alcohol rate tends to rise in this part of the world over time, as opposed to in Scotland where the alcohol rate would fall. So they tend to barrel lower level where, where up in Scotland you'd come in at 65, 68, even 70%, they're coming in around 55 or so, but they still cut with water. These are all 48%, which is a respectable alcohol level for a whiskey.
02:44:44
This particular addition is not directly bottled by Starward. You can't buy this from Starward. This actually comes from a group called the Whiskey Club. So you subscribe to the Whiskey Club and they request custom bottlings for from Starward and you can then buy it through them. This one was 140 Australian dollars, about 90 US NFRAD, only in Australia. So it's been good fun to drink. There's not much left. I believe I got this yesterday yeah, maybe the day before so I've been sharing it with friends. It is a little heady. It's quite fruity, the wine is definitely there. It is also quite a young whiskey. So you know it tastes and drinks very much like a new world whiskey. This is not your old Dalmore 18 by any stretch imagination, and for 90 dollars. You know it's fun but pricey for what it is. Is it like a like?
02:45:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
a like a it's a jammy fruit bomb of a whiskey Jammy fruit bomb.
02:45:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what they say on the website, it must be true, yeah.
02:45:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's funny.
02:45:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What's the Pedro Jimenez cask? Is that from Spain or Mexico? So that's.
02:45:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Spanish. That's a Spanish sherry cask, right, and that's you know, and those are typically finishing casks to Scots do this all the time, right, but you know, when you have these low alcohol, you know a sherry cask is 20% to 2% alcohol, and wines even lower than that, and so there's a kind of funkiness that can come from this, like you don't want to spend a lot of time in those barrels and honestly, I like to eliminate the middle man.
02:46:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was going to say I'm not going to be straight.
02:46:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
To be honest, I might want to uh.
02:46:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I like to recognize that sherry is just wine with brandy. Yeah, it's like just drink the brand.
02:46:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're right. Good point, you could simplify things. We do windows weekly every uh, every uh Wednesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern.
02:46:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I want to wrap it up. I got to get to twig here, yes, I just saw something real quick. I just grabbed a drink and I realized this is a thing I see in Mexico. I've never seen the United States, which I think is wonderful. Seltzer bottle. It has a built in. And so, like you've seen this before, so to me, like I've just never, you actually I, I, I have seen them in the three stooches.
02:46:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Put it down your pants, Paul. Do the right thing Right.
02:47:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like literally a disposable water dispenser.
02:47:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I used to have it delivered to my door in San Francisco there was a company called the seltzer sisters. They found a bunch because this is the twenties. The seltzer guy would come to your door like the milkman and deliver those bottles. They take them back and they refill them. And so the seltzer sisters found a bunch of these old bottles and had a business briefly for doing. I love it.
02:47:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, I. We went through a period where it got milk delivered, you know as adults, which was unusual, but yeah, I've never seen seltzer. Oh my God, I, it's just the, I, I'm just. This is might be the height of entitlement, although there is, it's a shame.
02:47:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's plastic I wish it were thick glass bottles with the metal sprinkles.
02:47:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yeah, no, this is, this is non recyclable. Yeah, yeah.
02:47:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's Mexico.
02:47:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And, by the way, sherry is a protected name for booze. You can only Spanish Sherry can be called Sherry. Oh yeah, they make Sherry here in Australia, but they call it a para Nice.
02:48:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a short for a para-teef?
02:48:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, Just sell it. You know, Sherry with an eye? Yeah, exactly.
02:48:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Our show is every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1900 UTC. You can watch us live at youtubecom slash twit right when the show starts and then it ends right when the show ends, although we're segueing into twigs. So, guys, just keep the YouTube going as I wander over. If you want to watch a show at your own convenience which is really how it's intended you'll find copies at the website twittv, slash w w. You could subscribe in your favorite podcast player. There's also a, a YouTube channel, which is great for sharing clips of of moments that you really thought were quite interesting to your friends and family. Paul is at thorottcom T-H-U-R-R-O-T-Tcom. His books are at leanpubcom. Richard Campbell's at runasradiocom. They're going to. They're going to do a little scramble and go other places. Paul, you're still in Mexico next week. Yep, Richard, you're in God knows where next week. I'll be there Exactly, we're in the world as Richard Campbell is.
02:49:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He looks like Waldo too. Yeah, A game we could all play, We'll do.
02:49:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We'll do Brisbane next week and we'll do Flannel gentlemen, in the crowd of people in a different country.
02:49:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you're slowly, that's good. You're slowly heading west is what you're doing. You're working your way west.
02:49:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Wait, yeah, I'm going to. I'm going to get crack across the Pacific, You're not backtracking.
02:49:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you Richard, Thank you Paul, Thank you all for watching. We'll see you next time on Windows Weekly.
