Windows Weekly 875 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. Guess what we got? Whiskey, because Richard Campbell's in studio. We'll talk about this fine bottle of brown liquor plus AI, co-pilot, antitrust and Windows 24 H2. Yep, windows Weekly is next. Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is twit. This is windows weekly with paul thurot and richard campbell. Episode 875, recorded wednesday, april 3rd 2024. A lot of neil diamond. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we cover the latest news from Microsoft. Something's a little strange about this episode. I don't know what it could possibly be, except I do know there's a bottle of whiskey next to me. Here he is appearing in our studio Richard Campbell from Run as Radio. Yes.

01:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're in town, I am. I was in Vegas last week, as you know, and I had to come to NorCal for a few things you kind of made sad noises last week about. You know you're going to be in NorCal. I begged, I did. You just made sad noises. I begged and so I talked to she, who must be obeyed, and said I think I'm going to have to spend the day take a little drive and, uh, I've never been in this studio before, so that's really great to be here.

01:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, you're better half for letting you be here. I don't know what she puts up with me. Honestly, I'm so glad you're, I ask yours the same thing too, right?

01:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, I don't know why she puts up. It's crazy, but uh, but yeah, it's great to be up here, see everybody in person and uh, I brought a bottle of whiskey with me.

01:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know you'd be shocked oh, it seems like every time I come to your studio, I bring some whiskey?

01:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, I don't have to drive. You do and I do for a change right.

01:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Last time I didn't, but now Now you know who's very sad now Mr Paul Thorat, who is still in Macungie. You could have flown out, Paul, but no.

01:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hi Paul, I didn't either, so I'm really pleased it's good. Thank you for coming out. I could find something to drink if I had to.

02:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, please do. Paul is, of course, the man in charge at Therotcom, and his books are at LeanPubcom, and together, mr P and Mr T do the thing that they do so well, which is talk about Microsoft, and today I think we should just throw everybody a curveball and talk about Windows. Weird, what do you say, guys?

02:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, we can talk about the future of Windows 11 and Windows 10 today, wow.

02:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So what is the is there? I mean at some some point. Windows 10 and 2025 is out of support, right, right.

02:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I mean at some point in the next year they gotta say, well, except that microsoft has that extended security updates program, right like they had for windows 7.

03:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I was looking at the uh now this is admittedly from last year but at at the market share of Windows 11 and Windows 10. And Windows 11 is still way behind Windows 10. Yeah, yeah, yeah, in fact, it's only slightly ahead of Macintosh, I mean Mac's 14. All right, let's settle down.

03:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Settle down? No, Well, I mean. Obviously part of it is the artificial hardware requirement constraint. You know, part of it is businesses that don't tend to want to move on to something new and different.

03:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So you know, for a long time I was giving up a bunch to move to 11. Like, group policy was not lined up, so any set of managed machines going to 11 was really problematic. That's largely resolved now, but it doesn't mean they're in a hurry. Until this April 2025 deadline came along.

03:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, at some point I mean right now, what is it? Windows 11 is hovering somewhere around 25% of market share and Windows 10 is somewhere around 70% of market share.

04:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it's got a way to go. Yeah, but we see this right. This happened with XP, it happened with Windows 7. By the way, yeah, that's where the other 5% is Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows.

04:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
XP no I mean back in the day. This is a credit to StatCounter, yeah.

04:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And these are the only two supported versions of Windows. Now, Right, so you know. The silver lining here is that Windows 11 is built on top of Windows 10. It's not a dramatic move sideways or up or anything like that, so customers that stay on Windows 10 receive most of the same benefits especially around security?

04:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What is enterprise telegraphing to you? Are they knowing they have a year, are they going to go with extended support or are they going to upgrade?

04:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No well, they were waiting for the final pricing which just actually come out, and $60 a machine for the first year yikes, that's enough to put a fair bit of pressure on a move remember when it was 10 and a double c or two, so there's a time frame to keep going up uh uh, and a year is enough time and most of the benchmarks have been done now, like we kind of know where we're at. It's literally it was april. Now they're saying october is the end of support.

05:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, it is October, that's right. Yeah, next year, yep.

05:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So that's enough time, but you have to move right. That is a budget cycle. So wherever your budget cycle happens to be for your organization, you're like okay, we've got to do this thing. There's going to be some hardware changes, which happens anyway, and you're going to deal with all of that. But nobody's in a hurry and, arguably, that deadline shifted. Once already they told us it was April 2025. Now it's October. Maybe it'll be April 2026 next.

06:03
I can think of certain Microsoft customers that if they said we're not, going to move and we're not going to pay this.

06:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They might adjust their numbers, I don't know. Well, I don't know. I've always been like the future of Windows today guy. So when Windows 11 was announced, I switched to that immediately. I started working on the book and this is a little out of order for the show notes but I last week pulled out an old Surface Book 2, blew it away, went back to Windows 10 just to sort of see if there was going to be any pulling of the heartstrings or anything there.

06:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why would you go backwards? Is this just an experiment? Just on the one.

06:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have 21 computers here. Who?

06:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
cares.

06:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is one computer, but I just wanted to see what that was like. Again, it's been a while. I also looked at my old book, the Windows 10 Field Guide. When was the last time I updated that? And that was almost three years ago. In fact, it was tied right to the release of the announcement of Windows 11.

07:01
The little asterisk caveat there, or whatever, is that the subsequent releases of Windows 10 introduced no new features right or inconsequential new features and so the only things that have really changed in Windows 10 from an end user perspective are that some apps were updated to versions that match what we see in Windows 11, like the Photos app and the Store app. Actually, microsoft Edge gets updated every four weeks, so that's kind of consistent across platforms. And then Copilot is happening, although I'm not seeing Copilot on this computer, and I've kind of gone back and looked at what they said about that and that seems to be on its own little rolling, rollout or whatever. So I don't know. But I don't know, just I. I don't know. I, as, just as a user, I'm not an enterprise, but I, there are some things in windows 10.

07:51
I, you know, I kind of miss and, and most of it is just related to, um, a lack of escalated in certification, although, to be fair, that did start with Windows 10. It just escalated horribly in Windows 11 and it's gotten much worse in recent years. I missed the File Explorer app. We're going to talk about that. The one that just works, that weird one, the one that actually works. Yeah, it's not covered in a bunch of crap that doesn't matter and doesn't slow it down, which is kind of nice. I like that. I really don't like the Settings app. The Windows 11 Settings app is much more logical and easy to use. But yeah, so it's kind of hit or miss. I did get a OneDrive harassment notification, which I thought was amusing, and then I had it silently turn on OneDrive folder backup, which I found less than amusing. Yeah, just like it does in Windows 11.

08:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So that's inconsistent behavior, at least.

08:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you get a little credit for that, I guess. But we're getting to the point now where I don't want to be this guy. I don't want to be the guy where all my tips are how to make Windows not work like Windows because Microsoft can't seem to get it right. I wish it wasn't like that, but here we are. So I don't know. I mean I just from a user or what do you call it Like a user experience, aesthetic kind of standpoint at Windows 11 is subjectively prettier, I guess you know it's not as old fashioned. You know Windows 10 was built at a time when maybe Windows Phone was still going to make sense oh, just kidding. And far too late. They've still got this squared off live tiles based UI that has looked archaic for a long time.

09:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, but I can put my dashboard on the left side of my giant wide screen. That's right.

09:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can put it on top, you can make it small. I mean, there's all these fun little things that we kind of miss. I will say, if you had to pick one major complaint, like one really specific complaint, when Windows 11 was released, I think we would all agree it was the. You right-click the taskbar and not only was Task Manager not there as an option, but there were no options. There was nothing there Like there was.

10:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The only thing there was was a dialog that said don't click, right-click again.

10:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, don't right-click. Well, you can do taskbar settings. In the initial release of Windows 11, there was one choice and I will say, years later now, two and a half years later, whatever it is, I right-click on the taskbar on Windows 10, and I think, oof, way too much stuff there, way too much stuff, and it's stuff that is so esoteric and unnecessary to most people. I know everyone has their little pet feature they love, but I don't know. It was an interesting exercise. I'll keep it going. I want to see if the Windows Compiler arrives.

10:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I've got to tell you I'm still not in love with Win11's tendency, when you right-click on a file, to create little icons, either on the top or the bottom, and hide the many things that you want to do in those icons that you can't identify.

10:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, when you simplify a user interface, by nature you have to get rid of things, so you're going to hide features that people you know want the. The thing you're describing is, I think, the ugliest and stupidest design decision that they made, which was is that some of the more common features that you would access from right click, like copy paste, rename, etc. They don't have the names on them, they're just little icons, so it's like looking at a egyptian hieroglyph Egyptian hieroglyphics, but only of the stuff that you care about.

11:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're very specific. Just take the ones that people care about and move them.

11:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so this could still happen, I guess, in time for 24-H2. But for a little while there they were testing putting the labels back. Just common sense.

11:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're in this place now, where you get two versions out of each feature idea the version where you put it in and the version where you take it back out again.

11:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Since you mentioned this feature, I feel compelled to also mention that when you right-click on the desktop or anything on the desktop actually, it's probably true of anything you right-click, but let's just use the desktop as the obvious example those Actually, it's probably true of anything you right-click, but let's just use the desktop as the obvious example those icons that you're talking about, the ones that are just icons without labels, will appear on the top or the bottom, depending on where you click on the screen. And this is just one of those misguided. We're trying to be helpful notions, but what they were trying to do was make it less of a distance to travel with the mouse cursor. Right, you know, because the ones you need the most should be the closest to the mouse cursor. And without knowing anything about UI, you might think oh, that makes sense. That doesn't make any sense.

12:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's not where people's eyes go.

12:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, we build up this muscle memory about where things are. So I mean, we start before you even see the icon you start clicking, and then you've clicked on the wrong thing because now it's on a different, you don't move UI. It's not a game of chance, you know like it's. The consistency actually matters too.

12:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So anyway, they missed the April Fool's Day version where when you move to the one on the bottom, it didn't flip up to the top.

13:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like the bottom and didn't flip up to the top like that would be ours. Yeah, exactly right, it's like, wasn't that on the bottom before? Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's weird. So, um, I just realized, oh, we've moved things around. I say I'm like speaking of moving things around like. My notes are in a different order.

13:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I reorganized them to reflect the actual order of the that's cool.

13:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was looking at that and I'm thinking did I, am I going crazy?

13:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am on top of things, by the way.

13:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was just describing.

13:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very pleased to see that the lady running across the beach is still running across the beach on the desktop.

13:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This was pre-Me Too, because the latest version has that movie executive running behind her.

13:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You say it's like riding a bike Back to the good old days yeah, yeah, don't stick your foot in the front wheel, yeah, or anything else for that right yeah, I, I, I'll, just, I'll leave it windows 10 at this.

13:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, I, I get it. I get why people do, not businesses. But people would stay with this, like I get it. Yeah, um, obviously I understand why businesses would stick with it. For me personally and this obviously I have books and blah, blah, blah, whatever. But I do prefer, for all the ugly little things and whatever problems I have with Windows 11, I guess I still do prefer it to Windows 10.

14:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But you did the right thing. To be sure, you went back and had that experience.

14:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I waited longer than I should have, honestly, yeah, but I did, yeah, yeah, so I'll keep it going. You know, I mean I'm not going to use it every single day, but I've actually been using it since I did this. I keep, I don't know, foolishly expecting something to change.

14:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know what I'm thinking is going to happen. I mean, the next story here is what's the upgrade experience from windows 10 to 11 now? Because you did that so early on, plus you, you're prone to paving machines anyway.

14:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, right you know, going through an update upgrade cycle is interesting, yep I wish you could, on a physical machine, do what you can do on a virtual machine, which is just kind of set a checkpoint and say I'm going to upgrade this thing and then I'm going to just go back yeah, you know, uh, just to see what that looks like.

15:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's yeah we'll see there are the funny thing is I well, there was a remember.

15:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The machine can do that right like have you ever done a p to v, the physical to virtual conversion of a? Typically only do this with servers, but it literally kicks the. The server continues to run and any changes that are happening on the file system are literally logged Right, right, while they synchronize a copy up to the virtual machine and then they catch it up and then move it.

15:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know if you could do this. Yeah, this may have come out of your conversation with Jeff Woolsey a month or so ago, but I'm delighted that Microsoft is paying more attention to Hyper-V again, which I think is sorely needed. But for whatever issues Hyper-V may have, one of the great joys of this product is that revert to checkpoint. The thing just comes right back. I mean, it's so quick and, yeah, it'd be neat if you could just do that right on the device or whatever.

16:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and we could be saving a lot of users, a lot of grief by isolating software in pseudo-virtual machines so that they're not cross-contaminating each other.

16:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you mean like XP compatibility mode?

16:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, Well, like well.

16:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Do we talk?

16:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
ourselves into this last week.

16:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so this was the plan for Windows 10X, right? This is well. Arguably, is the architecture of modern Xbox consoles a Hyper-V based situation, and I think we were talking I think it was us in last week and we were talking about maybe bringing these like an Xbox OS down to like a portable gaming PC and running that instead of Windows, and this notion of well, if they just architected Windows, right, I mean, this could work. Great. They have it there, it's all there, right, you know, it just isn't available. I guess I don't know.

17:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just have this sense that there's going to be a big push on the consumer side of Windows in the immediate future and it's going to be more the AI-centric thing this whole move with the DeepMind guys is. I think Satch is saying I'm not happy with what we're doing in consumer. Let's try some new people. I just hope they drag Windows into that. It's a good shot.

17:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And that's how you get people to upgrade. You give them a feature that, yeah, that's compelling, that's compelling, so there were a million thoughts to that.

17:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've been struggling to come out with this article. I've been writing about this topic essentially, and the idea here is that AI is like personal computing, accelerated right. We've gone through these phases in time the GUI, the internet, you know, mobile web, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And we're only, you know, we're barely 14 months into this AI thing. You know that Microsoft touched off right With what was called Bing chat at the time, and I feel like we're kind of entering the third phase already. It's so weird, but it's in that phase. Is that hybrid phase, right, where we offload everything from the cloud and try to do as much as possible locally? But the issue there is tied to the issue with AI and selling AI right now, which is that there's just no compelling experience to show people that would make them want to bother. I don't know that we are ever going to be able to convince individuals to buy a new computer because of some cool new feature. I just don't. To the cloud, no.

18:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
To the cloud. Wasn't that the consumer pitch? And the whole desk turned around and she went to the cloud.

18:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I don't know how that was compelling to consumers, where I think the game side is compelling. Gaming, I think the productivity piece getting on the internet. You know, remember the old version of Windows and how much clunking you had to do to get onto a dial-up system.

18:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I mean it's definitely streamlined to be out there. That was a while ago. The people you're asking that just looked up from their phone and they said what are you talking?

19:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
about the. Internet you mean they think it's in my phone all the time.

19:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know we are having this conversation about what if the screen was just the output device and you're mostly talking to a very good chat bot, that it's also using the cameras to look at you and measure your frustration level and where you're gesturing? Really a big rethink of UX. Like what if there were no more buttons? Like you're gesturing, you know?

19:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
really a big rethink of ux like what if there were no more buttons? Like you're just not doing that anymore, I don't, I, I have such a high frustration level I would just never stop setting off alarms and that system would have to, would yeah, you know shut itself down it's the co-pilot button.

19:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, you know one keyboard with one big button. Yeah, you just go mash it and then you tell your computer what you want and you say, please make a Spotify playlist.

19:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He basically said that in October he was talking about this notion. He was speaking somewhat metaphorically perhaps, but this idea that Copilot was the new start button, this new start menu. You know that the center of this orchestration that occurs on your PC.

20:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know we've tried this before. People don't want to talk to their PCs. That's my core topic. No, they don't they don't want to talk.

20:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
People don't even want you to move the start button or God help you remove the start button.

20:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And in an office it's even worse, because no one wants to sit there with their coworkers sitting around them. We're having a nice chat with Bruce.

20:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Talking yeah. Talking to a piece of technology is fine as long as it does what you say. As soon as you have to say the same thing twice, you never want to talk to it again. So annoying. Yeah Right, I mean, that's the end of it, which has always been the experience. Talking to Siri is fine. Arguing with Siri makes you look stupid.

20:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And if you have kids in the car and you're talking to Siri, guarantee you they're going to say they're going to start adding things to it and play the poop song, and then you're dead. It's over.

20:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The Siri experience was perfectly portrayed in an early ad by Apple, where that Zoe Deschanel woman whatever her name is was standing in a window looking outside. It's pouring outside. She picks up her iPhone 4 and she goes hey, siri, is it raining? I'm like you know, this is.

21:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Zoe, zoe, look out the window. It is perfect, Perfect, that was 4S era. Yeah, 4s.

21:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, wow, you know I'm going down the path of the voice interface to the house, bit by bit, and she, who must be obeyed will, will issue any given command once. If it does not function the first time, it's broken and she'll do something else yeah, here you go.

21:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's our good friend yes, what the do? You think that is? Oh, let's get tomato stick delivered that's the better version how cute and quirky of you.

21:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now go f*** yourself. Good, Because I don't want to put on real shoes.

21:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, my God.

21:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Remind me to clean up tomorrow.

21:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You are such a lazy f***. Excellent. Today we're dancing. Play, shake, round and Roll.

22:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You are a really f***ing cancer.

22:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know where that came from or who did it, but I don't think that's the original.

22:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't think that's the original, Whatever you will bloop it right, Kevin.

22:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, Apologies to the live listeners. You heard the girl in the back lawn and she's like what's a computer? And the guy standing there with a hose. He's like ask your mother. You know, it's just these insipid. Anyway, I don't know where he got off the sidetrack there, but anywho, um, I forgot where I was. I know where you are because I have the uh.

22:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Multiple sources have revered, revealed or revered a staggered release.

22:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's schedule so we we right there, there's your head next to it and there's richard's head next to it.

22:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's so cool how your heads pop up. Okay, go ahead. I'm easily amused Apparently.

22:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Tell us about 24H2.

22:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so I've heard this now from a couple people. Zach Bowden's been writing about this, actually, since I wrote this article. He's written something else I can't say expands on this per se, but kind of reiterates this that for all the weirdness around Windows 11 updating over the past two years, let's say it's going to get weirder this year. That's hard to imagine. Well, you decide. So there are probably reasons for it that are tied to their OEM partners and their chip silicon maker partners.

23:25
Whatever, there is every indication that Microsoft is about to RTM. If you will, they don't use that term but finalize what will be the initial release of 24H2. It's going to ship basically in April. It will be finalized in April. We'll start shipping on new Qualcomm-based computers in May or June and then they're going to keep working on it and October is going to come around and there'll be more new features to add and they'll release an update to 24H2. And then it will go out to the rest of the world on other computers. Apparently. That last part I'm not 100% sure of the notion that everyone won't be able to get it immediately. I don't quite understand what the point of that is, but you may recall that 22H2 and 23H2 are the same right. Yeah, in every way imaginable, except for that one number. And maybe this is the grand consolidation and it will come early, perhaps to everybody, but if not, certainly to Qualcomm users. And weird.

24:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's surprising to to the alarm first, like where you probably have the most problems because you're still just getting fit and finish around the CPU design Like that surprises me.

24:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's really interesting to see Qualcomm saying we're going to be faster than Intel, we're going to be better. It's like doesn't that put some pressure on Microsoft?

24:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Even a child learns not to brag after they've been proven wrong so many times.

24:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But that is part of what.

24:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What if they're right? I believe them too. I do, and we are longtime victims of the Core i5 performance level. Uh promise of three years ago, whenever that was, but we've seen too many benchmarks. Um, there's just been too many, too much information from the outside that has we saw google release chrome. Why would they do that? Yeah, this is not a company that takes a bet, makes no kidding.

25:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's on the yeah, ever Is that them saying? We think that's the future of Windows.

25:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, I don't want to read too much into it, but this is a platform that has so little share now it has no share, basically, and for anyone to release software on that platform is very interesting to me. So a company look like Stardock is releasing versions of their apps in native ARM form. Okay, that's a small little company that does Windows software right. Google is not that kind of company at all.

25:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, I think it means something. This also might be just a straight triage, like how is the thing written? Because it's mostly in C? It's pretty portable. You're just changing underlying libraries. It's not that tough to do, arguably if you're working in c sharp because the clr will take care of it for you. Not that difficult to do either. So you know, you do a triage, run down and say who are the easy ones. Let's pick a couple and and see what happens but again, because it's google, it's easy to do.

26:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not even the issue, like they just wouldn't do it.

26:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a business. That's a strategic business decision, not a programmer.

26:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah right, yeah, do you think that was like a tit-for-tat kind of thing? They swapped off?

26:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know. I honestly think they may be reading the tea leaves and saying, look what apple's done with their m. Well, that's what I was gonna say.

26:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Anyone who's used an m, whatever base mac. Yeah, has come away with the same there you couldn't find. Now someone's gonna raise their hand in the back of the room and seriously go seek help, but you couldn't find an individual who used one of these things. It wasn't blown away. Yeah, it's not just okay no, it's dramatic.

26:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it's the best computer currently made and I am not an apple, don't use apple hardware but you cannot deny how good an error is, so maybe even.

26:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There are things.

27:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Somebody at Microsoft nudged Google and said we see the future of Windows as ARM-based. No one has that influence at Google.

27:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No one, not from Microsoft, I don't know the answer to that, but that's why I was thinking with the tit-for-tat. It's like somebody owed somebody something, and it's just like you know what you could do. Take a look at this. Yeah, something, and it's just like you know what you could do. Take a look at this, yeah, but I don't know. Does microsoft want windows on arm to be the next, the future windows? I know the. I know on the server side in azure. It's a big deal and there's a good reason for it because of density yeah, right, like they get more compute resource for that. Um, certainly it, and it sort of ties back to the google thing, which is are you getting tired of your Intel dependency and you want to have choices, right? I mean, that's why they originally shipped ARM for WinRT. Was that they were so frustrated with Intel it's also why Apple made the switch frankly.

27:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it's also because of, basically, iphone, ipad. We'll call it Apple envy. I mean, windows RT was born in a world in which the iPad had just been released. Apple had this great story fanless, super thin devices, no sound, and Windows was this archaic thing from the past and it. You know they look. Microsoft has invested so much time and so many billions of dollars, first in RT, and then Windows and ARM, and then Windows and ARM in particular. Just the progression of this thing, the evolution of it incredible. They've sold none of these devices. I mean, you don't just keep going. You know, if this wasn't going to work or didn't make sense, they would have given up on this years ago.

28:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Kevin, the chat made the point. Google wants the data and that's legit. You know that's a very simple, straightforward rock occam's razor kind of solution is like. Just in case it takes off this time, make sure your default browser is correct. Oh, I mean I I.

28:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, in the short term the market for that data is going to be pretty small. But yeah, sure, I mean um, so I look, I, I do. I believe, as much as I can believe, without not having an exact answer, that this is the, this is the real deal, and then now we'll see. It would be uh horrific for anyone who's a windows or microsoft enthusiast to have this thing wither on the vine after it comes out. And it's actually pretty damn good, you know. But I think pc makers want this stuff too. Right, for all the same reasons, they want to ship. That's another reason, like fanless devices, 18 hours of battery life, or whatever the number is, and of course they everyone wants the same thing, right, and we were just having this conversation about why would someone buy a new machine?

29:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
upgrade, that's one reason.

29:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And so thinner, longer battery life and quieter, cooler and ai yeah, and it does ai better right, because it's got the NPU.

29:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's just a question is what do you call an AI at that point? Right? Is it just that? My background blurring is excellent?

29:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it a problem for Microsoft if Windows and ARM starts to become dominant, or do they want this?

29:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, there's no downside. Yeah, no, there's no downside.

29:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, oh, if no downside, yeah, they want if anything god, I'm sorry they want the end point, right end points, where the money is, that's where the customer is. The more end points they have, the better.

30:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is a lot of um, a lot of the things that microsoft has done and a lot of the things that they've been successful at have worked to prolong the lifetime of a platform or whatever. It might be right. Like you know, the office ribbon set up that productivity suite for the next decade, or whatever. It might be right. Like you know, the Office ribbon set up that productivity suite for the next decade, or whatever. Right, office 365 had a similar effect.

30:26
You know, windows we haven't had one of those in a while and you know, between mobile and web and all the stuff that's happening, I mean, there's been kind of a decline, I would say, over the past many years. But this is a way you can extend the useful lifetime of the platform. Right, it makes it more viable, it makes it more interesting and it yeah, like you guys said, it makes it more likely that someone might say, okay, actually there's the thing that would get me to buy a new computer. It works more like my iPad or whatever, and I don't mean functionally, like Windows 8. I mean, it's silent and you forget about the battery so much you don't even think to charge it all the time. Yeah, that's a beautiful world to be in.

31:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's not a bad thing. And you can't tell me Intel's going to get you there, you know.

31:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can tell you, I can be pretty confident, that they will not. He really wants it to not be true. I can be pretty confident that they will not.

31:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm going to beg to disagree. He really wants it to not be true. Yeah, really wants it.

31:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Even Intel's hedging its bets, saying but we can make ARM chips. Don't think we can't. We can do that, so we're fat too.

31:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Intel's going to come up Right, I got to tell you though this is, intel has become the Eddie Haskell of the technology world. I don't think you can believe anything they say anymore. You know, and I feel bad for them, right? I mean Microsoft and Intel. Obviously. You know we have a term for this, wintel, right? But they came up in the world together.

31:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They dominated the PC space together. It was a tense relationship, wasn't?

31:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it. Yeah Well, and they deserve each other. But the Microsoft by and large not so much Windows, but most of the rest of the company made this transition to the cloud and now they're trying to do the same thing for AI successfully, and Intel did not. They got left behind, you know. The bus took off and Intel was standing there with its lunchbox going. Where did everybody go, you know? And they made, like all companies that fail. Sometimes it's exterior forces, but more often it's a combination of that and strategic mistakes. And Intel and Microsoft begged them for decades. Stop going up, go down, please. You know the industry needs this and they were like ah, gaming, pcs and power, you know, premium computers and whatever. And it's like that is.

32:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's what our Anthony Nielsen is saying. He doesn't know. Thousands of CUDA cores in a GPU trump a few NPU cores. But that's not the point. There's a thin slice of people who want all that power and they'll still make those. I'm not saying they'll stop like Apple did. No, this is about going after the mainstream. There's a big market for thin, light, long battery power.

33:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
PCs. Oh my God, yes. And look, microsoft has been worried about Apple and the Mac since Mac OS X. And I mean, realistically speaking, you could kind of point to any era of the past 20 years and say they didn't really move the needle that much. Even the release of Apple Silicon didn't at first move the needle. But my God, you know, once you overcome that inertia, we're going to move into a much more heterogeneous space in the PC world than has ever been the case before. Until you'd have to go back to Commodore, atari and TI and all those computers, the 8-bit computers. I mean, it hasn't been like that for a long, long time.

33:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm also noticing that Microsoft and I think I'm jumping ahead and seeing a little thunder into your later section here Microsoft's getting very confident about giving you the latest version of all of their AI tools and making more stuff free. Certainly, at the Fabric Conference, we saw a lot of conversation about the small language models that they aren't afraid of burying their cloud anymore, where they seem to be edgier, you know, nine months ago and but that they believe more work's going to be done on the edge and they're going to be part of it, and that would include these new devices would be good at that let me take a little break before we go on because in in a weird synchronicity, before you talk about Windows Canary builds, I want to talk about the Thinkst Canary.

34:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How about that? How did this happen? It's a nicely done. It's meant to be.

34:32
I think this episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by Thinkst Canary. The Thinkst Canary is awesome. We have them and you should have them too. Any business, any company, you know what the problem is. People say well, our perimeter is well protected. Well, you know how that works out. You know AT&T said our perimeter is well protected. The problem is, assuming that you are impermeable is problematic. Once somebody gets in, then you have no way of knowing what they're doing in there, unless you have a Thinkst canary or two or three or a hundred.

35:07
Thinkst canaries are honeypots, but not, you know, not hard to deploy. You can deploy them in minutes and you can make them look like anything. You can make them look like a NAS, a SCADA device. You can make them look like an IIS server, an old one, a new one, xp server, windows 11 server, linux server. You could turn all the lights on and, you know, make it a Christmas tree of services. Or you can just narrow it down to the key ones that hackers love, like port 139. Turn that on, baby, and see what happens. You can also make LOR files which you can spread around PDFs, xls, docx files that look super valuable, you know, maybe like a spreadsheet that says payroll information, except it's not.

35:48
As soon as a bad guy hits the canary, tries to hit those lure files, tries to brute force your fake internal SSH server, your thinks canary goes, hey, it lets you know you got a problem. And no false alerts, just the alerts that matter. Choose a profile for your device, register it with the hosted console for monitoring and notifications. By the way, notifications email, text, syslog, console-based. They support webhooks. You can get it on Slack any way you you want. So that's the nice thing. You know those notifications come in there. We've had things canaries running for years and only got a notification once when it really mattered, when there was somebody probing our ports inside the network. You wait, attackers who breached your network, malicious insiders, any adversary, by the way? Yeah, insiders, the, what is it called? The, the rogue maid, the, the filthy maid? What do they call it? The disgruntled employee, disgruntled employee maid? Somebody in the network? Already They'll hit the things Canary. Don't tell them about it, by the way, you just keep it to yourself, but when they hit it you will know.

36:56
All right, let me give you the deets, the specifics Canarytools slash twit. C-a-n-a-r-y dot tools slash twit. Let's say you want five, which is a small number. Banks might have hundreds, back-end casino operations might have thousands, but let's say you want five. That's $7,500 a year.

37:13
You get five things to Canaries. You get your own hosted console, you get the upgrade, you get the support, you get the maintenance. If you use the code TWIT in the how did you hear about us box, you're going to cut 10% off that price forever, for life. And here's the best part you can always, if you're at all skeptical, can return them for a full money back guarantee anytime in the first two months that's 60 days to try it out. I have to tell you, though, in all the years we've been talking about things canaries, not one person has asked for that refund not one. That's amazing. It's because they really work. They do what they say and you're going to need it and love it and you won't want to live without a canarytools slash twit. The offer code is twit. Put that in the how did you hear about us box canarytools slash twit, a longtime sponsor of the show. Now we've talked about our kinds of canaries, let's talk about your canaries windows canary.

38:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're my kind of canary baby a dead kind in a coal mine um geez louise.

38:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, sorry, sorry so canaryary is the dev build for Windows right.

38:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it the colored Canary or the bird Canary? It's the bird, yeah, okay.

38:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's supposed to be the earliest view of a feature it's supposed to be. It doesn't always end up that way.

38:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought it might be Canary yellow, like you have red, green, yellow, but no, I think you're right. I think it's like we're going to test this and if the canary dies, we're going to pull it back. Yeah, then you know, just let that one go. Yeah, yeah, with apologies to canary owners we have many in our audience. It just doesn't seem to work that way. Does anything ever get pulled out of the canary bill? I couldn't tell you. Yes.

38:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Have you seen it go away? Sure, yeah, okay.

39:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sorry, I'm lost.

39:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Canary yeah, widgets, improvements head out to more people.

39:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I see Two different channels. Okay, temporarily they are the same channel. Microsoft has explicitly acknowledged that you're testing 24H2. Sometime very soon, canary and Dev are going to split again and Dev will stick on 24H2, and Canary will start testing features that will come post-24H2, or, as I like to think of it, the other version of 24H2 that's coming in the second half of the year because Microsoft is off the charts. Ridiculous, because version numbers are hard.

39:37
It really is crazy, it's just hard. So, in a further indication that 24-inch 2 is nearing what we used to call RTM, the two most recent sets of builds across Canary Dev, which again same builds very minor changes functionally and lots of bug fixes. So I mean, this thing's it's April and's it's it's April and it's winding down, you know, like it normally does, except in August. So that's happening. That's kind of interesting. Um, and then this this was announced with zero context and uh, as a result, I have some theories about it. But Microsoft announced yesterday via a like 125 word blog post, that they're moving the photos app in windows 11 and 10 I would imagine, because they're the same app to the windows app sdk, which is the what used to be called project reunion. Right, um, from uwp, I believe. I said the current version is a uwp like a mobile app. Now I why? I don't know, you know, I don't know why.

40:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, this sounds like reorganizations internally.

40:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, okay, but I mean it's so. It's in a weird coincidence. Just fairly recently I wrote I wrote one of actually several articles that kind of touched on this. But it's very interesting to me that, for all of the native app platform worries that kind of the enthusiast community has, microsoft has taken a stance in recent years where they're like look, windows apps are Windows apps, build them with whatever you want. If you're on this tech stack and you want to keep going where we'll support it, don't worry about it. But Microsoft itself new apps we might have touched on this in Windows Weekly at one point are web apps right, or web-based apps, teams, the new Outlook Loop right but you remember?

41:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
you're mentioning all M365 stuff there, so that's going to be web, because they are strictly cloud.

41:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But the thing is, photos app is a native Windows app. That's not cross-platform, right. It is based on UWP, which is deprecated and end of line, basically, right. The best you can do there is, you know, webview 2 with WinUI 2. It's not, it's just not modern. Now they do have an upgrade path, microsoft to support it.

42:01
So if developers want to move a UWP app forward and take advantage of UI3, et cetera, et cetera, they can use the Windows app SDK. So they're doing that for their own app. So it's the only major app I can think of from Microsoft. Majors may be a stretch, but the only Windows inbox app that I know of where they're explicitly doing this.

42:23
The other thing that's a little bit like this is File Explorer, and File Explorer is a classic Win32 desktop app and it is not even though they used the Windows app SDK to update some of the visual components at the top and side of that window. It's not a full redo of the app, right, it's still a desktop app. But Microsoft did kind of a custom take on Windows App SDK to create the UI for the address bar and that command bar and then for the navigation pane. So it's got its own little, yeah, its own little thing, so it's. Maybe this is the upgrade path for inbox apps, right, that are not new because they're upgrading, right. And then new apps like Clipchamp is one that's built into Windows is a web app, right.

43:13
So, maybe this is the break now.

43:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm wondering if they're experimenting with a pipeline to be able to show a path for third-party apps built in the older WinUI approaches, a way to go forward, and so they're testing it with one of theirs. Oh, that could be. You need a path forward, and there's no better way than dog food it yourself.

43:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right.

43:38
I mean, that's such a responsible, adult way to do things, which is why I don't think it could possibly be true. But yeah, no, that makes sense. My initial guess in this I had to research this and it's probably not true is that it might have something to do with Copilot, because Microsoft revealed a week or two ago, whenever it was, that they're going to be or maybe it just leaked. I think it leaked. They didn't reveal it, but they're going to be adding Copilot capabilities to the Photos app. Now people probably know that Copilot in Windows is implemented as an instance of Microsoft Edge. It's a web thing.

44:12
Copilot itself, when you think about it, it's web. Microsoft 365 apps like Word and Excel and PowerPoint and Windows now use a web-based extensibility model, right. So adding Copilot there was kind of a natural. You know this is a natural way to extend things these days, but actually you can use web technologies in a UWP app using the latest version of the Edge, that WebView control, whatever it's called the web rendering engine they have. It is WebView, webview 2. So that's maybe not why unless there's something else going on in the platform that I don't know about that maybe requires this latest version. But it's interesting. It's interesting if only because it's so unusual, I guess, and maybe we'll see more of it.

44:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and certainly I'm speculating as to why they might be doing some of those things. Yeah, no, me too, and it easily could be experiment, because the other option is just rewrite photos again.

45:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Exactly. I mean, they have one of the only and certainly the last great UWP app that was bundled with Windows is the media player app. The way it used to be called, groove Music. Right, this is an app no one would ever use, ever, but it will always stand as a shining example of what was possible. This platform or this framework or whatever you want to call it. Uwp was good for some things, right, and I don't mean just, I mean obviously this backend stuff. That was very good. These apps could go to sleep and all that kind of stuff and stop using the processor and RAM and all that. That's great. But I mean just from like a user experience standpoint, a lot of not great apps were made over the years, and that's when we're like okay, the navigation's nice, the presentation's nice, it's good. Nobody navigation's nice, the presentation's nice, it's good. Nobody actually needs an app like this anymore, but it's fun that you made it.

46:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was well done and in some ways, you want those technology demonstrators too, and I always feel like sometimes these things are done by interns, right? Or they're done by a tiger team, if you want to use that phrase.

46:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where it's like. Let's see if we can actually make this SDK do the thing we want it to do. I like your team of interns, though that sounds like fun.

46:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I think there's something to that and, without saying like that's explicitly obviously the case, I think it's certainly in the right direction. The thing that's kind of odd about Windows and apps and the apps that are built into Windows and all that is that when people will make fun of this stuff, but when Microsoft adds something like background image or background removal to paint right, which is one of the oldest of old school Windows apps, or they are now adding AI text creation capabilities to Notepad, a lot of people naturally it's understandable would say oh, what are you doing? Like, why do you even touch this thing? Just leave it alone. But actually that work is far more difficult than creating a silly little media app.

47:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
These responsible paths forward to let other developers who've also built things find a way to move them forward because you have an exemplar are right, like here's an app that, with migration, you're going to need to go through, and we knock down some bug bears along the way so that you have a chance to make it there without you know have to do all the heavy lifting.

47:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they don't do this enough, but they do. The teams that make these changes and make you know, design these things will speak publicly and they'll talk about it and they explain it, and they're hard to find. This used to be super common in the Windows space. Microsoft would lead by example, right. They would create these apps and then show other people how to do them. It's been a long time since that's been the case. I'm just wondering if they're trying to get back to that. Yeah, no, I think it's the right thing to do, even though adding a ribbon to File Explorer in Windows maybe didn't make any sense, at least to the developer community. You were sending the message that look, this is serious and we are doing it and you should think about it.

48:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and the debate here is is Microsoft serious about native client apps on Windows anymore, or should we just all be building a web Because it's definitely in the Win8 time frame? We were told it's a JavaScript world and that's why we're going to make WinJS, so that even JavaScript developers can work in Windows, except that what they made was something JavaScript developers looked at and go, whoa, I'm not going to do that it's too.

48:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they repeated the same mistakes of the Longhorn era. It's like web stuff it's not web. Yeah, honestly though I'm reading a little bit into it because we don't have a lot of these examples yet but I think Microsoft is, in a way, not leading but showing that they, too are following the same trends that other developers are following, which is, yeah, if you're creating a new app that's going to run on desktop web, if you have an existing app and you want to upgrade it with modern features, maybe WinUI 3 user experience, whatever we have this path forward for those apps too, and they're doing that, I think, across the board. So you know, I can't say they're leading, and at the same time, there's also a bit of feeling around saying so you know, I can't say.

49:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's also a bit of feeling around saying what if we're wrong? So let's go, you know, try this other path with another, with another app. And yeah, and only somebody with meticulous OCD would find all of the examples go.

49:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What is this? I don't. I don't even know what you mean by that. Let's move on. So, speaking of OCD, one of the interesting, one of the little ways that Microsoft tried to make it easy to move forward to Windows 11 was they allowed users to move the start button and the start menu from the middle of the screen over the side of the screen, where it used to be Right, or, as some people would say, where God intended it to be right. Of course, they didn't let you move the taskbar around, no, Because I like it in the top left-hand corner.

50:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
thanks, Thanks.

50:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the thing is, we have these new UIs in Windows and we have things like widgets, which by default sits over there at the left end where the start button used to be in Windows 10 or is in Windows 10. And now we have Copilot, and that used to be in the middle, but now it's over on the far right and blah, blah, blah, whatever. So Microsoft is now experimenting with meaning. We'll almost certainly implement this with moving the widgets button. If you choose that left-mounted start button, the widgets button will not be next to it anymore. It will be over toward the middle oh no, I'm sorry and will not be next to it anymore. It will be over toward the middle, oh no, I'm sorry, it will be over toward the system tray, which is where widgets predecessor, which was called news and interests in Windows 10, still is there, right, is and was located right.

50:50
So that too, I would say assuming you leave it on, would ease that transition in a way. Right, because everything is where you left it now. Right, the widgets, which used to be news and interest, is now back over on or has moved over to the right, where it has been in Windows 10. And the start menu, a stop button would obviously be over on the left. So yeah, whatever, it's, fine it's still. I think the problem with OCD in Windows 11 is that, because of the unequal nature of the balance between what's on the right and the left, it still feels like it's tilting with the system tray.

51:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are they going to put something else in that?

51:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
corner. Why are they moving it over? That's what I'm saying. Right, they're tilting it even further.

51:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they're making it worse, yeah, but it's okay, is everything going to be in the center eventually? I mean it's okay, is everything going to be in the center eventually? We're jobs-intended.

51:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I believe everything.

51:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're jobs-intended. Yeah Well, what Microsoft can't do is move fully to the Mac model and put a system menu at the top of the screen, right, Right, Because all apps implement their own menus in different ways and do different things, and we just can't do that. And if they could, you would have a system where you might be able to have, you know, status icons and things up at the top, and that would you know, it would look a lot like the Mac, I guess.

52:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the single biggest difference. That and where the Windows Zoom buttons are. I mean that's pretty much it. Having that menu bar permanently at the top of the screen is actually kind of weird. I kind of prefer the way Linux and Windows do it with it's attached to the window. Yeah.

52:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm kind of mixed on it.

52:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a consistency to the menu structures you see on Apple, which I do like yeah, you always know where to move that mouse to get system preferences.

52:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Preferences for an app are always in the same place and preferences for the Mac, in this, this case are always in the same place and available no matter which app you're using. So there's things I like about it, but yeah, I mean. And then, of course, you know, apple added a full screen mode to Mac OS. I don't remember when, but that changed the nature of that green button. That used to be maximized is now mostly full screen, right, right For most apps. It's not really.

53:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's a little different. Well, that's the problem. So you can still go full screen. It's unpredictable. I don't know what you're going to get. It's like a box of chocolates, I think.

53:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sometimes you get the one with the cherry in the middle and you're like oh what is? That Somebody ruined my chocolate. Oh yeah.

53:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay.

53:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So do we have this empty space, there's pros and cons.

53:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know what's going to happen over on the left there. I don't know, maybe they'll have.

53:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're going to come in one day and your monitor will be tilted like 27 degrees and you're going to be like. Is that because of all the icons on the right?

53:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
side of the taskbar. I think a larger than normal number of Windows users are OCD or PC users are OCD or PC users are OCD, so it's got to.

53:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, you think the free thinkers over the Mac side aren't OCD?

53:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, everybody's just.

53:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Computing is OCD by its nature I almost said I'm OCD At least the ones that are commenting on where the UX is Right. Most people don't notice, don't care.

53:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
People on Apple are passive, though, because they don't get a choice yes, and so it's.

53:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Are passive, though, because they don't get a choice. Yes, if they ask, they're told they're holding it wrong.

54:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they know, no one's listening.

54:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it was Stephen Wright who said I have a really bad form of what we used to call ADHD. He's like I have ADHD or whatever, ADHD, ADHD.

54:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
D-O-C-D. Well anyway, Is this an experiment or this is the?

54:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right now it's a test, but it will be in public tomorrow. That's how they do things now, so it's happening. There's no doubt this is happening and I have to say this is one instance where it actually kind of makes sense. It mimics the way that Windows 10 works and the way that Windows 10 works, and I think the goal, if it is, is to get people to come from Windows 10. This will help in a small way for those people, but then again, ocd types, they're going to turn that stuff off. So who?

54:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
cares where it is. What I really don't like is that the search. What do you call it, Chubby thing? The pill the pill that's it On mine now has a uh, like I had harry houdini and some handcuffs the other day right has little.

55:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, every day get rid of the arch like what is that it's confusing because it's so small.

55:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I said that looks like handcuffs. Why are there handcuffs in my pill?

55:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm getting subliminal messages from my software. I just don't I think that's.

55:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm sorry. You're saying that there was a pill and then there were handcuffs. What happened?

55:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
next, and then Harry Houdini appeared on his birthday. Then you woke up in a room and you're like what's happening? Is this a?

55:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Saw movie. So in the same way that Google does that thing on their search page, where they have a little design every day, microsoft is trying to do that. That's what it is.

55:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I figured that out, yeah, yeah, trying to do that. That's that's what it is. No, I figured that out. Yeah, because if you click it, it does the same thing as google does.

55:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But because I listen. I I, I complained about the cartoon dog in windows xp and how that little guy would truck his way off. You know when you turn him off. I always hated that and they were like all right, how can we make windows childish again? I have an idea. Let's put a cartoon right in the taskbar that people won't understand and can't remove. How does that sound when I?

56:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
was a DJ, I flattered myself that people wanted to hear little tidbits. You know this day in history, or this is Harry Houdini's birthday. I thought they liked that. Until the station formatted, it changed and it said light rock, less talk, Less talk.

56:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Leo. Actually the tagline was light rock less talk, less talk Leo. Actually the tagline was light rock, less talk. Comma Leo, less Leo is how I realized. People didn't want to know this curiously specific In history.

56:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They didn't want to know whose birthday it was, they just shut up and play the music. That's when I became a talk show host. There's no music. I like the talk part. Music. I like the talk part.

56:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sue me you wouldn't be on the radio if you didn't like the sound of your own voice well, I became a DJ because I thought I liked music.

56:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, I was in college and I loved working in college radio. I thought, oh, I love music. It'll be so much fun to play music for a living. You know, spin discs, create segues. And then I got my first commercial job and they gave me a listing and said here's what you play. It's a lot of neil diamond, I know, but the people love it. Yikes. And uh, I realized that, okay, well, it's not about the music anymore.

57:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I'm not playing music, I'm being told so you could.

57:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You were one of those guys who talked right up to the last second before the lyrics began right, yeah, is that? Yeah, is like in the game ways of the city. Happy Harry.

57:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Houdini birthday to you. And, speaking of escape, here's Rupert Murdoch and Pina Colada song.

57:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The other Rupert, the other Rupert the Pina Colada song guy or whatever it is Actually, whose real name is Escape.

57:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
People didn't know that I'm playing that the Pina Colada song Because it's Harry Houdini's birthday on this Wednesday afternoon. A good afternoon to you. 56 degrees in the city.

57:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I turn off search in the password. Again, if you really have OCD or ADHD or whatever we're calling it this week, you just turn that stuff off.

57:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because you can't deal with it.

57:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And you don't need it. How many times?

57:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
have you used a computer where you're focusing on whatever the job is and out of the corner of your eye, something's moving around? Yeah, and you're like, is there a bug on my desk? A mouse, it's up to stuff and it's some stupid little thing in Windows for me, maybe the Mac for you. Remember the Mac always used to. They used to have the icons that would alert you and it would not stop moving until you addressed it. And I remember a friend of mine telling me that that was a wonderful feature because otherwise you would miss the notification. I said really, I said, while you're watching TV, I'm going to do this and let me know when this starts getting annoying because you're watching TV and all these systems have had and do have their little, every time the computer prioritizes its own needs over your own, it's doing it wrong.

58:47
That's right Right. Or, in Microsoft's current strategy, doing it right.

58:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so I see that Dropbox is in my Microsoft store. How nice.

58:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, which you may be confused by, because there was a Dropbox app that was released many years ago, but that version of the app was just kind of a front end. In fact, I think OneDrive used to have an app like this in those dark years where we didn't have folder sync or whatever. But remember the initial folder sync implementation they found was a huge problem. They got rid of it and it was some weird Windows 8 something version where we didn't have it. Briefly, this is the actual client. Apparently it's not the old mobile client, so it's still in beta. It, I guess, supports all the features I don't use I've been using. I kind of alternate between OneDrive and Google Drive, so I'm not really sure. I assume that Dropbox supports selective sync, that kind of thing, right? Where you can just choose folders.

59:45
You don't have to sync the whole thing, no, so I assume it works with all this stuff.

59:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's actually really pretty good at that. I would say of all of them, that's the one I think is the most flexible and intelligent I actually pay for. If I added up all the terabytes of storage I have with Google and Dropbox and Microsoft, I pay for a lot of storage.

01:00:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't use frankly. I use a lot of it.

01:00:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But yeah, lisa asked me the other day. She says why are you paying for Dropbox Professional? I said I don't know. I really don't know. I don't know.

01:00:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
My response to that would have been. I would have been like a misdirect. I would have said what are you saying? I'm not professional.

01:00:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because the unprofessional version is.

01:00:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just put you know, get her so she forgets what she's arguing about? Yeah, no, that doesn't work.

01:00:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look at Elvis. That does not work.

01:00:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Your wife would probably just punch you.

01:00:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And, by the way, she's got a mean left hook. Let me tell you you don't want to do it. No, she was right. Why am I paying for that? I don't know. I think I did cancel it. I can't remember, right? Yeah, oh, yeah, see, now they're trying to get me to buy it again.

01:00:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's the only way you know you canceled it. Yeah, that's when they start banging you.

01:01:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, 15,000 gigabytes.

01:01:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's a lovely number. You know, we have Wait what?

01:01:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the business, plus how many megabytes is it?

01:01:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's 15 million megabytes. That's a lot of megabytes. That's 15 billion kilobytes. That's a lot of kilobytes, um, anyway, yeah, I don't have anything on here. I should really you, because even in you you know you don't upgrade, downgrade, you still have an account with stuff on there.

01:01:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know, and every time someone sends you something through dropbox, even when you don't have a dropbox account. It's trying very hard to get you to Dropbox. Just download the file for me, thanks.

01:01:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you know you can get documents signed right in Dropbox? No, I'm listening. Can I pay extra for that? Well, your regular business trial is 9,000 gigabytes, so that's 9 terabytes. Why is that's nine terabytes? Yeah, why that's 15 terabytes yeah

01:02:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
or 0.15 petabytes. There you go. That's what they really should be doing. Would you like 0.0015 exabytes?

01:02:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
we can get that. How many zottabytes is the?

01:02:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
lms, could I fit in this thing? I was watching the three body problem, which I'm quite enjoying, on Netflix. I read the book. At one point they have a file that is several petabytes and they're kind of going oh it's on a thumb drive.

01:02:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is. It's on a little red USB, that's the only way they can do that thing. Remember, back in the day, for a period of time, one of the ways you could show attention was waiting for the floppy to copy fully so you could get out of there the progress bar well, it's already on the red thing.

01:02:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is why they show tension. Is it's encrypted? And the guy says, well, how long is this going to take to encrypt? He says, well, I don't know. He said, well, give me a guess 15 trillion years, it's a guess, but it could happen sooner. And then he looks over and it's oh, he said, well, give me a guess, 15 trillion years, it's a guess, but it could happen sooner.

01:03:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then he looks over and it's oh, it unlocked, it's done, it's done, we got it. It's like BitLocker you can actually just say always open it, without requiring me to do anything, just check the box.

01:03:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was a little Easter egg that I noticed. I wonder if people watching noticed Because the file name. I forgot the file name. It's something important Dot CXL. It was a CXL file and I realized that's the initials of the author. Oh.

01:03:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Jason Liu, or whatever his name is. It's the Chinese version of Microsoft Excel.

01:03:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, liu Xi, that was what it is, or maybe it wasn't CXL. Yeah, I think it was.

01:03:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It could be because these names are reversed.

01:03:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was his initials. I don't know what it was in the book, but anyway, lots of fun. So let's take a little pause. That refreshes. Would you like some coffee? I'm a tea drinker. Tea drinker. We have Yorkshire Gold and PB Tips. I've been drinking vodka out of the bottle. I hope that's okay. All right, you're watching Windows Weekly. It's great to have Richard in the studio, richard Campbell's here and Paul Theriot's there in Macungie, and we are having some fun. Now let's continue on with a look at artificial intelligence there's really any such.

01:04:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
These brakes stink. I can't even go to the bathroom, okay no, you go to the bathroom.

01:04:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can go to the bathroom, we'll wait.

01:04:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's fine, it's fine, it's like ai everything's faster now yeah, I got a copilot.

01:04:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't have a P button. What's up with that Exactly Putting a copilot button?

01:04:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
on the keyboard is very much like putting Harry Houdini in his cufflinks.

01:04:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just, it's more of a cuff, it's almost a non-sequitur, it's more visual distraction.

01:04:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just distracting. I don't need a copilot button.

01:04:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's more of a cause for confusion than for help. Yes, that's exactly right. You are not making the situation better. This year is going to be difficult for people like me or anyone who cares about Microsoft 365 or just trying to stay up on what's going on, because we're getting stuff so quickly. I think probably a month ago I would have mentioned that Microsoft is now going to start documenting publicly all the features it's adding to Copilot or Microsoft 365 specifically every month, and so we've just gotten our second such update and it introduces some important AI language.

01:05:36
This is one of the problems with AI all the linguistic baggage it comes with, and this term aground and grounding and this is the kind of I think of as maybe, at least for now, the holy grail of AI, which is that we all know how powerful and incredible it can be, but we also know how horribly off it can be and hallucinations and mistakes and whatever.

01:05:53
And the more you can ground AI or an LLM, I guess, in a kind of a limited information base, kind of a finite data set, the faster and more reliable and more accurate it can be. And with Copilot well, actually Copilot for Microsoft 365 in particular, the two big buckets here for grounding are the graph, right, which is the combination of all that data that's out in your enterprise, your organization, and then maybe OneDrive. That's the one I'm kind of looking forward to, right Is this? I want to point it at my document archive and ground it in that and let's see what comes out. Let's see what insanity comes out of this thing. So, starting this month, you will, as a Microsoft 365 commercial customer with Copilot for Microsoft 365, you will, as a Microsoft 365 commercial customer with Copilot for Microsoft 365, will be able to ground Copilot in whatever selection of data from your Microsoft graph that you want, and this is going to be an interesting little milestone, right? I think that's kind of a big deal, so we'll see how that goes.

01:06:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's coming this month I always hear the whole grounding thing is don't lie to me. Yeah, yeah Say I don whole grounding thing is don't lie to me.

01:07:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah yeah, this is what you don't know. When you don't know something, yeah Right, right, right, just right, exactly, I just yeah, I. I just told a story, but one of my earliest work experiences where, uh, I didn't know what I was doing, but the my manager, my boss, was sitting there telling a customer something that I knew to be incorrect and how weird it is to be put in this position as a young person, and I later approached that customer and said I, just so you know that is not correct.

01:07:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Please speak to the actual branch manager, but that's kind of a point that I think is important to make, which is, the humans hallucinate all the time. I don't know why we expect AIs not to. We call it consciousness, that's right. Yeah, it's just. I mean, people make mistakes, so do AIs.

01:07:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is. I'm sorry that this is a story from exactly the same period of my life, but I worked in banks and we were robbed many times and one of the things you learn is that people are horrible witnesses. Oh yeah, a woman in one case was described. I was in like the kind of cubby next to her and she's telling the police what she saw. And I was like, nope, that is not what happened. And and that's pretty funny, yeah, and I remember I I looked at the assistant manager and I said and he says he goes, you need to walk away and tell someone else to don't do it with her, don't, because people convince each other of this. You know you need to walk away and tell someone else Don't do it with her, because people convince each other of things. You could turn to someone and say could you believe that guy had a red bag? And she's like I know that's crazy, he had a purple bag, but now in the heat of the.

01:08:32
Moment it's become the memory right. And I'm not saying that's why AI is inaccurate. But it is a fascinating thing about people that our recollection of things are just all over the place.

01:08:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you were mentioning this custom AI. You see that I added an instruction in here that it's responses and code examples are strictly based on the user-provided documents, so it has to come from these documents it has to come from that.

01:08:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's exactly what you want for something like that.

01:09:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's perfect. By the way, I have not had any hallucinations. Yeah, it's been really, really good. Now I don't copy and paste code from it, I don't go that far, right, but for me this is instead of looking up.

01:09:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You see, I've got here almost 20 books, so you're all in.

01:09:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it's great. I think that is an excellent use case for this it really works.

01:09:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's incredible, but he really is describing a good search tool right, yeah, and that's why I think that I've said this before.

01:09:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think that AI is a threat to search that really, ai does what you really want. Here's the thing, though this is a risky year for Microsoft. We're going to see what happens here. I think we all, you know, we've talked about this. We all see the power of AI, we get it and everything but and this thing working or not working is almost going to be the make or break, I think, for these products. Like, if this isn't you know, for Microsoft right Like if this doesn't work, like there's going to be some problems.

01:09:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This tips over in a way. I mean I would argue what are they competing with? Have you met a Microsoft search product you loved?

01:10:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean it really hurts Google, not Microsoft so much. In fact, it's a real opportunity for Microsoft, which has failed with Bing, to suddenly leapfrog Google.

01:10:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm not even talking about the consumer side of search. I'm talking about searching for stuff in your enterprise? Yeah well, it's never been.

01:10:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not, and that's why, by the way, I think on-prem search is so important because I don't want to send the stuff in my enterprise. I don't mind sending these list books up to open ai, but I don't want to send my bit precious business data.

01:10:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and once upon a time, google made a one u appliance you could buy, oh really, and stick it in your app.

01:10:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's what I remember then.

01:10:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, your own search. It just wasn't actually good for Google's business and it wasn't really probably good for anybody's. It worked pretty well internally, but Google's business is not providing good search. It's harvesting your data, oh, and so keeping it inside of your company ruins everything. It's a profit, deal, yeah, deal. Yeah. I'm sorry, paul, you were saying something.

01:11:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, anyway, there's other stuff going on. Uh, in microsoft 365, whatever it doesn't. None of this is super. You know exciting co-pilot will be. You know, in excel, that's still in beta, that's going to be improving in outlook and loop and share, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever. So all that stuff, nothing, nothing super surprising there. And then more recently they announced priority chat, gpt-4, turbo access and the end of conversation limits for customers. I guess paying for co-pilot for Microsoft 365.

01:11:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Of course, 5 is on the way right this summer. You think so?

01:11:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They say it. I wonder what the training set is, because you know they already use the Internet, Do they?

01:11:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
have something else. People have seen it say it's so much better.

01:11:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's an Apple product. It's going to make what you're using now look like crap. Richard, I remembered what I was going to say earlier what Microsoft uses. If this fails, what's the competition? The competition is what they were using before. The competition is the same as it's always been for Office, it's the last version and, unfortunately for Microsoft, if its customer base decides that Copilot for Microsoft 365 isn't worth paying for, that means $30 per user, less per month across the board Then that would be a big problem for Microsoft. Less per month, you know, across the board then that would be a big problem for Microsoft. It's not that they're going to a competing chat, gpt, something, something for the enterprise, necessarily. But yeah, if they stop paying for it or just don't pay for it, that's a serious problem.

01:12:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But again, you know we were talking a little bit about the confidence side on Microsoft. The fact that they're going GPT-4, Turbo, unlimited conversations like that's just opening door for more resource consumption by customers. So they have to have some confidence that it's going to be enough. The infrastructure is going to be able to hold up. From that, yeah.

01:12:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I see this on Twitter now Chat GPT-5 is being rebranded Cyberdyne Systems 1.0. So there you go, there you go, there you go. Now I understand Tony Stonk.

01:13:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
How much of ChatGPT5 is actually an April Fool's Day joke, right?

01:13:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Could well be. Gmail was an April Fool's joke. I mean it did pretty good.

01:13:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It survived 20 years. Has anybody, was anybody fooled this? April Fool's Didn't see anything great. No, no, alex Lindsay was, but we won't, I won't, rub it in Get it done right, tim.

01:13:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay, it's nice of you, leo.

01:13:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it really is. In fact, I shouldn't really have even mentioned that.

01:13:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm not a big fan of April Fool's tech jokes personally, but we had to put out some stuff this week and uh, deliberately said we're releasing nothing on monday, just to not confuse me. I really think that's the right thing to do. Don't put stuff out on on april 1. Nothing good comes of it. If you are serious, it's not taken seriously, and if you're not serious you're just confusing people.

01:13:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So just, don't do it. The reason I think that chat gpt5 might be a minute is now that they're making ChatGPT 4 kind of the default right. Yeah.

01:14:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And lowering and just making it more and more available A ChatGPT 4 Turbo even.

01:14:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean they've made this broadly available across the board, Free, non-free, whatever.

01:14:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So it's just like you know you make the old hardware cheaper and more available so you can clear it off the shelves before the new hardware comes in. Except it's not hardware, no, it's just more cloud consumption.

01:14:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
How much space does consumption? It doesn't matter.

01:14:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, so OpenAI is? It's the same answer.

01:14:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're allowing people to use chat GPT without an account Not limited, but whatever. So I guess anyone can get a little taste of AI. The first hit is free, as we say, is this anxiety?

01:14:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Are they worried they're not getting enough customers? Is customer momentum dying down, like why give away more?

01:14:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right Especially since it costs you money. It's cynical right, I mean everybody who uses it is costing you Out of the goodness of their heart.

01:15:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now you're undermining my good feelings about opening. I don't know.

01:15:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm sorry You're talking about positive feelings. That's so weird.

01:15:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm usually the cynical one. What's happening?

01:15:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think they feel the competition breathing down their necks?

01:15:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, I wonder that. I mean, and definitely we're in a land rush right now. Get your customer while you can. Oh yeah, Because there is competition. Claude's gotten pretty good, yeah, and open, and you know, Lama's got some good stuff.

01:15:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're seeing more on-prem, and that's open source, which I like. Yeah, real open source.

01:15:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah yeah, you know there's enough stuff in motion and we keep thinking something good is going to happen for Google at some point here too, right, like I would like that All these products get better when there's competition going on, right, and I think it's the hint of competition that's starting to make them like get your customer now, get them used to your URL before they get used to somebody else's URL.

01:15:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The blue ocean will last so long, then it's a red ocean. I mean, I know this isn't an Apple show, but Apple did say that they have now an AI that is better than ChatGPT4 as well.

01:16:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Because they weren't going to put out a post that said well, we have a lousier one.

01:16:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you were to count the number of times Apple said they had something better than everyone else, how big do you think that number would be?

01:16:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Probably every product they've ever released.

01:16:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the company that literally says the most obvious marketing line of all time this is the greatest iphone we've ever made. We've never made a greater iphone, which to me, I think, is the baseline for every new iphone.

01:16:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, that seems like if you're really going for this year's goal was to make a bad one and we've achieved it.

01:16:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're excited.

01:16:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The funny thing we took a step back this year um in a way, this they said the reason our AI is so smart is because we can look at the screen and we convert the text, the on-screen or the sound into text so that we can feed it to the AI. So it works better. Okay, the secret is OCR. Yeah, text we.

01:17:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Text We'll see.

01:17:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I would not dismiss Apple.

01:17:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think they're going to be a credible presence in this area and they persist.

01:17:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They will keep going at it until they get there. They have nothing. They made five Apple TVs before they got it right.

01:17:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm very puzzled this is called Realm Reference resolution as language modeling. Well, that's appealing.

01:17:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, we'll see. You know, WWDC is going to be very interesting. I assume right now this is going to be all AI To get the partners lined up. We'll see what they come up with.

01:17:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There are always interesting moments when the other big tech giants are talking about nothing but what the other guy was doing.

01:17:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The researchers from Apple Research said we also benchmark against chat GPT-3, 5, and 4, with our smallest model achieving performance comparable to that of GPT-4 and our larger models substantially outperforming it.

01:17:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So they're saying it. But it also compares an M3 to a third-generation Intel chip, for some reason. You know, I don't know. Look, we'll see. Right now these are just words. Nobody has used this thing outside of Apple. We'll see, we'll see.

01:18:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not saying they exaggerate all the time, except that I'm kind of saying that the only reason I brought it up is that maybe there is some competition breathing down OpenAI's neck and Microsoft's neck.

01:18:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Clearly all of the tech giants are taking it seriously. That's good. It's good for us.

01:18:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Amazon has invested $4 billion in Anthropic. There's a little proof point for you. Yep, that started out as a $1.25 billion investment. They said, if this thing goes good, we're going to go all the way up to four. And then they did so. It didn't take too long and that's your cloud. Right, that's cloud, isn't it?

01:18:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Cloud. Yeah, actually, anthropic used to be Googlers who left Google because they didn't think Google was interested in safety. So it's a safe. That was their focus point. Sure, seems to me safety is the wrong direction, but okay, I think let's so.

01:19:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Opera has been pushing native AI in a browser. They're trying to innovate in this space. Now they're bringing local LLMs to their Opera 1 browser and data, which is very interesting. They have a wide range of choices.

01:19:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Doesn't Arc do that? I mean, isn't Arc kind?

01:19:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
of AI. I don't think it's local. It's not local. Llms oh, it's not local. Yeah, yeah, Okay. So this could take up gigabytes of space on your device. But you know, someone in, I think Macedon probably said do you have any concerns about safety because Opera is owned by a Chinese company? And I said I don't know, Do you have any concerns about safety because Volvo was owned by a Chinese company? I mean, which are you more likely to be harmed by? I don't know, it seems maybe this is a Nordic thing. They're all being bought by the Chinese.

01:19:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know, it is probably good to know that Opera is owned by a Chinese company.

01:20:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think that add that to it. Yeah, it's like a group of investors from China that bought this company some years ago.

01:20:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The hatred they're getting mostly is because they put so. Remember we were talking about how Apple and Windows and Linux have different places for the experience buttons. They put the expand buttons going down the left side like this and everybody's going, no, that's wrong. No, why would anybody want that? What does Arc do? Arc doesn't even have no buttons.

01:20:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The correct button is no button. Arc is if you can't figure out a keyboard shortcut, you're not using a frame, You're not qualified.

01:20:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know about Arc on Windows. If you can't figure out a keyboard shortcut, you're not using a frame. That's not true. You're not qualified. I have to say I don't know about Arc on Windows. I haven't really played with it much, but I have to say I love Arc. I am Arc on the Mac.

01:20:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm going to thank you, paul. This is going to come up later in the show as well. It is a revelation. On the Mac, I have to say it's yeah, it's good. So Google got a lot of heat for saying that the Pixel 8 couldn't do Gemini Nano locally like the Pixel 8 Pro, and the only difference between those two phones, aside from the camera and the screen size, is that I think the Pixel 8 has slightly less RAM it must be RAM Than the Pixel 8 Pro. Yeah, and one thing I don't know if it was Google or Apple, I think it was actually Apple, but it would have made sense for Google to come out and say guys, I don't think you understand how resource intensive this stuff is, but they're bowing to pressure and they are going to bring Gemini Nano and also Circle to Search for some reason.

01:21:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So as long as you don't have any pictures or any other media files or resources or apps installed on your phone, it'll run great.

01:21:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I used to have a custom boot disk and I mean that floppy disk for my 386SX computer so that I could boot it up in a way that would use as little RAM as possible. So I could run Doom. And you're going to have to do that with the Gemini Nano on that. I remember that.

01:21:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I used to do that too.

01:21:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was so jealous of a friend who had a 4860X and he could just anytime he wanted Me and my math code processor are going to be over here.

01:22:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you remember when Doom went from being a DOS window to running in Windows? Yeah, that was much slower so actually the first.

01:22:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, it was WinG, the predecessor to DirectX. The guys from the Xbox, what became the Xbox team? The DirectX team asked those guys to port to WinG so they could show it. They showed it off at like their first big gamer event or what Microsoft did, and it kind of took off. I mean, well, obviously now you don't really run it in DOS anymore, but I mean, yeah, that was the start of a. That was a big transition. Yeah, I mean, quake was a DOS game when it came out. There was a Wind Quake eventually and Quake 2 and Quake World and all that stuff. But I mean it probably I don't remember the exact history of this, but Quake came out probably in 97?.

01:22:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, somewhere in that, that's John Carmack right.

01:23:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Doom 95 was released in August 1996.

01:23:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There you go, yeah, and the original Doom must date back to what like 92? Something like that, probably Something in there, and that was, you know, obviously, DOS. That was everything back then, but yeah, even as late as the very late 90s, a lot of these top-tier games were still DOS-based.

01:23:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was fast. Well, and exactly to your point, you could have all the resources. There was nothing else going on.

01:23:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Windows was just another app running.

01:23:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They should create another kind of hardware where you only have the one game running and nothing else is going on. What would you call such a thing?

01:23:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't. Imagine does the xbox? Have any operating system running when you're playing a game.

01:23:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, it does? It is hyper v based uh system, but it's just two partitions, so it's it's the os and the game. Basically, even even on an xbox.

01:23:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You still got a stub of windows in there.

01:23:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, definitely yeah, that was um. It's got a stub of Windows in there. Oh, definitely, yeah, that was.

01:23:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And you thought Linux was a cancer.

01:24:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That was Dave Cutler's vision, right, it was a common kernel across everything.

01:24:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, yeah, yeah, it's become the History Channel show here there you go, that's right.

01:24:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, we are talking about Windows, leon. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's part and parcel.

01:24:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now I like this headline here. I yeah, yeah, that's part and parcel. Now I like this headline here. I don't know, Maybe we've already done it Is Intel circling the drain? Oh, boy.

01:24:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I referred to Intel earlier as the Eddie Haskell, I think, of the industry. And look, I like Pat Galsinger. I kind of want this company to turn it around. I have not seen much of an indication that it is doing that or can do that. It's gotten something to the tune of $20 billion in handouts from the US government and it's fab business, it's foundry business, the chip-making business we now know lost $7 billion last year on revenues that were down 31 percent from the previous year.

01:25:00
So intel, it's not his fault. I want to be super clear about this. I'm not blaming him, but under pat, galsinger has been a he's. He inherited this mess, right, he's trying that, he's doing it. It seems like it might be a sound strategy, but unfortunately, under him it's just been a constant series of promises. They keep getting pushed out further and further every time and, uh, like I said, I think we talked about this earlier today but the you know intel just didn't get on the bus and, um, that was a lot of strategy mistakes on the part of, uh, previous uh leaders of the company. But well, they thought they were the bus. Right, they might. I'm going to change it to boat now. They might have missed the boat, I don't know.

01:25:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The bus missed the boat, and that's bad news.

01:25:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a rocket ship in here somewhere.

01:25:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the wrong direction they're still trying to rub two sticks together. What are we talking about? This is, though I think it's a little bit of a comment on what Gelsinger wanted to do bit of a comment on what gelsinger wanted to do, which was to take it from an integrated uh, design and manufacturing company. Just two separate businesses? Sure, and he does. He did say in this quarterly report he wants to report separately, and that's because one of the businesses, the one that makes chips, lost seven billion dollars.

01:26:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Put it over there, right, yeah, but that's also wonder if the company organization means could they look at fabbing somewhere else? Could the foundry business be getting other customers?

01:26:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's, I think, his goal. He even said we want to make Apple's chips.

01:26:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they hired a new CFO. We'll see there are national security implications to the Intel stuff. I mean all of our chips are made in Asia, Right, you know?

01:26:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and hey, there was just a big earthquake in Taiwan. They evacuated TSMC Forget. China, you got earthquakes. I think it's prudent. That's why the Chips Act gave Intel so much money because they want to bring it home.

01:26:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Apple is an interesting I don't know if Apple will do it, yeah, no, and I was going to say they're an interesting demonstration of the trouble with moving out of China, because they've been talking about this and trying to do it for years and they have moved things to India and I think Vietnam Companies are starting to talk about Mexico, which is kind of interesting, but it's a really slow process. It's not like Apple woke up one day and said, all right, we're switching all the iPhone stuff over to some other country. It's like, yeah, that didn't happen.

01:27:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and the slow part is not building the fab, it's training the people. You just can't grow fab engineers overnight. It's not a button, they don't come from a vending machine. You have to teach them and they have to learn. And those first operations are like the first clutch in your first car. You're not going to go very far, you're going to make some bad smells right. It takes a lot to get the yields up where they need to be Right.

01:27:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How's Arms doing? Are they doing well? They're doing great.

01:27:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Are they a platform or is it a company?

01:27:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I mean, I remember that for a while SoftBank wanted to have NVIDIA buy them and then that got turned down and it felt like SoftBank was trying to unload ARM.

01:28:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They were, and now ARM is a sort of standalone company in the sense that there's a company called ARM Holdings that reports their earnings every quarter like a normal company. They've only been doing that for a couple of quarters now. Compared to these big chip makers, they're actually tiny, but remember that they essentially create designs which they then license, right? So I'm not looking at this, but I mean their revenues in the most recent quarter ended December 31st were under a billion dollars, right, $824 million.

01:28:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So compared to these guys, it's tiny Compared to Infinium, but it's healthy and it's doing great. Infinium is doing one particular thing. I mean we also have to remember that the US government was so worried about Intel that they forced Intel to license to AMD to make compatible alternative chips. Right, right, like there's always been an awareness of the strategic importance of the CPU business. And yet they let the fabs go and let the training go, let the pipeline to build up people to do this kind of work. I mean, it's a decade of effort at least.

01:29:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was looking at the article I had written about Arm and their earnings back. Whenever that was. It'll be January, but there's you'll remember this when I say this their margins 96% Nice.

01:29:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not a lot of overhead in this business. Yeah, they sit there thinking things write it down, sell it.

01:29:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They sit there, think of things, write it down, sell it. The other thing to know about this company is that the designs they licensed to others were shipped on 7.7 billion chipsets in that quarter alone. Wow, right, because this stuff is not just the devices we all know and love, like portable devices and smartphones and stuff. They're in data centers, they're in little car chipsets and they're everywhere. It's in everything. They're in data centers, they're in little car chipsets and they're everywhere. It's amazing. It's incredible, yeah.

01:30:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We live in an interesting world, don't we? That's why I am glad that you guys are here. It's great to have Richard Campbell in the studio, paul Thurott at his worldwide Thurottcom headquarters in McCongee, pennsylvania, and the Windows Weekly Show continues on in just a moment. Before we do, though, I would like to mention that it is the club members who are making this show possible, at least to a great extent. You know, richard's Whiskey does not come cheap. Actually, not a penny of your money will be spent on richard's whiskey. Nope, well, allegedly spent on richard. I don't know what he's gonna spend. I can't, can't, guarantee you, uh, but it is only seven bucks a month, that's. That's hardly a bottle of whiskey, but it gets you a lot more. It's a couple of cups of coffee, and what do you get? You get ad-free versions of all the shows we do. You get video of all the shows we do.

01:30:58
We've made a little bit of a change, which I'm kind of happy about. Everything that was behind the paywall is now available to you as audio, including the Untitled Linux Show, hands on Mac, paul Thorat's Hands on Windows, the Home Theater Geeks Show all of them available to you as audio downloads. So we wanted to really let everybody listen for free. Those are ad supported. If you want the video, though, join the club, and we've got video for all of those as well. You also get access to a fantastic club twit discord, which is a fun place to hang, you don't? Not everybody who joins the club goes into the discord, but it's nice to have it there. If you want, you can watch the shows there before and after as well. You can also chat with other club members and special events coming up the book club, and we've decided to do another special event.

01:31:46
We're going to have a movie watch party at the Laporte House, and you're all invited. You're all invited Not into the house, though. You'll have to come in via the internet, okay. Okay, there's not room enough for all 11 000 members, but I think it's going to be a lot of fun. We also, of course, have an open studio this sunday, club members only, and we filled it up. Sorry to say uh, but if you want to get on the waiting list, please go to the club. If you're in the club, go to the discord and get on the waiting list. There's going to be another uh, open house on the 21st, and this is going so well. I think Lisa said she's willing to come in again in the weeks to come, so we may do some more of those this summer. Please join the club. All of those benefits aside, it's what keeps us on the air and we really need your support to do that.

01:32:33
Twittv slash club Twit Enough said, enough said. I'm not going to belabor it On, we go, there you go. He's going to belabor it. Thank you, kevin King. Did you tell us what the movie's going to be.

01:32:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Sorry, what's the movie going to be?

01:32:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe Roadhouse.

01:32:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, no. It's going to have to be a public domain movie because we want to show it at the same time as we talk about it. So it's going to be Fritz Lang's classic Metropolis Such a good film.

01:33:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think it'll be a lot of fun and because it's a silent movie we can make some real commentary.

01:33:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can talk the whole time. I think it's great. This was Anthony's idea. I think it's a great idea. It's a brilliant idea.

01:33:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He brought this up yesterday, you know, and just all the cues for all the science fiction that came after. Oh yeah, metropolis is a required viewing. Yeah.

01:33:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's on YouTube if you want to pre-watch, but you can also save it for the night. I've been asking if anybody knows how to play the piano or the organ so we can have Nice, have a little, but nobody yet has popped up On. We go with Windows Weekly. We continuing on to antitrust Something you've all been waiting for.

01:33:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's not antitrust from Microsoft.

01:33:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Aren't they being investigated in Europe, are they not?

01:33:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They are. That's why I think this is very interesting. So a bunch of gatekeepers have been held accountable for the DMA, the Digital Markets Act. Most of them have done what I would call a malicious to belligerent type of compliance. Apple is almost certainly the worst of the group by far. That's interesting and not surprisingly when the EU announced today they were in fact investigating those companies that are not complying. There were a lot of very Apple-specific points which I thought was interesting, including one. I had gotten a MacBook Air a couple of weeks ago and noticed and was you know, now I'm using the iPhone more and I noticed a weird user interface thing regarding default browsers that only applies to Safari and I thought it was off. And they touch on this. You know like they deliberately design these UIs to confuse people and keep them on their browser, et cetera, et cetera. So I thought that was kind of interesting. But I only mentioned this because of those gatekeepers Google, meta, amazon, microsoft the only one that I think, unless I'm missing one, I could be. Am I missing one?

01:35:01
I could be missing one, but the only one of the big guys that is not being held immediately being investigated it's microsoft right, and and we talked about this a couple weeks ago they said they only have the, the two gatekeeper products Windows, which is obvious, and LinkedIn, which is like what, but whatever. And they are just complying. And not only are they complying, but they set up like a public website. They're like we're going to come out every once in a while and document how we're complying and what we're doing and all the changes we made, and I love it. I wish you would do that for the rest of the world, but you know we'll talk about that too, because, separate from this, microsoft is, was or is, I guess, still being investigated in Europe for bundling teams with Office Right.

01:35:46
This was the Slack complaint back from when Slack was still a standalone company, and Microsoft announced this week that they're just going to debundle teams.

01:35:57
You know they proposed this to the EU sometime last year and I don't remember the exact numbers, but you as an organization would save, I want to say, $2 per user per month by not using teams.

01:36:10
So it's not the cost of Slack, which I think for Slack or their current owner, salesforce, that might be a sticking point, but that was their plan and now they've announced they're going to do what I think all these companies should do, which is do it everywhere. Right, just do it everywhere. How difficult, expensive and convoluted would it be for any of these companies to maintain two different versions of these products, one that complies with the DMA and one that does not? Out of you know when, in fact, the, the I don't know, the situation that led to teams being so successful is not going to reverse itself. Right, it's, you got it. You have I don't know, I don't know what that, maybe Richard knows 400 and something million licensed customers right now. I don't think you're going to see a lot of those guys walking away from teams, so this is a low risk concession to make.

01:37:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And yet compliant, and they came straight at it, right yeah.

01:37:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And you know, this is the way they behaved with Activision Blizzard. They just kind of hit the thing on the head, addressed the complaints, got it done. This was the stuff that came out of. I guess it was Microsoft's second antitrust trial, the big one in Europe, where Brad Smith came in and said guys, you need to start being nice, we can't just be this way. This is a message Apple has not gotten. They will, but as of today, they're acting like microsoft.

01:37:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You choose to learn it the hard way.

01:37:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All we're missing is the hours of video of tim cook dissing us senators, and then maybe or just him slouched over in a chair in a dark room, like arguing over the meaning of the word the right, you know which was a classic. I told you this the soul-sucking nature of those. Um, what do you call that? Like a testimony that bill gates gave for the us antitrust trial? Oh yeah, any journalist could contact wag at at the time and get every it came. It was a box of it's all on youtube now is it watched on?

01:38:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
youtube. I remember devorek, the only thing I've watched. He ordered the box and he took any. This was back in the video toaster days. He loved his amiga video toaster he. He edited out everything except the gulps, because apparently bill did a lot of gulping during his testimony and so he made like a five.

01:38:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Minute.

01:38:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, he was drinking coke. The whole five minute video of bill gates going he?

01:38:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
um. The only thing I've watched in my life that was more soul sucking and depressing was the time I was homesick and I watched all three Godfather movies back to back. But other than that, this was. It was no, they're great movies. I'm not criticizing the movies, I'm just saying they're depressing.

01:38:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
These do not feel good movies. The endings are all kind of the same.

01:38:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're not. Yeah, they're not. We're going to the mattresses, guido.

01:38:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The cannoli has a good time, but that's about it.

01:38:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, my wife came home and she's like how are you feeling? I'm like I've been crying all day my boy, sonny, my boy, oh sorry, Anyway, microsoft today is different than they used to be, except with Windows, right, well, except with they're adhering to the DMA. They're doing a great job, but they're not doing it everywhere, and I wish that that is something they would do. Look at that page. I'd like to see them do that that is a beautiful page.

01:39:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Microsoft's Compliance with Digital Markets Act. Welcome, dot com, dot com. Yeah, it's you know. Community edition.

01:39:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's the right way to. You're a global company. You've got to exist in the world. You know it's the right thing to do. I think yeah.

01:39:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you think they're completely off the hook? I think Germany is still. They're not doing anything of what the DMA is concerned.

01:39:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're making inquiries around open AI, for obvious reasons, reasons, right, and I think microsoft's positioned themselves very well on that too by engaging with mistral and huggy bear and like everybody else, so that, uh, you can just say, well, we're not specific with open ai, we're just, you know, supporting all of the different uh lines of module we can find. Yeah, but you know the the interesting about the brad smith approach is that it is a good pr play. It is making happy noises to the constituents, to the people of the eu. The actual compliance part is, you know, a separate question. Like you got to go take a look what are they actually doing, rather than what they're saying.

01:40:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, you presume what what the eu has not said is that, unlike all these other companies, we're all that. What do they call them? The um, it's not the right term, but it's the interested parties, right? In other words, the spotify's, the, the people who are complaining about these companies, yeah, all have these further complaints because they should like. What apple's doing is ridiculous. I think any even the biggest apple fan in the world knows what they're doing is horrible, right, but but no one has said that about microsoft.

01:40:55
With the dma complaints like, no one has come to the EU and said, oh, this is bullshit, you know they're not doing it Like um, so you know. My complaint is just that we can't get it outside of the EU. I can't afford to move to France, but I would love to have this stuff happening, so for Portugal and France too. But um re re-loving bastard. The point is, a lot of the feel-goods that I got out of Microsoft over the past decade, which I sort of attributed to Satya Nadella right, in many ways, when you think about it, might have come out of the Brad Smith mentality right, he was the guy.

01:41:31
Right, I mean the kinder gentler Microsoft thing. It might literally have originated with him. In fact, I think we could make a really good argument?

01:41:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, because he started back in the bomber days. He was helping to clean up the DOJ crisis and get the consent decree. So we've had a decade of him more.

01:41:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Two decades. The great story about him. I'm going to get this slide wrong maybe, but he went into the room with all the senior leadership team and he had one slide for his presentation. It just said settle. And that was his whole message he's like this is what you're doing. You can't whatever you're doing now it's not working.

01:42:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's not going to work, it cannot work.

01:42:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just not going to work.

01:42:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Settle, just settle. Do what they want.

01:42:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If you've ever been in the room and you probably have. I feel like Richard you have, where your lawyers and their lawyers are sitting across the table and you're going back and forth trying to negotiate a settlement. Now, while you read the room is the room temperature going up. Yeah, you take a break. Yeah, always, and there's always somebody who smokes. Yeah, so that gives you the option. I don don't smoke, but I have often gone out for a smoke. Yeah, because that conversation is worth it does 10 times everything in the room.

01:42:43
Yeah, just break them up feed them.

01:42:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I'm tempted to write a note that says settle, yeah, and that's. It's where we need to be right that should be your business card.

01:42:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It just says like what is this like?

01:42:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm a lawyer you don't want to go to court. That's the real truth, the line that I was taught long ago is winning a lawsuit is like winning an earthquake. That's very accurate. I've only done it once and it was not my favorite thing. Nobody's happy.

01:43:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know what? This is coming around full circle. I mentioned the movie Roadhouse. That's a line from Roadhouse, yeah. She said something like do you win most of your fights? And he said no one wins a fight, Wow.

01:43:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know that's a good one.

01:43:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right Everything.

01:43:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I need to know in life. That didn't stop him from fighting, though, as I remember, no.

01:43:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The whole movie was about fighting. That's why we're here.

01:43:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Still got a film to make.

01:43:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Goodness, the people who won were the people watching the movie. Plus, there was a monster truck. It's amazing. It's an amazing film anyway. Um, what are we doing?

01:43:40
oh yes, so uh, moving on, I guess yes shall, I shall you, yes, shall I um, last year, microsoft replaced a paid one drive tier with with something called microsoft 365 basic. It doesn't give you any of the Microsoft 365 apps, but it's a great name Ransomware protection, ad-free experience for Outlook which is all the more important these days because ads are now in the new Outlook, which is the web slash native app, et cetera, et cetera. They just upgraded this offering, right? So there's ransomware detection and recovery. Now there is a improvements to the personal vault, um, which this is crazy to me, but I actually I use personal vault, uh, pretty extensively, right? So if I get, like, a serial number from a company for a product, or if I have, you know, a photo of my license and my passport, put that stuff in personal vault. Um, this tier was limited to three files before. It's just like what? Okay? So now it's unlimited, like the rest of Microsoft 365. Good.

01:44:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You only have three important files. I have three important yeah exactly.

01:44:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You have another bank account.

01:44:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a picture of two of my three kids and my wife, so it's like I don't even. It's crazy.

01:45:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Paul, you don't have three kids, though. I just want to make it clear.

01:45:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sometimes for a joke. I have to free will a little bit. I have cats, you can. Microsoft 365, I'm sorry. Onedrive has its own form of sharing links and you can now password protect and expire them. It with this tier, you can do that with the other ones before you can access offline files and folders on mobile, which is maybe, I guess and it's you know it's 20 bucks a year.

01:45:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I mean it's cheap. But the thing about I'm curious about is this ransomware protection so it senses that there's malicious activity on your files and then says On your OneDrive yeah, but OneDrive, these are not immutable files, so they're actually maybe being attacked as well, and that's how they know.

01:45:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, they always keep multiple copies. It's the versioning. So what they're looking for is unusual simultaneous behaviors. Yeah, all your files are being opened in sequence. That's not what you normally do, so when they see that you can roll back to a previous version. They make sure there's another version locked off and they notify you.

01:46:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so a lot of people don't know this, but many of the storage-related OneDrive features which most of the features I guess are available in Windows. You know versioning like file versioning, stuff like that. But the one that isn't is there's a recycle bin and it's like a. It's basically a way to, it's like basically versioning for your entire OneDrive in addition to things you've thrown out. So they do allow you to do file recovery in the event of a ransomware incident or whatever.

01:46:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's actually for 20 bucks a year. That might be worth it. You know, I mean it's 100 gigabytes. It's not for big businesses.

01:46:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Personal vault is big too. I kind of downplayed it when I said it, but I use offline files and folders on desktop all the time. I have never and I can't think that device as you would on a PC or Mac. That's actually very useful right.

01:47:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And OneDrive will do that on an iPad.

01:47:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, on a mobile device yeah. The mobile app yeah.

01:47:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's very nice, that's cool.

01:47:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean that's fine, it will do it on an iPhone too. But I mean, I just see less of a use for that. But I guess I'm sure someone could come up with a reason.

01:47:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Sounds good to me. If you want more space, you can always upgrade, that's obviously the plan right, absolutely yeah.

01:47:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There are two things I'd like. These are semi-related. I would like to see Microsoft have storage tiers that weren't tied to Office. In other words, this thing, but a terabyte or two terabytes, just sell me a terabyte, whatever, yeah, just the storage, I think would be cool. And then, semi-related to this, in the Apple space, there's like iCloud. Obviously, icloud goes from 200 gigabytes, which is enough for a couple of devices to be backed up, to two terabytes is the next tier. It's like guys, I have two kids with iPhones and iPads and me, and we are right on that line. I need about 300. I don't need two terabytes and I certainly don't want to pay for that, but one terabyte or something, anything in the middle, something would be great. So Apple is always going to be for advice. I'm surprised they haven't asked, but anyway, that would be nice and I think it would benefit a lot of people. I think a lot of people would like that. All right, I considered making this the top story.

01:48:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I was going to ask you why you buried this one, because it's certainly a storm in my world.

01:48:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, this may be one of the biggest stories of this year and I know it's just beginning of April, but randomly and coincidentally, a Microsoft engineer who was working on benchmarking a Debian distribution in a virtual machine who's not a security guy wasn't looking at source code, nothing like that discovered some anomalies in the performance, tied them to a set of compression utilities One half of one second, this is why OCD is good in our business. Thank you, because no one else cares about 500 millisecond latency. And he's like no, that ain't right.

01:49:01
Most people would have been like eh, whatever. He reported it. This was a. These were what's it called XY, or whatever the utility.

01:49:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
XC.

01:49:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a compression utility.

01:49:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You don't really see.

01:49:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It doesn't usually have a user facing it it is a perfect supply chain.

01:49:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's a really so here's this is.

01:49:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's so much about the story. That's astonishing, but this would have gone out to every basically every stable linux distribution yep in the world and it could have been one of the biggest technology disasters of all time. But the thing that blows my mind the most like, literally, is that the individual or probably nation state right that was responsible for this was playing the long game Two years. They invented a two and a half years I think it was of a pretend persona who ingratiated himself into this community, started making contributions, started to be trusted and then just became part of it and then he unleashed hell and it would have gone out to the planet, except this guy randomly found it. And that is this.

01:50:08
Story is still unfolding. There's still much more information. I think that will come out of it much like the Microsoft hack thing from a couple of months ago, whatever. But this is. It's just awesome, but it's also scary, because now, of course, where your brain goes is oh crap. Now we know anyone could do this. I mean, well, you know, it's not a random kid, no, kid's going to do this for over two years. But the fact that someone played that game for that long and was successful suggests to me, and probably to others, that there are other people could be doing this or other whatever.

01:50:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I mean the open source side is one thing, because, of course, code was visible. So once you scrutinize you found it right away Visible, but obfuscated. He tried to hide it. They did a good job of it too. It was very tricky to find and I think that's what actually twigged him was when he went looking for why is this is delayed? He couldn't see anything and it was just too clever. Then, you know, the hair stood up in the back of his neck like that's strange. I better call somebody. What about? I mean a classic, the, the real sort of um mole approach. Become a microsoft employee, spend two years until you're contributing to it. Yeah, card keying, your mole approach. Become a Microsoft employee. Spend two years until you're contributing to it.

01:51:20
Yeah, card keying your way into another building Inside of.

01:51:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Azure Yep Kevin King do you have anything? You want to tell us my friend. You came to us, was it two?

01:51:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
years ago, two years ago, with no history. No track record.

01:51:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually I found XE on my Mac. A lot of people with Homebrew would have it installed because it's a utility.

01:51:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just a question of whether it was going to be updated.

01:51:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And there is a fix that downgraded it to the old version. But you may have it if you have WSL running on your Windows machine, because it's not something you would install, but it's something many other tools install. It's in a package.

01:52:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It is a proper supply chain attack, including OpenSSH. He might have literally saved the world.

01:52:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is incredible, isn't it Andres Freund, who is a German Microsoft employee. Do we know what he does? Yeah, he works on Debian. Oh for Microsoft Okay. This for Microsoft Okay.

01:52:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the thing. It's hard to explain. I don't actually know what he does, but think about how big Microsoft is. Think about how much Linux is happening up in Azure. Yep, it's probably related to that. To a lot of people who think about Microsoft from the outside, it's not what we think of when we think of Microsoft. No, of course they have these people right. Well, and uh, listen, if this doesn't fix microsoft's reputation with the open source community, nothing will. This is this. If this doesn't do it, I mean what? What do we have? What? What's what you know? What could you do to to solve this?

01:52:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do like that. So he founded. He says he found an obfuscated script which was executed at the end of a configure, but he was able to unobfuscate it and one of the things it does is it copies a file called bad3corrupt lzma2. So you know, okay, just a little tip to hackers.

01:53:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Better name no, no, no I appreciate your.

01:53:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That was a long time existing file. It was a test file.

01:53:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That file? Oh, because it's a test file.

01:53:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a test file. It's an LCMA test file, that's right.

01:53:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it isn't from the bad guy.

01:53:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, well, it wasn't the bad guy. The bad guy modified an existing test file, so you would ignore it.

01:53:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So sneaky Levels of clever here. Steve Gibson did a whole half hour on it yesterday. It deserves every minute of it, the whole, you know and.

01:53:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it's a novel. Oh, I bet he touches on it again in the future. I think we're going to learn a lot more.

01:53:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, we've been talking about supply chain attacks on security now for years. I mean this has been a problem. There were a bunch last week on NPM and PiPi.

01:53:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It just happens a lot On NET Rocks. We talk about the sort of corporatization of open source where all the big players are now there and there's a lot of paid employees working in open source as well, and the effect that has on the community as a whole. But one of the things you talk about is this burnout of the maintainers.

01:54:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was the real problem with XE, which is it was one guy. He had some mental health issues.

01:54:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He wanted to get out of it.

01:54:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And along came this perfect solution Amazing. That's like the scene in the Omen, where the nanny shows up and they're like we didn't call a nanny and he's like no, the agency sent me, it's all good. And then two years go by. The kid's fine.

01:54:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then he's in the devil.

01:54:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, it's the same.

01:54:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's this classic scenario, was it? Perhaps it's all for you, damien what a great movie, by the way. I love that movie. Uh, all right, what else we got? Linkedin isn't just getting games, it's getting t TikTok-style videos. Oh boy. The. Tiktokification of the world continues. God, kill me. I can't your resume in 15 seconds. But you know what, is it just wannabe TikTok, or is it really?

01:55:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
there's some utility there, I mean there's generally been a motion towards LinkedIn as more of a social media site, truly, you know where. Once upon a time it was just a digital resume. I'm not saying that I'm excited about it, but you can see that just because of the destruction of what used to be Twitter and the pull away from Facebook and others. So this one's a bit more credible. Do I think 15-second videos are going to make it better? They can be longer than that.

01:55:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can tell you that 15 seconds is about all the patience I have for LinkedIn every time I visit it.

01:55:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
15 seconds is quick enough. You don't have time to skip away from it before it's over, so you were a full watch.

01:55:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know of another social network that allows a business to buy an ad that then triggers a message to me from that business as if it were them messaging me. Yeah, I, I, I, I. If I paid for this, would that go?

01:56:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
away, like what is, what's the business model here? What's the five bucks a month to make this crap go away?

01:56:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's weird. It was such a good feeling the day I realized. You know, I'm never going to look for a job again. I do not need a LinkedIn account.

01:56:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, I'm more. I'm more not employable, I wouldn't hire me. I'm kind of a pain.

01:56:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I don't need a business network.

01:56:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't need to. No, I don't. So yeah, for me it's not about hiring or getting hired, it's about just being able to like do things like look up people from Microsoft and see what their history is useful for that.

01:56:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a great source of gas. Yeah, it works, it's good for that, that's a good point.

01:56:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but man, you got to wade through some, some real crap to get to that.

01:56:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's really bad, I don't know. Well, now you have a TikTok like videos. You know, I think a lot of this is also because TikTok may be disappearing. Yes, and it's good to be positioned. Yeah, hey, kids, kids.

01:56:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Come on, join us on LinkedIn. Microsoft was going to help before with TikTok, remember. Maybe this is them doing it again.

01:57:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, a few times a year I go and talk to high schoolers about tech careers and they don't know what LinkedIn is. Yeah, They've never used it.

01:57:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They probably are rapidly coming to the point where they don't know our Facebook.

01:57:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I talk to their career counselors about. You know employers kind of look at your LinkedIn profile like not a bad idea to walk them through how to make one Yep, yep, yep.

01:57:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, you're right, no, you're right. And then they can play a few games.

01:57:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Watch the video.

01:57:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Excellent. Net may rock, but NET may also be end of life. Yeah Well, NET 7.

01:57:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is absolutely something Richard will know a lot more about than I do, but it's weird to me how many complaints I see about this type of thing. So NET is on every other updating schedule, kind of like Windows Server used to be where there would be one long-term, you know, major release Every other. Lts. Yeah, so these, yeah, now it's STS or LTS, and NET 7, which came out about almost a year and a half ago, 22, yeah 22, yes.

01:58:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is one of the shorter.

01:58:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's not that long ago.

01:58:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, that's the short cycle one. No. The long cycle's only three years, which none of this is long.

01:58:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you, do you have to rewrite it now?

01:58:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no you can upgrade and arguably, every time you upgrade it's faster.

01:58:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They've done so many performance improvements so they don't change the API, they don't change the system calls. So for this to make sense, it has to have gotten to the point where these upgrades are seamless and reliable and fast, and then, of course, you get that message that Richard just said, which is true. Somehow they continue to do double-digit performance gains, every single version somehow.

01:58:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's going to have to slow down eventually, but for now I don't know. Tom is a magician truly.

01:58:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But is there? I mean you are way closer to this world. Is there a level of dissatisfaction that this maybe is a little too fast?

01:59:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's version fatigue right. Like you know, microsoft committed to with what used to be called Core and now it's just called NET. After, as from six onward, that we're going to put it out every year, that it's going to be every November You're going to get another version of NET and they've shaped their feature design around that. So often there are dark features sitting in NET. They go through several versions before they're complete. A lot of performance tuning and a lot of incremental work, but it is a dizzying cadence. I think it's hard on everybody. I don't feel all that different than when they were trying to do Windows quarterly. It's almost that same kind of madness. I have to change guys. Yeah, there was a case, for it was initially a race to get to feature complete and to be competitive and significant, but I think people are starting to not care.

01:59:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's almost like it's outlived its usefulness. It's like, guys, we are so impressed that you made this transition and got to this point. Yeah, and now slow down, please. Yeah, breathe because it's okay. Yeah, I think there's. If there is an instance of a major customer of NET that runs into problems with what should be, like, I said, a seamless, fast, whatever update, I think that's when the you know it's going to hit the fan, but even still, I Also.

02:00:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
all of these versions are side by side, so there it isn't. Like there's no, there's no. The process of switching from seven to eight is changing a manifest, right, like there's not even a recompile necessary. It's just entirely compile anyway, right. And if it doesn't work you flip it back to seven and then you go try and figure out what's going on.

02:00:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But most of the time you literally just switch the manifest, make sure the frameworks are in place, you're going there's also kind of something this is obvious when you think it through, I mean, but to me this is like kind of goofy that NET 6, its predecessor, is supported until the end of the year.

02:00:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, that's the LTS version. Right, that's the nature of it. But the other part of this is sort of the always be compiling mindset that what Microsoft's really afraid of is that people get so much inertia around software that they lose the ability to rebuild it, and then they're dependent on software that eventually has a security vulnerability that they have no ability to fix. Even though the fix is made, they can't redeploy it. Fix. Even though the fix is made, they can't redeploy it. And so by having this constant cadence, you keeping the deployment engines working properly so you can cope with fixes to security. Not that there's been a big security issue with the modern versions of dot net. It's really been great. They knock on wood, we, we're just lucky. But uh, you know, so far so good that's why dot net rocks my friends yeah, but yeah, if you want.

02:01:41
If you're talking about it, is there fatigue? Yep, there's fatigue. Aid adoption was slow, you know, because people are like really again, this is this is why I use a programming language that was.

02:01:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was the beck was finished in 1994 and many of my libraries are five, ten years old.

02:01:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's not it's not old, it's not retired, it's finished, it's done, it's finished, it's good. So, yeah, I mean you, you're reading it, you're in the room right, paul. Like people do feel like it's aggressive, but we don't have a better answer, especially with something that is, uh, internet facing right.

02:02:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the problem. Security is really. It's one thing for a lisp to be old, but, but something that is designed-facing right. That's the problem. Security is really. It's one thing for a lisp to be old, but something that is designed to be out on the network.

02:02:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I would also argue, this whole performance improvement thing is like the Empower stats change every day. There's a lot of groups of folks that are putting together their favorite bits to make the fastest websites and so forth, and Microsoft wants to play and they consistently stay in the top 10, but only because they keep pushing the envelope and, as Hazel and I were saying in our Discord, angular is six months right, but that's strictly JavaScript. There's no deploy involved in that. That's right.

02:02:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, exactly. Well, actually a lot of NET is probably technically up.

02:03:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It is, but it should be in a CI-CD pipeline, right? So what it's really saying is you're not hand-deploying this stuff, right, you do a rebuild. Well, really, what you're doing is you're modifying a manifest that you then push to GitHub that kicks off a GitHub action that runs through a pipeline and deploys it, and if that's broken, then you've got big problems. Yeah, you don't want to be maintaining that goal.

02:03:20
Now I would argue, the same thing is true with Angular, that you change up the version of Angular and you do the PR. And same thing a pipeline kicks off and maybe goes through Terraform. You know, you do you, but same basic issue, right.

02:03:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, thank God, video games come out of the. You know the womb perfect every single time and you never have to update them.

02:03:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know they're just right boy this is the biggest complaint of the internet of them all. It's like there's just no reason to ship finished software anymore because it costs you nothing to ship an update. Let let your users yeah, test this for me. Yeah, first pay me 80, test this for me, right? And maybe I'll slip you a fix for it, but we'll call it a DLC and pay me another $30.

02:04:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, if it's on Xbox, I can guarantee you there'll be a fix. It'll be a day one fix and it'll be 156 gigabytes.

02:04:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Have fun. Oh yeah, massive every time. Then there'll be a fix of the fix, and it's another 160 gigabytes.

02:04:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right. A massive list you must have written this on April 1st Of Activision. Games are coming to Game Pass. It's time for the Xbox segments boys and girls. A massive list. No, I was kidding.

02:04:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We've waited for several months to see what happens with Activision Blizzard on Game Pass. Last week they shipped the first game. Very exciting, very exciting. So you're thinking, okay, I got this email from Blizzard on Game Pass Last week. Diablo they shipped the first game, diablo 4. Very exciting. So you're thinking, okay, I got this email from Microsoft. Here comes the next batch. This is going to be awesome. I don't know. Activision Blizzard games, harold Halibut there's no Activision games. The only game I know. I don't care about any of these games but LEGO 2K Drive. Maybe EA Sports PGA Tour Yep, any of these games, but lego 2k drive. Maybe ea sports pga tour yep, maybe. Uh, I shouted botany manor definitive edition. Maybe little gator game. Honestly, yeah, the only interesting thing happening to game pass this week is if you're paying for ultimate, you can get three months free of youtube premium. Oh my, this is like, yeah, I yeah, I don't know Talk about paying your five bucks a month not to be annoyed.

02:05:20
Yes, honestly, youtube Premium is probably the last subscription I would get rid of.

02:05:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I would get rid of online storage before I got rid of that, yeah, giving away three months of your Gold Pass is really brilliant, because once you've had three months of YouTube not nagging you, you won't be able to give it up.

02:05:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They just, I believe, raised the price of YouTube premium, Did they? Fantastic, I bought it when it was YouTube Red, Quite a bit as I remember. Was it Red? It used to be called Red. Oh yeah, it was Red, yep, back in the day.

02:05:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I used to be able to buy YouTube Music Premium and pay less but still get YouTube Premium. They figured that one out eventually, so now it's the same.

02:05:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I think they raised it a lot.

02:06:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I might be wrong, please don't look, I don't want to know what that is. That's not. Yeah, because we're just paying it automatically. We don't even know, we can't give it out.

02:06:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know I don't even.

02:06:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Individual $14 a month family $23.

02:06:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, all right. Yeah, well, I'm just like one. Like I told you about the iCloud thing, it's like if this is what pushes me to some iCloud tier where I get like Apple music and blah, blah, whatever they call that stuff, what do you call it? Apple One or something? Just kill me, I can't, I can't, can't, even imagine what that looks like.

02:06:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But wait is your copilot coming to. Xbox. I'm so excited. This is amazing to me. Are you sure you wouldn't call it Cortana? This?

02:06:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
is so beautiful. Microsoft is testing an Xbox virtual agent, an internal prototype of an animated character that can query Xbox support with voice or text. His name is Cortana. Huh, what does that sound like? Like a personal assistant kind of a thing? If only they had a name for such a product. Of course.

02:07:01
That's crazy, I love. You're telling me and what? What message does this send to women that this thing was an ai powered assistant in a game, became an ai powered assistant on your phone briefly, and now we're going to turn her. Now she's ending up ending a career. They're not actually calling xbox support, like that's what's happened here it's terrible.

02:07:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That was always the problem with the cortana name was associated with a video game, with what was a digitally scantily clad woman right, yeah, who, by the way, in later versions of the game went insane and became the villain went insane and became the villain. You can't use the name, you can't, you know like a real woman.

02:07:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So no, I mean, this is what I'm saying. It's dicey and one of the problems, all these things. Think about it, Siri, Alexa, you know we've moved into a world where you can change the voices and you can get men in there and all that kind of stuff, but this just says so much about our industry. Anyway, sorry, I didn't mean to turn that off onto a weird sidetrack there, but yeah, I think you can expect to see Jen Taylor coming back and we're going to be getting Cortana, and now she's going to be answering.

02:08:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Are they really saying they're going?

02:08:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
to do that. No, they're not saying no, but it's all you know. But no, but your call is important to us.

02:08:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're going to be like this voice is familiar. Am I calling your Xbox? Is that what's happening? Yeah, I don't know.

02:08:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It makes me nervous. Okay, so Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, is, you know he's been talking the right talk. He's got that kind of Brad Smith mentality. He's open to everything. He's a gamer. Blah, blah, blah, whatever. He's starting to jump the shark a little bit. He's talking about opening the Xbox to rival game stores, which is not a strategy Microsoft has and no one's really considering this. But I think he's just you know. Again, he's open to everything. He's a gamer. First. You know, blah, blah, blah. That's sort of a pitch me move right, this is not how the world works, you know. When people ask me well, you know you complain about Apple and 30% fees and blah, blah, blah, whatever. If that's illegal or if that's problematic. Why is it that Sony and Microsoft can do exactly the same thing in the video game space and like what makes that okay? And it's like what makes it okay is those companies lose money on hardware, and that's the business model. They don't make 46% margins on hardware and then overcharging fees.

02:09:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Would you like an $800 PS5?

02:09:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's right. It's built into the price of the system. That's the. You know. It's a different model If you open up your this closeded garden platform to third-party stores. That doesn't work, not in this system, not when you're subsidizing the hardware. Yes, with the software. Anyway, I appreciate where he's coming from. I love the guy. I think it's maybe time to reign it in and let's get realistic here. You got Activision Blizzard. You can stop overcompensating. We got it. It's good, you know, don't? Worry about it.

02:10:05
This is not as monumental as Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard, but Take-Two acquired their longtime partner, gearbox, for $460 million, which is interesting because Gearbox was sold to another company a couple years ago for like a billion plus. Why, leo on Earth, did you paste that into Discord? Why, just to make you unhappy? What is that? That's not a price increase. That's like you're paying for two.

02:10:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's 50% more, I think. That's terrible yeah, how could that be? It can't be totally derailed. It couldn't be, it could, it couldn't be god, why stop it? I'm gonna turn up that display damn it, I didn't think you were looking. Okay, sorry I'm sorry.

02:10:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
talked about things that animate on the side and you get distracted, and this horrible white screen came up.

02:11:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's the Apple price $18.99. Oh, okay, but you know what I pay for YouTube Premium Family, which gives you music and YouTube. That's $30 a month, which means Apple's making $10 a month on it.

02:11:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know that's no wonder those two companies love each other secretly. They're the Romeo and. Juliet of the tech industry. It's 15%. Actually, that money goes away from Google, technically, I guess, anyway. So Take-Two is the company that makes Grand Theft. Gearbox and Take-Two have partnered for years on every installment of the Borderlands franchise games. They're going to keep making those and they are very vague. But there's sequels to Borderlands and Homeworld coming, and then some other like a new title. It's supposed to be pretty good. Anyway, these companies are mostly combining and Well.

02:11:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Gearbox owns Duke Nukem man. Like that's, duke Nukem man Is Duke.

02:12:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nukem still around? No, there's no current one. The last one was Duke Nukem Forever, which took forever to come out. I came here to kick ass and chew gum and I'm all out of gum.

02:12:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The last time that game was entertaining was 1994. It was entertaining.

02:12:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was fantastic. It was the. It was entertaining. It was fantastic, it was the best LAN party game ever, man.

02:12:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know pipe bombs and tripwires my favorite thing in the world. Oh man, pipe bombs and tripwires what fun.

02:12:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's great. Anyway, duke Nukem Forever was a steaming pile of terribleness, so that was a terrible game. Yeah, no, but you know, I think Duke Nukem in the Grand Theft Auto universe is a possibility. You know there's a lot of crossover stuff like Minecraft does this a lot? Yeah, I think there are others.

02:12:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's fun. And back to you know, it's not just Microsoft consoling the gaming industry. The gaming industry is consolidating.

02:12:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this was going to happen anyway. And then there were rumors of this God, I think as long as two years ago, but that Microsoft would come up with not just a white version of the Xbox Series X, which is the higher end version of the console, but also a disk-less version, which you want to be careful saying, meaning it doesn't have the optical drive.

02:13:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Because who uses optical?

02:13:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
drives anymore, right, so you can get it for less. That makes some sense. There are now pictures of it. This doesn't necessarily mean the pictures are new and this you know it's coming. But, uh, people seem to believe that we are going to see this thing you know coming later this year the black rectangle is kind of attractive, the white one is not. You should I actually like the white one? Oh, I'm sorry, sorry, sorry, I like the. Yes, I'm sorry, you're right, I agree with you in in the bigger refrigerator style.

02:13:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, uh, the white one just doesn't look right no, no, in black it's okay, like because the edges aren't so apparent, but in white you're like wow, that is a refrigerator yeah, unfortunately, though, there were a series of leaks.

02:13:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
remember last year where these the not next consoles, but the next versions of these consoles leaked, and the Xbox Series X Refresh that leaked was a canister, so more of a trash can than a refrigerator, but I thought that shape looked nice, I think so.

02:14:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I like trash cans. It looks like a little droid from Star Wars or something. It's nice. It's good enough for R2,. It's good enough for me. Took for R2, it's good enough for me.

02:14:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They took the box out of Xbox. They took the box out of.

02:14:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Xbox. It's an X cylinder. Interesting.

02:14:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's true. It's been a while since we've had an X-shaped Xbox, but actually, with the exception no, that's not true. Actually, with the exception of Xbox 360, they've all been kind of a box, haven't they? Like a rectangular carton or whatever.

02:14:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They had curved corners.

02:14:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That one was curvy. Other than that, every other Xbox has actually been a box An actual box.

02:14:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Sometimes there's a box with a red flashing light on it. That made everybody sad.

02:14:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But that was round. That red ring was round.

02:14:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm so old I can't remember things properly, but I sent back I want to say five Xboxes eight times. Wow, yeah, which means that at least two of them were sent back twice, and, if I'm not mistaken, one of them was sent back three times. Nice.

02:15:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We talked about it back in the day.

02:15:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I remember you saying that. Yeah, I don't remember. Maybe I'm off on the numbers.

02:15:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm not trying to exaggerate, but it was incredible how often I had to get these things fixed.

02:15:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's one way to spend a lot of money. Well, no, it was free fixes, but it was just annoying because you spent a lot of money for Microsoft.

02:15:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was a multi-billion dollar right there.

02:15:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You didn't want to be without it. You know what if?

02:15:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you couldn't play your games yeah, it's annoying for everyone concerned. Yep, no, that's a bad year.

02:15:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Back then, though, you could pop off the storage. It was nice. So if you had a second one, you could just pop the hard drive on and get. But they any many of them.

02:15:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They were just turned into refurb units, right. And then there were so many refurb units getting returned, yeah, that, um, they became giveaway gifts. I believe I was given at least three of them, wow, and just sort of distributed them out. Sure.

02:16:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is like when they used to sell Surface RT at events. It would basically be like it's $100,. Just take it, yeah, please.

02:16:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'll pay you $100, take it.

02:16:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm just going to put some in the back of your car. If you don't want them, it's cool, but I'm just going to leave them there.

02:16:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Please make this go away.

02:16:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just, you know, just yeah, get it off the show floor.

02:16:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, there is in some Midwestern states a celebratory day called the leave a zucchini on your neighbor's porch day. Ah, it's a good day. We could have leave an Xbox on your neighbor's porch day. It's better than a burning bag of dog crap Barely. The real problem in Ohio and other states where those zucchinis get big is you might leave one on your neighbor's porch, but they're going to leave one on your porch. So there's no net. Everybody's got too much zucchini. Everybody's got too much zucchini.

02:16:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The correct amount of zucchini is no zucchini. Oh, I like zucchini, but only the little ones, right. The correct amount of yeah, the correct amount of zucchini is no zucchini. Oh, I like so in the. This is probably the little ones, right?

02:17:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
but in the in the northeast united states that problem. We we have that problem with tomatoes in the summer right you go from. That's right, it is the greatest thing on earth to holy god, please save our tomatoes, it's it's so bad here that my wife and I, when we lived in that apartment in mcungee, were walking each morning and this guy we had never seen or met before came out and said can I please give you guys a bag of tomatoes?

02:17:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Please, and we were like okay. In my neighborhood I have the big box smoker and it was an Italian family that lived across the street. We recently moved in, found out I had a smoker and it's like would you mind if we smoke some tomatoes? I'm like no fine. So we sat and drank wine and smoked tomatoes. They brought over 200 pounds of tomatoes. We smoked tomatoes for days. Oh God.

02:17:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you get high when you smoke tomatoes?

02:17:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean only if you inhale. You got to really pull. Don't inhale when you're smoking tomatoes, that's for sure, but drinking with an Italian?

02:17:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
family. They made salsa, they were making sauce, sauce, but they wanted sauce.

02:17:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, that's good sauce. They brought their own oak.

02:18:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I loaded up the smoker, we'd roast them until they blistered, and then they would put them through the mill, and we were just filling the racks over and over again. Now I've got a few jars of that.

02:18:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's probably why God invented tomato sauce. Totally.

02:18:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Because of the overproduction of tomatoes, that's how we invented whiskey too.

02:18:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We got too much barley. What are we going to do with the barley? We're going to do. We got whiskey coming up, we got our tip of the week, our app pick of the week, and I'm running his radio as well. It's all just around the corner with the back of the book. Richard Campbell so nice to we're in studio. Tomato sauce yeah, I think it's Italian.

02:18:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah it is, it's definitely tomato sauce.

02:18:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's definitely some tomato sauce. Paul Theriot, he has a bag of tomatoes he's willing to give you. Please, take them Please.

02:18:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're a bag of tomatoes.

02:18:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's at therotcom and you're listening to Windows Weekly Tip of the week, mr P.

02:19:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I mentioned last week I think it was, when I went back and looked at Windows 10 again and I was like, yeah, most of this I can live without. But the one thing that really stuck in my car a little bit was the file explorer thing.

02:19:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
How crisp and clean the efficient is.

02:19:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I started looking around yeah, yeah, like it actually works and stuff.

02:19:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So one thing, this is kind of fun. Does it do file copying? Because that would be awesome.

02:19:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it does. It copies files and everything. It's fantastic, oh my God. So if you are in Windows 11 now, you get the new File Explorer. Obviously you can open Control Panel and hit the up arrow in the toolbar and it goes to the old File Explorer. It's in file explorer. The old file explorer is still hidden in Windows 11. So that made me think okay, hold on a second. A lot of these taskbar start menu replacements are based on the fact that old code is still available in Windows and that's what they're using to resurface this stuff. There must be a way to resurface the old file explorer.

02:19:55
And there is. There's a utility it's free, it's on GitHub called Explorer Patcher. It's all one word. It also does things for the start menu and taskbar and probably some other things. But I've just played with it with File Explorer, wow, and you can go back to the previous I think it's the previous version of the Windows 11 File Explorer before they. You know WinApp SDK they've had a lot of it. You can go to the Windows 10 version, which is the one I like, and then you can also go back to the Windows 7 version, which is a real blast from the past. It's got some Vista era UIs in there. It's neat. I forgot that. Yeah, so if this is, you know, if this is a literal concern for you this might not be a bad thing to try.

02:20:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, it's um, look, you got a little. You got a little pig in your search bill, oh, or is that a hippo? That's, that's a tapir, oh, a taper okay, a taper, whatever it's called.

02:20:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Them's good eating. Um, yeah, a little you're gonna pluck the hair.

02:20:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the key. Yeah, this is a cool app. Yeah, I like it.

02:20:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so that's just. You know, it's a little tip, it's possible if you want to. And then, for apps, I just want to mention Arc again. I've been using it on the Mac. It is God dear. God Changed your life. Sometime this year they promise they're going to bring the Windows 1 up to speed and apparently the mobile version, although that thing today is not even a browser.

02:21:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it's different but I like it. It's what taught me that AI is a better way of searching Arc search on the iPhone.

02:21:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I really like it, so I don't know if you saw this, the mobile version. One of the kind of predatory complaints against that is it doesn't bring you to the site. Yeah, I don't have to read dotcom anymore, yeah, well, they've updated it and the way they present it in kind of a good PR way is. We heard from our users that sometimes I want to go just to the original sites. We made that really easy now, so actually they're making that easier than used to be the case.

02:21:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah because it did kind of disintermediate the websites, but now it's like a regular search engine.

02:22:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But if you do the browse for me, let me see if it.

02:22:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, yeah, See they did, they added that carousel. Yeah, yeah, they added the carousel Because normally.

02:22:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I think this was to address not complaints from users really, but I bet it was complaints from competitors or websites, no, the sites that they're.

02:22:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't scrape us, please Snippeting. Yeah, yeah, or at least you give us attribution. I love this, though I turned lisa onto it and I I wasn't sure if she would go for it. It completely replaces my safari. Now it's really just for everything. Yeah, it's really, I love it.

02:22:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, here's my well, there's, there's one. Uh achilles heel for this thing to me. I I've adapted to all the navigation, the way things work. I have multiple spaces. You know spaces. I really like the thing. The only problem with it is that control tab, which is how you move between the tabs in any browser right, is limited to the five, I think, or six, most recent tabs. But it doesn't matter how many tabs are kind of like open, although its notion of open tabs is also a little different. In the browsers that I've used to date it's almost always just in the order of the tabs right. Right, I think Safari will let you do it in the order of most recent, but it's always all of the tabs. For a power user product like this to be that limited is curious to me, and I feel like they'll probably fix that eventually.

02:23:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's funny, I didn't even know and or notice, cause I almost always want to go to the last page of the you know several.

02:23:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't usually want a lot of people, wouldn't but my thing, though, is my default browsing set in any browser is, on most browsers I pin for sites, and then I have this set of things that are related to my website, to comments, to news and news readers and things like that. So I want these things open everywhere. I want to be able to switch between them. I'm very keyboard oriented. Like if you just had the sidebar open and we're going to click on them, you probably wouldn't notice that either. Right, I have the sidebar hide.

02:23:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you create spaces? Because I have multiple spaces for news, but that again see.

02:23:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the thing On the Mac that makes much more sense because the Mac has tremendous trackpad gestures Right, windows does too, I know, but it really does work better and it feels more natural somehow on the Mac. So switching between things on the Mac to me in Arc, to me, is more you can tell it was designed for the Mac. To me in Arc to me, is more you could tell it was designed for the Mac. It's Mac, yeah.

02:24:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Which makes me sad. I'm on a Linux box right now. I can't use it. I end up using Firefox on Windows and Linux and Arc on the Mac and now you really feel like you got. I thought about doing that and I.

02:24:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's hard If you ever want to be convinced the way you get convinced not to use Firefox is to use it on iOS, because it's ridiculous. If you're using Android, you can. Firefox supports extensions now. Yeah, it's actually kind of awesome. Yeah, but that's Apple limiting what they can do?

02:24:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It depends on the system yeah, yeah.

02:24:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then just real quick, of course, because I'm me. This is a classic thing you don't trip into it like a hole, you fall into it like with your entire body. Like on Monday. I wrote an article about how I spent months trying to replace this mobile app called Artifact Love.

02:25:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Artifact.

02:25:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm so sad about it. Never found anything, even close, and I'm like you know, but then they kept it going. I'm like you know, but then they kept it going. I'm like you know what Screw it it's going to, it's fine. The next day they announced they had sold it to Yahoo and Yahoo's killing it. And oh, are you kidding me?

02:25:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What is it that?

02:25:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yahoo does I didn't even know.

02:25:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yahoo was around.

02:25:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'll tell you what Yahoo does. The same thing a snowball does when it's rolling down a hill. That never ends, it just keeps going. It's like a, the terminator robot of stupid. It's I. I think it's just that for p. I don't know who uses yahoo. Don't answer that question, by the way, because who cares? Yeah, I yahoo. Yahoo should not exist it.

02:25:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're like a vestigial, like limb from the 90s or something, we used to have tickets at the Levi's Stadium where the Niners play in the Yahoo section. Wow, of course, and you had to go up a purple escalator, right, I remember.

02:26:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yahoo billboard in San Francisco. Yeah, that beautiful. The best billboard in San Francisco was the Yahoo billboard.

02:26:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you'd go up the escalator and every five feet or so go. Yahoo, it was the most annoying.

02:26:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And you're like this company's never going away and as it turns, out.

02:26:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You were right. Oh my god. Well, this was only a few years ago. It was crazy.

02:26:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, I look, I I've done everything I can. If you are on android, you're screwed, there's nothing. Uh, you, I, flipboards, okay, all the big ones stink.

02:26:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's nothing as good You're on iOS. You have a couple good choices.

02:26:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I use something called Feed, which is like feed with four E's. It's actually very good. It's not as good as Artifact. But what is Bulletin? Pretty good, but I can't find anything on Android that matches this. It's killing me.

02:26:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So who owns Yahoo? I mean the shareholders.

02:26:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The Chinese they own.

02:27:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Opera and Volvo and Yahoo.

02:27:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, it's 10% Verizon, which should tell you something. 90% Apollo Global Management Wow, which is private equity, which means you know, not good, they're just riding it out, you know. It's Leon.

02:27:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Black they're just I must still be making enough money to keep it on.

02:27:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I don't even know. I go search for.

02:27:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
AltaVista, it just takes me to the Wikipedia article, and I'm okay with that.

02:27:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, wait a minute. Axios says Yahoo sparks a renaissance under the new owners. Well, I wonder if they got bought by apollo global as well. A renaissance?

02:27:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
renaissance, a renaissance in the walking dead in one way these were fake. Well, let me show you yahoo. Um, by the way, microsoft once gonna buy this company, for, if I'm not mistaken, yeah, six billion dollars.

02:27:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Remember that that was gonna breathe a sigh of relief when that failed. It's gonna be the bombers.

02:27:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Big deal you know so.

02:27:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So what Apollo's doing is Go ahead.

02:28:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He just woke up in a cold sweat one morning and was like what am I doing?

02:28:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What was I?

02:28:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
thinking so. Yahoo, apparently under Apollo. That's why Artifact they're trying to rebuild, they bought a social investing platform Common Stock Wager a gaming thing last April last year. Factual to add news credibility ratings, here's the problem.

02:28:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let's say Yahoo somehow miraculously pulls it off, that their mobile app is worth it. It's the thing I loved about Artifact and that somehow I can quickly get to a thing. That is what I want, which is a tech feed. I'm not going to use it. I, I'm just not. I'm that obstinate, I, I have no, I, I have no respect for this company.

02:28:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's no way, no way maybe you will have more respect when you hear I think it's that they are highly profitable with a revenue of eight billion dollars a year.

02:28:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe that'll change your tune, Paul Thorat, Okay so Microsoft has long claimed that MSN is highly profitable for the same reason, yeah, right, and this is like saying remember that 80s action hero and he's really big in China now and now he's probably making more money than he ever did. Like yeah, like, okay. It just doesn't impact me, I just I'm not, I don't know, yeah, not doing it.

02:29:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't buy Yahoo's stock, you have to buy Apollo's stock. But Farewell yeah, it's interesting, damn you Artifact A farewell and a hello. I tore my heart out. Well, you know, see, I did not have the same reaction you did. I was very sad when they got put out of business and then when Kevin Systrom said, oh, wait a minute, maybe we can, we fired everybody. There's only two of us, I know.

02:29:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But maybe we can. I know. No, that's what I'm saying. You bought it. I kept using them. I thought I thought no. Two months, months went by. I wrote an article Monday. I'm like you know what. Maybe they're just going to stick around.

02:29:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what he meant. Maybe we can, and they're killing the app right, yahoo's not going to keep doing it.

02:30:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, they're not killing it, it's dead. They killed it immediately. God, it's horrific.

02:30:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So sad it makes me crazy, so sad I saw the story.

02:30:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I read Artifact that morning and it worked fine because I used it every day. Then I sat down on my computer and I did whatever I do. My news feed came up and it said Artifact sold the app. I'm like what? I went back to the app and it's like no, we're dead. We're dead, like it happened that morning. Wow.

02:30:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It didn't even fade out, it's just gone. Let me launch it and see what happens. Oh yep, we've already shared a decision to wind down. Yeah, yeah. So they're taking their AI-based aggregation technology and they're going to roll it into Yahoo News. Here's the page. That's all we have for you at the moment, wow.

02:30:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Not good, nothing Not good. This is a way to hang on to those customers. That's what this is. Oh, my goodness, we'll take away everything and then maybe sometime later we'll show you something. Well, I can't believe I still have on my phone yeah, hadn't used it in a while.

02:31:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Huh uh, well, I know I stopped using it because I thought I'm not putting any more effort into it, right when they announced that they were going out of business. Huh, they want me to turn on notifications. Of course they do turn on notifications. Maybe, uh, something will happen. You never know. Yeah, run as radio coming up this week what you talking about uh, did an.

02:31:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This was when I was down in Australia not that long ago. I talked to George Coldham, who is a Microsoft Cloud IT advocate, about what used to be called Security Copilot but now it's called Copilot for Security Big name change there. They've been trying to get the name organized. If you recall, this was one of the very first copilotsilots that was announced after Satcha said, hey, we're going to do co-pilots everywhere. It's the kind of co-pilot that really scares me, because you take security. You're just going to say security, really, like what do you mean?

02:32:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's, you know, security yeah.

02:32:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You push the easy button and the security goes away. It button and the security goes away. It'll be fine. That was easy. So, uh and and I have not been able to find very many people to talk about it, but george was the exception and you know he, he walked me through. Okay, it's a preview product. Here's where we are. You've got all these different security products at microsoft, you know, typically in azure, and here's a tool that helps you navigate them to figure out what your needs are.

02:32:34
That's good that's a good use does some good log consolidation and even helps you with the tools that are specialized in that, the SIEM-related products. So I mean, if you check the links on the show notes, you'll see all the different products we touched on that are authentication-related and data identification-related and, you know, attack-related, ransomware resistance SIEM. So to me and it's certainly where we went with this conversation is an awful lot of organizations out there, small shops, two to three IT-related folks and nobody dedicated to security full-time. It's just not feasible. And so you sort of rock paper scissors who has to put on the tinfoil hat this month? And now there's a tool that you put the tinfoil hat on and then you talk to a nice piece of software that tells you what you're probably focused on next and gives you some ideas of where to go.

02:33:22
So it's not giving you security advice or locking stuff down, it's just helping you navigate all the different products and as well as maybe giving you a bit of a checklist have you checked over here, have you looked at that? But also can look at the security postures you have in all of these products and say you've configured this, but you haven't configured that and you haven't looked at this.

02:33:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As I say, thank you, citizen.

02:33:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
At the end, your compliance is appreciated. Anyway, again a preview product. It makes me want to spend more time with it, just because there is so much to look at and they are rapidly building these connectors to copilot for each of the different security products so that you'll have a big, bigger and broader view across the space. I mean, the only product like of the copilots that scares me more than this one was the one they called azure copilot, because that's not too big of a bite, is it?

02:34:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think now the name change kind of makes sense, because Azure Copilot or Security Copilot is subtly different than Copilot for Azure or Copilot for Security.

02:34:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm just back from the Fabric conference. I'm not even home yet. I stopped at your place first, thank you. And they talked about because Fabric is this data analytics tool and the fact that you are moving through from the analytics client into the data warehouse client, into the data acquisition client, and at each tier of that there was a co-pilot to help you, to help you understand the data you had, the features you had available, the capabilities you had, capabilities you had like. We're starting to see this matrix of co-pilots like that. There's a relationship between what you're working on and being able to have a language conversation and you know a written or spoken conversation with the tool to understand what you're looking at and what capabilities you'd have, why you might want to do things there and it's trustworthy.

02:35:15
There's no hallucinations you would would hope but you know he was pretty insistent on preview and double check.

02:35:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, be very careful.

02:35:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, Cool. I mean, in the end you know you are still responsible for your security. You're the one willing to Tim Boyle hat.

02:35:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there are suggestions, but it's up to you to take it on this week's run as radio show nine 26 Microsoft co-pilot for security with George Coldham. Now, one of the. But it's up to you to take it on this week's Run as Radio show 926,. Microsoft Copilot for security with George Coldham. Now, one of the reasons I wanted you to come into the studio is I knew you would probably bring some fun with you. I always bring whiskey with me. He brings the fun.

02:35:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a rule. What do you got? I got a find, no question about it.

02:35:54
You can go ahead and grab the bottle there we can tell the story. Going to grab the bottle there, we can okay story. So I mean we've been going through a bit of a story arc. Even with uh micah, when you were off and having some fun precious, I ran across some really terrible whiskeys. There's a big wave of new whiskey companies coming up and, after having some bad experiences studying some really bad new whiskey companies, I wanted to have a good experience and this is one of them it's irish. It's Irish. I like Irish whiskey. I have to say it's.

02:36:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Clonacilty Clonacilty, clonacilty, clonacilty.

02:36:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's so weird. It couldn't even be a technology product name, right, it could be. But Clonacilty is a town in Ireland, on the very southern edge of Ireland, on the Atlantic Ocean, in the atlantic ocean county um, and they were best known for the some of the best black pudding you could get anywhere. But that's changing now because of the scully family. So the scully family owns a barley farm outside of klonikilty which they've owned for arguably 200 years nine generations but they didn't get into whiskey until 2016. So they are one of the new age whiskey makers, long time family.

02:37:03
They have some interesting ideas about how to approach whiskey a little differently. They built their facility out, was up and running by 2019, which means there's no whiskey in there from them. Right, 2019 is too young, it takes longer than that. In fact, most likely they're buying their whiskey at this point from the new Middleton distillery, which we talked about when we did the Irish episode a while back. That is the distillery that makes Jameson, telemore, dew, red Breast, all of the spots, green, yellow, some of my favorite Irish whiskeys, very good whiskeys. Yeah, yeah, very good whiskeys.

02:37:35
Yeah, yeah, they did hire a master distiller, a fellow by the name of Paul Corbett, who worked on Teeling and Temporary, which are both Irish whiskeys, so he kind of knows what he's doing. They do have good equipment They've got the triple pot stills but their big play has been to build a rack house right on the sea cliffs. So 200 feet above the Atlantic there's's this gigantic rack house and they do the palette style, so they're using pallets with standing barrels and so, uh, their initial releases and I'm going to focus on the us releases, so you have a chance to get them these are all going to be middleton whiskeys. And then what they've done is they finish them at this new rack house. So maybe it's got a little hint of sea air, but consistently you'll see the same descriptions where it is bourbon aged, but something finished. So the double oak, which is about $50 that you can get here in the US, is finished in a different kind of oak barrel.

02:38:32
The port cask spent its last year in a port barrel. These are all the things that a young distillery could do. They're buying six, seven, eight-year-olds whiskey from the distillery, from the rack houses, which have all been aged and used bourbon casks, and then they're doing a year in their own rack house to give it a bit of its own character. And while they are making their own whiskey, running their stills as hard as they can and starting to rack new make so that a few years from now we're going to see this. So we get a chance to see Clontakilty in its transition period. They're also making a vodka and a gin, because those you can make in a day, right Like those, don't need aging. So they're trying to get a bit of pipeline of income while they are letting their whiskey that they're making themselves mature.

02:39:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is not yet from their barley field, no, it is from a pretty darn good whiskey maker's barley field.

02:39:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean I've got nothing bad to say about New Middleton. Those guys know what they're doing. They make some very, very nice whiskey. I like the whale tail on the label. That's kind of cool whiskey. I like the whale tail on the label, that's yeah. And they, they are big on supporting sea life. They've got. They make contributions to some uh, conservatory, uh organizations. Um, they talk about, they talk about some stuff.

02:39:46
Like I was reading some of the details of the way they're making their whiskey and you know that when it comes off the still uh, on that third distillation irish whiskey tends to be very high 87, 87, 88, even pushing 90. And so you don't barrel it that high. It's too much of a solvent, it'll rip stuff out of the wood, it'll make everybody sad. And so you cut it with water. You'll take it down into the 60, 65 range before you put it in the barrel to start lifting some flavors from the barrel. And so they've got this idea they call gentle cut, where they're introducing water slowly to it. I guess I mean I don't know why the whiskey would care, but they went. You know I study gentle with my whiskey. I study bottles pretty carefully, you see, they even put right on it gentle cut and now it's chill, filtered, yeah well, non-chill filter.

02:40:36
Non-chill that's removing the flocculation from the product, right? So I mean, this cask number 3512 was probably the that's the barrel that they got from Middleton, right? And they which obviously had been aged in bourbon for X number of years. It's not cask strength, though. Well, it's a 52.4. That's a little high, so that's pretty high. So I think they came out of the barrel in whatever state it was in. They threw it in a rum cask. Now they don't specify exactly for how long, but probably a year. That's kind of typical. It's not very dark, it's kind of a light finish. No, but that also means they didn't put any caramel color in it. Oh, I like that, frankly, and, and I mean, you'll get more color if you put it in a port cask, because the port the part some color too it looks like rum yeah, it's kind of rumish, isn't it like a light rum, yeah, so, um, I hear there's some glencairns around.

02:41:28
I think we could, so this is a shot. So I. There are three whiskeys you can get in the us I mentioned the double oak and also the Portcast. They also have what they call a single malt, bordeaux. So they finished it in Bordeaux barrels Nice. This is none of those. What is this? This is the rum.

02:41:46
This one you cannot buy. This is what's called a private barrel select. I got this from a specialty shop which has done the rum finish. They are partnering with a lot of other distilleries and breweries to make special editions in the us to try and get introduced to the us market early with these special editions, before their main production starts. So they're doing all the marketing things to establish a market. But let's see what we got. Skull, it's an Irish kind of a cereal-y nose I like it.

02:42:23
That's my tasting note oh, I like it, it's yummy. No bite on the front, no, right, just got it. Came in there. I almost got a bit of fruit going on, like a little pear, very smooth, yeah, very light yeah, and then a heat going down, like when he actually gets down there, you're like oh, I've drank whiskey. Not only that, but I've drank 54%.

02:42:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is remarkably gentle for 54.

02:42:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, surprisingly gentle for that.

02:42:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's quite good.

02:42:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're not prepped for this. Sorry, 52.4. I would normally at this moment take a little bit of water, maybe two drops, put it in there and see what happens, gently, yeah, just to see where it goes. Well, we can do that now, because it's over, because the show is over, sorry.

02:43:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Paul, he looks so left out, quantico.

02:43:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Tea is new into the US market. You can find a few bottles around. They're running in the $50 range. It's quite good for $50. I think it's really good for 50. I think it's great Knowing that it's actually one of the new Middleton whiskeys, which are all very good and they've done their own finishing Reminds me of Middleton it definitely has that style. It has that kind of little Jameson, although I'd say less heat than Jameson. Honestly, it's quite good Tasty. As much as I've.

02:43:30
I mean, I always thought it only introduced to the table that I'm like, don't buy this, but this is one I'm like. This is new to me.

02:43:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would keep this around. I think it's very drinkable.

02:43:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I would keep this in the house for anybody who came over and wanted to snort and it makes me happy that there are new whiskey makers making good new whiskey, no kidding.

02:43:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And when they start actually making their own whiskey, I'm very curious. We'll have to see what they make. Yeah, yeah, very curious. Would that make a difference if they have their own barley and their own distillation?

02:43:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think there's no substitute for five years in a barrel in their warehouse. It's the finishing that really matters. The finishing makes a big difference. But the Isleys, because they're so close to the sea, consistently they talk about those sort of salty notes, those kinds of flavors, as opposed to the highlands that are further from the sea. This is one. Most Irish warehouses aren't near the sea. This is pretty much the only one that close to the ocean, so they may have something in the air and it's consistent temperature.

02:44:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Probably it's stabler?

02:44:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, right, um, so they have a possibility? Yeah, and, but it's gonna we're. We're five years away from knowing uh, no peanut butter flavor.

02:44:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sorry, I can't taste the chocolate anywhere. I don't taste cinnamon, it just tastes like whiskey.

02:44:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Disturbingly like whiskey. He's not not passing. He's so annoyed with us now. He's so pissed off.

02:44:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He says I have nothing to do with it. That's Richard Campbell. He brings whiskey whenever he comes and it's always nice to see you. It's been a while. It's been a while. It's been a while you haven't been in the new studio.

02:44:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, it's the first time in the new studio. Last time we saw each other in person, we were on a cruise ship.

02:45:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, the cruise I forgot, yeah, where we all got COVID. That was fun, including my wife. Thank you, richard, so nice to see you. Safe trip home. Not too much of the clinic guilty before you leave. I think that'll help.

02:45:15
Paul Thorat is at Thorat. Rich is at runasradiocom. By the way, that's where Runas Radio is and NET Rocks is too Fabulous programs. Paul Thorat is at thoratcom. T-h-u-r-r-o-o-t-t-c-c-o-o-m-m. No, I think that's a little bit too much. You'll get there, yeah, t. We'll get there, yeah, t-h-u-r-r-o-doublegoodcom. His books are at leanpubcom, including Windows Everywhere, which is a great story about the development of Windows, kind of through its languages, and the Field Guide to Windows 11, which includes Windows 10 inside, like a little bit of a surprise filling.

02:45:54
And he joins us, as does Richard, every week, to do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us live, as some of you are right now on YouTube, youtubecom slash twit. We stream our shows live so that you can interact with us in the chat room and so forth. After the fact, though, you can go to this website right here twittv slash www. All the shows live there, hundreds of them. Hundreds of the shows, 875 to be exact. There's also a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly and, of course, the best thing to do is subscribe in your favorite podcast client and that way you'll get it automatically as soon as it's available. And if you're a club member, you can subscribe and get the ad free version automatically Windows Weekly in audio or in video. Thank you Paul, thank you Richard, thanks to all of you, all you, winners and dozers. We'll see you next time on Windows Weekly. Bye-bye.