Windows Weekly 877 Transcript

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

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Theriot is at home in the lower Macungie. Richard Campbell is in Romania. I'm in Cranston, rhode Island, at Mom's house. We're going to talk about Windows 11. Paul starts the show off with a rant. Believe it or not. He says guys, focus. He also talks about his spidey sense tingling about a small announcement that Microsoft made that he thinks might mean something larger is on the way. He's also saying goodbye to the guy who designed the Ark mouse. We'll talk about AI, lots about AI and Xbox, and Richard has an old friend with a new look. It's all coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

00:57
This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell, episode 877, recorded Wednesday, april 17th 2024. The Tiger in the Grass. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show. We cover the latest news from Microsoft. There's a lot of AI news these days. Of course, we are all over the world. Once again, the only person who's at home right now is Paul Theriot, in beautiful lower Macungie person.

01:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and I'm overdue to move anyway, so maybe I'll mix that up soon.

01:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah it's time to get out of there. You know, yep, it's been a few months. Every few months. It's a good thing to pack everything you have up and do a little bit.

01:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Keep the cats on their toes.

01:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, scares the hell out of them Romania. And what is it? Is she? Is she yeah?

01:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Just like it's spelled yeah With two, i's yeah.

01:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, wow, are you in an industrial hospital of some kind? What is that?

01:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think this is the heater, the radiator behind me, nice.

02:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I like that they move past tiles.

02:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, remember the old tile wood stoves I don't have a fireplace. Yeah, you know something.

02:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's kind of Eastern European looking so that's good.

02:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, no, it feels very Eastern European, it does, and are you there for a conference, here for a conference?

02:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, nice, what a guess. Yeah, I am at my mom's house where we're having a conference over at the Assisted Living Center.

02:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nice and my mom, how's that conference going, leo, it's so much fun.

02:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm having lunch with my mom and she says, in a sotto voce whisper loud enough to be heard across the entire dining room yes, see that guy over there, he's rich, I love it. He had three wives. It's like he had cancer. Yes, thank you everyone. I think they're all deaf enough that nobody really. It's really hysterical, it's almost comedic, it's wild, uh. But uh, it's fun. You know, it's nice to see mom. She's doing great. Her, she's in a memory care ward where nobody remembers anything, so she will forget that I was there this morning. But uh, I'm sorry, you know what I'm doing tomorrow. I'm very excited. Uh, here in a beautiful rhode island, the dune brothers quahog shack has opened up and I'm going to be picking up clam cakes and lobster roll.

03:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I recommend not calling it the Quahog shop when you go there, but I suspect it's going to be a good name.

03:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Quahog's the Rhode Island name for clams. No, I know, it's Quahog, quahog. Quahog is a place, quahog is the clam, I think.

03:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'll ask my wife, who grew up with two feet in the water, whether that's the case or not.

03:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think so You're a native, but you know, I grew up here too. I'm not completely without my Rhode Island savvy, but yeah, we always call them quahogs. Anyway, whatever it is, it doesn't matter, I'll ask the guy you guys grew up within 30 seconds of each other.

03:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean that's interesting. Yeah, it's amazing.

03:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's probably where the straight line is. I'm here in Cranston, yeah, beautiful Cranston. Line is it's. I'm here in cranston, yeah, beautiful cranston. Anyway, that's irrelevant, because we're not here to talk about our locations. Our physical locations are irrelevant. We are here, right, we are gathered together to talk about windows ai and the future. Well, that was the past, that was last week. This week, windows ai and the future in the future. Let's start with windows 11. It's almost like that was last week, this week, windows AI In the future. In the future.

04:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let's start with Windows 11. It's almost like there's a theme. If I could just go off on a, this could be a short one, but a little rant.

04:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Already, we just got here.

04:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know I just this upset me so much that I wrote a scathing 200, 2000 word article like editorial and then shelved it, looked at it the next morning and said, yeah, I can't put this out there.

04:53
And then wrote a like, wrote a better like a, a slightly friendlier one, but the the. The long story short is that, as you guys know all too well, um, you know I've spent years, and arguably decades, if you take into account all of the versions of Windows, you know, complaining about the things that are wrong with this platform, and Windows 11 is what I would call a target rich environment for these kinds of complaints. Like it's escalated, and I think I talked about this last week. I had recently kind of formalized these complaints into a list which I organized by severity level, right.

05:26
And when I look at Windows 11 today, to me the biggest issues are basically come down to forced usage, slash it, not paying attention to my choices. The forced uses of Microsoft Edge when you choose a different default browser. The things that Edge does horrible even when you do choose it as the default browser. And then the forced usage of Microsoft OneDrive, which enables folder backup behind your back after you say no to it. In fact, right before the show, I rebooted the computer and the screen I see is that thing that pops up that says, hey, do you want to finish setting up your computer? You could turn on folder backup. You know, and I take a picture of it every time. I've got like a thousand photos of the screen now and there's no click. There's no click here, to never be asked this question again. Right, and they don't care what you say they're going to, they're just going to turn it on.

06:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I really want you to do it.

06:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's these are these are my big I pet peeves. These are way beyond pet peeves. And then there's this whole other world of other annoyances and blah, blah, blah, nonsense, whatever. So last Friday, after the show which was on Wednesday, obviously you know kind of an innocuous little Windows Insider build something, something, something and not really much going on there. But Microsoft is adding a recommended app icon to the start menu in Windows 11, and it's going to appear first in Canarian dev and then it will make its way to stable or the general availability channel.

06:49
I'm sure Any second. Now right, and for some reason, this is what everyone chose to be outraged over. So I saw this via email, I saw it in the comments on my site, saw it on Twitter and other social networks. People like literally losing their minds over this, like this is the line in the sand for people, and all I have to say to those people is you need to focus, because a this feature has been in windows 10 since windows 10 was a thing. It's the touch right at the top of the start menu.

07:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You talk about it all the time You've been talking about this. It's been, it's not new.

07:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's new to windows 11. In fact, it's kind of a regression, if you want to look at it that way. Right, because the start menu was all new and they couldn't do everything, you can turn it off. In fact, the option to turn it off is already in Windows 11. So if you don't see this feature today and you've already turned off this option, you probably will never see it, and that falls into below low severity. For me it's an annoyance, but it's not like an endemic Well it's a fixable annoyance.

07:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a fixable annoyance. Can I ask a question, though, because people did act like this is all brand new. In the past was it only recommendations for Microsoft software and now it's recommendations or ads, frankly for third-party programs. Is that the difference.

08:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I don't think that's the difference. I think the difference is that we forgot this was a thing because we've been using Windows 11. We just got used to it. Windows 11's start menu is dramatically different and when I a couple weeks ago went back and reinstalled Windows 10 on an 8th-gen Intel system, I took one look at the start menu and said, yeah, this has got to stop, and I just got rid of all the live tile stuff and I actually configured it so that I don't see this stuff anymore. But you will see newly installed apps and then recommended apps at the top of that all-app list in Windows 10 by default. That's the default setting.

08:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I remember you teaching us years ago how to turn that off.

08:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, I mean, look, for many years now I have been writing about what I used to call the kind of post-install configuration tasks. You know you just install Windows Decrapifying others might call it and it's still. You know it's a big part of the Windows 11 field guide, but this one, this is not look. You don't need a third-party utility, you don't have to know any secrets. You know it's right in the UI. You can turn it off. Simple, not a big deal. But yet, like I said, people, I still get pushback from my problems with Edge and OneDrive, which to me are endemic, huge insurification problems, and for some reason, this has set people off. So all I have to say is you got.

09:26
You got a mountain mohill pick your battles you got to be able to see which is which I.

09:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm really confused, sort of an attack on the reviewer thing lately too. Um yeah, marquez brownlee and his review on the the um, the humane thing, which I mean. There's nothing new in their review. It was obvious, but there was a big lash back on him because he's so popular.

09:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Because he was honest about the product he reviewed, which is what we all do and should do, which is why he has a massive number of followers because he says it like it is.

09:55
So here are the two things that I find outrageous about that incident. One is that Microsoft, apple I don't know Google, but Microsoft and Apple have shifted from focusing their PR efforts on what I would call actual journalists and reviewers and targeting uh friendly bloggers and YouTube channel type people, right, influencers. They are looking for positive feedback, not feedback. They don't want, they don't want any feedback. They want positive uh press, so to speak, that just channels what they're already saying. Right, they're not interested in people like me who just tell the truth Good, bad or indifferent, you know. But the most outrageous thing I saw about this came from Stratry.

10:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ben Stratry Is that the guy's name Stratechery Ben Tom Stratechery he said we need more people like this.

10:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We should all be like this and I'm like, excuse me, when this guy was still in his diapers, I was this these people do exist, and this is the role that I have played in the Microsoft ecosystem my entire life. It makes me sad, but the fact that this guy, who was very popular, like you said, and exists in that kind of enthusiast, no, no, no Influencer space, sorry, ben.

11:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thompson is not, he's an analyst. No, no, marquez.

11:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, you're talking, marquez, yeah yeah, yeah, the fact that he is out in the world doing that is important and we need more of that. We need less of the. You know people like they said get a free sample of Revlon and they start talking about how beautiful it is and like all that kind of nonsense we see online, especially on YouTube. So, yeah, I look.

11:33
I don't want to get too deep in this, but there is an editorial kind of thing I have. I used to have a standalone email newsletter for news excuse me, for news. That was called Win Info and the tagline was news and information, dot dot, dot, no fluff. And sometimes people would write me an email or whatever and they say, hey, how come you didn't cover this topic, whatever it might be? And I said because it's not important, you know, and but editorial by omission is too subtle for people. So I think you can't. Just you know, you have to be explicit about those things that are bad, you know. Just so you can. You know people understand where you stand on things.

12:17
Anyway, this is a little thing. This is a this little recommended. It's a single icon in the start menu that you can easily remove. A single icon in the start menu that you can easily remove, caused a level of uproar and what I can think of as like faux outrage that is incommensurate with what this is, and it just it makes me sad, because all I try to do, literally at just like at a professional sense, is try to highlight the things that are really problems and then try to solve those problems. And this thing is already solved. It's solved. It's not a problem, it's stupid, it's typical microsoft, it's all kinds of things it's not even worth discussing, other than the fact that what happened happened. So anyway, I hope that wasn't too long. I'm sorry, I didn't want to make it too much about that how do you feel about the humane ai pin?

13:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
though glad you asked what I really would like to, know.

13:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this epic piece of crap, no, what it reminds. Look, we are looking for the thing that will replace the smartphone. Right, this is what Microsoft used to call the next wave. They thought they missed it. Well, they did. They missed it with the smartphone. So they're like we're going to be on the next wave and for a little while it was like a personal digital assistance. Maybe that will be the next wave, you know. Now we're like, okay, ai is going to be the next wave, right, whatever it is, this is we're always. But what's the thing? Where's the platform? Where does it go? How does this thing change? You know, what's the thing that does to the iPhone and to smartphones what the iPhone and smartphones did to Windows and the PC? Right, like, what's the next step? And I don't look, I don't have an answer. None of us do. We have, we might have thoughts. We can look at the stupid pen and be like you know what?

14:07
I don't think it's that. I don't think it's that. It's not going to be that Another way to do the thing I can already do with the device that I carry around with me all the time. No, I mean, I think in some distant future there'll be versions of things that are improvements over what we have now. It could be a future version of a watch as an interim step, but it's more likely going to eventually be things that are kind of embedded in our bodies, whether they're glasses and then contact lens, and then literal transplants or little sensors that you insert into your wrist or wherever to give you that health feedback, stuff that you use now with a, with a watch or tracker. I mean, there's all kinds of things. Is it going to be a pin that looks like a hello? My name is Bob thing? No, probably not. You know, probably not. So that's my take on that. I don't, I didn't, I've never seen it, I don't care about.

14:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think the good news is you probably won't Right. The real question is how they raised $270 million for it. Oh, I can tell you why.

14:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Two letters A and I yeah, you know, in the same way that you know the Internet and then Linux and then different things at different points in time kind of resulted in these waves of investment and VCs and whatever.

15:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a really good article by Steven Sandofsky not Sanovsky about this and it really does kind of explain the whole reason when it started. By the way, they started doing this in 2017. Is this an?

15:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
AI hype cycle issue, or is it more than that?

15:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It wasn't AI initially, so much it was a phone replacement. And the whole thing was the laser projector. Sandovsky says that they got all the money because you know it's a couple, a husband and wife, that are doing it and the husband used to work at Apple. I was going to say a former Former Apple employee by the way that that raises visibility on any project.

15:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, you're like yes interesting.

15:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He might have some ideas about what the next thing might be, you know he and and and what sandovsky says. Well, the article's tied called why you can't build apple with venture capital. Nice, and uh, yeah, it's really. Uh, it's actually a perfect synopsis of what happened. Okay, here they pivoted. It sounds like it's really it's actually a perfect synopsis of what happened here.

16:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They pivoted AI a few years ago. It sounds like it's a perfect storm of wanting to believe.

16:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and actually do you maybe remember there was a bracelet that you would wear that would project a screen on your arm, on your forearm? That was equally terrible? It was called the CICRET C-I-C secret. C I C.

16:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
R E. I don't remember that, but I do think about that when I talk about glasses slash contact, slash I.

16:33
I do sort of I, always I. My scenario was always it could be anywhere, but I'm sitting in an airplane. I didn't bring a computer right but in my eyes, on the tape, the thing in front of me, I can see the screen and on that tray table I have a keyboard and I'm computing because it comes with me. And that's the. You know, that's the this future I sort of see. But you know you have to take interim steps to get to that.

16:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So these are. I'm excited and I think it's reasonable for those of us in the business to look at all these things. There it is. That's the article. Thank you, Kevin. Yeah, and I don't think it's unreasonable for Marquez to warn his vast audience don't buy this.

17:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't think it's unreasonable. It is not. It's beyond reasonable. It is his responsibility.

17:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But at the same time, there are those of us, for instance, the Vision Pro, which was even more expensive than the human eye, and I didn't tell people not to buy it. But it's pretty clear to me that that is a dead end product in a category we already have seen and has failed. But I think we want to buy those and try those. We do we don't want our audience to. I just bought a pair of I'm sure they're going to be terrible glasses. They're from a company called brilliant. It's looking more like this and uh, they're ar, they're augmented reality projected on the lenses. Very, it's a very interesting category. Uh, the folks at rewind ai, which we've been talking about for some time, uh, paris martineau knows, uh, the principles there. She she ran into him in a bar a few months ago Just announced the thing called Limitless.

18:09
I don't know if you've seen this. I think this is the closest thing. It's a pin, a brooch or you can hang it around your neck, but it's not projecting anything. It doesn't have a screen. It's not a phone replacement, which is what Humane was pitching. It's a recording device that hears, listens, records all the time, sends it to AI for synopsis and transcription, and then you can query the AI. They actually have a. Yeah, there it is, they have an app already.

18:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We've somehow gone off on some deep AI thing here in the middle of us. Well, no, the only reason I mention this, these are all new products that are worth looking at, because just as you say, they're the first steps in a new category.

18:51
The thing that's tough about replacing a phone is that it's such a multi-purpose device, just like the PC is and was Actually, I should say was right. The PC has kind of consolidated down to some core tasks related to productivity, for the most part gaming, but it's not everything anymore, right? Um, I did see a uh a story back at ces about a a single purpose uh device that was ai, that instead of a pair of glasses or something like that, it was the thing you could put over, like maybe put on one side, I think it was and what it would do is live translate and live caption everything that was happening around you, yeah.

19:26
And the reason I there are these little germs of ideas that I think make sense. My son is deaf. When he was a child they were just starting to bring like what do you call this? Like individual use captioning solutions to theaters, like movie theaters, so you could sit there with this thing on a, on a pole that had like a see-through plastic screen and it would project captions to that so he could sit. It would, it would kind of sit in front of him, he could watch the movie through and around it and the captions would appear as if on the screen, but only for him. And and, uh, that was nice for the day. Now you can actually see captions in some theaters and they do that kind of thing.

20:08
But the notion that you could wear like a, like a little thing you know we're bringing this thing down to something that's manageable and personable, fits in your pocket, whatever, it's an interesting idea. But again, like, because the phone is so universal, you have to look at everything through the lens of a phone and a lot of these things, like the pen, you know it's like well, does this do anything that the pen, the phone, doesn't already? Do and does it do?

20:31
everything the phone does, and the answer is no.

20:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, yeah, but you could probably do the same thing with your, your Apple watch. Yes, the brilliant glasses are exactly what you described for your son, except you're looking through prescription lenses that have an oled layer that are displaying. Yeah, no, it's so.

20:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a very interesting idea, I think, but it needs a phone, I'm sure right, this is not in the notes, but I I wrote an article about oh, maybe it isn't it, so I wrote that we might talk about this later this notion of embrace and extend. And yeah, no, we are. I'm sorry, but, um, one of the interesting uh things about that is that, uh, that phrase was kind of vilified on the outside of Microsoft, but internally it wasn't really seen as this horrible, antagonistic monster strategy. It was just like a recognition that that's how all software and hardware was at the time. You built on what came before. Everyone does this.

21:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is the app Build on the shoulder of giants.

21:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, I mean Netscape, the company that brought this to light publicly, was doing the same thing to mosaic. You know, I mean, it was like you. We all build on what came before. That is the point of our industry, um, and so some of these things will be like we talk about, like arc browser, we talk about windows phone as an example of something where they tried but failed. It's important to try these things and some will succeed and some won't. Not all ideas are good, but you know you can't move forward without taking some risks and you know whatever. So I, I don't know, I I agree with you, I guess is all I'm saying.

21:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just in a very wordy way yeah. Yeah, and we're, and, by the way, things are happening fast and we're going to be, I think, seeing this stuff in the next couple of years actually come to fruition.

22:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We have always the three of us and everyone watching and listening have always existed in this industry, where speed is the key. We talked about Internet speed in the 1990s, which looks like grandma in the slow lane today the key. We talked about internet speed in the 1990s, which looks like grandma in the slow lane today. We talked about how regulation and laws can't keep up with the speed at which technology evolves 100 million users in a year, yeah, but now it's exponentially faster than it was 10 years, 20 years, 30 years ago.

22:40
It makes the complaints about the speed of technology in the 90s look quaint. For people like us who are used to it, it still feels too fast it's accelerating it's nuts it's getting faster and faster. So anyway, it's interesting because, honestly, this is the past week. In the notes you will see multiple examples of these things that we just talked about. It is a literal theme of everything just talked about it's. It is a literal theme of everything we do now. It's crazy. So that's the world we live in.

23:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, which I think is exciting. It's exciting and scary, isn't it? It's scary and it's. You know what's scary for his incumbents? And really the battle at this point is going to be who gets to disrupt? Do the big companies get to do this because no one can do it at the scale they can? Jason Snell wrote a good article about that.

23:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this is not in the notes in any way, shape or form, but I think it's very interesting that Microsoft was disrupted by this cloud I would call it web and mobile, I guess but then found a second life in cloud, which is astonishing. A huge business case study. It's awesome. Apple went through its own thing, almost went out of business. Steve Jobs came back, went off in a completely different direction and became the biggest company in the world, and you know, these companies that were the disruptors have, in some cases, been disrupted and, of course, now everyone's like when, what's? What's it going to be Like? When does Apple get disrupted? When does Google search get disrupted?

24:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
and whatever else, and I mean Apple's decision to go to Google for AI services is, you know, smart. They could sit down and try and build their own, and there may have been a time when a jobs would have done that. It's like why there's a half a dozen of them already. They're really expensive. The chances of yours being better are low and you own a phenomenally valuable customer base. Have a bidding war. You know they're not going to pay Google for AI services. Google's going to pay them, yeah.

24:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, but it is pragmatic, it's smart. Is it disruptive, right? I mean, is it enough to fend off disruption from the outside? Or is some small company like OpenAI or something like that going to come up and, you know, stab them in that little part of the Achilles? That's, you know, not protected because that's where they held the guy into the water, or whatever Right. I mean that protected because that's where they held the guy into the water, or whatever Right? I mean it's, it's got. That's how that stuff tends to happen.

25:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you know, we'll see. Anyway, we live in interesting times and we do with all the caveats and asterisks that you attach to that statement Exactly.

25:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And this is one of the reasons, you know, I like what we do because we get to what we have front row seats, yeah. And, by the way, we also have that responsibility and and part of it is to try we can't, we're not always going to be right, right, but look at all the stuff that's out there or otherwise and say this is important, this is not you know, this is silly and superfluous, this you know, and and it's pretty clear where this pin thing ended up in the dustbin of history there, and it will make lists in the future and people are like, oh yeah, I kind of remember that.

25:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's always a battle of is this an iPhone or is it a Newton? Yeah, there you go. That's a good way to put it.

25:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But the iPhone. Well, the point is, though, that the iPhone wouldn't exist if the Newton hadn't existed.

26:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I wouldn't disagree, and that's part of it, like they're very much going for the Star Trek, you know, badge on the chest kind of thing. So there's a call back to science fiction. There's a case for the form factor. The tech may not be ready and the customer may not be ready, right.

26:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But we may well end up with something like that, yeah.

26:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can tell you who's not going to make it those guys.

26:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A lot of the upset, by the way, was from humane adjacent people, like investors who saw $270 million go up in puffs.

26:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I hope this informs future investments in AI and potential iPhone replacements and it will and maybe this will help slow this down a little bit make it a little more manageable. I you know I am nostalgic for the days when Microsoft 365 used to be hard to cover because they added too many features every month. I wish it was like that. Those are the good old days. Yeah, they really are, and it was like 10 seconds ago, it wasn't like 20 years ago. This is, you know, not that long ago.

27:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I am paying close attention to what's getting funded and what isn't Like. Is there rationality entering that investor class around this? Or are they just still thinking it's all a land grab? Grab as much as you can grab.

27:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's the interesting thing about the Sandofsky article is he really talks about why there is so much investor money in this. You know it's really play money for them.

27:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, the issue is there's too much money.

27:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You want to back a company that's going to experience rocket growth, which is something that can't really happen with Microsoft and Apple and Google, right, yeah, the very nature of them being incumbents and being humongous means that they will do what they do. Being incumbents and being humongous means that they will do what they do. Like you know, people can kind of debate the US antitrust case against Apple, but the reality is, when you have a monopoly or market dominance whatever you call it semantically, whatever you want to call it you circle the wagons and you protect it, and that's not where innovation comes from.

27:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And you live in the innovator's dilemma because you circled the wagons.

28:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, so that's just it is a natural byproduct of size. This is what happens. We had this is exactly the conversation we had yesterday on mac break. Quickly, whether apple could, could play in this space, and I think it's the same. Uh, can microsoft? Microsoft's really positioned itself surprisingly well.

28:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know those brilliant glasses I was talking about, right, they use open ai right, so we, so we're going to oh God, there's so much that ties into this in the show.

28:29
Where these companies do or do not play in this world is very interesting, because to enthusiasts, we think about it as being all front-end UI devices, software, whatever it is. But really the thing that these giant companies can bring to bear is really more backend in nature, and Amazon we're going to talk about this very explicitly is like look, we're going to. We're basically just on the backend, this is what we're doing, and that it's a smart move because developers build on AWS. It's very familiar, it's very trusted, it works great and there's signs that they're developing a back-end infrastructure that will keep that momentum going, just in the same way that Microsoft is kind of extending their own cloud thing with AI. In addition, you know they're doing that I don't think anyone looks at like Copilot and Windows 10 and 11 and says that's the future, but the stuff that they're doing in the back with Copilot and Azure, services based on AI and so forth, this will keep these guys going for decades.

29:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a gold rush, Sell picks and blue jeans and you're going to do very well. You may not get the gold, but you're going to sell a lot.

29:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's right. But I'm concerned for AWS going to the back end because they are late to building a model.

29:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If they're really going to play in that back end game, where they're going to have their own model, certainly they have the cloud for it Well I actually think they're doing a parallel path to that, which is they are going to be multi-model and are and will basically just you know, look, you trust us. Here's the infrastructure. We work with everything. Pick the LLM or LLMs that make the most sense for your solution. This is going to be the best place to do that stuff. You know, that's their kind of message right now and I honestly, yeah, okay, I mean I think it.

30:12
you know, we'll see.

30:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're in that period of time and it's the best time. I think, yeah, I know.

30:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is the implementation time.

30:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And no one knows. No one has any idea what's going to happen. So everybody's throwing stuff at the wall, everybody's scrambling as fast as they can and there's going to be lots of innovation. You know, I'm excited because we've been going through the doldrums in the last 10 years. The iPhone kind of killed everything. And everything looks like an iPhone.

30:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You were gone for a couple of weeks down in Mexico and Micah did the show for those two weeks and one of the things he brought up that I thought was kind of fascinating was me being me complaining about the chaotic, unpredictable nature of Windows updates. Every two seconds something new is happening. And he said, yeah, I got to tell you. From my perspective as an Apple guy, I actually think this is kind of cool, because nothing happens with Apple Like it's. They have the one year release and then nothing. And I said yeah. I said, well, your market has adapted to focus almost exclusively on rumors for the other 12 months or whatever, and that's the nature of that world. So, yeah, is the chaotic, unpredictable nature of Windows updates in some way exciting in the same way that we're describing here is somewhat exciting, yes, but it's also scary. It's like falling off a cliff in a car. We don't all want it, but I'll tell you your heart's going to race for those two seconds and you know, is that good? It's exciting. I think we can agree. It's exciting, yeah.

31:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know Okay.

31:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, okay, that was a lot of talk for like one icon in the star menu.

31:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Microsoft is putting ads in the star menu. Unbelievable, oh my.

31:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
God, yep, and this is what set you guys up. Now that we've really put it in perspective, my article fell well short of this. I wasn't really encompassing the whole industry.

31:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, let me take a little break and then we'll get back to the matter at hand Windows 11. I know you have more to say about that. We're doing our windows weekly thing, as we do every wednesday. Paul thurot and the fabulous parapet I'm gonna call you parapetetic richard campbell because he never seems to light in one place for very long now in romania. Uh, good to have you both. Good to have all our club twit members listening as well. Our show and all of all of you twit members or not? Uh, our show. Good to have all our Club Twit members listening as well. And all of you, twit members or not.

32:28
Our show today, brought to you by our friends at ACI Learning. They are the provider of IT Pro binge-worthy. You know IT Pro right Video on demand, it and cybersecurity training. With IT Pro, you'll get certification ready with access to their full video library. More than seven it keeps going up. Now it's more than 7,250 hours of training.

32:55
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33:39
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34:23
Take your IT or cyber career to the next level with ITPro at ACI Learning. Be bold and train smart with ACI Learning. Here's how you do it. Visit goacilearningcom slash twit. Our offer code twit30, use that at checkout. It'll save you 30% on your first month or first year of IT Pro training, and if you have a team, there's no better place to get your team training and fabulous discounts are available there too. Here's what you do Visit goacilearningcom slash twit. And for individuals, the offer code twit30 will save you 30%. Everybody else, huge discounts too. Goacilearningcom slash twit. We thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly. We know we have a lot of listeners who are IT pro or ACI graduates who are working in the business now thanks to IT pro. It's a really nice feeling. It really works All right Now. Are we done? Are we over with the fact that microsoft has put ads in the start menu on windows 11? We're done with that. Yes, for today for now.

35:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, let's move on. Yes, let's uh. Week week ago, tuesday was patch tuesday, remember we got moment five for the third or fourth time and we're waiting for what we think is going to be called 24 no, I'm sorry, what we know will be called 24 h2 to kind of land in its first iteration and nothing is really kind of happening. That that icon story that we just beat to death was part of one of the only insider builds that occurred since the last show. There were two others that were both release preview builds one for Windows 11, one for Windows 10, that kind of are not very exciting, so we didn't even write an article about these on Threatcom. But very little going on, which is actually kind of good news in the scope of my. We have too many updates, complaints, because that means in the short term we probably aren't going to get anything crazy and stable, or the general availability channel, as we call it, and good, so that's good.

36:35
A couple of small things to mention. Those widgets are coming to the lock screen of both systems, right, so we're going to not, which is sorry. We don't use widgets anymore. Are they called widgets? I guess they're called cards. Whatever they're called, we're going to get more of those things on the lock screen. We're seeing ARM64 MSI support in group policies, which is very interesting, right? So?

36:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It speaks to future versions of hardware.

36:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, and lots of fixes, many of which are similar or the same, sorry, across Windows 11 and 10. And Windows 10, you know getting some features. I know that's always the source.

37:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They told us they wouldn't, the account notifications.

37:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're getting recommended apps in Windows 11 and you're getting account notifications, which came from Windows 11. That started there. I don't this is one I don't actually see a lot of myself. So that's when you click on that little. It's a little bit different in each system, but there's a your user account picture. You click on it, you've got these options to sign out or lock the PC, et cetera. You'll see a little pop-ups there. In fact, that's one of the places they can say hey, you might want to turn on folder backup because, god knows, it's user UIs or Legion.

37:44
And then for you people in the Linux community who thought this was a strategy, it was just a mistake, they're fixing a race condition that stops a machine in a dual multi-boot configuration between they didn't say it this way, but it's Linux and Windows from starting up correctly, which I guess was a little bit of a problem in Windows 10 for a couple months. There, that's a problem, it's a problem. So there you go. Um, this is a similarly small.

38:09
Actually it's a set of stories, but a small story, but I'm going to conflate it into something a little bigger and I think it's related to ai, right? So, uh, I'm going to do this in backwards order. Uh, last night and I mean literally last night for me it was, I don't know 7.30 at night we were getting ready to, you know, hunker down and watch a couple hours of TV and call it a day, and this thing popped across my feed and it was, you know, kind of weirdly worded, but basically the idea was that the Photos app in Windows 11 was going to be integrated with the Microsoft Designer app, which is a web app, which is the front end to their AI image creation stuff.

38:45
soft designer app which is a web app, which is the frame to their AI image creation stuff. Okay, that's interesting, and so I read it and I reread it and I reread it again, cause I must be missing something. And what they announced in a discreet blog post was that they were going to add a button to the wind, the photos app toolbar that looks like the designer logo, so that you can open the image you're working on in photos in designer, which is like so, um, I I think there's some stuff going on there that you know this would be maybe a good use of the share utility and windows that nobody uses, you know, whatever. But I was also reminded that there was a similar standalone announcement a week or two ago about how the photos app was transitioning from being a pure UWP app, which is now deprecated, and moving to the windows app SDK, which is Microsoft solution for modernizing both desktop and mobile UWP apps, right To a kind of a more modern foundation.

39:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I wonder if this is what addresses your question around the Microsoft store app getting faster, that they are playing with different migration strategies away from UWP, and I think they're playing with them on their own software. They may not even be publishing the different methods they're doing.

39:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think yeah. So for me nothing has changed. I had made the observation that new apps typically are web apps and existing apps are modernized in windows, that is, inbox apps with a windows app SDK. They have not said that they're modernizing the Microsoft store with the windows app SDK, but they just did something under the hood that you know sped this app up dramatically. I never found it particularly slow, but okay, fine. The thing these things all have in common, or one of the things maybe, is that each of these is in some ways related to ai, which I think might be the point. So I am definitely reading between the lines. I might even be inventing. I would argue it's an excuse to recompile.

40:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
okay, I mean it's also, but I wonder if that's the push, is that okay? Well, we've got these AI things we need to get in.

40:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We are meaning to revise off of UWP anyway, so let's do it all at once, not arguing that that's part of it, but I am wondering why they would announce it, right? So, for example, when Microsoft releases, like, instead of it being part of a, we're doing this in a Windows Insider blog post about Windows, they actually put out a standalone blog post that says we're speeding up the Microsoft Store app, I'm like, okay, without explaining anything about architectural transitions, right. When they put out a standalone blog post explaining that they are transitioning the Photos app from UWP to the Windows app SDK, I'm like who benefits from this information? Like this is a weird thing to tell people. Like when they modernized it's not a great word, but modernized the file explorer UI in Windows 11, version 23 H2 by moving to the Windows app SDK, they made a big deal. They talked about that, but honestly, you took away a feature you can't drag and drop to it anymore, so I don't maybe don't highlight that. It seems like a weird thing to talk about.

41:49
So now they've released a standalone blog post saying we're adding a button to one of the apps that's built into windows 10 and 11 so that when you click on it, it opens a web app that's part of microsoft 365 and copilot free and paid. And why does that warrant an announcement? Yeah, so my guess is we've talked about how all parts of Microsoft, far and wide, have been dictated to that you are going to embrace AI? Yeah, show me the money. And I think I honestly wonder if these announcements aren't in some, because the Microsoft store, by the way, has an AI hub, which is a stupid interface on the side. You click and it's like there's AI apps you can get in the store and none of them are interesting and maybe they will be someday background removal, etc.

42:48
Now we'll push in, uh, you know an, uh, an image over to the microsoft designer app, which is a web app. You can install it as a pwa if you want. This is a little bit like manual orchestration, the thing that we expect ai to do for us in the like copilot might just do this for us. This might be the uh, what's that little pin thing we were talking about, called the humane pin, the humane pin version of the AI we want in the future, where it's actually very interesting? Today it doesn't really. It doesn't seem like an innovation, it isn't, but it might be the first step toward this re-architecture. May have, well, it is the things we were talking about, but I think it. I think it's more of a refocusing of like, what can AI do for these apps? And in some ways, these blog posts are almost. They almost feel like they're targeted internally.

43:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like see, we're doing what you asked, you know, because I really think you need to rethink the UI in general with these new AI tools, and they're not there yet. It's, it's, it's the very much the um, CBT, you know, beside this, this is going to come up again.

43:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, yes, and I, uh that talk. We always reference this bill last year, his great moments on stage, unbelievable. It's one of the best Microsoft talks of all time. He talked about those three application structures and, and Copilot is the first. It's the AI beside and then he used a, by the way, designer was one of two examples. The other one was clip champ of AI inside, inside.

44:16
Yes, apps that were designed for this era are simpler UIs that did a surprising amount of stuff with less. You know, front end stuff. And and I I can, I'm a clip champ fanatic by this point, and he's right, I mean it's. It's an incredible thing when you look at video editing solutions, whether it's Adobe premiere, the Apple stuff, the DaVinci resolve, whatever that stuff's called, all these they're very complicated, they're, they're control dense, command dense. They're very hard to figure out. Somehow. Clip champ pulls it together. It's, it's, yeah, makes you graceful. It the the. The success of that app has less to do with the fact that it's a web app, although that I think that is notable. Well then, it has to do with they figured out some ux that just like, made this make sense. It's beautiful, like a web it's and it is a web app, which is crazy.

45:13
Um, and I can confirm, I just I did a video with it using yep, and, but it works in chrome on a mac, like it's like, wait, what I mean it's uh, you know, I'm sure I haven't done this yet, but I'm sure it would work on a chromebook too. So, anyhow, um, this is I. This to me, this is me trying to play that role I was talking about earlier, where you can't. I feel like our responsibility is to look at what's happening and say not, important, important. And then, in this case, it's like huh, and you know, maybe I'm that guy. I see something moving in the grass, I think it's a tiger. And in this case, it's like huh, and you know, maybe I'm that guy. I see something moving in the grass, I think it's a tiger, and I run away and it's not. Maybe it's nothing, I don't know. All I know is that that species survived because of that instinct, it smells like something.

45:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it does smell like something.

46:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's raised my radar a little bit.

46:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's raised my radar a little bit and the hair on my arm is standing up. Something's going on. My spidey senses are tingling.

46:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's my, yeah, that's my take. I think something's going on. I think you're right, we'll see. So I think I this is just my way of I want to put it out there and then people can, if they see things they think are like this, let me know and I'll, I'm going to be looking to and we'll see. You know, we'll see and you know build is coming and it's going to be. I mean, we're going to be flooded.

46:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I already announced a day ahead of bill for AI related hardware, so I guess it's going to be some new machines and things. Yes, so you know that's there.

46:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, speaking of which, I have exciting news. I got my first. Well, I had my first AI PC experience back in, I guess, December, when I tested the core ultra based HP's specter X360, I think, MPU you could get the thing going. You know Windows studio effects, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But now I've had my first experience with an actual AI PC with a little TM next to it, because I got a computer in for review that has the copilot key on the keyboard. I got to tell you game changer.

47:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think you're being facetious, have.

47:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I ever.

47:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh no, you're the model of serious journalism, you know I hit that copilot key and my spidey sense started tingling First of all, it shoots confetti out of that webcam, which is astonishing.

47:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think they've got something here. I don't know where it comes from. It's amazing.

47:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean it beats the heck out of the property key, but okay, From a key that we never used.

47:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you leap to your feet and say to the bat cave, stephanie, to the Thurot blog, stephanie, I don't know what?

47:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
piece of crap computer you're using now, but we're replacing it Everything is changing.

47:59
You know, one of my big tips with Windows 11 in particular is that they put this stuff on the taskbar by default that you can just get rid of right. Even if you use that thing every day, you should get rid of it right. So the search bar thing is a great example of that. Copilot it's a great example of that. The task view button is the other get rid of a key. The reason you get rid of it is because it's taking up valuable real estate and there are keyboard shortcuts that always work even if you hide the icon. Just use the keyboard shortcut and windows key plus c opens copilot. You don't need, yeah, a button on the task bar and you certainly do not need a key on the keyboard. But of course I'm not in microsoft marketing, so what do I know? Um?

48:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, it's just like putting an ad in the start menu. It's a reminder that we've got copilot in this machine.

48:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's like intel and have you pressed thepilot button lately, have you?

48:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it now. The button they replaced is the menu, that menu, that's right right context menu nobody used that either, right.

48:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, the thing is, if he went, if he used it once, it made it a better button I literally just clicked it on my keyboard here just to see if it actually yeah, it does something.

49:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's fun.

49:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, I don't what is it the right? The right click? Is it the context? It's like right click, yeah, okay.

49:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nobody. Look, this is the law. There's a long legacy of this stuff. Remember the office keyboard? We still have these weird keyboard shortcuts at launch, like Word, excel, linkedin, et cetera, because they were discrete keys on those keyboards. Look, we're going to be going through a like a pawn shop or some kind of a flea market 20 years down the road.

49:30 - Speaker 2 (Host)
Someone's going to hold one of these things up. Remember they did this.

49:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And everyone's going to be like, no, what is that? Is that a picture of a ham? What am I?

49:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
looking at. Why is that on the keyboard? It isn't, by the way you look at it.

49:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not obvious at all, and that's that's. That itself is rather interesting because the co-pilot icon, as exists today in windows 11, has been up like everything else in a has changed, not dramatically, but it's changed quickly because it used to have different color schemes. Remember it was in um, it is still in uh edge as well, and it was. They moved the position and you know the size and the color and whatever, and uh, putting it on a key tells me well, we're done, we're not, we're not, we're not changing it anymore. They might change the color scheme, I guess it's, but it's uh, yeah, it's not color schemed on the button either.

50:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I mean one would argue they're doing this because nothing else has worked listen the.

50:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They have done and will do everything they can to make this work, including just auto-launching Copilot when you boot into Windows. Right, this is coming. You know, this is coming. You were worried about a stupid app recommendation thing. Did they emphasize how much, how dumb that concern was? There's other things happening that are like oh, you'll use Copilot, yeah right, you will.

50:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're not going to have a choice.

50:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it is getting there. So anyway, yeah, I have a hard time moving on because it was such a game changer for me. Everything else we're going to talk about today seems like superfluous by comparison. The Walking Cat has leaked the first images, believe, of a snapdragon x elite pc, um, which, as you would hope, is as thin as can be. Uh, suggesting that this thing is probably going to be fanless. Um, it's got that kind of what I would call now classic, kind of leno premium PC style. Leo, what is happening with you?

51:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Pay no attention. What are you doing? Pay no attention to the man I'm just fixing the camera. Is it distracting?

51:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm sorry. Well, no, it's confusing. It's like you've gone on a Universal Studios ride and it's the room you know. You're crawling on the ceiling, but you're really still.

51:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm just fixing the camera.

51:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is the camera. On the side of the laptop there's a shot.

51:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's on a tripod and I'm fixing it.

52:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like Toto has been pulled the sheet aside. It's like when their heads.

52:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Kind of come in from the side. Hello, hello, hello.

52:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I had too much headroom and I'm fixing it.

52:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's Leo, Leo, Leo Leo.

52:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Just forget it.

52:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just go on with your, we're fine. I don't know what I'm talking about.

52:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm sorry, are you going to get one of these Snapdragon machines, paul? Is that what?

52:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you're going to do? I absolutely am. The only question is which one? Right? Yeah, how much will you spend? You know what the problem is Like. Lenovo just today reached out to me about a different laptop. I got another one from a different company. I got one in like the one with the co-pilot key on. It is a Lenovo laptop and look I do.

52:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I want to review these things, but I want to move. I'm ready. I want to move forward to this one, yeah, well, no, I want to move past Intel core ultra gen 1 to snapdragon x elite or whatever.

53:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, or me, I want to. I want to get armed, I'm ready, ready to be armed. So in the meantime, I will well, I I shouldn't say that I won't, I won't do that I was gonna say I will not do that I will do my job, but I want to move on.

53:22
You know it's tough. Well, you see the future. It's like when, uh, when Microsoft announced media center, which was then called freestyle, at whatever CES, I said to the guy you've just ruined the year for me. And he's like what are you talking about? I said, everything I use now sucks. You just showed me something awesome that I'm going to have at the end of the year and now I got to go through the year and not have that thing. You know, I, I think I mean, you know you ruin the year, yeah, and that's what this feels like. It's like I, I just I want to get there, you know yeah, they're taking their time.

53:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No toys about it yep.

53:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So what is it where it's a april, right? Yeah? So, um, maybe in a month or so we'll have it's going to happen, I mean it will happen, and then may, into june, I think, we'll get the release, the initial yeah, I'm very interested to see what they announce ahead of build.

54:07
I very much want to see what Microsoft announces. You know I want to get. I see the Surface Laptop as the you know, our MacBook Air I mean the MacBook Air I have is fantastic. I would like to think and hope and I want to find out that the Surface Laptop, whatever is similarly good, and I hope it is and I want it to be, and I'll buy one. I'll buy it with my own money. I don't do that a lot, I'm just saying I do it with phones.

54:32
I don't do it with laptops. Yeah, so I'm ready. Awesome, okay, okay, yep. A couple of unrelated points, but I'll throw them together. The lead designer of the original Surface, ralph Groening not to be confused with Matt Groening, the guy from the Simpsons has retired from Microsoft and I guess retired, although he's going to have, he says very vaguely he's going to help friends design things. But he is a long-term designer. He started at Volkswagen go figure as a toolmaker, worked at Frog Design, which is that legendary design company in California that did a lot of work with Apple back in the day, and then ended up at Microsoft and his first product, his first big success, interestingly was the ArcMouse.

55:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think you can kind of lay flat travel with it pop it open, right, you had to crank it and it gave you the art.

55:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I always, I think, aside from being non-ergonomic, the only issue I have with the ARC mouse was that the sound you made when you crushed it flat. It was like when you crack open a lobster's back and it always made me like I always felt like I was breaking something. But it remains a great idea. They still sell it and I will say the surface, the classic Surface tablet 2-in-1 form factor, formalized a new PC form factor in a way that hadn't happened since the MacBook Air, frankly, and Microsoft has been trying desperately to repeat that success. It's hard, if not impossible, to do that, but that thing persists. I think they nailed it with the uh surface pro 3 in particular, and then they, but a while ago.

56:10
Now it's yes we have pro 10 now we are almost 10 years off from that, yeah, but you know, 12 plus 12 years since the original uh surface um and we haven't seen all this arm stuff like where's the surface arm? That will be. That's going to be in may as well. That will be you think?

56:29
they'll announce an arm surface unit in may. Yeah, I think that the rumors are and I this sounds right to me is that there will be an arm version of the surface pro, which they've done before, of course. Uh, originally surface pro x and then, um, surface pro 9 came right in both versions. Yeah, but to me the big deal is going to be if and when they and I think they will the Surface laptop as well right Mm-hmm 15-inch Surface laptop with an ARM chip in it. Love it, yeah.

56:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It should be amazing.

56:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This will solve the hotbagging problem. I'll tell you that. So I can't wait. Yeah, you got to hope. Yeah, but I can't wait. Yeah, you had to hope. Yeah, well, I hope. Yes, that's true. Anyway, um, ralph is a super, super sweet, nice guy. Uh, I've met him several times. I think the last time I saw him in person was pre pandemic um, surface go something, something in New York. But just a sweetheart of a guy. And but just a sweetheart of a guy. And one of the real shining stars He'd been Stevie Batiste. Frankly, they were co-workers and did a lot of that work. You know he, groff, was the guy who came up with the kickstand idea, which is one of those things. Say what you will about surface and tablets and all that stuff, but once you experience a kickstand on a tablet like that, you can't not have one.

57:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, it's just.

57:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Suddenly it's like I need this yep, so you know that's him. Great guy, do the uh, arc mouse I.

57:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That was pre-surface, so he came to microsoft. I don't remember the exact year I put it up my head. I want to say 2006 ish, something like that.

57:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Was that old, that's amazing.

57:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's been around for a while and there's been different gens. You know they did the um, the nubbin version and then it went Bluetooth so you don't lose that thing in your bag because there was no place, it would magnetically attach to the ArcMouse. But you know, also an early example of Microsoft really embracing design in the sense that this thing, from being iconic looking, came in multiple colors and was very attractive and it was one of those things, like people who care, like I need a mouse but I also want something that speaks to me on a kind of a personal level. It was a good idea in that in that way. And you know, well done, I was really well done. I honestly that little, that little lobster back thing. You might regard that as an early peek at what was going to come later with Surface right and the hinges and stuff. I mean that was they were all over that.

58:46
Lobster every time you heard it. No, I felt bad for Lobster every time I heard it because it's like you know, I was like did I just break his back? I, you know I felt it made me feel bad, crushed him again and then unrelated. But Microsoft announced this week that they're going to retire perpetual standalone versions of Office 2016 and 2019 at the same time as Windows 10 in October 2025. Interesting, windows 10 by October 2025 will have been in the market for 10 years, so it kind of hits that traditional old school mainstream support lifecycle right. Good, office 2016 and 2019, you get the kind of feeling that Microsoft begrudgingly makes these things because customers demand it and they don't want to move on to Microsoft 365. And they limit them in some ways that I would say mostly today are not that egregious. I mean, you can't interact with Microsoft 365 services, et cetera.

59:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, and all the new features, the planners, the list.

59:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they don't get new features. Yeah.

59:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're not on-prem, they're only to some people, though, these are benefits.

59:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, um, we talk about that chaotic, unpredictable release schedule of windows. This is the opposite of that. You buy this product and this is the product, and you use it for x number of years. So, when you think about office 2016, I don't remember exactly when it came out, but I think we can assume it was probably late 2015,. Right, that's 10 years. October 2025 is 10 years, but Office 2019 came out in 2018 or 2019. That's what? Is that? Seven years, something, something. Yeah, it's not that young. They're retiring two products that are three years apart at the same time, which says that the newer one is on a shorter support license.

01:00:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and we've seen this everywhere right, there's no more 10-year support license anymore.

01:00:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Doing them together is a little weird to me. It really sends a message and it will fuel the fire of you know they're going to get rid of the standalone version at some point and then you know, every couple of years they announce no, we're doing another one, and we kind of put that tag off for a little while. But it's microsoft, right? I honestly you can't say never, but I don't really see them getting rid of it. 100, but they'll make it so unattractive. You know, um, there's one version of this. I don't know if this ever came up with the show. I looked at this recently. Um, but I don't want office, right, I just want word. So can I buy word? Can I just buy Word? Not anymore. Well, actually, you can. It's really hard. Yeah, you really can.

01:01:15
The thing that's goofy about it is a standalone version of Word by itself. Just that one app is more expensive than the standalone version of the cheapest Office suite, whatever that is, the home and student, whatever it's called. So for the price of more than the price of Word, excel and PowerPoint, I think, and maybe Outlook, I don't. I can't remember the exact makeup of that. You could just have Word and so no one's going to buy that, and that's the point. You could get Word, but you're going to pay. You can get Word, oh, you're going to pay for it. Remember how Adobe Photoshop used to be a really expensive standalone app? Yeah, well, well, we're doing that with word now. Um, so I, that's how I see perpetual office progressing. I think that's what this is really about.

01:01:49
The, the shortened uh support life cycle is part of it. It's uh, yeah, you can get it. Does it do anything? I don't know. It boots up, it uses the ui. I mean, does it? I guess it edits words? I don't know. We don't even pay attention to it. We're not sure. You know, I don't. I mean, you can try it. I don't know. Give it a shot, let us know, yeah, you, let us know you. Let us know, yeah, tell us, yeah, tell us if it meets your needs.

01:02:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know but um, for all the ai features, nothing coming in standalone. This is all m365.

01:02:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like they are holding out the future set, so you can't really some people are gonna love it for that, though you know, the pushback on Copilot, or just AI in general, is very real and it's very, it's very broken record record reminiscent of the move to the cloud Right, it's the same and the internet and the mobile phone.

01:02:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And the printing press.

01:02:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I also we've, yes, yes, we've all done this. I always use this example, but I back. This would have been 2010, 2011. We did the phone, the iPhone with the onscreen keyboard, okay, and then they move it to the iPad. I'm thinking no one's going to type on this thing. That's ridiculous. And then one night I'm out in Seattle visiting a friend and we're watching a movie or something and I look over and his wife is on the little table tapping away at her iPad and she's going to town on this thing. And I'm like, okay, so much for that opinion, paul. Like some people just do that stuff. So you know, it's when. I don't know. I think some, in some ways, your experience with things also can color. You know how you view new things, right? I mean just like any incumbent.

01:03:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, you know a time before as well, like you've seen these patterns, so you know where they're going.

01:03:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's why I'm doing all A-track tape for music now. The rest of this, everything else, has been just a pointless excuse in getting me to spend my money a different way. There you go. Okay, we will have a story about this on Threatcom, but we don't have it up yet. As we record the show.

01:03:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hold on Before you go to AI. I want to take a break, yeah yeah, I didn't put a little orange text in there.

01:03:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, why not Now? I miss it, leo. Now that it's not there, oh, bring it back. I feel like you don't care.

01:03:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
More with Paul and Richard, but first a word from our sponsor, kolide K-O-L-I-D-E. We've talked about KOLIDE before, I'm sure you remember, but did you know that KOLIDE just got acquired by 1Password? This is huge news. Both these companies are leading the industry in creating security solutions that put users first, and so it's a partnership made in heaven. For over a year, kolide Device Trust has helped companies with Okta, ensure that only known and secure devices can access their data Still doing that just now as part of 1Password.

01:04:38
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01:05:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I like it. That's a. That's Microsoft Post hoc roadblock. I like it. That's Microsoft strategy with OneDrive. So, like I said, we don't have this article up yet, but Bloomberg is reporting that the European Commission has looked into Microsoft's unusual partnership with OpenAI and has determined that it does not warrant a formal probe because Microsoft doesn't actually have control over the direction of OpenAI, and it is for all of its unusualness. So, yeah, I mean, like we said when this came up originally, I think the EU, the UKCMA and maybe the US government have all said that we need to look at this and, yes, this is the role of these regulatory bodies.

01:06:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's fair to say, they didn't go further, like it's perfectly reasonable to come down and say, okay, they don't have control over it, but this is like we're just walking away. They barely got started.

01:06:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah Well, open AI is free to partner with other companies. They meet certain milestones. They could walk away from Microsoft forever and Microsoft has partnered with a bunch of other companies. Yes, those feel strategic right In some ways.

01:06:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I do think one would argue somewhere in Brad Smith's org. As fast as they've walked away from this, it's like did it right? We positioned ourselves sufficiently to have them leave.

01:07:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And that's smart just for the company, but it's also smart for appearances, with regards to regulators and so forth. So I don't, I don't know if I, I don't really have much of an opinion on whether this, you know, like I, like, okay, like I. I feel like the EU, the European commission, is responsible and does, typically does, the right thing, if that makes sense with regards to what they choose to fight, not fight, I mean, it's also a top heavy bureaucracy where everything takes a million years to have anything happen. But good, okay, anyway, that's fine.

01:07:37
Um, I, we're going to talk about the steven sanofsky book. Uh, hardcore software at the end of the show. Um, I should have taken notes the first time I read it. I've reread parts of it several times, oddly, um, for as, uh, just to deal with my own form of PTSD, I actually read the book in reverse order, meaning I started with the end of it and went backward in time which is, you don't read the chapters backwards, we read in the chapter the reading, the sections yeah, so if the final section, which deals with windows 8, has whatever four or five chapters, I read those in order and then read the previous section.

01:08:14
Yeah, right, anyway, a lot, a lot came out of this, but of course, uh and like I said I should have taken notes, I'm gonna, I I feel like I'm gonna have a series of articles that come out of this, aside from the review. But of course, he brings up these things that you know, all of us remember well and have our own perspectives on, and one of them was this notion of embrace and extend, which is contorted into other things. Yes, and there's a whole history there. This phrase, I think, is, uh, completely misunderstood out in the broader world, but including by me back in the day, like everyone else, because you're just a victim of the information you have.

01:08:54
But it occurred to me that so the, the formalization of this, that the, the thing that made this eventually come out in, uh, like a public kind of a way, was the antitrust trial that Microsoft had in the U? S government. So all these internal documents came out. Everyone's freaking out. Oh my God, they're talking about cutting off life supplies terrible company. And it's like no, it's just, it's just a company, they just compete. That's what people, that's how people talk, and we got a little too caught up in that stuff.

01:09:21
The interesting thing is I don't know that, I don't think anyone's ever said this, but bill gates used to use the phrase uh, internally embrace and extend all the time. And so when jay allard the guy who wrote the kill and windows should be the you know killer app of the internet wrote that memo, he used the phrase. He played off that, knowing it would get his attention, because he was trying to get this guy to wake up and actually embrace the internet. Right, and he called it embrace, extend and innovate. And if you read this memo, if you read especially the parts that deal with this, it's, it's really, it's. It's not malicious, it's, it's uh, it really is talking about working right, that's.

01:09:56
Uh, this is jay allen, jay allen, okay, um, it's, it's, you know it makes sense, it's pragmatic, it's you know, it makes sense, it's pragmatic, it's not really nefarious. And whatever they did, they did I mean Microsoft did some horrible things I'm not downplaying that. But in reading this I thought to myself this sounds, this sounds familiar, and it sounds a little bit like none of these comparisons ever perfect. It's not like lining up DNA when you're like a CSI guy, but it sounds a little bit like the ai inside ai outside, ai, whatever.

01:10:29
The third one is uh, strategy inside, inside, outside, yeah inside it's in well, beside, inside, outside, yeah, uh, that stevie batiste talked about last year. Now the big difference is that the jl had memo, embrace, extend, innovate was literally a three phase in step, you know, step one, first step to next, step three and then we arrive at our end goal. But the you know the whereas the Stevie Batiste of Microsoft thing today is these things are going to overlap, and they do. We already have those examples. We we have literal co-pilot UI next to Microsoft word next to windows, whatever it might be, and we have the AI inside apps like Clipchamp and Designer we just talked about. Right, so we're getting there.

01:11:08
And I hinted, I invented, but maybe I might see the hint of the beginning of that third app structure in these announcements they're making about photos and Designer, which seem innocuous on the surface because they are, but could lead to that. What he's talking about is AI as an orchestrator taking over the role of what windows today is like, or an OS Right, so kind of fascinated by that, you know, and it. The similarities may be due to the fact that this is how the big software company gets from one place to another, but this may be just. This may be the way it always is. Maybe sometimes there's four steps or two, or maybe you know whatever, but I thought that was kind of interesting. It might, it might not, but it may, in the same way that I see the tiger in the grass. It may put it in some sense of historical perspective or not, but I thought I was. I was fascinated by the parallels, so I threw it out there. Nice, all right.

01:12:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's also like less and less AI apps. More and more, every app has AI in it.

01:12:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but if this thing works the way Stevie described it, we may see, and maybe this ultimately may be the next. Wave this notion that the very idea of an app changes. You know, yeah, wave this notion that the very idea of an app changes. You know, microsoft has tried, and they just didn't have the technology at the time. But they've tried a lot of times in the past the document centric UI in Windows 95, the Microsoft Bob stuff, the Windows phone stuff with the hubs and everything like.

01:12:39
Stop thinking about apps. It's like we play whack-a-mole, you know, when you pick up your phone, you're like, all right, I want to share, share, I want to share a photo. And that means I use the instagram app and I got a muscle memory, the icon, wherever it is and whatever it looks like, and that's how I do things. And you know, these things were all like no, no, no, you're, you're, you're a human being and you're trying to share a photo, like, yeah, it's a photo, it's a photo hub in windows. You know, that was, that was how they, you know, think of things and maybe this breaks down the capability. Maybe I'm not saying this is going to happen, but the idea here is that these standalone apps, as we think of them today, become, honestly, the way that Unix command line apps always were to chain them together and orchestrate a bunch of discrete task solving apps for lack of a better term into a concerted uh, orchestrated final thing that solves your problem, right? I don't have the words because we don't really have this. These uis to know.

01:13:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And again, we thought windows would be the hub of this, but it might be through other apps. I mean, part of this is the politics inside of microsoft who's got the clout, who's got the cloud, who's got the skill set? Uh, who can get to customers quickest?

01:13:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
right, I think, and that's why I kept what impact does this have on those things that mean a lot to us today? Because they make lots of money right. It's the reason Apple views everything through the lens of iPhone hardware. You know, microsoft today looks at the world and says well, I mean, people are subscribing to microsoft 365 or companies are if this sells them, if we do this good yeah, it's okay to cannibalize word in excel.

01:14:11
If all we do is provide more benefit to the people who already subscribe and we get more subscribers, right, you have to be able to make that kind of a, a mental calculation.

01:14:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean an m365 also has the graph, so there was a product they couldn't otherwise use. That copilot can surface in a meaningful way, Yep. But I also think it's got the energy. People are used to getting new features constantly in the space. They want a bunch of these things Like where the Windows folks I mean what's been before the LLM wave showed up a year and a half ago.

01:14:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What was the primary message?

01:14:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
coming from Windows. Just stabilize it, make it reliable.

01:14:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've given this example on the show before. I don't remember, richard, if it was since you've been here, but years ago, when it was Microsoft Office and it would come out every three years and it would be a different version and it would have all new capabilities. Sometimes it would be new apps, right. So, whatever year, this was a million years ago. I'm out in Vegas for some office launch something, something, and they do this demo on stage that involves all of the 11 or whatever it was office apps at the time and a completely fanciful, ridiculous example where this one human being had to create a document, a word, crunch numbers in Excel, publish something to what was probably like a newsletter or a flyer, and publisher.

01:15:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They used every single component. Stupid like ridiculous to what was probably like a newsletter or a flyer and publisher.

01:15:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They used every single component. Stupid like ridiculous. It was patently ridiculous. But today you could make the argument that that software moves to a place where it's like what we have now. You're prompting it, you say I need to do this and it says, okay, we'll use the capabilities from the apps that we know exist and the you know. Whatever it does, you don't have to worry about it, as the user already warm. Yeah, and here's this thing and uh, honestly, that's not so fanciful. We, we kind of you could see it right, I mean, we're, we're kind of getting there, so interesting yeah, I know it's three times throughout it out and the investments continue yes, just not inhumane.

01:16:05
Hopefully I'm well, I'm going to. I kind of want to have almost like speed date some of this stuff, because there's a lot of AI stuff here, but but and they have a common theme, right?

01:16:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's just here and also here, and also here and also here.

01:16:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and I left stuff out, you know this is the abbreviated surprisingly curated list of stuff, but, um, it's kind of weird.

01:16:28
So the uh, the ceo I think they call her of the uk cma was actually in washington dc not to speak to the us government but to speak to it like kind of a trade organization show, and she made a, I would say, a pretty compelling case for uh, big, you know, governments regulating ai and preventing the type of abuses that these companies have already made or done or whatever, from just, you know, extending their and expanding on their dominance, et cetera, et cetera. So the only thing I have to say here is like to me it sounds fairly obvious that regulators need to look at AI and maybe move quickly for a change. And then, just from the perspective of the UK CMA I mean objectively I looked at their arguments about Microsoft Activision and found them to be ridiculous. I mean like just unbelievably stupid.

01:17:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And also petulant, like they'd already lost and then they went back. It just felt, yeah it.

01:17:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't want to. That's another old wound. I don't want to get back on it, but it was horrible and I hated it and I didn't understand it and it just didn't. There was no, you couldn't, I haven't opened enough mind if you provided me with the data and the facts and the logic. Yeah, okay, I can see that point of view and that one I just couldn't see it. This one, it's again. Okay, I will see what comes out of this, if anything. But yes, of course regulators should be looking at this stuff, right, of course. So I'll just leave it at that.

01:17:50
In other controversies there's a company in I can't my notion. When I click on things in Notion, they do not launch the articles. So there is an AI company in the United Arab Emirates which I'll try to bring up, if I can figure out how a computer works, called G42, named after the 42 thing from Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which, honestly, is the only frivolous thing about this company. They were doing a lot of work with Chinese companies that Microsoft said violated their sanctions against Huawei and other Chinese companies, had violated their sanctions against Huawei and other Chinese companies and they did a little deal with Microsoft. That was approved by the UAE government as well as the US government, which was we're going to stop pretending that China is a thing and we're only going to work with the US companies, including Microsoft, who we are now starting a major partnership with, and we're going to bring Azure to the Middle East, and it's good for Microsoft, good for them, and we'll see.

01:18:51
It's like really controversial. I'm sorry.

01:18:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, I think it's an excellent question. It's like are they actually going to get there in a way that's better for everybody? Yeah, so Microsoft's?

01:19:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
billion is a lot of money too. I mean, that's that's.

01:19:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's not the Microsoft announcement does not mention China or anything like that, even once, but uh yeah that was a big part of it, yeah. Oh, it was a big part of the story, it, it, it's the Microsoft. Just, I think, was just trying not to you know that hornet's nest, but it is a big part of it.

01:19:25
So very interesting. I'm going to speed around some of this stuff because, you know, whatever, of course Adobe is working to bring generative AI capabilities to Premiere and et cetera, et cetera. Of course they are Right, I think. Is it what's the video? Is it DaVinci Resolve is the video editor I mentioned? I saw it's Blackmagic.

01:19:49
I think that's the one, the thing I saw at the Qualcomm event, which is what you click on an object and it tracks that object while everything's moving around it. It's available now, I assume, on an Intel, whatever computer. It's using the GPU, et cetera, et cetera, but this is one of those things.

01:20:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We don't know the answer to that.

01:20:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't either. Yeah, that software is so complicated it makes me feel like an idiot. So I tried it and I'm like I can't stop using this. Brave has had a flurry of AI announcements over the past few months, most notably around this Leo in-browser AI, which they brought first to the desktop and then to android and then to ios and, uh, ipad, um, and then I don't I don't know if we talked about this last week, but they added it to, uh, brave talk, which is their, by the way, completely free and limitless, um, private video chat service, like, like a zoom type thing, but free, you know, so interesting. And then, since then, they announced, just today, I believe, a feature called Answer with AI that is added now to Brave Search for free. So Brave Search is free. There may be a paid version of this. It will build on whatever they have now for free. But if you've used Google Search in recent days, you know that, depending on the query, you could get a little ai block up at the top. You can see it kind of rendering and it will try to use ai to answer your question and then provide traditional links below. And this is basically, uh, the brave version of this, but it's, um, you know, private, right, it's not. You know it's not tracking. You're on the internet, so you know anyone can use brave search. You don't have to use the brave browser, it's just searchbravecom. So interesting, cool.

01:21:31
Um, I got a cute little email from google, one which is a subscription service I pay for, primarily for the two terabytes of online storage I get, but there are other perks and I had a hard time seeing the benefit to this one. But they sent me a cute little email where a lot of good stuff was happening, including Google Photo. Ai editing tools, which were previously a perk of the service, will now be free for everyone. So that's fun for me because I pay for it. They took away the VPN, which I didn't care about because I've used it once and it was terrible. They are taking away, but what's the other one? I can't remember? They're taking away a third feature and a booba. What's the other one? I can't remember? They're taking away a third feature. And there you go. So enjoy the value from your Google One subscription, like so is the price going? Down. It's declining rapidly.

01:22:16
Yeah, so anyway, the good news for everyone out in the world is that the Google Photo AI editing tools, like Magic Eraser, are actually pretty great, like I would say, in the scheme of these things, pretty good, pretty bueno, as we say. So that's going to be. That's something you know if you use Google Photos and you probably should frankly check it out, because that stuff works really great for the most part.

01:22:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, they're discontinuing free shipping for select print orders. That's it From Google Photos.

01:22:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's why I didn't remember it, because who cares? Who ships anything from Google Photos?

01:22:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's right, they do photo frame or um photo. You know books and calendars and stuff. So thank you not to do a huge callback, but you know leo was talking about memory care earlier in the show and I have a family member who's recently put it down into care and one of the things you've been doing is taking pictures with her every time we're there and getting them on the wall. Yeah, yeah, not that she sees photos of all of us, she sees photos of all of us there.

01:23:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, oh, that's interesting, she has a tough time remembering that we visited her right, yeah, nice filling the walls with those physical pictures really makes a difference for her. I I do both, in fact. I I came over with photo albums this time I came over with I think it's a 19-inch frame. It's like a big screen, yeah, from. Nick's play and it's digital. It has 2,000 photos in it, all the old family slides, all the history which she remembers, in extraordinary detail.

01:23:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I haven't done too much of this, but I it's very similar experience. Sorry, my the, the stepmother that we bought the house from and then are living in her condo, is suffering from dementia and alzheimer's and all that stuff, and conversations with her are very difficult. Um, I have all these old photos that my father supplied to me, but I want to. I, you know, I kind said I want to talk to her because she's in these, I'm in these photos as a baby. She's in them. Where was this? When was this? That kind of thing? And I'm thinking she's not going to know any of this stuff. Yeah, and my wife said you know what? You got to try it and I just tried a few and she was like, oh yeah, that was. And she like rattled off a couple of going on this like this is right.

01:24:22
Get them while you can there's some interesting um breakthroughs you can make.

01:24:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, with that I think we prompt I think we stop taking pictures with them, and that makes this these later times even more confusing. So to take pictures today and in that setting yeah, I think that's a good idea.

01:24:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we can this uh, this uh. Nix play, by the way, is fantastic. Yeah, you can email uh pictures to it as well, and videos, um, although I want to.

01:24:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think I might move to us like a digital, just a standalone digital photo frame like that I I'm using like a google. This thing is great. Uh, what do you call it? Like a hub thing, and it's like yeah I don't use anything else.

01:25:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She had an echo, she had an amazon echo and you can set up the echo if you really tweak it. They want to put ads in there, to just be pictures with a few extra little things. Okay.

01:25:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So she has that I just want. I just want photos.

01:25:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She has that in the sitting room and she loves thing for a bedroom and honestly, you're right absolutely right. Richard photos are fantastic.

01:25:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They, they, they, they, something, right? I mean, yeah, well, I even my, even myself, like when there were photos of the rent I remember it better.

01:25:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have photo frames everywhere in the house yeah, it just triggers the. I don't know it's wonderful yeah, yeah, yeah. Granted, I'm suffering from my own form of whatever brain problems, but it's, but hey you know, you know, when you get to one of these places, you realize we're all yeah, we're all yeah, we're all on the same path here yeah, the same path, yeah, I know, I know, uh, amazon, like spotify, has added an ai playlist generator to amazon music.

01:26:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
In this case, the differentiator here is that it will work on all the tiers, free and paid. So that's kind of cool. It's only in beta. It's only in the US right now. It's sporadic. They're kind of rolling it out. I don't see it. I don't pay for it, but I loaded the app to see if I had it. I don't, so you may or may not see it. I just bought an M3 Mac, so obviously they're announcing the M4 Macs in a Simpsons. You got a while.

01:26:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You got a while. I was worried too, when I read these news stories from Bloomberg, I'm not worried, but it's like a force. It's the end of the year.

01:26:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You got a while, it just means they've laid the dyes down and they're going to start doing production. Yeah, they're taping them out and obviously they've expanded and PU parts is dramatic. That's exactly right.

01:26:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
In keeping with the way the world's going right. You know, I think it was back in February when they did their earnings announcement. Apple's revenues, as I recall, were like flat or even down a little bit, and so it was like hey, we're going to talk about AI.

01:26:53
You know, don't look over here, look over here. So you know, we know, wwdc is going to be all AI. Mark Gurman has leaked that it's going to be local AI, almost exclusively with the first round of stuff. I think that itself is fascinating. We'll have to talk about that when it happens. That's very Apple, of course. Right, very Apple. But you know, and strategically maybe smart, this is how they can do their little privacy game. So, anyway, no surprise, obviously, m1, m2, m3. I wonder if they're working on anything new. Oh, yeah, is it going to be called the M4? Yes, okay, it's all you know.

01:27:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Whatever, the AI focus is interesting. We talked a lot about this yesterday on Mac break weekly because Apple is so far behind in AI.

01:27:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But ahead on the chipset.

01:27:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they've got the hardware, yeah.

01:27:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And so we're just about to talk about Amazon. But in the same way that Amazon we said earlier is kind of approaching it from a unique angle, I think Apple we'll see but there is the potential that Apple will do the same. Well, they'll kind of cherry pick from the best of whatever LLMs they partner with and provide those capabilities to their customers, and I think it's Apple. So it's like a bespoke on-device AI service of whatever kind right.

01:28:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't have a really nice voice. It's hard to imagine, right, yeah?

01:28:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So we'll see what that takes. And then, with regards to Amazon, and Anthropic, cloud has emerged as one of the big LLM choices. They have a family of these things different levels, different capabilities, different speeds, different size, different performance, etc. All three are now available on Amazon Bedrock. This is the I think, the only place you can get these and stable, I guess, is the way to say it. But they also, you know, they're partnering with basically everybody who isn't Microsoft or OpenAI, so, or Google, I guess.

01:28:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're all racing and weirdly, because Microsoft's ahead and it's good to see the positioning and being smart about it too, I think Apple's making the right play for Apple. I'm not as convinced of the Amazon offering. I think they're still feeling around for their intent here.

01:29:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think Apple and Amazon, both because of the way they're still feeling around for their intent here. Yeah, I think Apple and Amazon, both because of the way they're coming to market. They're behind. What are you waiting on? But again they're just kind of doing their own thing. It's interesting. And then, finally, I don't know as much about the AMD kind of AI accelerated processor families that I know it has expanded dramatically. Just this week they announced at least a new family of these Ryzen Pros 8000 series chips for desktop and mobile that have their MPU built in. So this is AMD's take on the ai pc thing. So I will say I don't the. The problem is you don't see it as much and this. There are examples of this, but it's very rare where you have the same computer but with an amd or an intel option.

01:29:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, yeah, comparing, that was more prevalent a while ago, but it's yeah they're differentiating more now it's less.

01:30:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, it's less common now, but I'd love to be able to compare these things side by side. The only thing I do know is that AMD has come out and said yes, by the end of the year, we will be in that same range where Intel will be and where Qualcomm will be as far as the tops performance of the MPU, the top's performance of the MPU, I mean once AMD exists.

01:30:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Because the US government decided that Intel couldn't be a monopoly and needed to share the chip design so they could be an alternate supplier, and from there they have diverged. They've each done their own ways of making a better process. They're still working the same chipset. Amd got 64-bit ahead of Intel after Intel, which drove.

01:30:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Intel, mad, mad and, within you know, microsoft basically went to them and said no, you're doing this, it's called amd 64, deal with it. Yeah and uh, they forced it on intel, you know? Yeah, that was windows on windows. Yep, exactly, and it was dave color yeah this is it when the cutler speeds?

01:31:05
Yep, you're doing it and yeah, that made them crazy. But you know, amd started off as like a low cost alternative and they were, you know, kind of cheaper, not quite as good, but these days, I mean obviously, for a long time I mean, they've been very competitive. My experiences with AMD Ryzen based PCs are is and base species is very good. Actually, I would say overall Cool. Definitely will pay attention to that stuff and that's it. Pray. I look it was like 21 items. What a speed round it was amazing.

01:31:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He was rocking it. You're a rocker. Let me do a quick break and then we'll get to the Xbox segment. We still have brown liquor to come, maybe something Romanian, I don't know Call me crazy.

01:31:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just got here.

01:31:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just got here, all right. Good, I'm kind of relieved. Actually, our show today brought to you by Melissa the data quality experts. Did you know? Melissa's Global Address Verification and Validation Service verifies addresses for 240-plus countries and territories. I didn't even know there were that many. By doing this, melissa helps your business improve deliverability, reduce costly errors, boost your address data accuracy, increase delivery speed, bottom line boost your ROI. Melissa also offers free trials and sample codes, and flexible pricing Makes it very easy to get into Melissa and you will be glad you did.

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01:34:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I have a question okay, it's the middle of april as we record this.

01:34:22
Um deal went through in october yep, microsoft acquired activision blizzard in october. They said within a month of that, we're not going to have anything for you on xbox game pass etc. Etc. By the end of the year. Stay tuned. They waited until february to say anything and even then admitted they only came out early because there were leaks and they were going to actually do that in March. And then they announced it and said the first game is going to be Diablo 4. Yay, it's going to happen at the end of, I think, march. Awesome, that is literally the only. Activision Blizzard game that has ever appeared on Xbox.

01:34:57
I'm paying 15 bucks a month for this thing. What are you doing? So there's a new, like a? You know, every two weeks there's a new announcement and it's like what are these things? They want to cash in.

01:35:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They got to put out the Fallout series with the Fallout TV show on.

01:35:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like now's the time to make some money. What are you doing? And that's Obsidian, which is not. That's not. Oh wait, that might be actually be, they might actually be on there. I think that's a. That was pre. That's not Activision Blizzard. Yeah, Fallout is Bethesda.

01:35:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That game has got me, that TV show, rather, has got me really wild, totally got you. Yeah, it's so good.

01:35:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I. So. I have friends who are really just love movies and love comic book movies, and I feel like they're not very discerning right? And one of the things they always say to me is oh no, no, this one's just a good movie.

01:35:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not a comic book movie, it's just a good movie.

01:35:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then you watch it and you're like there's a guy flying around in a cape.

01:35:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a comic book movie. I have the same reaction, Paul.

01:36:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And I feel like video game movies, how half-life two especially, how is that not a like a Netflix limited series or whatever Like these?

01:36:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
things would make an option badly back when you couldn't make a good video game.

01:36:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so I have not watched fallout yet. I I tend to wait until every well, first of all it's done, but this has got the vibe where people I actually trust are saying forget how it came about. This is just a great show. It's really good.

01:36:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and you know Lisa had never played the games Yep, and now she wants to.

01:36:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
She loves it more than I do, yep, because it's got the thing that made the game fun, which is that quirky, retro, futuristic it's hysterical and because there are multiple games that all take place in different places and times, franchise, you could do multiple seasons now and move it on to the Atlantic City version.

01:37:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Whatever 76, whatever you know like anyway, so good, I'm so glad something good came out of that. And this isn't the plot of the game, by the way. Every once in a while something weird happens, where you go like you need to find the doctor and get the shot within three hours. It's like okay, that's from a game, obviously. But it isn't the plot, as far as I can tell of any of the games.

01:37:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's his own story. It doesn't open that door and he's like I guess you have to find the key. We're playing a game.

01:37:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's got so many of the elements and some of the quirky funny style elements of it, it's wonderful.

01:37:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a whole look and feel vibe to the Fallout series. I think is beautiful and they've very clearly done a wonderful job of putting that on the screen. So this is good to me because it means those other things I care about, like the half-lifes and whatever could now happen, like could make sense, you know, and meanwhile over here in microsoft, well, this is halo, the halo, it's like oh, so sorry you're gonna take off his helmet.

01:37:54
I'm just curious do you think that was a core part of the game, or or the exact opposite of a core part of the game? I'm just. I'm just curious, though. Like what are you doing? We wanted to re-imagine Don't use that word, no, no re-imagining here. There's a whole rich universe, got no imagination. Universe level history. Just tell the story, Please. I beg of you, yep, you saw Battlestar Galactica. Do that.

01:38:18
You know I wish that would come back. I would love to see that. By the way, I think it's going to. I think there's another remake coming by the way, Won't be as good Won't be as good.

01:38:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't see how it could be no.

01:38:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was perfect. This is how you know that one's good. I haven't done this, but I feel like I could get my wife to watch it.

01:38:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
She would resist because, say, and then she would get into the whole mythology bit of it and the who is the Cylons and who isn't. It was profound about Ronald Moore's House of Galactica is that people had breakdowns, that when they ran.

01:38:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was gritty and realistic.

01:38:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Nothing got fixed. The argument is that Moore was working on Star Trek Voyager and he wanted to do the same thing for Voyager and then the other writers wouldn't let him and he left. He went and did it for Avery Brooks.

01:39:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The Avery Brooks Star Trek series, the Deep Space Nine. I think that was supposed to be gritty. We were going to make this and it wasn't. It was Star Trek.

01:39:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Gritty the cleanness of the future is, and they tried, and they tried again with Voyager and the same thing, and then he and then the guy with the with that broad story.

01:39:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I thought they nailed it, you know. I mean, obviously the special effects are dated. I don't know what we're talking about. I'm sorry. I love that show, I recommend it highly, the whole run. Okay, I don't even know what I was talking about. Okay, so a couple of months. Oh, it's part of this same announcement that they you know, diablo is coming to, diablo four is coming to. Game pass yeah, the game pass.

01:39:53
They also announced and this was the, these were the leaks that got them to announce this stuff early that, yes, four of our games across our studios are going to come cross-platform to PlayStation and Nintendo Switch, and we have now, as of today or yesterday, I guess today, yesterday have had three of those releases. So yesterday released Grounded on Switch, playstation 4 and 5. A new, fully yoked update. This is one of those honey, I shrink the kid things where you shrink down to the size of an ant and you're in the backyard. Now everything's really dangerous. It's kind of fun, right, it sounds like fun. Yeah, I think so. Cross-platform fun, fun, fun. I don't know that we covered this explicitly, but Pentament and Hi-Fi Rush were two of the others. They both shipped cross-platform in February, march, depending on the game. I think Hi-Fi Rush is PlayStation 5 only and the other one is all three PS4, ps5, and Switch. Pentamon is that is, and then the fourth of the games, which is Sea of Thieves. Is it Sea of Thieves? Yeah.

01:40:56
Sea of Thieves is launching on PlayStation 4 and 5 at the end of the month, on April 30th, and we haven't written this up either because it just happened, but they announced today that, over the course of the game, sea of Thieves has had 40 million users. Now that doesn't mean there's 40 million people sitting there playing Sea of Thieves, right? It's, you know, cumulatively, I guess, 40 million different players across Xbox, windows 10, and Steam Windows 10, meaning, uh, the microsoft store, like the, the xbox app on windows, I guess, um, cool, right, so this is a game that's like kind of under the radar type games. Um, that has achieved kind of a nice long life and it's a good example of microsoft. They don't always do it, but they some games. They just throw their support behind it and they keep releasing updates and doing things with it's fun. And now we're going to get it on PlayStation and that might expand the audience even further. So that's cool. So, 40 million players, there's nothing to sneeze at, that's great. Yeah, I have never really even played it, you know, I'm embarrassed to say, and I only mentioned this one because it's kind of fun.

01:42:00
So Epic Games, of course, is these two antitrust cases going against Google and Apple. They've done terribly against Apple, they've done really well against Google and they have submitted a petition to the court to force Google to open up Android and the Play Store further than Google wants to. And the way they did it was by writing what I will call fan fiction. I will call fan fiction, and what I mean is they submitted. They submitted a filing as if it were the judge issuing an order and look, if you agree with it. I'm not saying, do it, but you can just put your name on it. We did your homework for you and they wrote it as if it was an order from the judge which I found to be incredibly funny.

01:42:41
I don't know if that's common.

01:42:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've never personally really piss off the judge, which I found to be incredibly funny. I don't know if that's common.

01:42:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've never, personally, really piss off the judge. Honestly, I do think there was. Maybe they asked, maybe they asked. I don't know.

01:42:48 - Speaker 2 (Host)
I don't know how this came about but I was reading it and it was like wait this is from the judge.

01:42:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What is this? I thought that's epic was and it took.

01:42:56
It took me a while and then I said wait a minute, this is their idea of what the order might look like. It's like we just want in court we have some idea about the damages face. I don't know if you're interested. Uh, so epic is uh ballsy I think it's the term I would use. Yeah, going for it is what they're doing, so good for them. I I I only, like I said, only mentioned it because I'm like what is this? It's like, is that what this is? Are you?

01:43:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
really gonna go for that. I guess we see how judge does.

01:43:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All along they've been kind of like this kind of jerky. I feel like this is not going to land well, but who knows?

01:43:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, they're the little guy fighting the big guy, and that goes a certain distance.

01:43:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not that little Come on.

01:43:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're a gnat.

01:43:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Compared to Google and Apple. I mean they are the Fortnite gods, but they are lesser gods compared to google and apple. I mean they are god, they are the fortnight gods, but they are lesser gods compared to the apple god look, they may be a big deal in north carolina, but I don't know what you know.

01:43:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You don't know what it's like here in california. Um, I don't know. Yeah, they're a big deal. I mean, they're a big deal in the gaming world, for sure. I mean, obviously, but um, I just thought it was funny, I don't know.

01:43:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good for them, I don't know, you know, but we're kind of a big deal in our numbers.

01:44:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We have our own lawyers. We can throw something together. Why should you do any extra work?

01:44:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, look on it, here it is.

01:44:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's 40 pages, I don't know, maybe Tell us what you think. Try it on for size. Give it a grade. It's just funny to me. Maybe someone who's a legal expert or a lawyer could be like oh no, this happens all the time. I wonder that's a good question. To me this felt unique. I thought it was kind of funny.

01:44:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We had Denise Howell on Sunday. I should have asked her then, but I didn't know about it, so I didn't.

01:44:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It might have happened since then. It might have been earlier this week.

01:44:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, Mr T, hold on for a second your tip of the week coming up, your app pick of the week. We've got a run as radio pick and, yes, a brown liquor pick. That kind of shocks me. Kind of surprises me. Is it because it's gin? No, it's. It's um, it's traditional. It's a kind of traditional well, we'll see.

01:44:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm just going back to basics here. I think I don't know what rich is what Rich is thinking I'll tell you when it's my time.

01:45:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, this is exciting, but first I just want to put in a little plug before we get to the back of the book for the club, because you club members have been so great. We are so grateful to our club members. But also we know that club members are less than 2% of the audience. Members are less than 2% of the audience and, honestly, you know, if you don't like us, you could just say I don't like you. Is it me? Did we do this? Because if we want to keep going as a podcast network, we're going to need to get more than 2% of you to join the club. I mean, that's just the fact of it. It is, in a way, a vote. You're letting us know. You're voting with your dollars $7 a month. We try to give you some good benefits. I think we do.

01:45:56
You get ad-free versions of the shows. We don't need to show you ads, we don't need to track you. You also get video of all the shows, for instance, one of the things we did this was Lisa's idea. It was a great idea is to take some of the shows like hands-on windows uh, that Paul does. Or hands-on mac with Micah, or the untitled linux show or the home theater geek show or ios today shows that we're we were keeping behind the paywall. We've now made them available to everybody. But we did a little sneaky little thing. We made them available to everybody in audio. If you want the video, you can join the club, okay, so everybody gets to listen. And those are ad-supported, those audio versions. So if you want to hear what Paul's talking about on Hands on Windows now, you can, but the video is behind the club paywall. We also have the Discord, which is a great hang for all the people who love to get in there and talk about geeky subjects. And, by the way, not just the shows, every subject under the sun. We also have additional stuff, like Stacy's book club is coming up tomorrow and stuff like that. We've got a little party event. We're going to do a watch party from the Laporte house next month. That should be a lot of fun. All of that for seven bucks a month. But more importantly, that seven bucks a month is your way of saying yeah, we want to hear more, we want you to keep doing what you're doing.

01:47:18
You probably are aware of this advertising. It's kind of interesting because I just read a stat that said more ads have moved to digital audio this year that there's now. The spend is like seven billion. I think it's all going to joe rogan. I gotta be honest, it ain't going to us. I don't know who's making all that money, but it ain't us.

01:47:35
And all the podcasters I talked to, especially the tech podcasters, are saying it's really tough out there. Um, so, frankly, the ad dollars are dwindling. We have had to cut back. We will have to cut back more. Honestly, we don't have we're not, you know, humane pin. We don't have hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital. It's just me and Lisa. So if the expenses go above the revenue, then we have to cut stuff out. If it goes far enough, we might have to end the whole thing, and a lot of podcasts have gone out of business.

01:48:09
A lot of podcast networks have gone out of business. We don't have a side hustle, we don't have conferences, we don't have books that we're selling. What we're doing is this so if you like what we're doing and you want to keep it on the air and you want to keep hearing the shows and you want us to grow, please join the club Twittv, slash club twit. I would really appreciate it. I know everybody at Twit would really appreciate it. It's how you vote for what we're doing and, frankly, these days we need your votes. All right, enough said. Thank you very much for your kind attention On we go with the show. Thank you very much for your kind attention On we go with the show. And Paul Theriot, let's do the back of the book. Your tip of the week, sir.

01:48:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, just real quick, though. I pasted this into the notes. Somebody tweeted this to me.

01:48:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apparently, microsoft is now displaying an this is going to be shocking an ad in Windows 11.

01:48:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's a big ad, yep. If you're using Chrome, they'll be like you know what. You can use Chrome, but how about putting Bing into it as your default search engine? And you could use ChatGPT. Oh, for free, yep, oh, that's a good comment, oh what price you sold for free. No, it's not really free right? They're kind of following you around the internet here. I don't know.

01:49:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, that's interesting, interesting, that's really interesting.

01:49:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's a big ad, I will say that looks like it's about three times as big as a standard banner notification ad in windows. So, wow, good for them using that real estate. You know it's not going to sell itself. That's all I'm saying. Okay, this one's going to shock some people, but I have finally gotten through Hardcore Software.

01:49:45
This is the book by Steven Sanofsky, the former head of office and in Windows at Microsoft. He left the company in a bit of controversy in 2012, right as Windows 8 was coming out the door, and I think my let me say this diplomatically no, we've clashed a bit over the years, maybe it's the way to put it. Um and so I, I avoided this book for about a year and then I think I might've mentioned this at some point it kind of came up. I don't know. I was like I was browsing around for a new book and it popped up in Amazon. I was like you know what? I got to read this? I got to get through, I got to get over my PTSD and, like I said earlier, I read it in reverse and then I went back and reread big parts of it repeatedly, in fact, in some of them cases several times, and I'm probably going to write a bunch of articles that will be inspired by some of the things.

01:50:42
There's a lot of insight in this book, which I, you know, I, I hate. I don't mean to say I'm surprised by that, but I disagree with him on some things. For sure, I agree with him on more things than I expected and he came to some of the same conclusions internally at Microsoft as I did externally, which you know. Obviously I appreciate. We all like to be told we're right, you know. Anyway, if you care about Microsoft and the history there, this you know he joined the company in 1989.

01:51:10
Like I said, left in 2012, ran Office successfully or I should say released at least I think it was six successful versions of that product. Managed the transition of Microsoft from a company that targeted not all of Microsoft. Managed the transition of Microsoft from a company that targeted not all of Microsoft. Managed the transition of a product line that originally targeted enthusiasts and then individuals, and then small businesses and then finally enterprises in the cloud. And he did what he did with Windows, but historically very important and, I think, an interesting parallel to my book, which is Windows Everywhere, and it will inform I was already going to update that book, but uh, this you know there'll be this will inform some of that. It's worth it.

01:51:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm so shocked because I really thought you didn't.

01:51:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I did too. I did too. I'm disappointed in myself. Um, I I will say I have not talked about this privately with Richard and this is unfair of me to do this here. But I said this to Mary Jo when I saw her in New York a couple of weeks ago and I'll just say she reacted negatively to this suggestion. But I would suggest it to you as well, richard. Given your inside knowledge of the history of NET in particular and all the software development stuff over the years, you should read it.

01:52:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You may, you may not want it on my Kindle. I will read it.

01:52:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's, it's, it's worth it. I think you'll be fascinated by it and this, this is so much to it. So, and I'm and I'm making that recommendation, I think, just generally um to everybody, um, and then a little bit of inside baseball. Uh, last week I recorded some new episodes of hands on Windows, and just not that anyone probably ever thinks about this stuff. But that podcast is very different from this show.

01:52:49
With this show we have notes and we kind of use it as a guide for the discussion, but obviously we veer off in whatever directions. And then in Hands on Windows it's mostly screen grab stuff, like I capture the screen, I talk about things. So I don't create a script. I don't like to read, you know like read and then you know like I'm dictating or something. But I do make notes and one of the episodes I recorded we're going to be doing a bunch of this stuff, of course is about Copilot, and each time I got to a topic it occurred to me that I needed to take a step back and define something or explain what something was, and I ended up writing in just note form what amounted to probably a thousand pages or a thousand words of explanatory text, background text that, frankly, has no place being in a hands-on windows, right?

01:53:35
Which, or its name, is hands-on. It was too much time so I just threw up a free video on throutcom. It's like a five minute, it's all. It's literally a presentation. It I listening to it myself. It sounds like I'm reading it, which I hate, but it's not. It's just based off those notes I had written earlier for hands on windows.

01:53:52
So it's just kind of a backgrounder on a lot of the goofy language and concepts that are unfamiliar, that come out of AI and how they apply specifically to copilot. You know like we talk about things like GPTs or LLMs or grounding. You know there's all this language prompts that came up in the. Today Amazon announced this thing called Maestro, which is their AI based playlist minute service. In Amazon music they use the word prompt. They say it's a simple. He's given a simple prompt. This word is just permeated our lives Like. It's like a. The language of AI is just out there. So I think for a lot of people it's confusing and unfamiliar, so I just made it quick. It's quick, it's just a little, it's a goofy, it's five minutes. So I just didn't want to take that time and hands on windows, because you know those things tend to be, you know, hands on, okay, uh. And then, uh, a couple of quick app picks to.

01:54:48
Um, duck duck go, which I think you know in this space, is one of those companies we can trust, has created a subscription service called uh privacy work that they've done in their search engine and their browser and their other services, and there are three pieces to it, kind of like the iPhone you get in the picture. It's like three things, except that three unexciting things An anonymous VPN, a personal information removal service that will take your data away from data brokers, and then that nuclear option. You hope you never need the identity theft restoration service, which is your identity has been stolen and they will literally give you a human being that will work with you to restore your stolen accounts, your financial losses, if possible, fix your credit report, etc. So, um, I really like duck duck go. I like them a lot. I want so badly to recommend their web browser. Um, it doesn't support extensions. You know there are these. You can't pin browser tabs. There's all these like basic.

01:55:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, like getting my password manager. It's not optional.

01:55:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You got to nail Right, right there. I think they use Bitwarden, by the way, at the back end of theirs, if I'm not mistaken, the password manager, I think. But regardless, I, I love it, I love the idea, I want to use it, I would recommend it. But you got to have the basics and they just finish it. Yeah, so they're not there yet.

01:56:11
Uh, and then finally, uh, mozilla, because it's been four weeks, if you thought. Um, um, game pass releases. We're getting predictable and boring. Um, mozilla releases a new version of their browser Firefox every four weeks. It's been four weeks. Um, I wouldn't describe any of this stuff as major, but a bunch of improvements across across codec support, pdf, uh features firefox view, which is that little tab button up in the corner. Um, autofill improvements will prompt you, you know, to save your address if they see you. Submitting it right makes sense, etc. Etc. So if you're on firefox, you're going to get this. You know it's a, it's a solid update, but just mentioning it. Uh, if you didn't see the update, you can just go grab it.

01:56:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You still uh using arc? Is arc on windows getting better?

01:56:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um. I use arc on the Mac I love um. I, I'm so. I can't believe how good it is.

01:57:00
I've been. I'm still primarily brave, but that said, I've been trying other browsers. I've been using Vivaldi a lot lately across platforms as well, like on the Mac, on Windows and on the iPhone. It's interesting. You could build a matrix of features across all the browsers. There are things that Brave does much better on mobile than Vivaldi. They don't have a built-in reader mode that makes any sense, but Brave does, and it works great. I don't know. But then again, the Vivaldi is prettier and they do this auto theming thing where you're visiting a site and the browser shell takes on the color theme of the site, which is cool, frankly. So yeah, but anyway, yeah, Arc is, yeah, Arc is. I'm still. I'm obsessed about Arc. Arc is two browsers.

01:57:50
I'm using a Markdown editor called IA Writer, which I may have mentioned. I'm sure you're familiar with Leo. It is the most minimalistic, ridiculous application. I'm in love with it and my brain is broken because this product and ARK probably don't make sense to anybody. It's not like something I could just kind of recommend, but I love them both and I can't explain. It's hard. I can explain why, but people just look at me like yeah, uh-huh, okay, so I'm just going to use Word. Is that okay? Can I just write?

01:58:20 - Speaker 2 (Host)
with a normal application Like. So I'm just going to use Word, is that okay?

01:58:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Can I just write with a normal application, like I just don't? This is the way my brain works. I don't know. But yes, I do still use Arc, okay.

01:58:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richard, time to do a little plug for Run as Radio.

01:58:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Absolutely so recorded back. When I was down in Australia a few weeks back, my friend, damian Brady, who's one of the DevRel folks for GitHub, we got to sit down and talk about GitHub Copilot the sort of original Copilot, but also we targeted at the SysAdmin. So we've been talking about SysAdmins using GitHub in general just starting to treat their scripts like the code that it is. But if you start playing with Copilot as well, you start to be able to improve your scripts a lot writing, parameter testing and better error messages and all those sorts of things that make a higher quality script get way easier with a tool like Copilot.

01:59:09
Damian was quick to push us into hey, you're going to be talking about sensitive stuff about your company, so you really should be using GitHub Copilot for business because it protects your data better. So you don't be. You aren't afraid to put your own code up there. One of the fun ones we were talking about was modernizing PowerShell. So a lot of folks write PowerShell like they're still using PowerShell 2 or 4, and it's PowerShell 7 now. And the reality with Copilot is you can literally show it a PowerShell script that runs and says can you modernize this, can you write it using PowerShell 7 features and it will rewrite it for you to write it using PowerShell 7 features and it will rewrite it for you.

01:59:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's interesting. I think I just saw stats that some huge number of developers are now using AI. Yes, it was 55-plus percent somewhere in that realm. It is just a huge success. This is the most successful slash.

02:00:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
well, maybe not influential, but arguably the most successful AI service in some ways in the sense of impacting that particular market that strongly. It's incredible, it's amazing.

02:00:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know and I wonder maybe you guys know if the way they're using it is. You know, I saw somebody saying, yeah, I just typed the first three words of my phrase and then it just finishes it, so it speeds up hugely. I wonder if people are using it to paste in code. I've been using AI in my coding problems, right, and it is huge. It's transformed my ability. I've gotten so much farther but I've never pasted. I don't paste in code, I query it. It's just as you said. I can't remember the regular expression, well, you know for this and but it's so helpful. It is literally like having gandalf over your shoulder and you say, hey, uh, what the hell is, uh, how do you do that? And he says, well, you try this and I never paste it in, but I have to. I I wonder are people pasting in code? Blocks of code, that seems to me a bad idea People are going to use it.

02:01:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, some people write their high school essays.

02:01:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Some people just copy. We're going to get the whole gamut, but I will say it's incredibly useful, even just as a code advisor.

02:01:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It just seems perfect. It seems like the perfect use for ai, right, if it's, it's such a finite body of information. It's, it is. It is that perfect grounding example that you know should always work. It's, it's, it's great, it's amazing, yep it's amazing I wish I programmed more. I would.

02:01:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is uh, you know I've last year I got to day 16 on the advent of code installed. I see your post on macedonia. I am now up to uh 21, day 21, and I think I'm going to finish it. Uh, and it's really I, I credit the, the little gpt that I wrote. Just, it's made it. It's made it so much easier. It's really helped me get over a hump in coding.

02:02:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm a fan. Should we talk about Four Roses?

02:02:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think we should Brown liquor time.

02:02:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I was shocked.

02:02:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I always think of Four Roses as the thing behind the bar that they just have there for the rummies.

02:02:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You can't taste anything anyway there. They just have there for the rummies, and you know why.

02:02:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a good reason for that. Leo, why that's wild turkey.

02:02:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, okay, it's a step above raw turkey.

02:02:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Four Roses. This is part of the story. One of the reasons I want to tell the story is because that's exactly what happened to it. Four Roses was an old school bourbon, started in 1888 by Paul Jones. That was when he got the trademark. Arguably he was making it 20 years before that and was originally made as a classic Kentucky straight bourbons. That's, as we know it, the 51% corn model that's become the standard for American bourbon, and so they made it through the early 1900s and you, down through Prohibition, came back up and running again.

02:03:06
But the big change happened in 1943, during World War II. The Seagram's Company, which is out of Ontario, canada, acquired Four Roses. Now Seagram's was well known for making Canadian blended whiskeys and so they started doing the same thing with Four Roses. Now they had a good contract with the Kirin organization out of Japan and so they would continue. They continued to make the Kentucky bourbon the way they always had on what they call the black label. They would ship that only to Japan. Kirin was importing it for Japan.

02:03:41
And the rest of the whiskey they're making they were making into various kinds of blends, and from the beginning Four Roses blends through Seagrams were high-end or A-class blends.

02:03:52
So when you're making a blend, what you're really doing is cutting with neutral spirit. It's not just stuff that's aged in a barrel because that's expensive. You add a certain amount of neutral spirit to it, although initially they were adding what's known as grain spirit, and grain spirit is you're still using grain, but you're distilling it up high 80 plus percent and Seagrams. Because they use so many barrels, they would condition barrels by using that grain spirit, put it in the barrel for three months, which preps the barrel for other uses, and then they would use that as their blending stock, which still makes a very good whiskey. But as you get into the darker times of whiskey in the early 70s, early 80s, when whiskey was falling out of favor and they kept trying to cut the price, this is where Four Roses got that bad reputation. At one point the standard Four Roses edition was only 20 percent uh aged whiskey. The rest was all neutral spirit, so it was kind of known as crap.

02:04:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh rot gut yeah, but you'd seen a brown paper bag in a gutter somewhere. Yeah, because it was cheap.

02:04:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah so, but by 2000 seagram's actually gets sold in a joint deal between Diageo and Pernod Ricard. It's a complicated story on its own and in that process they weren't sure what to do with Four Roses and Kirin. The company that this entire time has been importing black label Kentucky bourbon called Four Roses, says we'll buy it. So to this day it's owned by them. They take it over lock, stock and barrel, and the first thing they did was get rid of the blends, because they didn't have the blending stock coming from Ontario and all those other places. They just wanted to make the normal stuff and so within a couple of years they reintroduced it in the US as straight bourbon again, and their initial product was a yellow label combined barreling very normal, but later on go on to make the small batch and the single barrel. The single barrel won in 2019, won gold in the world whiskey award, so it's a top tier whiskey today.

02:05:55
Their particular approach is they have a couple of different mash bills. One's called mash bill B, which is 60% corn, 35% rye, 5% barley, and Mashbill E, which is 75% corn, 20% rye, 5% barley. They also use a bunch of different yeast strains five of them, so that they have essentially 10 different recipes for how they make whiskey and in fact recently they were talking about putting out a special bottling where you could try all 10. They do normal American bourbon distilling process. So they use a column still to raise to 66% from their 8% brewer's yeast. Then they use a pot still which they call a doubler, but it's a pot still up to about 70%. Oddly, they then take all of the distillate, put it into tanks, tanker trucks and ship it to warehouse facilities in Crocs Creek in Kentucky, which is a different area because they have a very specific design of rack house.

02:06:52
They use a single story rack house storing their barrels in wooden racks horizontally very traditional, but it's because the temperature problems in kentucky are substantial, so by keeping their rack houses low they don't have as much heat variation top to bottom.

02:07:08
Of course they cut with water before they go into the barrel, so typically their distillate is in the 70 percent range. They cut it to 60 before they barrel it so they don't pull those harsh flavors out and they do at least five years of aging. They're normally chill filtered and again, for many years they were taking the sets of barrels that were getting out, plus some older ones to get their standard yellow label. But these days now, they routinely make an addition that I quite like and I think is worth the price, which is their single barrel, and that's typically coming around 57% alcohol, so fairly high and about $100, which is a pricey for a bourbon, but this is pretty high caliber bourbon. Your basic yellow label can get down to 40 bucks, but if you're going to get something nice, get the single barrel, you'd be very happy wow, god give them another try yeah, they've come around you.

02:07:59
Just this means you've been around long enough, leo, that you remember the before times.

02:08:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and in a way I'm surprised they kept with the brand, but I guess well.

02:08:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But you remember Kieran had been selling this stuff as proper bourbon the entire time in Japan. In fact it was kind of legend for us cultists who were into bourbon trying to get your hands on the black label, the export, because it's like, listen, there is good Four Roses, you just have to be in Japan to get it. And once in a while you could get one back, because they were all made in Kentucky, it's like bluefin tuna. But then they were shipped to Japan, right?

02:08:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It all gets shipped to Japan. All the good stuff gets shipped to Japan.

02:08:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So this is one of them, and I hadn't talked about a straight up bourbon in weeks. The last time I talked about bourbon was was elijah craig, and I've toured the distillery. I knew this. Trying to go back over again and pull all the details together, because it is a redeemed brand every week.

02:08:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What do they drink in romania?

02:08:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
uh well, this is. We're in the eastern part of romania, close to the moldovan border. This is a great wine country. We're on the eastern slope of the carpathians, so nice, you know. Semi-arable desert, the red wine. I had a bloody beautiful cab style for dinner tonight, um, but this is divin country, my friends. They make, they use the cognac process for making brandy here and it is outstanding and you never see it in the West. It all goes to Russia.

02:09:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you talked about this last time you were out there.

02:09:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, Well and this is you know. This is why I don't have my suitcases. I packed a big bag. I intend to bring a half a dozen bottles back with me because you just it's hard to get this stuff when I get to Warsaw. There's a couple of specialty shops in Warsaw where I can get some, but we're in the motherland now. I can get the real good stuff. I'm not going to go to Moldova to get it because there's kind of a war. But here in Eastern Romania we'll be all right.

02:09:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Every time you recommend a whiskey or a bourbon, I go to that company's website and almost every time they have a really good section on like cocktails, you know, but they're kind of takes on on cocktails. This one's particularly good. I forwarded it to my wife. I I don't always forward this, these pages, to her, but if you care about cocktails, this is a, this is a good one the, the one from uh, from uh four roses and uh, like their bourbon forward cocktail, very like paper plane, which we I only discovered last year. And then they have several takes on like the Manhattan and the old-fashioned. It's good. This is including one, by the way, called the MMC Old Fashioned, that uses mole bitters from Mexico. Well, the bittermans might not be from Mexico, but the name is very Mexican for sure and it's it's very interesting. I'm very now. I'm like, hmm, I'm going to try that.

02:10:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Interesting. You are, Richard. I did not know this, but you are in the country that has the fifth fastest Internet on the planet, Not in this hotel. It is the number one state in the EU when it comes to Internet speed. Somebody in our Discord sent me an article from last September in Euroreporter how Romania built its blazingly fast Internet.

02:11:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It helps not having anyone using it no that's the other thing Romania is also the study in depopulationulation right when the wall fell. Yeah, a quarter of their population right left.

02:11:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They've never really recovered from it but the people who stayed at 88 coverage rate. They have a very high uh.

02:11:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They have more internet penetration than france, belgium, finland and austria and they're big tech centers and we're not in one right now, but I've been spent some time in timishera and in kluge. Like they're serious tech centers. Those are very bright people build cool stuff it's true in estonia also.

02:11:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's a really smart way of taking a backward economy that's been suffering under soviet rule for decades and bringing it into the 21st century and making it a digital economy.

02:12:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, the Estonian is very much modernized. You do all your voting online. Yeah, they were also attacked by the Russians. Uh, back as a cyber attack. Extend the nationwide, small nationwide.

02:12:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, still, um, before we go, it's a quick question for Richard. Do you know Chris Woodruff? Is that name familiar? Sure, yeah, okay. So Microsoft ecosystem developer guy on the outside right. He's on Mastodon. I see his stuff all the time and he always posts about developer topics. So he had a post that said it was a missing div. So I wrote it back and I said you know, that would make a really good epitaph for your tombstone. So he sent me a picture of what that might look like. So it just says Chris Woodworth whatever years it was a missing div you know, which is like, I guess, an HTML.

02:12:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, yeah, it's an HTML joke as opposed to a site. It's always DNS.

02:13:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the end yeahns got him yeah it's very nice boys.

02:13:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time to uh call it a day uh sun's gone over the yard, arm time to pour us a little cocktail for four seasons cocktail yeah, and for the mmc uh manhattan old fashioned.

02:13:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm gonna slip upstairs to the rooftop bar because I didn't get in the last call and get myself a brand new. Go on up there, get a Four Roses for yourself.

02:13:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richard Campbell is at Run as Radio. That's where his shows Run as Radio and DotNet Rocks live, and he is always a welcome presence on Twit. Thank you for being here, richard.

02:13:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Paul Theriot, the founder of this show windows weekly, is at thurotcom t-h-u-r-o you might I mean you might have been the founder of the show, but I it wasn't a show till you came along.

02:13:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I joined you for sure. I had a fantasy. I had a dream. I said, if we were to make a windows show, who would I want to host?

02:14:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it, and if that guy's not available, let's go with the right no, you were the first and only.

02:14:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I swear to you first and only choice, because you were at the time you were doing the win super site, super site for windows, and I thought you were the best guy out there covering windows.

02:14:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You still are I thought so too.

02:14:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, almost 20 years later, still doing it uh, he's only gotten better looking and better spoken, paul. His books are at leanpubcom. That's where you can find Windows AdWare and the Field Guide to Windows. Somebody's calling me. I thought I'd put my phone on hold. Did you hear that? Did you hear it ringing? I actually did hear it. Yeah, yeah, weird. Okay, sorry about about that. My phone is the camera, so when it rings something weird, there's the windows everywhere book, a great book if you want to kind of cover the history of windows, and it's through its programming languages. Of course, the field guide to windows 11 is also a must-buy.

02:15:00
Together they became the Windows Weekly fantastic duo and every Wednesday we get together 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern Time, 1800 UTC, to do Windows Weekly. You can watch it live if you want to get the very first edition of it. The ink is still wet On YouTube, youtubecom slash twit. Let the ink dry a little bit and you can get it on our website, twittv slash dubdub. There's also a dedicated channel on YouTube to Windows Weekly's video and, of course, you can subscribe anytime in any podcast player and, by the way, you can choose audio or video whatever you prefer. That way you'll get it the minute it is available. We thank all of our subscribers. We thank especially our Club Twit members who make this show and all the shows we do possible. Thank you, club Twits. We will see you a week from tomorrow with Stacy's Book Club. Actually, stacy's coming up on Twig in just a little bit. We've got a kind of reunion episode ahead. What else? I guess that's it. Thank you for being here. We will see you next time on Windows Weekly. Bye-bye.