Windows Weekly 893 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 Thorat's here, richard Campbell's here. We're going to talk about the implosion at Intel Rave, reviews for the new chips from AMD, paul's got some thoughts about the CoPilot Plus PCs and Snapdragon. And it's the return of WordStar. I know you've been waiting for it. All that coming up next on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is twit. This is windows weekly with paul thurot and richard campbell. Episode 893, recorded wednesday. 993, recorded Wednesday, august 7th 2024. The WordStar look, it's time for Windows Weekly, the show we cover the latest news from Microsoft. And joining me in the little tiny boxes to my left and right, paul Thurott from Thurottcom, do you feel cramped in your little tiny box? I'm feeling boxed in today Leo.

01:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Nothing wrong with a three-shot.

01:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Three, three shot makes me happy. And Richard Campbell, yeah, we actually can do H up to eight if you, if you want to invite someone. Cnn from runners radio. This is the new method. You might as well get used to it, kids, because there's no more old method after today.

01:21
This is the last windows weekly from the here we go studios, here we go up into the attic I have taken you know it's funny, I have, I don't know a few awards, it's eight or nine and I uh, I was gonna leave them here and then slowly, one by one, I've got. Well, I can't, you know, like steve martin jerk, I can't, but all I need is this well, I need this, and so I've brought them all home, and now there's a shelf which I always said I would never do of.

01:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah of awards. I don't, um, I don't think much of this kind of stuff, my stuff, my this stuff myself. But my wife got a writing award a couple years ago. That's cool. And I said, um, my daughter was like, oh, that's really, you know it's. Um. My daughter was like, oh, that's really, you know, that's really impressive. I'm like, yeah, I mean it's, it's probably just a coincidence that came eight or nine years after I got one. But and then, uh, and I said.

02:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I said there's a little rivalry, quite a bit bigger. Yeah, I have an emmy, but it's the little emmy. Yeah, I have, there's a. There's a regular emmy which is pretty massive with a big thing, and then I have a regional emmy award which is like this compact it's.

02:38
I have the commensurate with the region yeah, I even brought my Ziff Davis editors or what was. It was uh, oh boy, publishers Circle or, uh, chairman's Circle, back when it was, uh, when the chairman was uh, I can't remember his name now, ziff or Davis it was. It wasn't. It was after Bill Ziff. Um, oh, I've forgotten his name, which is probably a blessing. I have a tech TV award. I mean, these awards go back 30 years now.

03:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Since I took over the company, I have given myself the best boss award.

03:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Best boss award. I have that mug Nice, so that's good. I have the mug In the old days of the MVP program.

03:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
One of the things you could do is you could request a letter from microsoft to someone to say you're an mvp, oh, so I send it to the same friend every year. Just oh, that's cute congratulations.

03:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just to lay it out, if you're an mvp in our book yeah I am feeling a little inadequate, though, because I have an r2d2 but it's smaller than yours I get. I guess it's like the me paul has the big r2 and I have the little r2.

03:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
My r2 is falling apart I don't know if you can see it, but I'm a little part of those pieces from the r2. It's gonna teeter over.

03:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know this r2 unit needs a little work. R2 crisis. Let's talk about windows 11, because that's why people are here. We welcome all the club members and all the people watching on all seven count them seven streams. There's discord for the club members. There's youtubecom slash twitch live for the youtubers. There's twitchtv slash twit for people who like to watch on Amazon's money losing Twitch streams. There's kick, which is the new guy in town. He's like no one knows him. He's sitting in the corner. We should make friends, but so far we haven't. There's LinkedIn, for no apparent reason, but it is a Microsoft platform, so that's good it doesn't arrive in LinkedIn as like a sponsored message.

04:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, message from someone undoubtedly I have no idea that I would visit it there's also facebook, but my favorite.

04:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're on the fascist platform xcom.

04:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So now and we're going to sue people who don't watch us if you don't watch us, we're going to court over that buddy.

05:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's going to be an anti-throw suit too. Don't watch us, we're going to court over that buddy.

05:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's going to be an anti-throw suit too.

05:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't that hysterical? What is wrong with that man? What?

05:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
is uh first. You know, a year ago he said go f yourself to sponsors.

05:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, now he's saying wait a minute, hold on anyway. So seven streams, pick the one you want watch. We have a unified chat, so if you're chatting in one of those platforms I will see it. May not respond because I don't. I only have two hands. Um, welcome to all of you, and especially to our club, to members. Now the week D mystery continues.

05:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I feel, like this is the only reason I exist anymore. Just to make sense of this nonsense, but just to kind of recap things. Everybody knows about Patch Tuesday, second Tuesday of every month, microsoft issues quality updates for Windows Security. Updates are included these days, A lot of new features, et cetera, et cetera. They have an insider program for testing new features that they ignore kind of willy nilly, but whatever, they have various channels.

06:10
And then I don't know, I think it was last year, sometime last year or so they added a switch to Windows Update, so anybody using Windows 11 could opt into preview updates, which are delivered also once a month. But on the tuesday of the fourth week of the month, the week, this is the week d update, as we call it right, everyone with me so far. So, um, this past year, two years, has been kind of interesting on the windows update front because microsoft keeps changing the way that they update Windows, right, so there are different literal methods for updating Windows, but also just the schedule and how things are done and so forth. And so this year I'm not going to remember all of them, but the big one is that 24H2, which historically or typically would be delivered in the second half of the year was partially delivered in the first half of the year for people on snapdragon x based pcs, the co-pilot plus species, and there'll be a second release later in the year for everyone else. Um, I provided a tip, probably two, three months ago now, where anyone could get this if they want. But for this little magical slice in time, we have three supported versions of windows, all with roughly the same feed. The goal is for them to all have the same feature set. We've talked about this, right? Um, yep, what else am I missing? I'm missing all kinds of stuff, but you know, we'll just talk our way through this. So, a few weeks back we uh, you know, we had patch tuesday in july and and that Windows 11, 22h2 and 23H2 roughly caught up to where 24H2 was. And then, a couple of weeks ago, we had that week the update and the Tuesday came and went. We did Windows Weekly. I actually forgot about it and then, I think it was Thursday or Friday, they delivered.

08:01
Microsoft did a week the update for windows 11, 22 and 23 h2 belatedly right, a couple of days late, and that's been happening this year. This is probably the third time that's happened. It didn't go out on the tuesday, but it did go up and okay, and you look at these updates and you see, okay, well, this a couple of new things in there um, minor updates to the start menu, the taskbar. Um, this is the duplicate tab thing in file explorer that everyone is so excited to have, and those features are actually not in windows 11 24 h2. And there was no 24 h2 week d update but h2 week d update. But, coincidental to that, on the same day microsoft put a new build of windows 11 24 h2 into the release preview channel of the windows update sorry, the windows inside a program. And the new features in that update map to the features we see in week d for 22 and 23 h2.

09:04
So my theory at the time was august is going to come around next week. Let me look at the calendar to be sure. Yeah, next week is patch tuesday and, you know, maybe this was a little off, maybe they intended for this to be the week d update. They just, you know, whatever they ran out of time, whatever, there must be some release window, who knows? And, uh, this is going to be what would have been the week D update, and so that was the story as of last Wednesday.

09:32
Then Microsoft on August 2nd, which was probably Tuesday Nope, it was Friday, sorry. On August 2nd. Am I doing the wrong? Yeah, so they released a weekday update for Windows 11 in August. That was for July and it is, in fact, the same stuff that was in that release preview, build and some other stuff, right?

10:01
So this is a bunch of new features that we're probably all going to get next Tuesday or start to get, because CFRs right, which is one of those other new methods that Microsoft has for rolling out updates. Right, they don't just blurt it out into the world at the same time. The features come out randomly, essentially, right. So we're going to have things like the ability to drag pinned start menu app shortcuts, things like the ability to drag pin start menu app shortcuts down to the taskbar to pin them there. We're going to have the ability to duplicate tabs. We're going to have the ability again because this is a regression problem to drag files up to the address bar in file explorer and then move or copy them to a different location in the breadcrumb bar, like we used to be able to do. Um, this is not that I lock screen widgets, you know all that stuff.

10:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, there's a million new ways to use, you get a sense that like a bunch of people are on vacation, so like the kids are just having a good time I have no sense.

10:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
um, I have the. In fact, it is, if anything, nonsense. Right, I mean, I don, that's the thing and honestly, that's been what I mean ever since Windows 11, it's been confusing and alarming and just, I feel like this is parallel to you being on the show, I think.

11:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I feel like the whole update.

11:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I'm not saying it's a causal relationship, but it's. It's interesting that I, or to my memory anyway, seem to recall one of the earliest conversations we had was hey, there are like three different versions of one drive. Now anyone know what's going on there? And to this day they have never acknowledged that that happened. It was like that for a year, year and a half or more, I mean. It was you know. And then this is when features just started appearing in windows that were never tested.

11:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Fragmentation is a constant problem with a company this big. Everybody has access to code bases and they take advantage of it.

11:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, there's kind of a bigger topic here in a way that has to do with Microsoft and the markets. It does well in and doesn't do well in, and the thing that's so weird about this is this is not what its primary and most important customers want at all. It's not what almost any customers want. But I could sort of excuse behavior that ignored consumers to some degree because maybe they're not as important to Microsoft. I would get that, but at least they don't understand it.

12:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's funny because I just put a Windows server show in the can for Run, as which is a good six weeks away or something.

12:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, who did you talk to? By the way, do you mind if he don't it was.

12:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Orin, thomas. Okay, nice, right, the only guy I know has written more books than you. It's like he's clearly not learning. But one of the questions is people how much money server makes like those servers aren't going away.

12:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this is the. So this isn't like the return of vinyl, right? No, it's not like. Uh, you know we're not all going back to buying CDs in stores and not using Spotify or whatever. But I, for Microsoft, because of the marketing or maybe marketing is the wrong word, but it's almost like a fiduciary need to market Azure during those many years where it was like 70% growth, 70% growth, 70% growth. You know, this is what drove Microsoft's market cap up with its share price. Right? Was this Wall Street excitement over the cloud? And they didn't talk about it a lot. Of course, they very purposefully obscure their financials, so they don't have any specifics. But yeah, I mean, azure was growing, but it's very likely that for a lot of that time, server was the bigger business making money, money, money, money, because that stuff's not going away and it was really.

13:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was very gratifying to spend time with oren talking about server and active directory and like the thing it's just yeah, it's like virtually every listener to run as has for it.

13:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is like my excitement over wpf it's like it's back baby. Yeah, you know, it never went away really went away.

13:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But that is back in the back, in the context again, and it's, and it never stopped being important. It never, never, left anyone's budget.

14:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I you know, always been there. I'm not claiming this is purposeful, um, but I think it might be. You know that microsoft all of a sudden is talking about server again, at a time when azure growth has not leveled off but has slowed dramatically. And now talking about server wouldn't have a negative impact on analysts watching the company for growth right, they've been kind of worried about Azure for a while now, frankly. And now we have got AI oh, look over here, another new thing we can wave our hands at.

14:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I think we have this terrible conflict of interest where they want to move the stock price more than they want to serve their customers.

14:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes.

14:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's the enterprise and certification yeah and in fact, because it makes all that, leadership has an awful lot of stock and, in theory, they have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. That's what the Harvard Business School keeps telling them. And then, even when you get down to the employee level, if your leadership is banging on about Azure, your best promotion path is focusing on Azure. So it doesn't matter what you're good at, what makes money, you know they, they're in the trap.

15:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I. I lived this nightmare because the topics, the products that I care about at Microsoft most are client products. Right, they're what we might think of as consumer products, but they're really not really right, but just client products. The entire company had a pivot on the cloud and the way that happened in Windows as a client was Windows as a service. In windows as a client was windows as a service.

15:49
Let's take this spaghetti code of legacy you know, infrared well, infrastructure, client infrastructure and uh, we'll pretend it's an online service and we'll just update it all the time and it was really really bad for a really really long period. Um, terry myerson's um pay package was, or his uh bonuses were based on that kind of growth that he was never going to achieve. They cooked the books, they were counting VM installs. Remember they were trying to get to a billion installs of Windows 10 at one point in some really fast period of time. And the irony, or the weird coincidence, I guess, of all this is that, honestly, today they got really good at updating Windows.

16:24
Yeah, maybe a little too good because now they just I guess anyone with a desk can pull a switch and something goes out to Windows. Now I don't know what's happening, but yeah, so hopefully the as I see Microsoft starting to stop stopping to pretend that Windows server isn't a thing, when the Jeff Wilsleys of the world who never went away are suddenly back, you know, in public again.

16:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I love that because although when I did the show on the next version of server, he wasn't allowed to say server 2025. He had to say server V next.

16:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it was probably just the timing of the. You don't want to. Well, you know what, if they missed it? I don't know. I hear you, if you miss 2025, you really miss something like that. I don't know.

17:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I hear you, if you miss 2025, you really miss something like that.

17:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, yeah, this is where we're at right and so we just don't. Like I said, it doesn't make sense to me that Microsoft does things so erratically and chaotically because it's primary customers and it's probably a higher percentage now than it's ever been but the historic number we've always used is you know, two-thirds of windows, from a revenue perspective, comes from commercial, not from a consumer, right, yeah, but my god, there's been a lot of focus on, you know, copilot plus pc, local, ai.

17:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But that's not happening on the server side. The server side incremental improvements, because what do you want from a server but reliability?

17:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
have they added copilot to the windows server desktop yet why no? No, they've not.

17:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They've had to do their very best to get rid of the desktop entirely right they don't want you to already pee into those servers anymore. They don't think you should have a gooey there anymore.

18:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, I sure yeah, we're all, they're not wrong well, I mean, I think one of the hot new tips we're all going to not wrong. Well, I mean, I think one of the hot new tips of 2025 is going to be the same as it was in 2005, which is how you can get a copy of Windows Server and make it run like a Windows client. You know just so you can get escape from all the terribleness that's happening yeah no, I did that at one point.

18:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I had one. I had one of my P4 laptops, you know the one you could cook food on. Uh, that I ran a server edition of, I think, 2000 I think it was no, we all we all tried this at one point. I mean just something, something to leave me alone.

18:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I have stuff to do god forbid yeah, anyway, sorry for the distraction, because no that, no, it's, it all ties in together.

18:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, it's honestly, those two things parallel each other, right? So windows was the thing that didn't fit. It was the square peg and everything else was round holes. It just didn't make sense in microsoft. Still doesn't, right? No, um, server never stopped making money yeah, well, the parallel there is.

18:58
Uh, apple 2e in the 80s was the thing making all the money for apple, but they were selling the mac. Yeah, you know, they kind of wanted it to go away. The difference there is that that transition was always going to happen with the server, and this is true on the client to a little small degree, but the server, especially because of the um, you know the nature of the cloud and infrastructure and so forth I mean it was never really, it was never going to go away. No, uh, the question was what the plateau was, and I think it ended up higher than they thought.

19:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We deploy NET code to Linux instances now because it saves us 25% right off the bat.

19:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, nice. Hopefully they're running on Azure, but that's fine, that's where they're running, but you can run them elsewhere.

19:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They run fine on GCP and they run fine on AWS as well. But why, right, right, uh, and if you've got iis chops app service seems very familiar, right like, it's not hard to get around in there, you'll recognize it right.

19:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
but on the client side, changing clients is hard, you know, and folks we I mean, we were joking before the show about the difficulty of going from a Mac keyboard to a Windows keyboard and back again, and that's just the smallest little corner of that.

20:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well and I'm wearing my run as hat here it's about administering. It's about controlling images and controlling driver sets and common hardware sets and all of those. I am responsible for X, many thousand desktops, and by golly I know how to do that in Windows, and it's not the same with a Mac.

20:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have to think that Microsoft's strategy, you know, pushing out that 23H2 as, oh, just a monthly update for 22H2. Just kidding, you know. That kind of thing is part of a broader plan just to beat down IT and just hope that some of them just give it.

20:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, what are they doing effectively? But it's like you can have any update you want because they're all the same exactly which version of windows you want to be on.

20:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, 22 inch, too sure you can have that. Oh, you're gonna have all the new features, but you're on 22 inch, do you win?

20:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'll keep that I'll keep that name there because we made that concession.

21:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, exactly it's, it's, but it's the same it is I really? It is beautiful, I mean it beautiful and sad, but twisted man this is.

21:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is orwellian. It's unbelievable I know.

21:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's why, like you know, when you said something about making sense of something earlier on, I'm like there's no sense to be made here. It is just a coping strategy and just some form of submission. You know, just like it's like it's brilliant.

21:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Also, yeah, like no. No, I'm gonna get you to use this feature. I'm just gonna tell you whatever you need to hear, yep there's, it's look.

21:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's easy to be cynical um period. It's super easy to be cynical big tech, uh, microsoft in particular. But it's hard not to look at their behavior sometimes and think you know, antitrust regulators, they have started looking at Microsoft too, but they're really starting to pay attention to, like Apple, google, you know yeah.

21:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, we're going to get into that later today.

21:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're like, yeah, and they're like, you know, when the ISR on is looking the other direction, maybe we could scurry around in here and do what we want and see what happens.

22:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, hey, you know what around in here and do what we want and see what happens. Hey, you know what? I'm more than ever and you made this very clear to me the Brad Smith strategy works. Yeah Right, those folks are looking for talking points to get them reelected and you don't give them. It's like we're happy to comply, let's go Now. It doesn't mean whether they are or not, but they say the thing that leaves no talking points so or not.

22:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But they say the thing that leaves no talking points, so it doesn't make the news. We don't know what happened with uh teams bundling in the eu, exactly. I'm sure it will come out someday, but, um, it's, that's the one weird exception where microsoft, uh offered concessions, then they just did it. They, they didn't wait for the eu to agree. They said, okay, we're just gonna, we're gonna unbundle it, we're gonna do the right thing, it's it. You know, you're like wow, this company's really changed. And then the eu's like nope, like what happened? Like what? Do you just have to do something different? Can you give us any guidance? No, we cannot.

22:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, but what you did was wrong.

22:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it was just wrong. We didn't like it. So now the eu is acting like a chat.

22:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I don't yeah, and I think that's the. You know, windows N was like that. Yes. Well, your effort to protect customers has now hurt customers. What would you like us to do next?

23:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
In the late 90s and early 2000s because of what happened to Microsoft with the US government. You know me and other people like me and you. I'm sure we all had to learn about antitrust.

23:24
You know we had to sort of understand what was happening, yeah, and so we're going to apply this knowledge later in the show, um, because, you know, google had this big event this, um, we this past week, that parallels what happened to microsoft 20 plus years ago and I mean, like, really, it's like, it's crazy, like shockingly, it's explicitly paralleling it and, um, you know, I think we all have our own memories of that time. I I cannot tell you how strong the belief is out there that microsoft won that case. You know, um, that they settled and and they got everything they wanted, and it's like, oh, we're gonna look at that a little bit, but that's not true, but that is not true at all.

24:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But no, no that you know. Basically, steve Ballmer got his job and made his job the first year he had that job, when he successfully negotiated the consent decree A compliance officer, basically, but he spent a year making it come true.

24:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, the victory for Microsoft was that the breakup order was taken off the table. Yeah, so that was the big thing taken on the table. Yeah, yeah, so that was the big thing. But I think the important point to know from back then is that, uh, the guilty verdict and the findings of facts, those were not taken away, those were all legal precedent that's, those are all no, you were these things, but you're now complying in a way that allows us to not have to enforce a remedy.

24:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know now that we're, 25 years later, hard to believe.

24:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What if Microsoft were broken up?

24:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Dvork's contention was that would have been a good thing for shareholders and everybody else. Right? So the two big what-ifs of that era to me are that right. Like what would two Microsofts look like?

25:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Would it have been bad?

25:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah me, are that right? Like what would two microsoft's look? Like an app? Would have been bad. Yeah, I. You would have seen, uh, you know office. By the time windows 8 was coming out, office had already created office for the ipad and steve ballmer said no, we're not putting it out right. The office of that era, 15 years earlier whatever that is would have put it on linux, would have put it on the web faster, would have, you know, done a cross-platform thing that the integrated Microsoft of the early 2000s would never have done. The Windows-focused Microsoft right? That's probably the big one. Would it have been successful is no one who cares? I mean in some ways, right. But the bigger one to me is what would the 2000s and 2010s have been like if Microsoft was like it was in the 90s? Companies like Google, amazon at the resurge, resurgent Apple to some degree, and Facebook would never have happened. If Microsoft could have Netscape those guys which they would have yep, our world would look like East Germany today.

26:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It would be, you know there's no, I mean, it'd be horrible, oh no, no, it'd be just being ish, it would be. You know, there's no, it would be horrible, oh no, no, it'd be just bingish, it would be you know we talked yesterday.

26:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's also the 27th anniversary of bill gates looming over steve jobs announcing that they were going to give apple 150 million dollars, without which apple would not have survived literally, and it's, I think, likely although there's some debate over this that the reason microsoft did that was because of looming regulatory.

26:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Of course it was absolutely yeah, um, very recently I heard, I read somewhere I I put this aside, um, and so I'll be able to tell you where it was eventually. But, um, someone had a story where supposedly steve jobs went to gates and said, hey, you know, we've all that uh lawsuit stuff around, look and feel and intellectual property, you know it, we could make this go away. But just so you know, like we actually have more and if you guys don't agree to help us out, like we're gonna launch another lawsuit against you and supposedly that played a role. A role I've never heard that before in my life. So I, I this just came, this just came up recently. I was like I don't know about that one, but, um, yeah, and, and there were.

27:09
You know, we'll talk about Google later, but there were parallels, uh, between that and Microsoft and Apple and uh, today with Google and Mozilla, right, that if, uh, google stopped paying Mozilla, that company would probably disappear in about two seconds. You know it's some 90 something percent of their uh, uh, operating, um, uh revenue or cashflow or whatever it is every year is comes from Google, right, they pay them um, some hundred, I think it's 500 something million dollars a year or whatever it is. So, yeah, there's a lot of parallels. I'm not sure we got off an antitrust there, but uh, but anyway. Uh, but there's a lot of parallels. I'm not sure we got off on any interest there, but but anyway. But with Richard's point earlier, yes, the now that Microsoft has kind of just just through natural business evolution, you know, as you're slowed down, it's still. You know, now it's a real business doing great. Right, the focus is elsewhere and I think, think windows server can come out from the shadows again and say, yeah, remember us, we're still here and they'll never admit to it. But I bet that's a huge percentage of intelligent cloud, a huge percentage, way more than people would imagine, because they've incessantly marketed the cloud right, um, just like windows is I mean, we don't know the exact number, but it's probably eight to ten billion a quarter. Just like Windows is I mean, we don't know the exact number, but it's probably eight to 10 billion a quarter right out of Windows client right, like consistent forever. It's just like an enduring cash machine, but it's treated so horribly by this company and I think it's because the upper level executives have their eye on a different prize these days. Right, which now is ai.

28:47
Okay, um, windows 7, but okay so, um, in the past week not much going on with the windows insider program. There was a very small build last week in the beta channel, um, an equally small build to dev, but today they put out something very interesting and it's hard not to believe that this wasn't purposely timed, because I just updated this chapter in the book. But they're issuing a major update to the Windows Store app that will eventually it's not public, but it's in the Canary and dev channels. Yeah, kind of a I would call it the third major redesign of the library part of that app, and they're separating out updates and downloads from there, which, honestly, is probably overdue. That was kind of a mishmash, or it is today. If you go look at it today, it's actually very confusing and they've changed it over time so that, in fact, I'm just going to bring it up so I can speak to this more intelligently.

29:38
But if you go into library today, in the window, the Microsoft Store app, what you'll see is a well, a library, but the default view is well, things you might need to update at the top, but the library view itself is actually apps that are installed on your computer right now I sort of think of this. I'm not really sure why anyone would need that view. Honestly, the default view in the beginning was your actual library, right. So if you go in there and click the little sort button over on the right and you unclick, show installed products only, what you'll see is a list of all of the apps and games that you've ever purchased or downloaded through the Microsoft Store, including, by the way, on Xbox and elsewhere, although I think there might even be Windows Phone stuff in here, although they might be finally filtering that out by now but some of that stuff you can't actually do anything with if it's from a you know for a different platform. And I use this to go in there and find the handful of like expensive apps that I purchased, like affinity photo or Adobe Photoshop elements, so that I can reinstall them quickly. Right, because in this case they both being with the letter a and they're both right next to each other, so it's kind of easy. I can just go click, click and kind of install it.

30:50
So they're going to separate these two functions out so that updates and downloads will be its own view and then library will be its own view, which, frankly, is what it? I think it's what it was some time ago, but it's what it should be, and it will be coming back or at least changing in that direction. And then some other stuff that's not super interesting, about special deals and things that will pop up from here and there, but this is kind of a not structural, but it's a big. It's a good update Because, like I said, I just updated the chapter in the book and, as I wrote, this is what this is. It was like man, this doesn't make any sense. Like this is this interface actually does not make any sense. So, um, they're gonna fix it. So that's good and, based on the fact that it's in Canary and dev, I will probably have it in stable, uh, tomorrow or Friday, uh, cuz we don't know when things come out.

31:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's the point, right that's what it comes out after you talk about them on the show yeah, yeah, oh, did the right.

31:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
update his book? Yeah, okay, ship it. Yeah, make sure you change all the graphics while you're at it. Yeah, exactly the one thing. That's the one thing I looked at was if these people and you know, when I talk like that, it's getting bad but when they, if they updated that nav bar, so I literally have to change every single screenshot in this chapter, I'm going to lose my brain. And yeah, there's a change. So fantastic, because that's what they do Awesome, okay, well, let's see.

32:20
So when did we have this discussion? Sometime in the past few weeks, we would have talked about this notion and this is before. You know we're going to. Later in the show we'll talk about Intel's financials and all the bad stuff happening there. But you know, microsoft shipped or Microsoft and its partnership, these co-pilot plus PCs right Running Qualcomm's Snapdragon X processor, you know, very efficient, much better battery life, very good, not processor, you know, very efficient, much better battery life, very good, not perfect, but very good.

32:45
Compatibility seems to solve a problem, you know. But, um, the? You know we have to be measured here, right, obviously, we knew, and know now even more, that AMD and Intel are going to, or have now, in one case, shipped some of their next gen chips, and part of the design of these chips is to address some of their shortcomings compared to arm right. Sure, but you also get this kind of knee-jerk reaction on the other side where it's like, oh my God, oh my God, intel screwed, x86 is over you know, and it's like guys, guys, guys, easy easy there, yeah, yeah, so settle down, um, but the thing is it's not just uh, maybe we should call it x64, but x86, x64, right, the Intel architecture.

33:29
That's not necessarily the primary target, although obviously we want that to improve as well. Right, in the same sense that Windows Server is probably never really going to go away, x64 is not really going to go away and, honestly, in the Windows world it's probably going to be dominant for the foreseeable future. I don't really see that changing. But we had people writing stories like Intel's doomed. They don't address this right now. You know, if they don't do something, they're going to have to pull a Hail Mary here. And it's like guys, intel's running into a lot of problems right now, literally because they've been pulling hail Mary's for the past three, four years in a row.

34:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, they they've actually gotta stop throwing the long ball.

34:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, Like for Intel they've been actually moving pretty aggressively, like you know. One might say too aggressively. We'll get to that, but, um, but we know, you know, in uh the uh AMD mobile chips. Right now Intel's on track to ship Lunar Lake, which is the mobile version of their next-gen Core Altar chips, in early September IFA. This is a great time to be alive if you love hardware. But the other target, and honestly kind of the explicit target, is Apple and the Mac right and the Apple Silicon chips.

34:41
Apple, or Microsoft, made it very obvious that the MacBook Air was a target, if not the target, at the co-pilot plus launch right. I mean, they mentioned MacBook Air again, again and again. You know, and that's not a surprise, I mean, back in I think it was February or March or whenever, I purchased a MacBook Air M3 ahead of getting any of these snapdragon pcs, um, not because I need to reacquaint myself with the mac or the software whatever, but just because I wanted to experience over a long period of time, like, well, what are the real advantages to this thing? And um, there are, there are very real advantages to it. Um, snapdragon x has uh made major inroads into battery life and what I'll call efficiency. You know that instant on stuff. Yep, um, it's still better on the mac and I. I don't know this for a fact, but I suspect I could put my macbook air over here on the bed, go away for a month, come back, lift the lid and it would just come on. You know it's. It's that good.

35:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, uh, if that sounds like an exaggeration, I hear you, but almost not but you're delighted with the snapdragon, the fact that you can open it each day and it just comes off yeah, so the thing, there is a time period at which that stops happen, right?

35:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know what it is, um, it's probably you've had this happen to you now. It's happened to me twice, right, and in both cases it was a. It was a machine I had reviewed and put aside, and I'm you know. Of course I have to move on to other things and I opened the first time it happened I was like huh like what's happening here.

36:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Sat for a week or two.

36:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was at least a week. Yeah, yeah, it was at least a week.

36:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I now you open it and it's not the battery's dead, it's dead no, nope, the battery's fine.

36:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But yeah, look, we all know where. We have some vague idea that there are power management states and windows and that there are different configurations where it goes into kind of a light sleep, if you will, when you first close the lid, because you may just come back and want to open it up, and you want that to happen quick.

36:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But at some point do you think this will conserve battery.

36:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It just actually goes cold after a few days, uh, yes, because one of the other. This is minor, but it's real. Um, with a mac, uh, when you close at least the macbook air, when you close the lid, like, the battery doesn't actually go down over time, which feels impossible. I mean, it must, right, like it must go down by micro amounts, but if you put it, if you had 100 battery closed, went to bed, woke up the next morning and lifted the lid, is a hundred percent battery, like this, it's, it's magical. I mean, maybe it's lying, I don't know, but it's, it's amazing.

37:14
Um, a Snapdragon will lose one to 3% every night, um, so it's possible that you know, maybe after a week it's like oh know, you've had a period of inactivity here, we can stop. Whatever it's version, whatever battery standby, hibernation is, it will, it will do that. I don't know. So that's something I kind of want to look into. But it's, it's hard to test because you need to, you need to experience it over a long period of time and you have to. You can't just do it once. I can't just say, hey, I did it, I know what it is now, you know. So I'm looking at it, but it's, it's going to be a while, um, still, but but still better than x86, right, sure?

37:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
um, at this point, anything's better, yeah yeah, well, I, I have, I happen to be with you on that, um, but you know, uh, we have uh at least one staff member who has an i9 I think benito has an i9 uh, the 13th generation, that's, you know, frying, and uh, he's got the bug. Yeah I don't know well he says everything's okay so far. But wouldn't you be nervous? Yep, I would be.

38:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're gonna get to it. We're gonna.

38:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's get to let's hold off and do the amd intel story in just a bit so I can take a break when you're done with the snapdragon yeah, I just well, I just wanted to finish up the uh, just the mac bit of it, because I please that.

38:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think in the Windows world people either ignore it or don't know about it, and I am exposed to people who are openly hostile to Apple. I say this a lot. I really do prefer Windows to Mac OS. I think this is the for all of the problems we just described, some of them in Windows 11. I very much still prefer Windows to the Mac, but the Mac has a true full screen mode that Windows lacks.

38:51
It has incredible touchpad gestures that work all the time and are awesome. I've had weird issues with the Surface Laptop mouse cursor, which I explained. That survived a reset Still a problem. But I think the thing that puts Apple over the top for consumers, for individuals, right is not necessarily. It's not like the Mac or Mac apps or Mac OS or whatever. It's well the hardware design, which it's thinner, lighter, et cetera. That machine is also unbearably magical, magically, like light and thin for its size. It's kind of crazy. Um, it's the ecosystem, right, it's the broader ecosystem, like. Um. I think that most people using a mac today are probably there because they started using an iphone and they had such a really good experience they started halo affecting their way through the uh ecosystem you know that's the sort of question is like you may like Windows over Mac, but do you like iPhone over Android?

39:50
Yeah, so on that one I'm actually mixed. I like both of them quite a bit. I I've been actually been using an iPhone this year a lot and I just did this this morning. I picked up the pixel. I'm going to update, you know when the new pixels come out and this thing is like thinner and lighter, and there are parts of the system that I really, really appreciate that they don't have on the Apple side. There's things on the Apple side I really appreciate, like um, uh, what do you call it? Airplay, which, uh, lets me use Sonos without having to deal with Sonos, which is a huge advantage, because Sonos is terrible. So all.

40:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sonos really broke their app, but I've been using such pain that is. It's they're, they're in, it's inexcusable, like it's. It's awful, terrible company. There's a company that should go down with intel, to be honest.

40:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but okay but the thing is like and this is the thing that will pain people, because microsoft can never get there with this stuff there's the, it's the cross-device integration stuff that is so amazing and so impossible to do seamlessly on Windows. It's just there's. We're never going to get there, and so you as an individual have to decide for yourself if it matters you know the so-called ecosystem play.

41:01
I mean yeah, I can copy to the clipboard on an iPhone and paste on the Mac. Continuity, so great. I used this example before. But at a Qualcomm event in New York back in, I think, april, I wanted to get a photo I'd taken on the phone into the Mac. And I was like, could I? And I went into the camera app, copied it to the clipboard, pasted it into my notes on the Mac and on the Mac and I was like, okay, this thing is magical. Now obviously Microsoft's working on stuff like this. Right there. We talked about file system integration over wireless last week and file explorer, et cetera, et cetera with Android. But if you have an iPad which a lot of these guys do right, they're kind of buying in this thing becomes a second display for your Mac instantaneously. If you want it to be a wireless display with multi-touch and Apple pencil compatibility, yep, you can do that too. Send and receive text messages back and forth through all your devices. Don't have to have your phone with you at the time. Kevin.

41:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kevin, hold on, you don't need to show the Apple page when we talk about Apple.

41:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's not an app. This is Windows Weekly. I think probably let's not offend anyone here okay, sorry this is my.

42:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is 2024. I have been writing about microsoft and windows for 30 years this year, and if there's anything that I do that's maybe a little different than most of the people who do what I do, it's that I've spent a lot of those 30 years looking at all of the alternatives over time, again and again and again. And I think you have to be, and that means you know I've had I've probably had 15 max since 2001. Um, I probably own more apple hardware than most apple fans. I've had almost every ipad, almost every uh iphone, almost every ipod, almost every not every mac, but most many Macs and I got to tell you I do.

42:48
You look, you may not want it, you may not like them, I get that, I respect it, but you need to understand this is there's a bridge. We're never going to cross on the side of the fence because we just don't have that ability. So we, what we have, are I don't want to call them half assed, it's unfair but we're always going to have these things that aren't going to work as well or reliable that will do some of the things I just described. Right, you can if you have a high-end samsung phone and you can get it to work with phone link. You could have instant on hotspot capabilities in windows. But you know what, if you have a mac, you just get it. It's just there all the time, that kind of thing.

43:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, new, you know. You know, on sequoia the new uh phone link with the iphone is basically doing what microsoft's doing with phone link, but it works and it's really nice I've been paying attention to this beta stuff they're doing now.

43:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have to say, the ability to have a remote screen of your phone on your pc is actually not very interesting to me, um and there are.

43:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't. It's only if your phone is distant, like most people, I would guess, have their phone nearby all the time. Yeah, so if you get a notification or whatever, you've got it on your phone. But if jason snell, for some reason he keeps his phone in the house while he's doing the shows, so he likes it because he's got his phone on the screen of his computer.

44:04
Can I say something, though, because I yeah I really think, despite all that, it's merely a matter of personal preference. I think the difference between windows, mac and linux is just pure.

44:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, there are pros and cons, but I'm just no, no, I my the inspiration for this conversation was that, um, guys know Snapdragon stuff is awesome, like it's, they did it Like and this I say this after the last decade of like, seriously, are they ever going to get there? And it is amazing. But there are people now we're kind of doing this victory dance and it's like guys, it's not over. We have this. There's way more to do and you know we'll see what happens going forward.

44:43
The Microsoft experience works like this we have phone link and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. If you have a high-end Samsung phone or a handful of other phones, you get additional features that everyone else doesn't get. So there's this kind of burficated experience that doesn't make any sense. The remote phone display thing we were just talking about if you have that high-end Samsung Ultra, whatever you get. That that's cool and you even get a feature I don't think it's on the Apple side which is actually very cool if you like this kind of thing, which is you can run individual apps in their own Windows off the phone, on your on your computer. You can pin them, you can have them be there like apps, like alongside your other computers. It's not just a view of the phone. They're like apps, like alongside your other computers. It's not just a view of the phone.

45:30
I don't think Apple's doing that. They maybe they do that in iOS 19 or whatever, I don't care. But and it's so you could check that off and say, look see, we're doing something Apple doesn't do. And it's like yeah, for now and only on certain phones, you know, and that's if you accept those limitations, or you just don't care, or you don't like Apple anyway, so you're not using an iPhone. So who cares? Yeah, you're fine, right, so in the United States that's less than 50% of people now, I guess, but in the world it's probably 75, 80. I don't know what the percent is?

45:57
I think it's because of price more than anything else, right, well, it's price and it's choice, right you get well, it's price and this choice right, you get the choice of hardware choices.

46:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's true, but I think that's why android's dominant worldwide is not the top tier phones no, yeah, you're right, it's the 50 same, the same reason that windows is dominant in the pc space. Yep, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's price, yep, um, I wonder if you know everything I mean, but you have that choice.

46:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean you, you can have a premium Android experience if you like, samsung for some reason, or maybe I guess, maybe Pixel you might consider to be in there.

46:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Pixel's more, the bare bones.

46:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But honestly, Android phones aren't as diverse as you might think. I mean, they're all right, it's all basically the same. There's some hardware difference. When you pay a thousand bucks or more, you get a better camera and a better screen the bigger thing that happens with android phones is that the carriers hijack them right, yeah well, you don't want to get it from verizon or any carrier, every carrier rogers right I understand between android and windows are so obvious.

47:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just like you know back in the day and not back in the day today, one of the big complaints about pcs is the junk the pc makers put on there. Yep, you know, windows will have a set of features that are built into the operating system and hp, lenovo, dell, whatever, will put features in themselves that duplicate stuff that's already in windows but bypasses it, just like samsung does or verizon does or whatever with android. And it's like guys, seriously, but they're not, you know they're. They have different competitive um aims, right, than the platform maker or the customer, I guess, or whatever. So, yeah, anyway, yeah, we have the choice.

47:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We definitely have the choice is great and I guess in from apple's point of view, at least when they're talking to the department of justice, the choice is apple or something else. There's no choice within the apple ecosystem yeah, well, I, yeah, that that's.

47:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's a tough one. I mean, if you, um, the apple stuff is actually similar in some ways to the microsoft antitrust stuff as well, in the sense that they are artificially, uh, restricting what competitors can do on their platform. And even something as simple as you know, there's a 15% fee for a music service that we don't charge for our own music service. Like it's like guys like what do you know? Like, come on, you know those types of things. Or messaging apps. They can't do everything their messaging app can do because art of Apple artificially restricts that. Or the safari, you know, core at the bottom of every browser, etc. Etc. That stuff to me is hard to defend. Um, but you know, that's the. The doj didn't get everything right. I mean, they sort of suggested, like apple should make apple watch compatible with android. And it's like guys, this that has nothing to do with their iphone monopoly, like that is that's ridiculous. So, yeah, there's it's.

48:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's not, it's not 100 straightforward, but it's so funny because, uh, I am now saying things that are pro windows, but people are still saying, oh, leo's so pro, you have this.

48:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can't you you don't win. There's no, there's no way for you because on the show you'll be like, oh, you know, you should see him on the mac show, he's just so I'm just saying it's a personal preference.

49:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the only difference, honestly, that and price price, please.

49:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm waiting for someone to be in the thing now and say well, if you like apple so much, why don't you start the apple supersize? You know, like it's like. It's like guys. That's not the point. I'm just saying you have to recognize here's the good competition is doing.

49:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's cross-pollinization now between all platforms. So, just as you said, no matter what feature you want on the other platform, be patient because it'll you know it'll, it's really a good idea.

49:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It'll propagate everywhere, exactly uh yeah, yeah, tribalism is not that smart, like we're kind of past that.

49:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, there's it's silly to be tribal. That really is my real point. I wish it's past it. But yeah, no, my real point is it's guys, it's just your personal preference.

49:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not one's better than the other, it's personal preference I'd like you to briefly imagine I know this is horrifying, so bear with me like how horrible it would be to be married to me and what I mean by that is I get up in the morning and I read it.

50:08
I think about that all the time. I know I, you should never. And I had written the article. That was the thing we were just talking about, what that was based on and the reason I wrote it is because there is serious tribalism, especially in my little community, and I wanted to get to get on top of this. I didn't want people to get ahead of themselves. Yes, the Snapdragon X is a huge step forward. It is. We're not done. You know it's not over.

50:32
And I had some people in mind when I wrote this. Like I know, because these people they are, they're very tribal. And this morning when I cracked up my laptop, by the way, screen came right on love, snapdragon X, the. And those, some of those people were in there saying like, like I laughed out loud when you said that the Apple ecosystem was better than the Microsoft ecosystem. We have a much better apps and windows and it's like yeah, I was talking about the broader ecosystem, meaning not just the computer and there is nothing on the Microsoft side. We just have these half assed integrations we try to do in phone link and wherever else. Like we just have the cobbled together thing that we've always had in windows and that's that's. That was kind of my point, so anyway, um, yes, so you can stop thinking about that little relationship, but uh, sorry.

51:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, let's take a break, because we do want a hammer on intel. I mean, let's say I'm sorry, I'm sorry, this I.

51:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What I meant was I. This morning, as I'm reading this, my wife is sitting next to me trying to read the news and I'm over on my laptop about the.

51:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, because people are not paying attention anyway, sorry I try to avoid the news early in the morning. I don't want to be angry until noon it is now more energy in the morning.

51:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I want to get it out of the way. Ah, I get it. You know, like in the afternoon I would just be like yeah.

51:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I, you know it's funny, uh, I wake up cheerful. My wife is the other way, so it would be like being married to you, I guess. Uh, yeah, I, I wake up like cinderella, you know, or uh, sleep, you know going. Oh, it's talking to the birds, yeah, anyway, I don't, you know.

52:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like how did you sleep? It's like I made some mistakes. I didn't do good, you know. I, um, I'm gonna work on it tonight I don't know at all. I don't have my hopes.

52:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love. It All right, let's take a little time out for our sponsor and get back to more with Grumpy Paul and Rich. I feel like you might wake up happy. I wake up happy, absolutely. Yeah, that's what I thought. So it's two to two. You're infuriating.

52:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I wake up ready to write, head going 100 miles an hour like yeah, I'm excited for the day.

52:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got ideas I want, I got things to do by the way, I I do have that to some degree, he wakes up.

53:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Cynical, I think, is what it is uh loquacious in our youtube chat.

53:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Says I wake up like sleepy Beauty.

53:10
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55:37
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56:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
right. I mean, really what we have is Intel, and then I guess there are these other companies sometimes, and it's well. It's weird to me that AMD has not gotten more traction, although I think I touched on this last week or the week before. You know, intel spends a lot of money. To you know, intel spends a lot of money. To you know, keep their position in the market right. So I can, I'm on the kind of other end of the funnel.

56:34
I get these opportunities to review laptops and it's more than nine out of ten are running intel chips. You know that's. That's been like that for a long time, um, but my experience with amd has always been very positive, so I have high hopes and we've seen the first uh reviews of the mobile version of this new generation of processor from amd and it looks like that's going great. Intel has started talking about lunar lake a little bit more and we're going to learn a lot more in september. Um, so everything's going great, except it's not um.

57:08
So this has been a big week, or 10 days of earnings. We're going to talk a little bit more about earnings later, but we'll do Intel's now, because unfortunately Intel has been suffering, I would say, for a couple of years now with, you know, a PC market that's been down and a very slow and expensive transition to this future that their CEOo envisions, where, um, they kind of seize on and leverage their historic strength and manufacturing, take advantage of some subsidies that we're getting from the government because it's a national security concern, yes and uh, manufacture chips at home here in the united states, right so?

57:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
and elsewhere, but not that they've ever stopped manufacturing chips in the us, because, well, but that volume and for others, right, yes, um, and the idea here, yes, specifically the, the high, the, you know, extreme ultraviolet stuff yeah, it's complicated and expensive and it's going slow.

58:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so I unfortunately you know from my perspective, because I have to write this up every quarter I feel like we're in an endless loop of underperforming. It's going to get better. We're so close. We're hitting this milestone soon. We're doing that and it's like have we actually done anything here? Is Intel still using 14 nanometer chips, or is that just my imagination?

58:24
I mean it feels like they are, but they also make other ones too, yeah, yeah, oddly enough, I mean this last quarter, the part of Intel that makes PC chips experienced a 9% gain on revenue $7.4 billion. The rest of the company not as good, but it's just not going well. So they announced as part of their earnings that they're going to lay off approximately 15% of the workforce, which is approximately 15,000 people. They're going to restructure again. They're going to reduce the number of products that they produce. They're going to stop all non-essential work. They're going to reduce capital expenditures, which is the term we use to describe I call it building out AI infrastructure at Microsoft. But this is the building for the future bit. You know, yeah, a capex, um, and their goal is to reduce costs by 10 billion dollars which is, I mean, the issue here is when you're building fabs.

59:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Fabs take 10 years to build right and you're supposed to report quarterly on this, like that's just tough business. Yeah, the problem is you get this confluence of in my mind three things right. It's this. They, they are struggling to make the newer chips and are having problems around all of that. The snapdragon came out with a big old splash like everybody's real happy about that, yeah, and then problems with the 13th gen yeah, I.

59:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that one's interesting to me because there's a lot of evidence to suggest that the problems are having with these chips aren't necessarily any worse than problems they've had with other chips over time.

01:00:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, but I do think the public has gotten onto a pile-on mentality. Yeah, exactly, look at Boeing. A wheel comes off a 777, thanks, boeing, they're not the ones doing the maintenance on that plane, well yeah.

01:00:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So obviously when a company gets big enough, there's an inertia that takes over. They're just a superpower, they're doing great. You also become the butt of jokes. It's kind of like the little indie band you loved is now on MTV all the time and they're selling out tours. You're like, oh, I used to love those guys. They sold out. They suck now. So maybe that's just human nature.

01:00:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's kind of hard to say you're one of it. Certainly it's american cultural nature there you go build up the little guy until he becomes a big guy.

01:00:56
Then tear him down yeah, you're probably right, yeah, no you're probably, but it's just, yeah, I'm, I am, I empathize with boeing, although there's a bunch of things they really have done wrong. You know, the mcast thing is not funny, starliner's not funny, but at the plug door not funny, but the you know the other stuff come on and intel. Yeah, you're right, this is but bad news on itself. This is totally, and I think it's just like we're in a time of of echo chambers and you get the wrong echo going and you get a lot of noise.

01:01:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's a lot of noise yep, so yes, and and tied to this um and very, you know american, but capitalism, uh, this need to grow and grow and grow. You know that need is how we get things like snickers cereal. You know, breakfast cereal. It's like what wait, what are we doing?

01:01:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
and we've got a good idea. We're working our way down the bad ideas yeah, so here's the thing.

01:01:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So here's some, here's some, some, some good and bad, I guess. So some, some data in the in the wake of this uh wall street, which is uh akin to black magic, you know, again, it's, it's, it's a dance, you know. And intel spiraling, uh, spire, spiraling the drain, from a sort of pr perspective, this stuff kind of piles on. So the day after they announced their earnings, their stock price went down almost 30% in 24 hours, its biggest loss in the market since 1982, and its second biggest loss of all time, since it was a publicly traded company, which started happening in 1980. Um, its market cap went down by 30 billion dollars. It is under 100 billion dollars for the first time since 2009, yeah, and it is worth a lot less than any of its competitors, most of which are actually smaller companies. Right, well, nvidia is worth 2.9 or 2.69 trillion, or it was the day I wrote this article TMSE 720 billion Yep, over seven times Intel. Amd tiny company, by the way, comparatively 233 billion and Qualcomm, 183 billion. All of these companies worth more than Intel, yep.

01:03:05
So there was an analyst at what I would call like an industrial, um investment firm. You know someone who represents, uh, lots of really rich clients. He wrote a letter trying to explain what's happening with Intel and I thought this was very measured. Um, he said look, if this wasn't Intel we were going to. We would be having a conversation now where this is a going concern. But he says we got to look at this more pragmatically. This is the company that is getting subsidies from the US government contributions from partners?

01:03:36
Oh, because of the chipsack, yeah, yeah. And if you look at what they expect, what they're doing, they will actually add $40 billion of cash to their balance sheet through the end of next year. So, yes, layoffs are bad. Bad news things are going slow, yep, but they're doing big work. There's a national security issue at stake here. I coined the phrase. Maybe Intel is too strategic to fail, right, but honestly, they're kind of too big to fail and they're generating too much money to fail. And so, yes, at this moment in time, this looks horrible.

01:04:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah well, the layoffs mean they're going to generate more money for a while.

01:04:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, as long as they're not critical people right. Well, I mean that was one of the little one of the things no one talks about that they expect almost all of those layoffs to come in the form of people who volunteer to retire early, or maybe it's time, you know. Whatever, so we'll see happens with big companies, you get a lot of extra people. I don't know how to say this in a kind way.

01:04:43
Well, everyone did it, that microsoft, uh, apple even uh, although I don't think apple had to too, and everybody's you know apple will never do it.

01:04:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, Google, all the big tech companies overhired.

01:04:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Not only overhired, but then also found that when we have routine layoffs, conversations about unions and all of that, stuff are down. That's right. I feel like it's become an employee management strategy which I find offensive. I do too. I do too. I do too it does seem to be going on there's. I don't know what other explanation there is at this point.

01:05:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Corporations can be. It's very evil sometimes. From a new cycle perspective.

01:05:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's hard not to look at Intel and see something cratering here.

01:05:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But we'll see. Hey, how much of this do you think, especially this 13th and 14th generation chip problem, is YouTube generated? Yeah this is the thing Right. A lot of this comes from YouTubers.

01:05:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is not a fact which god. You should take that to mean nothing. Is that I don't know that this is any more serious than any other chip problems they've had over the past two decades. I really don't.

01:05:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You'd have to go back congressional hearing what are the failure rates of 11th gen and 12th that's right compared to 30.

01:06:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
there are. There are sites, and actually youtube channels too, that are starting to point out that, like, if you look at failure rates for chips, amd chips are actually way worse than these.

01:06:13
Oh interesting, these exact chips so interesting it's hard to say but but and by the way, here's another. So Intel, over the course of just less than a week, says all right, look well, first of all, they acknowledge the problem publicly, which they don't do a lot yeah, that that it has happened, but not a lot. And they said look, we're going to do the right thing for our customers. So if you bought a core processor Gen 13 or 14, with a PC, we're just extending the warranty by two years, don't worry about it. And if you bought it yourself off the shelf, which is not a huge market, no, that's me.

01:06:48
Individuals Yep, no. But people do it yep, uh, just contact support. And the story at the time was if you contact support, obviously we're going to do the right thing for you. We're not going to leave customers stranded, no, they'll just ship you another chip. But youtube guys, blogs, they're like oh, I heard from a reader who uh called and they told me to go screw themselves. They're not going to do anything. So a couple days later, intel's like all right, look, we're going to extend the warranty for everybody you bought it. It doesn't matter how you got it if you have one two years. So they're going to provide more details on that soon.

01:07:16
And this is just like everything else we just talked about. You can look at this very negatively. Look, it's a a part of a cycle of negativity and bad news around intel. Yep, it absolutely is. But here is intel doing the right thing for customers and we should at least acknowledge that too. Yeah, sure, right, I mean, it's part of the story. So whether this is overblown or not, in some ways it doesn't matter. The question is does GirlSlinger keep his job.

01:07:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's not going to be a fun board meeting and I'm not going to blame him because I think we're also in a market time where there is this overreact. But, uh, and you know, there's a bunch of forces there, not just the echo chamber, that is youtube, but there are, uh, certain state actors that like to emphasize any failure of any entity in the united states that's right.

01:08:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They, I, I don't know, I don't remember. Like when did he become ceo? Like how long ago was this? Five years ago ago, not even Something like that. Obviously, you're looking at a broken company. This is a company that made the wrong bets for too long. He's done everything right to fix it. In my opinion, I think so. The problem for him is that, from a public perspective, from an investor perspective, you've got the same face, the same guy saying the same thing every quarter and it's not getting better. It's not. I don't think it's his fault.

01:08:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He came back to Intel in 2021 to become a CEO, so it hasn't been that long Brady Reese is Steven Elop of Intel. I think that's unfair and I think a lot of this no, I actually think. Steven Elop did, actually did everything he could to get back away. Oh, did a good job. Oh, okay, all right, I know, I said. I said that it was the nokia head who was came along.

01:08:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know very few people think that's true, but I I think I really do think he's up a lot I think that company was going right down the drain uh no, I think if I that board meeting would be scary. Well, there's no conversation should be like look, this is a five-year plan or whatever it is you have to give me the five years or it's on.

01:09:11
We don't get there. And I think we have to be honest with ourselves. Whether you're on the board or an investor or whatever, that it's not him, you know. No, like, I'm not saying he's doing like that. There isn't some scenario or some other version of some other leadership and some other plan might have done something better, but it's possible.

01:09:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This was not fixable I think I still like him. I know that he's, so I do too. Here's the problem. A lot of this is perception. It starts with youtubers. It then becomes a stock market issue.

01:09:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's when the stock tanks by the way, when we're allowing influencers to literally influence, the stock price of it.

01:09:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Don't, don't, let me, let's, can we?

01:09:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
draw the line at that, please. That's ridiculous's ridiculous.

01:09:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, what's interesting about him? He's the first leader at Intel who's actually a chip engineer, a chip designer.

01:09:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He designed the 386. He used to be CTO of Intel right. Wasn't he previously CTO?

01:10:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So he started at Intel at the age of 18 as a QC engineer. He was the lead architect on the 486. The youngest VP in Intel's history, at 32. He was mentored by aunt. I'm looking at his Wikipedia. Yeah, andy Grove. He was CTO in 2001. Wi-fi under him.

01:10:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wi-fi USB, intel core, intel Xeon 14 different chip generations I so, because you mentioned Wi-Fi, you've reminded me that I'm reading what I can about what's happening with Lunar Lake, like this next gen chipset they're working at, and one of the things that Intel is requiring for this is something I have been begging for for years and years and years, which is that you cannot buy one of these things without having a usbc port on both sides of the laptop. You have to have at least one on both.

01:10:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There will be three, one of them has to be on the other side my apple laptop has two on one side and none on the other I know I have been begging for this once in a you'll get a laptop that does do this.

01:11:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have two now that are like that. But this is, you know, Intel, you know everyone makes all they have, like all these stupid stickers. They have specs like Evo and like what. Does it even mean? It's marketing nonsense and like the thing maybe a lot of people don't understand is that's part of that. They're like if you want this sticker thing, if you want the chip, you're going to do this. So it's Thunderbolt 4, Wi-Fi 7, the latest Bluetooth and USB-C ports where they belong, and the fast USB-C ports, Not some baloney USB 2, whatever nonsense that we still see on PCs these days.

01:11:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
right, so they don't do everything wrong.

01:11:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, and if I were on the?

01:11:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
board at Intel. I would say, pat, you're bailing out a leaking ship and this is keep going because you got the right. I think he's got the right strategy the dual strategy.

01:11:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's not like he walked up to the deck of the Titanic with his little teacup and is like, hey, what's going on, guys? I mean he flew in on a rescue mission. Those deck chairs, they're in the wrong place.

01:12:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, flew in those chairs. They're in the wrong place. Yeah, yeah, no, I agree and I you know you're gonna give more than three years. You may not give them more than five years, but you're gonna get more than three years, I think.

01:12:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, let's see if you can see if you can turn it around, but the situation is serious. But I do think it's interesting to see that stock behaviors criticism is becoming more radical. Right that they're. It's not, it's not just intel, it's also boeing, like there's, and there's other companies where oh yeah, well, boeing did wait a minute.

01:12:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wait a minute, boeing deserves it. What's going on?

01:12:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
boeing deserves some of it. Yeah, just like intel deserves some of it right.

01:12:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think boeing is a much worse story.

01:12:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't disagree, right, you know. I think there should be people in prison for what happened with m. I agree 37. I right, you know, I think there should be people in prison for what happened with them I agree.

01:12:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
37, I agree. You know, a chip fries doesn't necessarily kill several hundred people right, yeah, right.

01:12:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But you know when, when, when united has failed to do sufficient maintenance on a 777, so the wheel falls off and lands in a parking lot.

01:13:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, oh, by the way that's not going here's, here's a, here's one a little closer to home. So we had that crowd strike outage. Whole world freaks out takes days to come back. There was one company that kind of stuck out there, right out there, uh, which was delta. Delta was down for several days after everyone else had come back and I made a point of watching this back the boy.

01:13:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, that's what I mean. I said early on, I'm like hold on a second and I discussed this.

01:13:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, yeah, that's what I mean. So I said early on I'm like hold on a second.

01:13:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let me get this straight United's back, American's back, Everyone's back, but you're not back. And then he came out and he said the CEO of this company said you never hear anything about Apple having an outage. Yeah, because iPads don't run the world's infrastructure. Jer, Like seriously.

01:13:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They apparently are talking about a $500 million lawsuit right Like. Good luck with that.

01:13:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If I was Microsoft, I would sue them for defamation right now. Crowdstrike came out publicly and said I just want to be clear. We want to be clear. We reached out to Delta several times to help them get over this. They never even responded to us.

01:14:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They never even returned the call and then the other day.

01:14:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Microsoft issued a statement that said the same thing. We have been reaching out to Delta since the beginning of this to help get them online. They have ignored our help. So yeah, that was Delta.

01:14:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was not Microsoft.

01:14:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So look, look, it's bad enough. I mean, I crowd strike a lot of people, a lot of knee-jerk reactions, whatever I get it. But the again, as with intel, you have to give them a little credit. For one thing, god, they've been transparent, god they they've responded quickly. They took credit for this. Not the right term, but they took responsibility for it immediately, right, they didn't wait for the Senate to have an investigation and figure out what. Like they, they admitted to it. They explained what happened. They provided to at least two that I can think of major updates, including one just the other day, or even the past 24 hours, explaining exactly what went down. They've worked with Microsoft. They've documented what happened. They've talked about fixing the industry because we shouldn't let this kind of thing happen. Yada, yada, yada. And Delta's over there oh, you never heard about Apple going down.

01:15:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, by the way, you do hear about Apple going down.

01:15:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Candy.

01:15:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Crush is working fine, that's true they go down.

01:15:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What are you talking about? They don't have infrastructure that you're running on. Anyway, that's insane. That's like saying you know you don't hear about Charmin going down, Like, yeah, they make toilet paper, what are you?

01:15:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
talking about. Actually, they do go down, but it's a different tube, that's a different problem, anyway.

01:15:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
but it's a different tube, that's a different, that's a different problem anyway. Crazy, anywho, welcome to our industry.

01:15:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice, yeah, and honestly I think a lot of the money that left intel in the market went to nvidia and it's uh, it's a little bit chasing ai and chasing the latest fad, but even I know that there's the wisdom of crowds and all that.

01:16:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But I just got their first little bit of uh backlash. You know their, their next gen is not working good it's. They got some problems they're holding out. They're not now people are gonna start beating on them, you know, because that's the way we are.

01:16:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're awful I hope we don't pile on honestly, because I think really to some degree that kind of short-term mentality of the stock market that companies respond to it's a source of a lot of problems it's a huge problem because you're responding, and sometimes to things that are not true or coming from sources you should it's ephemeral.

01:16:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, yep, our entire planet is built on this shaky foundation of finances.

01:16:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's crazy, yeah, and the internet has caused it to vibrate even more severely than it used to.

01:16:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's true Once upon a time, this would have been news stories, not YouTubers. Can I tell you something from the senior edge of life? Okay, yes, you start to realize as you get older it's all a house of cards, it's yeah but it's the only house we got it's the only house we got and I hesitate to consider the title of the book.

01:17:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're eventually going to write something like everything sucks, nothing works. It was all a lie.

01:17:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was all a lie and it's all a lie.

01:17:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, but it's life I'm going to open the whiskey early right.

01:17:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's an illusion that it's all. Oh yeah, this is a well-run company and everything is going to be. It's all an illusion. It's all just people. It's people all the way down. And you know what we're flawed?

01:17:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And we do the best we can, yeah, but at least we're making AI that's not flawed like we oh wait.

01:17:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh dear, oh dear, yep, you are watching Windows Weekly. That's Paul Theriot. To my left, wait a minute. Yeah, and that's which way am I looking To my left? Am I mirrored? I don't.

01:18:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're always mirrored Over.

01:18:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That way is Richard Campbell, you're doing great.

01:18:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Leo, You're doing great.

01:18:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I didn't know. The whiskey segment started early. You're freaking me out, man. What are you doing?

01:18:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kevin King is running the board today. Thank you, Kevin. John Ashley started us off. It's good they're all getting trained because we're closing the studio today. Congratulations.

01:18:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm getting emails from people saying can I have your microphone? No, you can't, it's going to happen.

01:18:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't have my microphone. No, I, you know it's funny. Uh, I did a Mac World. I get a keynote at Mac World Expo many years ago and I sat on the ball during the keynote that's awesome. And then I, and then, years ago, and I sat on the ball during the keynote that's awesome. And then I, and then, um, I threw it into the audience, yes, at the end. And then I realized I feel really bad about this. Oh crap, that's my only one. And I literally had to go wait into the audience saying, um, can I have my ball back? Wow, humiliation, a little bit, you're watching weekly.

01:19:11
I should have. I should have. What was I thinking? Still get a new ball, poor guy. Hey, dude, if you were the one who caught my ball at the macro. I still want it back, yeah no, no he gave it back. I'll give you one. I'll give you the one I'm sitting on right now. He doesn't want to go now? All right, let's talk about. We talked about Copilot Plus PCs, but we didn't talk about Surface. Yes, do you have anything to say?

01:19:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This has been kind of a busy year for Surface unless you help making money.

01:19:44
So back in March, microsoft announced two new products for business right Surface Laptop 6 and Surface Pro 10, based on Intel Core Ultra chipsets. Right, kind of came and went without a lot of interest from anybody. I mean, it's sold only on the business side, whatever. But we all knew that CoPilot plus PC versions were coming, and those arrived in June. So we have Surface Laptop 7 and surface pro 11 right for consumers, running on snapdragon, multiple configurations.

01:20:17
Um, the pro version came with an oled option for the first time. Um, there was no 5g connectivity, however, but they said it would come. And, uh, surface laptop is, you know, two screen sizes, etc. Like it's been for a couple years now. So, um, the other day they announced uh, I didn't expect it to happen this way, but there's going to be a version of surface laptop 7 and surface pro 11 for business right through their business channels as well. Um, they're available for pre-order now. You can pre-order 5g on the pro, but not the laptop. That's nice. Um, kind of limited configurations, more limited colors too. So there are two fun colors that you can sometimes get, depending on configuration, with Surface Laptop and Pro for consumers.

01:20:56
I think the best configuration was actually only black, right, yeah, so the one I got black was my only option, but the one I really wanted was that kind of I don't know the name of it, but it's a blue color, it's awesome and it's also a sage color Not available for business.

01:21:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So it's platinum and black. I don't need another silver, anything you know.

01:21:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so you know. Whatever's business, I guess. But very specific configurations. They still have Snapdragon X Plus as an option on both devices, on the low-end SKUs Snapdragon X I'm not saying which one it is, I'm sure it's the same one everyone ships and the same one they shipped before. But whatever, prices don't seem to be any better or worse or whatever than the consumer versions, except that if you want 5G, you got to pay for it. It's several hundred dollars extra. Yeah, it's expensive. Plus you have to buy one of the higher ends. You know they kind of, they kind of you know, spec it out. So it's not great, but but it's happening. And so those things are.

01:21:56
I think they were arriving in what? In September, probably September 11th, which is maybe not the best date of launch product, but fine, and yeah, so you could spend as little as 10, 99 for the laptop and or and for pro. And then you know, the sky's the limit. I mean, I think the 15 inch, decked out, 32 gigs of ram to buy the storage, 20, 20 bucks. So, and it's even more on the uh pro side because you have all the keyboard choices, with or without pen, the flex version, et cetera, et cetera. So, um, you could spend three grand probably, or more, I'm sure, on a surface pro if you wanted to.

01:22:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't recommend that, but yeah only, uh, only on the surface laptop. In this is the canada site, you know, in black I can get a 64 gig version that's right and that's going to be 26.

01:22:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I bet it's 26.99 in the united states if I'm not mistaken.

01:22:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So it's 36 with the 15 inch, 3600 bucks canadian it's it.

01:22:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Listen, I'll tell you this. You open that lid man. It comes on every single. I'll tell you this. You open that lid man. It comes on every single time. I'll tell you this.

01:22:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I spent more than that on the studio too. Yeah, but I got a. But I got a RTX 40 60 in my studio too, I can tell, cause it keeps burning my hand.

01:23:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I mean, it's probably good for visual studio.

01:23:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, no, it's, it's plenty, it's a lot of horsepower, but it all depends on what's using the GPU, right they?

01:23:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
what gets hot? Yeah, I mean, if you're doing video, it's the.

01:23:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
GPU Yep.

01:23:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's.

01:23:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's until it's warped the case on my pixel. That's how hot.

01:23:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. Yeah, when you said that the first time I thought you might warp the case on your computer. Thank god that wasn't the case. But you know, warped it on the phone.

01:23:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I could see that it's hot you can export video very quickly there you go, and it's a pixel six like it's just encouraging me to get a new one yeah, it's time you got about one week to go on that yeah, before the dynes come along and then see if I've already been that much on the phone yeah, I don't know how fast the lid comes on or whatever, but they're probably pretty good phones. You know, arm chips or something I don't know, I didn't do is see if I could get the 5g feature in canada, yet I wonder if that's there.

01:23:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, um, yeah you should go look, go go to surface for business and find out, right? Yeah, I don't know it's a great question. I think it. Uh, you know what? I'm sorry, I, I think, I do know, I think it is. I think it's US and Canada first and the rest of the markets later, I think, if my memory serves.

01:24:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And don't make sense, because our carriers are pretty heavily integrated. You say that.

01:24:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That sounds familiar. Let me see Pop up in September. I'm not sure, but I considered putting this as the top story as a joke. Today we have a lot of controversies in the Microsoft space, but one of the bigger ones, um, is the new outlook, which I did an unofficial kind of poll and 0% of people like this app. Um, I'd have not found anyone who likes it.

01:24:44
I will say I don't use an email app because you know I'm normal. But I tried it and it it seems fine. But I paid all email apps, so who cares? But it is the Outlook thing integrated email, calendar, contacts, tasks, et cetera, et cetera, all in one interface, et cetera, et cetera, based on web technologies. That seems to really rub people the wrong way. But that's what all the modern apps are doing, because that's in Office in particular. That's the extensibility model. I mean it's going to be web-based guys Like that's where everything is, so you don't have to get it right now. You don't have to replace the thing you're using.

01:25:25
If you're a consumer, you might be using Mail and Calendar in Windows 10 or 11. God help you if that's true. But you might be um, and if you're in a business or a business user. You're probably using the I hate to say it this way the now Legacy, uh, office Classic or whatever we're calling it um, which is much more powerful and full featured and bigger and heavier and complicated and all that stuff. But you know everyone, a lot of people seem to like that up and I think that's part of the problem. So, um, this is like when a really popular band gets a new lead singer and he doesn't look or sound anything like the other guy and people are freaking out like what is happening here. So, anyway, it's, it's GA, which means it's not in preview. You're not gonna see a little pre-tag on the icon anymore. But, um, they will not replace classic outlook or whatever they're calling that, for a couple of years at least. I think it was 2029, if I'm not mistaken at the earliest.

01:26:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, because I cannot stand this new outlook, my god yeah, I don't.

01:26:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like I said, I've not run into anyone who's been like, oh no, it's okay like the reaction is literally I hate it with everything in my being.

01:26:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you know and they always have like a list of what they need.

01:26:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know what is it you want to do. You want to do something like what? Do you want to be offline Like a princess? I mean, what's your problem, man?

01:26:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, like I don't know, it's so weird, but yeah, the new outlook is great, unless you want to do email.

01:26:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Unless you like email. Yeah, unless you need email, exactly it's not a thing, oh geez crazy. So um moving along, I guess here we go yeah. So big week um biggest antitrust ruling in 20 years plus since microsoft's 99, I think truly.

01:27:10
Google was found guilty of abusing or of having. Well, google has a search monopoly. That is now a legal finding of fact. Yeah, that's also just common sense. You just have to look at their usage share numbers, you get it. Yeah, google was also found guilty of illegally abusing that monopoly, and what that means is they are maintaining and or growing it through means that have nothing to do with making the product better. They're using their power to hurt competitors and harm partners and, in effect, harm consumers as well, through higher prices. Because a monopoly, one of the many things they can do is raise prices indiscriminately. There's no competition, which, uh, the judge made a really long and good point of making by comparing them to microsoft. So which?

01:27:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
was kind of tough. I remember james barksdale back in the old netscape soups pointing out people here using internet.

01:28:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, he's their hand, he's the source of so much humor in um entertainment. He's like it's like I'm not a big city lawyer, but you know that kind of thing like he's. He has that kind of you know midwest, uh, that kind of thing Like he's. He has that kind of you know Midwest, uh, rube kind of thing, and he's that guy. The problem is it's not search that makes the money.

01:28:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's the ad business and they don't have a monopoly on the ad business.

01:28:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but they, but they're intrinsically tied. So there's, there's, if you look at every part in alphabet, or Google's earnings, and so if you look at that part of the business ads, overall, I think last quarter was 74% of their revenues, of their revenue.

01:28:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But if you look at the overall ad market, they're a big player, but they're not the only player.

01:28:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, but they do have a monopoly in search, and so this is the product tying thing. In other words, they've tied these two things together and they've created kind of a virtuous cycle for themselves from a financial sense, because they've gotten really good at this right. They're really good at it and they also partner with platform makers companies like Apple and Samsung and others that make Android phones, and they partner with browser makers, most notably Mozilla, like we know about this and to ensure that Google search is the default, because most people just don't even think about switching right.

01:29:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, because there's only one.

01:29:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean, but this feeds on itself, and so this notion that they're kind of paying to play, if you will, um, but they get the users from that. That helps them improve the search, which they do, and search gets better. More people want to use it. You know, that's the virtuous cycle, um, the problem is that's illegal when you have a Monopoly, and it was it. This is in the documents. I mean, I think it was 2022 or 2022. I think it was the last one. Over $20 billion, it's been going up every year, the rumor. There was a story that last year it was $23 billion to Apple. For Apple, this is $23 billion in raw profit. They don't have to do a thing. There's no research and development, there's no engineering, there's no nothing. They just take the product as it is. It's great Works. Well, you know, whatever Everyone thinks, those guys hate each other. Surprise.

01:30:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I have 23 billion reasons not to hate you, yep.

01:30:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And you know Apple's Apple. They still would like to replace them if they could, but they look at like what would it take for us to create or?

01:30:26
more money than that, yep, and that's that's to me with. The most interesting thing that comes out of this is the microsoft connection, because that microsoft connects to this in two major ways. Um, one is the legal precedent, because this case is exactly like the doj case against microsoft in 1998 or 9 or whatever year that was, and because microsoft is the only other major company that has a search engine that might compete with Google, except that they have 6% of the market compared to 90, whatever it is.

01:30:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I would argue that it's not a competitor in the search engine space. It's a threat to Google. It's replacing the search engine with a large language model.

01:31:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, okay, but that's not. That was not what was in. I hear you and I even agree with that. But the but this was about search, right? In other words, microsoft has the opposite effect that Google gets in search where they don't have enough users. They can't improve it as much, it doesn't make sense to spend the money they would have to spend and Microsoft slash Bing mentioned 500-something times in this 286 page ruling. Now, some of them were Microsoft Bing, so there's overlap there. But several hundred times and yeah, I didn't count it. I'm sorry, I'm lazy, but it's. This is astonishing. I'll just tell you from a legal precedent perspective 100%. Yes, the parallels here are obvious. They don't even need to be discussed. The fact that Microsoft went from the hunter to the hunted in such a dramatic fashion over the past 20, whatever years, is really astonishing, at least in this market right. They are the biggest or one of the biggest companies on earth by market cap, powerful market power and they should have owned search back in the day.

01:32:10
But the most dramatic story in this entire ruling is the multiple times that they went, microsoft, to Apple and said, hey, it's in our mutual best interest to defeat Google here, let's do this. And there was no version of the numbers that made any sense. They couldn't. Apple calculated that they could have given them Bing for free and then paid them 125% of whatever revenue they would have made, and it still didn't make sense and it just it was never going to happen. And again, I want to be super fair here. It's not Microsoft's fault exactly. It's maybe a little bit like the Intel stuff we were talking about earlier. Microsoft couldn't invest in Bing over the years like google did in search, because they just weren't generating the, the usage and all that kind of stuff. So you know, at the end of the day.

01:33:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and to be clear, like they genuinely had a better search algorithm, like google did, google produced better results. There were other searches when they were first coming on. There were a look.

01:33:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, I, you know, I I don't remember everything, but you know, being here and covering this for the, for the duration, I mean, there were, there were moments in time where Microsoft did something that was like, okay, like you know, that's interesting. You know they would come up with these kind of uh, I guess I'll call them vertical search, um, things that were very interesting, whether it was Windows Live Search at the time or Bing eventually, whatever where they did a better job to some capacity for certain things. Microsoft has the power of defaults working for them in Windows with Edge, right, it's the default there. It's now being used by Copilot, of course, and, to your point, richard, I think there's a coming battle over whatever we call this thing, but I look at it as a combination of AI and search, and whether it's AI making search better or search making AI better or both, right, I mean, there's other angles.

01:34:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
you could have gone at this on like, look, I don't search on Google for products anymore, I go to amazon. Yeah, right, like they, that there is a fragmentation of the search market, but only if you look at it in the ways that people actually use it. So, that being said, like I don't have a problem with declaring those guys a monopoly, like they kind of earned it, and they have been distinctly anti-competitive. They have done everything they can to suppress competition in their primary space the.

01:34:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The way that people um kind of react to these stories like a dominant big tech companies is very interesting to me, right? Um, some companies get a pass by a very large percentage of the audience, like apple. This just happens to apple all the time. It's like what are you talking about?

01:34:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
like dude if you want to innovate about a past.

01:34:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They love the environment, they are, you know, they're good people. They, you know, they, you know Google. It's like, oh yeah, screw them. Like they're horrible, you know, but the thing is like they're, they're, they're, they're. All companies, guys Like I mean, come on, and that dominant, that abuse is what makes their dominance persist and what makes their dominance grow. Right, and there's a real fear now, with AI, that this will keep happening, and it will. I mean, we're not going to prevent it, there's no doubt about it, but the but the thing I try to, I finally I call it.

01:35:22
I think of this as a paradox. This is probably not the right word, but people have trouble with things that they believe are mutually exclusive. Right, right, like I could say something negative about Google and I could say something positive about Google. They can both be true. Right, like, google objectively has the best search engine on the internet. I think most people would agree with that, probably strongly.

01:35:43
But whatever, google also has behaved in extremely anti-competitive ways to undermine their partners, their competitors, and they've harmed consumers in doing it. Those things can both be true. Yes, they both are true, by the way, but you know, and that's true of Apple's, was true of Microsoft back in the day. You know we integrated Internet Explorer into Windows and it benefited it benefits consumers. Here's the list of ways in which it benefits them. Like yeah, okay, I mean we can kind of go back and forth and whatever, but you also integrated it into Windows in such a way that it disadvantages competitors because they can't be integrated with Windows to the degree that you are, and the default experience is you and you're not offering a way to switch and you're using your market power with Windows to gain entry into this market, and then your defense is well, it's so heavily integrated now we can't remove it, which didn't make the story better.

01:36:33
This is where Google and Microsoft diverge and where Apple and Microsoft connect, because Microsoft during that trial was the judge said hey, you guys should sell a version of Windows that doesn't have Internet Explorer in it. And Bill Gates was like, yeah, let's do it, rip it out. And then they shipped this version of Windows. It didn't work. And he's like what are you doing? And he's like I didn't ask you to ship a broken product. He's like you told us to take it out. That's what happens Because you artificially engineered it in such a way.

01:36:57
Right, and that's what Google's doing in the EU right now. Right, it's the same thing. It's like well, you told us, we're just meeting to let yeah, this is how children behave. Like that's ridiculous. So Google didn't do that. Google didn't release a version of the search engine that brought you to the wrong page or give you the answers to the wrong question or whatever. But you know, the tactics are all basically the same. The reason they're there, the reasons they're there are basically the same, Right? So, yeah, you know, fun for me. Me, it's like deja vu, you know. Yeah, we're back again. We're doing it.

01:37:39
Well at the same time, it's like how did you let yourself get here? Well, how do you not fall into this trap? There's no version of we don't just keep reaching for more money.

01:37:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, every tech company sucks. When they lead, yep they. As long as they're chasing, they're fine, but the moment they leave, oh yeah, alums.

01:37:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This was, this is Richard knows this better than anybody, but one of the big myths in the Microsoft space is that once Microsoft obtained a monopoly I guess we'll call it our dominance in the web browser market they stopped working on the product monopoly I guess we'll call it our dominance in the web browser market. They stopped working on the product, yeah, and they let us sit there. And that's when mozilla first came in with firefox, or you know. Eventually phoenix, firefox, whatever, and then eventually chrome, of course, and by the time they kind of got their mojo back and started working on ie. Again it was too late and then they switched to edge and it was too late.

01:38:23
And then they changed edge or something new and it's still too late. Basically, although they don't know your question, what's the real reason, richard, you know what were they doing? They were working on dot net. No, they weren't they were I thought they moved on to wpf, didn't they? They?

01:38:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
were. Yeah, remember, wpf wasn't supposed to be in dot net. That happened later. Okay, and, and let's get crazier and really talk about what we're talking. What it what it became wpf?

01:38:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yep, what they were actually doing was re re-engineering html, right entirely because the windows shell was going to be based on something like html and they and they, and I think bill had in his mind that he wanted to come up with a better web, but this was the beginning. First we'll make it work in windows, then we'll make it work everywhere it would be just like the web, but there'd be like a start button in the corner. There you go, and it had a little microsoft logo on.

01:39:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah and then and a dollar goes to bill every time you click.

01:39:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, exactly is that? Is there a cash register?

01:39:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, no, it's the sound scheme they literally kept that team together and and the kicker was that bill was chief architect. Then he just stepped down as ceo as all that went on.

01:39:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So yeah, arguably had entirely too much time to work on this was the presentation part of what would have been a big, bigger strategy around. You know database file systems and you know inter app community and I enter, I guess, computer, internet, whatever communications, etc. Etc.

01:39:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So well, and the code name was avalon for a reason right, it was the paradise right, it still is baby.

01:39:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was just playing around in it today. I love wps. Yeah, it's still paradise. It's not perfect, but yeah, um, what else is happening in our world? Oh, and this is only sort of related, but this is going to start impacting people.

01:40:02
So google's been threatening threatening to roll out manifest v3 for several years, which isn't actually the problem. The problem is when they obsolete manifest V2, which is the manifest that extension makers use to block ads and trackers in Chrome and also Chromium-based browsers. Right, well, in other browsers too. Is that Chromium, I'm sorry, safari and Mozilla as well? So this past month they quietly slipped into some really snow somewhere they're actually. They have a schedule for this. Now they're doing it and, uh, one day, week to go, something like that. Uh, if you went to the chrome web store and you look for what are the best security products, they had a little section up there for chrome number one. You block origin. Google loves it, but then you click on it and there's a warning at the top of the page that says this doesn't conform to our security principles anymore. We're getting rid of this. This is going to stop working soon, and the problem is that this thing, of course, uses manifest V2 and they're switching to V3. So what the uBlock folks did was they created a different version called I think it's called uBlock Lite, that will work with v3. They claim it's dramatically less effective.

01:41:14
I've talked to a few people I guess maybe that's not too many, but who said this works exactly the same. It's fine. And over the past few years a lot of these companies, like the guys from Ghostry, have come out a lot to talk about this. I think the EFF, which I believe makes privacy badgers, talked about this. Um, uh, I think the eff, which I believe makes privacy badgers, talked about this. It's actually possible to. This is a lot like the kernel access stuff in windows that cross cars track. You know like it's possible in v3 to actually do pretty effective blocking. It's okay, um, but it's. This is happening.

01:41:45
So for the short term, um, unless you're microsoft, if you're using edge, you're screwed, but if you're on any other chromium based, they're going to keep the V2 stuff going as long as they can. They're already forking Chromium as it is, but they'll keep that stuff working. It will continue working in Firefox. They're on their own thing. I don't know anything about Safari, but I assume they're doing something similar. So if you like and use, you block origin and you're on a different browser, you're going to be okay, at least for some amount of time. But if you're using it on Chrome, I mean, that's sending some mixed messages, isn't it? It's like I want to use the worst possible browser with the best possible. Like what are you doing? Like he was brave for crying out loud it doesn't even need this thing, but anyway, that's happening. So just be aware of that, because I that, because I think a lot of these other extensions are going to start running into some issues soon as well. It's not going to be just when you wonder if the fork will be long term right.

01:42:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know forks often happen just to maintain compatibility. At some point, you know we could see a firebox or somebody just never come back to take on manifest three well, even so, uh, even something like uh like brave right?

01:42:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so brave said, yeah, we're going to keep maintaining this as long as we can, but they can't promise forever, right? No?

01:42:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Eventually there's going to be important features they have to have.

01:42:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, like Chromium will itself evolve to the point where the B2 stuff work that they've kept going is not going to work anymore.

01:43:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So somewhere down the road, there's going to be things in Chromium you now need to have, probably security related.

01:43:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And the only way to get them is to merge the line again and that means you're getting an fs3. Yeah, which is why you should use brave, because you don't need this thing anyway. Who cares if they support v2, it doesn't need it. Yeah, it's, it's built right in um, but yeah, anyway, that's happening. And then microsoft.

01:43:24
I think you know, in the same way, that microsoft releases uh updates for windows 11 all the time. I feel like now they're on a little cycle where, like, they spin a wheel and it's like, all right, three days from now, we're going to talk about security again and they just keep. I don't want anyone to forget that. Uh, we're really serious about security. I know, I know we say that a lot, but we're really serious about security. We, they were making their uh security the top priority of the company.

01:43:48
Uh, back in november, I think it was, with that new sdi or whatever the thing is called. Uh, they announced in may right, uh, tied the build. There's a big push in um windows 11. Yep, security is our top priority. That uh crowd strike thing happened. Just wanted to remind everybody we're super serious about security and to prove that we're going to fix this problem with the industry, because we love you guys. We don't want this to happen anymore. And a memo leaked from uh, microsoft internally. Microsoft, by the way, has a chief people officer question again, kind of that's just the new.

01:44:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the new age name for hr. That's all okay. Yeah, okay, the guy that is. Yeah, it's the hr.

01:44:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He literally walks around wearing a darth vader costume just to make it clear he's job is. He's a people person. I'm a people person. It's like who does he respond? Who's his direct report? Like, what's his name? I do not believe. Yeah, yeah, he's like.

01:44:39
I'm going to open the deal again, faith. So he sent out an email to everybody at Microsoft and said look, I just want to remind everybody we're super serious about security. Said look, you know, I just want to remind everybody, we're super serious about security. And, uh, we are going to um base your future earnings as an employee on how well you conform to this this never ends well.

01:44:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Google did this with social, which created google plus. Um, I think meta did it with, uh, the metaverse right, look how well that's gone.

01:45:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, I hope microsoft's sincere about this the way I imagine. This is like right after the crowd strike thing. The guys in the ai division are all like, hey, um, are we actually going to do this? And they're like, no, that doesn't affect you, don't worry about that.

01:45:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it is interesting how it they're essentially have to do internal memos in public, right, yeah, that's the only way to make it real yeah, that's right, it's.

01:45:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the perfect way, that's a good point because you're. You really want people. We have said we are serious about security several times in the past few months and no one seems to believe it. Can we anyone think of a more effective way?

01:45:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
why don't they believe it? I wonder why.

01:45:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, here's an idea threaten every employee and then they'll believe it.

01:45:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, so that's what they know. The you know your pay package is going to be affected by your role in security. Yeah, maybe that's the thing.

01:45:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's how you do it this is the new stack ranking right. It's security ranking.

01:45:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, you still have your, they still have their okrs, right? I deal with this sort of thing all the time, interacting with microsoft employees. Where it's like this isn't tied to my okr, then I'm not doing it, and that really is so.

01:46:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
are they saying that's part of your OKRs now?

01:46:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I hope it is, because they do have to take security seriously and they do have to be able to pull the Andon cord to stop production, to say we have a serious security problem, rather than wave past it, to put in you know this. All you talk about the big SFI kickoff that was finding a bunch of dev resources on Azure.

01:46:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that didn't follow the security process which, by the way, was the net cause of that late 2023 security vulnerability that no one's talking about anymore, thanks to CrowdStrike. Thank you, crowdstrike.

01:46:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you know right, we're not talking about that anymore and there is a fix to CrowdStrike. Right, there is API calls they can now have, and arguably Microsoft should be saying if there isn't, we'll make you one, right, we'll push it out in 22H2 for you.

01:46:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no ring, zero the thing they're almost certainly doing right now is well, first of all, they kind of did fix this already. It's just that no one really knew what happened, so now you can just kind of just kind of re-promote it like it's new. I mean, we're going to work with crown strike and the other security vendors so they can implement these new out of the kernel apis and blah, blah, blah. This stuff's been around for five years, but you know what? Don't worry about it, we're just gonna we're gonna make.

01:47:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The other side of this is crown strike. Has to look at how many dev cycles that represents versus the feature set their customers are demanding. Like all you're doing is fixing something that nobody can tell if you fixed it correctly yeah, only tell it right and we don't actually understand the benefit to it.

01:47:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, to the approach you took, right, no, right, how are you almost?

01:47:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
guaranteed will be slower because transits are transitioning through a security boundary. It takes time, yep this is sure, this was but this you still put locks on doors, right, like yeah, this is the, the nt architecture.

01:47:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You remember they moved the um, the graphics into the kernel and it was like what are you doing? And like it's faster. Like, of course it's faster, you know like it's. But that was a big debate at the time. You know, nt was pretty top.

01:48:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and the argument was as soon as you don't allow third-party drivers in ring zero. And the answer after vista was forget it, we'll just write the drivers yes, right, which you know.

01:48:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like everything else in the world, the hardware vendors hate that kind of thing, but that's part of the story recently where they said we're getting here's an idea we'll write your drivers now.

01:48:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If I'm responsible for 20 000 machines in my office, yep, I'm going to run reference drivers.

01:48:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't care about features, I care about reliability oh, that's okay, that's a very that's an interesting and appropriate kind of um customer facing view of it. But from microsoft's perspective they're, we just start, they get blamed for everything.

01:48:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, yep we're going to catch it. Anyway, you're still going to use pss we're gonna.

01:48:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're gonna fix printers. We don't even make a printer, we've never made a printer, but we're still going to fix printers. We don't even make a printer, we've never made a printer, but we're still going to fix this because apparently you guys can't stop writing crappy drivers, so we're going to fix it. And because we are the ones who get blamed, we're the ones who get called, you know, and we are the ones who get threatened because they're going to move to some other platform and it was your fault. So, yeah, I mean, this is a pretty common pattern, unfortunately.

01:49:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, no, and it's a tough problem because part of Microsoft's whole play is having a broad ecosystem with many vendors, so that you have lots of choice, but then they have to do things they're not good at.

01:49:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Double-edged sword and every one of those companies has a different strategy for success that is counter to what everyone else is doing. You know that's this is the reality, I mean. So, yeah, it's good and bad.

01:49:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If there were simple answers, we would have used them.

01:49:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's weird because there isn't really nuance anywhere else in life.

01:49:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's funny, we've never encountered this before.

01:49:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Nuance. What's that? I don't know what you're talking about. I'm just really amazed that I still haven't opened this bottle of whiskey. I don't, I know Okay.

01:49:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's what I'm about to say. Still to come, still to come. We've got earnings. There are some, still some earnings on the table. Uh, we've got xbox and richard has said that this is a really good. I'm very happy what I found liquor coming up. So all of that ahead. You're watching windows weekly richard campbell with run as radio and dotnet rocks at run as radiocom. Paul thurot, thurotcom, me, I'm the little old winemaker, me. No, I, uh, I'm just sitting in the middle. Do you remember those ads? Yeah, a little old winemaker, me. I can't remember. I don't remember what the wine was. It was around the same time as Bartles and James.

01:50:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was gonna say it's got to be like reuniti or something, or yeah, I think it was. It was some horrible wine. Back in the old days, people didn't know wine and they were drinking you know, or some tools used to do like a wine ad for some.

01:50:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, wine drinker me is uh Dean Martin's song oh, all right, yeah, but that makes sense.

01:50:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I would use it now yeah, matus rose.

01:50:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, let's continue on. Paul, you got some earnings for us. Swiss colony, swiss colony thank you.

01:50:59
Okay, that's a little white maker there's a cut so kids won't remember this, but there was a time when people didn't really know anything about wine and they drank the worst wine possible. Boone's farm. The first thing I ever got drunk farm apple. You didn't. The boone's farm. There was bartles and james, which was like a, a drink of some kind. There was matus and there was swiss colony and it was all terrible wine but we didn't. We didn't know. What do we know?

01:51:28
yeah, anyway, I don't know I don't know if it's better now or schnapps.

01:51:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah the kids still drink Yeager.

01:51:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, yeah, I know yeah, yeah, there it is Italian Swiss colony. Well, they're so rad, aren't they? I think they are, I think they're just up the road a piece sorry for the digression, but they're not like outside of detroit what's your state?

01:51:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
is the wine, the, uh, the ottawa wine region. So it could exist, I don't know. Uh, global warming, you never know. Um, last week we talked about microsoft's earnings obviously blockbuster. We mentioned intel. Uh, kind of lightning round this one, because we got some big tech and then just some chipmaker stuff. So Arm Holdings right, they're almost a billion in revenues up 39%, by the way, in revenues. Gross margins that's up to 96.5%. You thought it couldn't get any higher. They did not rise or raise their annual earnings forecast and actually Wall Street punished them for that. They expect crazy growth. They're looking for some sort of AI play, but yeah, so here's what's amusing to me.

01:52:39
You folks may remember that ARM is suing Qualcomm for its Nuvia-based Snapdragon X chips that we keep talking about, because it wants them to pay both royalties. Right, not just the Qualcomm royalties but the Nuveo royalties. And Qualcomm's argument is we pay you more royalties than anybody. What are you talking about? We have a set of royalties. This is covered by our royalties. Arm disagrees, so that's kind of hanging over Snapdragon X, but it didn't stop Arm from promoting Snapdragon X in their earnings announcement without mentioning Qualcomm once, which is awesome, awesome, so they said. During the quarter, microsoft announced its first-generation co-pilot plus PCs on ARM. Double the battery life of the closest PC competitor and on par with macOS. Every major software app and developer tool now runs natively on windows on arm, including office, chrome, slack and github. Blah, blah, blah. Nope, no, qualcomm played no role in that well done, well, nice piece of writing.

01:53:43
I love that kind of stuff. That's good, um, and then we, uh and speaking of qualcomm, qualcomm is also doing really well, although they've got a smartphone-like problem that, like Intel, has with PC or, I guess, with everything they keep pushing back like when smartphones are going to come back. The interesting little side story for this company is that the architecture they created or modified or whatever for Snapdragon X is what they're going to use for the next generation phone chips, and they're going to announce those in October at their annual Snapdragon event. So maybe this was their way of saying yeah, the sales of that stuff is fairly flat, although, honestly, that part of the business rose 12%, just like Intel's PC Part of the business road 9%. Right, so actually, um, that's still doing well, but the next big jump in revenue gains is gonna happen, um, with these next gen chips. Presumably that's not gonna happen in time for the holidays, so wall street not too happy with them either.

01:54:46
Um, apple made what I'm gonna call I'm using. This is like a financial term of bajillion dollars I think was the term um bajillions. You know, 85.8 billion dollars on uh, 21.4 billion in net income profit. Right, yeah, um, these are single digit gains. But come on, this is, it's like, the biggest company, it's like a humongous yeah, um, iphone revenues roughly flat. They actually fell a little bit, but still 93 point something billion compared to 93 I'm sorry, yeah, 39 point something billion compared to 90. She's like I can't read to 39 point billion something last year. So basically the same 45 of their revenues. Um, the big news here is that for the past I'm going to say two years ish services has been their second biggest business, nice.

01:55:34
Followed by, in shifting order, mac and iPad Right, and then the other devices they make. But this quarter I didn't realize this until after I'd written my story Services was bigger than everything else that Apple makes combined, except for iPhone. So when you add up the revenues from mac, ipad and then the other part, which is wearables, home and accessories, services made more than all of those.

01:55:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, so this should always been the biggest business well, they got into it late right, uh, this, this, and I don't think they've grown it particularly well either. I think they're, yeah, a tough time. They're really a hardware company, services, businesses, a different mindset, yeah it's a different right and Apple's strength was never software.

01:56:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're doing better, and part of that ecosystem manifesto I guess I was delivering earlier is that one of the interesting things about their service is that most of them not all of them, but most of them work like everywhere. You have an Apple device right as well as you.

01:56:33
That should be in the walled garden. It should be right, absolutely symmetrical. Yep, yeah, so that's kind of you know it's so it's getting there, but but it's getting there. You know, we'll see what it looks like when uh apple or in uh google's 23 billion dollars in revenues goes away, because, uh, that's about 25 percent of that business's revenues. So that's going to be interesting.

01:56:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The other question mark for me is apple intelligence. Doesn't show up in this earnings report yet. Granted, they have not shipped it, but you'd think the believers would just buy. But I think and I'm among them like I would consider an iPhone if Apple intelligence really is great.

01:57:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I'm trying to think what I'm going to see you next. That's an interesting conversation. It's going to be a lot more interesting when there's more to see. Ignite in Chicago yeah, chicago will be November, so by then we'll actually have something to look at, hopefully. I would say the big difference between Apple and, say, microsoft and other platforms and actually Google, right, the two platform makers that are also kind of all in on AI and are capexing the hell out of AI infrastructure costs. Apple is not doing that, right. No, apple's in an interesting position where they can go to, like OpenAI, and say we'd like to partner with you and we're not giving you anything. You just want access to our customer base, just like Google does, right, I mean. So this is a virtuous cycle thing for them. This may work out for them because they don't really have to, I mean they will.

01:57:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I think they, and they're being the slow mover side of things is pretty great. You know I set a line on a different call, not a show related call where I said listen, we all know people are screaming about a gold rush and there, Russian, there's lots of shovels and jeans being made. I'm just still looking for the goals.

01:58:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, and from Apple's perspective, the slow approach has almost always paid off, and in this case it's particularly good because the costs are so astronomically high early in the cycle it makes it prohibitively expensive.

01:58:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Although again we are talking about companies that are paying for this stuff with cash right.

01:58:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, that's right. There's only a couple that can.

01:58:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What's the difference between what they would normally do in this? Fewer stock buybacks, but only fewer.

01:58:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, exactly that's all that's happening is oh, we have something to do with this cash. There's different ways that companies can invest the money they got from investors and grow the value of that stock. And Apple's pretty good. They're pretty good at making money. I mean, say what you will, but they're pretty good at that, really good at that. Maybe it's the right way to say that. So, and then Amazon, of course, I don't know what's, what's north of a bajillion, but they made 148 billion in uh revenues and a net income of 13.5 billion. Um, they're, you know, they're interesting because the vast majority of their revenues comes from retail operations, as I would call, like online stores, physical stores. They're warehousing companies, right right, they're a logistics company in some ways, but their most I'm going to call it profitable business, by percentage anyway, is, of course, aws. So, 22.1 billion in revenues, 5.4 billion in net income.

01:59:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Those are normal tech company numbers. Back to the whole. You look at that part of the company and you see tech. Yeah, exactly, you look at the rest of it. It's like what is?

01:59:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you know what is this?

01:59:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, If you're an investor, you're like these companies need to be split apart. I'll take shares in both.

01:59:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so right, yep, yeah, there's an argument to be made that Amazon did anyway and cause they're starting to be profitable overall. That was not the case for a while that they were able to leverage the, the profits from AWS, to voice new businesses onto the world, which may lead them down an antitrust path.

02:00:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, that's what I mean.

02:00:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, like that may be. Yeah, yep Cause, it's not. It's not just that you got. We always talk. We usually talk about uh, you got a monopoly, you deserved it, you made a great product, god love you. But there's also that version where you got a monopoly through illicit um means and that is also illegal.

02:00:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You don't have well, because, yeah, if you are in the amazon from a retail company, their, their margins are predatory I mean huge money. And if you're in it because they're a tech company, their margins are predatory I mean huge money, yeah, yeah. And if you're in it because they're a tech company, their margins are garbage. Right, because the because the margin should be 20, 30 plus percent. Right, and they're not. They can't do that because they have these two combined businesses that are really don't get along all that well.

02:00:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, they're not even related in any way.

02:01:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
really, Right, the retail operation is a customer of the cloud business yeah, I didn't get into this with the Intel stuff.

02:01:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But they Intel reports their fab business as if it were a, a second business, separate from them. Right, it's not, but you know, because they're trying to show I, that this thing can be profitable on its own and will be a, you know, a growth, a profit center at some point. But, um, intel, ira, md could, geez, amazon could do that with aws in a way and actually, honestly, you can see what it would be because they are very transparent about the numbers. So, yeah, you kind of get a look into that if you wanted to. All right, okay, uh, xbox so excited. All right, okay, xbox so excited.

02:01:44
Some stuff going on. I'm just trying to say I don't have any like super bad news about Xbox this week. So that's kind of fun. It's the news we're still missing. Cross your fingers.

02:01:56
I mean, it's the day is young, but there are two big industry events coming up in the next 30 days or so and both of them are in Germany. It was just like when was the last time you ever said that that's when all the Xbox stuff happens in Germany? Yeah, so Gamerscom is happening end of August in Cologne. I always struggle with that Cologne, cologne, cologne, yeah, and then in the very, very end of August, I think, beginning of September, is IFA, which is in Berlin. So opposite sides of the country, opposite sides of the business, whatever.

02:02:30
But Microsoft is not just going to Gamescom, but they are going to show off over 50, I will do no that. That's what they did when they showed off that redshift game or whatever it was, that vampire game, that piece of crap so unplayable, um, which is not the thing you want to see in the title of the review. Um, no, what that means is they're not going to show up videos, they're going to put games out on the floor. People can walk up and play them. So, uh, star wars games, any of jones, all kinds of stuff Still sounds funny. Good, that's good, and this is one I've not looked at. But there is a free first-person shooter called Ballorant which is on Xbox Series X and S and PlayStation. It's supposed to be pretty fantastic and it's on PC. So I have no excuse, but I'm going to take a look at this. It looks interesting, it's supposed to be really good. It looks like a next-gen Overwatch, maybe that kind of game.

02:03:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
A lot of people love it.

02:03:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's supposed to be fast-moving More down the realism path than Overwatch. Yeah right, Not much more.

02:03:42
Not quite Pixar, but better than cartoon, I guess little, yeah, um, not much more, not much no, but yeah, like, like we're not quite pixar, you know, but better than cartoon, I guess. So this one I might need a little bit help on, because I've been um complaining you probably didn't notice about the lack of activision. Blizzard games on game pass, but if I'm not mistaken, uh, there's something called Crash Bandicoot and Insane Trilogy. Isn't that an Activision Blizzard game?

02:04:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Not originally. No, I mean, they may have ended up buying it.

02:04:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is it Sega who made Crash Bandicoot?

02:04:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I think it was originally a Sony game. Oh jeez, okay, built by Naughty Dog? Then never mind, this is yet another one. No games, god damn these people All. Oh geez, okay, don't buy naughty dog, never mind, this is yet another that's right, no games god damn these people so, um, all right.

02:04:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, that's coming to game pass. In the second half of this month, the uh mafia definitive edition. Um, this is a good month because I actually recognize some of these games that's, that's pretty names, names you can recognize, yep, and plus you know the. The recent um call of duty right is there now as well. Never heard of it. It's a little indie game. They're trying to make it work.

02:04:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, they'll get there.

02:04:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So Sony and Microsoft, sony and Nintendo I'm really losing my ability to speak here also announced their earnings. These guys are both at the tail end of their cycle for the current gen console. So things are you know. They're doing what they're doing, yeah, with no real sign of things. These guys are both at the tail end of their cycle for the current Gen console.

02:05:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So things are you know they don't have no real sign about the next Gen console yeah, there's been not a lot of rumor on the Sony side.

02:05:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the PlayStation 5 only sold 2.4 million consoles. Most recent quarter it was 3.3 a year ago. Yeah, over 60 million overall. They're on track to have the worst selling PlayStation console of all time. Like, this is probably going to be the slowest selling of all of them. Right, it's expensive. It's not their fault. In many ways, they and Microsoft both chose to launch these things, for better or worse, right in the middle of the pandemic.

02:05:39
Lots of component shortage problems Remember, sony did a better job with that than Microsoft and they are outselling the xbox by a pretty wide margin. But you know, um their game business, which is called game and network services um, lots and lots of money. They're doing great. Actually, it's their I think it's their biggest, yes, their biggest business overall. Sony um, you have to all the math I do with sony, it's like what it looks like if you don't include their financial services business, which is a huge part of the company. Um, but they've. They sold, uh, 53.6 million software units. Um, they had a game hell, divers 2 that sold 12 million units in the quarter really really great game it's incredible.

02:06:19
Yeah, so they're. You know, given where they are, they're good. They have 160 million monthly active users on PlayStation network. That's up 7% plus over a year. So, yeah, good, nintendo had been doing great. But their latest report wasn't great and they declined to update on when the next gen switch was coming. Remember, they had said they didn't say they'd release it. They'd said they'd announce it before the end of their fiscal year, which is ending at the end of june or march rather, and they did not. They had nothing to add to that. They didn't lower their earnings forecast for the rest of the fiscal year, which is good, I guess, but like sony did that last year and that didn't work out. So, um, they only sold 2.1 million switch consoles in the quarter. That was down 46 percent from last year.

02:07:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They sold almost 40.

02:07:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah they're doing bad right now. So software sales same thing 41.3% down. The little asterisk here is that last year Nintendo benefited from something that makes no sense to anyone who has a brain in their head, because they don't. Why would you think this? But Nintendo is starting to get into movies again and had a mario movie last year.

02:07:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That really helped sales of their games and that was the bump they got you know, the other part of this is you're doing year over year measures and they don't make new machines every year.

02:07:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they barely know. Right, there hasn't been a rev. Yep, there's still. Oled, still the best one but I do like the idea that there is things they could do, like making movies and things that engender enthusiasm for certain, and they actually did say that they're working on a sequel to that movie and they're hoping to get a little bump from that whenever it comes out.

02:07:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You can't crank out a movie every year either. Like it takes, see it depends on who you are, richard.

02:07:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I don't know if you know how netflix makes movies, but give me, if you, all you need is like lots of teams, ryan reynolds and a green screen and you could get a crap out of movie in like 10 minutes.

02:08:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They do a bunch of those, More of a Jon Favreau thing.

02:08:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
but yeah, right, that's it Right. Like a star, we have yet another Star Wars series, yet another Star Wars Switch has sold over 143 million units overall. They will probably beat their own record, meaning that that device will probably become their-selling console of all time by the time it winds down. So the the best one so far is the uh, nintendo ds, which has sold 154 million units. So you know based on their if they hit their numbers.

02:08:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The ps2 is like 155 million, like we are talking about the outer reaches of the most successful video game consoles of all time.

02:08:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean, I I think the PlayStation 4 was up there 120 million, something like that. It's like it's somewhere up there. Yeah, um, even like the, the, the worst gen for them to date was the PS3, and I I don't remember the exact where it landed, but it was somewhere around 90.

02:08:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I, I mean, you're shocked 90 yes, yeah, I would be shocked if they hit that with the well, yes, but look, you know, yeah, if you're, if you're over 150 million on anything in this scenario, you're magic like that's crazy, crazy. There's only yeah, but a handful of devices have made a hundred and let's not forget, nintendo made the wii u so yeah you know, not everything, not always perfect they're not always perfect.

02:09:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Not everything is. They don't always win.

02:09:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, that's fine. There you go, and I don't know what you. I don't know how you follow the switch.

02:09:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know you call it the switch two.

02:09:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the switch ultra the switcheroo, the switch 4k well, it's coming out next year. I can't wait. I'll be on the online. I'm curious. I love my switch, all right. Well, uh, let's take a little break and when we come back we are going to go to the back of the book. That means tips, that means apps, that means brown booze, baby, and uh, and a good one. According to richard, this week, a surprise, a delightful. It's always a good one, but this one's a delightful surprise I like most of this one.

02:10:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was looking at the site earlier. Yeah, no, this one's.

02:10:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This one blindsided me. Don't get ahead of it oh, it's exciting.

02:10:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But first I want to put in a plug for our great club members 12 484 strong. Wow, we love you. I know, isn't that? You know? On the one hand, you know we were hoping for maybe five percent of our audience, which would be more than twice that, but that's, you know, that's a lot. 12 000 people is mind-boggling. Really, it's fantastic. Yeah, um, it's, it's, let's see. We have, I think, 750 000 uh uniques every month. So you know, it's, it's one, one percent of the total.

02:10:53
I would like to see more than one in a hundred people in the club. Could we make it two or three? I'll tell you the thing uh, right now, with the 12 000 members, that pays half our payroll. That's fantastic, doesn't include any of the other expenses, but it pays half the payroll. People are expensive. They're the most expensive part of any business. They're also what makes things work. Yeah, I, I tried it all by myself, not the same. No, no. So if we made it, if we doubled that, if we got to 2% or 3%, we'd cover our entire payroll. If we got to 5%, we would have so much extra money that I would move to Bermuda. No, I wouldn't. What?

02:11:34
we would do is we'd expand, we'd pay people more, we'd expand, we'd add shows. So the club to us is really that's where we can grow. The ad revenue is pretty flat. It's gone down a little bit. It's kind of gone up now, but it's pretty flat, it's just normal. And that covers the other half of the right now, the other half of the salaries, and didn't cover the studio. That's why we're moving out.

02:12:00
I would love to see us be just completely listener supported. We do exactly what you want. We could do a lot more because there's content that we could make, for instance, me just coming on an hour a day shooting the breeze that no advertiser is going to buy. But if the club members wanted it we could do it, that kind of thing. So that's why we really keep. I don't like begging, I don't want to do pledge breaks and all that. I just want to give you an opportunity to participate if you want, if you like what you hear on this show and the other shows, if you want more of that, if you want to encourage us. It's kind of a way of casting a vote for what we do.

02:12:38
Join the club. Twittv slash club, twit. Yes, there are benefits, you know. You add free TV slash club to it. Yes, there are benefits. There are ad-free versions of all the shows, there's additional content, there's video where there isn't video in public, things like that.

02:12:49
But really it's the feeling that you're supporting something you like and you want to see more of. If that matches your goals and you can afford seven bucks a month, I understand. Believe me, if you're outside the US and it's a hardship because of the exchange rates and all that, or if you're inside the US and times are tight and I know a lot of us that's the case fine, that's great, because we still make most of our stuff available for free. But if you can't afford it, I would love it if you would go to twittv slash club twit and join the club. We'd like to have you.

02:13:23
The Discord is great. It's a place where club members hang out. I just want to put in a plug for that. Let you know how much it means to us. We're doing our part, we're cutting back, but what we would like to do is do more. So twittv slash club twit, that's all. That's all I have to say. Now to the back of the book and our tip of the week, mr paul thorat, and believe it or not, it involves wordstar yep, that's crazy, I know it's.

02:13:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's overdue, frankly, but it's about time, paul.

02:13:56
This is the story I've been waiting for yeah, so uh, an award-winning science fiction author who has been using word star since the late 1970s and has never stopped using word star and, by the way, word star for DOS, uh has released a complete archive of this software that includes thousands of pages of documentation, the complete archives of the comp. You serve forums for word star from back in the day. Um, his own little custom configurations, uh, the emulators you need to run this thing, and uh, he like, um, what's the guy who writes? Uh game of thrones?

02:14:31
uh rr martin, yeah, uses word star to this day. That's so fun. Um and when, if you go to this guy's site, it's actually kind of fascinating it kind of looks like he uses word star.

02:14:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He kind of has that.

02:14:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I use word star kind of look, you know what I'm saying.

02:14:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's good. I like his stuff.

02:14:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is fascinating I just as a treasure trove of historical you know data. I mean, this is amazing, um, the number of famous authors who have used this over time. Now, granted, most of these guys were back in the day, like arthur c clark, right um, and rice, who, uh, obviously today uses a modern computer in microsoft word. Or, uh, actually, george rr martin still uses this thing. Um, uh, what's the guys? Uh, michael creighton, right the guy, uh, not michael kram, sorry, different author, but um, have used this software and a couple, I guess, still do so. I looked at it today. I gotta tell you it's completely unusable. I have no idea what he's talking about, but he makes an impassioned plea for why this thing is still superior my fingers still do control ks.

02:15:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, a lot of people do yeah.

02:15:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I could see, so I you have to run in dos, so, which means you have to run a dos emulator I mean, I use a markdown editor, so I I'm like I could probably do this, but I didn't really get into this stuff until WordPerfect probably four, maybe three point something. But I used Microsoft Word in DOS.

02:15:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This thing runs like a hot damn on a Raspberry Pi. Oh yeah, oh yeah.

02:16:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, on anything.

02:16:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

02:16:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
On my Apple Watch.

02:16:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just the keyboard shortcut. The problem with this to me would be the keyboard shortcuts, because, a I never did use this and B we're talking now 40-ish years of common keyboard shortcuts that work everywhere and it's like I don't know. But you know what? It's fascinating.

02:16:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So definitely worth looking at. I'd consider it if it ran Emacs.

02:16:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, it probably could be configured to do whatever. I'm sure it's really configurable 8.3 file names.

02:16:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, this is so cool. 3 file names.

02:16:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's really neat.

02:16:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So is it open source.

02:16:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
How did he understand? So this company was sold, was sold, was sold, was sold, was split and sold. So this company was sold, was sold, was sold, was sold, was split and sold. So it's abandonware, which is not like a legal term. But there is no owner of this software. The companies that ended up with some of the assets of some of the companies that used to have something to do with this are companies like some tiny part of Macmillan Publishing or I can't remember the other company. They don't have any, no caring or oversight of this.

02:17:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They don't know, wordstar is like a lost chair in a back closet right, like it's just yeah. Nobody knows about it, nobody nobody, nobody cares.

02:17:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, so it's, yeah, it's. There is no answer to this. No one, I don't believe I. My guess is that nobody owns it actually illegally, that it's just been abandoned. So I don't think he has anything to worry about.

02:17:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you know, from that perspective, what was the name of that book? Jeff Jarvis is always recommending. It's a history of word processors that he talks a lot about WordStar and MicroPro.

02:17:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I found it. I couldn't find it now, but I found an old quote from Anne Rice on Facebook not the one that everyone references, where, like you know, microsoft Word is a hot mess, whatever but she was saying this is kind of interesting. With any technology In the late 70s, her friends who are authors would complain to her because she would use a word processor. They couldn't believe it and she said you don't understand. This is a direct connection between me and my brain. This is a. This is me being the best writer I can be, and if you don't accept that technology can help you be a better writer, then you should not be a writer, something to that nature. And it was like nice because, like you know, you could apply that to anything like over the years, right?

02:18:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Steve C Martin, who is a Windows big Windows fan. Um was telling me that when he. That's why he went gray early, by the way yes, I think so when he wrote the three amigos. Yeah, he wrote it in a word processor which is very early for, uh, hollywood. Yeah, and I don't remember if he told me which word processor I feel like it was. It was word perfect, probably, word product back then he said he would move a paragraph and he would have to get up, go have a cup of coffee.

02:18:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it was real I used to try to write in like geo right on a comedy 64 and you literally had to go. It was like rendering a 3d graphic, you know, like cut and paste was like you also got into that reflex save too, because sometimes it would fail yo all the time.

02:19:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's funny though, because it doesn't feel like the three amigos. Is that old of a movie?

02:19:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
right, it came out yeah but it was but in computer terms 1986, was pre-history yeah, right, and that's the day that's when that movie published.

02:19:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
When was he playing with the screenplay it could have been.

02:19:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, he was probably right in there in the 80s.

02:19:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah it was definitely das. I mean, it was his first screenplay.

02:19:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think so yeah, yeah, great story, yeah awesome. Yeah, yeah, lucky day.

02:19:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is it really the good of all mankind?

02:19:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't even know it's not bad. Yeah, I love it. Uh, and then just a couple of web browser updates for apps. Um, new firefox is out. This one. There's several improvements to the reader mode, which, which I'd say honestly, awesome. It's really. I really like the way Firefox renders text. It's really nice looking. And if you were burned when Arc came out of Windows that it was not available on Windows 10, it is now. They released a new version and you can get it.

02:19:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I try and burn on one of these I love arc on mac, yeah, but I on the same no, it's, it's getting better, but it's yeah, you're right, it's next, it's next level this is our.

02:20:08
One of the reasons I use it on the shows is because it has no chrome and it's no user interface. So it's great for screenshots, you know. And then, when I want to go back to the show notes, I just you know that I have a little thing over here I can, can do that. I just I love that. I love the clean look and the little uh. You know, when I have a little thing over here I can, can do that, I just I love that. I love the clean look and the little uh. You know, when I open a window, you see it does this little mini window I don't know what they call that, but I love that.

02:20:35
Yeah, I love that yeah, and you can make it a full screen if you want, but but you can also just hit escape. I just really. I really like that. You can also just hit escape.

02:20:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just really, I really like that anyway. Uh, I don't. Is it getting more like the mac version?

02:20:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
on windows. I mean, yeah, sure it is. Um, I mean, I'm sorry they're there. What do you use these days?

02:20:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
is your daily so I go back and forth, right. So I've been using firefox past couple days because of the new release. Um, I don't know, I I'm getting to you know when you, if you think about it, when you. We've been talking about password advantages a lot lately. That's one of the things that kind of helps you not have to use the same browser everywhere, right? So, like, right, firefox may not be super great on like ios or something, but you could just use safari there and it was. You know, as long as your stuff can get everywhere, you could actually kind of use the best browser on whatever device you're on. Right, doesn't always have to be the same, yeah, maybe, so you just basically didn't answer well I use a, I use an extension for the home page, which is my bookmark.

02:21:33
I don't use bookmarks, so that's taken care of. And then I passwords, obviously the big one, all the autofill stuff, and so what else is there, like what I mean? Just you know, you sign in, you get your themes, get your themes and whatever, what browser are you looking at right now? Right now On desktop, I'm using Firefox. Okay, interesting.

02:21:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I didn't even know, you still used that.

02:21:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wow. Well, I go back and forth. I use a lot of different things, so I've been using Safari. Lately, I've been using the beta version of iPad and iOS 18, whatever 18.1. So you know.

02:22:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I the. Ai, summaries of articles and whatever I kind of need to stay with the same browser only cause, like all the bookmarks, and you know that's what I use for the shows. So that's why it's arc now. But uh, yeah, no, I don't want to use Safari with two use at the end.

02:22:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know the traditionals uh, if you if you stutter in French, uh, fine and uh, but it that it has multiple pages of links and stuff.

02:22:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's, it works well for me as a for bookmarks or whatever mr richard campbell, you have a fabulous run as radio coming up.

02:22:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think we missed. No, no, you did it. I got yeah published today, episode 944 with Natalie Sarabirakova. We picked this show up while we were together in Oslo at a conference and we're talking here. She had a great angle on approaching disaster recovery, reducing costs by using cloud If you were on-prem just looking at the different models that are available, because, a a lot of that tech's advanced and people don't scrutinize it much and B, in general, when you walk through your infrastructure in the sense of how you'd recreate it based on the scenario we talked through scenarios like, oh, I've corrupted a server or this drive volume's gotten messed up through to the one I refer to, which was there's a smoking hole in the ground where the office used to be, which happened to me once.

02:23:27
And if you think about things a little differently and just a study of infrastructure often turns up inefficiencies like why are we doing this? Why does that still exist? All those things were supposed to be turned off years ago. So it's one of those maybe quarterly reviews you do do ostensibly to reduce costs, so the CFO loves that. You can spend a few days on that or even bring in a specialist, but in the process you'll usually come back with some other optimizations that lower that cost and improve overall performance. So it was a strategy for doing the preventative stuff, because when the cloud gets involved it turns into immediate monthly return.

02:24:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There you go, yeah, and there's nothing better in the world than an immediate monthly return.

02:24:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know I do this once a year. I do a show. That's sort of my thoughts on what it's going to be like to be a system in this year and I think, a couple of years.

02:24:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I like that, that's good, that's a good idea.

02:24:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is it ever like a conga line party kind of a situation?

02:24:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, there's a lot of discussion about degrees of suck.

02:24:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Are you someone who doesn't like to do things proactively? I love this job.

02:24:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What is it going to be like to be a podcaster this year?

02:24:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I might start doing that every December. You should start a tweet storm about it. Yeah, I definitely recommend them snuggle up to their CFO December you should start a tweet storm about it.

02:24:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I definitely recommend them snuggle up to the CFO back when we're really concerned about the downturn. It's like this is the year to delay replacing hardware, buy the extended warranties and do the numbers on that and the number of emails I got back from listeners saying dude, I have lunch with my CFO every other month now because for the first time ever, I touched him in a method that made sense to him. I care about how we're spending money and it's like now you get to ask for your spend if you produce ROI.

02:25:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Does he buy lunch, though, because that would kind of put it over the top?

02:25:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Your recommendation is to snuggle up to your CFO and touch him in that special place. That's it.

02:25:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know I feel like that's a paraphrasing that perhaps didn't pass the advice.

02:25:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Did I have to take to HR? Yes, yes, I do. Oh wait, they're closing the office. Who do I bring it to now?

02:25:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The person in charge. What is it? The people person. What is the new HR term?

02:25:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh head chief people off. No, it was, yeah was that people officer.

02:25:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What a terrible. What do?

02:25:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
you see three po officer of people yeah, you're making.

02:25:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What's that stuff? The uh, you know the uh, the science fiction movie where the food's made of people.

02:25:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, soylent green soylent green.

02:25:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm like chief soylent green officer.

02:25:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There you go ladies and gentlemen, I think you have sat through this long enough, you deserve.

02:26:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're all here for the whiskey.

02:26:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We know fine brown liquor oh look, I have to enter my birthday.

02:26:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I always we have to talk a little bit about how I select whiskeys for this. So sometimes a listener sends me to one or sends me one. Uh, sometimes I get given to me by a friend, like there's lots of different things. This was not one of these occasions. This is one of these occasions where, on monday, I'm like, huh, what am I gonna do? I've been home for a while, what am I gonna do? Right, and uh, I literally went to my local whiskey store and I looked on the wall and I was thinking american bourbon, because I hadn't done a bourbon in a while. You know, it's not a time to go. They did some classics. You know, I'd always check which ones I've already done. What have I missed? I should do a will it? Or any, any, any number of that devin williams and happy van winkle I already did, already done you did, peppy, that's right, yeah not that I can find that on a shelf anywhere.

02:26:54
And then I also had a hinkering for, oh, you know, I've only done a couple of japanese, maybe japanese whistle pig. Have you done whistle pig this? I saw this and turns out it's it's both. It's it's American and Japanese. Oh, combined what I was wanting.

02:27:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this is a part the heck yeah, well, and it's.

02:27:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
By partnership I mean an ownership right. Like to be clear. Yes, well, in the.

02:27:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Microsoft sense of partnership.

02:27:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you would partner. Now what? What's interesting about this is that it is a collab. You know, jim Beam, yes, owned by Suntory, but it is a collaboration between Jim Beam and Suntory.

02:27:32
Now, obviously, a quick run on down on the two companies Suntory we've talked about a number of times now, from the original Japanese whiskey show way back when that. This is Shinjiro Tori, who you know first started selling imported wine in 1899. And then there's Masaka Takasuru, who was the serious whiskey guy who had been trained in Scotland, and so they collaborated, built the first Scottish style whiskey distillery in Japan, the Yamazaki distillery, in 1923. Took him a few years to make a whiskey. It was terrible. Takasuru, you know, went back to Scotland and everything could have tried to make it better. Finally got frustrated with Tori and left in 1934, went and made his own distillery, the Nikkei distillery, which is up in Hokkaido, the northern part, because it was more like Scotland. Meantime, you know, his son, shinjiro Torii, continued on in 1937. He finally got a hit with his Suntory whiskey, which the Japanese soldiers really liked. Fast forward over the good years and bad years of whiskey and of course we all hear about Suntory with 2003, when Lost in Translation comes out right, make it Suntory time. And also the same year that the Yamazaki 12 was the very first Japanese whiskey to ever win an international contest. They got the gold medal that transformed Suntory.

02:28:52
I've never really dug into this part because by 2009, suntory is now reorganized into this monster multi-entity. There's a holding company, the beverage and food company, there's a thing called Products Limited. There's wellness, there's liquors, there's beer and spirits. There's a holding company, the beverage and food company, there's a thing called Products Limited. There's Wellness, there's Liquors, there's Beer and Spirits, there's the Wine International Group. And they start buying entities, lots of different companies, to the point that by the time they acquire Beam in 2014, they're the third largest producer of distilled beverages after Diageo and Paranormal Ricard.

02:29:26
Now, if you go to the Beam story which I've never talked about before because we generally don't talk about Beam whiskeys for better or worse and there's a ton of them, you know today, besides Jim Beam, that's also Basil Hayden and Knob Creek and Booker's and Baker's and Little Book and Old Tub and Old Crow and Old Granddad and Old Overholt, whatever that is in harden creek, like, they own a lot of whiskeys which, some of them which they made and some of which they acquired. The company goes all the way back to to a man named james beam selling whiskey in 1795. Uh, the company's officially called the james beam distilling company in 1935, although they ultimately sell it to a guy named harry blum, who's a spirit merchant out of Chicago. And then it becomes that horrible story about products where it just shifts from one brand company to another all through the 60s and 70s. One of them was American Brands, which was originally a tobacco company, but it was also in insurance and golf and home hardware. And while they're under that banner, an 85 American brands bought National Distillers which is where Old Crow comes from and they become the Jim Beam Brands Company. So they're now going down that horrible path as well, until the parent company, american Brands, becomes Fortune Brands because that's not weird or creepy at all and buys 20 more whiskey-related brands from Allied Dominique in 2005. And this is when they ended up with many Scottish distilleries and others as well, and so by that point it's now called Beam Global Spirits and Wine.

02:30:57
It's 2006, which they actually split off from Fortune Brands to become a separately publicly traded company, because I guess they decided they needed more money, but at the moment they were public, they were a candidate for acquisition and by 2014, that's Suntory. So Suntory ends up owning it and renames Suntory to Beam Suntory, largely because they were concerned that Suntory was not well known in the US market but Jim Beam is, and so the name was really important. So they thought they don't think that anymore. As of May of this year, this parent company is now called Suntory Global Spirits. So there's the origin of the two companies that collaborate over this whiskey, even though they've basically been the same company for 10 plus years. But you know, suntory being one of the good guys, I think, like Diageo, where they've really done a lot of work to protect brands and arguably enhance those brands. Suntory is also the guys who facilitated Makers Mark making their cellar edition some very good whiskey they wouldn't have been able to make without the money available to them. That Suntory has to be able to expand what otherwise was a very small operation. Tori has to be able to expand what would otherwise was a very small operation.

02:32:12
So the actual collaboration part of this whiskey is between two people Fred no and Shinju Fukio. So Fred no is a seventh generation master distiller. He is literally the great grandson of Jim Beam. So this is the family heritage of Jim Beam which is still involved, and the core of this whiskey is a Jim Beam mash bill. So 76% corn, 12% rye, 10% barley, and then it goes into American oak for five years, which is super normal. That to me is an American bourbon right. To me is an American bourbon right, except it's not, because after that they take a portion of the batch and they put it into Californian red wine oak casks for about a year and another portion goes into sherry casks for a couple of years, and then the separate, what they call parcels. These products are blended by Shinji, so Fred Ngo is responsible for making the bourbon and setting up the barrelings, and then all of those parcels of the product in different barrels goes over to Shinji, who is only the fifth ever blender for Suntory.

02:33:18
And remember, the Suntory made their money on blended whiskey. Their single malts are an anomaly, but their famous yellow label Suntory whiskey has always been a blend. Their blends have always been their business. The challenge here is that Japanese whiskey has always been made in the Scottish style. They only work in barley. So for Shinji this is kind of a shock. Here you have this mash bill concept as well as this array of barrels, so he's trying to assemble different flavors together and does this unique blending, and they did the first version of this back in 2019. So it's been around a few years. I just finally ran into it.

02:33:56
The crazy part is, what do you even call this? Because it breaks the rules for American bourbon and it breaks the rules for Japanese whiskey. Nominally it is an American blended whiskey, but that has a very bad reputation. Like, generally speaking, blended whiskeys are frowned on in the American market. They don't mind buying a Scottish blended whiskey, like a Chivas or a Famous Grouse, and they certainly don't mind buying Japanese whiskeys that way. But when it comes to American, that's kind of a problem. Although I would point out that Jim Beam makes a blended whiskey too, called Little Book, and coincidentally, the master distiller in charge of Little Book is Fred No's son, freddy, so all in the family, on the other hand and the other part about this is okay so I like a blend because somebody did this intentionally. They put the pieces together. They were looking for a flavor profile.

02:34:56
Shinji goes into the idea of like the fruitiness. I find too sweet when it's just bourbon, too much caramel. I want a little more fruit. I want a little more tannins, and so he gets that from the wine and from the sherry. The other part is they don't do chill filtration and they don't do coloring. So one of the complaints from some of the reviewers is that, depending on the bottle of this, you buy different colors, different shades, because not every barrel behaves the same way and they're not trying to compensate for that. They're focused on a consistent flavor and they get it Well.

02:35:27
As far as I know, I've only had one bottle of this so far. So, up front of the nose, this is only 47%, so not a lot of burn, but it's not pathetic either. Like you definitely know, there's alcohol in there. It's got that burnt caramel, butterscotch kind of I think I'm drinking bourbon Like here it comes and then a weird fruit note hits you, like that's not what happens with bourbon normally.

02:35:50
This is much more like a ported scotch. That's strange. But then it's got a sort of tightness coming off your mouth. After that, more of the leather and the smoky there's any peat in this. The leather and the smoky there's not any peat in this and lots and lots of warming. So good evening drink, although I'm drinking in the afternoon, but I drink in the afternoon every Wednesday. What's brilliant about it? Forty four bucks from total wine, you know, because it's not a single malt, because they're not being pretentious about it. What they did was they made the best whiskey they could, using a different set of skills and a sort of typical production. So it's reasonably priced for an unusual whiskey, without being awful Right. When we talked about JD, I'm like I'm impressed with how good JD is for a $20 bottle of wine.

02:36:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm looking for a whiskey. That that's not awful. That seems like.

02:36:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I care less, honestly, yeah but, uh, about awfulness, or about leather off through your mouth about awfulness. But you know a couple of themes that have come out with. Doing this on a routine basis is like I'm learning not to hate the conglomerates because they seem to be good things. Yeah, and I'm learning to resist the, not that I've ever. People consider me pretentious about whiskey just because I'm knowledgeable, although whenever I ask what my favorite is, it's like the one sitting in front of me I'm not that idealistic. I like that.

02:37:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a good motto.

02:37:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you know, I got a little Glenn Gary in the decanter behind me and it's still fantastic. We talked about it a while ago and I put it in the decanter. This is a big, rich jammy. It's a surprise. You don't expect this much from a a 44 bottle of american bourbon that even can't be called american bourbon, even though it says on the label here kentucky straight bourbon whiskey, partially finished in wine and sherry cast. So they're being honest, but not by. According to the fda rules it's not really a bourbon, right, right, so they've definitely tinkered with it, but they've tinkered with it in a lovely way.

02:38:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Legend with a T at the end. Apparently it's legiont Legiont.

02:38:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I had to look it up.

02:38:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I am legiont.

02:38:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, Hmm. Well, once again I'm at work and I'm drinking.

02:38:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It must be Wednesday, that's a good drinking. It must be Wednesday, that's a good job. It must be Wednesday, sometimes that's because my whole afternoon.

02:38:29
That's Richard Campbell. He is runasradiocom and net rocks Also runasradiocom Always a pleasure, our whiskey expert and aficionado, but not snob, and I like that. Paul Thorat, he's a snob and he admits it. Yes, he's at thurottcom t-h-u-r-r-o-double goodcom. Make sure you become a premium member, kevin. You've got to pay for your premium membership and log in so that you get all the special goodness, all the best stuff from thurotcom. Also, his books join the crowd with. The love of tech is real. Did you make that up, paul?

02:39:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it's a great line I love it.

02:39:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's a. That's a pre-me owning the uh business tagline that you just reminded me. I should probably update but business tagline and you just reminded me I should probably update, but I mean, I'm sure I okayed it. Yeah, I mean, they must ask me, but it makes me angry at some point you just kind of said we're just going to listen to what the marketing people say for a little while we?

02:39:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, when I was at ziff davis television, later tech tv ziff davis's slogan was believe in technology nice, which I always thought maybe was a little too. Um was there a cross and then maybe yeah, exactly a little too uncritical, so we always face the end of every screensaver.

02:39:57
Not in your god, kate and I would always believe in technology, but you know, back up your hard drive and things like that, which I thought was kind of a nice way of spinning it. Yeah, anyway, uh, the tech love is real. At therotcom you can also get his books, uh, windows everywhere, which is a really cool history of windows through its programming, languages and and and models. And then, of course, the field guide to windows 11 with windows 10 built in at leanpubcom choose your own price. And of course, uh, paul and richard and I gather together every wednesday to do the show. 11 am pacific, that's 2 pm eastern time, 1800 utc, and there are now not one, not two, but seven them ways you can watch us do the show live at that hour. And I mentioned them all earlier and I'm not going to do it all again. But if you're in the club, of course you get a special access permit at our Discord After the fact, on-demand versions of the show, with or without ads, depending on your club status Available at twittv.

02:41:06
There's the web page. You'll see also link on the web page to the YouTube channel for Windows weekly and to a couple of podcast players. But any podcast player you can subscribe and get the show automatically when it's available as soon as Kevin finishes polishing up this masterpiece, right kevin by the way the uh, you know they make a windows weekly whiskey playlist.

02:41:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What, yeah, did you do that, kevin?

02:41:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you did that on youtube, right yeah, I'm sorry, I'm a little behind oh no, I thought you meant music.

02:41:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was like what music to listen to?

02:41:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
windows weekly, buy and get drunk but originally we talked about just doing that scottish whiskey series. Right, the eight, yes, but it's also good he's kept going. You can't stop on a guilty. One just got published and I went back and watch it because I was with you I love that klana guilty. You were right here and we left paul completely out of the conversation. It was fantastic really so good.

02:42:01
I have a slightly different memory of that day I have no memory of that day so you got me, we got into the cloud of guilty, I'm afraid in a very good way, but you had to go on and work more that day. Yeah, I felt for you, man, yeah yeah, uh, so we do.

02:42:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, this is it, uh, the last chance to uh, wow, rape and pillage? I guess people have been coming in and taking stuff and I'm getting emails. What are you gonna do with that? Uh, the desk this is. If this is done correctly, when we come back next week it's gonna look pretty much the same, no, yeah, well, uh, yes, in the sense that you guys will look exactly the same right, and I will be in the middle here, but my backdrop will not be the same.

02:42:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're innovating yeah, well, I'm sure a few more similar pieces will have fallen out of R2 for Paul and I. Still have an empty shelf or two here.

02:42:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I gotta put stuff yeah, I don't feel good about R2.

02:42:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm feeling like I need to buy a bigger R2D2.

02:42:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Put it on basically, richard, I'm doing a shelf behind me with the twit logo and a bunch of podcast awards. That's about it. Um, it's fun. You know, I'll do at some point, I'll do a tour of what we're doing because we we kind of overbuilt it, not that we've never done that before. I can't imagine no, it's me, it's me, all by myself in the attic and I have one, two, three, four, six cameras Wow.

02:43:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Wow, are you able to control them, like you have an ATEM or something, so there's a single, there's a two-shot, there's a camera.

02:43:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If a guest is with me, there is an over the top shot so I can show you stuff on the desk. That's got a dedicated camera. There is a GoPro behind me so you get the big, the big picture, and I'm taking home a PTZ. I mean, I have, we have all these cameras, so we're taking home a PTZ so that I can, you know, zoom in and out and all that stuff so you know, I tried to add a second webcam to one episode of hands on windows and the entire thing melted down I was like under the table in a fetal position like.

02:44:10
I keep my view camera around for you all the time. Man, just, I love your view cam. If I had a view, I'd have a view cam. I don't have a view. I'm in an attic. See, if I had that view I don't think I'd be doing the show, but you're gonna be on like ghost hunters one day.

02:44:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're gonna be doing the show and weird shapes going to go by in the background.

02:44:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Dude, it happens all the time it's usually humpbacks I'd be out there in a canoe if I were in the attic like a ghost oh, in the attic.

02:44:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
God knows what what kind of things you're going to see.

02:44:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, goodness, it's, uh, it's an interesting space I always meant to rig up my old office with a camera for the dog, just so you could always get cut to a.

02:44:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Jason Snell has a dog cam he has a dog sitting in a bed does that count? Yeah, yeah that's all I got so you could have the balcony cam. Yeah, yeah, it's fun, I mean, I have it.

02:44:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
A port switcher yeah, you might as well take advantage of it. You know you really should put a cam out there because you could also you could also be a riot cam for you too, paul, like once in a while you have to never want, or at for you too, paul, once in a while you have to parade.

02:45:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Or at least those parades that go by in the early, early hours of the morning.

02:45:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Our neighbor texted us a video. 2 o'clock in the morning exact same thing happened. Another parade. Yes, they do it once a year. I guess there you go. The theory is it is police cadets.

02:45:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Marching from the school to the station.

02:45:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It could be a running shootout between drug dealers and stuff, but it's a parade, no there's music.

02:45:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's really cool. So it happened again, but it happens in the wee hours of the morning.

02:45:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like 2.30 in the morning. It's the only time it's cool there.

02:45:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe that's it. Maybe that's it. So, Paul, you're going to stay in Mikanji for next week.

02:45:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I will be here next week. Yes, Okay.

02:45:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And Richard, you're going to stay in Madeira Park for next week.

02:45:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay, two more weeks here, and then Copenhagen. Oh, I got to get going.

02:45:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We'll let you go.

02:45:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's it for the show.

02:45:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you everybody. We'll see you next time right here on Windows Weekly. Bye.