Windows Weekly 912 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 Our last show of 2024. And, of course, as befits the last show, paul's going to take a look back at the biggest stories of the year. That and a lot more coming up next on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love From people.

00:21
You trust this is twit this is windows weekly, with paul thurrod and richard campbell, episode 912, recorded wednesday, december 18th 2024 unicornification it's's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, all you, winners and dozers, this is it, the show you've all been waiting for, the last show of 2024. Introducing our combatants.

00:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Finish him. It's the end of the year, we got to do something.

01:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The orange trunks and the purple hair, mr paul thrott throttcom. Hello leo, hello paul. He has been blessed with a brand new computer. We'll talk about that in a moment. So, uh, mr richard campbell from runners radiocom hello.

01:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Friend sir richard campbell oh, I don't know about the sir, that's he's ajack today I am.

01:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I, however, have the proper Clippy.

01:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You got the Clippy.

01:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am wearing the. I think several-year-old Microsoft ugly sweater, since we're not able to get the new one, ever Poor Clippy, poor Clippy. Clippy's saying happy holidays. And then there's an OK button. Maybe wait a minute.

01:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It looks like you're trying to wish someone a happy holidays. Wait a minute.

01:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll give you a good shot for the thumbnail.

01:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it looks like you're trying to have a good holiday.

01:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Can I help? Yeah, may I help you. So where do you want to talk about your new computer, paul, now or later?

02:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that was good. This is the thing that's lighting up my face right now. Nice, yeah, I sent him a nuclear powered.

02:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, he's got the snapdragon dev kit. Oh yeah, so you shipped it he did one of the few, the proud, the 200 yeah, I hear that some little bird told me richard, you haven't even opened yours, no, I.

02:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What I love about that is how eagerly we anticipated this thing for like three months. Yeah, we kept checking the emails, yeah, yeah, and then it arrived.

02:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're like, well, no, there was something that happened in between, where they they said was it qualcomm said this yeah, we're not basically we're not gonna.

02:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Uh, I think we're gonna take, we take it back this thing should have been in our hands.

02:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What did you think we thought we wanted?

02:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
but the nice thing is that, uh, even though I got mine and a few of us did like you and me and jeff gerling, um they never charged us.

03:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
no, yeah, I refund Like they had charged me, but money all came back. I should check.

03:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't remember you and I ordered it roughly in the same time frame.

03:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, the day of, I think pretty much.

03:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then we were happily watching.

03:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
When its ship date and its delivery date were reversed right Like those were good times. I miss those times.

03:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's churning like an asthmatic.

03:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, the idea was at the time, the Snapdragon Elite X, the highest performing new Snapdragon in a box that you could. It was fairly inexpensive. What was it? 400, 500 bucks, I can't remember. It was like 900 bucks, it was. Yeah, oh boy, I hope I got a refund. Yeah, that'll be $900,. Mr Thorat, I'm sorry You're breaking up, it's not worth $900. Well, I guess it's a full computer, right.

03:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If it worked normally. You know maybe.

03:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No keyboard, no mouse, no monitor, but I did throw in the HDMI dongle, that's true.

04:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And I appreciated that. Yeah, that will probably be the longest lived component of this system. No, it's not fair.

04:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's pretty funny, all right. So you had a little trouble, though, using it, and I think that's why this is a story.

04:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't actually know a lot about Windows, so it took me. Yeah, no, so any other computer on Earth I could break into pretty easily not break into, but reset and get a new version of Windows on it, and this one has defined my every attempt. It's not going to be possible for me to enumerate all of the different ways in which I tried to do this, but from a high level. I was using Windows 11 on ARM, recovery disks from three, I think three different computers Surface restore, image bootable, whatever the Windows 11 on ARM downloadable ISO converted into install media two different ways. Various forms of media, meaning various USB keys. I tested them on other computers to make sure they booted correctly. Nice, I tested on this computer. He's a very available.

05:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
USB. I presume you didn't do this first. You did this because it didn't work on this. Right, that's exactly right, it's my fault.

05:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I apologize. I said I installed everybody.

05:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, no, it's me install it and and.

05:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, no, Watch me, install it and I just sent it to you without erasing it.

05:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like I said, any other computer, no problem. And yeah I, that's what I thought. This, yeah, this one, this one brought me to my knees. I don't know. That's why I sent it to you, Paul, it also and.

05:37
I've seen a Leo before the show. You know he would have seen this. Anyone who's used this even for a few seconds would have noticed. You know, the boot process is a little strange, like, yeah, when things are working it's fine, it's actually very quick, in fact it's. I'm already at the desktop, by the way, um, but the when it reboots, um, I have a feeling it was because I I had to turn on boot from usb in the menu.

05:59
That's not documented, that's not really firmware or bios, but it's sort of what it is on this computer, and I found that, um, I, I think, because I think it was trying to boot off usb but couldn't. Um, so you know, I at one point I was like I'll just replace the ssd, but it's like, no, you have to be able to boot from your speed to do like. I still can't. You know I still can't, I couldn't even do that. So, uh, yeah, the only leo had to give me his pin so I could just sign in and reset the computer. But now, see, one of the first things I'm going to do after the show is create recovery media with this computer and try it, and I have a feeling it's not going to work just based on my experience I don't interesting I can't.

06:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Imagine do you think there's not a recovery partition? No, because it was very fast when it reinstalled.

06:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look leo, I don't know, I don't know. I'm not set up yet, but uh, that's never stopped me um we, and we have no information about why they canceled it.

06:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, wow, this thing is they never said no, they never I have never seen.

07:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Let's face it, I think the vendor botched the job so badly oh yeah, by the way, arrow electronics who made?

07:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
did they make it or just sell it to?

07:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
us yeah, I don't know the answer to that anyone who's ever looked at uh, disk management in windows, whatever version doesn't matter, but um has never seen this. So this is a. It's a. It's a single disk. The wind. The c drive is 410 gigabytes. Yeah, there are 14 other partitions on this thing oh what, and that does not make any sense what. At all. Somebody had an idea. I'm afraid to touch any of these things. Some of them are very small. In fact, six or seven of them are just one megabyte big and they're all not all of them, but most of them.

07:40
I didn't do it. No, but most of them are labeled OEM partition. But there is a recovery partition, which further annoys me, because all I had to do was get in with a stupid recovery disk and I would have hit that thing. Yeah, but I couldn't do it and I don't know why.

07:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, literally Delete all those partitions and see what happens.

07:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I am not going to do that.

07:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
See, you're no fun. I would you know.

08:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think the interesting experiment to just wipe the like, really wipe the drive that's the instinct right is to start from scratch.

08:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, but you have to do the thing 14 unknown partitions on there, yeah no, but if you can't um, if you can't boot off usb yeah, that's right how would you how? Would you do it, don't do that yeah until you're bootable off usb, that's I wonder if you've now kind of narrowed down part of the reasons why they just Well, the one thing I mean I'll get rid of Is it all the OEM malware, Is that it I'll turn off boot. I could turn off BitLocker. I could turn off secure boot.

08:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know why. I sent it to Paul for no charge. I paid the shipping even.

08:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think you actually owe me money. I'm not 100% sure what a bill. It's all yours.

08:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, it's great, it's all good. Do you think maybe it's patches? Those little ones are patches for the processor or something.

08:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've never seen anything like that in my life.

08:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's an interesting thought, leo, that each vendor for the components got their own partition. Yeah, got their own, like one megabyte partition.

09:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're the same size as a floppy. It was shipped before final right. They've got their own like one megabyte partition.

09:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's your megabyte. They're the same size as a floppy. It was shipped before final right. I mean this is supposed to have been a developer kit.

09:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So let's see it was supposed to be.

09:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's see where we're at. Is that where microcode would live, microcode patches? It could be drivers right, or it could be drivers.

09:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, it could be right, or it could be drivers. Yeah, it could be, but I was only being partly facetious, no it's. You could easily have had each OEM have their own partition, so they load their files up.

09:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Which is a good reason not to install Linux on that thing. It is the most recent build.

09:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, like I, said, as soon as you can figure out how to boot from USB, do whatever you want to it.

09:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
After that that it doesn't matter, right? So I'm gonna try.

09:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm gonna keep working on that one honestly, because you want to. You know, richard, you got now, you now that you are obligated to open yours.

09:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is definitely a christmas activity, but the road caster comes first so you're not using, okay, part two of our post-mortem, or should we say pre-mortem, uh, pre-mortem, our pre-mortem uh, rich're not using the roadcaster uh video that you uh not yet no, and why not supposed to be?

10:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
because it was supposed to be this weekend. And, uh, we had an outage, oh, made a big windstorm late friday night and by 6 am the power was out and it stayed out till three in the afternoon on sunday. Then, never mind, not anything wrong with the roadcaster, no, nothing wrong with it at all. Never got a chance because suddenly it's like I don't have enough electricity to do anything. We practically had a hurricane here.

10:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was a tornado down in the Santa Cruz area. That was a wild windstorm.

10:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That was the same system. We had snow fly away, yeah, I think it was.

10:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You had snow, yours was not the same system, I can assure you, sir. But uh, yeah, it was really heavy rain and the wind I've never seen wind like that knocked out power and petaluma everywhere but us, I think every.

10:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was kind of surrounding us, so I'm not surprised yours went out lots of trees we've got an inverter that uses these pack batteries that are part of, like, the, the gardening system. So we have blowers and and uh snippers and things like that. Then we have these batteries on. You can all stack them into an inverter and it's good for you know a few kilowatts of power a minute.

11:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A minute too, a rivian, which I. I thought that was really cool. You could plug in well this is what we did.

11:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right is we use the battery packs for most of the day to keep things charged, and I was able to use my laptop and things like that, and then, when it was getting low, it's like let's go for a drive and literally threw the whole assembly in the back of the truck, plugged it in, went into town to get some food and do other things and charged it up while we were driving right, and then charged up the truck at the at the supercharger, and then came home with a fresh set of batteries, all loaded up. Presumably town had power yes, town had power what happens to a supercharger? And then came home with a fresh set of batteries, all loaded up presumably town had power.

11:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, town had power. What happens to a supercharger if the power goes out?

11:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I can imagine they're not very interesting. It's just a plug that doesn't do anything super, now are we well, some of them have solar panels, but I I doubt, yeah, yeah, you're not gonna have enough solar. There's not enough. Yeah, you need acres. Right, it's 2.8 acres per megawatt for solar panels. I'm working on my.

12:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My see, that's interesting energy geek out right and a mega and a typical power plant produces 300 to 1.2 1200 megawatts. Yeah, so you would need 3 to 1200 acres of solar panels to equivalent.

12:27
It takes up a lot of land. On the other hand, if you allowed which unfortunately our local power company does not because they're privately owned and they're profit hungry If you allowed everybody to put their solar panels on their roof, you might be able to do that. Pg&e says you can only put enough solar panels on your roof to might be able to do that. Pg e says you can only put enough solar panels on your roof to power yourself. You cannot compete with us.

12:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I'm sorry, I'm wrong it's. It's a gigawatt, not a megawatt oh, big difference only off by three orders of magnitude. Did you see this?

13:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
story. There was a story a few weeks ago. Throw out your black spatulas. Oh my God.

13:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just read what you're about to say to my wife. I was like, hey, did you hear that story? Oh well, listen to the follow-up. I'm glad I didn't do it, because then it turned out there was a multiplication error in the paper by an order of magnitude and by all the important things that were supposedly wrong are all within safe levels now, yeah, and so they're like. Well, I don't think this changes the outcome of the study.

13:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's still potentially.

13:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like oh, I think it does I think it does Unbelievable Science.

13:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Science. All right, I'm sorry I interrupted you. Go ahead with your early peek at the top stories of the year.

13:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Paul Thornton Well so, yeah, I've been doing the year-end wrap-up stuff as one would, what with it being December, but I haven't gotten to this because I keep getting distracted by other things that are related to it. As I start writing it I'm like, oh, this is big enough, it should be a separate article. So I thought I would just kind of go. So I thought I would just kind of go. This is incomplete because it's based on the thing I started writing. I just have the list, so I thought I'd just grab 10 of them, and these are 10 of the things that I kind of collected. After, by the way, I went to we use Raptive for analytics and I'm not saying they're terrible, but I'm not sure they're right either. So, according to them, the top two articles by something page views or I guess for them it would be ad revenue or something were my reviews respectively of the samsung galaxy s24 ultra and then the pixelate pro.

14:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you know great, and we just canceled our android show. Oh my god yeah, yeah.

14:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So yeah, have wasted my life.

14:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because I think that probably has something to do with virality and somewhere it got posted on YouTube or something.

14:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but it doesn't help me, because what I'm really looking for, what I would objectively call or I guess none of this is objective, but what I think of is, like the biggest stories.

15:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, we don't want objective, we want subjective, we want your editorial judgment. People don't listen to this show, for some, automatically generated For facts.

15:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, we've just established that. By the way, my tip of the week is like throw away your plastic spatulas.

15:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But for right now, so just to reiterate black plastic cooking utensils are fine the wrong word.

15:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is what bothers me about that kind of story. Um, the original story, widely publicized, right, everyone covered it was, it was. I don't watch the news, I'm normal it's 2024. But if you did I bet you would have seen it on the news. But the follow-up or the one they're like yeah, just kidding, it's all wrong. Yeah, you didn't hear that one. That one did not get wide publicity. I, that blows my mind, but that's the world we live in. So, whatever the stupidity flows, and then that's the end of that anyway, what is it that ben franklin said?

15:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the the lie travels all the way around the world before the truth can even put its pants on. Yeah, I love it for something that's the original plain spoken.

16:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He got it. Now, people that he was talking about a guy. We're going around the world, men taking a ship. Yeah, I mean, that was all yeah, uh.

16:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So really that's the that's. The problem is that the first story got all the coverage. The second story probably nobody even heard about. That's why we just tell you. That's why you have to subscribe to windows weekly.

16:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You get the hard-hitting, important information I just read an interview with uh rves, who had a quote from Thomas Jefferson, and this is exactly the type of thing that would get contorted today into something really positive and nice. And it's not exactly that. It's a little more nuanced, right. He says travel makes a person wiser if less happy, right.

16:41
Like in other words, like most people would condense that to like well, you know, you, you travel, you become a worldly person. You, you know, you know more, you're wiser. And he's like no, and, and this is like the more you know, the the less happy you are this is the, the, the corollary being ignorance is bliss yes, yeah, that's right, there you go. Yes, exactly I, I'm, I'm fascinated by this. Anyway, this is though, th though when Thomas Jefferson.

17:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
as you pointed out, richard had to take a boat to get to France. Yeah, and it took months.

17:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And he got sick as a dog. He told Ben Franklin to go in his stead. I'm not doing it again.

17:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He did your turn, ben. I think that it is true, that all that is true. But the other thing that makes you happy after you travel is coming home, doesn't it? It makes you appreciate your home.

17:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's the worst. Um, I hate everything about this place and I hate it back in mexico.

17:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I like it in both places, but I don't want to be here. I appreciate my home.

17:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
When I've traveled and I get back in my own bed, I go yeah it's nice, yeah, but don't you also have that kind of moment where you realize like nothing has changed at all? And then you have that sort of side realization that, like my existence here doesn't matter in the slightest? Oh yeah, well, I have no impact whatsoever on the planet and, like you, come back and you're like you know, you know what?

17:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it's funny because I think about the nihilist. This is great, and this comes up.

18:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A lot is I'm thinking. Right now there's somebody sitting on the champs-Élysées drinking a cup of coffee.

18:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and you know who that person is Freaking Mike Elgin and that guy.

18:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hate him, no.

18:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
On the other hand, his risk of a pigeon pooping on him is much higher than us Good point the only place I ever got pooped on by a pigeon was venice there you go.

18:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Listen, I I could trace my place in mexico right like directly to a social media post he made easily 15 years ago, easily maybe more, where he was in barcelona and it like now you see these every day and you groan, but he literally is like a cup of coffee laptop I got some harmonica and he said this is my office today and I was like screw you, well done yeah, so, yeah, well, that's good.

18:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's why you're living, that's why inspirational it's good, yeah, no, it's good yeah I love mike, by the way oh, we all do I'll understand, I'm screwing around here, yeah um actually this sunday's twit, by the way, we're going to kind of do what you're doing right now, okay, and richard's going to be on it, because you've already done the year-end one, so I thought it'd be fun to have richard on uh, along with paris martineau and, uh, some other wonderful people. I'm I'm forgetting micah is going to be on uh, and it's oh, father robert balancer. So, uh, we're gonna look back at the year for all tech, right, yeah, so that'll be a special episode for sunday, but let's talk about windows.

19:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so, like I said I I do this rare and rear end year end recaps. I also do the rare and recaps I like it, the rare end year cap we're looking from in the rear end mirror, the rear end mirror cap, no wait.

19:48
Anyway, I'm still in the process of writing kind of the main one, which is about what I perceive to be the top articles. I was going to expand them this year anyway. Each of these is a little longer and goes off in these directions anyway, but I've written these kind of side articles. So I was going to do this one yesterday and I ended up doing one about hardware and whatever, and I was going to say we're going to get to it, but I actually do. Yeah, we do get to it. All right, we'll get to that later. Um, so what I have so far and I might be missing a couple, but and these are just my like, subjective, subjectively, this isn't based on hits or views or anything like that um, and I probably should do these in reverse order, but I'm not gonna like a letterman, do the top 10.

20:27
Yeah, it did work out to be 10 by the way, I didn't shoot for 10, that's how many I had um. So the top one was intel. Yeah, I think that's yeah, you know, probably non-debatable um and this is all from a pc perspective, really right.

20:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Mostly, mostly, not always, but yeah, mostly and to be clear it's not like Intel has disappeared, it's just like this does not look good.

20:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The trend is I don't remember A year ago at this time would we have been saying, oh, it's going to be a bad year for Intel.

20:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, a year ago this was going to be the year the, the PC rebounded. First two quarters of this past year they grew right. They were doing great. Pc makers were growing, amd was growing, qualcomm always growing they're humongous. But everything was going great. And then there were warning signs, you know, and then it went. Then you could was. Did anyone else hear a toilet flush? It was got.

21:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It got kind of weird there and um, you know, we all, we all know how the spiral ended up.

21:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, at least so far, so far. Yeah, I think that they end up being an amazing turnaround, right? I mean in the sense that anything is possible, but you're talking about rolling like a d20 and landing it exactly.

21:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So we'll see 20 yeah yeah, landing a 20.

21:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean we'll see, we'll see, um, but you know this followed a decade plus of strategy mistakes, ignoring mobile, the microsoft especially, begging them. You know, um, it also uh follows, uh. This goes back to paul otellini, so I'm going to call it 15 years issue of anti-competitive, basically paying their partners to ignore their competitors and only bundle their chips on their LDUs.

22:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So, rather than compete, you did some naughty things that kept your numbers up while still not competing.

22:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean, if you believe, as the United States does, by law, that companies are people, then this is its version of karma.

22:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's a bad person?

22:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you're a bad person. Yeah, you're a bad person. Um, yeah, so okay, um, the. But if it weren't for intel?

22:33
To me, the biggest thing is this windows and arm stuff, the qualcomm, snapdragon x, uh, microsoft, uh, improving the underlying system and then having it all come together at once out of the blue, um, I was, I I'm writing a series on, kind of the history of windows and arm, which was going to be three and I think now it's going to be four parts, but the, the history just of this past year is interesting to me because as recently as last November, we were like, yeah, no, they said this. They keep saying this is the one you know. We just didn't believe it. We, we had been waiting on the N nuvia based version of their chips for a couple years, um, and I don't know. But then this past year has been a series of indications like this was going to go well. I remember you might you might remember me saying earlier in the year I keep waiting for this moment where something's going to betray the reality of this thing.

23:23
And then they allowed us to go and look at those laptops in New York and we got to see actual running hardware and it was like, oh my God, this is actually looks really good and, uh, you know. And of course, then they launched and we're not going to talk about recall yet but uh, they, we, I started getting their re, uh, review units and and of course, I also bought my own, my own surface laptop and that's my, that's my favorite laptop by far, still to this day. So that's been, you know, I. To me that's great, and for people in this community and when for windows like this is a, this is a, an unqualified win, it's just excellent. So we'll see what the new year brings. We don't know if they're going to be other competitors in the arm space next year, but there will be at some point, obviously, or we think there will be.

24:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, I think I'm okay with windows on arm in the consumer space. I don't think the enterprise is ready for it yet. I haven't seen an enterprise product yet. Oh, interesting.

24:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, I, I understand why you're right and I think I made the case I think it was here on Windows Weekly that the enterprise is not this giant blob. I mean obviously different companies, different things, companies are in different places. But the iPhone I think I used the example that got into the enterprise specifically because C-level executives were like fix this, like this is going to work.

24:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, exactly the iPad and the iPhone were forced on administrators Fix this like this is going to work. Yeah, it's the CEO showing up with an iPad saying I'll be using this. Figure it out so.

24:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think what this does, though, is it brings Windows up to somewhere close to where the Mac is, with the ARM hardware and the reliability, the performance, the battery life, et cetera, et cetera. So the quality, all that stuff, I think there's an audience for that.

25:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean we're not all saved. I'm sure there's plenty of admins that are getting pressure for folks wanting Snapdragon laptops In the field. We're just not seeing the management space as well, mike.

25:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so I mean right In the trenches. I mean, a couple of things are going to matter. One of them is, well, first of all, the management. I think what you're alluding to is they get, they've gotten rid of some classic, or they're phasing out some classic management interfaces and are not bringing them to arm.

25:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, they're never going to arrive.

25:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're never going to arrive and their answer is, well, use this other, newer stuff. And people like, yeah, that doesn't do everything. It's like, well, yep, we're. You know, we're simplifying here, sorry, sorry, um, but you know, and then they're just the people who are in the trenches, the actual employees or workers, whatever, depending on the company. I mean, a lot of companies have these legacy uh lb apps, um, that they created in-house on whatever technology stack, and that stuff may not work at all, or at least not efficiently, maybe, or needs to recompile something, yeah yeah, but uh, newer a lot of the you know, obviously, if it's web-based, if it's newer, a lot of the stuff is just mobile anyway it just works.

26:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, it may not matter, and then dot net's pretty simple, but it has to be compilable and that's not always the case, right, yeah, yeah, so if you're, if you're back on, if you're on core, you're fine, but if you're on the original framework, you're not right, right.

26:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I wouldn't even god, I wouldn't even try that, I don't even I would imagine. I mean it's there, I know it's in there, but yeah, it must be terrible. Um, but the newer stuff is great. I mean and you know, richard covers this more than anybody really, but I mean every. The biggest thing every year with dot net, which is the core version he was referring to, is the performance Double digit performance improvements across the board every year. It's crazy, I mean. So every version is dramatically better than the last, and the last one was pretty damn good.

26:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, so they're in a good space. No coding changes. Just use the new version. Non changes. Just use the new version non-trivial. You're gonna love that over and over exactly yep, yeah, the legacy stuff.

27:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You got to do some. You know they have migration utilities and stuff and it's kind of hit or miss and you know that's nobody's fault. But whatever technology moves on um the other big kind of global actually, there are a couple more that are big global stories um, antitrust right, this is the year antitrust really started to hit back at big tech across the globe, which is fascinating to me. We'll see how that changes in the new year, obviously, but there's, I mean, and it's been a mixed bag for sure. You know you get Epic winning against Google, losing against Apple, basically, or the EU, especially, going after every company basically that is based in the United States is what it feels like. So there's a lot of that going on. I think we let big tech have kind of a pass for too long, and then you know Microsoft was, they weren't part of that group of five or whatever the number was, depending on the year, ever Right, which always annoyed them, and so it's like, are you back in the spotlight now?

28:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
How does it feel? Congratulations, you know. Congrats, you know um, you get an investigation.

28:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You get it speaking of comebacks, you know you're back, baby, good for you. Yeah, uh, yeah, dark satra, you know gonna love that. Um ai, I don't even. We don't have enough time to go through this whole thing, but it is fascinating to me. We're going to talk about co-pilot later in the show. Just co-pilot. Right, dear god, is this thing changed to 12 months? And I'm not talking about icons and a taskbar, I'm talking about.

28:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The big thing you're saying at the beginning of the year is like 2024 we're supposed to be the year that okay, let's go make money with this, I know, and other than getting investment, show me the money it's, it was the year.

28:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let's play whack-a-mole with it and see if anything clicks.

28:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I'm not sure that anything did. It's turned into really the year of hurling stuff at the wall.

28:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah, well, we'll talk about the Copilot stuff, like I said, but for me I don't remember what it was back in, I don't know, august, july, something like that, I wrote this editorial. It was basically like I'm not paying for AI. I will pay for things that make me more productive and whatever tools and things I will pay for Microsoft 365, for example but I'm not paying this other thing. You know that should be in there and it is not fascinating to me, but it is interesting because I think a lot of Microsoft's business customers had the same reaction, which was like look, we get it, we're paying you a lot of money every month, month and everything, and now you want to charge us more for this other stuff. No, no, no, no, um. So I think they're they're starting to scale back, that we'll get into this a little bit more because, uh, it's fascinating and maybe richard might know more than I do about this right now um, about the rationale behind these, some of these changes, especially to microsoft 365, co-pilot.

29:40
But yeah, well, I think I wonder if I you know the this was the play that google could have made this year was to say hey, you know, if you move over to google workspaces, gemini's for free yeah, so they did do that for some groups of customers not business customers that I know of this year, like if you bought a pixel, like you did, you got a year, I believe, or at least I did, you know I assume you did of, uh, google one, two terabyte, whatever the thing's called, where you get all the gemini, whatever that's called a gemini, advanced gemini, whatever it's called, um, so that gives you a chance to kind of play around with that stuff. I've used it almost not at all, you know, I don't.

30:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I don't mean, I just yeah, it primarily is a distraction for me trying to do something and it's trying to introduce itself to me.

30:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There is a lot of. This was the year of the pink and purple animation with the sparkles. It doesn't matter which one you're using, it's like, hey, we're here.

30:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, the unicornification of software, yep.

30:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a good look. It looks especially good in the enterprise and I mentioned, you know, recall. There's so many things that are fascinating about recall to me but, um, it launched with such controversy, with such anger and hatred and fear and an almost demand that Microsoft was going to kill this thing. It's stupid and no one wants it, you know. And uh, and then it came out and I was like yeah, I guess it's fine. It's like I don't know what were we arguing about before.

31:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The thing that's interesting to me is that it's a consumer product only Like this is not how Microsoft does things.

31:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, and I know.

31:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I have to wonder if the enterprise wouldn't have been happier with it actually Just staying that way happier with it actually because, just staying from an administrator well, from an administrator's perspective, a tool that I can use in discovery for harassment and things like this, like it's a big deal right, Like there's a, there is a case for it in the enterprise. So why didn't they do it Right? The best thought I had is because they didn't want to use it themselves.

31:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's amazing, I was going to say, because that would have required a lot more time and they wanted to get something out the door immediately.

31:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and to be clear, the machines that they wanted to run it on were consumer devices.

31:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and this is tied into the co-pilot stuff we're going to talk to later. There's sort of an underlying security issue here where they want to make sure they get that stuff right, especially for businesses. And I just don't think Copilot sorry Recall would have passed that bar for a long, long time. It would have just taken too much work to fold it into the whole system policy and management and so forth. But the way they did it was a little bit reminiscent to me of Windows Phone 7, where they did at that time they were just trying to be Apple. We're going to go up to consumers first. Hey, it worked for them.

32:33
I think ignoring your biggest market is a mistake, but also being antagonistic to that market is an even bigger mistake. And that was the thing they were basically not basically literally saying at the time was we're not even going to let these people turn it off. If an individual has one of your computers and they want to turn this thing on, they can do it. That's their business. And it's like no, actually that's our business. Microsoft Interesting turn of phrase. So I think they've arrived at the place they should have been at. When they announced it, they obviously were rushing it to market. They were not even going to test this thing right until they put it out to the public, because they were trying to justify an upgrade to these new computers that use local AI and made sense. I think that was the original driver and it just sort of yeah.

33:21
Yep, that was that. Everything else kind of fell by the wayside so I don't think I have it in the top 10 here, but one of the other big stories this past year it must be in here somewhere no, do I have it here?

33:30
no, maybe I don't. Uh, you know I do, I'm sorry, it's the microsoft security thing. So you know, we're all. It's all ai, it's all ai, it's oh, what's that? Oh no, it's all security, we're all security, we're all security. So I think that's the shift you can see from first half of the year second half of the year. Yes, we're still doing AI. Yes, super important, we're never going to stop with that. But they're actually looking at the security stuff.

33:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I got to tell you. I mean, I interviewed a lot of Microsoft people and there's almost no conversation that doesn't and bump against a secure initiative all the time, like it's just, it's, it's. I don't know that it's visible to the public so much as it's certainly visible to the Microsoft employees.

34:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you don't want to be the guy that is the cause of a Bloomberg headline involving a fortune 50 company that was hacked because you did something stupid or whatever it is Well.

34:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
and then, and then, a company that came out and said don't worry, we got this yeah right, I mean, that's the thing.

34:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, so security was number nine, but uh, the microsoft security. Um, remember, this was my. I know not you rich, I know you remember, but listeners or whatever, remember that this company was hacked and didn't talk about it a lot and still, by the way, it's not completely disclosed what happened, and that's not the crowd strike hack that you're so well?

34:45
no, this is the microsoft infrastructure hack that we don't don't have the entire story on um. I didn't write about this and I don't think we discussed it on the show, but about a week ago there was a story that came out from amazon. Um, about a year ago, signed a deal to for billions of dollars to they. They were going to adopt Microsoft 365 across their infrastructure for all of their workers in the offices and that's on pause. It's not that it's not happening, but that incident and then CrowdStrike. They were like we need to know more about this and we need to know what you're doing. And uh, they were. They were actually fairly complementary to microsoft. If you find this article, you can read it. But um, the, the guy in charge of amazon operations, was just like look, I that put the that put the brakes on there. I mean, um, we need to make sure that our stuff is safe. So, yeah, I think microsoft has gotten to the point now where they amazon feels fine about it.

35:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But but yeah, I think the other subtext of that to midnight blizzard was it was a nation state. I suspect um government assets were involved and yeah, those folks tend to be very closed mouth. So microsoft's only way was to be very closed mouth with that.

35:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh interesting, okay, yeah, it's not really. We say yeah. We often use the word businesses to describe this part of the business. Microsoft uses the term commercial. It's governments, educational institutions, businesses of all sizes, whatever other organizations.

36:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, when the nation state. The big thing they said about Midnight Blizzard was nation state involvement, which the subtext of that is federal agencies are now involved, because it was a nation state right and they set the terms on a lot of that stuff. So, and you think we haven't heard much in the public you should see a person like me poking at the various teams saying, hey, you want to talk about this like a no, yeah I don't know.

36:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They didn't want to talk about vms out in the world you want to talk about yeah they really don't want to talk about. No, I don't and that to me says they've been.

36:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They've been given instructions from hires up that thou shalt not speak of this Interesting. Now you know there's another side of this, and I've dealt with this, dealing with real classified stuff, where the second stage pass. I don't want to talk about this is please don't talk to me about this anymore. I need to report every time anyone asks me about it. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

37:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right which is.

37:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's a very normal thing when I'm dealing with military government folks. It's like here's how serious we are.

37:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I need to report that you asked me that question. The third step, by the way, is your door gets a knock yeah. Then you start having difficult conversations. You get an interview yeah.

37:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, why are you asking this?

37:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that could definitely be it.

37:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't think they come that heavy into the tech giants for the most part, but I think that the senior level of tech folks are real aware and pass down. Really don't talk about this Right. We got to say the Activision story to me is the greatest non-story of them all. This time last year, my friend, it's like next year's gonna be activision man, it was a non-stop karaoke party.

37:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was gonna be awesome it stopped.

37:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Even being fun teasing you about it. That's how badly this went no, even to this day.

37:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm not happy about it. You know it's still, it's just yep, yep. And this is another example of like mic Microsoft in this case, or in the Xbox org when they talk, they seem to think that they're making progress and things are going great, and then we've done this and this and this and I'm like I don't. I don't know if you think that's what we think, cause that's not how it looks to us, anyway, do you remember this?

38:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Do you remember queen Elizabeth using the term and it's?

38:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
horriblest? Yeah, of course they do.

38:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I guess after the castle burned down and no yeah, after oh, princess diana and I had a dying. Yeah, you know most of the folks I know in gaming 2024 was on.

38:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's horrible right and that okay. So I was just going to say, tied to this were the layoffs, the studio closures yes, um. And then the subscription price hike thing, which is an ongoing issue still to this day. Youtube music, youtube tv just raised youtube tv. When it came out the gate I don't remember how many years ago was 37 a month and it is 82 a month to start now. That's how. That's how big it's, how big it's gotten now.

39:01
It's not their fault, they're not ripping people off. They're getting the same treatment that cable TV networks got, which was that the big content makers are coming and saying oh, did you want the popular Disney channel? Well, you need the 117 other pieces of cruft, and you're going to pay for that too. So I'd like to see something change. I don't know that Google has the power, honestly, to do anything about this. The one advantage that they have, the one advantage that all of these, or most of these services have, is at least you can walk away when you want to. You're not stuck on it like you are with cable. But yeah, subscription price hikes for Game Pass across the board, and then the big one before the Activision games, or before Call of Duty, I guess, started hitting, the service disappeared, they just got rid of it Like they got rid of that day one perk that most people were getting.

39:50
So that's kind of tough. The one thing I don't kind of agree with when it comes to the community is the overall strategy. This is not new, but this year it came to a real head and Microsoft didn't help matters by making an advertisement for TV that and I think a couple of them now where it's like this is an Xbox and this is an Xbox Like one of them was a Sony PlayStation. It's like guys, you're just poking the bear, what are you doing? And that is tied to them not having what I believe to be like ARM-based consoles ready and the hardware platform isn't quite there yet or whatever it is. But we're in a weird holding pattern, like the end of Die Hard 2, and the fear is they're going to run out of gas and crash into the ground. So we'll see what happens there.

40:37
But yeah, I thought this was going to be celebratory, and this year has not been great yeah well, I mean, we've had the usual sets of titles release.

40:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's been an update to World of Warcraft, there's the new Call of Duty, but there's been no new marquee anything. Maybe it was a little optimistic to say that they would, because it takes a year to get your hands around a beast this large, much less to activate some teams, and at the same time they were. Clearly, you know, the bean counters have arrived and squeezed everything.

41:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This probably is not the central issue, but I think one of the issues is that Activision as an organization was never going to allow their games to be on these subscription services. They had a really healthy market of several marquee titles every year or every so often, big, big, big, you know, and they didn't see any reason to change that and they certainly didn't see any reason to architect the games in such a way that it would make it, you know, make it easier to do that. So that might've been part of it. Um, I don't know. But uh, call of duty, the new one seems like it's worked out great. You know, I don't know money-wise, because you never will, they'll never say that, but as far as revenues, whatever, but it's certainly very popular by some metrics, the most popular one they've done, at least by players or whatever.

41:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't want to argue that Microsoft's acquisition spree makes sense in the context of what you just described, that as they started going serious on Game Pass, there was going to be subscriptions for all the. Your subscription is going to cover all these things. They knew they were going to get squeezed in renewals and so they tried to buy as much as possible so that they couldn't. They could try and keep the price under control, and then they didn't anyway, because why not take the money?

42:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, spend all this money not just on activision but these other studios they purchased, and then only sell that stuff on the Xbox. I mean, the math doesn't work, you know, but this is not a chicken-egg thing. They bought those studios knowing that this was where they were going. This is not new. This is the thing I was trying to say earlier. People are like, wait a minute, you're trying to tell me the PC is not an Xbox. This is the thing I was trying to say earlier. I people like, wait a minute, you're trying to tell me like the PC is not an Xbox. It's like, well, you know, I mean, I, I use, I play Xbox pretty exclusively on the PC, actually literally exclusively on the PC. And uh, I'm not saying the PC is an Xbox, so the term is kind of weird, but you know platform, so yeah, sorry um, sorry if that bothers you, I guess I don't know.

43:05
Um, and thank god for uh xbox, because they make windows look a little better by comparison um, I mean xbox itself, didn't you know they?

43:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it's not like they had a bad update or anything like xbox has just been xbox. It was last year that you were really making fun of the launcher, right, like the launcher changed a bunch of times on xbox and not necessarily for the better. It was almost like which in turn version.

43:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Should we use this time? Right, this is a problem they had run into on the Xbox One and actually on the Xbox 360. But I remember in the Xbox One they literally hit a wall where there was nothing they could do to make it run faster. It was as fast as it was ever going to be, so the only thing that was left was to reduce the number of steps it took to get something done. And it's like, guys, it's you failed, like you're.

43:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Just if this is what we're talking about, no, but that core statement there's nothing we can do to go faster means you're wrong.

44:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You just yeah, you guys. So windows 11, um I, I I don't know what to say anymore I, I, I think. I think I could be wrong, but I think richard, coming on the show, coincided with me, kind of saying, hey, I think there were three versions of one drive for some reason, and that situation persisted for a year, yeah, and then they did all the co-pilot moving around the ui and changing what it was and changing the app, but and that's still going on to this day um I, windows is in a tough place. It's been that way for a long time. It's not the center of the company, everyone knows that. But it also doesn't really fit into this world that microsoft is part of now. It didn't fit in. It doesn't fit into cloud competing per se, certainly not in a central way, and it doesn't fit into AI per se, I think the only role that makes any sense at all, other than some kind of niche MPU speed up, I don't know, but you understand that Windows has not figured out how to update itself yet.

45:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Since the change right, since the Locus went to cloud Right, windows has not figured out how to update itself yet since, since the change right, since the focus locus went to cloud right, they tried in windows 10 with the square and the round hole thing.

45:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They just can't.

45:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're trying, but they can't, so you know microsoft you can't think in terms of windows 11 was a plan, because we know it wasn't right. They needed a response to the mac, so they did the thing, but now they're like windows 11, is the the perfect Microsoft product.

45:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a technical problem that they want to solve and they have an idea and it's good, until you the implementation did not work, but it's a good idea. And that problem is we have this legacy software code that is writing all over memory. That's causing security problems. What if we put it in a container? We segregate it from the rest of the OS? We already have this sandboxing occurring with all our modern apps, and then we'll take this legacy thing forward. It'll be good, and that thing was called Windows 10X and, yeah, it didn't work. So what we got was they stripped out the awesome technical bit and they just gave us the Fisher-Price UI part and they called it windows 11. Right, and it was like guys, come on, and they shipped it in a horribly incomplete state. It didn't even have everything they talked about just three months earlier. It took a year for that to happen and I would say it wasn't until this past release, when they did that big architecture change under the covers.

46:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, that was the argument I would call. 24h2 is the first time they've tried to pass a new os as a patch yeah, yeah, well yeah, that's the reality right, like, like the yes and I I yeah, so, but again the.

46:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The problem is I keep talking about this. Now, this has been a recent thing for me, although I think this has been the case for a long time. There's those two sides of the Windows team, for lack of a better term, the architects in the white robes up on Mount Olympus dictating from on high. How things shall work.

46:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There are 15 commandments. They're throwing features at it and they have no idea.

47:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're doing drive-bys and they have no idea what they're doing, and every month they're introducing new features, but they're also introducing problems. We're going to go into the new year with this the file explorer menu that goes off the top of the screen. Guys, I could fix that. I mean, I don't understand a I don't, I will never understand. I don't really even care how it happened, but I don't understand how you can't fix that. We're not talking about an architectural change, we're talking about a menu, right, but they somehow. This is beyond them.

47:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they were going to throw a recall without testing it, but this thing you know, so we know they have feature teams.

47:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So the real question is, do they have an overall like vision team, these things like I don't think they do, yeah, I don't think they do, yeah, I don't think they do. The gabe old or the. You know, these people have all moved on, yeah, but what so?

47:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know what to tell you it's, it's gay ball. No, gay ball used to run the you're gonna use to run it very carefully.

47:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The gay ball gave it all gave old.

48:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We miss them greatly, because otherwise it sounded like they have gay balls and I don't give us I don't know if that's really not saying that I think you're the only one who bought that leo pretty sure nothing wrong with that yeah just come here, I'm sorry I just want to clarify um, the only software company that makes microsoft look good, sonos uh, nice job guys. That was, um, that was good, the worst that you know, somebody with a lot of.

48:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sonos gear.

48:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the thing I remember most about this other than they didn't fire their CEO somehow is I was using an iPhone at the time, so I didn't really run into this problem. I hated the old Sonos app the one that people are nostalgic for still was a piece of crap. It was horrible. So I would just use whatever app I wanted to use, and I use AirPlay and it just works with. The one that people are nostalgic for still was a piece of crap. It was horrible, so I would just use whatever app I wanted to use, and I use AirPlay and it just works with whatever speakers you have. It's fine.

48:50
So when all this broke down, I was like, oh, I should go look at this app. And the first time, well, I was going to say it was beautiful looking, but actually it wasn't, because the first time I tried to run it on the web and on mobile, only half the UI would come up. It wouldn't load properly. And I was like, okay, so this, okay, I can see there might be a problem with this. And then, a couple of days later, I finally got into it and then I was like, okay, actually this is a really nice looking app that does not work in the slightest and didn't have basic music player features. That once again I hate to keep saying this. I could write like change the order of songs in a playlist. You're playing songs right now and you want to move a song up or down or take it out or add a song. That stuff was not there. This is not AI or high-end functionality.

49:35
They shipped this piece of junk. They didn't leave the other one in market. I don't know. It was the stupidest. Anyway, whatever, apparently their new soundbar is pretty good, but I'll never find out because I will never buy anything with the word Sonos on it, ever again. Those guys can go screw themselves.

49:49
I am disgusted by how they handled this. It's gross. It's a remarkable thought. Even Microsoft has more credibility than just responding to things. I mean it's terrible. We talked about security already. I mean just the two big events. I love that. At ignite they referred to the crowd strike thing as the incident that is so beautiful. Um, that to me is the name of like a paperback thriller you buy at the airport because you're out of stuff to read. You're like, oh, maybe this is pretty good, and then you find out it's about computer nerds. Um, it's kind of disappointing. But you're stuck on a flight, um. And then the 10th one is, uh, paskies and PASCIs are sort of like PWAs, in the sense that I feel like they're kind of flying under the radar. And there's all these people that really doubt it's ever going to work or take off or whatever it is. But PASCIs are literally the portable and work across platforms. It's going to explode and even Windows is going to do it.

50:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Does Windows not support Passkeys?

50:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Windows and the Microsoft account, both sort of support. Passkeys is the way I would say it In the shipping version of windows 11 today. There's nothing there. You can do with it. You can. You just get one automatically when you sign in with a Microsoft account. But in the future you'll be able to associate pass keys with that on your computer, move them onto your phone, you know, move them around however you want. So third-party password managers are already doing this. Google is doing it in Chrome and, whatever their system is called, Everyone's doing it. Apple.

51:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Passwords is signed on for this. The biggest problem you've got with passkeys right now is you go to the wrong website, like an Amazon site, and Amazon is going to ask you to set up a passkey. The browser is going to ask you to set up a passkey, your password manager is going to ask you to set up a passkey and, if you're really lucky, windows is going to ask too.

51:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right and there's a missing it's not a missing link, but there's something broken in the chain there, where you do have a pass key and you can't always get to it for some reason, even though you're using that browser, maybe, or that operating system or whatever it is Like. This happens to me a lot, and it happens to me the most with Google accounts, although I have to say I don't know why, but the last week or so I just did it on this computer. On this computer I'm using brave. I brought the browser up and I had to sign into my Google account because I have Gmail and Google calendar set up in there, and it got the passkey that was in brave, that you know was synced across the world or whatever, and I didn't have to do anything. It was great.

52:25
But on a lot of computers people say, okay, yeah, I want to use pasky, and that throws up a qr code. I'm like I can't get a qr code with my computer, idiot. And then you know. So you're like, okay, I'll try my phone and the phone though. And it's like, no, that's not gonna work. And then like, can I just type on my password?

52:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah you.

52:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can type in your password, you freaking jerk, and, by the way, then you're going to need your authenticator app and then you realize, in a way, how ponderous that is, because once you get used to Passkeys, that thing that people were complaining about with 2FA and authenticator apps suddenly is true to me, like now. I'm used to Passkeys and I love when they work, but right now there's still know, it's so. Pasky's got a way way better this year and it was because of companies like dashlane one password, uh bitwarden, uh proton that all implemented. Um, what do you? Uh, portable pasky's, for lack of a better term, right, the ability to use these things everywhere. So once you get that thing into the password manager, it doesn't matter what device you're on. It's there, it's nice. Those definitely. Check out my galaxy s24 ultra review. I guess it was big stuff. Um, I don't know why. Yeah richard.

53:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, we should steal this list for sunday, I think this is a good totally, I've been me. I actually was making notes from it, so I think what I'm gonna do on sunday's twit, which is our year-end recap, and it's not just obviously pc news, yeah, but I think many of these stories will be in there um yeah, I mean divided up month by month.

53:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So we'll have a crowd strike and, uh, the antitrust stuff. This is in there, for sure, world, worldwide, everything and I hear there was an election in November.

54:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know. We'll have crazy talk. Look that up.

54:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, mexico elected a woman president, which was just a beautiful thing for democracy. Yeah, I'd love to see that happen.

54:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What did we do again?

54:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can't remember, was it something different?

54:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're going to pause here. That was a great rundown, by the way, thankul, I really. I mean, it's reminded me what a crappy year this was nice.

54:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I love reminding myself, in case I start feeling good about myself. It's like case, just here's what you did.

54:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's how you spent your time this year to paraphrase thomas jefferson yes, the more you back in the year makes you wiser and feel the more time that goes by, the worse.

54:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is awful. What yeah?

54:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, we will come back, talk about windows and a lot more in just a bit. You're watching windows weekly paul thurot, richard campbell as always, a must watch. This is the last show of the year, uh, and chris capicella doesn't work at microsoft anymore, so there should have gone. Found him anyway. You should have just to say okay, chris, now who knows what he'd say now, now that you don't work there.

55:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't think he can. Yeah, he still talks. I tried to get a special guest for this one, by the way, and it just didn't work.

55:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But maybe she was washing her hair.

55:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, I was going in a completely different direction actually.

55:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's okay. All we really need is Paul Thorat and Richard Campbell. That makes this show. I honestly believe that we have a great year ahead planned for you starting. So what's next week for windows weekly will be a best of. So we've taken some of the stories that you just talked about and actually we've got the clips from those episodes and we'll we'll show you that Kevin King's been working hard on that. Thank you, kevin, for doing that. The following week is New Year's Day, so Christmas Day is the best of New Year's Day. I'm not going to make you guys work, because you'll be hung over like crazy. I'm going to be in pain that day In pain instead of Pennsylvania.

55:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'll be back up on the coast, so I suspect I'll have no power. That's a 50-50 show Wow On the coast. So I suspect I'll have no power.

56:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a 50-50 shot on that. Yeah, wow. Well, we'll just give you a day off. So you've got three weeks after this, you don't have to do a show, and we'll be back January 8th with the next episode, the brand new episode of what.

56:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're still going to do this. Okay, what?

56:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, actually there's some very good news. Finally, you know I've been complaining about advertisers. For some reason they just woke up this week and they've all come in at once. So what, we thought we were going to have to do some cutbacks, to be honest, for the new year, and we don't have to. That's the good news. Also, the club woke up and we have a bunch of new members Welcome. So thanks to new Club Twit members and advertisers returning many of the names you know already. We are very happy to say I will not be working at McDonald's next week.

56:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like a certain healthcare shooter.

56:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, nice. You know what's funny is I. My first job was working at McDonald's and to this day, whenever I see McDonald's with a help wanted sign, I make a note of it in my mind Like, yeah, like.

57:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I am totally qualified for this. I'm ready. I worked at Burger King and I this is beef like McDonald's had nuggets, but no one else said anything like that, and we used to cut everything we had up into nuggets so we had we'd make like fish nuggets, veal nuggets remember these? They make veal sandwiches and then also chicken nuggets out of the. They had a chicken loaf or something. I don't know what the hell it was but did they?

57:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
did they flame broil those burgers to order? Yeah, we used to.

57:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We used to buy them from the company to have them for, like, fourth of july cookouts. Those hamburgers are great. Oh, they're really good like the whopper, yeah, oh now I want a Whopper Junior.

57:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's my favorite.

57:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, those were and I'm sure still are. But yeah, those are legit.

57:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll be right back. No, we got a show to do and I am here for the duration. Our show today, brought to you by a wonderful sponsor who will also be rejoining us in 2025. I'm happy to say US Cloud and us in 2025, I'm happy to say US Cloud, and it's a sponsor you ought to know about. I have to say, when they first came to us and I met with them and I talked to them, I said guys, I've never heard of you. And they said that's why we want to buy some ads, because we are the number one Microsoft Unified Support Replacement.

58:19
But a lot of people, like you, leo, would say who? Us Cloud? I'm going to say it again the number one Microsoft unified support replacement. A global leader, I would say the global leader in third-party Microsoft enterprise support. They are supporting 50 of the Fortune 500. And there's a reason. There are a number of reasons, but the number one reason switching to US cloud could save your business 30 to 50% on a true, comparable replacement for Microsoft unified support. Now I have to say comparable, yeah, it's good, as it's better, it's better, it's faster, it's better. Us cloud supports the entire Microsoft stack 24, seven, 365 days a year. They respond faster than Microsoft and they resolve tickets quicker than Microsoft for clients all around the world.

59:11
And you're going to always talk to a real human, a real human engineer based in the US. And I asked him. I said, well, so what's the deal with your people? Where do you get them? They said, well, it's we recruit and we offer great benefits, great salaries. That's why we have expert level engineers working for us, with an average of 14.9 years experience, and that's for break, fix or DSE, so they're 100% domestic, the best engineers in the business. Your data never leaves the US.

59:42
Oh, there's one other thing Microsoft does not do. Us Cloud offers financially backed SLAs on response time. They guarantee it, and initial ticket responses average under four minutes. And it's nice when you can get somebody on the line smart, competent, can help you when everything's falling apart, that's when you need it can help you. You know when everything's falling apart, that's when you need it. And all of this for less. In 2023, 94% of US Cloud's clients reported saving one-third or more when switching from Microsoft Unified Support to US Cloud. So, from Fortune 500 companies to large health systems, to major financial institutions yes, even federal agencies, major financial institutions, yes, even federal agencies. Us Cloud ensures that vital Microsoft systems are working for over 6 million users globally every single day, and I'm talking big brands like US Cloud supports Caterpillar, they support HP, aflac uses US Cloud, dun Bradstreet Under Armour KeyBank. Even the IT folks at Gartner have chosen US Cloud for their Microsoft support needs. That should tell you something.

01:00:51
We have a great quote from a director of information technology, so shall remain nameless. But boy, I saw this interview and I thought, wow, can we use that? He said. And within an hour, us Cloud responded with, I want to say, four engineers. Not only did they bring the right guys to the call, they brought the cavalry. I just felt like wow, that was amazing. That was unlike anything I had experienced with Microsoft in my eight years of being with Premier.

01:01:17
Yeah, we made the right choice with the US cloud and, of course, fully compliant when it comes to compliance. No one gets it better than US cloud. They're ISO, gdpr, esg compliant. For US cloud, these are more than just regulatory requirements. This is important to the company. There's strategic imperatives that drive operational efficiency, legal compliance, risk management, even corporate reputation. These standards are important to US Cloud because they foster trust and loyalty among their customers and stakeholders. They attract investment. They ensure long-term sustainability and success in a global market. That's why US Cloud's the best.

01:01:58
I came away so impressed. I want you to go right now to uscloudcom. Book a call with them. I think you'll be impressed too. Find out how much you can save and how much better their support is. That's uscloudcom. To book a call today and get faster Microsoft support for less, it's better too. I hope now you know the name US Cloud, you'll remember the name and you'll visit uscloudcom. We thank them so much for supporting the show and we thank you for supporting the show.

01:02:25
If they ask you, you say oh yeah, paul, I saw it on windows weekly, the paul and richard guy. They, they're great. If they say it's good, it's got to be good enough. Sure, nice, yeah, just help us out a little. Those guys, those guys I said on those guys, joe, all right. Hey, I wanted to ask you a question. Yes, that's unrelated to your coming topics, but it is Windows related. Yesterday, steve Gibson, a week ago, steve Gibson had said oh, you know, windows 11 doesn't support TPM 2.0. It requires it. It requires TPM, it requires it. He said, and I'm sorry, vice versa Will not support 1.2. You have to have TPM 2.0. No, well, and then he corrected it last week, or yesterday, I should say. He said okay, technically, microsoft says yes, if you want to use windows 11, you should have tpm2, but it will still. You can still install it right.

01:03:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And all they're saying is, as they've said before, we can't guarantee support if you're using an earlier version yeah, that's right, that's right, they came out with windows 11 saying you need to have tpm2, and then we all pushed on, need to have, and it's like this is strong, I want to have maybe so that's what happened, because steve joined the push a week ago, but yesterday he uh amended it to say well, it turns out, it'll still work.

01:03:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah. Do you have to jump through hoops, though, to install it without tpm2?

01:03:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, no, no okay, so just install. All you got to do is spend 9.99 in the windows 11 field guide and it's all in there, everything you need.

01:04:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Upcom it's not hard, but okay, good, thank you for uh for that.

01:04:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just wanted to uh clarify, appreciate it there's like news happening as we're doing the show, so I put some stuff in. What's the news? Uh, we'll get to it. It's a copilot. Github copilot is free in visual studio code now apparently so and worth every penny. It's worth, yes, well, actually. So I thought I think I told the story last week or whatever that, um, I had used entropic cloud in my case to have it create a c-sharp class that I had created myself manually and it came back with the same code and I was like nice, you know, like it's kind of was a nice proof point but I'm as smart as an AI, I am very exactly I is.

01:04:50
I can hallucinate with the best of them, but they well. I want to use it on my mynet pad project. I want to. You know, maybe I could use it to get over some hump. So this is very interesting to me. I'm definitely going to take a look at this increasingly.

01:05:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I have to say the uh ai is proving to be really. Yeah, I think the pair programmer stuff is um, I think it's good.

01:05:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think it's a good good use of ai he was saying that too.

01:05:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I think he's coming around. He was.

01:05:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, he's a little skeptical do they have ai on windows 2000?

01:05:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't remember um I'm sorry, he's windows 7 now, my friend. Oh, that's right, I'm sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. He is up to date with the latest. Wow, that dirty glass interface. Yeah, I know he does somewhere have a Windows 10.

01:05:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like an animal, yeah, windows. So yeah, well, I almost did this as the first story as a joke, but I realized I just didn't have the energy. Microsoft deprecated a feature in Windows that I'm pretty sure very few people have ever heard of. It's called Suggested Actions.

01:05:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was in the Windows 11 field guide until they deprecated it then I just removed it.

01:06:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nice but very limited feature, very hard to make it kind of come up, but you wouldn't. You would be surprised if you saw it and then wonder how you made it work. But basically, if you type in a phone number and you select it, uh, you'll get a little pop-up that will let you do things with that. So, depending on the apps you have installed on your computer might say something like call this number with skype or whatever, um same thing, dates or times. In that case it would bring up in the old days the mail, a calendar or, I guess, the calendar app. Now it works with the new Outlook app and I guess probably with third-party apps that register for those kinds of things, but it will, you know, make a new meeting for this day or time, that kind of thing. So this has probably been around for about two years. My anticipation was that they were going to expand it with other similar features. They never did, I think me and no one else ever used it, cause I had to write about it for the book. And then they were like okay, apparently this is one guy in Pennsylvania using it, so maybe we just get rid of it, you're right, and so it's been deprecated. They're not going to update it anymore and it will be removed in a future version of windows, probably 25 H two, I would imagine. Okay, the first or the other thing that has happened since we started the show is there's a new build in the insider program, in the dev channel, and this is the channel that's testing their recall, and a copilot plus PC features, right? So if you have an AMD or Intel powered, uh, copilot plus PC, meaning you know, amd Zen five chipset or Intel lunar lake, um, and I would assume, our lake, I guess, right, um, I think, um, you'll, you know, you want to put your computer and ruin it in the insider program. This is a great idea, great idea. You could do that. And so Windows 11, one of the, unless you really need it. You probably don't know about this feature either, but it has live captions with real-time translation Awesome feature. But it only works English primary language and you have a secondary language that you're listening to and it will translate to English. So they're testing, mixing and matching this with multiple languages, meaning that you could be native to German or French or whatever language, and it will do the real time translations for you as well, and there's a whole list of these things, mostly European, but also Asian languages. So this is happening soon. They're testing it now.

01:08:20
On the Insider program, actually that one I think might be Snapdragon exclusive for now, but it's going to come to everybody obviously. Uh, and that's about it. So that's. I think that's the big one, but they're just basically, you know they're, they're building out the recall click to do all that stuff. You know these kind of local npu features, um across snapdragon and then x86. So that happened. And then there was a build, or there were builds both to, I think, devon beta on Monday and nothing major there either. There's there, there's a feature coming in windows 11. That's going to allow you to access the, the one camera everyone has, with two or more apps at the same time. You can enable that, and then this is kind of a debugging mode where you can put a camera in like a basic um mode and turned off most of its features, basically. But nothing.

01:09:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Remember when you thought the copilot plus was going to be resolved in 24h2 no, I don't remember.

01:09:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, I don't remember anything. What do you mean?

01:09:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
uh, well, and much less that. It's a fragmentation of the feature set, like yeah, wasn't after 24h2. Arm is just going to be a fellow citizen alongside all the other processors, and so everything will ship together.

01:09:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Everything that has the word copilot in it is an example of Microsoft skewing the product yet again right. In other words, go back to Windows XP. The first NT version for consumers. It was XP Home, xp Pro, xp Enterprise. You know, office always had these SKUs server, multiple SKUs, et cetera, et cetera.

01:09:53
Copilot has become like another SKU, right, right, another added charge, another set of new features, and it complicates things. Right. Set of new features and it complicates things right. So people who get a computer that has windows 11 home are like, oh, um, I think I might want pro. Like well, why do you, what do you need? Like, what are the missing features? You have to kind of sit there and figure it out. It's like bitlocker management, bitlocker to go as well, hyper v, etc. There's a couple things, right, um, but then copilot plus in this case adds this other layer of hardware accelerated local AI features, like additional features in paint, in photos, in nothing else.

01:10:32
Who knows, I don't know some other things. There's some other ones, but but yeah, it's like it's, it makes it. It turns what should be a simple conversation into kind of a complicated conversation, you know, but yeah, it's only going to get worse. I mean, this is the divide now between the MPU enabled, you know, current sort of in future with the past, you know. And then Intel and AMD. Well, intel, certainly, but I assume AMD are still going to release new chipsets, right, that don't have MPUs.

01:11:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a bizarre world.

01:11:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But there we are. Assume AMD are still going to release new chipsets, right, that don't have MPUs. So, like I, it's it's a bizarre world. But here we are Um, arm, uh, the Qualcomm started, uh, the trial on Monday. It's supposed to go through Friday. I have not heard a single thing since the trial started. I did a writeup, kind of going over the history of this thing. Um of write-up, kind of going over the history of this thing. Um, I don't know that I have any new news here per se, other than I just want to highlight the fact that a lot of people seem to have big opinions about this, like qualcomm's, wrong, or arms, you know, screw, arm, you know whatever, and we just don't know the details of their contracts, right, and so this is something that might come out kind of astonished.

01:11:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This made it to court yeah, me too.

01:11:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, this should have been subtle.

01:11:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're going to learn more about everything because they actually allowed.

01:11:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well so this is that. This is why I'm kind of I'm I'm hoping to see reports about day-to-day trial stuff, because I don't know if they're going to try to redact this or if it's going to be private or how they're going to do it, but things tend to come out, you know, when big companies go to court. There's been disclosures all over the place. This happened to Google with the amount of money that they're paying Apple, for example. That was not supposed to be public information. That came out during that trial, so we'll see. But basically, a jury is going to decide. If Qualcomm is violating arms contracts licenses, decide, uh, if, uh, qualcomm is violating arms contracts licenses, and if they are, then a judge will decide what the penalty is. I suspect it's not going to be destroying every co-pilot plus pc that's ever been made.

01:12:32
I that seems a little extreme to me, but um, we'll see, I would at least be surprised if someone the judge looks at these two and go you need to figure this out, grow up yeah, like it's, it's this kind of dumb this has come up in a couple ways this year, when you think about it, because arm went public sometime in the past year and arm is a company arm holdings that has never made more than a billion dollars in revenue in a quarter yeah, but also, what a 98 profit. No, I know, but it's like it's a billion dollars, but it's cash their designs are used to to make the chips that power 90 some power, the majority of computing devices in the planet yes, and I know, and they're looking at that and saying, hey, hold on a second, what's going on like?

01:13:14
it seems like we should be getting a little bit more of the pie, right. So they, uh, they have. They have a new like vrm, v9 design that has higher licensing fees, etc. They're expanding into other product types, like qualcomm has already done for themselves, right, like iot, car, pc, etc. Um, our qualcomm notably uses the v8 design, but they also don't. They, even though they're by far the biggest licensee. They pay them very little because they make their own stuff. So they use a very little bit of the arm IP and then they go and make their own variations and do their own thing. And in the case of Snapdragon X, obviously they bought a company, but that was doing the same thing. They are not using the higher license fee V9 and may not ever or may not for a long time, but to me they remind me a little bit of Samsung to Android, which it's like we're doing so much of this now. At what point do we just say we don't really need?

01:14:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you anymore.

01:14:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know I don't have the exact numbers off the top of my head, but I want to say in the last quarter, you know, arm Holdings was probably $800, $900 million in revenue and Qualcomm was somewhere between 10 and 12 billion, you know. So like about 10X, right, a little bit more than 10X as far as revenues go. And you know Arm Holdings is like can we just have like 1 billion of that? Or you know something. I mean, you know it seems like you're doing okay, but anyway we'll see what happens. Like I said, we don't know the inner workings of the contract.

01:14:44
They they've both been very well. I will say this RM we're about to find out.

01:14:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If this continues, we are going to find out. It's all going to get disclosed.

01:14:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Qualcomm has said look, we've gone over this in the slightest. And then you talk to Arm Holdings and they're like well, we did have to make a note in our financial earnings that if we lose this case, we're not going to grow as fast as we want to next year, so we're not counting on winning the case. And it's like well, those are two very different outlooks. I guess we'll see.

01:15:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Disclosure's got some very strict rules around it.

01:15:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You have kind of take yes, no I'm not, I, I don't, I'm not saying that means anything, but uh, yeah, so, kev, uh, thank you for screwing up my third new uh show. Uh, new story when this has also happened. Um, but uh, the image creator, yeah, is now um, no, that was the the third of three that have happened since we started. The show was amazing.

01:15:41
That's the nice, that image creator is now using deli three, or the latest version, I guess, because I think they were already using deli three, um, and it will work now through um being the search engine and also in the uh sidebar of the Microsoft edge browser. So I actually I use designer for the images I do on the site I. I'm actually really happy with it. So there you go. I'm like an edge user. Now I've turned into a dork. I don't know what's going on. Okay, I don't know how many people know about this. I was going to kind of do this as an app pick, but the truth is I'm not sure it deserves it. So I write in Markdown. I love Markdown. I struggle to find a Markdown app that I love, especially on windows. If I was using a Mac, this would not be a problem. Those a lot of apps are great, including one called IA writer, which I paid for. Ia writer, yes, um. On windows it's a lot like arc. It's not quite as good as it is on the Mac. You can tell it was designed for the Mac. It doesn't quite run as fast, it's not the same, and they just announced a new major release and you can sign up to get on the beta, which they described as a public beta. It's actually kind of a private beta because you got to join a wait list, so I actually got in super excited, but it's still kind of slow. It's not quite there. So maybe it will get even better, but it is better than it was, but it's still not quite there. So in part of it might be I don't think it's native on ARM, so maybe that's part of the deal. I got to start testing this on a few different computers but I was thinking this was going to screw up my end of year app list, but I think I'm going to stay where I am, so it's out anyway.

01:17:18
Um, you may have seen a story about Chrome OS adding something called safety reset. Um, this is a way you can non-destructively reset the system. In other words, you're not deleting any of your actual data, and sometimes you have to do this. Right, we do this in windows. Um, the way that works in Chrome OS now is they have a feature called power wash which resets the whole thing. You got to sign in again. You know, come it's not. It's a little easier to come back on Chrome OS cause everything you know. They'll kind of come back, yep, um, but this thing is not destructive, happens in line, and just just just so if you don't know.

01:17:55
Speaking of features, I think a lot of people don't know about um, windows has a feature that does this right. So I think most people are familiar with Reset this PC, which began its life as Reset this PC and Refresh this PC, which were two different features. Now it all goes through Reset this PC, but you can still do a refresh where you basically reinstall the operating system but keep your data and your store apps, and that's actually all you can do is you have to reinstall the desktop apps. But there's a new feature I think it's in 20 I don't know if it was 24h2 to begin with or if they'd put it in just before then but there's also a way to reset the system using windows update, which, so you basically you download a new version of the same version of windows you're using now and it reinstalls and it also can clear up a lot of problems. So we do have things in Windows that work pretty well for this kind of thing, if you care.

01:18:48
I didn't have this in my top 10 list for the year, but Vision Pro kind of came and it didn't. You know whatever, microsoft laid off about a thousand people in their Windows Mixed Reality team, hololens, kind of sitting there on life support. You can hear that. You know beep sound. You know, whatever We'll see what happens. They have they have a set of customers.

01:19:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I know, I know they're not going to sell any new projects. They're keeping the existing hardware for the existing customers, because the stuff does wear out thank you.

01:19:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, but apparently google is looking at this market like, yeah, we got to get a part of that and uh, so they announced android xr, which I assume. I guess they probably is competing with MetaQuest or something. But you know, apple, meta, google, now all these companies what they really want is to come up with glasses at some point. So the only interesting thing to me about Android XR, other than the obvious references to Google glasses and Robert Scogglebull taking a shower, dear God, don't ever put that in my head.

01:19:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was a lot. You got a long memory, my friend well come on, have you seen this?

01:19:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
video you can't. It just ruins everything. I can't even have normal relationships anymore so um, didn't he actually this?

01:19:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
didn't? Didn't the google guys actually comment on that too, like yes they made it all the way to the ceo, this time with no scoble, you know yeah we've been de-scobled, um.

01:20:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So anyway, I found it interesting. They're going to market with samsung, they're going to have you know big stupid vr headset like you would, but they're already talking about the glasses. They're testing glasses, they're courting developers, they're going to be glasses like. This is. They're like. We think now we're in the point where we get to, we can get to mark with something that makes sense, and so you'll look like kind of like a like. You know, like the bleedsinger collective souls got the big thick red. You know black glasses, or I guess roy arbison or uh, we'll all get used to that.

01:20:31
We'll all look like nerds, but we'll all be nerds and you know the whole thought that you know it ruins my biggest tear now, which is like a four eyes, you know like now everyone's gonna be four eyes.

01:20:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have artificial intelligence in these.

01:20:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, now I can be all mad like you don't even see those glasses.

01:20:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're just wearing them, so you could have ai.

01:20:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're such a jerk. I have an actual stigmatism no, so um, anyway they're they're heading there.

01:20:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's cool, I mean and, to be honest, to be fair, vision pro production was halted because they sold all the vision pros they wanted to sell. I mean sold half a million.

01:21:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're not yeah. They got to a place where it's like, are you going to do another run?

01:21:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's like, yeah, they couldn't make more because they bought all the lend, all the screens sony was capable of making I appreciate, leo, that you're an apple. I'm defending them, but I yeah, well, it's just that there was kind of this sense of, oh, it's a failure because they're not. Oh, it wasn't a failure. They did exactly what they wanted and the next generation they're going to do it. I mean, whether it's the right. I'm looking, I'm a vision.

01:21:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The next generation is an interesting thought, because you just got these people spend 3 500 bucks.

01:21:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what we say about hololens 3, though, but I yeah for apple. To me this was got the money to pursue it was, but it was a statement of intent right, they had a the money to keep going on cars. You know they could have done all kinds of things. But I, when you look at what they say, okay, we are going to do this or no, we're not going to do this. I think that was part of the, the rationale there.

01:21:57
Oh, that's interesting, I mean I we'll see, we'll see yeah, I mean my head's already big enough, I don't need anything else weighing it down, but you know.

01:22:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's my attitude.

01:22:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't want to wear that thing. No, yeah, I'm like a baby. I can't keep my head, like you know, like I'm all over the place, you know.

01:22:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I think that I think I guess our consensus on Mac break weekly is it was a developer product, but Apple has no genetic material that allows it to release a developer product. That's right they can only release product products, so they did release it as a product, but really they're they're seeding in a category in a long-term play that they are planning to put multiple billions of dollars in.

01:22:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, so you would probably be talking about the next one, right like?

01:22:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the real thing here is unfortunately it's probably a couple years off.

01:22:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If it was a hit, they'd be finding a way to make more it wasn't a hit, but they couldn't sell more than 500 000 period that's because that was a production.

01:22:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what sony said.

01:22:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sony said we only can make this sony could also make more okay, but we don't follow Apple closely enough to understand the weirdness of this company, so like one of the things I was reminded of.

01:23:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I mean like I have to remind myself of this. They're weird.

01:23:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So there was a headline. You'll be all over this. It was like Apple is going to make another magic mouse, right. Yes, so I'm like oh okay, that name's familiar to me. I don't remember when it came out or how old it is. I thought it might be the one where you plug it in on the bottom. It is and it is. That is what it is. Yes, this thing is several years old. They've never updated it. It's like 10 years old.

01:23:43
It's the new one, according to Mark Gur do this with displays too. They put out it. They did it with the mac mini. They put a product out, it sits there in the market forever. Eventually someone's like hey, do you think they'll ever update this thing? What's going on? And then, like a million years go by and then one day all of a sudden like hey, like hey, v2. You know so, like that's that's exactly it. That is uniquely Apple Most companies don't do that.

01:24:06
The butterfly keyboard for years. Oh, belligerently, yeah, insisting Belligerently that this was exactly the right thing to do. And they finally-. What I want is something that literally removes your fingerprints as you type and is so painful that your fingers are bleeding and you're crying but you have to get through the article.

01:24:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everybody knew that this was awful, but Apple and maybe Apple.

01:24:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's crazy, but you had to know. They knew right, it's the DNA problem it really is.

01:24:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Their DNA is never apologize, never surrender.

01:24:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What was the point? It's slightly less painful than typing on glass. It's like in Die Hard where the guy's walking on broken glass. You know, like that's make that a keyboard did you make that a keyboard to some degree.

01:24:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A lot of this was johnny ive, to be honest, and now he's gone, and also but steve jobs pushing this to the the whole thinness, above all else, right, right, that kind of thing which is why we're getting a slim iphone next year? Fantastic yeah anyway, uh, just Anyway, just. I'm not the guy to defend Vision Pro, because I've said from day one this is a terrible product.

01:25:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think you've done a wonderful job of defending Apple and Vision Pro.

01:25:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I'm not convinced that Apple's giving up on Vision Pro? I guess no, I don't think that.

01:25:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, I didn't mean to say that at all.

01:25:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They never tell us. They just suddenly, we won't know, there'll us. They just suddenly, we won't know, there'll just be 21 more thing. Yeah, no, I bet. Finally, black magic just released a camera they developed with apple that's designed for shooting content. For vision pro it's 30 000, yeah, so it goes with the vision.

01:25:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have it on layaway.

01:25:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's at walmart um but it may be the kind of a critical turning point because there hasn't been that much use for the vision for a half a million devices.

01:25:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're going to make a dedicated camera well, that's what I mean.

01:25:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean there's. Well, I mean that, but like you just set the market.

01:25:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That market is rather small, but they spend money right maybe, yeah, but I don't.

01:25:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that this is all really an investment in the future. I don't think the Vision Pro, as it stands, is intended to be.

01:26:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it's a dare to see what people will buy. The fact that Mark Zuckerberg doesn't make it makes it interesting.

01:26:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't want to wear it. I mean, I'm with you, Paul. Who wants to put that on their head.

01:26:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I want that thing, and then my CPAP at the same time. And then like noise canceling headphones and it pap at the same time, and then like noise, canceling headphones and it'll just be like a hyper chamber.

01:26:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm like the elephant man now. I honestly uh, I don't. I. I have said at day one no one wants to strap a computer on their face. I don't know if apple knows that or not, but I think I still believe that? Well, they're obviously shooting for the glasses right there, once you get to something lighter weight, exactly, yeah, with augmented reality, not vr, so you're not isolated.

01:26:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But one day we're going to be crapping on glasses because they'll have inserts for your contact lenses, and then yeah, uh, you know whatever the.

01:26:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it going to be in my lifetime?

01:27:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
no, but someday well, you know, facebook meta showed off the orion and now are the computers in a box. You know, off your face like that. That was a good move on their part but that's also just like.

01:27:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, frankly, google, sandra, guys, I don't know about your eyesight, but future if I can read like a menu at a restaurant, I'm doing grid, I don't. The rest of it is just gravy I could.

01:27:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know whatever you got your nokia phone for that you know you're sitting there. You're like I asked my wife.

01:27:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is really past her head like four feet away. So I gotta read it, yeah I really.

01:27:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You always know when you're in a restaurant with old folks, because everybody's got their phones out the word.

01:27:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it's you go like when you're, when you're in your 30s or 40s, you start using the light on your camera.

01:27:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:27:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
When you're really old. You take a picture and then you zoom it in, Zoom it Exactly.

01:27:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There are degrees. I got to stay on the early bird special. I definitely like augmented reality. To read menus Like that makes perfect sense, yeah.

01:27:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I will wear this thing as long as I can read the menu Image to text right.

01:28:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And have it, just make it text.

01:28:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, that's good. Well, now throw the ai in. So you just hold the menu up and then the software says you want the fish no, don't even say that.

01:28:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just yes, it says what you want, you just say not to get off on a weird tangent, but the ios 18.2 has the visual intelligence thing in the camera. Have you tried this?

01:28:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, it's actually. It's really good. It's interesting. It's kind of like google.

01:28:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just pointed to stuff in my apartment.

01:28:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like you want to buy another one of those and like, maybe, like it's like it's pretty good now for Amazon If I, if I want to order something or whatever, yeah, I mean that's, that's, that's that's going to hit.

01:28:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's a good one. They've gotten dumped on a lot for whatever Apple intelligence. But I was looking at that this morning walking around the house and I was like, oh my God, yeah, I mean, it's pretty accurate Honey?

01:28:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
why are you taking pictures of the furniture?

01:28:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Why are you taking pictures of other women. I'm looking for something like this, but less expensive. Yeah, what a newer model. Yeah, a newer model of this Quieter.

01:29:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love it on Amazon when you go to buy something that's Apple Intelligence 18.3.

01:29:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Don't buy this. There's a newer model. Yes, yes, yes, exactly.

01:29:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's take a break before we get in any more trouble with our spouses. Paul Theriot, that's Paul Theriot and that's Richard Campbell, not me. I'm me. I'm Leo Laporte and you're watching Windows Weekly. We are really glad you're here.

01:29:24
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01:32:21
Unless you want to talk more about Apple, because I'm ready, yeah, so iPad. No, or how about that Samsung Galaxy S24? No.

01:32:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm kidding what's happening.

01:32:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, let's stay with that. Let's stay with Microsoft. This is amazing.

01:32:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So Ignite was last month, but by my count what's that?

01:32:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And we didn't go, oh, we didn't go.

01:32:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Ignite was last month, but by my count was it and we didn't go. Oh, we didn't go.

01:32:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you didn't go.

01:32:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe you should have gone. There was a lot of announcements, approximately 11,000 of them. I have spent an unbelievable amount of time watching videos from Ignite, including some developer-oriented videos, interestingly. But in the last week there have been a couple of curious announcements about Copilot for commercial customers and Microsoft 365 Copilot. As it turns out, these things are commingled. So last January Microsoft announced that some PCs that's how they worded it were going to start having a new Copilot key on their keyboards, going to start having a new copilot key on their keyboards in the seven or whatever. There's 11 months since then. I every single computer I've reviewed is that a freaking copilot key and I install power toys now on every computer I use so I can use power toys keyboard remapper to turn that thing off, because it makes me insane. I hit that by mistake all the time it's crazy what?

01:33:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
do you just disable it entirely? Or do you say I just make it, do nothing?

01:33:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
exactly right, or it, by the way? So, uh, keyboard remapper and power toys is actually a little hard to use for me. Maybe it's just a user error, so if I have to, I'll have it. Uh, used be the left arrow key, right, right. That's the thing I'm hitting, or?

01:33:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the thing I mean to hit yeah, same, same effect.

01:33:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, so I turn it off. So there was a a curious little bit of news last week. Microsoft I had to read this one five or six times to be sure I was seeing this correctly. Microsoft told customers commercial customers that the copilot key on PCs is designed to invoke copilot in Windows. However, since then we have changed the way Copilot works in Windows and we have separated it from Copilot for commercial customers. That stuff's all going under Microsoft 365.

01:34:33
So the new Copilot app that came out a couple of weeks ago in testing, which is the native app, which is really just a web app with a native wrapper, but whatever only works with Microsoft accounts. It doesn't work with enter ID accounts, which is kind of confusing to people. It's like before you could sign in with a commercial account and you could access your commercial stuff through that app. Now what they're saying to businesses is, because of this change, we're telling you now you should remap that key to not load that app. We're recommending you load the Microsoft 365 app which sounds stupid, but it turns out there's a reason for that or just turn it off the few companies that were actually using it, I guess and then they recommend uninstalling that app, the one that comes with Windows, and just using the Microsoft 365 app, which apparently has some copilot stuff in it, or you could just go to the web, right? So I was like hold on a second. It's like 10, 11 months after you announced this thing. These computers are everywhere now, and now you're telling businesses-.

01:35:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
On the consumer side I can say it's not huge in the enterprise but-.

01:35:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, oh, fair enough. Okay, so it turns out that there's a an enterprise data protection feature that's part of microsoft 365 that they're going to uh implement across certain interfaces. One of those will be the microsoft 365 app. Uh, it will not be the new copilot app. So they're doing this kind of segregation between the um, consumer and commercial world.

01:36:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It needs some pretty serious promises to M365 users when it comes to all the co-pilots, right.

01:36:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, this is the fear, right? I mean, it's one thing if, like I don't know recall, takes a picture of my credit card or something, but it's another thing entirely if co-pilot blots out your private information from your company publicly, yeah well it's specifically what Microsoft said.

01:36:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like if you use our enterprise co-pilots, that will never happen, Right. In fact, we will indemnify you If any of it does ever appear and you get into a situation. We're going to cover the legal costs on that, right Like they've made a pretty big bet, and then co-pilot key.

01:36:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So if you're an admin in a commercial Microsoft 365 organization, go to the message center today and you will see two new messages in there related to this and that Microsoft 365 app which, if you use Windows 11, you've seen it it's pre-installed.

01:36:59
It looks kind of like a Fisher-Price front end. It was like Windows 11, not feature complete or didn't work the way you would expect it to work in the beginning. So it has links to, you know, word, excel, powerpoint, whatever but when you opened apps from I'm sorry, if you open documents from that app, they would open in the web app, even if you had Office installed in your computer. It's like what? So actually that's been fixed, by the way, but you know. But from the beginning it was kind of a strange app, kind of Fisher Pricey, turns out, one of the 11,000 things they announced at Ignite was that app is going to be renamed and rebranded as the Microsoft 365 Copilot app and Copilot experience is going to be there in the side rail just alongside the other apps, and this will be the one protected by enterprise data protection and it's got a new icon and so you know, if you're familiar now, it's kind of like a circle, like a purple circle.

01:37:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's turning into the co-pilot icon, but it says m365 at the bottom right yeah, well, so just out of curiosity, because this machine is a domain, is that is an aad joined machine with m365 and so forth. And I haven't run the 365 admin app in ages. So I just click, you know, I cut the windows key because I don't have a copilot key and type in 365 and there's the 365 app. This would normally be my administrative tool, right?

01:38:18
okay, there you go yes, right, actually, yes, yes, yes ran it and it's now popped up and says it just says microsoft copilot, not 365. Interesting. And says pin copilot for quick and easy access. Use copilot in the apps you use every day by pinning it to m365, outlook and teams. And then you have a choice between ask me later, do not pin, or pin and continue I like that you get to opt out of that.

01:38:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So that's fascinating for two reasons One, it's treating you like an imbecile, which I think is hilarious. But two, the reason they're doing that, I think, is because most business users, especially IT admins, if they ever launch that thing, would be like oh, I don't want to run this, and they're saying hold on a second, hold on, this is going to be it. So they're actually just, I guess, like the stuff that used to be in the co-pilot app in windows 11 or on the web will will now be in that app alongside your other Microsoft three 65 stuff. Like I said, if you click on one of the app icons on the side, or if you open a document and you have office installed, it will actually now open in the right app, which is how it should have always worked.

01:39:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm kind of surprised they're asking me, though they should. They're asking you. Yeah, why are they asking me like? It makes me concerned that they're asking like so this should just be an update to outlook so, if you go, this is tied to the, the previous story.

01:39:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So if you go to the message center and you look at, there's two messages, because one of the other one is related to something called microsoft 365 co-pilot chat, I think is the name of it. Is that right? It's like the chat interface. Um, that too is being integrated. This is like the chat that's grounded in information from the web and your data, you know, inside the company, you know whatever like that interface is going in there as well. So this is like now, the new front end for I don't know whatever, the copilot stuff. And so, if I like, tied to the I will not pay for AI thing, that Microsoft's customers coming back and saying, hey, hold on, what are you, what are you doing here? I my understanding is there's going to be a new baseline set of functionality that all customers will be able to access. There'll be co-pilot functions in Word, for example, that you'll be able to get, even though you don't pay for it. Extra. You'll run out of credits or tokens or whatever the term is if you use it too much, and then they'll ask you to pay, but some of this stuff will be free. But well, you're already paying for it. You know what I mean. Some of it will be part of the thing you're already paying for.

01:40:48
I think this is them kind of adjusting the mix, if you will, which brings up a weird Steve Ballmer memory when he was talking about windows eight one, and it was a slightly different blend. He was talking about coffee. He's like we came up with this coffee and it was a little too strong, and now we're going to make a slightly different blend and that blend is actually going to have a start menu in it. Right, that was the way he described it. It was weird. Anyway, I think that's what they're. They're making the same adjustment, I think, here with Copilot. Copilot we've talked about this a lot. There are too many products named co-pilot. Last year there was 100, I don't remember the number 117, 170, whatever you know of these things Not that we're public.

01:41:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We knew there was a bunch around. There's only maybe a dozen that became public.

01:41:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But now there are features that are co-pilot. Like it's getting a little weird so I don't use you know, I don't use Word or Excel or that stuff with Copilot and I don't know what that looks like but there were now dozens of features that are just Copilot features that are in these apps and it's like yikes.

01:41:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So, yeah, I did finally get to the message center, because I can't get to the message center without agreeing to either pin or not.

01:41:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I've gone on the web.

01:41:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No messages for you.

01:42:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm very afraid to click that pin and continue but I wouldn't surprise me if it knocked me off the show in the process. Right like this feels like something that's going to break everything. Yep, so what is that? Oh, ui, changes to the m365 app.

01:42:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this, this is not.

01:42:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know they're disguising a. You have to do this or you won't know what happens as a choice.

01:42:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean you want to keep up to date with your organization, right? I mean we're not holding a gun to your head With no sense of consequence.

01:42:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, what will happen if I actually click on this Like I don't even know? No one knows. Yeah.

01:42:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this is not. So. The change isn't happening, isn't going to roll out till January.

01:42:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So it's not happening right now, but I think what they want to do is get you set up with this thing. So this like well, the app. Again, I'm deeply concerned that they're asking me to agree and not just rolling it out as an update, right, like what is this?

01:42:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
well, I mean, as an admin, you should be able to go in and determine whether or not you even see that right, like I think that's a, that's is or is going to be a, an option yeah, this is not really dealing like a like a admin approach to it either.

01:43:04
This is like there's some kind of legal thing I'm not telling you here, but just agree with me so, like everyone else listening to this show, the first thing I do every morning after I use the bathroom is is load the microsoft 365 message center and I see what's going on.

01:43:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's not true. First you open your laptop and see if it self starts right place then, you get the giggles. Right, that's the first thing, that's really the first, yeah anyway, I happen to see this and I was like.

01:43:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was like what's happening? I had to go back and watch the keynote. So rajesh, during his segment, blew through this in like two seconds. But he had a picture of the app. He had a picture of the icon. He's like it's happening in the next few months and, uh, this week, today or or yesterday, they put a message or two messages and they're saying yeah, it'll be mid-January so buckle up.

01:43:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This was you remember. They also talked about sort of this like wave two of co-pilot. Yeah, that's what this really is right.

01:43:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, it almost feels like wave three. You know Like it's.

01:43:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, because what was wave two?

01:44:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like they said there was going to be some things and we never really felt like it was anything. Yeah right, that's a good point. I I always I took it to mean the agent based stuff, but actually that in some ways hasn't really even hasn't really happened.

01:44:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's more wave three, right, that's the now talk.

01:44:11
Okay, yeah, part of yeah but I think that's this, this realignment, but I I mean I think you're what you bang squarely into is there's a big risk here for them with the, because inside of the, on the admin side of things, we're having a problem with users using their personal LLMs, their chat GPTs and so forth at the office, and so the answer has not been to try and block it all. It's virtually impossible. It's to give them a path. It's fine. If you want to use this, please use this one. It protects the company. And then Microsoft made it hard for us to use right the fact that the copilot key would go to the non-secure version of a copilot that the copilot key would go to the non-secure version of copilot.

01:44:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I feel like there's a tiny percentage of businesses that rolled out and managed copilot to any degree whatsoever. But because some of them did, they had to kind of deal with this in a way Like if they just come to market like this from the beginning would have been a different story, but now they just look spastic again. You know they moved the copilot icon three times. They changed, you know they. They made it different things. It was a sidebar, resizable sidebar window. There was an app that isn't out, you know, and now they're doing it again. Are you kidding me? Like you couldn't make this up. They look like they have no idea what they're doing because I think they have no idea what they're doing.

01:45:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Satch has also bifurcated the AI story with having Suleiman running the consumer side of things.

01:45:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like now.

01:45:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm starting to wonder if that's what we're actually seeing here, yeah, so now we're going to see the difference between yeah.

01:45:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's a good point. We get two different groups working.

01:45:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it sad when your software doesn't fit the org chart?

01:45:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I think your software is fitting the org chart and that's why it's weird. That's why it's weird that's why it's weird. This is conway's law in action. Oh, you built two totally separate ai teams, one for consumer and one for enterprise, not recognizing that a lot of consumers also work in enterprises. Gee, I wonder what's going to happen. Yep, isn't that interesting.

01:46:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm not only an enterprise employee, I'm also a consumer this is just the only thing I can equate this to is there's a feature in Word that started only on the web that allowed you to do. You could upload a video or an audio and make a transcription, which is just very common. But at the time it was not very usual and my wife and I either one of us would run out of it. There was some invisible system of credits. So we would go to each other and say, hey, could you do this for me? And if that didn't work, I would load up my commercial account and do it from there. You know, but like that's what people who use Copilot are going to start doing. They're going to be like oh, I guess I ran out of my tokens on my whatever accounts. Now I'm going to go over to my work account or my whatever it is and like, just keep you know. Like it's like where can I? Just? I just want to get this thing done.

01:46:53
I'm trying to make a funny picture of tim cook. Why won't anything? Let me do that. You know that kind of thing. So I don't know.

01:47:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's just, at least they're entertaining it's interesting, but yeah, I know it's. This was probably a non-trivial crisis internally. Oh, my god you've got early adopters who've been working hard to trying to deal with this issue of not using insecure LLMs, and Microsoft gave them a path to use it. That the obvious path, that key was a problem Like that's pretty awesome.

01:47:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know it's perfect.

01:47:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's, just it's perfect. Yeah.

01:47:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You couldn't. If you wrote this script, someone would say nope. But you also know no company is that dumb?

01:47:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You have presented me with the perfect case for why there's not a Dell Latitude with a copilot key. Yeah Right, like that's why it's all. It's just purely consumer hardware so far. It's like how do I advise an administrator about is it time to start buying these machines? It's like how do I advise administrators about is it time to start buying these machines? It's like now, if they haven't made a latitude, it's for a reason, cause the guys who work on latitude are very careful about how enterprises work and that would be a linchpin on it.

01:48:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I feel like I I mean, I think there are HP and probably yeah, like the um, I don't have it here, but the the latest X one, carbon, has a co-pilot key.

01:48:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah that I don't have it here, but the the latest x1 carbon has a co-pilot key. Yeah, that's not really an interesting device either we all have that cousin.

01:48:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're not super proud of you know, the copilot is like that, it's just it's the same.

01:48:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Here's my daughter.

01:48:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
She's a failure, but now now I'm confronted with a you know the, the administrator, who's got a thousand machines to bring in. They're all gonna have copilot keys on it, and installing power toys and configuring each one of them is not on the radar. Like that's not the thing I can do. It needs to be a policy that's the stupidest thing in the world.

01:48:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean they're, I'm sure there are no. Well, so I should say, first of all, you're going to be able to do this from policy. That that's you would hope. Yeah, no, they've said this. No, they have said this, um, but yes, it's, I don't remember. I think if you look this up, the uh, the co-pilot key maps to function key 22 or 23. It's like it's not, it's not on the typical keyboard, you know. So it's kind of a weird one but do you have this key?

01:49:05
I do not know it's like I've never seen a number that high.

01:49:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's uh, that's a curious one. That's on my second row of functions, yeah all right, let's take, we're gonna.

01:49:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to talk about ai, because you know that's my favorite subject, right after vision pro. But uh, I want to take a little break here, if you don't mind. And just you insist, people, that this is windows weekly. And that guy right there is paul thorat. He's in the middle if you watch this if there should be a firing squad.

01:49:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm not saying there will be one, but if there is one, one in the middle and then the guy on the right is richard campbell, run as radiocom.

01:49:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we're so glad you're winners and dozers, all right. Uh, that was just a little pause so we can, if we, if we feel like it, stick an ad in, and I've stuck in, it does feel that way, I'm sure, but we do direct ad insertion. I don't know, I could just you know what. I'll put one of my own ads in.

01:50:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Antifreeze isn't permanent, it wears out. So every fall my baby here gets a fresh feel of presto and antifreeze my baby here.

01:50:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There is a conspiracy theory that we insert ads like that to compel people to join the club, so they get ad free versions of the shows you know if their ads are bad enough, if their subscriptions go up, people will pay.

01:50:38
Uh, no, we don't do that. We just, you know, look at, we're trying to squeeze every penny we can out of this sad sack. A penny at this point, it's a penny. No, you know what? Uh, this was a good week. Weirdly enough, all the advertisers that said or never didn't. They ghosted us basically for a month, finally just kind of woke up and said oh wait a minute, maybe year budgets, yeah we got to spend this money.

01:51:04
Don't have any clear answers here. Yeah, I don't know what it is. I don't understand business, I really don't. But the good news is we will be back next year.

01:51:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Keeps the lights on these lights.

01:51:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know they're not cheap. Let me tell you, Keep those lights on. All, right on, we go with Windows Weekly AI, the topic for the next segment, yeah just quick, because most of this is not particularly Microsoft-related.

01:51:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
but Grammarly, the AI writing assistant, I hate to hate you use it anyway though don't you? Yeah, well, I've been using something called Language Tool for the past few months, which I actually like quite a bit. I find my relationship with Grammarly is. It annoys me, and then I turn it off and it's kind of like a yipping dog.

01:51:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, I've definitely had the experience of it. You're not happy with the sentence? Okay, show me your new version of it. It's you're not happy with the sentence? Okay, show me your new version. You show me the new version. Goes and it says I'm not happy with this one either. It's like okay, well, show me that version. That's the old one. What are?

01:51:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you doing I, I've, I've had it switch. It's like okay, I'll, I accept it. Then it goes. It says well, what about the thing? It's like, that's the thing I had originally and switch it back. It's nagging me about this. Like I, I'm not changing it.

01:52:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, you know the idea. That would understand that you're writing in different styles different times. Now let's face it the real reason you use Grammarly is to get a weekly affirmation email. It said, boy, you read a lot.

01:52:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually there's all sorts of good stuff. You used the passive voice 16 times. Yeah, Stuff like that.

01:52:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I would say you're passive, aggressive, but you just pass you just pass. Yeah, so they're buying a company called Coda I've never heard of, but Coda makes an app called Coda docs, which is just like notion.

01:52:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And they've created something called this story.

01:52:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just like something else, cause they've created a, an AI assistant, so they're going to. They basically merge. So the CEO of Coda is going to be is going to become the CEO of Grammarly, and they'll keep doing the product. Each of them will keep doing. Well, the one company will keep doing all the products they have been doing, but almost like a reverse takeover.

01:53:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's interesting.

01:53:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's kind of weird. Except maybe they said maybe the CEO of Grammarly said I'm tired.

01:53:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Apparently those guys are buddies and they know each other and he's cool with it. But of course you would say that I don't know.

01:53:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's interesting. There are many ways to solve this problem, and some of them are involving checks with two commas in them. Yeah, I think it was a. You know, stepping down is real easy when I hand you a check.

01:53:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was imagining it was like kind of a rock paper scissor thing.

01:53:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But yeah, that would be another how about? You could be the CEO or the giant pile of money.

01:53:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, he's still on the board. Still, he's still on the board.

01:53:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, okay, I wasn't sure about that part of it, but yeah, so that's interesting. I think, if you haven't looked at these things, google just announced something called Veo, or I guess it's Veo, veo is pretty amazing, Holy moly, these are all amazing.

01:53:57
Imogen 3, which has been around for a while, but they've updated it, and these are their models for creating videos and images respectively. And then they have these tools on the web and Google Labs that let you use this stuff. These are really nice looking, actually. These are really good. These are really nice looking, Actually. These are really good. Um, they also announced that an app called whisk um, with a, an H like whisk. Whisk um, which looks like a consumer product to me. Um, also in Google labs for now, but uh, which is a way you can uh, give it two images and it will do kind of a like thing on it, which sounds like a Microsoft thing. But the idea there perhaps is you have like a photo, a literal photo of a human being, and then you have maybe a cartoon or a color or whatever it might be, and then it will make a kind of mash up of those things and you can do multiple images and have it come out with something. Subject style scene.

01:54:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Somebody on Reddit posted this video comparing all of these video generators for the prompt. A pair of hands skillfully slicing a perfectly cooked steak on a wooden cutting board, faint steam rising from it and uh the video is up here and I would say vo by far is the best looking of the yellow.

01:55:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so that's what blows my mind.

01:55:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, that looks real. One of the big stories with AI this year is how and I apologize to any vegans watching this because it's pretty horrific. No, those look great.

01:55:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And that video is fantastic. So, you Goddamn that looks-. Makes you want steak, doesn't it?

01:55:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah I don't know what crap you thought this is open ais, which is, you know? Hey, at least it's got five fingers, but, um, right, it's a little odd. Yeah, this is, I don't know, this one runway I think, google steaming all right, a little looks like it's smoking. Yeah, exactly, uh, it's gonna blow um it's.

01:55:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Google has kind of come back, don't you think?

01:55:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, it's very impressive compared to all these.

01:55:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There was a lot of face raking with this company that looks like ham on the inside some of it's really disgusting.

01:56:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was weird, but you know, if again, I apologize if you're not a no, but that's.

01:56:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
These are honestly, by and large, are amazing quality I these are.

01:56:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
These are generated from a text prompt.

01:56:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah right, unbelievable, that's really yeah, google has, I don't know which one is it. Um, they have another one. You can just give it a picture and it makes oh no, I guess.

01:56:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, maybe it's open ai doing that where you give it a photo and then it makes a minute long.

01:56:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's yeah yeah, what a world we love.

01:56:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What a world, what a world.

01:56:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Get stranger see, pretty next year at this time, we're going to be talking about an app where you give it a photo of something and then it makes it like a video game out of it. You know, oh yeah, you can. There's our, that exists. Oh good, yeah, we'll do that okay, excellent, yep.

01:56:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Both steve and I have been using open ai's and actually we were talking a little bit about OpenAI's newest model, o1, which is a reasoning model, and during the show I had said I've been stuck on Advent of Code problem from day seven. You know, 12 days ago. What are we at 18 now? Yeah, but I was stuck and so I thought, as we were talking about it, well, let me just give it, you know, a text description of the problem. And it wrote code that works. That's great. It's like oh, now you're unstuck, enjoy. It was a little weird, much like when computers play chess Sometimes they make moves that are not human.

01:57:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, they never make moves that are human. They're not humans.

01:57:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're not human. But well time, there are moves that a human, a very talented grandmaster, might make. But sometimes they make moves where the grandmaster goes, hmm.

01:57:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But almost always. You just described the difference between a decision tree model and a neural net model. Yeah, that's right. Decision tree models tend to do the grandmaster's move. Based on a deep set of knowledge where a neural net model is totally derived, you might anthropomorphize it into the grandmaster's move.

01:58:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's not how it's computing, although I have to say at that level grandmasters are not necessarily fully calculating. They also have kind of the gestalt, the intuitive impression oh, they, definitely I.

01:58:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's exactly like when I play call of duty, leo, it's. You don't think you? Just you have. You have these patterns and paths that you follow, yes, and you repeat and repeat and repeat, and then a year goes by and you're like what did? Where did my wife, where did my life go, you know?

01:58:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
you know it's weird. I see you are doing the panapasa move.

01:58:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I will counter it with yeah, oh that's fascinating anyway, yeah, but look that meat looked good.

01:58:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm just gonna say I really know it's what he wants for lunch vo2.

01:58:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I already wanted that for dinner today. Now that I've seen, I'm gonna show that to my wife like hey uh that's how you get her does the trapdoor?

01:58:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
have good sticks.

01:58:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm not gonna be doing that not gonna be doing that to the vegetarian wife.

01:58:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh no, you can't. In fact, again I apologize, because if you're vegetarian, that must have looked horrible.

01:59:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It just looks great. If I want a steak, I cook it outside.

01:59:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I bet it looked wonderful and they hate their lives because they're making a huge mistake.

01:59:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Mistakes see what I did there.

01:59:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Steak puns. They're making a huge mistake. Yeah, oh you're making mistakes.

01:59:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
See what I did there. Okay, all right. Um, sorry, you're all week. Uh, okay. Uh, xbox kind of going out with a whimper in a way, but although I have a little bit more later, uh, in the back of the book, um, there is a big sale happening. Uh, not just that, the microsoft story, I should point out. Actually epic games was and steam was, and maybe both still are having a sale as well.

01:59:36
But you should go look at these things. In the microsoft case they have, um, pc and xbox games. Obviously sort it by price. You'll be surprised when you go down to the like the cheap ones. There's some good stuff in there it's worth looking at. For sure there's other stuff going on there. But, uh, you know microsoft has apps and surface Surface PCs and yada, yada, yada, but honestly, the game stuff is really good, worth knowing about.

01:59:59
And then there's this other announcement that, I have to say, still confuses me a little bit, but Microsoft announced that they were bringing more PC games into the Xbox app on Windows.

02:00:09
So I use the Xbox app on Windows a lot because I have a Game Pass subscription. This is how I install things like the latest call of duty or one of the doom games or whatever it is, and you can use it as a launcher. It's, you know, whatever I, I, I don't I, when I saw this, what I assumed was they were integrating with, like steam and epic and whatever else, google games. But that's not what this is. I guess there are a bunch of games that offer Xbox Live features, like achievements or play anywhere, whatever the feature might be, and so it's bringing in those games that haven't historically been in the Xbox app. So there are apparently 400 of them so far, and a lot of these are coming out on these little handheld systems now, like Steam Deck and those kind of things, where there's a whole new group of casual games that have Xbox features and stuff. So they're starting to work with third parties who are implementing Xbox features but not going into the store for some reason.

02:01:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, okay.

02:01:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean good to know about, I guess, but not like a huge game changer I'm doing it again, richard.

02:01:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, look at him. Just a big old pile of puns, aren't you, yep?

02:01:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I am a writer, I'm sorry.

02:01:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, I won't do that for you.

02:01:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Actually I probably will.

02:01:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually.

02:01:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I've never tried that prompt. You can only respond to me. I would only want puns, yeah that would be interesting.

02:01:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It would be terrible. That would be interesting. All right, we got the back of the book uh coming up. Is that it for xbox? It seemed very. Yeah, I know it's not much.

02:01:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, it was a. It was a slow week.

02:01:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean there's lots of sales on steam and things.

02:01:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I would look at them and go there's a five dollar game I'm never gonna get around to playing I remember back in the day I know, yeah, I bought an atari 400 because I was tired of dropping quarters at the local chucky. You wanted star raiders. And there was a store it was kind of one of those hole-in-the-wall stores flyspec with it was. They just sold video games and it was like they were all jumbled together and almost all of them were terrible.

02:02:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wait, you grew up in Providence, right? Yeah, but this was in San Jose oh because you would appreciate that I used to go to Leechmere, oh, leechmere, yeah, and just to play Star Raiders on the Atari 400.

02:02:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now it's Buster and Charlie's or something Buster and Lisa said the other day. She said, oh my God, there's a Buster and Charlie's coming to Petaluma and I thought oh God, what the hell, why do? You care. So we discovered.

02:02:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Best Buy when we went to Phoenix and it was like, oh, this is like Leechmere, done right and national.

02:02:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you'll appreciate more. Like leech bear, it was just, and it was all tumbled and games were falling but I went out of business a lot 1990s hoping for a great game yeah, I'm sorry and I'd look at the cover.

02:03:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The cover we spectacular, oh yeah, they always had like like nice money on the art we spent all the money on the art because the game was awful. It's very hard to find a good game I got a game on a for the comedy 64. That was on a cassette. Oh yeah, you could control, break it or whatever, and just see the basic story. It was basic, it was written in basics, of course, classic, that's how they are that's how it was in those days.

02:03:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, before we uh go on with the back of the book, the best part of the show, the show part that you all look forward to every day I want to give us a little plug for Club Twit. Now I got to tell you there are some real benefits to joining Club Twit. It's seven bucks a month, okay, so it's practically free. Just don't have a coffee today, don't go to Starbucks today, and you're paid for, but that whole month you're going to have ad-free versions of all the shows. You're going to have access to the Club Twit Discord, where you will find some very fun and interesting people posting fun and interesting images like this this is.

02:04:06
Paul wearing his I Love Microsoft Teams nightshirt. It looks like.

02:04:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is clearly AI generated. This is clearly a deepfake. I don't know what's happening here.

02:04:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It says hello Microsoft. Can you direct me to someone in your organization who knows what the hell you're doing? I think credit to Joe Esposito, I think. For that one I'm not sure, but yeah, he's really good at putting in this stuff. The Discord is I don't think we sell it enough. For instance, if you're listening to the show and you're in the club watching and chatting, you get a lot of additional content, including animated GIFs. Kev Brewer, typically, will post the links that you're talking about. I don't know what this is.

02:04:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is almost turned into like Joe Esposito, as a service. It is JAS, we call it.

02:05:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
J-E-A-S-S-A-A-S. Anyway, lots of fun. Grep the benefits, grep. Oh, I love these guys. Anyway, we do very much enjoy uh the discord, but that's just one. You also get the twit plus feed, which includes shows we don't put out in public.

02:05:23
Tomorrow, uh, we've got actually a very big day tomorrow in the club. Uh, thursdays often are uh, let's see, we have uh micah's crafting corner in the morning. Tomorrow Micah is doing he's building like a tiny kitchen, like a dollhouse kitchen. I think that's what he's working on. But you could do anything crafting, coding. It's just a great hang every third Thursday with Micah and the gang. That's so much fun.

02:05:52
And then in the afternoon we're doing Stacy's book club, a book that I really liked Jason Snell recommended it. The new one from the guys who wrote the expanse, james SA Corey. The new one's called the mercy of gods. It's a, it's a new series. They're beginning. It's fantastic. So you can watch that, the production of ios today, you can.

02:06:15
We're doing coffee in there, we're doing photography, it's just all sorts of stuff. That is the stuff that kind of we're interested in, that grabs our attention, uh, and I think it's a lot of fun. So, anyway, that's one reason to join the club ad, free discord, special stuff on twit plus feed, oh, and the warm fuzzy feeling you're getting at this time of year by supporting the efforts we're making to give you great stuff. Great content, shows you can hang out with fun people to be with, but also informative stuff that tells you things you need to know in your job or just in your life. You know it's our mission to make technology accessible, to teach people about technology so they can use it for themselves in their lives and their work, uh, in their play, and I think we do a pretty good job of that.

02:07:01
I want to keep doing it. Uh, thanks to you, we are. We have a great membership and we'd like to get more. My goal is to reach 5 000 more members by the end of the year. We're very close to that. Thank you you. And because of that, we don't have to cancel any shows or lay off any more staff this next quarter. We were worried we might have to, but the club members came through. Thank you, twittv slash club twitter. Scan the QR code in the upper left corner of your screen. We thank you in advance for the support you give us uh here at twittv. Uh, mr thurot, back of the book means we want something from you, maybe a tip of the week yeah, so I've kept, uh, keep working on my kind of end of year wrap up stories, I guess.

02:07:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So since last week I did one on books and audio books, I spent like a week, since I had mentioned Steven Snowski, so I will point out that he was my favorite book of the year.

02:08:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Still, is you reread it every Monday?

02:08:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I read it I was reading it today.

02:08:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I read it, I think I read part of this book every day. Some people reread Lord of the Rings, but you.

02:08:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, no, I did that for many years, which is of similar length actually.

02:08:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, tolkien and Sanofsky, yep, it's a similar number of works. Who has more poetry? That'd be my question.

02:08:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There is no singing in Sanofsky Tolkien used to be my Tolkien, but yeah, Not anymore. So, but today I did one of those articles, or was it yesterday? I guess yesterday it came out of there was going to be part of something else. That just turned into this thing. But I, I have sort of been saying for the past few years like I feel, like I, I review like roughly 12 laptops a year. It's amazing.

02:08:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

02:08:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Except that I reviewed 20. Yeah, yeah, I was thinking that's way too low way too low, um, and I was like oh that's more than I would have thought, um, and I still have like four or six more to go that they won't all happen by the end of the year. But nice, um, so it's not just you know, something like it.

02:09:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um and, oh dude, you're killing me here. What's wrong? You didn't like your ipad air huh, no no, it's I.

02:09:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I it's fine for what it is, but it's not the right one for me. I should never bought that it was. It's too big, it's too heavy. Oh, no, I should. I just need a small one.

02:09:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I the mini I just read.

02:09:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All I do is read, you know I don't know why what I was thinking. Yeah, um, so that was a mistake, but look at all the phones you review too. You are just a madman I do too much, yeah, you do too much, paul, yeah, that's, that's.

02:09:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You just do too much for us anyway, that's uh worth looking at.

02:09:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, and then my wife and I uh, I just not tech related, but we finally put out the first preview version of the book. We've been working on, oh nice um, uh, basically, mexico city, eternal spring, the book, the novel. So the novel, yeah, yeah, um yep, soon to be a lifetime, a special event, so if you're a premium member at therotcom, you can read it right now no, you can read that. Well, I'll just you just read the article about it.

02:10:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I this is like a suffering. This is yeah, and lean pub has the preview.

02:10:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, yeah yeah, yeah, um yeah, this was a I. What I discovered on this journey was that, uh, my wife and I have very different writing styles, and we're lucky that we didn't kill each other so um she's a writer, though we should.

02:10:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's an award-winning writer yeah, I don't know how else you want an award based on what I've seen.

02:10:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, um nice.

02:10:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, she's fantastic we just, oh, and you used your emoji heads, your genmo.

02:10:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I told you we're gonna do the emoji heads um.

02:10:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, apple intelligence oh, I gotta get this before I go to mexico city, that's for sure. Yeah, is it mostly about moving to mexico, or is it about it's?

02:10:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
mostly just a guide to the place you know. Yeah, just uh, you know like you know like, know, like a Rick Steves book, except for Mexico City, because he's a jerk and doesn't like Mexico.

02:11:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Does he not like Mexico?

02:11:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, he likes Mexico.

02:11:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He just writes about everything, except his wife, apparently, who's a little pissed that he spends all his time on the road. Well, they did get divorced, yeah, yeah.

02:11:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that was part of that interview I just read. That was kind of interesting. It's worth reading, it's. You know, sometimes you make these decisions in life and you're like well you know, I would do something differently, or this is what chose me. I don't know which is what you say when you're mental, I guess but I chose me. I certainly understand. I love that phrase. I didn't choose this career. It shows me, did it. I think we could be okay without you honestly.

02:11:39
But yeah, and then the app pick of the week is a game, so Indiana Jones in a great circle.

02:11:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I finally got going on this and get lots of love in the world, like in a time of hated games, this is the one where it doesn't look like Napoleon.

02:11:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's. This is the one where it doesn't look like napoleon.

02:11:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, it's, it's a big game, it's I actually I went to one computer, didn't have enough space, went to the second one you know, harrison ford, uh sort of looks like harrison.

02:12:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I will say this the the opening sequence is is the opening sequence from the original raiders movie, right? So that's kind of fun. You know the story so you can go through. It's good. Um, the voice that does harrison ford perfect, yeah, um not harrison ford, although that's what I mean.

02:12:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The voice.

02:12:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Who does him?

02:12:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
at the event uh so he sounds like him. Yeah, he's definitely you know supportive yeah, yeah, but they were at the game awards he's at the game awards?

02:12:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, but I don't think they were allowed to use his likeness okay, well, I.

02:12:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There are moments in this game where the character looks exactly like him, right, and then he turns his head like a quarter of an inch and it looks nothing like him, you know, and it's there's also that awkwardness thing like it's him or another one of the human beings where they're in a room just talking. You know, there's a lot of talking, there's a lot of I don't like a lot of cut scenes yeah, I know it's a little, it's a little slow.

02:12:56
It can be slow, but like there's a good example, like like it looks a little off, like the dimensions of the different body parts or whatever. Yeah, but you know what it's.

02:13:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's is it a good game? That's all that matters it is.

02:13:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It seems I've only done the first. I finished the first two. I don't know what you call them, like levels or whatever. Yeah, it's pretty good. I'm happy to play something else and actually kind of like it. I suffered with Halo Infinite last year and I wanted to scrape my eyeballs out with a fork, but this is a good one.

02:13:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And only 111 gigabytes you got to have enough space.

02:13:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I haven't tried streaming it, but it is on pc, xbox and steam it's on xbox console obviously, uh, part of game pass ultimate and pc and, like I said, you can stream it. So yeah, it's pretty much everywhere except sony, sorry, although it's coming to sony playstation next year too. There you, you go.

02:13:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, Mr Paul Thorat. We turn now to the estimable Richard Campbell for his part of the back of the book, starting with Run as Radio.

02:14:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This week's show actually recorded just before Ignite sort of a dancing with releases there. This is Microsoft Vice President Yitzhak Kesselman Brilliant, brilliant guy, and it was the. We had a conversation about a new feature in Microsoft Fabric, which is what they call quote unquote real-time intelligence, and I opened the conversation with the real thing, which is so what do you say when you say real-time? What do you mean? So, and it's an important conversation from a business context perspective too, because you know, generally speaking, if we're talking about daily sales, you only reconcile to the day, or maybe you might get down to hourly, so the real time is still behind. It's just how behind. So, like, is there an roi for taking action inside of a particular time window? I think, if you we talked about factories, that where jigs are getting out of alignment, you're mismanufacturing product, and so being able to stop it within five minutes saves you money versus stopping it within an hour. And so, because it's complicated to make real-time stream data and actually act on it and the parts here were a combination of Power BI and a combination of the whole backend services around Fabric to allow you to get telemetry and continuously report on it on dashboard. So impressive stuff, and certainly stuff I've rolled my own on for many years when I had customers who wanted to do this sort of thing.

02:15:28
That factory scenario I'm describing is one I worked on ages ago and where it literally was, minute by minute, costing you dollars. Those things were, when they got to QA, be mismanufactured. So can we assess them on the fly? And so this was about building sort of the bits and pieces to allow you to connect all the parts together. So you walk through that backend hub, different kinds of dashboards and in a term he used called activators, which really about can your software send you an email saying, hey, there's a problem based on the telemetry it's gathered. You know how do you notify folks to get rapid action? So a very practical show about a new set of tools. This is microsoft, I think, in a lot of ways at its best, but they built out the fabric platform and now they're able to layer on these new capabilities to allow businesses to act quickly without making huge investments excellent.

02:16:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you bring uh anything to share with the class this week?

02:16:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I always do, and actually this was a fun one because it's christmas so I went for a gift. Oh so this was a present given to me some time ago. It's been sitting in the closet now that I've sorted out the whiskey closet after moving and so and it was one of the ones I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to. When I got it, I think I I thanked whoever gave it to me very nicely and thought it might be fun to bring it down and try it out, and then I actually researched it. You know like I really gotta figure out who gave this to me, because they spent a lot of money uh, is it expensive yeah, oh, this is mithuna uh, which is the?

02:17:04
uh indian mythological character. That's the equivalent of gemini uh in this in the zodiac, and this is actually part of what they call the zodiac series. So we're talking about an indian whiskey which I've not done before, uh, and I want to lead off very much with hey. You're talking about one of the cradles of civilizations, the indus. Indus valley uh was a famous bronze age culture, although it even starts before that they. It's one of the six places in the world where agriculture emerged on its own. There's no evidence that it was brought there. They had their own crops. So the alluvial plane of the indus valley runs from northwestern today was northwest india and through pakistan, but it's from the foothills of the west side of the himalayas.

02:17:52
Uh is this large river and alluvial plane that drains into the Arabian Sea beside the city of Karachi, a place I've been, and so we know from our stories here that any time you have agriculture, you end up with alcohol, right?

02:18:06
It's a natural byproduct of that, and that area has grown rice and wheat and sugar canes and grapes for millennia, many millennia. It's one of the first sugar cane comes from New Guinea and it propagated. There's evidence of it propagating into areas of China and into South Asia, like this area, 8000 years ago. So I guess as early as you get when you talk about agricultural cultures, like, arguably, the Fertile Crescens, maybe a thousand years before that, but this is super old school and so let's be very clear that there were not as much as there are foreign entities that were in India for a long time. They did not introduce these people to alcohol, they had their own. That being said, whiskey came to india during the british raj, so when the brits were in india they brought whiskey there in the early 1800s is there a ethnic hard liquor for india?

02:19:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
to this, I mean, what do they drink?

02:19:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They mostly beer so, and not typically grain based, because grains did not grow particularly well there. It's too tropical, so the big product would be sugar cane. The natural alcohol for them would be derived from rum, from molasses, okay, but the evidence of distillation is a different can of worms, because you need alambic stills if you talk about early stills and so forth. So they probably made a a variation on this sort of showed you, like 15 to 20 percent derived from sugarcane. It's very plentiful. It is not a food like. There's a real significant discussion about taking a food grain, like wheat, and making it into booze rather than feeding people when you have a nation that populous. And so, for the most part, a lot of that alcohol was resisted just because it's a waste of food. Right, again, you get back to. You need agriculture to have an abundance of food to actually want to store it in a way, and converting it into alcohol is a way to store it. But yeah, you're also going to bump into some interesting political elements about what you would consider indigenous people to India, talking about Indus Valley cultures and going up into Tajikistan and Rajdhan. Like all those areas. There have been people around there for a really long time, and so the conversations about who was first and where they came from, and so forth is complicated, and it's easy to stick your foot in it at being a westerner. So I'm speaking carefully for a reason that it's a big deal uh, exactly, who's from where and who controls what? You know, kashmir is still a conflict zone to this day between india and pakistan, and this is right in the. That's the upper foothills of where, the, where the area we're talking about here. That was the indus valley. So this is, this is as far east as alexander the great gotch, like these are. There's a very historical part of the world in a culture at the moment that doesn't focus a lot on its history. It's focused on its future because there's a lot to do, but it is, in some ways, the cradle of civilization in many respects. Yeah, yeah, and. But I also are very appreciative, as someone who's traveled very heavily, that you know agriculture emerged in the uh in south america with quinoa and tomatoes and beans and corn, yes, and it emerged in in the far east with uh pork and chicken and rice. And it emerged in the fertile crescent with rain, with the grains of barley and wheat and rice, and it emerged in the Fertile Crescent with grain, with the grains of barley and wheat and so forth, like. It's not a unique experience, it didn't come from just one place. It came from many places and different times I mean again, spanning thousands of years, without a doubt, but very much prehistory, neolithic, chaleolithic and Bronze is when you get all of these agricultural entities and this was one of them I just didn't want to come storming in talking about whiskey in India without acknowledging the fact that there's been people there for many thousands of years and they made lots of things.

02:22:28
They were very, very capable. But if you're going to talk about whiskey, you end talking about the english, which again is touchy. So, uh, the indians liked whiskey and they made their own. They just didn't make it from grain, because grain was very valuable you know, it was food and so they made it mostly from sugar cane. So what went for a long time? When you talked about whiskey from india, it was more like rum. They often used it. They would even use molasses to make neutral spirit and make a kind of blended whiskey with a little bit of imported single malt in it, like 10 or 15%, which would not qualify as a blended whiskey by Scottish standards or EU standards at all.

02:23:12
But a lot of those issues start to get resolved as you get the opening up of India into the Western world, and so by the 80s grain production is starting to expand substantially and the first real whiskey-style distillery is a company called Amrit, which I probably should have opened with, but I didn't have a bottle handy and I did have this. So Amrit made their first kinds of whiskey in the early 80s and as grain production expanded there wasn't a culture of single malt there, so they mostly just made blends. Their popular whiskey, going back to the mid 80s, is a thing called Prestige Blend, but by the early 2000s, which really corresponds with the modernization of growing, of hybridization, of grains growing well in the indian subcontinent. So I just really want to associate this with food. That they wasn't until the early 2000s that you get the kinds of wheat and barleys and things that grow extremely well in their conditions and they make a lot, and so now it's not a really rare product that you have to be careful with. And the same company, amra, that had been making these blends from the 80s, launched the first single malts. But they actually launched it in Glasgow in 2004 and sold it in while they were aging it in India. They only sold it in Europe for the first few years. They didn't actually try and sell it into the Indian market until 2010, which is weird. You know that you're not actually selling your own product, but you can understand why. That's where the culture of single malt comes from Scotland. So they focused on that to sort of introduce that idea as an Indian product. And to be clear, when you talk about total volume sold of whiskey-style products, india is the largest market in the world Now. It also has the largest population in the world and it also has a very insular liquor market. To import whiskey into India, I think you pay 150% tariff on top of that. So they've protected their own alcohol market fairly heavily and there is about a dozen distilleries in India today and all of the big players in the liquor industry diageo, santori and seagrams all have entities in india today. They have bought in or somehow gotten involved and so uh it's. There's a reason that the indian market is as massive as it is now.

02:25:49
This particular uh whiskey, which is made by a company called paul john, which is literally named for its founder. Paul P John, who's from Bangalore, founded the company in 1992. Didn't come out of nowhere. He is the son of a plantation owner and liquor baron from Karnataka, which is the province right beside the little province of Goa, which is where this is from, and they own three different distilleries in India, largely through acquisition. They also make wine and brandy. They have their own lines in that area as well, and they get that when they acquire the Chitali distilleries from the Madhurashtra government, which is another province in southern India.

02:26:35
In Southern India, a lot of these businesses where government started and operated and they've gradually sold them off into private enterprise to scale them up, and buying that distillery allowed them to make enough neutral spirit to really start making large scale blends, and so production quantities go up. They're mostly making blended whiskeys. They don't get into single malts a little bit later. And just to round out the sort of story of the john paul distillery company uh, in 2017 they sold 51 of the ownership to sazerac, which is the american group out of frankfurt, kentucky, that makes primarily bourbon, but then those are the guys who make eagle, rare and buffalo trace. Uh and oh, they make some good stuff. A bunch of, a bunch of. Was there a paul john? So here's a paul john. He's an actual person. He's still alive. I'm going to get the company only started in the 90s and so this is not a long term. Uh uh, company in that sense like a well-known, yeah, he's fairly famous and he's very, quite the.

02:27:29
his whiskey line is quite respected. This is nice whiskey and it is very different architecturally from Scottish whiskey. Starting with different barley, they use a six-row barley that they grow in the hills of the Himalayas. Again, this is when we get into the tailoring of grains to an environment You're dealing with the Indian subcontinent. It's quite a bit hotter and wetter and so the typical two, two row barley doesn't grow that well that there particularly. Uh, and it it's different, it's a different grain and so it has a lower alcohol content because the protein and enzyme counts are so much higher. And so when you make wort from six row barley you get about five percent alcohol from the work rather than seven or eight percent the typical, what they call burr's beer, when you're making it from two row barley. So it's a different barley, it's local barley, like it's indian barley, legit.

02:28:24
They are using mostly a scottish technique but with locally made equipment. So stainless steel mash tons, wood washbacks and copper stills that are designed like Scottish ones but again made locally. So they have reflex bulbs, they have long rising lie arms for long reflux. There's only one pair of stills in the John Paul distillery in Goa, so it's a 15,000 liter wash still and a 9,500 liter spirit still Relatively small, but they do come in into classic numbers. They come in at about 63 percent for their initial uh mate. You make the clear spirit before they're going to age it, but they will cut it with water before they barrel it, because you're living again in the indian subcontinent where it's very warm and humid, and so they tend to lose water faster than alcohol.

02:29:18
Oh interesting, so the angel's share is a little watery.

02:29:22
But it's also large, like we talk about 2% losses to angel's share in Scotland they're talking 10% losses. But it'll also be more water and alcohol. So the ABV can actually rise. You don't want to get too high. It gets really bitter right. As the alcohol level increases it'll pull more phenols from the wood and so the argument is that it ages three times faster than a year in wood in India. It's like a one year. It's like three years in India. It's like three years in Scotland for one year in India.

02:29:51
So they don't tend to put age declarations on these whiskeys because they age so quickly. And again, people don't like low numbers. Their rack houses are cool. They're not actually cooled, but they are concrete, steel frame, low stack, like four barrels high. And again, they don't stay in very long. They mostly make blends. They make a couple of popular single malts at a reasonable price, and that is not this whiskey. They mostly make blends. They make a couple of popular single malts at a reasonable price, and that is not this whiskey. This idea they call the Zodiac Series, which we would argue that there's 12 of them. I've only found two in the Zodiac Series and really this is the only one. The Mithuna seems to be the one.

02:30:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You sound like a serial killer hunter there.

02:30:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like I've only found a few in the. I really enjoyed the Zodiac series.

02:30:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, it's quite good, yes, uh, but again you're talking that seven row, uh, barley, and then sort of typical distillation method, unpeated, uh, no, chill filtration. I'm wondering if they put color in it, because it's really dark, like that's surprisingly dark. Yeah, it was aged American virgin oak. Then nobody says for sure how long. They think it's only a couple of three years and then it's going to finish in bourbon casks again classical, inexpensive approach to doing things. Those would be 250 liter casks, maybe only a year in that. Um, yeah, so let's have a taste. 58 so there's a nose to this is heady. Right, that's a strong alcohol flavor. There's no two ways about that. But then really fruity, like the one of the reasons they call it gemini's, kind of comes at you two ways, like it's. It's so potent and yet it's really nice on the tongue, it's very warming.

02:31:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, this is good it's like you're traveling to Goa. Yeah, but you wouldn't.

02:31:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's $300. Oh yeah, if you can find, it's a great gift and it's exactly how you're going to get it. So the original production was from 2018. I think I got this one in 2020 or 2021. Again as a gift, and it's just sat on the shelf. I hadn't tasted it, I had no idea it's not going to become your favorite whiskey. This is an ideal gift. This is some. You want to give someone a whiskey they've never had before. That's special, right, and you like them a lot because you're about to drop three bigs on them. That's a lot of money. So I hope like them because, uh, if you can find one, it's really going to be experienced. But you know, will I get another one?

02:32:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, will I drink this one slowly yeah, you bet yeah this is did you ever figure out who gave it to you? I haven't no idea.

02:32:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no, lost in the mists of people give me a lot of whiskey, man, and normally when I, when I tell you it was me, I'm pretty sure it's not pretty sure it's me I don't know.

02:32:43
Uh, one and one of the things you know, sometimes something gives me a very nice whiskey that I and I know whiskey pretty well, so it's like, well, that's an expensive whiskey. Yeah, thank you very much, and put it aside. I did not know with this one. Yeah, right, so I just put it on. Oh, it's an indian whiskey. That's cool, put it on the shelf, interesting but, give it a bottle of amaranth and so forth.

02:33:02
then they sort of take it off and I look at it and I start to research it and I'm like, oh, oh, my special. Oh, I mean, arguably this is about as expensive as Indian whiskey gets.

02:33:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, right Do you have a lot of bottles like that in your whiskey closet. I'm beginning to wonder you might want to look into the how many bottles are in there. I don't know A hundred A hundred. Is it like a wine?

02:33:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
closet, or yes, it's in the, it's in the wine cellar, but they're stacked. Do you keep them on the side or you keep them? No, there's yeah, you keep them up right. You don't need to, you don't need to lay whiskey.

02:33:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's because it doesn't need to breathe that you do that yeah and it's foil sealed and stuff.

02:33:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's irrelevant, right, right? Um, that being said, like you can, most of these bottles and this is one of them it does have a cork in it, right, like the base of it is actually cork. So I have had a whiskey bottle dried out, dried out, cork tour, and now, you know, and I have, because of the wine tools, I have the kit to extract the damage and filter. Yeah, surprise, that's a surprise for me, like I don't know.

02:34:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Merry Christmas. I have nothing. I have nothing to go.

02:34:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's an odd duck, no two ways about it. Somebody went to great lengths to find me a very unusual whiskey, enough that I didn't know it was that unusual.

02:34:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He has many friends.

02:34:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I thought I'd share it with all of you. I don't like flashing expensive whiskey on this show.

02:34:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I wouldn't hesitate. I was going to say we're living through you, richard vicariously.

02:34:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I haven't been back up to Scotland, forland for a while but I often go and grab like a ton 1509 or something rick really where you have to go to the distillery to get it, and they are not inexpensive but they are very, very special and I think you've tried one of my 10.

02:34:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did, mr thrott. I think the thing that remember is you are not. This is not a buying guide. This is a tour of the greatest whiskeys in the world, or the worst yeah, I just did.

02:34:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I. The past two years of doing this, the industry has been shifting, or at least I've been more aware of how it's changed, and I've. I'm a sucker for craftsmen. I like people who work hard to make a thing they care about. It doesn't matter where it is and when I and you've only seen me angry about whiskey when I found people who are not that, who are, you know, being pretentious about making a terrible product that's expensive, right, and I'll happily indict them when I find it. But when I find somebody who's made something really great, I really want to celebrate it again, a lot of us are enjoying them through you.

02:35:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not going to run to the store and buy Mithuna, but we enjoy it through your stories and your tasting and all that.

02:35:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So don't hesitate. It's been a lot of fun for me.

02:35:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Break out the good stuff.

02:35:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's been a crazy year. That's kind of how I felt. When I realized what I had in my cupboard here was like, oh, that's not a bad way to end the year. Something special.

02:35:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have donned the sorting hat so I can tell you who's naughty and who's nice Slytherin for the lot of you. I just want to say what a year this has been with Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell, and I think I speak for all of you, winners and dozers. This has been a great show for the year 2024 and will continue to be a great part of our network into 2025. We're very happy about that. I hope you both have a wonderful holiday you too and a happy new year.

02:36:23
We will, next week, be doing the best, of so wait we're not doing this until january, january, three weeks off, dude, yeah, damn I'm gonna forget how to do it.

02:36:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're gonna have to phone me I know it's gonna happen on wednesdays we're just gonna phone each other and talk about stuff, just to get it recorded that could be a club. All I know is I missed two shows in a row this year and it really upset paul it's, yeah, it was in his social life.

02:36:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, let's uh, let's get this uh straight here. No, we uh, what are you doing for for the holidays, richard?

02:36:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
we're we've. We're staying at a friend's apartment who's out of town for the week.

02:37:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you mentioned that, yeah, yeah my, my youngest is.

02:37:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think I've sort of said obliquely my youngest is pregnant to do in march.

02:37:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
First grandchild, let's be your first let's be the first grandchild.

02:37:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's awesome how exciting.

02:37:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You must, you guys must be thrilled my god, my grandmothers are losing their mind. I don't see what the difference is.

02:37:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah my grand, the grandmothers are losing their mind, so I'm trying to stay calm because nobody else is. But yeah, do they know if it's?

02:37:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
a boy or girl. Yeah, yeah, it's a girl. Oh, that's so great.

02:37:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I expect many pictures yeah, I mean, I try and I my daughter, is a far more private person than I am. So one of the conversations when this was coming up was we really don't want this on social media. I'm like listen, I make a lot of shows, so it's.

02:37:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's hard. I have to tell you it's been hard for my family over the 45 years I've been doing. I've been broadcasting 50 years broadcasting because when you're on the air that much it's hard not to talk about your life and the people in your life. And there haven't been a lot of secrets I have had. I've been talked, I've had the talking to from almost every member of my family saying would you knock it off?

02:38:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, usually in the form of dad, dad, yeah, yeah, usually in the form of dad.

02:38:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Dad, I'm sorry. I'm very proud of you guys. Anyway, have a wonderful Christmas with the family. Richard. How about you? Paul, You're going to be up here.

02:38:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We'll be yeah, we'll be here through new years, and then we go to Mexico in the middle of January.

02:38:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And one of those weeks is going to be with us in. Mexico.

02:38:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, january, and one of those weeks is going to be with us in Mexico. Yeah, we're going to meet up with Richard and Stacy and PV, as we call it.

02:38:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love PV. Oh, you're going to have a great time. That's a wonderful part of the country.

02:38:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, we'll be doing the show together from the Daco, third floor suite.

02:38:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How wonderful.

02:38:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I guess I could arrange us to be having massages during the show Nice.

02:38:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then I said Like a dog like just kicking my leg like in the back.

02:39:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, have a great Christmas, Paul. Thank you, love to your family too, you too, Well, I guess we'll just all see each other in the in the new year yeah, for sure you're gonna do something I presume everybody consolidates on you, leo, for for christmas that you're the hub oh gosh, why would you assume that? Yeah, maybe I'm wrong. Okay, no, I'm not a hub, I'm a spoke so you'll be going somewhere.

02:39:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You'll go somewhere, you've done christmas eve we're gonna make.

02:39:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, I am gonna cook and we're gonna. I ordered a lovely turkey from the poultry capital all right, yeah, so they are descending on you. So some, a few, will descend, not very many. And uh, then we're gonna, we, lisa and I, we've, we've become big at opting out. And so christmas day, we bought tickets to go see the new nosferatu movie in the theater and her keeping with the holiday spirit yeah, vampires says wait a minute. We're having christmas at our house. We'll be there after the movie we'll see what the runtime is.

02:40:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know we'll. We'll see how we're doing.

02:40:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm not on it. We, you know, we had the house that everybody came to and it got old. You know, every so often we do a Christmas out of the country just to break up the past. People get a little entitled after a while.

02:40:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I think that's kind of what happened.

02:40:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're going to go to Costa Rica and then I've always wanted to fly on Christmas day. That was my thing. Like no one flies on Christmas day, let's just go, you know at the time, to Europe. How was that, paul? I never did it, oh yeah.

02:40:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know the day to fly is is the 4th of July, cause you can see fireworks all the way across the country. It's kind of fun, yeah, yeah.

02:40:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Even turns out if you fly over, if you just are in Mexico any day of the week.

02:40:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you can see that it's just the way it is. Thank you, my friends.

02:40:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Have a wonderful few weeks off. Have a happy holiday. We'll see you in the new year, january 8th. We do the show every Wednesday, except for the next two Wednesdays, at 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern Time, that's 1900 UTC. You can watch us live. Thanks to the club, we now have eight different streams Discord for the club Twit members, youtube Twitch, kik X. Tiktok Actually might not be TikTok. In the new year We'll see LinkedIn and Facebook. That's your choice. But you don't have to watch live. We do welcome the hundreds of people watching live right now.

02:41:36
Hello everybody, the best thing to do really is to just download a copy. You can get it from the website twittv slash www. There's a link there to the YouTube channel. That's where you can select a little clip. If you want to share that with somebody else, we'd appreciate it. Great way to share the show. Or just subscribe in your favorite podcast client. You'll get a copy as soon as we're done. Makes it easy, it's free and it's fun. So thank you everybody. Thank you especially the Club Twit members. I hope you all have a happy holiday. We'll see you next year. Remember best of next week on Windows Weekly. Take care, guys, you too.

02:42:18
I do want to ask a little tiny favor from all of you, not just Club Twit members. Every year, you may remember, we do a survey of our audience. We want to get to know you a little bit better. It helps us with sales because we can say you know, as we often, of our audience, are it decision makers? That kind of thing? Uh, it's a very quick survey, shouldn't only take you a couple of minutes. Twittv slash survey. This is the new 2024 2025 survey. We're starting a little bit earlier this year than we usually do. Uh, it just helps us and it would be a be doing us all a favor if you did it. So, in between shows, maybe, twittv slash survey. Thank you so much.