Windows Weekly 923 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 and Richard Campbell are here. There's news of Windows 11, microsoft 365, microsoft's 50th anniversary and a farewell to a legendary Windows columnist. All of this and more coming up next on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is TWIT. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell, episode 923, recorded Wednesday, march 12th 2025. The bush is amused. Hello you, winners and dozers. It's time for Windows Weekly. So glad to see you, leo Laporte, on this side of the Atlantic.

00:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, I'm not on any side of the.

01:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Atlantic. Under the pond is Paul Thorat.

01:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He's in Mexico City. Hello, paulul. Unfortunately, mexico city is over a pond. It's part of the problem that it's a swamp right it's also it's a hollow space below the city that's slowly crumbling in on itself they never filled that in, they just kind of it's supposed to be filled with water and then they started using the water and now it's filled with air. And I don't know if you are a fun structural materials. Yeah, it's not good, but we have wavy buildings.

01:31
If you suddenly disappear, we'll know why it will just sink a little bit 13 centimeters a year, if I'm not mistaken.

01:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I could do that with my chair, but also with us from British Columbia also on this side of the pond. So really the whole pond thing was completely this guy.

01:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, we're pretty much all north america, we're all here. What is this? 500 sinkholes have been registered in mexico city between 2017 and 2020, so wow those are just the ones they register.

02:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's it. This is a registered sinkhole. I I've seen sinkholes that don't get fixed with by the street guys, so I don't know what's going on here.

02:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But well, it's still a great place to live. And we were talking. Your ears must have been burning because paul on twit, mike elgin, was saying how lucky paul is in living in the culinary capital of the world as I jokingly said to you before the show, I mean I he was a major influence that kind of led us in this direction. So, mike, nice, so we're going to start in a with. On a sad note, weren't we talking about woody leonard just the other day? I feel like we were. Huh, I don't remember.

02:46
Like whatever happened to him right.

02:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yeah, so we're still trying to piece this one together. But unfortunately Woody, whose real name I did not know was Greg Gregory Forrest, woody Leonard passed away last week at the age of 73. Very young, yeah, he is one of my primary writing influences him and Jerry Purnell, I would say Charles Petzl to some degree, but he was the author of the first windows programming book. I ever got ahead of even owning a PC actually. And uh, it was kind of lighthearted and casual and fun to read and not like other technical books. And it was kind of lighthearted and casual and fun to read and not like other technical books and it was kind of interesting to me that you could write like that, you know, interesting At later. I wasn't intending to become a writer at that time, but when I did later, you know that was a big influence. He wrote for Computer World.

03:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah right, Woody's Window Watch, which started in 1998 so I will.

03:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I will never be able to explain the whole entomology of this exactly, but you know about windows secrets, the newsletter and the books with brian livingston, and I helped co-authored one of those books and actually wrote briefly for that newsletter. There's also fred langa who wrote the langa list. Right, right and well, I always think of as flanga, flanga, yeah flanga.

04:11
Yep, um, so at some point those things were rolled into ask woody and somewhere around I don't know, 2020, ish, I found this out after I wrote about this. He actually retired from computer world, at least I think, just retired. In general, we talked about this.

04:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm pretty sure it was on the show that he had moved to Thailand. That's true. Yes, so right, and my understanding, just a month ago we were saying whatever happened to him. Don't you remember that? No, I don't remember, or maybe it was because, I do other shows.

04:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It might been on twitter, so no we definitely talked about you're right the thailand thing is correct and I I've only interacted with this guy sporadically over the years. I don't believe I've ever met him in person, which I feel bad about, but because you know, I'd like to be able to say hey, just so you know. You know you were kind of a big deal for me, but um, there is the last picture we saw of him.

05:00
Yeah, in thailand so the editor, the person who is in charge of this newsletter, now reached out to me, as he did to many other people, to try to find someone, anyone who knew anything about his full life story and nobody does. And, uh, he's trying. He's in touch with the family that they don't seem particularly interested in this, but there is some. There'll probably be more information at some point, but I I heard most recently that he had actually come back from Thailand when the COVID restrictions eased up and I believe he has been in Tennessee since.

05:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So Ask Woody. The newsletter is still around, but obviously others have taken it over, not even since his death, but much earlier A few years ago.

05:42
And a lot of consolidation with other newsletters, so I'm glad those guys are still keeping us going and um yeah, I don't know it's, it's too bad uh, you know he was one of the early uh guys and uh, you mentioned jerry pornell in your in your show, in your article about this and uh, yeah, who? Really kind of started, and dvorak, who who were kind of renowned columnists, who who made everybody kind of interested in this right thing.

06:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Every person you just mentioned influenced me to some degree. When I first started doing something I called when info shorts takes like a 25 years, whatever that was. I wanted to model it after the back of the magazine I don't remember if it was pc mag or pc world that dvorak did, where it'd be little paragraphs inside track. It was called yeah, yeah, they would have little bolded bits where that you know.

06:37
So I remember, I put yeah, sometimes it seemed randomly bolded, but okay yeah so the first one I put together, I did it in that style, and whoever was the editor at Penton whatever Penton was called that back then was like no, no, no, no, you can't do it like this. This is. You should have little titles for each one of these things instead, and I was like all right.

06:55
So, but yeah, so I anyway that went off in any way now, but I was a little behind generationally with him. So I think in the late 80s, early 90s at the latest, I had started buying books that were compilations of the articles he wrote for Chaos Manor in Byte, and it was a fascinating kind of time machine thing at the time for me. And uh, then I, you know I was a bite subscriber for many years too, but um, yeah, but just uh, you know he used to describe himself as potentially, you know the the first blogger, because he was essentially doing what bloggers did, right, like um, he.

07:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, uh he, I just was doing some research. His first book was self-published, because of his bad experiences with word for windows 1.0, which he became an expert in. Right, yeah, he, he, uh. He wrote a 280 page electronic book with bugs and workarounds. That's great and, uh, that led him to be asked to write his first real book, windows 3-1, which, by the way, was that first book that I bought and the thing that was amazing about this.

08:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now, it's weird because lately, because bill gates just came up with the first volume, you know, of his autobiography. He mentioned some stuff where I said you know, I'm going to go back and reread something, so I reread gates by stephen manas.

08:26
I've been rereading, oh that's a great hard drive by, I think paul anders is, yeah, if I'm not mistaken, and one of the two mentions how I'm gonna get this wrong, but I think it was windows two something, and then three. Oh, both could had this kind of small runtime so you could put it on like a disk and include it with a book. And in this case, what he had was a fully running version of Windows 3.1 with Word, and it allowed you to run the Word basic examples that were in the book. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, and this might have been my first experience, because my wife had like a 286 at the time and I do remember trying to put windows on it. It must've been this one, I don't remember, but it would draw it so slow. I've told the story where it would draw the line around the menu and then each line would fill in and then each word would fill in.

09:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was super slow, but yeah, that was my that was Steve Martin that told us in an interview he did a few years back that the first time he used a word processor he was writing the three amigos and uh, he, he, if he wanted to move a speech from one part of the page to another, he would move it. Then would get up, go have a cup of coffee, yeah, wander around the apartment, come back and there it would be. We forget it. So it's yes, you forget. We're surrounded by smart stuff now that's so easy to use.

09:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We forget this is a bit of an exaggeration, but I I know, when I had an amigo when I was younger, before the internet became a big thing for years and years and years, I would be up until three o'clock in the morning doing something on this computer and I can't tell you what that was. For the most part, I mean, I can sort of, but just before the internet I don't remember, you know yeah, I was doing. Yeah, I was right, I was balancing your checkbook.

10:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what everybody's programming and things like that and the typing in basic programs from compute magazine, things like that, no that was earlier.

10:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I used to do that too, but yeah, yeah or not even basic. They would be like that, like run magazine would have like a weird code you could do instead. Oh god, you had to write the codes and then you know, never ran the first time.

10:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, it's probably hex. Yeah, yeah, probably. Uh, oh, I'm sorry. Okay, I take it back. Um, steve gibson just texted me. It wasn't on this show. Steve gibson and I were talking about woody and how he had ended up in thailand and whatever, okay because we have brought this has come up.

10:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just don't remember it recently, but the Thailand thing with him has come up.

10:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, steve, that's right. I that makes sense, cause Steve, like you, was a columnist in the early days. Um, he, you know, his column was fantastic. You, steve, dvorak, cornell and Woody what was so different from all the other stuff people like me were doing? You had voice, you had personality that you could tell. Okay.

11:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I I've not read anything you wrote, but please don't undersell the fact that you also had a voice, and I well, but my voice is better on the radio.

11:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you have a great voice, no, but I.

11:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But I also mean a voice in a personality sense, because I used to watch you in the afternoon when I went back to school, after buying this book and trying to become a programmer. I would come home in the afternoon and watch whatever various shows and at some point Tech TV or I don't know if it was a predecessor or whatever Tech TV would come on, and it was you and Ed, right, ed Bott, no, who was the guy you were on? Ed Ed, no, who's the guy you run? Oh, patrick Norton, patrick Norton, sorry, yeah, yeah, and Ed Norton's an actor, patrick, all the Nortons are related, all the Nortons, yeah, and I and Peter Norton from our street.

11:59
No, but I remember, you know I would watch this thing. And I don't know a friend that came up, someone somehow, something. I talked about it and I said, you know, I, I'm already up on everything, like I'm not. I don't feel like I'm going to learn anything, but I just really enjoy this show. Yeah, you know, like I left it on, I would just leave it on, you know.

12:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so I mean people absolutely have a voice. I think that's probably true. A lot of people who listen to this show and all of our shows is yeah, no one's going to learn anything from that's for sure. But it's as much companionship, it's as much hearing people who share your interests talking about things.

12:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's a community kind of thing Almost yeah.

12:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean I, you know, jerry Pernell was always talking about S 100 buses and adding cars. I couldn't care less, I didn't.

12:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I wasn't part of the world then, right, so I would read. I read about that stuff later and was fascinated by it. Yeah, I will say in his case, I not only got to meet him, but had some awesome interactions with him and his son and I really, really enjoyed those times. But Dvorak, I mean in passing, yeah, I never met Woody Leonard. I feel bad about that, because he was a big influence.

13:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think many people did. That's the thing that's most interesting about woody is he is still kind of it's a mystery, even to people who worked with him even people computer and his blog they talked about.

13:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He lived in phuket from 2000 to 2014, like right. No wonder he didn't meet him right like that's he was.

13:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But nobody knows why he moved to thailand, or you know why he came back, and I mean, it's all a mystery. So yep, uh, but sad is he. You know, 74 is a little, especially as I reach that age.

13:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know, it's kind of a ripe old. Oh, I'm sorry, are we saying something else?

13:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, no, I mean, it's kind of, you know, normal life expectancy I guess, but it feels like too young, right, that's? Yep, you know, had he stopped writing completely.

13:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I think, yeah, I think so I. I after, like I said, after I wrote that I looked, I kept going looking right and um, and I was interacting with the guy from the newsletter a little bit and I did find his last column from computer world where he announced his retirement or whatever. Susan bradley took over for him. She's also part of the ask what he's still today. You know a lot of, I know a lot of people at lance whitney's over there. Uh, mary and simon, uh basan are over there, who I know very well.

14:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um yeah, now I remember. This is what steve and I were talking about. This is yes, and no wonder you don't remember it. It was on security.

14:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It didn't happen to me well, thank god, I don't remember it, but I remember it vividly steve it's.

14:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We were having this conversation not so long ago, a couple of weeks ago we have discussed this.

14:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like this, thailand has come up uh on the show, but it's been.

14:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's been a while yeah, so in a way, you know, it's more interesting because he was an enigma. Yeah, we wouldn't have been talking about it so much if he right, yeah, when I go, it's gonna be like finally yeah, paul's I never thought he'd shut up we knew way too much about him yeah, a little too transparent.

14:51
He's like, yeah, they'll say the same about me, uh, all right, well, it's not. I'm glad we could, uh, we could talk about woody and yeah the good old days. It was a different time. I think I feel kind of bad for anybody under 40 who really didn't grow up in the same way.

15:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The three of us did with technology you know yeah these are all, yeah read re reading those books, like I said, the early days of you know, microsoft and the industry. And as you get into the 90s, of course the internet happens and that's skipping everything. But, um, I always I used to read those when I was young and I always thought, man, I missed it, you know it's over. Like this happened and I would. You know the books about apple as well, and ibm, right at the time when they were still big in the pc, and what were the pc, I guess? Um, I thought I missed it, you know. And then the internet happened. I was like, oh okay, there's a, there's another wave, we can ride this wave now this is.

15:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And now for young people. You're not missing it because ai is happening right now. There's a whole new, and our us old timers are looking at it going. Hmm. By the way, there are some books that have lived forever. That's right, and and this is this is one of them.

16:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Tell a mid-sized animal with that book, oh wow, that book exists because they did not, uh, thoroughly document their own apis right and it needed to be.

16:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the delphi 3 super bible, which is, in effect, the manual for delphi. I mean, it's everything you need to know if you want to use Delphi.

16:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's an API reference. Yeah.

16:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Which was Turbo Pascal? Yeah, object Pascal into that.

16:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then, yeah, and they had a C product and I'm not going to get this right, it's close. It was object windows, desktop, maybe something like that. That was their class library. And so the VCL, the visual component library, in Delphi, was sort of the equivalent, but the language was, by the way, it was the original rust, when you think about it, the object Pascal.

16:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You couldn't oh yeah, I'm ready to screw up with it. Yeah, I think we could do like they do in some British churches where you you have the Bible open. Yes, a reading in the church yeah and you just every, every day, you, you turn the page or you go to.

17:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You go to a wedding and you're right. Okay, actually that's a better. I was gonna say it when you um, when you go to a wedding that if someone reads from the bible, it will always be like someone's best friend. Nine times out of ten it is love is never selfish. It's always the same quote. For me it would be like I just forgot it. No, it's like the. T object is the root of all objects in the VCL. It is the object from which all objects descend.

17:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, every day a new page, yep, and, by the way, this will only take us three years. It's going to take longer than that.

17:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
On NET Rocks we used to do well, we still do the bit but we used to do a bit called Better Know a Framework and it was literally pulling calling classes out from the NET Framework. It was so huge.

17:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You have to get through those days when you had all these API or maybe it was an sdk, I don't know or function calls or library calls, and you had these giant manuals.

18:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have apple's inside macintosh yes, I owned all of those. And then, by the way, those first uh, I don't know five, seven, whatever. Was this also pascal?

18:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that's right. In the early pascal based yep I I learned pascal because of that. I loved I did too, actually I thought, thought Pascal was a great language.

18:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I never did. The worst teacher I ever had was Pascal. I took Pascal at my senior year of high school. They just started offering computer programming classes. So in my junior year it was basic and I got an A+.

18:38
And the teacher was so horrible in the Pascal class I almost flunked out of it and I used to just copy my friend's homework. And then one day he decided he was going to call me out in front of the class. He's like maybe you could explain to me why your homework is always identical to Dave's. And I said well, yeah, I can explain it. I'm actually struggling in this class. So Dave is taking time out of his day. Every day we meet at lunch and we go over the homework together. So he knows that I understand what's happening and that's why they look the same, because we do them together. And he says you know, I hope the rest of you are paying attention to this and I wish the rest of you would take this class as seriously as paul does. So then I later wrote the delphi super bible, like you showed there, and I'm like I wanted to send it to this guy and be like go f yourself, you idiot. You're a terrible teacher.

19:22
You're a jerk, you know. I wrote the book.

19:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, suck it Is Delphi, pretty much Pascal. He left at the part where it's like I found the teaching here wholly inadequate.

19:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I really had to go to a different story. I had to go into it as a career.

19:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah exactly, I don't know. It does look like Pascal a little bit what's that I'm? Just wondering how pascal like it is. I see colons.

19:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah well, it is pascal it's object pascal it is pascal yeah, it's an object oriented uh pascal class library nicholas never, never knew.

19:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mr vert, professor vert, I am going to write the book, okay. Yeah, by the way, that thump you just heard was me putting it on the ground. I know, just dropping it lightly.

20:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Causing a 3.1 earthquake for their surrounding area.

20:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, we're going to take a little break. Come back. We have. Actually, I don't need to take a break, let's keep going. Let's talk about Windows. We haven't really yeah, it's been a while I haven't delved into the Windows thing yet.

20:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
As I do so often, I forgot that yesterday was Patch Tuesday. But yesterday was Patch Tuesday.

20:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you know, if you forget, Microsoft will remind you.

20:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, one of my machines was rebooted this morning. Yeah, they'll let you know.

20:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So we've already talked about everything that's in this update, but 24 and 23H2 both got they got different updates, but it's the same contents, right? So jump lists off of app icons in the taskbar that support documents so you can access those and share, if I'm not mistaken. Let me look at this one. Actually, before I say that, is there a way to? I don't have a thing anything with documents, nevermind. Anyhow, I believe share is part of that. If not, that will be next month.

21:07
There's some Windows Spotlight stuff for both lock screen and desktop, just about finding more about the image and so forth. If you see that start backup icon in a OneDrive folder that you're not backing up, you can actually pause that, not turn it off. They're not that nice, but baby steps I guess At some point it will come back on. But if that irritates, you can turn it off. Multiple camera support, which is kind of cool so you can stream two or more cameras at the same time and then have that be a view that any app should be able to use.

21:36
So I've not tried that yet, but that's kind of neat and I would say that's most of the important stuff. But yeah, that's most of it, but I do. Well, actually, let's talk about this first, because, well, let's not, who cares. So in a couple of minutes we're going to talk about some of the things that have occurred over Canary, beta 23H2, and then Devon, beta 24H2. And actually we're kind of getting back on this faster, more you know stuff's happening. So, uh, this is probably the third year in a row that I'll sort of wonder aloud whether we're not going to get something different later in the year, meaning a new version of windows or a major new version.

22:21
Maybe you know, we don't know Um, later on we'll talk about some big ai updates that are coming on the client side. It's possible they might tie it to that. I think. Originally the plan for windows 12 was for it to be kind of the ai release, but then they realized wait, we need to get this out everywhere. We have to force people to use it. So they kind of put the brakes on that. But I do wonder if it's starting to speed up again. It feels like it is, especially when we get into the insider stuff which represents things we'll see in future patch Tuesday. So January was nothing, because December everyone's gone. They didn't do anything for that. But now we have two months worth and they're functionally medium quality, whatever worth, and you know they're whatever. You know functionally medium quality, whatever, uh, or medium number of new items and so forth. But I think it's about to. I think it's going to get bad. I think april, may, etc. It's going to speed up again. It looks like so I don't know.

23:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The best proof that windows 10 will actually go out of support in october would a Windows 12.

23:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah there you go. Although, as dumb as Windows as a service was back when they first announced it, especially in as bad as it was for the first couple of years, I did sort of appreciate the message, which was we Microsoft want to get as many users as possible on the latest version of Windows, which at that time was Windows 10. Except that it wasn wasn't right, because windows 10 was revved every six months and there were at one point six or seven or eight, even whatever supported versions windows.

23:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was the opposite right of what they wanted to do um, but you know, I appreciate also that they were experimenting with trying to iterate faster on windows. They were pressing a team that wasn't used to that to doing something different that's right. And then they you can't have an operating system like an sdk, and that's what they were doing you can.

24:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just terrible, and the reason is everybody knows richard knows this better than anybody.

24:17
But the problem is, you're tying new features for developers to specific versions of windows 10 in that case, which means no developers ever going to use them, because they can't be guaranteed that everyone has them. So with the Windows app SDK, they separated church and state, so to speak, and now the developer features, the new APIs et cetera, are all on their own schedule. They're not tied to a specific Windows version. They will work on any supported Windows version. They learned, they learned, they learned.

24:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it took a while. It took a while Over on the run-in side. We had this period where our developers are asking us to update Windows in the office so that we can deploy this new app that's running with UI3X, right.

24:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah, so that was you know. It's one of those things. You look back at it later and you're like this should have been obvious. But yeah, but they, they, they picked it up. I would say I mean, maybe you know more about this than I do, but I feel like you know wherenet is on a very steady cadence. One might say a little too steady or at least maybe a little too aggressive, or however you want to say it. The Fantasyland. I don't know what they're doing. There are multiple pre-release, experimental whatever they're calling them versions of this thing out in the world, but the stuff that they announced for AI developers last May at Build is not instable and there's no indication it's going to be there anytime soon. I don't know what they're doing other than taking a really long time to do anything. I don't know. I don't know what's going on over there, but at least it's not tied to a version of windows. I guess I don't know. You win some, you lose some.

25:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know Well, and the point of the insiders, especially stuff like canary, was to experiment right Like when. I'm kind of delighted the idea that might be experiments in canary, they get reverted.

26:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah, and every once in a while, even in some of the other channels, they'll use this better, worse, different, and letting people kind of vote on it. It's not always that transparent, a good, but yeah, I think my bigger issue, though, I guess, or my bigger takeaway, is just that there's this kind of constant churn of change and just beating the dead horse, so to speak. I feel like for the past several years, I've been kind of saying the same thing, which is just I'm not sure Windows needs a constant cadence of change, you know, yeah.

26:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, I think in general, we're starting to feel like operating systems are going the way of stuff like microcode and Eufy, where what you want out of it is just a stability. We don't care about anything else. That's right. We don't care about anything else, that's right, I mean, but no one gets it. The shift towards microsoft being a cloud company has messed with the windows team. They've been the center of the universe for microsoft for 30 years and suddenly they're not. And one hand, that's freeing, like you should be able to go experiment now. On the other hand, it's like your best and brightest went to work on that's where the action is.

27:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's also like the seven stages of guilt phenomenon or grief phenomenon, where you deny that you're not the center for a while, you know, and then you kind of evolve or, in this case, maybe devolve into a new situation. But yeah, it's very clear that Windows is not the primary concern of anybody with any cloud at all at Microsoft.

27:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's just not clear at all, and yet we all still have to run an operating system.

27:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I keep mentioning the past for some reason today. But in addition to those books I've been rereading that we mentioned with Woody. I've also been rewatching these. Like Computer History Museum has these oral histories where they bring in people like Dave Cutler, which is the one I have been watching lately. You know Ave Tavani and from Apple you know Mark Kernel and OS X et cetera, and these are the vital histories but you kind of forget and, like Leo said earlier, like how different things were. But in Dave Cutler's case they asked him do OSs matter anymore? Are we going to quickly move on to something else? And the point he kind of made was you know VMS is still running today. So in that sense, yes, they do matter. And you know he also made the case and he's correct. I mean there's fundamentally two operating systems in the world and one runs a Unix or Unix-like kernel and one runs an NT or NT-like kernel and you know all the phones and a lot of the IoT stuff is Linux and infrastructure servers et cetera. And you know he's like these things could go forever. So we may not see or need that level of, I don't know, a foundational architectural OS development like the fresh, like Greenfield OS development.

29:16
When Microsoft hired away Cutler and his team in 88, 89, whatever that was, it took them what? Five years-ish to bring NT to market and really 10 years to make it be viable for every, you know, for mainstream or more for mainstream. But, um, you know, they take these things, take time. Who wants to go? Who wants to? What's the payoff? You know they're running to the money, right? That's why we see the AI thing happening today.

29:41
Um, you know, when mobile happens, apple made what today I would say it was the right decision. I wasn't sure at the time but to take their Unix, their free BSD, os 10, whatever, and chop stuff off until it was small enough to run on this device. And then I touched to it, right, smart, it worked out great and they had a great foundation there. So I don't know, I don't know what we're talking about anymore. All right, so in the Insider Program, to your experiment point, there was a canary build.

30:25
Last, in addition to recommending apps that you may want to install from the store, it will recommend two apps that it feels will go together well, side by side on the screen, that you already have installed, and their example, of course, is WhatsApp and File Explorer, which are terrible examples of what you might do with this. I mean, I think the best you know use case for side-by-side apps is reading, taking notes, watching a video, taking notes. You know that, whatever it might be or here are my notes I'm writing my final article, right? Um, I I don't know that side-by-side apps are a big deal for most people. I think most people run apps full screen, even on a big computer screen, I bet.

31:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But they still have Windows Snap, right? I mean, you could snap them.

31:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can snap them. You can snap them different ways. There's all kinds of different things but, like so much in Windows, I don't think a lot of people use that stuff. Unlike a lot of the stuff they've added to Windows 11, I actually do see the value in it. I'm not dumping on snap. I think the snap functionality is a great idea. I think the people that use it love it.

31:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's fine, there's nothing wrong with it. Um, but really I thought everybody used it. Is that a weird thing to use snap? I well, I my big screen, it makes sense yes I mean, I guess because a lot of people are on laptops now Yep, so you don't have a lot of real estate. You go full screen. So that's certainly how I use mine.

31:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The trends here are kind of strange for Snap, because we went widescreen with computer screens for a long time because of media, because movies were widescreen and for a long time you could only get like 69, 16 by 9 laptop screen.

32:08
It was not ideal, but that would have been good for snap, right, but now we have 16, 10 or, if you have a surface, obviously 3 by 2. It's actually not as good for snap because it's skinnier. Yeah, but yes, obviously big screens, but I still I I look microsoft isn't super transparent about this anymore, but when they were still talking about this, their experience based on telemetry was that most people just run full screen, screen, yeah, yeah, but again, I think that's laptops.

32:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think that's, but maybe most.

32:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but that is most people right. I mean, that's most people so I don't know, there's certainly a three by two screen that's not great unless you like a. Like a skyscraper style window, you know no, but yeah.

32:43
On my ipad I always go full screen on everything and just swipe between yeah you have multiple displays, you could do two full screen displays side by side, which is effectively snap. You know that works. Yeah, um, the other, the other, excuse me, the other change that they're making uh, and this one was in beta channel for 23 h2, but it's also in beta dev for 24H2, which tells me this is happening is they're adding a recommended section to the File Explorer home screen for lack of a better term that, if I'm reading this correctly, will actually replace the what do you call it? The quick access view, which is, I is. Just look at that, paul, I guess. Just look at the stupid screen, yeah, which is at the top of the screen, the top of the window, by default, and I think it's actually going to replace it. So if you have signed into windows with a enter ID account for the past, possibly a year or more, you would actually see this recommended section, and the idea there is that you're working, possibly in a team of people on a project, so the recommended documents and other files would often be from these projects that you're part of, but not necessarily the only author of. They didn't add it for people who sign in with a Microsoft accounts or consumers, but now they are, and again, they don't actually say this explicitly, but based on the shot and the language of the post, I believe that they're actually going to get rid of the quick access view, which is duplicated in the navigation bar. So the folders that you have pinned desktop download, document, music video I'd be missing one by default were replicated in the main home view.

34:26
I guess we'll call it, but now they're not. I guess they're going away. So that's whatever. That's fine. It's fine, but it's kind of an interesting update. Yeah, and then 24-H2. So I talked about how, all of a sudden, there was a bunch of stuff happening, right. So I don't think this is unstable. I can't tell because I'm on the dev channel. No-transcript is to have a Snapdragon X-based PC like the Surface Laptop, and I think it's still not. I don't think it's in stable yet, but with this latest build they have rolled it out to the AMD and Intel-based Copilot. Plus.

35:18
PCs. So probably coming soon. So that's Lunar Lake and Zen 5, for lack of a better term. The recommended files for everybody, the recommended Snap Groups, the thing I just said, right, actually, this is a truly useful feature. If you do sign in with a Microsoft account and you have not configured a. They call it what's the other word term for this? An account proof. I think of it as like an authentication prompt or whatever a way that it can determine is you, maybe, if something is wrong with your account, right, maybe you can't sign in, maybe you have to do a 2FA type thing and you don't have your authenticator app or whatever it might be. You can set up one or more email addresses, one or more phone numbers as well, and if you don't have either of those installed or configured for your Microsoft account but you use it to sign into Windows, you'll actually get a banner notification. So, hey, you might want to secure this a little bit better, which to me sounds like a good idea. So that's good, just kind of a way to remind people. Hey, you should. You know you want to keep up on this.

36:21
And then the final one. This is just kind of of goofy, but maybe this is like the recommended section, where it's a recommended uh yeah section of file explorer where it will happen more broadly eventually. But they're adding something called top cards into what I think of a system about. So if you right click on the start menu start button, sorry and choose system, it goes to the page in the settings app that's setting system about and it gives you information about your computer, right so right, the device stand, the processor, the ram, etc. Um, they're actually going to call that out in um cards, which is to me looks a little bit like.

36:54
Remember windows vista had that scoring system for how powerful your system components were. You were going to score like a windows experience index, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, that's exactly so. It looks a score like a Windows Experience Index, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, yeah, w-e-i score, exactly so it looks a little bit like that and it's going to separate out RAM, cpu, gpu, whatever you might have, and I think it's just a, it's only going to be in desktop.

37:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This gets really fun with three different chipsets and different MPU designs. Yeah.

37:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah so at first either, but so so we're talking about gaming pc users, so like me and well, the type, yeah the type of people who might want to say, like, what exact nvidia graphics card did I have again? And if only there was a I don't know a score of some kind where I could determine whether I wanted to upgrade it, that would have been useful to keep, but they didn't Anyhow. So that's coming, but for a limited subset of users. So I guess, looking at this list, that's not dramatically different than we got in stable on patch Tuesday. But remember, this isn't everything right. So we've seen other dev beta builds over the past few weeks. I think we're going to start getting a lot of new, new features. I think we already have, but I think there's gonna be more.

38:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I'm just amazed that we're not talking about a 25 h2 yet yeah, um wait what year.

38:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is this right? 2500, leo, come on, um, okay, no. So the first step in that direction, or whatever the next one is called, was when they started having the same build go to dev and beta. This is the beginning of the shift, right? So at some point beta will shift firmly to 24H2. And that means that dev will switch to that thing whatever it is.

38:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Whatever, the next one is probably 25 H2. I mean, it is March, like it's time.

38:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I could not agree more. Yeah, yeah, I don't know what's. Yeah, I don't know. So a lot of times when Microsoft does this sort of thing where they they use the term window right, there's a window that's open for now, and in this case the window lets you move between beta and dev without any repercussions right, you can just switch, get the same build, it's no problem. If you want to get out of there, you can switch to beta and go to 23H2, right, which is okay. So you're like I'm just, I'm out. Usually those close pretty quick, but I think we might be closing in on a month. It's been a while. So, yeah, I don't know, I don't know what's taking so long.

39:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, we've known for a while 24 inch two was basically a new version of windows, so they it was a big they really struggled with it and they still are.

39:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe, yeah, maybe there is some. I don't want to give them too much credit here, but maybe there's some thinking that we need to make sure this one's right before we move on.

39:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
you know, make sure that yeah, maybe that's, but it would also speak to. 25h2 should be a minor one, should be unless they call it 12, right, so yeah, we'll see naming is that argument. If 24h2 was actually a new version of windows, the 25h2 should be minor, which means 12 shouldn't be until 2026.

40:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to take a little break. We'll talk about AI in just a bit. I do have a reminder that, uh, right after this show, if you're watching live intelligent machines is coming up and Ray Kurzweil will be our guest this is one of the most interesting people I know. He has an 86% prediction rate and he's made some wild predictions. He says we are going to have AGI by 2029 in five, four, four years now, and that the singularity is-.

40:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's good, though, because that's just enough time for your retirement savings to bounce back. You know, what I'm saying.

40:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You joke, but actually that's I'm sorry.

40:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm sorry if that came off as a joke.

40:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am, it's not a joke, it's not joking, sorry um, and and, and, and.

40:54
I might make it another 20 years, because he says the singularity where we merge, yeah, with machines, where we extend our capabilities beyond what genetics gives us, is only 20 years off. This will be very interesting and, as I said, he's been amazingly right on in his predictions over the last 30 years. He's a fascinating guy. He's coming up in just a little bit, but we still got two great he's like the Nostradamus of our era. You know, he invented the uh, the, the first uh text recognition stuff, and the kurzweil synthesizer for stevie wonder, and and on and on and on, which is amazing and better, and I'm looking forward to talk. I'm all a little intimidated. I've talked to him three times before but I'm still always intimidated when I talk to him because he's kind of smart. Uh, let's take a little break. When we come back, we will talk a little more about AI and browsers. Did you try that browser I recommended last week?

41:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You bet I did. All right, I did an episode of Hands on Windows because of you.

41:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I like it. I like it. That's the show that Paul does for everybody, but the videos in the club. So it's like a quasi club show and we really said Mike does hands on macintosh that way and hands on tech and so forth. Um good, I won't, we'll talk in a bit. But first I want us to talk about our sponsor for this portion of windows weekly, and that's the fabulous folks at one password. I know you know that name, but you may not know about their newest product 1Password Extended Access Management.

42:30
Now, this answers the question that well, I think I know the answer. To Do your end users always work on company-owned devices, right? They only use the laptops you provide and the phones you provide. They never bring foreign devices into the network. They always use all the IT approved apps and never anything of their own. You know they probably don't even watch YouTube when they're at work, right? Okay, we know the answer.

42:59
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44:03
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45:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Isolation, not that exciting, however, yes, uh, one thing I neglected to mention or if I did, I only mentioned in passing was that when microsoft announced the new version of copilot in windows 11, which you know, by my estimate is the 17th version of the app. I don't, you know, it's something like that.

45:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Were you just counting the icons? Yeah?

45:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And the second in which they claimed it was a native app, but in this case it is a native app. I had learned something about this app that I don't think we discussed, and that was that moving to this new architecture I hate to use that term moving to this new app design was done so that they could add more features to the app, and one of the features I knew that was coming was something called Press to Talk, which they are now testing in the dev channel of the Windows Cider program. So, yes, this is a of the Windows Cider program. So, yes, this is a. Well, I think it's just a. It's a way to quickly start co-pilot in speech mode, where you're going to speak through a microphone and interact with it, so the conversation will be audio based instead of text based. Right, but okay, not super exciting to me anyway, but it's. It is one of also 17 apps that use alt plus space, including the one of my app picks today. Hilarious there's that they don't have any way to customize that to be your own keyboard shortcut.

47:08
What was wrong with windows key plus c? It was what I thought. It was a copilot key. Well, not everyone has a copilot key and for you peasants that can't afford to buy. No, yeah, so Microsoft. Well, look, when they announced that copilot key, I thought it was going to be only on certain models. It's like everywhere all of a sudden. So, yeah, eventually we'll all have copilot keys. But, yeah, so for now we don't. And yeah, in that case, I believe, you just hold it down and that will start the voice interaction. So, okay, I mean it's fine, it's fine.

47:40
But I think the more interesting thing here is that this new design gives them the ability to do things like we talked about last week, including bring back those Windows actions, the Windows commands I think we talked about. I think we talked about, I think we talked about, um phone integration. If you have an android phone, you can do things, uh, with your phone as well. But the list of other features that I got from rafael, by the way, I should say, is a daily briefing, which was in the previous version but is gone. This is the audio podcast like, uh, sort of amazon, a Amazon Alexa like feature, where it kind of talks about the day's news, you know, in a really jaunty style, literally a feature called walkie talkie integration with the windows screen snipping, something called windows vision, windows core audio, windows wake word it's like windows safe word, windows Pro enabled.

48:33
No idea what that means, but possibly there are going to be certain Copilot features that will only work in Windows Pro, because this isn't confusing enough, and something called Windows Context, which sounds a little bit like some of those AI features that we see on Copilot Plus PCs related to recall and click to do I don't know. And then there's also, I should say, windows file uploaded Windows. Oh, I said Windows context. Sorry, I think I'm sorry. Windows file uploaded Windows context, I think, technically are in co-pilot today. They don't really reference them by name, but I think they're in there now. So there is a bunch coming. So we'll talk about this a little bit later in the show, but there is a consumer AI event coming up and this might be tied to that. Maybe this is the launch timeframe for these new features, much like the original co-pilot for Windows 11 was launched at a special event in September 2023, if I'm not mistaken. Seems like a million years ago. But yeah, do people what do you guys?

49:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so there seems to be two ways, two kind of primary paths to using ais like copilot. One is, uh, to chat with them, chat bots, yep, and the other is, you know, kind of more informational to use, use it with your data, to query it, to do people like to I guess they do, I get, but it just feels like, first of all, people. They think they're people now people who are these people?

49:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, I, I think we're a little early to know, for sure I, and it's interesting because even just within the this year, right, um, starting with deep seek, it was struggled with that term. Um, we have this notion of reasoning models that spell out in front of you how they're getting to the answer yeah, well, everyone loves that. So that's something open ai specifically hid from you, right? But now what we've learned is actually this increases trust in the ai because we can kind of yeah, so I think these things evolve.

50:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I will say that I'm going to talk a little bit. That's primarily a text mode, because you don't want it to do that while you're chatting.

50:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look my, my knee jerk reaction when I saw what they called at the time big chat. Uh, three years ago, two years ago, whatever that was, uh, when they first announced it. Uh, I'm sorry, you're telling me we're going back to a text-based interface. Yeah, 30, 40, actually, years after the GUI kind of arrived. That didn't make any sense to me. That said, I mean we do these short textual interactions all the time in messaging apps, in Google search, whatever.

51:11
It is notable that Copilot or all of these AI, these chatbot things, seem to work well in a conversational context and I think I'm positive. I talked about this, but if I didn't, I'm going to during my tip. I've seen this with normal people, like mainstream, non-technical people, and I've now heard about this from a guy who is more technical where they walk around and they I'm going for a walk and what they want to do is offload some ideas onto chat, gpt or whatever, and they prompt it, say look, just don't interrupt me, I'm just going to talk, but I want you to collect all this information. And when they get back they're like all right, now, why don't you summarize the ideas I have? Tell?

51:52
me which you think are the most viable Right, so people are starting to do this. That, to me, is fascinating, and I distinctly.

51:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You used to do this with a little tape deck and then you handed it to your assistant. Yeah, exactly.

52:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like, yeah, you're like click idea A vampire, but it's in medieval times.

52:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's crazy like so, yeah, so there's like yeah, right, so people that's why I wear this little uh b computer, because it's always listening and I'm and I could say, hey, remind me to.

52:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Or things like right, I've never done this and I'm but I'm fascinated by it, like I. I actually do think this is remember when, uh, the little bluetooth headsets first arrived probably right around the time, yeah you look, people are crazy talking into there you'd see a guy out talking to the air and you're like look at that insane person. Now we're used to it.

52:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So now going forward, a lot of those people will be talking to AIs and we won't think anything of it. I felt a little guilty because I was doing this in the restaurant last night and the AI was talking back and I felt like maybe that's rude.

52:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You should say something like you know like the guy comes over with the bill. You're say something like uh, you know, like the guy comes over the bill. You're like, uh, hey, uh, co-pilot, um, based on my experience tonight at this restaurant, what do you think the bill should be or the tip should be? And then it's like, oh really, I'm like, why don't you tell?

53:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
him. And then, you know, I was thinking uh, maybe I should tip paul and richard for an excellent show. What do you think a good tip would be for a couple of podcast hosts is here's a tip Walk both ways when you cross the street. I should mention that.

53:14 - AI voice (Announcement)
A good tip for a podcast can vary, but generally around 10, 20% of the ticket price is a nice gesture. If you felt they did an exceptional job, leaning towards the higher end would be great. Consider what you think reflects their effort and quality of the show.

53:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have so many problems with that One is it sounds just like JK Simmons. Which is unbelievable which, by the way, I kind of like, I have to say I love it.

53:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, that's my choice. If I can't get Scarlett Johansson, I'll take JK Simmons.

53:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, he's good. Yeah, what story I want. Mike Ehrmantraub actually witnessed myself, but they were so good, they were in my brain. And you remember the show 30 Rock from the Sun. Who? Third Rock from the Sun? Oh, third Rock from the Sun, yeah, with John Lester. So aliens, right. The fish out of water, right. So someone teaches about a tip. So he goes in a restaurant, puts down a stack of $1 bills and the waiter comes over he says this is your tip. Every time you screw up, I'm going to take away a dollar. Now, I've never seen this show, I've never seen that episode anyway, and I think that's one of the most hilarious things I've ever heard in my life.

54:21
So, I think, yeah, I just think, like AI could be used like that, like AI like pay attention to this experience and, and you know, let me know what do you think?

54:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
by the way, you're getting 10 tips, yeah, yeah we underperformed.

54:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I get it, it's okay. Yeah, all he did was put tea and water, like what would which is pretty much what a podcast.

54:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I, to be more serious, I think you're exactly right that what's these are becoming, and this is the chat interfaces, companions that you interact with and get advice literal companions.

54:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so they tried to. We're gonna, you know, of course we're gonna have an ai section later, but they, they, they apple, amazon, google, microsoft tried with these digital assistants, these digital personal assistants, to achieve this type of interaction right in the beginning. You would say some word, you'd ask it a question, it would come back and that was the whole thing. And then eventually they got kind of conversational, where it could remember the context and keep going so you could ask it follow-up questions. But it was never super sophisticated and now it is. You know, now it's really good.

55:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's good enough that people are talking to it Getting close to her, you know.

55:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, yes, that's what I really want. But so, in a way, I'm preparing for that day, because they're not that useful, but the fact that I'm recording every interaction, I have everything that's going on my emails, my calendar stuff. I'm hoping you know this may be five, ten years down the road, but that this database that I'm building will be of value, right, five, 10 years down the road, but that this database that I'm building will be a value right.

55:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're going to be in a supermarket and you're going to walk. You're going to be done and you're going to walk to the aisle where you pay and it's going to say, hey, you forgot the butter, or whatever. You will know right, it's going to become proactive.

56:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Or is it what you?

56:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
want no, but I think it is, I think it is, I think it is yeah.

56:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It just depends on the person.

56:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And it depends on how annoying and intrusive it is right.

56:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that more or less useful than the typed AI interactions that you have? I?

56:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
don't think people can type. So the only thing that saves it is most people who are typing to AI are doing it on a phone and it's pretty good auto correct, you know, depending on the phone, and that might save it a little bit. And I, I watched my kids. My kids are like they're they draw straight lines and words. I don't even know how they do it and, you know, it's kind of astonishing. So I guess if you're younger than I am, maybe it's even better. I don't know, but yeah, I my initial reaction to typing was, I mean, I'm a writer and I was like what is this? No one's going to type, right, you know, complicated things to an AI, but actually, so what do I know? I?

56:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
know people are doing it, I guess. Oh, I use it all the time, yep, um, you know, I'm I'm fascinated by this.

57:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I understand it's not yet. No, but you see those moments where you're like okay, and you can tell you know, yeah, it's getting there and it's happening so fast.

57:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Whatever complaint you have today might be out of date, that's you know two weeks from ray kurzweil's uh book which, uh, we're gonna interview him. Even experts in the field have been surprised by many of the recent breakthroughs in ai. That's right. They seem to occur suddenly, without much warning, like we didn't even you know what.

57:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right now, which, by the way, feels like I know, richard, I know I just gotta qualify this by saying I know, but it feels like intelligence, it feels like developing intelligence, it feels like he also points out there's an interesting thing that, before the AI can do it, you say oh yeah, that's very human.

57:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, he's going to do it. He talks about an expert named Poggio. Tommaso Poggio, mit expert in AI in 2014, said you know, the ability to describe the content of an image would be one of the most intellectually challenging things of all for a machine to do. And now it's not going to happen.

58:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Almost the next day, yeah, right google the on device offline version of that updates on my laptop every three days. But his point is and then what happens humans do is oh well, that wasn't that hard right, right, that we're going to be doing this until we are all in caves with barely fire and we're going to be like I just still don't think it's that smart, of course, and they're flying over some spaceships like it's you know. Yeah, of course, it'd be the best champions of chess and go in the world.

58:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Of course it did. That's just a. It's just a calculation, you know. Of course it can make images you know, but that, but is it human? Of course you can do my job, but I mean yeah, that's where it's going my job's ludicrous.

58:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, that doesn't. What does that mean? That's, that's where it's going.

59:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I know it's crazy.

59:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's very, very interesting now I was down on campus the past two days and I'll tell you it's not happening magically. There's a whole lot of people working really hard. Oh, absolutely.

59:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But even and Stephen Wolfram said this a couple of weeks ago on Intelligent Machines even the experts at OpenAI were surprised.

59:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're surprised, exactly.

59:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, when ChatGB 3.5 came out.

59:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was like whoa. Like people you don't want to be, surprised by things. Those guys, the doctor operating on you goes whoa, I've never seen that before. You're like no dude. What the like? What?

59:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you know, like we've all written code where you know, you know it's not going to run the first time and when it does, you go.

59:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, it worked actually yeah, but usually pretty deeply suspicious. This is gonna yeah exactly that can't be right.

59:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is gonna come up in my my tip at the end. But I wrote code that was doing the opposite of what it should do and I went through it and I was like, no, this is wrong. I took it out and then it worked properly and that should not happen, right? So I had that moment where I was like, and it turns out it was somewhere else, it was some code, somewhere else was doing it. But it was like I had this one moment where I was like, okay, I have now proven that computer science is magic and now I need to bring it to the world. And it was just a human error. That's fun that AI helped me find, ironically. Yeah, okay, we're going to get back to AI. We do have a bunch more AI stuff.

01:00:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's talk browsers. How about that? Wait first, oh no, Remote desktop.

01:00:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so yes, in the list of things that Microsoft community folks could be outraged by, the most, skype right, which my wife, as I told the story, said they still make Skype, but now in our world, you learn of every single human being that still uses Skype, outraged that they would kill this thing that no one is using. You learn of every single human being that still uses Skype, outrage that they would kill this thing that no one is using, and be most outraged that the feature they want to use is the thing that nobody really needs that much anymore and whatever. So there's outrage there. The new Outlook, the perennial favorite, windows 11, falls into this list as Windows 10 goes out the door. Windows 10, which debuted with a UI that came from a phone that hasn't existed in a decade, somehow, is now nostalgic or beloved so, and it's just the ugliest, plainest looking thing in the world, but whatever. But now we have a new one. This is this. This might. I don't think it's going to beat them all, but it's definitely going to make the top five, which is the admins are anxious.

01:01:29
Let me tell you, yeah, the remote desktop app, right. So Microsoft announced something called the windows app, which every, I have to say, everybody loves the name. It's completely obvious. What it does is no problem. You can run the windows app on Android. It's hilarious. The jokes never stopped. But in sometime last year they announced that they would replace the remote desktop app with the Windows app, and then they released the first stable version of the Windows app just before Ignite last year, if I remember correctly. So the Windows app is a way to access remote instances of Windows in the cloud, right? So that's Windows 365, azure Visual Desktop, which is sort of the predecessor to Windows 365, and then the Microsoft DevOps, which is where you can get the big honking computers to run Visual Studio on and test things against different configurations. Sorry, but when I hear remote desktop, what I think of is that feature that's been in windows since I don't know nt something, probably certainly windows xp, um and actually that remote desktop is actually still in windows. If you run remote desktop from your start menu, you'll see a windows vista ui, uh, which has inexplicably lasted forever.

01:02:54
I wrote a tip last year about how you can connect to another PC on a home network or the same network when you sign in with a Microsoft account. This is part of the problem with this technology. It predates Microsoft account sign-ins. It only works with local accounts natively, so you have to kind of work around it, right? That's not the thing they're getting rid of. That's going to still be in Windows.

01:03:18
If you go to the Microsoft store you'll find something called the remote desktop app, and I believe when that was first created it's a store app.

01:03:24
It was supposed to be a modern replacement for that thing that's in Windows, but it never did replace it, I believe does still work with, um, what I'll call local computers. Local meaning they're on your current network, typically home network, right? Um, the windows app does not support that, interestingly, which is explains the outrage, because the thing I'm describing, where I'm sitting, like I am now on a home network and I'm on this computer and I want to access the file share on the laptop over there or whatever it is almost nobody does this. Yeah, that said, the people listening or watching a show represent probably a high percentage of people who do that, and they're the people who still do that, and, of course, it admins and whatever else. So there is some outrage there. They will be adding this capability to the Windows app and in the meantime, they are recommending that users use the remote desktop app that's in Windows the one that I believe debuted in XP until they add that to the Windows app.

01:04:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, which is called Remote Desktop Connection. Yes, thank you.

01:04:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, so fun.

01:04:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I got that local copy of the installer for the remote desktop manager, which was the fancy version that allowed you to manage multiple services for a long time. Yeah right, right, right. You know what really got me using less RDP Not having any servers.

01:04:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, yep, yeah, I mean honestly, I betdp usage exploded when they added um server core to windows server, because that was headless, essentially, it had just a command box or whatever. Um, I'm trying to remember when that was, uh, but about 2000, was it 2008? Had 2008, yeah, along with yeah, and then hyper-v follows shortly thereafter. Yeah, yeah, so it probably had a resurgence whenever that was Jesus. That was like 18 years ago, 17, 18 years ago.

01:05:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's tough getting old. Well, and the other tool in 2018 was Windows Admin Center, which was really supposed to be the thing that got us away from RDPs. Everyone hates it.

01:05:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, that's not fair, I'm sorry uh, well it's.

01:05:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know what it suffered from.

01:05:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It uses the plug-in model, which means every single time you opened it, there were 47 things to update and it was going to do them sequentially and you were going to wait that's why I love using this laptop for windows weekly, because every time I log in, notion has to update, discord has to update, my web browser has to update. I can't just use the computer. Apparently, my career is 50% managing updates or something.

01:05:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Now you literally want to, half an hour before the show, open everything and Twitch for a while.

01:06:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I am not that kind of person. But I will say today I was reading, this morning I looked over at this thing. I'm like you know what I'm going to do, exactly what you said. I'm going to turn this thing on and I and I had the patch tuesday updates. It was like it was great, this computer, when all of that is done.

01:06:18
Reboot the machine, oh yeah, and then of course, oh, and I, just since we're talking about it I saw something today I'd never seen. So if you're using windows 11 I don't know, 10 does a version of this too, but it's super common in 10. There's a checkbox and settings you can use to turn this off. But when you do a Windows update or reboot your computer, you log in and it throws up that Windows setup looking screen. It's like, hey, we'd love to see you set up Windows backup or whatever. And you're like, yeah, remind me in three days. And I do that every single time. And today that screen came up and it was blank.

01:06:58
And so I sat here for about 60 seconds looking at it thinking surely it's gonna, you're gonna ask me to do something, ask me. And I'm looking and I'm thinking ah, lunar lake, you'll never learn. Uh, no, sorry, meteor lake, sorry, not lunar lake. Um, and I had to turn it off and then turn it on again and windows, yep, uh, okay. So what else can I complain about? Oh right, so there's always something, the web browser thing.

01:07:19
So last week leo mentioned um, I almost said arc, uh no zen browser, zen browsing, right, yeah, and I had come across yeah, I'd come across something called sidekick, which, by the way, may not be supported anymore.

01:07:32
I've only recently found out, and I mentioned Opera Air and I decided to do an episode of Hands on Windows about new browsers when Arc came out. It was very interesting to me because, as these people say, that the browser company and others will say too, web browsers are the most used app there is, but there's no there's no economic upside, but also well there is.

01:07:58
If you are, no, you can't charge for it, but it's bizarre that the basic ui has not changed in 30 years. That's true, yes, um, I I've been. I've been really confused about this and it's fair to say that arc was a bridge too far for a lot of people. Um, there were people like leo and others who saw.

01:08:15
I loved it I fell in love with this is this is what I want, but and they say that too they're like, look for some percentage of the people nailed it, but the other 80 or whatever is like, oh, it's too much. Right, at least it's still using chrome. Yeah, and that's so. It's 60, 70 percent of the whole world, right, so totally dominant. Yep, I had, uh, you know, I started wondering, like we're starting to see these kind of um, they're almost like third tier companies, right, so you have the browser, the, actually the platform makers apple, google, microsoft that have a browser, and it kind of behooves them not to be radical here, right, like they're trying to keep people in their little gigantic ecosystems, really yeah, I feel comfortable.

01:08:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I recognize that it's familiar. I get it yeah, yeah.

01:09:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But the job of the browser, from those companies perspective, is to capture your digital effluent so they can monetize it.

01:09:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right so it's like a giant, but I think what's? I think it's like a giant. Notice, is that what you're saying?

01:09:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
but I think what's? I think something's going to change with browsers and browser makers or, yeah, no, browser makers are starting to talk about how these things will become agentic, right. So a week or two ago I mentioned that opera talked about hadn't released yet, but discussed how their agent in their browser will work and it will go out and browse the web for you. You'll say I want to buy 10 pairs of socks, whatever, and you give it some parameters and it actually does the browsing like it understands the browser. It does it for you. It's not taking screenshots and doing stuff like it's actually using the browser.

01:09:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you think about. That's not so far from what we're already doing I mean if I search with perplexity, it gives me a bunch of footnotes with links and there's no reason why it couldn't follow those links we're in a, in a weird little space today where things are transitioning.

01:10:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So sometimes with ai you'll say I want to do whatever the thing is right, right, and sometimes it'll do it for you, and sometimes it will say this is how you do it in right the app as you're talking. So we're doing, we're kind of making that transition I do that all the time.

01:10:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll say, well, okay, in linux I need to install, uh mosh, how do I do that? And it'll give me a step-by-step which I will type in copy paste no reason it couldn't just type it.

01:10:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
could you just do it, which I think is the well? Is the windows action thing to do in the copilot, right? Yeah, um, don't tell me how to enable dark mode. Just enable dark mode, you know that kind of thing, right? But a side topic to this is our declining attention spans. Right, I'm a lifelong reader.

01:10:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're getting stupider and stupider. Well, that's what's really happening.

01:10:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We are, but I'm not 100% sure this is any different than it was 50, 100, 200. You know, you could find any generation and be like, oh, the jet airplane is going to make you stupid, you don't have to walk places.

01:10:55
No, that's ridiculous, whatever, but it's just a fact. I've read 1,000 to 1,000 page books. I've apparently written some, and I have a hard time keeping track of this stuff. So the notion of browsing is something that may sort of go away. We may still call these things browsers, but they will actually be these things that go off and do stuff for us, right, even something simple that we do have today. Like you bring up a web article and you're like oh, that's a little long AI, could you summarize this for me, please? You know like we're already doing it Right, doing it right. So I think these two things together, combined with what I will call minor advances in UI in browsers, are I may be pointing at how these things will advance right. So the best example of this new UI I'm talking about is probably Opera, actually, although it's not complete.

01:11:47
But you have these class of web apps or services that are notification driven, which are social media, which are email, maybe, or calendar based, where today, in my case, I might have some of them up in my browser tabs taking up resources or whatever. Or maybe I have standalone apps like for, like Slack or Teams or whatever it is, and they're running because they have to be running. They don't actually have to be, but they run because you don't know any better and you're like well, just someday someone I work with is going to contact me. I need to see that thing. But I think this notion of these sidebar apps, which could be email, I guess, a calendar or social media, take them out of the browser bar, the tab bar. They run in the background, their background processes, and they just pipe up when they're needed. Or you could go over and click on it and say I want to send a message, right, I don't have to have this app running all the time. I think that's an interesting little. It's a baby step, but it's interesting and it's something that existing browser makers could do.

01:12:48
Edge and Chrome both have sidebars, but they're like the one in Chrome is actually really stupid. It doesn't do almost anything. Um, the one in edge, you know, has copilot, has image creation, has a few things that they have sort of the notion of apps. But I think, uh, opera is maybe the best example of this now and is, um, I don't know, it could be pointing this. I think maybe this is where we're going. You, um, I don't know. So I don't know, I I'm, I'm kind of hoping, through writing about it and then mentioning it, someone's going to reach out to me and say hey, look at this thing, you know, like your zen browser thing was very interesting.

01:13:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um sidekick, which may or may not be in zen's open source, which I kind of like, yeah, um and it uses mozilla's engine, which I also think you know good. We need some diversity and oh I did.

01:13:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I forgot, I didn't write about this today. Uh, so it's not in the notes, but I don't know if you saw. Mozilla came out and had their own reply to the doj suggestion that google not be allowed to have any payments to partners for search, which is what's keeping Mozilla in business, and I'd say they made a pretty good case and their case was based around the fact that, like you know, forget market share. Like look at what we're doing for the web and if we disappear, who's going to do that? Nobody, and you're arbitrarily killing us because you're trying to lash out at this company that has this dominant monopoly. I kind of see both sides of this one, frankly, but I, I, you know, unfortunately mozilla is sort of right now. Unless something changes, uh, collateral damage here. But yeah, leo, I'm with you. 100. Like I think this, this is important, like we want to keep this thing. Yeah, you know it's important, even if you don't use it.

01:14:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You should agree, it's important. Maybe we should be paying for browsers. I hadn't really thought about this. It's probably too.

01:14:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, netscape was on to something you know yeah because if you it was good to give you control over you, the data stream coming from you, that'd be pretty darn interesting that's how they're monetizing absent.

01:14:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Another way to make money they uh, you know they get money from google to use the google's bizarre that, like I said, this is the most important app for almost everybody.

01:14:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is, it's the most used app for everybody, and if you could poll anyone who uses it all day long and they would all say the same thing I'm not paying for that. What are you talking about?

01:15:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's free, you know it's crazy right about m365 family could easily allow you to use a version of edge, where that digital stream is now directed for you, so that you, as the family manager, can see the digital effluent of your family too, which may might make you sad, but I believe that exists, by the way, essentially, but yes, yes, but even if you pay and again, even if you paid for, it's like, hey, if you're an M365 customer, you're already paying Microsoft.

01:15:36
I figured they do go down this path right off the bat with the new browser, except that it sounds like the affluent is just so valuable, I know.

01:15:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This goes back to. We had this conversation in the context of Windows, especially Windows 11. I would, yeah, the browser I would add to as well, which is back when Chris Caposella was a thing at Microsoft and would come on the show once a year. I would say to him why don't you, let me pay? Take away all the garbage? And his argument, which I kind of get, was well, that would be like admitting that what we were doing was garbage, and I'm like no, it isn't.

01:16:14
The ad-supported model is very common in the digital world and you can pay, like I could get Spotify for free, but I have to listen to ads. I think that's garbage, but I would like to pay for Spotify and have it without ads and maybe have other little things that are better. Whatever, that is good. This is very common. You just adopt, you know, and I don't. I don't. Maybe the, maybe the number is, I don't know, maybe it's not it, maybe it's not just about how much is your data worth to us as microsoft, as it is the collective body, and if we take, if too many people do this, then we become less valuable yeah, although empirically that's, it's typically only two percent are going to pay, so it's just not that big of a deal.

01:16:51
I take that noisy two percent out of the loop, I know, I know, and the complaining it's a win-win. I don't understand it. I, I, it just blows my mind anyway. So I, I keep thinking, I keep uh, you know, leo uh messed with my head last week. When he mentions that, I'm like, okay, I thought I, I thought I knew what was going on. Now I'm like I have to look at this, um, um, it is very interesting. You know, when I um, yeah, there's so much uh it addresses, I feel like arc browser addressed some issues with browsers but also raise some issues that I don't think anyone was paying attention to was important. But Zen answers some questions or issues that people might've had with arc as well, right, by being open source and based on gecko, et cetera. So, yeah, anyway, I don't know. I don't know where we're at.

01:17:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know where we're at either. That's my problem. I'm confused. I don't get it at all. It's moving pretty fast. When you guys first kind of glommed on to technology, I bet you, richard, you didn't feel this way, but I felt like wow, it's, it's going so fast, I'll never keep up I.

01:18:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I embraced it when I was younger and then, as I get older, I realize a lot of this is just change for change's sake, and we're making it up as we go along. You know that we don't necessarily know what we're doing. We release things, we put them out in the world and it's like just kidding Nobody wants it.

01:18:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're just throwing spaghetti against the wall.

01:18:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The most bizarre thing to me is that we're still doing that with established platforms like Windows that don't need it.

01:18:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But do you feel like you can keep up? No, no, need it, but do you feel like you can keep up?

01:18:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
no, no, nope richard, you, you are super smart. You obviously feel like you can keep up. It's unlike up as a relative term.

01:18:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You sort of have to pick your areas right, avoid what you're going to focus on this you're good at deep research but uh, and obviously I have that.

01:18:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know the upside to what 3000 podcasts and all those relationships at microsoft is like I just spent a day and a half oh, that's right things of all the new products, oh yeah, yeah, what you're describing is almost like the in-person version of what I would say about programming or any other skill, which is like not necessarily that you have to memorize everything and know every fact, but know who to ask or where to look, right yeah yeah, um yeah, but that's weird schism where they've shown me all the next generation stuff they're working on and I can't talk about any of them, and so let's, uh, let's talk about that for a second.

01:19:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, yeah, I, I just feel like, uh, I'm, I'm sipping a fire hose through a straw, I just uh and it's. You know, maybe it's because I put myself in the position of not just covering Microsoft but covering everything. Yeah, a lot.

01:19:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
When Microsoft went through its antitrust stuff in the United States in the very late 90s, very early 2000s, I had to, and many people like me had to. All of a sudden, I have to understand antitrust, right. Right, there's a lot of you know, there's a lot of history there, there's a lot of law's a lot of the you know there's a lot of history, there's a lot of law, a lot of whatever politics you know, and um oh, I don't have nearly enough time to read everything I need to read.

01:19:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's so right, I mean today to study yeah, that was bad enough.

01:20:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, uh, or if I I I don't know if I brought this up on this show yet, but I I haven't written this, but I'm. I started thinking about the times in the industry where I was so overwhelmed by dot, dot, dot that I just couldn't understand it. So quantum computing was the big example.

01:20:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Perfect example yeah.

01:20:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
When they first announced Microsoft Azure, I was like nope, nope. The whole online, whatever we were calling it at the time, the NET related xml, whatever service, architecture, whatever that was. I was like I'm like this is the perfect time for me to get out of programming. I can't do this. I can't do it.

01:20:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't get it I think there is a certain one way of dealing with it is a certain willingness to just be in uncertainty and not yeah, okay, I don't know. I.

01:20:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I briefly mentioned this moment where the code was supposed to do one very explicit thing and very explicitly, was doing the opposite, so I deleted it. That's actually a good sign. Well, I deleted it to doing something to do whatever to debug it. And and when I ran it, it did what I wanted, but the code wasn't there and I was like like I'm, like I don't. If I hadn't found that, that might've been a moment for me where I'm like I'm out.

01:21:16
Like I'm, like I give up, you know, like I don't know anymore, I'm in backwards world.

01:21:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah. And we are feeling like the PC revolution, the internet revolution, the AI revolution, like this is what you're feeling, is it's the same caliber of event.

01:21:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I do feel it. I think each of those, yes, at the time, absolutely, but the truth is I think they're almost exponential to each in a way.

01:21:43
That's right, yes, and I had I was at, I would have told the story. But a few months back I was at some HP event. I was talking to Michael Miller and I said hey. I said can you think of anything that has exploded as fast as this? And he said yeah, the internet. And I'm like not exactly. No, the internet took longer. It was big, but to go from everyone had a dial up to everyone has broadband and it was just pervasive. That was 10 years, in many ways still just happening, depending on where you are. I now you can come to mexico or europe or australia or anywhere in the world and probably get online with your own phone, high speed, no changes to your. You know, if you're depending on your account, you may have to pay extra, whatever it is, but like I just get off a plane now and it's like welcome to wherever you are, you're online.

01:22:26
It's amazing isn't it this is not like it was 10 by the way 20 years ago, you know.

01:22:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ray Kurzweil predicted that 25 years ago that we would have universally connected internet all the time. 26 years ago he predicted it. Oh, he was right. He was right. I want to take a break. Come back. We've got lots more to talk about.

01:22:46
You're watching Windows Weekly Paul Theriot, richard Campbell and I do want to mention, if you are not yet a member of Club Twit, that Paul does this great hands-on Windows show. You can see the video in Club Twit. You can watch us do a lot of fun things gaming, coding, knitting in our Club Twit Discord there's great conversations going on and you get ad-free versions of all the shows. You wouldn't even hear this little message unless you wanted to, and actually a lot of our club members do listen to the ad-infested versions because they like the ads. But that's up to you Seven bucks a month, which is an incredible deal for all this great content and, most importantly, it helps us continue to do it and continue to grow, and we really need that.

01:23:32
So if you are not yet a member, please if you would consider twittertv slash club twit. That's all. I won't go on. I won't go on and on um, what do we have? We did a bunch of stuff in the last couple of weeks, I think stacy's book club is uh, we're gonna, we're gonna make that quarterly to give me time, since I have so much reading well, first you have to read.

01:23:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean mean, that's the thing. I don't understand how you can do it so quick.

01:23:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it's just so much, and I'm good at skimming. Ai. Could you give me the Cliff Notes version of this book? Yeah, well, that actually has been very helpful. We do have something new. We're starting Anthony Nielsen did this for the first time a couple of and it's great with members of our club the AI user group. So we get together and talk about how we're using AI and suggestions and tips and stuff like that. It's a traditional PC style user group but for AI, and it's in our Discord on the fourth Friday of every month, the next one's March 28th, at 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern. So if you're not a member, join, so you can be part of that too. That's really fun. That's really fun. Stacy's Book Club we got Hands on Tech, the monthly recording in there, chris Marquardt's photo it's a whole bunch of stuff. Twittv, slash club, twit. All right, sorry, I didn't apologize for interrupting. Let's talk about something much more interesting microsoft 365 yeah, is it interesting?

01:24:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
um, so I think it was late last year. Google uh talked about some of the features they were going to add to chrome os for chromebooks to make it better for those in a microsoft 365 environment, which sounds oxymoronic. But that work is now complete, so to speak, although I'm not sure it goes far enough. But you can access the Microsoft 365 web apps. You know Word Power no, yeah, powerpoint, sorry, and Excel in Chrome OS, like you can anywhere. But they're not. You know, if you bring them up in Chrome or Edge or whatever, you don't get an option to install them. And if you could install it or pin it, you'd always go back to that kind of Microsoft 365 portal site.

01:25:41
So in Chrome OS they've done work so that you can actually pin those things discreetly and run them and then associate them with file types and, you know, kind of make it more native looking and acting. So actually that's kind of interesting. Single sign-on pass-through so you can sign into a Chromebook with an enter ID or a third-party authentication manager, which is cool. Onedrive integration into the Files app in Chrome OS, which is something I did actually try myself. That's kind of interesting. You don't get that local sync thing, which I think is key for this kind of service. But you could also, as an IT admin, specify that you can't even see, as a user, the local storage. Everything will go into OneDrive, including whatever downloads and screenshots you have, and keep that stuff inside the environment. So kind of cool. I mean, you don't see a lot about these two companies working together. I don't think they actually work together on this either, but it is. You know, I think it's important.

01:26:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I wonder how well Google Workspaces works on Chromebooks. That would be my question.

01:26:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it works really well. Well, look, there's the world. That world, as the commercial space, I guess, for lack of a better term is kind of like two halves right. There's the Fortune 500 managed heavy infrastructure, microsoft world, right, microsoft 365, where you basically get everything from the same company. And then there's the. It's not really ad hoc, but it's like smaller businesses, startups, where you might go with Google workspace. It's a little cheaper, maybe you don't need the desktop apps, et cetera. And then you start picking and choosing other things like Slack and Notion and whatever else you might use. Right, and these things work together to some degree, but they're not all from one place and whatever. These are the trade-offs. But at some point, if you're lucky or if things go well, your business grows.

01:27:37
And the question was always sort of like well, what happens to a small business? It becomes maybe a medium-sized business or whatever. Do they stay on Google Workspace or do they move to Microsoft 365? And I don't think there is an answer to that question. I think it's going to depend on the company. But I think this is a recognition that google hasn't necessarily made a lot of inroads into a certain part of the market, and that's the part of the market that you know, standardized microsoft, right? Um, because for a while there it seemed like google will just duplicate every single thing that microsoft does, right, which is what, what they did in the buildup, as they were, you know, as we get to what we now call workspace, but I don't know, at some point it's like, well, actually, maybe not everyone needs all that stuff and maybe some of it's a little top heavy. I yeah, actually this. I yeah, we never talked about this.

01:28:30
But last week someone asked me about loop and said is this thing still a going concern? So I'm like, only look into it, right, and if, if what you're concerned about is loop as an app, right, the notion like app that you can run on windows it's a web app or on mobile, that stuff's moving like a glacier, like it's barely happening. But the thing people need to remember is that loop is the front facing implementation for something called the fluid framework and it's this kind of component based design, a modern, olay, calm, whatever you want to call it, of sorts. And there are other things going on. So they decided something to T, did, added something to teams to Copilot called Copilot Pages. Copilot Pages is loop, but inside Copilot and is designed to be a workspace where you can collaborate with, in this case, copilot and others on the types of things you might.

01:29:29
If you weren't using Copilot compiler AI, you might be doing a loop if you know what it was. Most people don't. So, to answer the question, yeah, sort of. But if you look at it as a broader platform, actually yeah, really aggressively. And the first thing that kicked me off to this was if you look up loop on Twitter, slash X, and find their official account all their local their recent tweets are all about copilot pages and I was like why are they tweeting about this? You know it's like they're promoting some other thing. It's because it's loop.

01:30:01
Yeah, it's under the hood, yeah, so I.

01:30:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know. I get that Loop lives is the point.

01:30:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I lives, you know it's.

01:30:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's got that problem of there's so many different products inside of loop and in some ways, like it's notion client on the phone is questionable, Like it needs to have a perfect connection, it's authentication is kind of nightmarish. Uh, it has a nasty habit when it has problems of just making pages disappear. So you think you've lost stuff. But it's still got it it. Do you think you've lost?

01:30:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
stuff. It's still got it. It's why yeah, I'm going to not remember when this came out. Leo asked the question earlier and I almost made this comparison with whatever the thing was. Oh, Copilot Copilot, I should say loop to me is the same experience I have when I use Copilot in Windows or Bing on the web, which is I should give this a shot, Maybe it has gotten better. And then we have one or two interactions. I'm like right, that's why I don't use this.

01:30:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's terrible, remember. Then I stop, and so when you bump into an old girlfriend and wonder why, you're like oh yeah, yeah, there it was.

01:31:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it was that thing. Um, so yeah, it could be a friend, it could be anybody, it could be a brother, whatever. Whatever it is you, you're reminded instantly yeah, why? And now I yep, so yeah, and like you said, uh, richard, to on loop, on mobile, like I'd bring it to the gym, I have a copy of like the stuff, the weights and things I need to use. In notion I made a copy in loop and I'd look at it like okay, and I go to the next machine, I bring it up and it comes up on a blank page. I'm looking at it like where'd you go? I'm like, all right, kill the app, go back, doesn't come back. I'm like I'm just gonna use notion. Notion comes right up, it works and I, I just you kind of move on, you know, um. So yeah, that's my, that's been my loop experience anyway. Yeah, I would like it to be better. It's pretty, it's a good looking app, it's nicely designed. This is terrible, um.

01:31:58
And then, speaking of terrible, uh, so Microsoft killed Skype. I, uh, the guy, uh, laurent, writes news for a threatcom. He's a great guy, and he pinged me and he said do you, did you know that Microsoft has something called group me. I'm like that sounds vaguely familiar. He goes well, you know they just killed Skype. Well, they're continuing to update this thing called group me, and now it works with copilot sounds like grope me yeah, a little too much, right.

01:32:28
So group me is a mobile group messaging app, because god knows we need one of those. Uh, is it?

01:32:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yammer is it is it? No, it's something else. It was an acquisition. It says something else again. It sounds familiar, it sounds like something does it like, you're like, like novella groupware or something group me.

01:32:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it goes back to the 90s.

01:32:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So microsoft probably did it, but forgot about it microsoft bought this company in 2011 oh, that's how long it's been around. Yep, and has it been a product this whole time and nobody just I guess.

01:33:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so um group mecom huh I, yeah, so they're integrating it with huh Copa. Jeez, I don't know. I don't know, I don't know. That's all I can say. I don't know. Um, so, uh, build 2025 is happening in may in Seattle, Um, but the registration is now open. So if you're interested in paying for this and want to go, you can sign up, and I just I checked it this morning you could still do that. You know, in the past, this thing used to fill up like that.

01:33:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It would sell out in an hour. Yeah.

01:33:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, really quick. Like by the time I could write a story about it it was already sold out, you know. So I'm not saying you have to get on it very quickly, but if you I mean obviously, if you're serious about it you should go do it. We don't have any idea what the session list looks like yet. I'm gonna guess you're gonna see the word copilot a lot, so we'll be putting that one in the middle of our bingo sheets.

01:33:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um, it's gonna be a lot. By the way, this is a crazy low early bird rate. It was not that long ago the build was two thousand dollars. That's right, early birds.

01:34:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Eleven hundred bucks like yep yeah, I mean, if you wait long enough, they'll probably pay for your uh flight or your flight as well.

01:34:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So well, I think bill's had a tough time and, uh, I know the leadership has changed. I I know hanselman's working on the content plan so interesting. Some of the stuff I saw this past couple of days make me think that the upcoming build is going to be impressive, okay, okay and and.

01:34:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hanselman will show us how to eat chips at Chipotle, I hope most likely Hanselman will do the Hanselman and Racinovich show. Like that's a fun show, I like that.

01:34:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I bought a croissant today and the woman asked me if I I I. She said the word Chipotle. She said it slightly differently but that was the word and I was like what she was asking me, if I wanted Chipotle sauce On your croissant sauce.

01:34:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No thank you.

01:34:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, the answer was no.

01:35:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a smoky chili. You don't want it. I don't want that. Don't want it, chipotle, but some do apparently.

01:35:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, yeah, well, some people like to eat garbage Chipotle in your coffee?

01:35:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know Really. Yeah, okay.

01:35:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I had someone last night got a tequila espresso martini and I said I'm sorry to bother you but I have to ask could I have a taste of that? No, Could I. I'm like I have a slight cold, but could I Excuse? Me, sir the back goes a little strange. Okay, the back screen is a little strange, okay. So this year is Microsoft's 50th anniversary. They're having an event at the campus in April to celebrate this. Apparently, I don't know a couple of months ago.

01:35:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sorry, wait a minute, I have to show you this. It's your people all together.

01:35:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
See, I would have changed this to. They think they're people. This is horrible. This is. I know. This is straight out of 2012. I don't understand what's going on with this thing.

01:36:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know it's this is the group me because does nobody use it does anybody use this? I've never I mean obviously I've heard of it. Oh, it's a campus. Maybe they're going after the college crowd. College centric, yeah established 2010 in new york city.

01:36:20 - AI voice (Announcement)
That's their oh, wait a minute, here's use cases campus alumni team sports.

01:36:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, they're going after the uh.

01:36:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well then, faith groups so in other words yeah, in other words groups of people that don't want the overhead or couldn't even handle it of a an actual managed environment of some kind, but need to get together. Maybe we're going on a doesn't everybody just use whatsapp for this. I think so, yes okay, just checking, yep in this country they do. Yeah, yeah, yep. I wish whatsapp could just do sms mms. I would just use one app.

01:36:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'd give anything that one app you can't have it be your, your messenger. Yet you can with signal. I don't know why. What's holding them back?

01:37:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know either uh, let's group me encrypted end to end leo, you kidding me, I barely even know the name of this thing Encrypted.

01:37:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sorry, I didn't mean to go back in time, I just I found the site and I went whoa hello, Hello GroupMe, I don't know. So, microsoft, it's no TAI. What day is Build?

01:37:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So should we do something with Build. Well? Well, that's a good question actually. Are you guys going to be building? So Richard is going. Yeah, I believe I'm going to go. I just talked to Mary Jo this morning about this because we've not heard about press registration or anything yet, but I've got to figure this out.

01:37:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Haven't you in the past done things at Build?

01:37:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We were there last year, right? Yeah? I mean yeah, yeah, I mean yes, I like build.

01:37:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Build was where uh that, uh, we saw panos bene humiliated, and we saw yes, we saw richie, that happened. Yeah, I could have tripped him and he ran right stevie batish, I know, do the amazing explanation and there's less panos's, less get is less well understood.

01:38:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Follow-up a year later, but yes for sure.

01:38:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is a good conference.

01:38:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, this is one yep the problem is as, as microsoft shifted into cloud right, super focused on cloud, build became this thing where it was like, are they going to even mention windows? You know there were builds where windows never came up, you know, and it's kind of shifted a little bit. I mean, they obviously ai is the big thing, but yeah, uh, but you see windows, because they're trying to push windows or ai and windows. So you know that's happening, but yeah, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. I will go if I can. I gotta. Yeah, sounds like fun, wait to the invite. Um, in the meantime, however, I so a couple, like I said, a couple of months ago, I got invited to go to a New York local Microsoft 50th anniversary kind of celebration thing which if I was home I would have gone to. But I was here and I'm not flying home to go there. It's amazing, it's 50 years old.

01:39:07
Yeah, but now they're having the main one on the campus, so I got invited to that a week or 10 days ago, whatever it was, and I did actually say yes, so I haven't booked this, yet yeah, but if I go it's going to be too quick.

01:39:20
I'm just going to fly one night, the event one night, and go home Like it's going to be quick. But the interest, well, not interesting, aside from just the anniversary of related stuff. They are going to announce something related to consumer AI and I think this is tied to some of the stuff I mentioned earlier with the co-pilot features that are coming Right this past week that internally, microsoft's uh, oh, you know, in-house developed ai models have finally reached the quality that we see with um, open ai and anthropic models, and this is the uh, the work being done under sulliman as part of microsoft ai, the consumer part of the company so they've replaced fee or fi with mai right or something.

01:40:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They have a new right model, that's. Yeah, we were talking actually on sunday with uh lumoresca, who uh is working in ai for microsoft. He did, he did the really cool thing he put python in excel, which is super cool that took.

01:40:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That took a while. By the way. It took him 18 months, two years, between announce and release of them.

01:40:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but what a great uh, yeah, a great idea, right I?

01:40:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
mean it's no visual basic, but you know uh no, vpa, that's not goodness.

01:40:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, so yeah, and I? He says he uses it every day. He's using the microsoft models. I assume it's the newer one, not?

01:40:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, I mean there's a bunch of them. It's they have the local models, they. I think this is their cloud. I think what they're really talking about although they'll be both is the cloud models that there have been rumors for a long time now that microsoft would like to figure out a way from copilot to use other models, either mixing and matching or just outright replacing OpenAI where possible.

01:41:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, for sure they don't want to be dependent on OpenAI.

01:41:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean I don't know if you guys followed the drama over there, but there was a little event at OpenAI where Microsoft was like we got to kind of fix this. So they've been working on that ever since, and I think this is going to be them coming out and saying all right, here's where we're at. We're actually pretty far along, so we'll see. But that's happening in early April, right, so we're not that far away less than a month now. Um, so that's kind of interesting. Um, uh, distant passing. Uh, open AI, oh, three mini, I believe they make you pay to access this. You can actually get that for free now in Copilot by clicking that think deeper thing button, and so we're in a weird place. I don't know. I don't know what's going on, but I think Copilot and what Copilot uses on the backend and all that kind of stuff is going to shift pretty dramatically. And then I think we're going to start seeing more in the way of actual end user features like those things I mentioned earlier. Whatever those are, right, we don't know yet.

01:42:18
This story happened late yesterday for me here and I'm starting to freak out a little bit here. So I tried to explain this to my wife last night, because sometimes I just can't stop myself. But in case it's not obvious that big tech is terrible, right, they're doing everything they can to move as fast as they can with AI without any regulatory involvement whatsoever. So, for example, in the past, if we were 10 years earlier or something Microsoft absolutely would have purchased, would just would have acquired open AI outright Right. But they know they can't do that right Because there'll be stopped at every level by every antitrust regulator on earth, and so they came up with this you know, partnership.

01:43:01
that's a kind of a special relationship, and that relationship is is being investigated all over the world, of course. Actually, the CMA just came out and said it's fine. We had big problems with this, but the thing that made it fine, which is fascinating to me, was that announcement recently a month or two ago where OpenAI can use other AI infrastructure, which is actually kind of a win-win for.

01:43:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Microsoft right, and that was immediately followed by the Stargate announcement, because I suspect Microsoft said, yeah, we don't want anything to do with that. Yep, of course.

01:43:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And for the CMA, which I think we've established, not necessarily the brightest tax in the bunch, so to speak.

01:43:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's a lot of people stuffed in one car.

01:43:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's a clown car. It's only funny when it's a small car. I'm just saying, you know it's a bus.

01:43:47
unfortunately it's the feet sticking out of the sunroof, yeah, so anyway, they're okay with it. But other jurisdictions we'll see. So there's that. There have been overt meaning, explicit public things where, like, say, amazon now twice has invested in Anthropic right. So they've been up front, I think. Think to the tune of about eight billion dollars. But the news came out yesterday through the new york times, which filed um. I don't know if it was freedom information or how they did it, but they they got some of the court documents from google or usb google that were heavily redacted and they were like no, we need to see the full, we need to see this, this is public need to see this, this is public interest. Whatever, they got the full documents and one of the things that was redacted was Google secretly owns 14% of Anthropic. Never told anybody that ownership doesn't come with decision-making. It's a lot like the Microsoft OpenAI thing.

01:44:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It looks like it's kind of 7%.

01:44:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's currently worth about $3 billion. Their agreement is that they can Google can only own up to 15% of anthropic maximum, which is less than, by the way, amazon, canon does own. But here's my question. This is a company I, when the actually it was the same antitrust trial when this trial was underway back late last year, late end of summer. Whenever it was the same antitrust trial when this trial was underway late last year, late end of summer, whenever that was, it came out that Google was paying Apple over $20 billion a year to be the default search on the iPhone, and I raised the issue at the time.

01:45:25
I want anyone to explain to me how it's possible for two companies to have a deal that's worth over $20 billion in revenues every year and no one announces this. You don't reveal this to your shareholders, to your investors. You're a publicly held company, you have SEC requirements for disclosures and somehow this is just a secret and this is it's a rounding error. Man, $20 billion, I mean this is a major chunk of Apple services in their revenues, which is their second biggest business, right? Yeah, I? This is astonishing to me. Now, this is a smaller number, but same company. They're doing the same thing with anthropic.

01:46:07
And, by the way, while they're doing this, just in case they're not hypocritical enough, I want to remind everybody that Google CEO, sander Pichai, has, on multiple occasions, ridiculed Microsoft for using other companies' AI. I guess they're not smart enough to make their own AI, like we are. Oh well, guess what? They're also using someone else's AI, not exclusively, and maybe not even yet, but they're clearly hedging their bets as well. And what is this world we live in, where the biggest companies on earth, all publicly held, are no longer required to disclose anything. This is something I bring up every quarter Not every quarter, but I see it every quarter when they do their financial results, which are not transparent anymore.

01:46:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Quarterly reporting is a joke right.

01:46:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just a bunch of made up numbers that don't have anything to do with anything, and you have no way to know where the money's coming from. And now what we're seeing is we also have no way to see where the money's going. It is astonishing to me. And so we have these companies that are going to, uh, the in the us and the eu and elsewhere and saying, oh, please, please, let us continue making our ai. We just want to help the world. They're, they're, they're bigger than most countries by revenues. Like how, how is this happening?

01:47:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's astonishing I'm gonna take a little different tack on it, which is I think this is unique yeah, there's no monopoly, there's no lock in on AI, because all the papers, all the seminal important research has been done publicly, in public. So, Anthropic doesn't know more than OpenAI knows, than microsoft knows that it's all kind of well known.

01:47:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think these are speculative bets that one of these or the other will somehow be successful.

01:47:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I think they want a a piece of the pie in every well arena right here. But what I like about it is you know, this is what made the pc revolution happen is somebody reversed engineered ibm's bios and so was able to make compatibles? Um, and I I tell you, if ibm owned pcs, it wouldn't have been the same world oh, that's no, I'm sorry, I'm not disagreeing with you.

01:48:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I know it's.

01:48:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is this is orthogonal to what you're talking about. I agree with you. This should be the issue.

01:48:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The reason this is an issue is for the classic antitrust oh, I completely agree with you.

01:48:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Understand it. I'm just pointing out there is another interesting side of this, which is that there's no monopoly on how this works. It's well understood, which I think is great.

01:48:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But each of those companies that I mentioned does have monopolies and this is how they extend in other new era, right so, in other words like but they're not going to be able to.

01:48:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But see, that's the difference. We're going to find out. It's not a monopsony, it's not a monopoly, because they don't control it. Even china can make these things.

01:48:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, I'm sorry I, I, I'm with you, I'm not, I'm not and I'm with you.

01:49:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I agree this should be reported.

01:49:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The. The problem is the. The attempt. In other words, what they're attempting to do is continue and extend their dominance through illegal means, when you have a monopoly Right and yeah 100%.

01:49:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The good news is, I don't think they're going to be able to, because there's no monopoly.

01:49:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and I think I'm on board with that. I some time ago wrote something to the tune of if everything is AI, then nothing is AI, and this notion that, if you know, microsoft adds these features to Copilot, but then I can get them free from Notion or whatever. You can't own it, then what's the difference? Like you know, yeah.

01:49:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah. So maybe you could make one that's. I don't know, maybe you can make one that's better than somebody else's, but they're, all you know, kind of Exactly.

01:49:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're very quickly moving into a point where almost any AI will be good enough, yeah, and the ones that aren't will be gone, which is what we want.

01:49:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We do not want one company to be the source of all of this, that is absolutely-.

01:50:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If we had to pick one, I think Microsoft would probably be the I'm just kidding, they've never-.

01:50:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We don't want. Microsoft, we don't want Google.

01:50:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They've never misbehaved when they own everything. What do you mean? Um you think?

01:50:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
sam altman would be a just custodian of all the world's ai. No, but fortunately, we are so fortunate convinced he's a person. I yeah, I know but we're so fortunate that no one has a monopoly on this. That is really good news. Has nothing to do with I agree with you, the sec should force these companies to disclose, because it is an investor you have every right to know.

01:50:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so the the point that I would make about earnings is that the sec has not changed the disclosure rules for earnings at all in this entire period, but every one of those companies has slowly, every quarter, stopped starting stops well, if you don't enforce it, you might as well change it, it's astonishing.

01:50:52
So now, microsoft's earnings, which is the one I pay the most attention to, is just a bunch of blunder numbers that don't have anything to do with anything. It's ridiculous Like you have no idea of. No, you could pick any part of the business you want.

01:51:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's the gerrymandering of corporate reporting reporting.

01:51:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You just organize it the way that makes it look the best, yep, yeah so what right?

01:51:12
and? And microsoft actually maybe is the best example, because microsoft has an invented non-business called microsoft cloud that they created so they could have some big number to compare it to aws, and they cherry pick what goes into that, but never tell you what it is, and it could be different every quarter. We have no way to know and it is nonsense. And somehow wall street is not just okay with this, but microsoft is, as I speak, probably the third biggest company on earth by market cap. I think I, yeah, trillion, something, something, I mean three trillion, whatever. It is ridiculous. Okay, anyway, sorry, I just I saw this and I was like you got to be kidding me, like I, I just don't understand where this ends.

01:51:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, this, it's just insane, it's astonishing it's. It's unacceptable, but I mean, you can it's clear that I don't know how many people even work at the ftc anymore. It's clear that it's not gonna go, it's not gonna change for a while. Yep, this is uh, and you know the stock market should be going up because of that.

01:52:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let me check. I think it is Yikes. No, all right, so.

01:52:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe investors are going. You know, I can't trust anything I hear from these companies.

01:52:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The only thing that will really kick off a change is a big loss Is the secrecy covers up the fact that the company is failing.

01:52:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's is a big loss is the secrecy covers up the fact that the company is failing. Yeah, it's a good point. Yeah, this is. You know, there might be a rebellion from investors. Yeah, I mean, it's not the little guys like us, but if institutional investors stand up and be counted, that's who has to enforce this.

01:52:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you make berkshire hathaway upset. You got a problem.

01:52:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they need to say we need these numbers. The here's what I fear they're getting those numbers, yeah yeah, they're just not getting.

01:52:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That makes me crazy.

01:52:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I had the thought that that might be happening which really just it tilts the playing field for small investors again, and there's never been an example where dominant companies ever try to do that, so I don't know how that could be happening. I would assume that yeah, crazy.

01:53:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
look, I will get off of my whatever it is Get down from that horse, soapbox horse thing, whatever it is.

01:53:16
Google launched Gemma 3. Gemma 3 is like their version of Fi. It's the local model stuff, what I would call a small language model. There's a family of them with different parameters, et cetera, et cetera. But the big claim to this one is, if you're hitting this with a single GPU or a single MPU, which you would be at locally like on a device, this is actually the most performant uh, ai in its class. Uh, followed by it's in a class of its own. Uh, anyway, um, and then I this I don't even know why this is in the notes, but AI is going to use Amazon's going to use AI, and vice versa, to dub movies and TV shows automatically, because, of course, they are right. I mean, it's going to be used to do everything like this.

01:54:00
I mentioned watching those Dave Cutler videos again and I don't remember when they were recorded, but let's call it, you know, eight-ish years ago. It eight-ish years ago, in the discussion about the future of operating systems and what comes next, and blah, blah, blah. Someone asked him about AI and he says you know he goes and this is before this current boom. He didn't say this recently. This was several years ago, eight years ago.

01:54:22
He said you know, people are dumping on AI. They don't understand it, but he goes. I've seen miracles come out of this, and one of them that he mentioned he called it Skype auto translate, which is now coming just to PCs. But this note, or well, at the time I don't think it was translation, I think it was just. Maybe it was translation, I don't remember. But either translation or just auto captioning, right, where you can just on the fly do that babblefish thing, right? Yeah, amazing, isn't it?

01:54:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's just incredible, and he's right. You know, it's a good point.

01:54:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know it's uh, and that was before it got exciting, you know back then, the image net thing had already happened by then, so we already were now expecting software to recognize images like all of that stuff. That was impossible, was changing, yep and well, and it was the beginning of this generation. But it's finally gotten to language.

01:55:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There are these stages you go through with this stuff, that and this is where the acceleration of AI is just so crazy where you have some software maybe you paid for it or something and the software can remove the background from an image, like Photoshop, by doing like, oh, this is cool.

01:55:21
And then you're like I can do this on my phone, and now I can do it in paint, and now I can do it in a video what? And you can go in and say this thing is the foreground, this object now, track it through all these frames and then in real time it changes or removes the background. It gives you basically a green screen effect or whatever. Um, I, you know, I always point to jurassic park as this line in the sand, so to speak, where I saw that movie and I said now they can put anything on the screen, which to me at the time meant now they can make a Lord of the Rings movie, because this was just impossible. You could not do the scope that this would require on screen but now you can, lord Helm's.

01:56:02
Deep required an astonishing Yep. And I saw Jurassic Park and I'm like, if you can think it, you can make a movie about it. Now they can do anything, you know, and I think that's where not but now. But that was Hollywood, right. Hollywood probably had whoever you know well, whoever did that. Ilm probably had all these like silicon graphics workstations and whatever. Now it's like I'm out, I'm waiting for like to pay for something in line. I'm like I think I'm gonna use AI to make a movie, you know, on my phone. It's crazy, like it's just crazy. It's getting out of your same.

01:56:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's happening so fast, I know, but there's still that effect that kurzweil talks about, where as soon as the machine could do it, we go. Well, oh, that wasn't that hard, I could do that. We are making a lot of progress as a it's crazy wild world. I don't and the thing, I don't know what you could predict what's going to happen next, because I don't even try. It feels like all paradigm shifts.

01:56:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know the joke. Every single place in the United States and maybe on earth has the joke. You're in Boston, you're in Seattle, you're in British Columbia, it doesn't matter. Don't like the weather, Just wait 15 minutes. Right? We've all had that joke. I'll say that Don't believe in AI. Wait 15 minutes, Don't worry.

01:57:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's about to get a lot better. And we don't say wait 15 minutes, change weather here. We say it only rain twice this week, once for three days and once for four.

01:57:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a little more consistent.

01:57:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like we have two seasons of Mexico city one last nine months and one last three months.

01:57:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're watching windows weekly with Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell, so glad you're here. We do this show every Wednesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern. We are now on a summertime in the States, not in Mexico and British Columbia. You also changed pretty hard following yeah.

01:57:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So with this means that we are now uh at 1800 utc, not 19 so what time is it for you guys now like 10 o'clock at night or something I can't follow?

01:57:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that yeah. But on sunday mike elgin said let's just all do utc and and screw it.

01:58:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So no, I am not getting up at 1400 and going to bed I do a 9 am thing with brad, which is 8 am here, which is now 7 am, and I'm like, nope, I'm not doing it. I can't get up for that, no way I don't do anything before eight.

01:58:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's just not not gonna happen. Even with a chipotle croissant I couldn't do, although it probably does wake you up a little a chipotle croissant, which is like just a random mix of words.

01:58:29
It doesn't make sense together um, hey, glad you're here, keep watching. We do stream, by the way, if you want to watch live on? Uh, eight different platforms, discord for the club members, youtube, twitch, xcom, tiktok, linkedin, facebook and kick. So watch live if you want. If you're watching live, I watch the chat. You can participate in the chat Wonderful to have you there and after the fact, twittv slash, www or subscribe on your favorite podcast player. I think everybody needs an amuse-bouche right now. Nice, a little citrusy sherbert, a little sherbet for the for everyone, aka the xbox segment.

01:59:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Mr so we've been kind of tiptoeing around this for quite a while now, but we finally have our first report that may be pointing to this future, which we've all sort of understood is coming right, which, because Microsoft themselves, you know, phil Spencer and others in the Xbox org have talked about this, you know, briefly right here and there, which is that there's some future fusion coming between Windows and Xbox, which you know, which we already have to some degree now, right, that there is an interest in these portable gaming devices. Microsoft has explicitly mentioned both Xbox and Windows as the platform for those things that it seems like there might be both. Right, we've talked about Xbox as a platform and this presumed move to well, not presumed, they talked about it internally to ARM, and what might that look like and how would that would be particularly good for a portable gaming machine. Right, there have been advances on the Windows front to make the Xbox app a front end for these devices, similar to what we see with Steam on a Steam Deck, right, or Steam OS. So Windows Central has a report that actually doesn't offer anything new over what I just said, but it kind of well, other than the codename. So there's a codename Keenan, which is a gaming handheld that will look like an Xbox device, not coming from Xbox, coming from our third party hardware maker. If you look at Lenovo and their handheld device that they have with SteamOS and they had said at the time I believe this could run SteamOS or Windows right, your choice.

02:01:05
The question here becomes it's actually a little bit like that thing we talked about briefly earlier. You are Apple, you're going to make the iphone. You take this big monolithic os 10 thing and you chop it down and make it smaller and it's better for the small device. Is that what you do for an xbox handheld? Or do you go with the xbox os, which is fundamentally windows platform but especially optimized for essentially running a single app with a separate background service, which is lower resource intensive and gives all of the priority for what resources you do have to the game you're running? So it's a good experience. So we'll see.

02:01:44
According to Windows Central, this device could appear as soon as the holiday uh season this year. Um, and it's almost like a test run the way they present it, in that, if this takes off, maybe we'll see one from xbox, we'll see some from other companies. Not clear if it's really windows or really xbox or if that matters, because I think these things are actually going to uh kind of consolidate, if you will, from the perspective of for gaming anyway. And they also mentioned that we're going to get console replacements for the Series X and S for 2027. So two and a half years. So interesting, but, yeah, so that publication specifically mentions that. Well, I feel like I think they've actually said this. I think Phil Spencer has said this exactly Microsoft wants to make it easier for game developers to create a game that runs on both the PC and the Xbox.

02:02:39
That's the point, like they're almost like a one Windows, if you will Like, when they were doing, well, nobody would do that UWP. Of course, this was for apps, right, not games, and the idea was that you, at the time it was HoloLens, surface Hub, windows PCs and tablets, windows phones, xbox, right, you could write an app and it would run on all of those things and would adapt, right, if it had to, to depending on the screens and so forth. So this is a little different, but also a little bit similar, right, that we're going to have this one gaming platform, um, probably based on, you know, direct x or whatever, which is how xbox started and, uh, if you, you know, you can basically credit a game as a game maker, that, uh, maybe it's not the same exact you know, maybe it's one of those forked kind of compilation deals, but you, you know it's easier to make a single game that work great on both. So that sounds like a good idea to me.

02:03:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Anyway, that's exciting. You think they just go directly to arm.

02:03:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think so too. I didn't. He doesn't. They don't mention that part of it, and that might be because that part's not known. I don't really know.

02:03:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, I forgot to mention All that. Dev is pretty bare metal. They just need to do some recompiles and some of the hardware things. But it probably won't.

02:04:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I almost let this week go by without crapping on Siri, so I just want to take a slight break and make sure I get onto that. No, I'm kidding, but yeah, slight break and make sure I get on to that. Um, okay, uh, but yeah, it's I. We've been the ai bit I forgot to mention. Uh, you know, apple delayed the siri features they mentioned announced last year to possibly next year. So right, that's going great. Um, and in the second I mentioned loop and copilot and bing, and I would add siri to this list.

02:04:28
Please do not pipe up on my phone. I can't stand you. Um, where I use it and it's just laughably bad. Um, yeah, I think I mentioned last week how we were up in the mountains, we were offline and it actually popped up, and if my phone could have drooled, my hand would have been wet. It was that stupid. Uh, anyway, sorry, that's, that's a digression. Um, and then microsoft released.

02:04:50
Then Microsoft released a firmware update for their Xbox wireless controllers, actually about two weeks ago, and apparently it's caused a lot of problems. So there's going to be a fix for that. So if you're experiencing latency or dead zone issues, those were caused by this. Your control is not necessarily bad. It's just drawn that way with software. So they're going to fix it. They're going to release a new version of the firmware update, which is something I've not done. You have to think. If you use an Xbox controller with windows, you actually have to think to see if there's an update. You download an app from the store, you check. If you do that, it will always say there is one because you have never checked. No one does so. Don't do that yet.

02:05:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But wait for the update. And why would you install firmware updates on a device that's working?

02:05:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You wouldn't. But on the case of the Xbox console, you actually get prompted, you do it. I don't think you even have a choice, I think you have to do it. So it's probably impacting people on Xbox, not on PC.

02:05:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, more people on Xbox, I would say Well, that was the briefest Amuse-Bouche of all.

02:06:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it was heavy on the bouche.

02:06:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
More bouche than Amuse.

02:06:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know what that means. You got your bouche in my amuse. I don't know. I'm all in hr. You wouldn't be the first heavy hold on.

02:06:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He brings the folder over uh, all right, windows weekly on the air. We uh have come to that point in the show where we all look forward to uh the back of the book kicking things off.

02:06:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Mr paul thorat's tip of the week yeah, I think I talked about this last week, but then, uh, since then I've written it up. I, I, um, I would say right now, I, I still struggle to use ai for writing, and I don't mean to write for me, I mean in any capacity, even though I now have a lot of good examples of how you might do it. Um, I've done some writing recently where I could have used AI to summarize something or whatever it might be, and, um, you know, I don't, I'm just struggling with I think I just I'm stuck in my ways.

02:07:06
But you know, I've been working on this, uh, this NET Pad app, and I'm working on the version that will support multiple tabs, multiple documents, very complex. I've hit my limit intellectually and also just from a knowledge perspective. I did figure out the fundamental background thing I need to do to make it work, at least on my own, but I did write something about how I'm starting to use this. So if you use Visual Studio as you would for this type of an app, this also works in Visual Studio Code. If you integrate that with GitHub Copilot, which is free, right, and you can pay for it still and get more out of it, but for most people you could probably just go with the free version. It takes over the auto, like the code completion stuff. That stuff is black magic and I think that's what I talked about last week. It's like it's crazy how good that is. Like it's crazy good. If you write a comment, it will then give you the block of code to do that thing that you say you want to do. That's crazy. But when you don't write a comment and you start, you like just start a line and it fills in like a block. Oh my God, it fills in like a block. Oh my God, like that. Stuff's really good.

02:08:14
I've also gone to AI's that are kind of outside of the product, right, so you can go to Anthropic Cloud or ChatGPT or actually probably Copilot. I can't say I've tried that. Very specific. I'm using Windows Presentation Foundation, which is 25-ish years old, 20, 25 years, has a rich body of stack overflow data and people helping people. It's just awesome. Very specific things. I'm writing a C-sharp app for WPF using the specific control, the specific property. I need to get you to do this specific thing. This stuff spits it out, explains the code. It's awesome, it is awesome. And then I may or may not have mentioned this I think I mentioned this, but I mistakenly used the cursor AI editor right, which integrates with Anthropic by default but can also use Copilot to do a code review of the entire app, which was not what I meant to do. I was not ready for this on so many like psychologically not ready it wrote and criticized you quite this hard.

02:09:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh my god, yeah, it was no, but but it was.

02:09:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was like listen, I don't know what you think you're doing it. No, it was. It was actually. It was kind of amazing so you said something interesting, though.

02:09:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love that it explains what it's doing. It's the best, that's the most valuable part, because it's not just spitting out a bunch of code, yep, and so I find that very useful for learning.

02:09:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I I the fact that the cursor thing blows my mind because I had decided on my own that I wanted to further modulize this. I'm not going to use like a design pattern or anything, but I'm, I, I and it literally I. This was the previous version of the app. I had already done some of this work, but it said no, you got to pull out the setting. Stuff should be its own thing, the file operation should all be its own thing. And I was like, oh my god, I already did like, I was blown away by this.

02:10:07
And then, um, I it, just I because of AI, I realized that like there were it's not a big deal, but I had this part of my design that was just unnecessary, like it just was redundant, you know. So I went through this entire list. So, since that happened, I actually went through the entire list and I made the changes I thought I should make and then ignored the ones I didn't care about. That, uh, I disagreed with, maybe, or whatever. But, um, yeah, I mean, this is like I'm not a professional developer. I get it, um, but this has helped my, this has helped this project, it's no doubt about it, write it for me, what's that?

02:10:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
you've upped your coding game yeah, it really.

02:10:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, yeah, yeah, I I just I I know enough about it to know that this is incredibly like. It's just incredible like these, this one, you're, if you're a developer, ignoring this, you're just hurting yourself.

02:10:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're being so, we're sort of at a point now where you're not employable if you're not using. Yep, yeah, you still know what you're doing. One of the groups I talked to yesterday where the guy's working on the Visual Studio Code Insiders Edition. So I don't know if you've played with that, but if you want to see some of the new stuff happening in that space, it's showing up in the Insiders Edition. I've only looked at it.

02:11:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a I think it's an extension that might be called well, I don't know, I'm always on the wrong computer I think it's called AI. It's not an AI studio, it's some kind of AI add-in, but it allows you to run local AI models within. Yeah, they're all using cloud. You can pick. Well, the thing that's cool about it is you can filter what you're getting. So, in my case, because I have the Snapdragon thing, I can say I want a local AI that specifically targets the MPU and that shrinks it down nicely. By the way, you know, it's like three choices, but then you can interact with it. Of course, you can write code to it, you can do that but you can interact with it in a chat interface as if you were using, like Anthropic Cloud or ChatGPT, whatever. It's fascinating, I mean. Anyway, yeah, that stuff is really cool. Just you gotta just don't be stupid. Just look at this stuff Super good.

02:12:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then two things you wouldn't let it completely rewrite your code. No, no no, no.

02:12:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, by the way, you could do that Now for an app. This app, which I would have described as a simple app, is actually fairly complex now, and I don't know. No, but Brad described to me how he used I don't know if it was ChatGPT, I think it was ChatGPT to write a game and you know you're not going to ship it to a store or anything, but his kid plays it now and it's like basically like a Tetris type game. And in that case too, he mentioned explicitly that it had a coding problem where the blocks could fall below the part you could see on screen, and he looked at the code and figured out where to change that and fixed it.

02:13:05
But I think even the most cynical developer on earth would be shocked by what this can do and that the right way to use it, now at least, is you're trying to get over the hump of something, whatever it is. You can't figure something out, Whatever it is, it doesn't matter. Ask it. And I think I used the Mark Rezinovich example where he said good, now make it better. Good, now make it better Good. Oh, there it is, it's perfect's.

02:13:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's kind of astonishing how little direction you could give it, but you berate it a couple times and then it's like, yeah, no, it's perfect.

02:13:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know it's it's, you know you're suffering sufficiently this, yeah right, it's it's. It's better than you think it is, or you already know how good it is.

02:13:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's the yeah and it's only getting better. Like the work you're doing in that area is astonishing. It's astonishing.

02:13:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, okay. So for apps, I've got a couple Speaking of red Fences 6 is out in beta. This is the desktop organization utility that they have where you have discrete areas of icons. They've added tab support for that, which is smart, and I know from adding tabs to my app how hard that is. So I appreciate it now and it's like icon tinting support like you see on mobile right, where you can have that kind of stylized look so you can have color schemes and so forth. So if you buy it while it's in beta it's $8.99. I think it's going to go up to I don't know the final probably $15 or something when it's finally out. It's also available in object desktop and then separate from that. Pocket. Casts, which last year made their mobile clients free and then, by the way, you open source them, which is kind of interesting has now made their desktop and web clients free, and this is the podcast app that I use for the best.

02:14:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think kind of the classic. I think it's. You know I should Patrick probably knows if he's listening I, for a long time itunes was completely dominant, right, that was the uh yep, that was the only way people listen to podcasts and it was maybe 80 or 90 percent of our downloads. But I think podcast is now number two and might even be number one, uh, so I I wonder if it's tied to streaming.

02:15:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Versus download.

02:15:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's that, by the way. That's one thing that has changed a lot yeah, because people are watching youtube on their tv at home, I know, and watching podcasts, they're watching this show on the big screen. I know it's. It's very interesting that's changed. I did not. I would never have predicted that I don't watch.

02:15:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let me think about this yeah, I don't watch a single video podcast in pocket cast. I think of that as audio. I think of it as one of the options when I'm on a plane and you don't commute by car anymore, right?

02:15:39
No. So I have to kind of yes. And it's worse when I'm here because, well, for a lot of reasons, but when I'm home I'll listen to either a podcast or an audio book. When I'm at the gym, when I walk, when I'm in the car, when I shave and you know getting ready, and stuff like that. Here I don't have as much opportunity for that because I don't go to the gym and I don't explicitly walk, although we walk everywhere, but we're always together. So I don't listen. Yeah, you don't put in headphones. No, I'm like I'm paying attention sort of.

02:16:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know I'm listening, yanni. What are you talking about? By the way, just for future reference, it's a great thing about hearing aids. Yes, you can listen to podcasts and books and look like you're paying attention. Nice, they don't know. They think it's a hearing aid, so you can hear them better.

02:16:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.

02:16:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're like no, no, I'm talking to ai, it's fine. Um, I I pulled up my listening methods for run as and yeah, podcast is number two behind yeah, what's number one?

02:16:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
itunes itunes, still, itunes, still. It's amazing, I think that's the same still for us. I don't know how that happens, yeah, yeah, by the way, jeez, if you listen on itunes or actually pocketcast or spotify, please give us a good review. Review bombing has hurt us a little bit. Makes it a little harder to sell advertising. If you like this show, just go and give us a five star on any of your, whatever platform you use and if you don't, you know, shut your trap.

02:16:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's all we're saying. And if you hate it, just yeah, go away.

02:17:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, by the way, because itunes is still dominant. That's where advertisers look. So if you are using iTunes, it's crazy how dominant they are.

02:17:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, isn't it? And there's all these other things. Well, yeah, Spotify is in there and CastBox. I used CastBox for a while.

02:17:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Patrick says oh wow, for our podcasts, itunes is still three times 300% larger than Podcast.

02:17:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah than that of a pocket cast. Yeah, it's crazy. And if you add in like, oh well, you don't add it, then I'm sorry, I don't. What does chrome mean? What's chrome?

02:17:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
chrome is weird. Chrome is people streaming it probably.

02:17:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, oh, just play, oh, they go to play it on chrome yeah, yeah, I'd also want to filter it to you know, recent, because I think pocket has made some big moves lately there was a brief moment where those guys jumped the shark.

02:17:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They did some terrible things with the ui I. I used that uh cast box app for about a year and then they finally fixed it all and I at one point I paid for like a lifetime license for all of their clients, right, which were all separate fees. But I'm this is great, like this is a great app.

02:18:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the right app they do a great job of syncing. Yeah, it's really really good. It works. Do we still have the issue? Uh, some of the club shows people were having problems, uh, with pocket casts is that's are we?

02:18:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
and so for a while we weren't recommending pocket casts, patrick would there was something wrong for a while, like yeah, weren't recommending Pocket Cast, patrick would know there was something wrong for a while.

02:18:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I think it's probably better, but who knows? And he says, by the way, yeah, chrome equals website views. That's what they're on Chrome watching.

02:18:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
By the way, just real quick, have not had a chance to look at this, but it just hit my little RSS feed. The FTC is going to continue their antitrust probe of Microsoft that was started by the previous administration.

02:18:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Huh, that's kind of a surprise.

02:18:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, they also agreed to or not agreed, but they're continuing their attempt to break up Google.

02:19:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that one is because Google lost yeah, Like that's over the trial's over.

02:19:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The judge is now, but their recommendation could have been like well, we don't. We don't see a reason, that's true that they didn't.

02:19:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They said they haven't fired all the lawyers yet. Obviously we'll get there we'll get there. Just be patient, just be patient. Um, so I guess I know what a good recommendation. Now it's a time for run as a radio.

02:19:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh ladies and gentlemen, I give you richard campbell a few weeks ago, I think it was for 919. I was talking about this uh bit of crisis that happened on february 11th when micro, an update to server, enforced strong certificates for active directory and if you had been keeping up with your updates for everything. This wasn't a big deal. It's reference to a, to a knowledge-based article, a security issue from like two years earlier, uh, almost three years earlier and uh, but for some folks it did hit them, and first, actually, some folks that were very contemporary, like if you were using intune, uh, esap, you, you had to configure some things, and if you hit that date with having not done it, it just locked people out. Now you could disable it. You had to go in and do a reg. You had to know. You had to know what was going on you had to do all that, but it kicked up pretty good messages.

02:20:32
So for I, I know folks who had prepared for it and literally sat in waiting all feb 11 waiting for something to die, and they were fine. But I did get a chance finally to circle back with richard hicks, who's been warning about it for forever and he's, you know, the, the certificate god in this space. I think even microsoft calls him to, uh, to get some things explained, and so we walked through the whole process and what changes need to be made and what the enforcement looks like, and the bigger case, which is that come right now there's a reg industry to just disable it so you can keep going as you are, but in september that registry will stop working. So you, you have a few. You know what I appreciate was sort of the way microsoft is signaling this. It's like we're really serious.

02:21:12
You need strong certificates for AD to work correctly, and the issue here is lateral movement in an exploit. You know, typically your exploit is a phishing email of some kind that drops a piece of code on the local machine and that person is probably operating with admin privileges because stupid. And they now do a lateral and the lateral they'd usually do once they're inside the network is to attack the actor directory, because actor directory is 25 years old and some people are still running it like it's 1999 and so there's known exploits. If you're all patched up, you're fine, and if you're not, you're not. But this certificate issue there was just no software fixed to it. You had to get the cert straightened out and so this was just getting through, getting this stuff done and the solutions to it. It turns out that through the course of that conversation I was actually able to reach out to some of the Windows people themselves, so I might be having some Windows cert folks coming on in the next few weeks to go a little further into this.

02:22:12
Just, it's a good conversation and, uh, you know active directory, like windows, isn't going anywhere. It does need a certain amount of care and feeding, uh, to to keep it running reliably and to keep the system safe. It should not be a path of exploit and it's. If it's up to date, you're fine, and if it's not, uh, your bad guys can move on you pretty hard and they'll quickly get an administrator account and then you're really in trouble all right run as radiocom show 975.

02:22:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think we've come to the most amused bush of all. Whiskey bush, it's whiskey time it's whiskey time.

02:22:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Whiskey time Felt like going to Islay today, just because you know the land of peat, and specifically to Ardbeg, which is an anglicized Scottish Gaelic word, meaning the small promontory. By the way, there's only 3,000 people living on the Isle of Islay and about a quarter of them still speak Scottish Gaelic. Wow, that's cool, like it's the Middle Ages. Wow, I mean things to know about Ireland. We've talked about this before. It's kind of the warmest bit of Scotland, actually, in the sense that it almost never gets snow, rarely even gets a frost, but it's always windy. It's only degrees of how windy, and the climate is such that it's not good for trees but it is good for peat bogs, which is why they dry their malt with peat. And where the peaty whiskey comes from is isla. They're all peaty there. Now, the particular part of isla we're talking about here is in the southeast corner, uh, which is right on the coast, right along the coast, and there's actually almost four distilleries within just a few kilometers each other in a row, from port ellen, which is the port area and one of the largest ports on island island, and its distillery is actually closed. Then Lafroi, then Lagavulin, then Ardbeg. They're right beside each other. They're all on the A846. And they're small, they're little distilleries, they're cute and some of them have been around a long time.

02:24:25
Ardbeg opened in 1815. Duncan McDoodle and that's from the McDougal families that had been the leading clansmen with the McDonald's in that area for the previous thousand years Wow Set up the rented the farms in the area to grow barley and open a distillery and the McDougal family would own Ardbeg for about 140 years, operating with just a pair of still small operation. The only time it really shut down in those early days was across Prohibition when everybody was struggling. But it wasn't until the 1950s when whiskey business was changing as a whole and Hiram Walker that's the Canadian company alongside the distiller's company, which is Scottish made an investment, split the company, bought it from the McDougals and split it between them and although by 1979, hiram Walker owned it outright but it didn't go particularly well for them, they tried to modernize it. But it's quite a small distillery. You know Islas got its access problems. You really can only get there by ferry. So you know heat and power and all those things are expensive. So it actually shut down for eight years in the 80s, 81, 89, it's completely shut down and then reopened under a temporary owner, basically a private equity firm, who eventually, in 1996, sold it to glenn murgy.

02:25:53
So that's the space side, uh, and they uh tooled it up, got new things running, switched over to centralized maltings out of port ellen, and that's where our bag comes from. They are big 10 that we're talking about today, first produced in 2000. So the, the 200 year old art bag that mostly sold in the us with the barrels and so forth. Largely that company disappeared. It was reborn with glamor angie in that time and a few years later, uh, lvmh that's moat hennessey louis vuitton bought both glamor angie art bag and a few others and that's the conglomerate that kind of runs it today, and they immediately started winning awards. They had a lot of old laid up barrels and things. In fact, the most expensive whiskey ever sold in history now is an art bag. Huh, in 2022 they revealed cast number three, which is a cast that was laid up in 1975, and they auctioned it off and got 16 million pounds for what?

02:26:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, do you drink that or just put it on a?

02:26:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
pedestal. It's a great question. Here's the scary part how do you know if it's good, right? You know like that's been laid up a long time, but I imagine they probably thief drum it and they made a huge deal. More than a million pounds were donated into the community in isla.

02:27:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, I love it I love it that they bill this as the pdist smokiest, most complex single world of them all all right.

02:27:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, um, you know, when we, when I generally think about drinking a pd whiskey because you know I have a momentary lapse of reason it's probably going to be a lagavulin, which runs at about 35 ppm, or 35 parts per million of peat. Our bag is 55. Oh, wow, okay, and it's, and it, by the way, and that's their lightest right, they, their supernova, is over a hundred like that's a lot of god yeah, it's dirty, right, it's like you have.

02:27:45
If you had an urge to lick a dirty ashtray, this is the product for you, uh, but the crazy part is like they've only had one set of stills the whole time until 2018. They finally built their second set of stills because they're gearing up, because as they, as they got themselves reorganized, they do really well. They make very good whiskey, but it is extremely peaty, and the art bag 10, which is not particularly expensive you'll find it for about 70 us uh, is only 10 years old. It's a pale straw color. It's aged in bourbon, like I said, at 55 ppm, which is quite high, probably the highest regular production, um, and the only way you can describe the taste is oily and peaty.

02:28:28
It is a big, rich, smoky you know on their website this the tasting notes are sea spray, tarry rope yeah, an immense smoky intensity well and all you know all those distilleries I described, but even the ones up in the north, like bomar and bunab, and they're right on the coast, so they take a lot of salt with that in the ocean all the time. Yeah, and so it's often a character, these whiskeys. But let me tell you you don't taste any salt in our big tent. You taste smoke, smoke. That's what you taste.

02:29:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow but people. There are people who uh, who enjoy it absolutely.

02:29:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and it's like I said it's a style, right it's like do you like this sort of thing and when I'm cooking a brisket is when you know. So I'm already full of You're already smoky. Right, that's right, you know. But I, you know I'm covered. I'm covered with smoke already. Then a smoky whiskey goes very nicely with that. Typically smoky whiskeys and cigars go together, but I don't like cigars so I'm not gonna do that. That's because you have a mouth and with taste buds in it cigars are fantastic what are you talking about?

02:29:33
I am I am instantly nauseated. Are you a pipe?

02:29:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
smoker. What do you smoke?

02:29:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
no, I don't smoke anything.

02:29:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the new thing I just read an article in the yorker is these little white pouches that you put in your cheek not, and it's not tobacco, it's just nicotine. It's like a tea bag full of nicotine. It's a nicotine delivery system and if you throw it on the ground it explodes and the flavors are like mint coffee.

02:29:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
From the companies that brought you vapes.

02:30:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's sort of like chew, but it's not tobacco anymore.

02:30:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right. So it's gone directly to concentrated cancer. I was going to say, yeah, well, I don't know.

02:30:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know the main side effects are heart disease. Great, how pleasant.

02:30:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know I was looking for something to do this weekend.

02:30:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's nothing carcinogenic. These are called zins, yeah, or in Sweden they're called snooze, and I just read this whole article about how it's taken the world by storm. Wall Street loves them.

02:30:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Because I just read this whole article about how it's taken the world by storm. Wall Street loves them Because vaping has fallen out of style. Right, we have enough kids now, this is direct nicotine.

02:30:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is as pot has become legal across the United States, I always figured that this terrible smell of pot smoke would disappear, but no, it's just everywhere. It's like, guys, gummies are a thing.

02:30:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I yeah yeah yeah, like, what are you doing?

02:30:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
why do you have to stink the whole place up? It really stinks, doesn't, and you know your dosage too so no surprises right right.

02:30:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Anyway, you know we often get one of. I get one of these as a gift every so often and I will drink it, but I rarely would ever buy it not the art of it.

02:31:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're back to the end of the art he's back on.

02:31:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He's back on topic. I mean I'm not, I'm on topic. He's like we've. I've allowed you to digress long enough.

02:31:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, yes, yeah, um, fascinating as always. If you're looking for tarry rope, tarry rope, we got it.

02:31:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, I remember. I remember a whiskey described as old leather and pencil shavings.

02:31:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's one thing if whiskey tastes like that, but there's wine that tastes like that and that's where I really draw the line. At the taco bar.

02:31:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They always want us to try new things right. But I don't like smoky drinks, as Richard knows. So he's like oh, you got to try this, but get it with mezcal instead of tequila. And I'm like no, I don't like smoky drinks. The guy says you should like it. I'm like no, I'm with you, I should like it, but I'm telling you I do not like it. What does that?

02:31:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
mean.

02:31:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know you should like it, you should like it.

02:31:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like it, you should like it, you know you should like it. I, my friends, we've come to the end of this fabulous edition of windows weekly. Richard campbell is at run as radiocom that's where you'll find the podcast run as radio or dot net rocks the show he does with carl franklin. Where am I doing that backwards again? No I think I got it right this time. I think I got it right this time. He hails for british columbia. You're gonna stay home for a little while, or are you headed out?

02:32:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
nope, uh, we got. I think we got one more week. Okay, but they grandchilds do, oh boy how exciting.

02:32:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you're gonna go into town for that one? Well, we'll be in town for that?

02:32:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, in town. I love that. I suspect I won't see my wife for a few weeks.

02:32:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yes, she's gonna she's already loaded a set of stuff over there.

02:32:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
She got a bed set up for herself?

02:32:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is this her first?

02:32:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
First grandchild. Yeah, I'm not ready for that. You got a little while yet I think so.

02:32:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe We'll see. We all have adult children now.

02:33:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They'll find a new way to disappoint.

02:33:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
End of March is MVP Summit and then followed immediately by the fabric conference in vegas we call that march around march madness.

02:33:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, yeah, uh. Paul thorat's at thoratcom become a premium member there. I mean, there's plenty of free stuff, but there's even better stuff behind the paywall and it's not expensive. I've been a premium member for years. T-h-u-r-r-o-t-tcom. His books Windows Everywhere and the Field Guide to Windows 11, are available at leanpubcom and he's joining us from his second home in Mexico City, roma Norte. You're going to stay there for a while or are you coming back home?

02:33:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I don't know You're having fun, fun beginning of may probably oh that's nice, you're basically skipping winter, I thought it was supposed to be an eternal spring.

02:33:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Come on it is an eternal spring, but I you know taxes were hard from here.

02:34:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is not easy some things were hard from here.

02:34:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean I started, as I told my wife, I mean we could probably just wait on this, because I don't think anyone's checking anyway. I mean, what's the difference like?

02:34:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, I, you know, I really. No, that's not. I don't want to get on a list or anything I think it's a little late for that.

02:34:24
But when you fire 6300 people from the IRS, it seems as if maybe nobody would be looking at these. I mean, if I had a refund coming I might Right, but they want money, a lot of it. I don't get a lot of checks from the IRS. No, not lately, actually, we did. We got a $1,200 check a couple of years ago. Then we got a letter a year ago saying oh, that was a mistake. Can we have our money back? Yeah, we want. Yeah, and you have one week to give it back, or we're going to start charging you double interest, oh god, well, maybe they should be fired. I don't know. Yeah, maybe they should be. You know what it is. It's a computer problem. You know that. I mean, these are old mainframes and stuff and it's cobalt and there's nothing they can do about it. If they would just move to delphi, this hasn't been the same since y2k paul thorat, richard campbell, I'm leo laporte.

02:35:19
We are so glad you are here. We do windows weekly on a wednesday at 11 am. Pacific2 pm, eastern 1800 utc. Please join us if you wish. But of course you can get it at the website twittv slash WW. There's a dedicated YouTube channel great way to share clips and, you know, subscribe. Patrick tells me that the issue with pocket casts is rare. It happens sometimes to people who put their club feed into pocket casts and he says usually if you just wait a bit and do it again, it will be fine because you have a custom url or whatever. Yeah, if you're in the club, you get your own private url that's ad free, yep. And so you have to re-enter that in pocket casts and for some people that was a problem. It's not very, it's not very common and it's easily resolved just by trying again, try again, turn it off.

02:36:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Turn it on.

02:36:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Stay tuned if you're watching live. Ray Kurzweil is coming up Intelligent Machines and we will be back here next Wednesday with Windows Weekly. See you guys.