Windows Weekly 925 Transcript

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0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Theriot is in Mexico City, richard Campbell's in Redmond for a Microsoft conference. We'll talk about Windows 11 in 2025, the end of the line for OneNote, for Windows 10, and another big week for AI. A whole lot coming up next on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is twit. This is windows weekly with paul thurot and richard campbell episode 925, recorded wednesday, march 26th 2025. It's the shirt. It's time for Windows Weekly. Get Ready, winners and dozers. It's the time we gather together to speak with Mr Paul Thorat from Thoratcom, today in Mexico City. Hello Paul, hello Leo, hello Paul, also with us, but this time from Redmond, washington. The host of Run as Radio and NET Rocks, mr Richard Campbell. Why are you in Redmond, richard?

0:01:11 - Richard Campbell
It's the MVP Summit, so I was able to ping a friend at DevRel Studios and borrow Studio C. You look great. Yeah, it's a great camera. It's a red dragon, I think. Oh my gosh, and a road and.

0:01:24 - Paul Thurrott
SM88s, you know nice right, I shot brad with a nerf gun is that the?

0:01:32 - Leo Laporte
is that the event that you guys were building a, a pillow fort?

0:01:35 - Paul Thurrott
no, no, that was uh built. That might have even been pdc that was a long time ago.

0:01:41 - Leo Laporte
I found that video like that.

0:01:43 - Paul Thurrott
That video was on my youtube channel.

0:01:45 - Leo Laporte
Oh fun it was a long thing fell asleep.

0:01:48 - Paul Thurrott
We built a pillow fort around him and we used it to uh we dive bombed it when mary joe was interviewing uh tom on on the show actually hysterical do you any good gets yet richard any big shots?

0:02:03 - Richard Campbell
oh yeah no, I've talked to some phenomenal folks, but it's all nda so I can't really discuss anything. We're doing here right now.

0:02:11 - Paul Thurrott
I mean it's high level, you know, kind of um, just there's some conversations about artificial intelligence.

0:02:17 - Richard Campbell
I don't know you've heard of this. Yeah, it's been a couple here and there a lot of preview of what's coming to build.

0:02:24 - Leo Laporte
So I'm going to write an article exclusive microsoft, to discuss ai and build yeah, no we're interviewing, uh, after the show on intelligent machines, a uh long time silicon valley, uh journalist gary rifkin. His new book is called ai valley. Yes, um, I just read I just pre-ordered this yeah, oh yeah, it's gonna be a I read it last night. I was up to like the middle of the night reading.

0:02:50 - Paul Thurrott
It's really good he I was trying to remember why he he factored into was the nescape microsoft stuff or?

0:02:57 - Leo Laporte
he. Well, so he starts at the beginning.

0:02:59 - Paul Thurrott
I mean, he literally starts with john mccarthy no, no, I mean like in his career, like oh, he's this, he worked for wire famous.

0:03:07 - Leo Laporte
He wrote a bunch of books. He wrote a book about bill gates that's right called something like why everybody hates bill.

0:03:14 - Paul Thurrott
Everyone's trying to kill bill, or you know? Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah ask him, uh, if you could put that in the public domain so I can get it electronically, please. Okay, I will, you know, because a lot of the books in that era are just paper only, they're you know you know, I will ask him that.

0:03:29 - Leo Laporte
That's a good point. He he refers to. Uh, he said he calls uh pascal uh zachary, his mentor. Uh, he refers to him. That's one of the guys who got him into tech writing. But he also talks a lot about microsoft and really, if I were to summarize this book and of course we'll talk to Gary in a few hours and he can do a better job, but I would say a lot of it is how it looked at first, like it would be a kind of typical startup scene in AI with a lot of small companies, and quickly became apparent that it costs so much money and Microsoft was very adept getting, um, he calls him moose, mustafa suleiman moose, uh, moose, uh and and building up a really strong ai presence and then putting money into open ai to make sure it had the lock that said, you know I mean it, it might have just bought itself the same position

you know, we don't know.

0:04:25 - Paul Thurrott
It may have just prevented itself from falling behind, but sometimes you've got to be in the race to win it right.

0:04:32 - Leo Laporte
He's very complimentary of unlike his book about Bill Gates, he's very complimentary about Satya Nadella and his kind of prescience in saying you know, we really need to make the acqua, acqua hires and and and bring people in uh, because we need to have our own ai uh efforts one would argue, their advantage was really the azure data centers absolutely yeah, of course that's where nadella came from, so he knew, yeah, the cloud was very good for him.

0:05:04 - Paul Thurrott
First he was the bing guy, then he was president, server and tools, which then he was fresh meat, as I referred to him when I met him, as he was in when he was part of the server team he said.

0:05:15 - Leo Laporte
It's funny, in the book he's quoted as saying uh, when he was 21, he did not want to come to the states. Yeah, uh, he was very happy in india, uh, and but he could. He got an offer he couldn't refuse and so he did when he was 21 to get his degree and uh never left, obviously, but it's a yeah, it's a very, it's a really interesting book and it's it's the best so far overall survey of what's going on in ai, although I mean it's out of date the minute it gets published, right? No?

0:05:43 - Paul Thurrott
it's going to be like next Tuesday. Maybe it's sometime soon. Yeah, yeah, I'll find out.

0:05:48 - Leo Laporte
I'm not sure I have a PDF. I don't have the book itself, but it's a good read. I'll save it for you, the electronic version.

0:05:56 - Paul Thurrott
Well, I'm going to buy it either way.

0:06:10 - Leo Laporte
In fact I'll ask him could you just send me the PDF books? I need it for research.

0:06:12 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, all I need is to feed it into the ai so I can get a summary of it and I can write my review actually, that's another good question we talk to writers is how do you feel about ai adjusting your content, um, but we're gonna talk about this. This is gonna come up, is it?

0:06:19 - Leo Laporte
all right, yes, but first window, let's. Let's kick things off. We'll get to ai and all that stuff in a bit, but first, paul, let's kick things off with windows 11 in 2025 yeah, this is a potentially.

0:06:33 - Paul Thurrott
I'm gonna call it pretentious. Pretentious is that a word?

0:06:37 - Leo Laporte
weak for windows pretentious, contentious or contentious yeah portentious.

0:06:43 - Paul Thurrott
Well, it's always contentious, for sure. Uh, yesterday I'm losing track of days, but I think it was yesterday, tuesday, which was, um, also week d, you know, preview update day. We'll get to that microsoft issued a new dev channel build with absolutely no features, new features. So naturally wrote a 6,000 word blog post about this, because that's what I do. No, because we have been waiting for that moment where Dev and Beta had been in lockstep 24H2, which was the signal that at some point Dev was going to split off and probably go to whatever. The next Windows version is 25H2, windows 12, you know who can say and that is what happened. So it's a new build number series, if that makes sense. So, previously in Dev and currently on beta, if you're in 24H2, the build stream, the build numbers are 26, 1, 20 dot, whatever. Right, um, they've moved to 26, 200 dot, whatever. Oh, okay, um, you will be amazed and unpleased to know that it's still 24H2. Yeah, so we could speculate.

0:08:10 - Richard Campbell
It's a service pack that will never die. I know.

0:08:15 - Paul Thurrott
It's not completely unprecedented, but it is somewhat unprecedented. It's unusual, certainly. Yeah, it's likely that at some point this will become whatever right. I mean, there is going to be another version at some point. But the reason I wrote such a long thing about this is that, well, originally I just went into this saying, okay, let me just kind of look at like where we've been and I can just kind of talk about where I think we're going.

And it turned into something else entirely, because last year was unique in the history of windows in the sense of we're testing these this coming version versions, whatever of windows and it's. We've never had a year like last year. So we know that 24 H two, for example, there were two releases. Essentially there's one in June that accompanied the Copilot Plus PCs, and then there was the one in October. That was for everybody right, and of course in between them they kept updating and if you were on X64 and wanted to get it, you could. I mean, you know, not difficult before it was officially released. And then of course there were also the copilot plus PCs themselves, adding another little element of kind of weirdness in there, because in the same sense that we have different features in windows home and pro and then whatever other versions. We also features that are unique to these copilot plus.

0:09:39 - Richard Campbell
PCs, and there's also the arm chip set on top of that, like they really did take a big bite last year.

0:09:44 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, last year was the year that ARM finally became a mainstream concern. It never was before. It was always lagging behind. Not that you can get ISOs, yet we did. Finally in October.

A lot of stuff happened last year. They announced recall as part of the new AI features. It was the only interesting feature at the time, and now I would argue that actually it's not the least interesting, but it's not the most interesting anymore. They were going to start testing that immediately and then they held off on that until November. Why is it less interesting? Did they hobble it? No, because now there are more interesting features, right.

So if you look at the set of CoPilot plus PC features that originally shipped in June, most of them were just not very good. They weren't really anything. Yeah, to me the interesting feature now is something called Click To Do, which they did not reveal until September-ish last year. It was described as a feature of recall and it is something that exists in recall. In fact, that's how they first tested it, but within a month or two it was just added to.

Well, this is part of the story. It's not out in public, but in preview. It is available just anywhere in Windows. You hold down the Windows key and you click anything on the screen and does the AI sparkle thing, and then they have actions related to text and images that you can do on whatever it is you're looking at, right. So it works with everything in Windows. If you have a Copilot plus PC that's enrolled in the dev channel that is running Snapdragon X, it's like a whole series of whatever, and this is what last year was like, right. So I almost had to remind myself of this. I don't know how you guys cope with things that are negative in your life, but for me not explicitly as a strategy it's just the way it works out for my brain is I just forget? My brain can hold so much, and so I know vaguely. Obviously I have this notion of the history of windows and all that stuff in my head, but last year, specifically going back over this, was almost like reliving trauma. I was like, oh my God, right.

0:11:48 - Richard Campbell
Like this was really it was crazy, right?

0:11:52 - Paul Thurrott
So, because they didn't go to 25 H2 or 12 or whatever, right? I kind of looked at this and I was like, all right, so we have. There are actually three. I guess we call them branches of 24H2 in the world, right? There's 26100 series builds. That's general availability. That's what's in stable, like if you're running Windows and you look at Winver, actually, this is not one of those. It's running. Oh, no, is it? No, this is on a yeah, this is on a dev channel. So it's 26 100, whatever. Okay, fine, if you are running the beta channel now and the dev channel previously on 24H2, it's 26, 120. And if you have gone forward with the dev build, as I have now on two computers, it's 26, 200, right.

So actually, I left out one of the things that was unique about last year. The other thing that happened was 24H2 came out only for Snapdragon X-based co-pilot plus PCs mid-year, right. But at the time, 23h2 and 22H2 were both mainstream, supported, stable versions of Windows 11. And I don't remember now off the top of my head when this happened, but at some point last year they started making it so that the end user features in each of these releases were identical right. That was one of the big stories from last year actually, right, right, yeah.

0:13:15 - Richard Campbell
So that now, all of a sudden, these different packs made no difference. They all had the same features.

0:13:21 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, I mean 24H2, Microsoft has still been very vague about this, but was actually a major Windows release in the sense that they made a lot of architectural kind of foundational level changes.

0:13:32 - Richard Campbell
I had run out of shows where Microsoft people said point blank this is a new operating system.

0:13:36 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, but they don't really talk about. They do sometimes, but you don't. There's no something this big. You think there'd be some huge documentation or huge documentation or whatever it is explaining all of the ways in which it's different. The way that a normal user might sort of have a hint at that being the case is how many bugs there were, right, so 24H2 was also unique in that super buggy, right? Yeah, the final release, the initial October 2024 release, is the version where that menu goes up off the screen in file explorer. That was the shipping version. They had been testing, I think, for several months, like it's it's super buggy. And even today there are stories, not every day but every week, where, oh, this thing is still being blocked, you can't get it for this reason, or this thing is there, whatever. Um, you know, they're still kind of trying to catch up with that, and I think it's tied in part to these changes they made at a very low level right In October I believe it was 22H2 went out of support and then today, for the most part, 23 and 24H2 and stable are roughly identical.

There are a handful of features that are not present in 23H2 and possibly in vice versa. The big one is the context menu stuff. So if you right-click in File Explorer or on the desktop, I should say right-click a document or a file of some kind, you get those. Remember the hieroglyphic little icons at the top we all complained about for two years? They fixed that in 24H2, so they have text labels, but that's still not fixed in 23H2. I guess it's coming. H2, so they have text labels, but that's still not fixed in 23 H2. I guess it's coming. They had to delay it or whatever. Anyway, with all that as background, that's about 3,000 words of that article.

I guess I don't know what possessed me to do this, but I spent hours on this. I went back to September, right before 24 H2 hit X64. And I looked at not every single update to Windows 11. This would have taken a couple of days, but because my machine well, now two machines are in the dev channel, I just looked at dev channel. So this leaves out some stuff. This leaves out new features that were introduced for Windows 11 that maybe went into other parts of the insider program and not to dev, which does happen. New features that went to Windows 11 with no testing, which absolutely happens. Standalone app updates right, we know that. You know, copilot was updated several times in this timeframe. Just that one app, and that's not the only app and they weren't as like 24H2 updates.

0:16:06 - Richard Campbell
They were app updates.

0:16:07 - Paul Thurrott
Yes. So actually I should say too, if you look at the insider program, like I did, and that was speaking of trauma, um, they will, and this happened we'll discuss this later in the show too. Um, obviously, there are these new builds that come out. This is a new build for dev or canary, or whatever channel. But they also say, well, here's an app update for paint or photos or snipping tool or whatever it might be, and it's not specific to a channel, like, sometimes it will be all of the channels, it's going out to all insiders, which is kind of a hint. It's probably coming soon, right, right, um, or it will go just to one or two and then it will go to one or two more and then, and then we're getting there, right? So one of the things we've talked about a lot on this show is this notion that it's not always logical to us. Anyway, you know when, when I look at the insider program, I think, okay, well, you're going to first, you're going to start in Canary. It's going to work its way through the program, right, it's going to go to dev. It's going to work its way through the program, right, it's going to go to dev. It's going to go to beta, it's going to go to release preview and then it's got stable and it doesn't always work that way.

So I spent hours on this. I went through every single again dev channel only insider preview build and documented every major-ish feature that they introduced in that build. And I went all the way from September through the other day. The other day was easy. There were no new features. Some of them have many new features, some of them are several whatever. Then I went back and I looked at on Microsoft Learn. There's a page that tells you all of the features that are in every monthly cumulative Windows 11 update. So when I had so, for example in the September one, you all of the features that are in every monthly cumulative Windows 11 update. So when I had so, for example in the September one, one of the things that was in there is Windows Sandbox 2 in preview. That arrived in a build in late September 2024.

It was released in I have the name of it, I'm not going to read it here, it doesn't matter but KB whatever, november 12th, still as a preview. So that thing is actually in stable Now. It was in testing for roughly two months. It's still in preview in this case, but that's kind of unique. And then I did that for every single feature and what I came up with at the end was most of the features they tested did make it into Windows 11 at some point. There's no rhyme or reason to it. Did make it into Windows 11 at some point. There's no rhyme or reason to it. There's never a trend where, on average, new features take about two months to get from dev to stable. That's not how it works. They're all over the map.

But there's also a really long list of features that have not been released. Right? If you're in the dev channel, you can access these features today, but if you're unstable, you cannot. And that list is very interesting to me because I think that list constitutes what is this next version of Windows, right, whatever we're going to call it? And there's all kinds of questions about things like will co-pilot plus PC features come to PCs with GPUs? You know all this stuff we talk about. But the fascinating thing to me was questions about things like will co-pilot plus pc features come to pcs with gpus? You know all this stuff we talk about, but, right, the fascinating thing to me was coming up with this list of features.

I spent the better part of the day on this and I finally published it and all I could think was I gotta go back and do this for all the other channels. There's going to be more. You know like this is a partial list, but anyway, a lot of it is co-pilot plus PC. Only Some of it is still Snapdragon X. Only One thing that has been consistently true and I think this speaks to this arrangement with Qualcomm we don't really know much about is that new co-pilot plus PC features always go to Snapdragon first, always at least so far and then they will eventually make their way to x64, arm and Intel. Some of the newest ones have not yet right, but things like Recall.

Recall came out with Snap to do in November In preview. It still has not hit stable, but sometime within the month it also went to AMD and Intel, right, but Copilot plus PC only. They added features to it over time. They brought Click to do outside of Recall over time. Again Snapdragon first, eventually AMD, intel App actions there's all this stuff, but the list is kind of interesting.

Not all of it is humongous, I mean for sure like our major, but I think, uh, the recall, click to do app action, the modern hello windows hello experience, right. A lot of the app updates that are specific to copilot plus pcs, paint photos, um, I don't think stepping to, I think stepping tools for everybody. Um, search with semantic indexing right. So this is a ai search, right, essentially right. So it was interesting to see that this thing evolved over time.

First came out on snapdragon only for I think it was documents in the cloud, meaning one drive, and then adventure went to photos in the cloud.

Then it went to though any kind of file locally, as long as the Windows was configured to index the drive. It eventually went to AMD and Intel and there's actually a plug model in there where third-party cloud vendors can plug into this Not yet, but will happen. So if you have Dropbox or Google Drive or whatever, they can choose to support this and you can use search in Windows. There's multiple interfaces to search in Windows, right. So there's the search pane that comes up, which is tied to that search box that you may or may not have in your taskbar. There's also search in File Explorer, right, and so these features went to each of these things at different times, different platforms, whatever. They're still not in stable, but interestingly in that case, and we'll look at this in a moment, but the release preview build that just went out, I think also yesterday, has this feature. So this is actually going to hit stable pretty quick, you know.

0:22:00 - Richard Campbell
So it's kind of to me I mean, but you still don't see an order, like they don't follow their so-called rules of going through dev no, no, no, there are no rules.

0:22:07 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, first rule of Windows 11 dev you know, insider preview is there are no rules.

0:22:12 - Richard Campbell
Good luck, yeah, and I wonder if it's just different teams approach it differently, like there's a lot of different contributors going into that stack. Yeah, I mean.

0:22:22 - Paul Thurrott
Where's the gatekeeper? So back when Windows was the or a primary concern at Microsoft, I think it's fair to say, yeah, gatekeeper, I was going to use the term Wrangler. There was a. There was a Jim Olsen, there was a Steven Stanovsky. It was somebody who was old, right, like back, you know someone's like all right, let's get this stuff together, right, I think these days you're probably, I don't know. I mean, I'm just going to speculate, but I think what you just said is essentially correct, that, yeah, we've got a bunch of stuff coming in from different areas. They all have this kind of marching order, like, if you can figure out some AI, something, something, we'll take it, you know and that's definitely a theme throughout all the teams right now.

0:22:57 - Richard Campbell
It's like listen, you better have AI in there somewhere.

0:23:00 - Paul Thurrott
Again, this wasn't part of this thing that I wrote and I really kind of want to go back and do this. But think about something like Notepad. So Notepad semi-controversially although honestly I think they've handled it well has adopted these AI features so you can do rewriting the poem thing I was talking about, et cetera. When that first appeared in preview or in beta or whatever we don't really have those terms anymore but through the Insider program, I guess I sort of assumed it was a co-pilot plus PC specific right, because that's where I saw it. But actually those I'd have to look that one up. That is either out now in stable or will be any second now and actually it works fine on a non-copilot plus PC if you have it, and the reason it does is it hits the cloud and it uses those AI credits if you have them and eventually, if you use it enough. I keep using this Venn diagram thing for some reason, but the Venn diagram of people who use notepad and then use a lot of AI credits probably doesn't intersect much.

But if you are using it that much, um, you could eventually run out of ai credits, and then they would say, luckily, it's time to buy copilot pro or whatever they call it. Um, so yeah, even though this, like I said, even though it's incomplete, like I, there's a bunch of stuff, um, that I do talk, or I did see that was related to paint and photos and actually stamping tool. But there's much more than that, and there's much more than that in other apps as well. And now I have to say I'm kind of curious because, as we've talked about these updates, every week, right, so every week there's some number of something you know, in the, in the windows insider program I I was kind of wrestling with, like, have they, have they really shipped like a ton of new features or some new features you know, and they have shipped a ton of new features, um, and there's a ton that they've tested that have not yet shipped, um, and I, I, I would look at this and argue this me like a second wave, co-pilot plus PC release, which is what the first 24H2 was, right, right, and it kind of makes me wonder if they're not going to do something similar this year and that they're either waiting for a standalone Windows day or whatever they do, or maybe it's something tied to build.

It might be build the AI day they're having at the campus in a couple of weeks or whatever. I don't know Right, but either one of those would make sense, which is why I think it probably won't be either one of those, because Microsoft doesn't make sense anymore. So it's just. It's just the George Costanza opposite day thing with Microsoft right now. So Are you?

0:25:42 - Richard Campbell
sure that's the right choice. It's's the wrong choice. You should do something.

0:25:44 - Paul Thurrott
The opposite of that, yeah no, it makes sense to me, so don't do it. No, is that what we're thinking? You know?

0:25:50 - Richard Campbell
it kind of feels like that well, and I'm I'm disturbed at how quiet qualcomm's been about a new chipset like this would be. This is the time to come up with another round, like if you're really going to make a run at this.

0:26:03 - Paul Thurrott
I know. So my understanding and this is just based on sources that I can't divulge or say or whatever is that September is the time frame for that.

0:26:12 - Richard Campbell
Right, at least not 2026, because that's what it sounded like at first.

0:26:16 - Paul Thurrott
I would like to see something quicker. Every time they did an announcement, remember in the beginning, they just announced the thing and then eventually like okay, we're going to have plus SKUs. And then we're like, oh my god, you guys are bidding these things. What is this? And there was some number of skews, then there were more, and then ifa came and they announced like the this snapdragon, x, elite, and plus, now there's this x, you know. So it's like, how low can we go? It's like, I don't know, you seem to keep adding new.

0:26:42 - Richard Campbell
You know, I guess you're trying to get the overall yield up and the demand for chips is significant. Right, like all, of this is good.

0:26:48 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, but what I've wanted to see is like a step forward, right, instead of just, like you know, meeting, look, meeting a lower end parts of the market is important.

I get that I'm not I'm not dumping on it, but you know, we know that the focus on the first gen was getting the processor where it needed to be and tied to what Microsoft did with the Prism emulator. They did a great job with that and the focus on this one is GPU and you hear these little things that are pointing to where they're going right the announcement a week or two ago where Epic Games is working to bring their anti-cheat stuff to Qualcomm. Epic Games is working to bring their anti-cheat stuff to Qualcomm and all of the auto SR stuff. The ability to run X look, we sort of accept most devs are just games are out in the world and no one's going to go back and fix them now, but they're just coded to X64. So this thing has to work well with that. With emulation, yeah, yep, and it's getting there there, but, yes, better, better chip would be important, as well.

0:27:48 - Richard Campbell
So and yeah, there's so many things they could be revving and I'm you know they had to make a cut sometime in 23 to get the production into play for 24, like they've had time to make a better chip, to realize some. Yeah, they have, and but I suspect they're mostly pushing on yield, that they're trying to improve the art, the, the print design for you, vl, so that they can get the yields up, because that takes several iterations and you tend not to build new features, new chip, while you do that.

0:28:18 - Paul Thurrott
Oh yeah they just a couple things. I mean, they did go very quickly from that I think it's called is it Onyx, the core processor, core of that to use it in mobile? So now there are Samsung devices out in the world and there'll be others soon, if they aren't already using this. You know what was what started as PC architecture? Yeah, intel not exactly the fastest moving company in the world yeah, has since September released and revved on Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake right. And AMD, which is like the goofy, quiet kid in the corner, never has anything to say, blew everyone away in September with their first-gen Zen 5 stuff and we thought, well, okay, this will be the year, I mean they'll be yeah, here we go.

0:29:04 - Richard Campbell
We got an ecosystem right. We got an ecosystem right we got no.

0:29:07 - Paul Thurrott
But then james or january came, cs, they exploded it upwards. They did what I wanted snapdragon to do, or call you to do, and, uh, I mean that stuff. I I still to this, I'm I I'm having trouble. I don't know if you heard about this. There's some kind of a tariff thing going on right now, but I have two computers waiting somewhere in ICE or something that I can't get to, so I haven't had a chance to test these latest AMD things. I'm sure they're off the charts, but based on what I've read about it, it's like they did this astonishing thing with the first Gen 5 stuff and then they were like it's three months later, let's do it better. I was like what are you doing? It's crazy. So they're doing awesome. So, yes, I to your point. Like I, yeah, I would like to see Qualcomm, qualcomm's not like a little company.

0:29:57 - Richard Campbell
They've been doing this for a while, I mean I know PC.

0:29:59 - Paul Thurrott
This is getting new place for them like oh my god, people like this. Um, yeah, so anyway, anyway, so yeah, I, I, I am now firmly, in fact, I, I almost certainly will do this. I think I'm going to go back and look at the other yeah, channels and uh, just to get a more complete picture of this I'm still wrestling with what machine to build, right, yeah, I do want to build a machine.

0:30:21 - Richard Campbell
It's really depends on what you're doing right.

0:30:23 - Paul Thurrott
I look for you. I would say even for most people. I would look at the AMD stuff. I think it's incredible.

0:30:28 - Richard Campbell
No, I think that's a fair call, and I've not had an AMD machine for years and years.

0:30:32 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, they're nice now. They're really good, they're really good, I ordered the Framework desktop. I don't know the ai, but you won't get that. What till april or may, or I think they said, uh, third quarter, so yeah, okay, yeah, well, you know, they're batching it.

0:30:49 - Richard Campbell
So yeah, and they come through too, like this has been frameworks pattern all along, is build up a big enough batch to get a good order structure together. Right, that makes sense and they do come through.

0:30:59 - Leo Laporte
Oh yes, I have had many a framework device.

0:31:02 - Paul Thurrott
This is my first desktop.

0:31:03 - Leo Laporte
It's their first desktop. Actually, I'm gonna think of all right, I want to take a little break if you don't mind, we are also doing a little test to see if it's my shirt that's causing the sync problem. So yeah, I think it is look and look and see is it a lot, of, a lot of pride in your work.

0:31:17 - Paul Thurrott
If you know what I mean. That's not pride that is a syrup a fantastic shirt.

0:31:23 - Richard Campbell
Burke says that richard is uh behind by two seconds now did that just happen when I went on camera kind of maybe

0:31:32 - Paul Thurrott
it is we apply a black and white filter to you and see if that does anything. Maybe it is the shirt, wow that'd be really something you improved our frame rate by like three to five frames per second by just.

0:31:44 - Leo Laporte
I'll go put on a black polo to match Paul and see if it's better, all right, well, we're going to see if we can keep Richard in sync for an entire commercial, our show today brought to you by Melissa. Hello, melissa, love these guys. For what is it? 30, 40 years now. Now the trusted data quality expert since 1985. So you have 40 years.

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0:35:05 - Paul Thurrott
All rightul and richard well, good hdr jokes about your shirt in there, by the way, but oh, in the discord do you need dolby vision to?

0:35:15 - Leo Laporte
wear this shirt. Somebody's saying it's the time code in the shirt there is a secret message there it is no, it's not, it's not it's not it, it's not, it's not, it's not.

0:35:26 - Paul Thurrott
Well, it's from Mexico. It probably says something like resist, it should.

0:35:30 - Leo Laporte
Right on, I'm really. I love these shirts and it's become my wardrobe now. So this is a more recent purchase. I've been adding to the collection. I think I have 50 of these Brazos design shirts Awesome which means I can know three months without repeating count. I can't go 10 seconds without repeating I don't even know what that's, but they're all see. That's the thing about black polos, paul is. No one knows if that's last year's black polo or this year's black polo I can tell you it's not last year's because it's from amazon.

They don't last that long, but yeah there you go, if, if, uh, burke, what do you think? Should I change my shirt? Is that really causing the problems? Wizard link says could you run some tests after the show? Work out how powerful a graphics card I need to upgrade to in order to display leo's shirt without lag wearing a 5090 shirt how many boffins had to die to bring that shirt? I'm gonna go change you guys go on please all right.

0:36:34 - Paul Thurrott
Uh well, and with the 6 000 word epic, whatever the hell that was behind us um, your treaties, there's more, right. So yesterday was the tuesday of week d, right, this is something we've probably didn't think about much a couple of years ago, but in the Windows 11 era, or the most recent years especially, this has become an important thing, right? So, in addition to the four channels that are inside of the Insider program, they want people in stable to flip that switch in Windows Update and start getting updates early, right?

And so yesterdayrosoft released new preview builds for windows 11 version 23 h2 and for windows 10, it's like, but not for 24 h2. But I just said that 24H2 and 23H2 were pretty much on the same path, right, same features. And actually if you look at the features that will be in next month's Patch Tuesday update, at least for 23H2, it's going to be 24H2 as well You'll see. Well, you won't see this because you didn't write the article. I did, but I see all the same features I just documented right.

So text scaling to more of File Explorer, these new top cards in settings about gamepad, virtual keyboard for the touch keyboard, the emoji icon in the taskbar, which is super important. That changed to task manager. We talked about, where they are calculating the CPU workload for processes and other things differently now, and then voice access, which we just talked about Qualcomm powered Snapdragon X powered copilot plus PCs. You can now use voice access with natural language, right. So you don't have to get the text parser, exactly right, you can kind of eyeball it. It will probably work. You know it's using the MPU on the PC and then probably in a month or two it will come to AMD and Intel, because that's how we do things. So Node 24-inch 2, that's not actually all that unique. Remember, one of the other things I didn't talk about that happened last year is that this happened last year a bunch of times three, four times at least where week D or even patch Tuesday came and there was no update for 24-H2, but then a couple of days later that landed and I wouldn't be surprised to see that be the case. And then, kind of supporting that, is that sometime in the past few days as well, microsoft released a release preview build of Windows 11 24H2. And you're not going to believe what's in it because it's everything I just said. So voice access, gamepad, keyboard layout, blah, blah, blah. Everything I just said is in this thing, so it's absolutely coming. This is definitely a preview of what we're going to see in Patch Tuesday, but a couple of unique things as well because of the Copilot plus PC aspect of 24H2. So the semantic search feature is actually landing in stable next month. And that's fascinating to me because when you think about the major post-RTM or post-initial release copilot plus PC specific AI features, this is the newest. They only started testing this fairly recently. They started in little batches where they put it here and then here and then they added different file types, but of the big stuff which I would throw in, you know, recall and click to do in there, right, this is the latest and those other two are not coming out this next month. And I, you know this speaks to what Richard was saying earlier Like there's no rhyme or reason to this stuff.

I can't explain that. But well, okay, so there's no rhyme or reason to this stuff. I can't explain that. But, uh, well, okay, so there's that. Yeah, um, there were two. There was a beta 23h2 and a canary build. The canary build was just a hour ago, just fixes, mostly no big deal.

And then there were these app updates, and it's the other thing I kind of I want to.

This is I'm particularly interested in because there have been a series of app updates, especially to Paint Photos, notepad and Snipping Tool, over the past I'm going to say four to six months that significantly enhance these apps, and I want to make sure this is the case.

No, well, in the case of the latest Notepad Paint and Snipping Tool features, which were kind of released separately to different parts of the latest notepad paint and snipping tool features, which were kind of released separately to different parts of the Insider Program in all cases are now available to everyone in the Insider Program, because app updates don't have anything to do with Patch Tuesday typically or Week D or anything like that.

That could happen anytime, but I suspect this stuff is going to be kind of right around the same time as patch tuesday, right, because it's in release preview. So, yes, um, and these are all just the new ai features. I mentioned briefly the, the notepad stuff with the rewrite tools, um going out to everybody, not just copilot plus pc. There was that consolidated, uh, copilot menu in paint, um, which they're bulking out now with additional features, some of which are Copilot plus PC. Specific Snipping tool has some interesting new stuff and has actually is an app that Microsoft has paid a lot of attention to. That was one of the things I noticed. Since last September, there's been a bunch of updates to Snipping tool.

0:42:01 - Richard Campbell
But how many people use this tool, like I know we do, but do regular consumers use this tool? How many people use this tool, like I know we do, but do?

0:42:07 - Paul Thurrott
regular consumers use this tool. Right now. I don't use it a lot because you can't capture the mouse cursor Right. One of the new features in this app which you won't see as a user is that it's not well. Extensible is not the right word. It's kind of API based now for developers. So you, as a developer, you have an app. You could say I want to use this feature from Snipping Tool, not the app, but I want that feature. You can start doing that with this new release and that's actually kind of interesting, you know, because one of the features it has is like OCR capabilities, right. So you bring in an image and then it gets the text, like you could say, I just want that. That's actually very interesting to me.

When I wrote that thing I wrote, the thing that occurred to me was like I should write an app that's basically just snipping tool but it lets you put the mouse cursor in it, because that's what I need for screenshots, right. So it's the one thing it doesn't have. But there are like little quickie screen capture things you can do with this, that screen recording things I should say that I actually do use it for. So it's kind of odd to me that my most common usage of snipping tool is actually for screen recordings that are typically eight to 15 seconds long, because I'm just showing something that's a little more than a still frame, right, maybe, like for my app showing you know, know, cycling through the tabs or something, something you can't capture in a screenshot and you can post that thing to youtube in two seconds because they're so small. And now they have the. You know, one of the features that's in this release is the trim capability, right, so when you create a recording, you can trim it right. This is the most basic video editing feature of all time.

So we're getting to the point where this thing could be, could replace other tools, right, um, yeah, so I I didn't understand why they replaced anything like, why they even brought this thing. I never understood the point of it. But now that they're kind of bulking it out in ways that are actually useful, it's like, okay, well, actually that sounds, that sounds okay, um, and then paint and I'm sorry, photos, uh, which, too, has seen a steady series of updates over the past several months, for both everybody and those only on Copilot plus PC, so you see different stuff in there, depending on what you have Now integrates with Copilot, because of course it does. It has to. There are right click options.

This is getting a little overblown. Remember, one of the things that Microsoft did in Windows 11 was look at the menu, the context menus in Windows 10, which often were humongous, cut them all down and everyone hated it. And now they're just adding new features to this thing willy-nilly Like. The menu in Windows 11 now is almost as big as it was in Windows 10, and it's about five times slower, so it's wonderful.

0:44:54 - Richard Campbell
And you still can't find the thing you're looking for because it's an icon at the top or the bottom yeah.

0:44:59 - Paul Thurrott
So, yeah, when you have selected a file, a group of files, one of the options in there is share, which is an icon, and but now they also have like a menu for it. So if there's a compatible app that you can share that thing with, it will be on the menu so you can go share WhatsApp or whatever app. Um, they're doing this with photos as well. So the photos option in there, probably, I think it today, if you look today, if, if you right click an image, it probably says edit in photos, I would imagine. But in addition to open with photos, right, but there's a photos sub menu and now that will have options for like edit with photos, erase objects with photos, visual search with Bing.

You know they're, they're bringing forward these kind of integration things. Um, and so that photos menu, not menu toolbar, I guess at the top, uh, used to be, you know, kind of the windows 10 style white icons on black or black on white, depending on the color scheme, and then they started adding things to it. Right, the first thing I think they added was like a clip champ icon, you know, um, and now they have and it's got color, yeah, their color exactly, completely inconsistent.

You know it's beautiful, um, but now copilot is in there as well and the copilot uh button will expand over time with new you know other features, but it does things like, uh, you know, tips for editing photos, framing suggestions, etc. It's gonna, you know it's gonna do what ai does, I guess it's uh. So they're just starting to test that, but I, I would expect that to keep going. And then I mentioned ocr in snipping tool. They have brought that capability to or are bringing. I should say it's still inside a program, but they're bringing that to photos as well.

Because, of course, right, I mean, this is a tough one because, uh, you, of years ago, one of the big conversations we would have had is you, look out at Microsoft Office, which is part of Microsoft 365. And there's all these different subscriptions. We used to have different versions of the suite, but now we really we still do, actually, but we really just have different versions of Microsoft 365 subscriptions, but we have different versions of these apps. So just Microsoft Word there's a version on the web, there's a version on all the mobile platforms, there's Windows, there's the Mac, and one day some version of Word gets some feature, whatever it is, doesn't matter, like a transcription capability, whatever, and it's on the web first, right. And then one day it's like, oh, now it's in Windows. And then it's like, oh, we put it on the mac. You know, like it was really hard.

It still is hard to keep track of where features are and I feel like with the ai stuff we're starting to get there, because if you think about ocr, which is the ability to take an image, and if there's text in it, get the text out of it, copy it to the clipboard, you know, open it, notepad, whatever, okay, I, I would argue, you know, paint, uh, photos, uh, snippet tool, has it that actually snippet tool? I think had it first, but then there's click to do. Click to do just brings it to everything. Why are we even putting this in apps?

0:47:56 - Richard Campbell
yeah, you know, like you get different teams and they and they haven't coordinated with each other. So, yeah, so we're missing bill gates again. He would seem to be the only guy who could look across all the teams and say y'all are building the same thing. Figure it out, and I don't think anybody else does that.

0:48:13 - Paul Thurrott
Ray Ozzy had a big problem with this too. He would always set off five teams to all do the same thing and let them fight it out. It's like, guys, we don't need five Microsoft Sync products, we need one or whatever.

0:48:24 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, and it's one thing to find it out in private, but when everything's going into preview so that we're all being slung back and forth on this stuff like it, just it looks bad and it's frustrating yeah, that's, yeah, you just described my entire career these days, richard.

0:48:39 - Paul Thurrott
That's beautiful, uh, yeah, so I'm, uh, I'm trying to, I'm trying to figure it out. Um, I can't look when this is something like the, the features of office, right, which stands so many apps and services. I can't, I, my brain can't, I can't do it. But I look at windows 11, I think, okay, I could probably handle this, you know, um, but not really Right, because you know, there's what. You see, I had to.

When I was writing that article, I had one of the dev laptops that I was writing on and then I had a, what I'll call a stable laptop, and they were so different. Just something like File Explorer, file Explorer. Let me see what it looks like on this one File Explorer on this computer, which is what. I don't even know what this one is, it doesn't matter. Yeah, this is the new one, right, so it has tabs inside of it. This is a new one, right, so it has tabs inside of it. I don't mean tabs like for documents, I mean the home view has tabs for things like favorites, recommended, shared, et cetera. Some of those, by the way, brand seeing in there fantastic, and that's a.

You know that's a tough problem, I mean for someone like me. Like I have a book and it's like, how do I write about this? But maybe more, or maybe more common. Uh, you're an it admin. You have to support a bunch of users, or you're just the tech guy in your family and they always come to you and it's like you're you. That guy is used to knowing what they they expect to see. And now it's like spin the wheel, bob, what do we got this time? You know, um file explorer is a great example, because there's so many features that have come online, but sporadically and not to every computer over the past several months, and there are more coming, and so it's just, it's just hard to keep track of, but it's just something I'm trying, I'm trying to do. This is this is where I'm drawing the line for me. I'm like, okay, come on, you can do this, but I can't. But I'm trying, I'm trying.

0:50:38 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, interesting question is should an operating system be consistent to all users or not? I't, I don't know what the answer is, but yeah, by the way, I've, I've I got a black shirt.

0:50:49 - Paul Thurrott
I hope that's. Uh. How do you find that's helping? Is that your wife? Sure, what did?

0:50:52 - Leo Laporte
you get? Uh, yeah, I don't have. I have shirts here, so I made a black shirt. I don't know if that's gonna help overall with the uh the codec.

0:51:00 - Paul Thurrott
So, leo, I think there's a small problem. What's that? Well, one of your, your collar tabs? Oh no, it's the giant rainbow. Whatever in the background, are you in the matrix?

0:51:11 - Richard Campbell
what's going on?

0:51:13 - Leo Laporte
oh my god, the shirt is spreading.

0:51:16 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, it left. This is the same shirt that leapt off of the shirt.

0:51:21 - Leo Laporte
Yes, this we've entered into like a sci-fi horror movie, I think you know all the color went out of the shirt in right into the room in my background. That's it, uh, uh. Should I do a spot now? Or do you want to talk about the photos app too? Right? No, we got it, we got it all right, let's do a little are you okay?

paul everything's fine, we're fine let's uh, let's do a little, uh, little break, and then we'll come back with more of windows weekly. By the way, does this background change the sink?

0:51:55 - Paul Thurrott
at all. Is everything big? What's going on here all?

0:51:58 - Leo Laporte
right, I'll turn it off, uh, and we'll just uh, continue on as if nothing happened. But I I did put on a black shirt because I think maybe that'll help.

0:52:06 - Paul Thurrott
We'll just continue on as if nothing happened.

0:52:07 - Leo Laporte
But I did put on a black shirt because I think maybe that'll help. We'll see that seems like the shirt shouldn't really screw things up. I mean it just seems on the face of it.

0:52:18 - Paul Thurrott
No, but if my experience with Windows teaches us anything, it's that it making sense has nothing to do with it, nothing to do with it.

0:52:24 - Leo Laporte
I know Computers, they're a mystery.

0:52:27 - Paul Thurrott
On and zeros. That's how we make magic.

0:52:29 - Leo Laporte
It's a mystery you know, it's not a mystery how we this show gets to you, our show today brought to you and I mean literally by CacheFly. I've been saying it for years bandwidth for windows weekly is provided by CacheFly at c-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y dot com slash Twitter. We love CacheFly. They're our CDN Content Delivery Network. For over 20 years, CacheFly has held the track record for high-performing, ultra-reliable content delivering, serving over 5,000 companies in over 80 countries, and we're one of them. We've been using CacheFly practically since we began, almost 20 years now. We love their lag-free video loading, the hyper-fast downloads, the friction-free site interactions. It's the only CDN built for throughput. I'll give you an example CacheFly now offers ultra-low latency video streaming that can deliver video to over a million concurrent users with sub one second lag, less than a second. Lightning fast gaming delivers downloads faster with zero lag, zero glitches, zero outages. And if you've got a website or anything that's serving images, you'll love this automatic mobile content optimization. It optimizes images automatically so that there's a copy of the image for every size screen. Your site will load faster on any device and look great. Now the other thing that was important to us, especially because we were a new podcast network, we didn't really know what the bandwidth was going to be like from day to day to month. CacheFly was really flexible with us. They gave us flexible month to month billing for as long as we needed and then, once we kind of got a handle on when we're going to use bandwidth and how we got discounts for fixed terms and the thing is you get the same thing. The key is you design your contract when you switch to CacheFly. CacheFly delivers rich media content up to 158% faster than other major CDNs, allows you to shield we've been doing this for a while now shield your site content in their cloud. So we just upload shows to the CacheFly cloud, which ensures a 100% cache hit ratio. That's fantastic, and with CacheFly's elite managed packages, you're going to get the same VIP treatment we do, which is, I could say, great. You get a dedicated account manager who will be with you from day one, ensuring a smooth implementation, reliable 24-7 support when you need it. Look, learn how you can get your first month free at CacheFlycom slash twit. Let me say it again bandwidth for windows weekly is provided by CacheFly at c-a-c-h-e-f-l-y dot com slash twit. Thank you, CacheFly.

As we near our 20th anniversary uh, there's, there are some people in groups I'm super grateful to, of course, you, paul. You've been with us since practically the beginning. CacheFly has been with us since the beginning. April 13th is the 20th anniversary twit and one of the things we're going to do is, uh, and we're getting some really great submissions. We've asked people who watch you've been watching for a long time how they discovered twit, how they watch twit. You know just to send us a little short video of yourself and tell us a little something about yourself, because I want to honor the. We've got a great community and I want to honor the community. That's really cool and we've been getting some great ones. I just got a guy in Canada riding his combine harvester Nice, I love it. He's out doing his farming and he's watching Windows Weekly in the combine. I think that's so cool.

So, if you've got an interesting story to tell somebody wrote me a poem. There was a guy in a boat um, you know people from all over the world send us a video. There's a couple ways you could do this one. Uh, just post it on your favorite social media we watch them all and hashtag twit or at twit, maybe at twitter be better, and that way we'll know to look for it and we'll find it. Uh, you can also email us, email me, leo, at leovillecom, uh, and, and send me the video, or send me better, yet, don't send me the video, but a link to the video on on you know one drive or wherever you store it, uh, and then that way we're going to get as many as we can and we'll kind of put them into the show on April 13th, that's coming up in just a couple of weeks. All right, back to the show. We go. Microsoft 365. I never. Is that Windows? No, that's everything but Windows, no.

0:57:01 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, pretty much.

0:57:02 - Leo Laporte
Windows is in there too.

0:57:04 - Paul Thurrott
Actually, Windows is part of yeah.

0:57:05 - Leo Laporte
You do get a lot. That's why I don't understand what that name means. Am I weird?

0:57:10 - Paul Thurrott
No, you're not. This shouldn't be so confusing, but it is.

0:57:16 - Richard Campbell
It's why they switched from Office 365 to Microsoft. It's.

0:57:18 - Paul Thurrott
Office but it also includes Windows. Well, yeah, so Microsoft 365 is that umbrella term for all this stuff. The commercial, the commercial versions of microsoft 365 can include licenses for windows. Okay, never mind, I know, I should never ask the question. Well, I mean, just I mean, but to that point, uh, part of the financial reporting change that microsoft made almost a year ago was to reorganize where that money from Windows goes. And now the money, the revenues, that are generated for Windows through Microsoft 365, actually go to Microsoft 365 or are reported as part of that business. They're not reported as part of Windows, which they used to be.

Okay, so, further confusing matters, we have a metric ton of AI news today, and some of it is Microsoft 365 related, as it would be. So I put it into the Microsoft 365 section, I guess. So we'll start with that. With that, the first two are topics that are not exactly near and dear to my heart, but I think are still interesting, and the first is that Microsoft has released two reasoning agents. I have a note almost to myself, about this later in the show in the AI section, I'm sure, but something about this when you think about AI in the recent era and how quickly it's evolved. We had AI chatbots and then Satya Nadella, especially, but well, especially to me, actually. I mean, everyone's talking about this.

The next wave, so to speak, is these agents, right, these AI services that work on your behalf. You prompt it to do whatever it is. It goes off and does something. It comes back when it completes that task, or maybe it has a question, whatever Fine Funny thing happened on the way to that future Deep Seek oh, look at me, I said it right Came out with what we now call a reasoning model, where it actually kind of shows you how it's thinking through solving the problem.

You asked it and people love this, and now everything's going. Reasoning. We'll talk about that, um, but what Microsoft has just announced is essential. Well, no, it is literally two reasoning agents. So it's like the you've got your reasoning in my AI agent kind of a thing or whatever. My AI agent kind of a thing or whatever and these are agents that use reasoning models to do multi-step whatever it might be on your behalf. So one of them is called researcher, which you can probably figure out what that means, and one of them is called analysts. These are very much for Microsoft 365 commercial customers using Microsoft 365, copilot, right, and so we've seen these kinds of things like deep research is one of those big terms that comes out of AI these days where you can use this AI for really complex tasks.

This is a quote from, oh God, chief marketing officer AI at work, jared Spatero, who said you could use this to build a detailed go-to-market strategy based on the context of all your work data and broader competitive data from the web. Yikes, ai is not just going to take your job, it's going to take everyone's job. It's going to be one AI, because at what point am I? What's the role I have in this? You know, um, and then there's the uh, uh, the second one, which is um, which is what paul, uh, oh, analyst, right, so same thing, right, you know, you're, you're pointing at a lot of data and it comes back and it analyzes kind of like a, like a big data version of what is the summary of this document. You know, uh, it can do visualization, look at purchase patterns. You know all this stuff revenue projection, etc. And yikes. So, of course, right, um, google's doing something like this. Open ai is doing something. This is going to be.

1:01:22 - Richard Campbell
You know this is it's a it's a race to automate portions of white collar work yep, yeah, this was um, I don't know if I mean reference.

1:01:32 - Paul Thurrott
I must reference it somewhere in the show. But uh, I wrote an article last, the past week, about a yeah, ai and web browser. Yeah, we will talk about this, but I, I, I don't want to give it away for later, but it basically boils down to if ai is going to do everything that I do, what am I going to do with all this free time? I'm going to have all this like it's getting, it's getting kind of weird, like what you know. Like I'll be like, hey, I, I could. Oh, you got it. Okay, sorry, sorry. Like, do you think that's going to happen? I think it's already happening right now. Yeah, there's this. You know, obviously there's always this spectrum of responses to this kind of thing, and we'll always have those people like, yeah, it's fake, it's a fraud, it's not real, it's not that serious. And then there are the people like, oh, my God, this is Terminator, it's happening, they're taking over the world, you know.

1:02:27 - Richard Campbell
And obviously we're going to be somewhere in the middle of that. But yeah, there's an interesting discussion going on about what an artificial generalized intelligence actually is.

1:02:34 - Paul Thurrott
Last year sometime, microsoft announced something called Microsoft Copilot for Security.

1:02:38 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, First it was Security Copilot, then it was Copilot for Security.

1:02:42 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, my comment at the time was why don't you just make your products all secure?

1:03:07 - Richard Campbell
no-transcript this space and uh they, I gotta say from an administrative perspective, this is really interesting because most admins aren't full-time security people that don't have a full-time security person, they put on the tinfoil hat once a month, yeah no, you're 100 right.

1:03:28 - Paul Thurrott
I leo said something earlier and I I don't remember exactly what he said, but it was and I said, well, we're going to talk about this kind of thing later and it was something about writing and ai and I and I think part of the the resistance to ai is that people have these kind of you know the egos, egos about, and they're like I am, I am the person that does the writing, if I'm a writer, or the coding, if I'm a coder or the adminning, if I'm an ad whatever and whatever that word is.

But yeah, the truth is we're all good at things and we're all not so good at other things, and you know, if you kind of accept the notion, I think it's correct that AI ultimately will save you time. How about using it to save time doing something either that you cannot stand doing or you're not good at, or whatever it is? And so, yes, in this case, in the same way that you would go into the cursor AI editor and say, examine my code base and tell me where I could improve the code quality or reduce redundancy or whatever it might be, you could do that with security. Look at my environment and then have a comeback and say, okay, well, bob over there doesn't have 2FA going, or you know whatever it might be Right.

1:04:41 - Richard Campbell
And so yeah, I mean Well, and we've done this show on run ads where it's exactly that. What's the bit most pressing? You know your view of my Azure tenant. What's my most pressing security risk? What should I address now?

1:04:54 - Paul Thurrott
The most basic and commonly said thing about it and this sort of work is these are people that want to be proactive but are always reactive because stuff happens. They're in the pounding surf, yeah, and this is the type of thing it's not the only thing, but is maybe a way to get to that ideal where the stuff that's hard or bad or maybe is lurking in the background you never know about whatever it might be that might later cause that reactive thing, is something AI could help you with.

1:05:22 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, you do a bit. You get a little bit bit of time, a little bit of preventative work, and if this tool would help you focus in on the best preventative work you could do right. So maybe the pounding surfs of sides a bit and you have a little more time yeah.

1:05:36 - Paul Thurrott
so the, the non-ai version of this that I think anyone, if anyone, has ever done, or is right now doing any kind of admin it pro type work is the, the practices work that Microsoft used to build into its management consoles and probably still does, right, so you have this kind of list of things that you can go through manually and say, well, okay, does everyone get two of A? But now this is something that will do it for you and not that it will necessarily set everything correctly, but rather that it will come back with that report, like you were saying, and say, look, this is what's wrong. You need to focus on this. Like this is, this is job one, whatever. That thing is Super helpful Because, before you know the then the pre best practices era era, microsoft had best practices but they were written in books, so they were written in documents and you know you would have to as the admin, like, all right, you know.

1:06:33 - Richard Campbell
and then they built it in the product and now they're building it into ai and right now and in theory, although I haven't seen an example of this yet but you're going to have a just do it button sooner or later. Right that it's going to say hey, you've not configured conditional access to restrict by geography.

1:06:49 - Paul Thurrott
I'm gonna just do it. This whole show is going to culminate in my second app pick, which is what you just described, but for developers, because one of the choices you get when you use copilot, github, copilot or the cursor, ai, whatever it is is this rewrite this and then it shows it to you and you can look at it, do it. I mean, most of the time you're going to be like, oh, just do it. I wrote this garbage and you made it look pretty and small and it does the same thing. It, yeah, you know, uh, yes. So I think you're right. I think you're, I think you're correct because, and and this, um, this is the hurdle I think we all have to get over collectively. Like, whatever it is you're doing in life, like wherever you're at, you may think I'm the guy.

1:07:39 - Richard Campbell
As the cloud came along, the guys who like spinning screwdrivers got really grumpy. But there were other things from the do and as Exchange Online became obviously the better way to go and we moved all our work, our exchange workloads, those exchange guys are still working. They're not doing the same job, but they still take care of mail. They just take care of it in a different way and actually arguably a better mail system as a consequence, because they aren't wrestling with DAX and distribution blocks and all of those sorts of things. That's already been dealt with.

1:08:08 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, and if you were actually that exchange guy, god help you. You know, your life consisted of two to three year cycles where you spent that whole time doing whatever migration and fixing all the problems and you were like time to go do it again Now it's time for the next version.

1:08:21 - Richard Campbell
yeah, Thank God they're only every three years, because that's how long it takes to get it stable. Exactly.

1:08:27 - Paul Thurrott
All right, now we can bring it down a notch. This one kind of came out of the blue and I have to say I'm not 100% on board with this. I don't quite understand it. Microsoft, in the past week, announced what they call companion apps for Microsoft 365 commercial. They run only in Windows 11. They require Windows 11. They're only in Windows 11. They require Windows 11. They're only in preview right now, and so you have to be I think you have to be in the yeah, the Microsoft 365 Insider Program beta channel to even access this today.

But if you were familiar, well, actually what they look like a little bit is like phone apps, so they're like these little mini apps. You know the companion apps for specific things. Uh, today, those things are file search and people, and you know you could make the argument uh, we have tools for those things. Right, microsoft is right now building out file search in windows 11 for the upteenth time, in this case to handle semantic search with ai and we doing we'll talk about this later. You know the OneDrive Copilot for OneDrive stuff. Why are we doing this kind of thing? Like, what's the point of this? They're almost. They're not widgets, but they're kind of small focused apps. There was an app called People remember in Windows 10, and it's basically disappeared in Windows 11 and now literally has disappeared. But you know, contact management, right, there are going to be more of these things. These are just the first two. That sounds like a threat to me, but I don't know. I'm not really.

1:09:57 - Richard Campbell
I don't. Oh no, we always need another companion, don't we Look?

1:10:01 - Paul Thurrott
what I'm looking for. Could I have more icons in my? Taskbar that I don't want or need. So I mean, they look pretty enough, but when I look at this and I think A superfluous and B if you're going to do this, it should maybe be in Windows, Unless the intention is to put them elsewhere right, because not all of your customers use Windows. But I don't think they're ever going to do that.

1:10:24 - Richard Campbell
So I don't know Well, and you get to who's the team who can build stuff from like this right now, and then you know the m365 guys are firing in all cylinders yeah, and, and tied to what we were discussing earlier, I do think there's going to be a kind of not a comeuppance, but like a, a consolidation in the future.

1:10:41 - Paul Thurrott
At some point we're going to have built out all these different ways to do things and yeah we're going to want to well and, to be clear, there's already a consolidation happening internally.

1:10:50 - Richard Campbell
There are way more of this than you're seeing publicly facing, but I don't disagree, it needs to consolidate more it comes. There is a political game here about who's being the best ai person in the company, so everybody wants to show off their thing I didn't put this in the notes for some reason.

1:11:07 - Paul Thurrott
I must have missed it. But one of the other things that happened in the space just the other day, maybe yesterday, was OneNote I'm sorry the new Outlook, which I think we can all agree. Everyone loves. No problems there. Everyone wishes they could just roll it out faster. Microsoft is now making it a part of the default install of the desktop apps for Microsoft 365 in new deployments. This is going to be controversial, some secrets and some circles. It's going to be installed alongside the other one, sorry, oh, like I mean, if you're on windows 11, which everyone will be you're going to have this app already.

I don't quite. Again, this is another example. I don't quite get it, but I almost wonder if they're doing it just to see how it goes with. You know, see what happens because you're giving admins the capability through policy to disable this or to just have one or the other, or to have them both. Like you have a choice, but the default, unless you change something, is that you'll actually get both, and maybe they're just hoping, you know, maybe it will go better than they think you know everything's going to be fine.

1:12:14 - Richard Campbell
It'll be fine.

1:12:17 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, you know everything's going to be fine. It'll be fine. Yeah, it's going to be fine. So I mentioned Copilot for OneDrive. I don't follow the commercial space maybe as closely as I could. I was under the impression that this would have shipped at some point. It has not. So they're. Oddly, even though they talked about it in the consumer sense only vaguely and much later than they did in commercial, microsoft is starting to roll out Copilot in OneDrive for people who have a Microsoft 365 family or personal subscriptions to the consumer side only for the account holder, which is something we've seen with the other copilot stuff. So if you are the guy paying or the person paying for the family version or personal sometime over the next, you know whatever period of time on the web, only because, again, these things roll out how they roll out. Eventually this will be in window. Well, that's coming in. We just talked about this is coming in windows too. But yeah, you'll be able to use copilot in one drive for web at first to do things like summarize documents.

You know, compared to one drive for web, right when it's quote unquote built into windows it's gonna be, yeah, it's gonna be both right, but yeah, yeah, this is I to me like with my own um, kind of very basic application development stuff that I do. I look at this and I think to myself you have just, you're doing this everywhere, microsoft, with these copilot features, like they must have what I would call a giant switch statement but you can think of it as like giant if-then-else statements or whatever where it's like is he a copilot, whatever customer? No, okay. Does he have a Microsoft 365 subscription? Yes, which kind. Does he have a microsoft 365 subscription? Yeah, yes, which kind. Is he having this one? Okay, is he the guy paying for it? No, then you don't get this like, like, like, these features, like just the, the code, just to manage what people see.

Oh, yeah, it's got to be a hairball at this point. You know, uh, everywhere in the microsoft. You know environment, right, and it's it's only going to get worse. But, uh, I'm I'm interested to see something like this happening at all. Like I said, I I believe as soon as April. Still, the question is, what will it?

1:14:24 - Richard Campbell
do on your personal account, like what do you want to?

1:14:28 - Paul Thurrott
what is the co-pilot's?

1:14:29 - Richard Campbell
role on your, on your OneDrive.

1:14:31 - Paul Thurrott
What? What I would want from it is for it to, at one point, basically essentially index index my whatever part of OneDrive. I tell it to index Where's that picture of my dog.

Well, yeah, or in my case, I have 30 years worth of documents that I've written about Microsoft and Windows or whatever, yeah, so I want to go to it and say, because I have to do this research myself manually, this is what we're just talking about. Right, I want to have a little chat thing, come up and say, okay, lay out the entire history of OneDrive and all the times I've written about it and give me links so I can go find the original documents and summarize this, maybe year to year or something, and then have it spit that thing out and say, okay, now I can use this as easy reference to write whatever it is I'm writing. That is not one of those features, right? So I think that is something that will. You know, what do we call this? When you I have so many AI terms, I just forgot when you train the AI only on your specific data, that is called grounding. I want basically a version of whatever it is Copilot that's grounded on just my data, right?

But no, this is pretty basic stuff. In fact, if you look at the rewriting stuff that's in Notepad, which I think we can all agree is a fairly basic application, it's kind of on that level. So you can select up to five documents and summarize them. You can select up to five documents and compare them. I think it can do a table output, but I think the best use for them, well, maybe one of the good use cases would be I have two different versions of this and we've kind of lost track of what's what. We can compare them, like that kind of thing, or just ask it questions, which is what I'm talking about. But it's grounding on one to five documents. Right, I have probably 100,000. I don't know what it is. Whatever, the number is A lot right.

1:16:17 - Richard Campbell
Probably. I have probably 100,000. I don't know what it is. Whatever, the number is A lot right, probably not what would be a normal consumer range.

1:16:21 - Paul Thurrott
Yep, oh no, I completely understand why I might have to pay for this, like, if that's what it you know, if it has to be a commercial, whatever I'll do that, that's fine, but I would like to see that happen. Anyway, I'm surprised to see this coming to consumers this soon, but that's good, and then we can finally squeeze out into the non-AI part of the office or Microsoft 365 stuff. Wow, yeah, I know this is not a big deal and I didn't even realize this was possible. But if you're working on a Microsoft Word, excel or PowerPoint document on the web version of those apps, you can share them to people using a link. Right, because it has to be saved to OneDrive and the person you're sharing them with. One of the options you have as the person sharing is they don't have to have a Microsoft account, they don't have to sign into anything. As long as they have this link, they can view the file. Now, if you want them to edit it or leave comments, yes, they have to. You know, reasonably, they have to have a Microsoft account.

So they've added this ability to the mobile versions of those apps on iPhone and iPad. So I assume they also mean what I would call the Microsoft 365 app, or maybe that's the Microsoft 365 co-pilot app now, where Word, excel, powerpoint are in the app as well, not to stand alone, right, but it doesn't say that explicitly. But I assume that's what they mean. But yeah, it's just a way to from those versions of the client share anonymously, essentially so in a read-only format. Microsoft is clinging to this, the office stuff. It was like the final frontier of giving up on you know all this proprietary stuff they have, but okay. And then this is not actually new news per se, but Microsoft reminded customers through in this case through the Microsoft 365 message center, which is where I saw this that OneNote for Windows 10, as we now call it I think that might be its seventh name, I don't remember how many permutations it went through anymore is going to reach end of support in October and if you're in an organization and this is the wheel version right Used to be.

1:18:34 - Richard Campbell
That's funny. You remember that.

1:18:35 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, so right. That's an important part of the history of this app, so originally, this app was called OneNote.

1:18:40 - Richard Campbell
It was the Metro experiment.

1:18:43 - Paul Thurrott
MX, exactly no, you know, it's funny.

1:18:45 - Leo Laporte
I saw the other day that Microsoft's terminating support for Windows 10 October 25th.

1:18:52 - Paul Thurrott
Yep yeah, and this is you know they want people to be outraged again because we haven't calmed down yet from the new outlook or from co-pilot, but, um, this one was years in the making. So, yeah, we knew. Um, yeah, and there's a whole convoluted history to this app because it came up out as the one, well, one of two metro apps they made for the office team did for windows 8, and then, when windows 10 came around, they were going to redo office as these uh well, at the time universal apps.

Um, it had a kind of a radical radial menu, which is what richard uh, quickly referenced earlier um, but just to be clear, one note, for windows 11 is not gone well, one note for windows desktop still exists, so 2016 was going to be the last version, and then, whatever the word, and after twice, right, 2021 probably came back, and then at some point, they made that the primary client again and deprecated the old version. That one note for windows 10, the one we're talking about now, and unifying the clients, whatever that means. So what's going to be left?

1:19:56 - Leo Laporte
one note for desktop one. There's that. There's that radial menu that weird. Yeah, it was cool you know it was.

1:20:02 - Paul Thurrott
I'm not saying it was better or whatever, but it was. It was a team of people looking at something touch-based and pen-based and saying, right, how could we do something here?

1:20:11 - Leo Laporte
you know, that made sense on the surface studio because it had that radial dial and the pen yeah, yeah, and the pen, yeah, yep yeah, it was context sensitive and it was.

1:20:19 - Paul Thurrott
It was a good idea it didn't last, but it was interesting. Anyway, it's going away so what so?

1:20:24 - Leo Laporte
and you and mary joe used one note forever on the show yeah, and I.

1:20:28 - Paul Thurrott
I actually preferred one note for windows 10 for a long time, um, but on either client we always had those sync issues where we couldn't uh, edit a dot or a note in real time that was.

1:20:38 - Leo Laporte
I mean, that's probably a huge problem for a team put up that for years team app to not be able to use it yeah, no, so it's.

1:20:46 - Paul Thurrott
You know, one time my mother called me and she said hey, I sent you an email, did you get it? And you know we used to have to do the that version of that. Like she'd text me and say, hey, let me know when you're out of the notes so I can get in there. And it's stupid. Anyway, they tried anyway. I use notion now.

1:21:04 - Leo Laporte
So there you go, yeah whatever, and of course there's always loop, yeah, so I use notion now and uh too soon.

1:21:11 - Paul Thurrott
No, I don't know.

1:21:14 - Leo Laporte
We were so excited about loop when they announced it, and it's just I, I'm open, you know we'll see, but right now no all right, let's talk.

1:21:25 - Paul Thurrott
Uh, ai, yeah so we're pressed for time, so I'm going to go through this very quickly, okay, a to z.

1:21:31 - Leo Laporte
I won't slow you down. We got an ai show in an hour, yeah, yeah exactly so.

1:21:35 - Paul Thurrott
I'm not. I'm going to skip over my little editorial thing about agentic browsers and blah, blah, blah, because we don't really have anything there. That's happening per se, but Sam Altman announced a leadership shift. He's not stepping down as CEO, but he's off putting a lot of his CEO responsibilities to three other people, especially one of them. Yeah, and to focus on product and strategy. Right, this company's trying to go from a nonprofit to a full, you know so he's going to do all that Is that because 4.5 was a little disappointing to people and people were saying where's 5.0?

1:22:05 - Leo Laporte
I don't. There's pressure on them, isn't there? Right, yeah, of course.

1:22:08 - Paul Thurrott
But the thing is, you know I feel like this is true of all the big AI companies right now Just when you think like, oh, someone else just leapt ahead, they, they announced something the next day and it's like, yeah, because the other thing they, they did I might've been the same day actually was, uh, they announced, uh, a GPT for O based image generation capability, for chat, gpt, which is like next level. It's amazing. Oh, you've used it. I've only seen it. I've not used it, but it's, it's uh, but it looks amazing and I, I don't know, I think they, I think they're gonna be okay, um, but yeah, they're yeah. But you know, every time you see anything from open ai where it's like, oh, we're switching stuff around, you're like here we go again.

I don't know, I I don't trust them in a way, but I think they're gonna be fine um, there's got to be such intense pressure, yep um, google is adding ai search to g Gmail.

You'll be able to toggle it off if you don't like it, but based on my experience with AI search and photos, you'll want to switch to a different email client because it's terrible. So I don't know, maybe that will get better over time, but right now I got to say that that stuff does not work, and I'm not like an AI skeptic at all. It's just that stuff is garbage. Google back in, I want to say February released the Gemini 2.0 models across the whole family. They just released the first 2.5 model, which is a reasoning model, which they call a thinking model, but in experimental it's only for paying customers. But over time we'll get more of the 2.5 stuff. So they're kind of going in that direction. But over time we'll get more of the 2.5 stuff. So they're kind of going in that direction.

Today Amazon announced a feature called Interests for its mobile app on iPhone and mobile web app Select subset of US customers. Only More US customers later this year. I for some reason have it, even though I'm in Mexico, so I was able to take a look at it. The idea is that you can use natural language to do a product search and then it will come back to you later when things change, Like if there's a price change or a sale or you know something, a new product in that category, whatever it is.

I can't tell you how good it is right now, Cause it just came out and is probably going to be bringing Apple intelligence to its iPhone and AirPods, but that will be through the iPhone, right, Because these things don't. You know it's a processor from a box of cracker jacks, so there's no way it's going to be able to do that on the device, but you know they'll have cameras and other sensors and things and fun. We don't have time really to go in depth on this, but apple is being sued for advertising apple intelligence features that didn't exist. I think it's kind of nonsense honestly, because if you go back to wwdc and last year and look at what they announced, they've actually released everything except for this conversational series.

1:24:54 - Leo Laporte
It was the ads though the that were all over the nfl, the bella ramsey, uh yeah, that still it can't do. Yeah, um, and look, I don't think it's a reasonable lawsuit. But apple is getting some egg on their face for promising and not for sure, and they're, they're doing a shift there's. You know, they're shifting executives around all that kind of stuff um yeah, well, that's a big deal, because they made a big deal when they when they stole john g andrea away from google.

He was their ai guy and now he's been and he's out because he hasn't been able to make it work and they brought in, weirdly, uh, the fixer right, so they had kim. Well, the guy from the guy mike rockwell, he did vision Pro right, but he wanted to quit before and he doesn't strike me as a techie kind of guy, he's more an operations guy. I think they're in trouble.

1:25:46 - Paul Thurrott
I don't think they've got anybody. I think their trouble is self-inflicted, in the sense that they're going to do this in the most privacy you know, faithful way.

1:25:58 - Leo Laporte
And that's hard. Maybe that's hard, yeah, the so-called context, where ai that the thing is?

1:26:01 - Paul Thurrott
we've. You've used siri. You've used it by mistake most of the time. It's terrible. Literally just today, I'm on the bed. We have to go. We had to eat lunch early today because the time shift. And what time? When do you want to leave? And I said I don't know, but two hours from now. I was joking, yeah, and then siri goes. Okay, I'll set an alarm for two hours. And I'm like you idiot. No, I never said no I didn't want that.

1:26:25 - Leo Laporte
It's the only time. Hey, siri, what month is it?

1:26:30 - Paul Thurrott
well, it depends on where you live.

1:26:31 - Leo Laporte
I don't know like oh wait a minute, the the okay. Now that's the worst thing. I said it right into the phone.

1:26:39 - Paul Thurrott
The Siri over in the other room answered this is the part of the demo where Steve Jobs is like and it just works.

1:26:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, by the way, darren Oki, who is one of our adepts AI adepts says he has used the image generation in 4.0. And it's very good. It's especially good to make small changes to an existing image.

1:26:59 - Paul Thurrott
That's actually so as good as the whatever image generation stuff is. I often want to go back and say this one's good. But could you? You know right, and actually that's a, that's a good capability, yeah.

1:27:13 - Leo Laporte
That's something a lot of people want to do.

1:27:14 - Paul Thurrott
It's basically photo retouching, yeah uh, wdc is uh scheduled now for june 9 and that week of june 9. Um, I I'm sure there'll be some ai in the keynote, but I don't think it's going to be like last year uh we'll see um.

1:27:29 - Leo Laporte
Is there going to be an apology tour? Is it going to be? What are they going to do? They have I think I.

1:27:34 - Paul Thurrott
My version of this is where they go. Look at me now.

1:27:37 - Leo Laporte
We're talking about this yeah, they're going to pay no attention to that ios 19.

1:27:41 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, exactly, yeah, so I'm sure they'll have to mention it but I don't think as much um opera, upgraded actually four um of their browsers today the opera one, uh, opera gx and opera, what's? It called? The little one, the calm, the calm one, yeah, the calm one, opera, what's?

1:28:00 - Leo Laporte
it called Opera Sleepy Dopey Grumpy. That's it.

1:28:04 - Paul Thurrott
And with a bunch of new ARIA AI features, including like tab management where you can speak or, more typically, type. You know natural language, you know all the stuff you'd expect. New UI on Opera for android, for aria um, not iphone yet, but that I'm sure is coming. So that was uh this week in ai, in about five minutes, I don't know you know what?

1:28:30 - Leo Laporte
we got a three hour show coming up.

1:28:31 - Paul Thurrott
You don't have to get it all in, there's gonna be plenty I was actually kind of surprised as I went through the show notes, like how much there was you know it's all that anybody's talking about right now.

1:28:41 - Leo Laporte
It's all I mean.

1:28:42 - Paul Thurrott
It's you know it's happening. I mean it's happening.

1:28:45 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's that was my question earlier is is it gonna happen or are we gonna have five years or 10 years down the road? Go well, that wasn't, that was a bomb no, I don't know I really think it's, it's gonna happen. Yeah, all right, you know what did happen and actually, uh, a little credit to steve balmer for this.

1:29:05 - Paul Thurrott
The xbox, oh yeah, okay, yes, yeah so there's actually a bunch of stuff going on with the xbox, um, gdc. You know they've started talking about stuff for later in the year, et cetera, et cetera, but there's been hints of this kind of stuff. You know use the Xbox app as kind of the UI on windows for games and they want to work with all the different stores and so forth and they put up a screenshot somewhere that had steam in the Xbox UI. Steam is not on Xbox or steam is not available through the xbox app, I should say on pc and um I. The thought here is that this is tied to they want the xbox app to act as the hub for these other stores. So if you have games from the epic game store steam, whatever it might be that you know, maybe you're on one of those little gaming handles and that's the ui, like that, stuff will all come up through the app. Do?

1:29:55 - Leo Laporte
gamers. Gamers want that.

1:29:56 - Paul Thurrott
That actually does seem convenient, if you were an Xbox, meaning Xbox platform, not console, but a focus player. Yeah, I mean I, I the. The two edge sword of the PC in many ways is the availability of all these stores where you can get different stuff, and then the weirdness of having to remember like, okay, I bought this game where, where and how do I go get you know? Like it'd be nice to have one place for that. Right, this is the dream everywhere. It's the dream for apple tv type devices. It was the dream microsoft had for windows phone. Like we'll just have like one texting interface. And everyone was like, yeah, that sounds great, except for the companies that make those apps and services. Right, so we'll see. But this is, um, yeah, we'll see. That's all I'll say there. Uh, no, no, no, no. So I haven't had time to process this too much, but, uh, xbox cloud gaming is a feature of xbox game pass ultimate. I guess game pass ultimate we're calling now.

Um, sometime in the past six months ish, they added the ability to stream your own games. Remember, this is something I've been promising for years. Um, today they've added seven new games to this, including the just released assassin's creed shadows, which we'll go briefly later. Um, and blah, blah, blah. Okay, so that's that, um, but about back to the notes. Where are we, uh, that did? Oh, yeah, so my uh, minecraft had an event, had a minecraft live event over the weekend. Um, I tried to watch this and I found the host to be kind of tough to deal with, but they're, they remember they were going to do this big ray tracing update thing and then they kind of didn't, and now there are third-party things to do it. So they are actually going to make a bunch of graphical updates to this game, starting with something this year called the Vibrant Visuals Upgrade, which doesn't make it not look like.

1:31:41 - Leo Laporte
You know it's not it doesn't go like yeah it doesn't go like 816 bit or anything like that.

1:31:46 - Paul Thurrott
It's faithful to the graphics, which I think is what people want.

1:31:49 - Leo Laporte
And there are add-ons that will make it look like you know, a modern game, but I think you want Minecraft to look like Minecraft. I think this looks beautiful like the thing that they're talking.

1:32:00 - Paul Thurrott
So talking about um, it's worth watching. If you go look up minecraft live on youtube, there's a segment you can see for this. It's really nice looking um, you can not install it. You can turn it off. If you do install it, you don't have to get it. Uh, the initial version will be on minecraft bedrock edition, selected platforms, which I don't know what that means. They haven't said yet, but it will be coming to other Minecrafts.

1:32:21 - Leo Laporte
It looks mostly like a lighting update.

1:32:23 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah, I think so, yeah, so one of the things is like in the video they show, like when you build a house you have glass windows. Now the light will shine in and light up whatever's in its path accurately, right, like you, light up whatever's in its path accurately right, like a game created 30 years ago, but it's Minecraft, I mean you know, whatever it makes it prettier?

1:32:42 - Leo Laporte
I think so.

1:32:42 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, microsoft is in the. This is on the console. So the Xbox dashboard, which you know, in many ways might be coming closer to the Xbox app on Windows and vice versa, right, but in the Xboxbox insider program they're testing this kind of a new game hubs interface that basically gives you everything about that game, including, like all of the download, you know, the dlc and whatever you can get for it and help with the game, etc. Etc. So I whatever okay, like I don't know, they just do this is someday we'll figure out xbox. I guess is the is the plan. Someday we'll figure out Xbox. I guess is the plan. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which is the game they released back in December, is coming to the PS5, which we already knew, but now we know it's coming on April 17th. I think that's all the news. I'm trying to think if there's anything else to this. No, I think that's it.

1:33:34 - Leo Laporte
No, it's perfect timing, sorry Okay.

1:33:40 - Richard Campbell
Very nicely done Paul.

1:33:42 - Paul Thurrott
And then I didn't write this up. But I'm kind of interested in this because the latest Assassin's Creed game, which is called Assassin's Creed Shadows, takes place in Japan. Looks awesome, right. It has been delayed a couple of times. Finally came out last past week, a little less than a week ago, apparently had over two million players in the first two days. So it's doing better than every assassin's creed game, except for, uh, the one that came out during the pandemic, which is valhalla. Right, that one had was the perfect storm of, you know, timing and all that stuff. But, um, it's doing better than basically every other uh game in the series.

1:34:18 - Leo Laporte
So so it's massively multiplayer. It's not yeah, it's different, like yeah they, it's not a single player yeah, they've.

1:34:25 - Paul Thurrott
They've tried to get this.

1:34:26 - Leo Laporte
You know they, they, they waited to get it right, right, so it's kind of cool it's a different approach and you have all of the different uh time, time, yeah, it looks good to me.

1:34:38 - Paul Thurrott
I wanted to. I I thought I was gonna. I have, you know, game pass. I'm like, obviously I'm just gonna install this in game pass. Uh, game pass is the one place. It is not. Um, you know, you can get it on pc through, uh, steam epic game store and, I believe, through xbox, microsoft. Obviously you can get it on the consoles. I don't think it's on ps5. No, it is on ps5. I'm sorry it is on ps5. Um, yeah, but it's that's going kind of blockbuster. It's good like I'm glad to, or it's not blockbuster, it's doing great like it's. I think it's in a solid place. Like there were fears that this thing might have been delayed a couple times too many and maybe we were done and actually it seems like it's doing good. So I'm kind of happy for that. I'd like to play this game I.

1:35:19 - Leo Laporte
I showed a video I may have been mistaken about. I don't know if that video was the new one or a montage of old ones yeah, yeah, it was the top 10.

1:35:29 - Paul Thurrott
I was gonna say the scene you showed was like a roman thing and I was like yeah, no, so the new one is all japan, right yeah, but it's all like it's um.

It's much more going on with it, like most of the previous games were really kind of consistent. So the odyssey, the one that I think was the one that took place in um, or was that origins? I'm losing track of which one's which, but the, the egypt one, you know the egypt right. So this one, though, it's like all kinds of different um terrain and weather. There's snow and rain, there's like swamps and mountains, and like it's it. They're really trying to make it a big.

1:35:59 - Leo Laporte
All right, here we go. It looks, really, it looks, I have. I have real video. Now, if I can pull it up, I have real video. This is, this is the new game. Uh, oh, they're showing. This is comparing. You know what? Something's wrong with this stream, because it's all yeah, it's all blocky and but this is right.

1:36:16 - Paul Thurrott
But it has all the familiar elements climbing buildings and swinging from building to building and assassinating people. In this one they go through one of those paper walls and stab the guy. Yeah, it looks cool.

1:36:28 - Richard Campbell
It's also Ubisoft's last chance. They've had some serious failures in a row. This is it for them.

1:36:35 - Paul Thurrott
I honestly think this is them proving they can still do it for some sale to someone. Hey, microsoft. Um, I don't know if it's too soon, but, uh, maybe you could buy ubisoft probably bought everything else.

1:36:49 - Leo Laporte
I don't think they need any more god.

1:36:51 - Richard Campbell
It was so hard for them to get blizzard that it seems risky to do any anymore at all yeah, there is a big fuss about the game because the male character is black in feudal japan, although that was based on a historical character, except for that part where the historical character wasn't a samurai, you know like there was a thing where the premiere or whatever the whoever leads Japan now not came to this company.

1:37:19 - Paul Thurrott
So you're going to make some changes to this, because I guess you could go into a temple and destroy anything and they were like there's, you can't let people destroy everything, and so I guess, like half the stuff in there you can destroy and half you cannot.

1:37:30 - Richard Campbell
But yeah, well, they're. Yeah, what it was was, one of the characters went in and, uh, one of the players went and killed all the priests in a temple and uh, then there was a big fuss about you, this is bad. And so it's like, okay, well, we won't let you kill the priests and temples at least. It's just a weird asymmetrical cultural thing.

1:37:49 - Paul Thurrott
It's, it's, it's like, it's fine, like I mean to me this is fine, like you want to be um correct, you know what they call it with that country that's fine but he, but you know skull and bones like far cry six.

1:38:02 - Richard Campbell
They've had a lot of fails, it's they're running out of money the last several far cries are like yeah, like whatever. This is a game, well, and the problem was far cry 4 was so incredibly good like it was going to be tough to make it anyway yeah, but six was bad bad, yeah, yeah I think it was five.

1:38:24 - Paul Thurrott
I tried it was the one I almost played all the way through on stadia. It was like a combination of terrible game and terrible you know whatever stadia trying to do a stadia.

1:38:36 - Leo Laporte
Oh man, I still. I think I still have my asterisk, or whatever. What was the amazon one asterisk subscription?

1:38:42 - Paul Thurrott
oh, amazon's still around the luna, luna, that's it. Yeah, no, that's still kicking her. In fact. Uh, luna is one of the places you can get assassin's creed the new one? Yeah, it's on, it's, that's one of the stories you can get it in. Um, if you're that stupid, uh, but I don't recommend that but that's fine, but but wait a minute.

1:38:59 - Leo Laporte
The eu said streaming gaming was the next big thing. That's right.

1:39:03 - Paul Thurrott
I feel like when we discussed this, that, uh, it was very clear this was not gonna be the next you debunked it.

1:39:08 - Leo Laporte
I believe all right back of the book is just around the corner. We're gonna get your tips, your picks, your app of the weekend. Yes, a little bit of brown like uh, just for you from. Uh looks like this is dutch. Belgium, belgium. Oh yeah, it's flemish. We'll get to the back of the book.

1:39:30 - Paul Thurrott
I gotta create my screen.

1:39:31 - Leo Laporte
Just, yeah, just mess that up. Uh, in just a bit. But first, uh, if you enjoy the hijinks and I know you do here on windows weekly and the other shows we do, I want to invite you to join the club. I'm talking about club twit. Seven bucks a month you get ad free versions of all the shows. You wouldn't even get this pitch. Uh. You get, of course, access to the Twit Discord, which is a heck of a hang, a lot of fun.

It's where people go to talk about the shows and watch the shows during the shows, but it's also a place you can go at any time of the day or night to find some nice, geeky people. I'm in the Bracket City section that we just created. Chocolate Milk Mini Sip said we had to have that. We have a Wordle, we have let's Play. We have a couple of Minecraft servers in let's Play. So there is more than just the shows. We also have special events coming up. Friday it's the AI Users Group. Anthony Nielsen does this. Anthony, I may be a little bit late for that, but I missed it last time. I don't want to miss it. This is where people like Darren and Anthony and all of our regular club members come in and talk about how they're using AI, ai tips, prompts, that kind of thing. That's coming up Friday the AI user group club only. We also have the photo time with Chris Marquardt on April 3rd that's a week from tomorrow.

Home Theater Geeks recording Micah's crafting corner. Micah has um moved on from the miniature kitchen creation. He's now going to do uh lego, uh plants. So if you bring your lego or your knitting or your painting or whatever it is, you're coding and enjoying a kind of cozy little hang with micah. That's april 16th coming up. We're doing another coffee segment with the coffee geek mark. Prince liz happy beans will be joining us. She's no, no, no, she's an expert. So, uh, you know on beans, so we'll talk about uh that. Anyway, this is an example of why you might want to join club twitter. I mean, all that for seven bucks. That's pretty, pretty good deal. If you're interested, find out more, go to twittv club, to it, uh, and sign up today. We it also. Most importantly, uh makes it possible for us to keep doing the shows we do to keep the people employed. Keep the lights on. It really helps us out in the long run.

So please, twittv slash club twit and join the fun paul back of the book time app or tip. I guess we'll start with a tip. A couple of tips.

1:42:10 - Paul Thurrott
Uh, pc game pass and game pass ultimate both have among their kind of list of perks something, something called in-game benefits. It's like games with benefits. It started as paid games only and then they added some free games, like free to play games that have in-game benefits, and now they've added a bunch more and it looks like this was. I had a hard time finding out what this even meant, right, because this is like one of those kind of esoteric word features you don't really see that much, and it turns out that that was not me. That's. It's hard. They really don't document this very well. So now they're updating the Xbox UI in the app and then on the console so that you can better find these perks and find out what they are. So this is list of perks. They've added a bunch of new games that have perks. So when you're a member of one of these subscriptions, you get these additional features. So it could be things like levels or outfits that a character might wear, or weapons or whatever it might be like things you would normally have to earn in the game. You know, as you play you can get just for being a subscriber. It's like cheating, it's fun, and then Amazon is having a spring sale right now, so we have our little page about that, but every you know it's probably a bunch of this stuff and definitely worth looking at. So if you were holding off on whatever device purchase, especially in electronics, um, bunch of that stuff's on sale. Nice, yeah, all right. So in the app space, two things. Google drive for windows is now out, generally available on Windows. On ARM it was spent in beta since, I think, november. I've never had any problems with it. I use it every single day. It's been great, but now it's generally available. So if you are on like a Gmail, like a personal Google account or Google workspace, it's everywhere. So that's happening, that's good. And then, um, I and I wish I don't have it in front of me, but I keep mentioning this cursor AI editor, and this is the thing I said earlier. But we're going to come back to this. I'm not going to go on and on because I want to make sure Richard has time here, but, um, this tool is actually kind of amazing. So there's a lot of like programmer pair, ai type things, right, like GitHub, copilot, which is great. You could just have a window, you know, with Anthropic or ChatGPT also fine. Sometimes, though, that's a little bit of a work, right, and so I know, like on the Mac, which I've not tried they're integrating ChatGPT with programming tools like Xcode, right, so that you run these things side by side and they interact and they understand each other. With Cursor, what you can do is open the folder that contains your project and, depending on the language and the framework or whatever you're using, you might be using Visual Studio code anyway, and that's what this is based on. So that works normally. It's great I use. The thing I'm working on right now is just full Visual Studio, but I can still open the project in this editor. Then I can just say, hey, I would like this to be more efficient, I would like to improve the code quality, I want to reduce the redundancies that are in here because I know I'm reusing code in too many places, etc.

Just before the show, I did this with my you know the app I'm working on and it gave me this enormous, excellent to-do list, which is the second time I've done this. Um, I before I did it. Well, I tried to do it for a specific part of the app. I ended up doing it for the whole version of the whole app, but this. That was not the latest version of my app, and so since then I've incorporated a lot of the changes that suggested before, and now I have this thing that it spit out and it is astonishing. It is so good. Um, I'm gonna see if I can use it for free. You can use it for free. I mean you can use it. You know it has a free tier. A lot of people are raving about this.

I am I'm already kind of blown away by the ai coding stuff like it's been really good, um, but the ability to the question I asked in the beginning was I explained. I said this is what this thing does. It's c-sharp, it's wpf. This is what it's trying to do it's not common lisp. I'm sad to say sorry, it's at this point, it's almost as old um.

Yeah really, it really is. But what I said, I want it to be more efficient, I want the code quality. I had this list of things I wanted and it said okay. And it said okay, it looks like, and it would literally spit stuff out. It says it looks like you're doing tab management in this file tab. So I see which I am. It looks like you're doing this here, blah, blah.

And it was like and it took I want to be generous here Three seconds, five seconds. It took longer to spit out the text than it did to generate it. Like it was, um, it's amazing. So I haven't gone through all of it yet, but I can't. You know, you have to right, you have to let. I'm like, oh, my God, yeah, I'm like, I don't know, I people, I, you know, I keep kind of repeating myself, especially on the code side of it. But, um, if you're not using this, it's not maybe not this tool specifically, but ai to assist you in coding you're doing something wrong at this point, like you're, you're punching yourself in the face, unemployable at this point.

1:47:11 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, because you really need to figure this out.

1:47:13 - Leo Laporte
wow, that's kind of amazing, you gotta figure this out. Yeah, wow, that's kind of amazing, you've got to figure this out.

1:47:17 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, wow, wow. It's really good and they're just not that hard to get into right, like they're everywhere and you can. So wherever you're currently working, you can use them and the productivity boost is 30%, like it's not a little.

1:47:32 - Paul Thurrott
I have a friend who's a developer in the financial services space. Obviously there are big concerns there around regulatory requirements and customer data privacy etc. But they are using GitHub Copilot and they have specific I don't know if they're. I'm not sure how he just described it to me, but he had the same thing. He's a very cynical person. He kind of went into this like ah, yeah, whatever, and then he started using. He was like oh my God, and he kind of came to me and said I don't know if you've heard of this. I'm like, dude, are you kidding me? Like I was like he's like one time he came, hold it, just stop right there. Do you have nothing you can tell me about microsoft? Um, no, but he was, you know, but he is a professional developer, that's what this is career. And he was like I can't, I can't believe it and development is different now, yeah, and it's all.

It's also one of those kind of things like I could have been doing this six months or a year ago, like I now. I wish I had known about this earlier. You know, it's really good.

1:48:35 - Richard Campbell
Well, it wasn't as good six months ago. It's really good. Now I'm gonna have to try it.

1:48:40 - Leo Laporte
It's a. It's a movie I highly recommend that cursor especially.

1:48:43 - Paul Thurrott
But yeah, all this stuff is great.

1:48:45 - Leo Laporte
Unfortunately, it doesn't support lisp either but uh yeah um well I don't know, it's ironic because lisp was the first ai language. You can change the model you use on the back end. I mean, I, I do. They use tree sitter, do you know?

1:48:56 - Paul Thurrott
It's ironic because Lisp was the first AI language. You can change the model you use on the back end, I mean I Does it use TreeSitter?

1:49:00 - Leo Laporte
Do you know what it's using as the?

1:49:02 - Paul Thurrott
First of all, you're not even speaking English anymore. Okay, I think, no, I think it's Anthropic on the back end by default.

1:49:10 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Anthropic knows Common Lisp very well.

1:49:18 - Paul Thurrott
I can actually ask anthropic. Uh, sonnet does a great job coding, but definitely just take a look especially. I will look at it. Yeah, I think a lot of developers, especially in the web space, are really familiar with visual studio code. So it's a you, you kind of go to it's vsc it is in fact darren's saying.

1:49:27 - Leo Laporte
It's basically not much difference between yeah, using copilot in vs code.

1:49:33 - Paul Thurrott
Well, except for me. Like I said, I I'm sure there are things that kind of do this, but the examining of an entire in my case C sharp visual studio 2022, whatever solution going through every single file and then saying you should split this into this. This needs to be over here Like it's. It's giving very specific instructions across the project.

1:49:56 - Leo Laporte
Awesome. I love it that it gives you a to-do list Like here's some things you need to work on. That's amazing.

1:50:03 - Paul Thurrott
I was going to do this method by method. I'm like here's the out-of-tab method how would you make this better? But because it can handle the whole thing, to me that's like next level.

1:50:18 - Leo Laporte
So you can give it your code base and say what can you say what should I work on next.

1:50:21 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it gives you a priority list that's exactly right that's why earlier I was like this is what I'm going to talk about in the app thing, because, but for coding it's exactly that.

1:50:30 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, it's really nice yeah, I've been asking the Microsoft folks what they're using, and Cloud 3.7 is their preferred, it seems. And then I ask them why, and I almost don't know that. They know it may just be a cliquey thing.

1:50:47 - Paul Thurrott
This is when someone says you know you really should use Bing or DuckDuckGo and you're like OK, and then you go use it and you're like within two queries you're like nope, it's like what's wrong. I'm like, you're like I just know the answer and I think that's what the anthropic cloud is like, like you use that. Then you go back to whatever copilot, chat, gbt, just, I'm just code specific here, uh, and it's like nope, no, that one, that it's that one. You know, and maybe that changes over time, but I think right now that is the case. Yeah, uh, you said three, seven. Yeah, is and is that the latest version? Cause there was a point where the previous version was the best one or something, but it, you know it shifts.

1:51:27 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, but again it's like how do you quantify this? So Like, how do you measure the quality of an LLM?

1:51:35 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, right, how do you measure your productivity, like? How do you?

1:51:40 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, what's the difference there? And you know, all right, because the thing with going to 3.7 is it's the most expensive one too. So there's a lot of self. You know. Validation here it's like latest number, highest cost must be better.

1:51:53 - Paul Thurrott
It must be better. Yeah, exactly. Well, when you're starting to take Friday afternoons off every week, maybe that's how you can do it, so I can chat with my code base, exactly right.

1:52:07 - Leo Laporte
So I can say like, what should I start? What should I work on?

1:52:10 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, what should I work on? Well, like, yeah, I mean, in my case, I've explained what it is.

1:52:16 - Leo Laporte
for some reason, I probably don't have to do this right, um, oh my god, see how fast it does this, yeah and my thing is fairly humongous you know, since I gave it the day one of advent of code, it said well, since you've completed day one, the next logical step would be day two. Okay, thanks, siri, a lot of help okay uh, that's good that's right, I could add more test cases, optimize the code further. God siri's talking to me. What's happening?

1:52:42 - Paul Thurrott
oh no, I don't even know what's coming um. Let me see opt.

1:52:45 - Leo Laporte
Can I help me optimize the code base so it does understand uh, lisp, yeah, no, I'm positive. Why wouldn't? Because it's using I didn't realize it was using Anthropix. So there you go, yep. Oh yeah, look at this, look at this, holy moly, yep. So I was always thinking it was just kind of like IntelliSense, but it's more than just auto-complete.

1:53:06 - Paul Thurrott
The most basic functionality that you get from GitHub Core Pilot is basically IntelliSense. It's like code completion or code correction or whatever you want to call that Intellisense, I guess. But you can do this I mean, I do in Visual Studio, chat to GitHub Copa and say blah, blah, blah, whatever, but this thing is doing this entire project view, which to me is kind of a mind boggling. That's what I'm saying. It's crazy, right.

1:53:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

1:53:38 - Paul Thurrott
Help me out. So next week we'll come back and you will look. A lot of this will be like oh my god, it's amazing. And maybe you'll find a couple things really like yeah, not really, but I'm curious like if, once you start using this because I feel like it's hard to walk away from this- this would be a great learning tool too, because, of course, I solved this day one, uh, probably pretty naively.

1:53:55 - Leo Laporte
This is one of the ones I put on. I streamed live, so I'm sure it was very nice. And then it says oh well, there's some things you can do. You're doing a lot of. We can make the parsing more efficient, and so forth. And so it makes some suggestions, and this would be a great way to learn Right To how to write better code.

1:54:11 - Paul Thurrott
No, literally that was my point was I have, like, whatever the method was, I do two loop checks on whatever it is, and I'm like there's got to be a way to do this more efficiently, and in that case I don't remember which one it was anymore, but whatever AI, sure enough, you know half the amount of code. One loop, beautiful, you know? Yeah, first of all, problems.

1:54:33 - Leo Laporte
Wow, it's interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this would. This would be a great tool for becoming a better coder. I I still make very nervous about having a right code, especially if you don't code right, right, right it's great for learning.

1:54:47 - Paul Thurrott
That's the other thing. So ai is great at explaining right, right, and actually I don't know at the bottom of this, but when I just did it earlier, it said these are specific places we could follow up on. If you want more detail, right, you know very.

1:55:02 - Leo Laporte
Yes, it said that I had more optimizations. There are still some possibilities. Um, wow, I you know I don't code, uh, for anything but fun, so this wouldn't make it more fun for me, but maybe for a learning I don't know.

1:55:18 - Paul Thurrott
It depends on what you're trying to do, right. I mean, I'm like this, uh, the code challenge that you're doing, and so you, you want to solve it right. You want to just get the answer. But you might be interested enough in this to say, okay, so I did like, I think you just did this, basically like I did do this right and it's well, here's a more efficient. And you're like, oh, that's really interesting. And then you learn this technique that maybe you can apply later it's also good for getting you out of thrashing.

1:55:43 - Richard Campbell
If you're stuck on a problem like I, just can't get these parameters right or anything like that. Absolutely.

1:55:47 - Paul Thurrott
It's great at that.

1:55:51 - Richard Campbell
This is a daily occurrence for me, I so I'm always like, well, you know, so it's, it's wonderful getting over the hump, you know, for me Well, let's get over the hump and get to the run is radio show for the week Brought back one of the legends, jeff Hicks, who's one of the original PowerPoint folks, you know, but best educator in the space, well known, and he had a new book out, so I was happy to have him on and talk a bit about behind the powershell pipeline, and jeff really pushed on these. I the ideas around making more maintainable powershell, like it's not enough to just make it work. Can you actually uh be able to understand what you did when you go back to it in three months? And uh, so some commenting, parameter controls, maybe even a bit of testing, just making higher quality PowerShell. And of course, we had to talk about Copilot, because Copilot help will help you write PowerShell too. So we have a good conversation and his book is, of course, excellent. It's the best insight you'll get on how PowerShell works.

What was the name of the book? The Behind the PowerShell Pipeline. Thank you, sir.

1:56:58 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, if I were a big Windows user, I would absolutely learn PowerShell. I mean, it's amazing, it's a superpower, yeah.

1:57:04 - Richard Campbell
It is a superpower, literally. One of the angles we went at was writing your scripts in a way where they pass sets so that you could pipe it from one to another script, so that you build up this repertoire of scripts that do core things. You need to pull data sets together that you can then do actions on, so it's just a way of thinking about building more sustainable power show what is our brown liquor for this week?

so this is kempish veer, which was brought to my friend hanus by by my friend Hannes to my home, so I don't have it with me, I didn't bring it across the border, and it is a Belgian peated whiskey, which is weird. They make great beer, they do. And in fact the guy behind this whiskey is a beer maker. His name is Guy Pirot, and he started making beer in the 80s in his mother's kitchen. Good enough that people are like you need to bottle this and sell it. So he finally opened a brewery in 1998. It's not that easy to open a brewery in Belgium, believe it or not and upgraded all their facilities in 2010. And while he was at it, he bought a still and started experimenting with whiskey as well. This is in Zandhoven, which is outside of Antwerp, so the sad part is that he keeps reusing the name.

Kempisch Bier means the fire of Kempin. The area that he's in is called Kempin and it actually has peat bogs in it too, which is interesting for going for peaty flavors. And so there are beers called Kempisch Bier, but they make one whiskey, and this is the one. It's only a 500 ml bottle, but he does use a bit of peat in the malt, uh, although he buys that malt already ground. But he has managed to make a deal with lefroy and he ages for five years in lefroy cast. So it's peed on peat, so lots of color, not a real high pPM. This is like a 35, 40, which is not bad, like that's a peaty flavor, but the taste is really excellent. 46% and only available in Belgium. So it's only because my friend brought it over, so that's why the website is in Belgium. Like they just have no effort at all to export this product so far. So sorry to even show it off to you, but it was a unique, very interesting whiskey that you can only get if you go to antwerp and buy some.

1:59:20 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's an excuse to go to antwerp. The only thing worries me is also the diamond capital of the world, and that means I better not bring lisa yeah it's a nice bottle yeah, yeah, an interesting product.

1:59:33 - Richard Campbell
And it's just they make one whiskey. They make a bunch of different kinds of beer and apparently all accident award winning they make one kind of whiskey, this one.

1:59:40 - Leo Laporte
Once a beer, and there's quite a bit of it. Yeah, yeah.

1:59:45 - Richard Campbell
The triple was the first award winner I love triples.

1:59:48 - Leo Laporte
I love triples oh.

1:59:50 - Richard Campbell
So good, they're Belgian beers, but yeah, looks good.

1:59:56 - Leo Laporte
Has this whiskey as well. So I mean, beer is not distilled, so it is a very different process.

1:59:59 - Richard Campbell
Well, it is, but whiskey before it's distilled is a beer. Uh-huh, like you, make a wort first you ferment it. Yeah, yeah. And then if you finish it with hops and age it, you're making beer, and if you fire it through a couple of stills, you're making whiskey.

2:00:15 - Leo Laporte
All right, so it's just a different final step in a way.

2:00:17 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, same frame brewery, same wash process. Really very similar, right Interesting, you get the same base product. That's why we always have that line is whiskey is what beer wants to be when it grows up?

2:00:30 - Leo Laporte
All right, Richard. You survived the challenges of Redmond. This was quite a day.

2:00:36 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, I think it's all going to come down to this machine. Microsoft decided it was going to be updated, whether I want it to be or not, which is why the fans are cranking on it.

2:00:45 - Paul Thurrott
The good news is we got a solid 37 minutes to show out of three hours. So that was.

2:00:52 - Leo Laporte
Oh boy. And a couple of costume changes.

2:00:56 - Richard Campbell
But next week I'll be in vegas, so I'll be set up in one of the skylofts and we'll, we'll do it from.

2:01:02 - Leo Laporte
Oh good, you'll be able to use y max and everything will be fine yeah, and I'll have my, but I'll have my starling, I'll just run my own rig, right, so you know, we should just get everybody's starlink. Uh, I mean, that'll be the next step, everyone gets started.

2:01:14 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah, don't get it for me here in mexico, I don't know they might not make it.

2:01:18 - Leo Laporte
Oh, richard campbell's at run as radiocom. That's where you'll find the great power shells uh episode, but also hundreds of others. Uh, he also does a great show, dot net rocks with Carl Franklin, both at runnersradiocom. He's on the road. Folks, where in the world is Richard Campbell?

2:01:42 - Paul Thurrott
He's on the prowl, lock your doors.

2:01:45 - Leo Laporte
Beware, beware.

2:01:48 - Richard Campbell
We're going to do three weeks in Australia and New Zealand, so that'll be fun. Wow, and I'm just putting the finishing touches on a couple of weeks in South Africa too. Fun yeah.

2:01:59 - Leo Laporte
We'll have a great time. We'll see you next week in Lost Wages. Yes, mr Paul Thurott coming to us from CDMX. He is, of course, at Thurottcom all over the world. T-h-u-r-r-o-t-t. If you are not yet a member, become a premium member. Ott. If you are not yet a member, become a premium member. There's a lot of great stuff there. You can also buy his books, the Field Guide to Windows 11 and Windows Everywhere. Those are at leanpubcom.

We do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us live on eight different streams. Club members are watching in the Discord can watch us live on eight different streams. Club members are watching in the discord, uh. But you could also watch on youtube, twitch, xcom, tiktok, facebook, linkedin and kick. Eight different ways to watch, but you don't have to watch live.

I guess that's the point, because we make a podcast out of it and that's what kevin's gonna be doing for the next five weeks on this episode. He's gonna be busy, uh, cleaning this sucker up, but then you get the. You get the full. You know, the perfect version, not the uh imperfect week. Yeah, he's gonna be working hard. It's gonna be pretty. There were a few technical issues for those who are watching the edited version. Really I didn't know that. Uh, those are available at the website twittv slash www. There's a YouTube channel with the finished edited videos. Great way to share a clip or a thought or an idea with a friend and help spread the word about Windows Weekly. And, of course, you can subscribe in your favorite podcast player and get it automatically the minute Kevin is done polishing it up.

2:03:32 - Paul Thurrott
It will be time for next week's show. Yeah, maybe just in time.

2:03:38 - Leo Laporte
Thank up, it will be time for next week's show. Yeah, maybe just in time. Thank you everybody. We will see you next week, you winners and you dozers, for another gripping edition of windows weekly bye.