Windows Weekly 930 Transcript

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

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Therat is in Mexico City. Richard Campbell is in Melbourne, australia, yet we gather together in the amazing miracle of modern technology to do a Windows Weekly show. We're going to talk about just the crazy answer from Microsoft about insider preview channels. Apparently they're not supposed to be in any particular order anymore. Microsoft says it's going to defend EU companies against the US government. Late earnings come in and we'll talk about those, plus a brand-new game for Xbox, towerborn. All that and more coming up next. That's a great whiskey on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love, from people you trust. This is twit.

00:54
This is windows weekly with paul thorat and richard campbell, episode 930, recorded wednesday, april 30th 2025. Flocculation and saponification. It's time for windows weekly, the show we cover the latest news from microsoft. Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce my compatriots on this show. Actually, they're the actual hosts. Uh, mr paul thurot, thurotcom. Hello, paulie. He's in mexico city and all the way from melbourne, melbourne, melbourne. It's richard campbell of run as radio and it's 3 am richard. My deepest apologies, it's getting early it's getting worse.

01:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Set up.

01:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's 4 am now, so we're making progress will, uh, will new zealand be better or worse?

01:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
better okay, better in every way leo every, what no uh I had a really great whiskey adventure this week you guys are going to hear all about, which would be tough to duplicate almost anywhere else, so mel's been very good to me this was uh, this had to have been still pdc and we were talking to this group of guys.

02:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Might have been the same pdc where we jumped behind on the pillows behind Tom Warren a million years ago.

02:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, as you do, the world famous.

02:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Talking to this group of guys. They're from Australia, new Zealand, whatever, and we're just as guys do, just ripping on each other and some guy goes. He's like, admit it, you can't tell our accents apart. And I was apart and I was like new zealand, new zealand, australia, new zealand.

02:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They were like holy you totally can I guess I just I just guessed, I, but she, but she guessed with certainty, and that's what it takes yeah, like any middle-aged white guy, just uh, I know okay, it was a good one.

02:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Shall we play a game. Yeah, shall we talk about Windows. You have an interesting point you made in the notes today, if you say so.

02:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I guess we'll find out. I don't know. So we've been talking a lot about Dave Plummer lately and that's not by design, I just you know he had come up with that longhorn video thing and I was like I love this guy. He didn't really add anything here, but he just did a video fairly recently, um, talking about windows 11, interestingly. So of course you know I perk up to this and you know what his argument basically comes down to is that in switching over to free operating system upgrades which was a technically, Windows 10 was the first big one, but it really in the wake of Windows 8 and wanting to get everyone updated there, obviously, and get past that, apple had made Mac OS upgrades free. At that point, mobile OS upgrades are free. They're like all right, we have to do this because no one's upgrading right and Windows had a well-deserved reputation for those upgrades being unreliable and, you know, problematic. Mainstream users would never upgrade. You know Windows. So all right, we're going to try to get everyone on the same version. Windows is a service. Yada, yada, yada.

04:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, since admins were big on, we wait for service pack one, right, yeah, exactly.

04:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Exactly, and you know they've been changing the rules ever since, I mean on upgrades and how that stuff works, and the upgrades are still free. I don't mean that. But you know, for businesses, depending on the type of arrangement license you have, whatever, you know you can skip versions and things like that. You know you can skip versions and things like that. They they get kind of mealy mouth about what things are called. It's like windows 10 actually probably had nine product versions in the course of its life or something, which are all were major revs of windows or version upgrades, whatever. But you know he, he gets to a point where it's well, you know, we've all heard the adage if you, if you don't pay for the product, then you are are the product. And I was like huh, because it's really easy to fall into that argument. Right, it sounds right, it sounds right.

04:53
And this caused me to go back and look at some stuff, because you know, one of those things that I've kind of done a lot over the years is get outraged over things that I believe to be important and then try to step back from the ones that are either completely made up or maybe just exaggerate and say guys, you know there are more serious problems in the world than whatever that you know, whatever the faux outrage thing you've got going on right now is so, for example, the key complaint against Windows 11 in this area is the forced telemetry which you know on the surface of things is. You know, I could see, I understand it Like I understand, I would like Windows to have the switch and it could be hoops you have to jump through. It doesn't have to be obvious, or you could just say no, I'm not doing this.

05:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I guess the question is the kind of telemetry Like application crashes, misconfigurations and so forth. That telemetry I'm less concerned about than my own personal digital 100%.

05:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And that's the thing I went back and looked up, because Microsoft, as it turns out, has a privacy policy and it very explicitly states what they are sending back to Microsoft about your computer. It's anonymous, it's all about reliability issues and what they're trying to do is find patterns so that maybe you have a problem because you have some weird configuration, but if they see that same problem across millions of computers, that elevates it up to the top of the stack. We've got to fix that thing quick because it's clearly a problem. Know, yeah, so my personal stance on this is what you just said. In fact, I wrote this when windows this would have been windows 10, not 11 when this first came out was look, I my, if I had the option to turn off all telemetry, I wouldn't, I'd just leave it alone. I I want to contribute in that small way to the overall reliability of Windows.

06:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think most people probably do All I'm saying and most consumers because most sysadmins block all the machines that are traveling across the firewall.

06:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, and, by the way, that issue just came up fairly recently, because that's a problem, right. You've got these corporate standard configurations being rolled out to hundreds of thousands of people.

07:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They could be having an endemic problem, yeah because they tend to use different hardware than the average consumer too. So you can have whole classes of machine that are all behind the firewall, that are just not being reported.

07:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No telemetry, so that's yeah. By the way, that is an issue, but that's kind of the issue. At the other end of the spectrum, I guess, but look, there is advertising in Windows. Other end of the spectrum, I guess, but look, there is advertising in Windows. I coined that slippery slope phrase with Windows 8 where I said, yeah, the ads are in apps. They're in modern apps only they're way at the end of the app. Remember they used to have these giant panoramic experiences. There weren't ads up front. But I was like, slippery slope, you don't put ads in Windows to put in less ads. In the next version of Windows you going to put more ads in and those ads are going to come front and center. They're going to come out of the apps. And that's exactly what happened, right, yeah?

07:50
without a doubt, and again it's again the thing the system means get is they get bare metal enterprise versions of windows, uh 11 or windows that don't have a lot of that stuff yep, yeah, I mean, um, this is a weird coincidence, but right before the as the show was started, before the show started, before we started recording, but we were here and we were trying to figure out video, audio, stuff, um, I was doing whatever I was doing in notion and I noticed in the sidebar of notion and it's gone now. But there was a little graphical pop-up for notion mail.

08:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A little ad got it too yep, I've got a full screen pop-up that blocked everything until I dismiss so you do anything important to you.

08:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Let me tell you about me.

08:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let me sell you something this is right, so it's still there now on the right now depending on, depending on your personality, depending on all kinds of things. I don't know. Um leo, for example, I know, said he pays for notion. So if I was 200 bucks a yearion, so if I was paying 200 bucks a year, buddy, yeah, so if I was paying for Notion, that would bother me a lot. Right, I don't pay for Notion.

08:51
I've made the case that I don't understand why I'm not paying for Notion. But there are these products that exist and they'll change. I get this, the world changes and things whatever. But for now, now, notion is on that very short list of products I do not pay for, that are not insuredified. That give me way more. This is like when in here in mexico city especially, but anywhere in the world really you'll go to like a little um dive bar looking thing and they have the best food in the world. Yeah, and and I always make this the same comment, which is this is better than it needs to be. You know, people who come in here and drink cocktails or beers or whatever would be okay with lesser quality.

09:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It doesn't have to be the best in the world.

09:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It doesn't have to be a Michelin class, but it often is like it's kind of strange. And if you apply that thinking to like a software services, whatever, the list is very short. Notion is on that list. List is very short. Notion is on that list. Substack is to me and I know there are other issues with Substack but Substack is this publishing platform that you don't pay a cent for and if you don't make any money, they don't make any money, whatever life goes on. But if you make money, yeah, they make some money. They're hosting your stuff. They don't charge you for anything and to me that's very, very good, know and anyway.

10:15
But the point is are you the product right? Like we all know, we use google maps, they're tracking us. We use google search, they're tracking us. Like we use google chrome, they're tracking us. People seem to be okay with that, most people, because most people use those things. So okay, but we understand it, or we sort of understand it. I don't think we understand it well enough. But this notion of like you are the product right? It's such a pithy, short little phrase. It's perfect. I don't think you are the product in Windows. I got to be honest. I don't think you are the product in Windows. I got to be honest. Notion has a right is a strong term, but a right in a way to advertise to us right? We have these other things we think you might like, and it would help us.

10:52
Obviously, microsoft does some of that in Windows with things like Microsoft 365. If you don't already subscribe, they'll pop up stuff during setup and elsewhere, onedrive. They want to force that usage to use the cloud and then have to pay for an upgrade or whatever you know. Edge is maybe the grossest one. Um, where they they? They push you to edge Even when you very explicitly say, yeah, I actually want to use this other browser, but I don't know. I don't feel like windows is fully on the dark side yet. You know, I don't know, and know, and and and. The big argument there, though, is the telemurity one, and richard hit it right up front because he's correct. It's, uh, it's anonymous reliability related data. I we should all want to send that to microsoft. If we we use this product, we should want it to be as good as it can be. It's not about them seeing what underwear I'm buying or what you know we should all want to send that to Microsoft, shouldn't we?

11:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everybody? No, I mean come on, shouldn't we?

11:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, no, it just is. Don't you want the community you're part of to be as good as it can?

11:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
be as long as you trust Microsoft to do what they say they're doing in their privacy policy.

11:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's really where it falls. If you literally think that they're lying, that they have put up this, what I would call a legally binding document that could be used against them in court if you can prove otherwise. Um, if you literally think this company is that evil that they lie, outright lie, you should not be using windows at all, like at all. So I mean, and that's a decision you can make, some people do make that right, that's and that's fine. I? I think it's a little extreme, I don't. Microsoft has all kinds of problems. Um, I don't think there's any.

12:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've never seen evidence of that, you know, I've seen all kinds of crap, but I think they're no worse and this is the thing I think apple gets a free pass on. Uh, because they their marketing is we're the privacy company, but I think all the companies are basically the same oh, you know, what's actually worse is when you promote yourself like Apple does and you say things like hey by the way, when you know Facebook starts up or Google starts up, you get a little dialogue and says, hey, they want to track you.

12:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Do you want to stop that? And you're like, yes, I do. You know where. You don't get that little dialogue and any Apple app Right. So Apple is tracking you. Apple is following you around the app store. Apple is showing you ads in the app store. Apple is actually doing almost everything that these companies we all hate so much do, but they have really good marketing. It doesn't mean they're not doing some things right. I respect a lot of the stuff they do. Actually.

13:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean this private compute cloud thing they're talking about sounds good, you know what's the proof that Apple is at least to some degree protecting your privacy.

13:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Their AI sucks. That might be the best proof they don't want it to suck. They'll get there, they will. You know what the real problem with Apple intelligence is? It was the anti-Apple way to approach anything. What Apple usually does is they sit back and they watch and they look and they see what people are doing and what's popular and they're like okay, how can we do this? Can we do this in a unique way? Can we do this in a way that is seamless and awesome and better in something? And then when they get there and it takes years they nail it. They usually nail it not 100, but a lot of so many examples this. This time they're like and they just like like yeah, that's like they gurgitated it out.

14:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They couldn't afford to miss the wave.

14:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, right, yep and why you know. You're looking at it now, a couple of years later. I guess uh, why? Why couldn't they waited? You know, like they should have waited. I don't think anyone bought a new iphone to get apple intelligence.

14:25
If you did you're stupid, you're annoying, you know, sorry, I mean, the next wwdc is just not that far away I can tell you that your old iphone is going to run chat gpt the thing you actually want just as well as your new iphone. So I don't know. Anyway, yeah, apple intelligence is a good example of what is ultimately in certification, in the sense that it's their corporate policy driving the agenda, even though it's not necessarily what people want, their own customers want. In the past you could argue with most things Apple did that it was in support of that thing. You know that when you can align with a company that is selling you a product, service, whatever it is, that's a good relationship, Like it's. You know, and I think most Apple fans especially feel that they have a very healthy and good relationship with Apple and I feel like when things like that happen, they're like huh, they're human. That's weird. But also they can make mistakes and that's kind of unusual.

15:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's one of the very few baubles in confidence we've seen out of Apple in a long time.

15:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Trust is tough because trust takes a long time to build up. I do this all the time because I'm stupid. But go back and watch an old video of Steve Jobs defending himself at one of the first WWDCs after he came back and people are just dumping on him and he's like, yeah, this I'm terrible. But to crawl out of that hole to get to where they are now required many years and then you have one little screw up and it it all goes rewinding back for some people. You know, um, I don't think that's what's going to happen, apple, but anyway, the point of all this is is what it always is really there's a lot of problems out there in the world and we should focus on those um there are more, so if you're, if you're still sitting here fuming over telemetry and windows 11.

16:15
Man, you got to get your priorities straight. This is not a problem, that's okay, thank you. Okay, you know, I don't see it in your notes, so I'm gonna just broach the subject I hope we do this every week, because I this I'm gonna call this segment what leo points out paul's flaws no, it's just that we spent a long time yesterday on security, now talking about the fact that the last windows update put an empty folder in your root directory called inetpub. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

16:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And Microsoft said it's necessary, don't delete it.

16:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I think yeah. So inetpub is the IIS folder.

16:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not there normally, unless you install this component right.

16:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this is something I've not even looked at, but I'm going to do it.

17:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So Microsoft's story on this is something I've not even looked at, but I'm going to do it. So Microsoft's story on this is we need it. It's a security part of a security update. It has to be there.

17:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Does it have to be visible?

17:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's visible.

17:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I don't know if it has to be visible?

17:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a good question. I temporarily hit it and then I said, no, never mind, I'm not going to do that. If you delete it. The only way to bring it back is to reinstall, is to install IIS and then delete it. Then you know install and uninstall IIS. If you look at the permission, so it was installed when I did the update and that's. Microsoft says that's part of the update.

17:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, everyone should be seeing this now. If you have a Windows 11 PC, you will have this folder.

17:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and it is a system folder? Uh, it is. It is owned by the, the system, so you can't just delete it and recreate it yourself. You actually have to create, you have to actually reinstall. Uh, iis, microsoft is complete is not completely clear on why it has to be there, but they say they are clear it has to be there, so I feel like I think it being visible was the mistake.

18:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I agree, I, but maybe it has to be there, so I feel like I think it being visible was the mistake yeah, I agree, I, but maybe it has to be visible.

18:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We don't know why, it's what, no, but this has never happened before.

18:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, this is very strange. Right, this is a very strange problem, so to install iis. Well, let me, I should you have to.

18:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know if you could do it in home. You can do it on pro. You have to go to the additional windows, the windows features.

18:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, I know I know, how you do it. What I'm saying is like I wonder if there is a like internet. If I go into like settings, yeah, you can't, you can't actually find. Well, let me try. I just want to try different things to see where, if it ever comes up anywhere, internet information. Yeah, it doesn't come up in search.

18:37
Um, yeah, so you have to know to do this you have to know to go to windows features which you have to basically search for to find, and then you have to go check the box.

18:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Furthermore, you have to know not to delete it well, that's the trick. So when, as you're saying, so this microsoft didn't say hey, by the way, we're going to create an empty folder in your root directory. Please don't delete it, right? Why would they say that?

18:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
but so well, and why create it until you need it to do?

19:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
actually the update let me me tell you who has no idea this happened my wife, and the reason I mention that is because my wife is that kind of normal mainstream user who doesn't understand file systems or look at file systems. The fact that this has come up at all says a lot about us. Like we're the ones who are like, oh my God, they added a folder to my file system. You're like what, how did you like? What caused you to even notice that?

19:23
Why were you looking there? That is bizarre. You know, in a way, right, and then you find out what. What it's about. And it was part of a security update, like Leo said. And and that leads me to my question, that is still my question it's like okay, why is it visible? Just if you had kept that thing hidden, the 90 something percent chance no one one we wouldn't be talking about this, right like no one would have heard about this right, the 10 would go.

19:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Why they put a hidden folder?

19:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
on. Yes, even worse, isn't it?

19:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
what are they hiding?

19:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
and, by the way, I mean they're already, we already know they're lying about telemetry. I mean, what will they do next?

19:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, it is a little bit, let's face it. It's a kind of kludgy way to do a security update I mean it's you know it is not kind of anything.

20:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's an incredibly clued you in. This is the opposite of. You know, one of the first, maybe the only time I was ever involved in like a major hack was that one where you go to your, you go to this folder, because I used to have this on my computers all the time. I used to do local web development, whatever, and a local copy of my website would have been there, except I moved it because at the time I had two drives and the bigger one was you know where. I wanted that and the attack which left a file there, erased everything in there and left the file, said you've been hacked by the Chinese, and I remember that, yeah, it's a big deal. I didn't impact me because I had moved the folder right and so I mean I'd moved. Is was pointing to a different folder on a different drive, so that folder was there but it was empty and okay, I don't know.

20:52
So this is kind of the opposite. It's like no one is installing IAS, basically, and now everyone has this folder in their computer for some reason. It's like what? And you're like no, don't worry about it, it's a security thing, like um, now I am worrying about it, so maybe you could explain this a little bit better. I've not heard a good explanation for this, nor has microsoft offered one. Well, that I am very familiar with. So, um, we're gonna get to that. We're gonna get to another version of that in a few minutes.

21:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, so I'm sorry I brought that up, I just I thought no no, no, steve covered it. We should probably mention it, just I don't know why we didn't write about it.

21:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, I, sometimes things like this happen and you see it, you're like, okay, what I don't want to do is write three stories about this, yeah, yeah I understand so, in other words, it's like people are seeing a mysterious inet pub folder on their uh file system, like okay, and it's like microsoft, uh comments, is on it. You're like okay, they didn't.

21:42
Now I have to write another story then, oh, they released an update for windows in july this year that gets rid of that folder that we were all freaking out about. Now I have to write a third story you know what I? Mean like I don't want to, I don't want to spend time on it from a writing perspective, but yeah, no, you're right we should.

21:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is something we should be discussing well I just made you mention in the show so that you're done.

22:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're over, it's. It's good. Every week, man, there's something. I'm sorry. No, I listen. I have two hours away from my wife and it's like you've just slotted right in you know, I want you to pay attention to me. My wife just walks in the room. It's like what are you screwing up? I'm like I'm sitting here reading what you know oh, I know the feeling.

22:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh god, anyhow okay. Kevin says kevin king, oh God, anyhow, okay. Kevin says Kevin King says I've never heard the word kludgy, really, so he's not obviously.

22:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Welcome to our industry, Kevin. I feel like we've been using that that word has. The origin of that word was the date that Windows was announced.

22:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did read a wonderful book which I recommend to all. I listened to it on audio from George Gilder. It's called Microcosm and it's really the best book ever. If you haven't read it, paul, I know you love these industry books. It's the best book ever explaining what a miracle this revolution is.

22:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But the reader on the audio book says and he says it not once but a bunch of times At least it's consistent and I want to go.

23:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's like I don't remember the book, but it was God. It's probably not the Steve Jobs biography, but some book on Apple. They would say iOS is iOS and I'm like dude, come on, I get it. Some words are complicated. Maybe there's a debate about how things are pronounced, but how do you?

23:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
know, ai is not A1. Dos is not.

23:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
DOS. No, it's. A1 is actually HP sauce, as we call it. Hp sauce. That's how you know it's not AI. Come on, man.

23:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Clearly. Anyway on with the show. I'm sorry I'm going to now press the button, Don't apologize, my wife never does so.

23:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Last week, my door is closed, I'm safe. So last week was week D, right, and the Microsoft update schedule. We got the preview update for 23 H2. And I predicted that by Thursday probably, or at least by the end of the week, we got the preview update for 23H2. And I predicted that by Thursday probably, or at least by the end of the week, we would get the similar update for 24H2. And we did. They didn't say this, but the interesting thing is it was accompanied by three announcements. So the typical preview update is not accompanied by any announcement. I mean no, none, I mean there's none. They don't announce it, they don't talk about it, but in this case they referred to it as the general availability of recall.

24:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh boy what.

24:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So that's look. I know we live in a world where words don't mean anything anymore and I know most of Microsoft not all of Microsoft, by the way most of Microsoft still doesn't use these common terms we've used for decades, like RTM and GA and release candidate and all this stuff, those words that had meaning, that were important. But general availability is not what recall is in right now. So, for one thing, recall is a preview. It's still a preview. It's it is available to the public, but not automatically. Right, you have to go get it, you have to be a seeker. We call that for 10 seconds, but it's a preview update. It will be in stable in generally available the tuesday of patch, tuesday of in, but still in preview, which, to me, yeah, generally available in preview, was an important part of that sentence. Right, they, it still hasn't risen to the level where they feel comfortable taking off the preview tag, right? So recall, which was announced last May, right before build, right at build, or the week of build, is now finally something you could get generally out in the world. But asterisk, asterisk, asterisk, right, like I said, it's in preview, it's in a preview update, which means you're not going to get it automatically, unless you went and flipped that switch.

26:00
It's only available on co-pilot plus PCs, which they're super proud of. For some reason, 10% of some small category PCs are now co copilot plus PCs, which they're super proud of. For some reason, 10% of some small category PCs are now copilot plus PCs. They still believe all PCs will be copilot plus PCs, which is a low bar, because, yeah, of course they will. All PCs will just have those capabilities, of course. But this is a tiny subset of the user base. I mean it's if there are one to 1.4 or five, whatever billion windows users in the world and you know, whatever the number, seven to eight hundred million of them right now are running windows 11, maybe. I mean the percentage that it could install this thing if they wanted to is still single, low, single digit. It's really low, single g. So yeah, generally available, I guess we're calling it.

26:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They were super excited to have this announcement, so you know, the other side of this is copilot plus. Pc is not generally available yeah, right, yeah, that's fair.

26:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, when they went to x86 in the fall with the new AMD and Intel chips, they were very mealy mouth again to keep using that strange term about it, because they weren't allowed to use that term at the time of launch and they would say over time these computers will get these features. And that is sort of what has happened. It's still happening. One of the new features that's generally available I'm trying to see where, don't see the notes but one of them at least, is available only on snapdragon based co-pilot plus pcs. It will come to x86 based co-pilot plus pcs, probably in june or july, but it's not, you know, it hasn't all just kind of happened.

27:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, in any event, um the 21 a co-pilot plus pc to just be a pc yeah, I do too, I do too, and I, and there there are some.

27:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's some interesting problems, and a lot of them are related to security things, because you know they're. Once you get into things like windows, hello ess. You have very strict requirements, requirements, I mean, that's what one is co-pilot?

28:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
they you know that a current full spec pc has specific hardware requirements, which is already true. Yeah, uh, that includes all of the copilot features. That's all I want my gpu to count yeah, why I?

28:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
why? I mean, you spent several hundred dollars on it and you can kick the crap out of these things. Why wouldn't you?

28:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, yeah, yeah, I understand, but remember how much trouble microsoft got in when they said oh, windows 11 requires tp, uh, tpm, tpm. Yeah, people got upset over that yeah, and mostly about all kinds of things right, tpm has been part of pcs for 20 years.

28:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean tpm 2 is more recent, but it's more recent like 2011 recent it's not. It's actually not that recent. This is actually a pretty low bar. But obviously you know, especially you hit our audience. There's guys out there running Intel fifth generation, blah blah, and they're like it runs windows 11. Fine, I don't see what the problem is Like.

28:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you know yeah, that's what they say is it's not a technical requirement. I can run the, I can run the operating system.

29:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this is weird. This is actually a little similar to that telemetry discussion and I didn't get into this part of it. But Dave Plummer said something to the tune of Microsoft started this automatic telemetry thing with Windows 10. It was especially egregious when it first launched, but then they backed off from that and I was like, hmm, I know a little bit about Windows. I don't remember that. So I went back and looked to see what he was talking about and that's not what happened. What Microsoft did was they added all the privacy switches you see now during setup. So back then you had to go through settings to try to find these things. But now they give you like a little dashboard thing where you can just say no, no, no, no to whatever you know things you don't want. Um, they didn't change how the system works in the slightest, they just get provided like a little ui, you know, for you to click things. Um, I think that's what he meant.

30:00
So in this case, I don't know. I don't know anything about what's coming. I'm not trying to qualify what I'm saying because, oh my God, there's a huge announcement. I don't mean that, but it is inevitable that what Richard and everyone else wants will happen, right, that we will be able to use these features across our GPUs at least, and probably CPUs too, by the way, depending on the system, because these things will evolve and they'll be. You know, in the case of a CPU, might be upgraded to have that make sense, but also just the system requirements will evolve, right?

30:39
So when Windows 11 first came out, this was outrageous to people, right. 11 first came out, they. This was outrageous to people, right, and to me to some degree, because anyone could run this system on two different computers and say, yeah, it works fine, what's the problem? But this is a case where they actually did change how windows works only in windows 11, and now that tpm 2.0 versus, say, the 1.2 or 3 I forget what the other version was, um, what the capabilities are it actually does does require a TPM 2.0. So it's not really outrageous because by the time that happened, it was like 2023, 2024, whatever year that thing had, like I said, had been out, I think, since 2011,. If I remember the day correctly, 2014 for TPM 2.0. 2014. Okay, there you go, and there is no such thing as a modern PC that doesn't have it. You know, for the most part, I know some people could build a thing and maybe that doesn't. But PC makers just ship this stuff, they just do.

31:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But to that point it's like you can't buy an ATX motherboard. It doesn't have a TPM two in it.

31:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now it's like that's true, yeah, I hate to say that. So it now like that's true, for yeah, I hate to say that, so you would know you probably you know that better than I do. I I almost didn't want to say that myself because I'm not 100 sure. I feel like you probably could do something stupid if you really wanted to, but I don't know. But most people, yeah, okay, so most people buy a computer. They don't really build it anyway, it doesn't matter, but it will.

31:57
All the modern chipsets for years and years and years of all supported this and, um, yeah, in the beginning was like this feels like you're trying to force this to upgrade. And then the security story they have now and some of it feels super recent. Right, there's the whole Windows. Well, the Secure Future Initiative and the Windows Resiliency Initiative or whatever some stuff. Windows, hello, ess very rare before. Um, copilot plus pc now very common, not 100. I mean, I'm not saying it's universal, but it's very common and much more common than it was. So the security baseline here has actually gotten a lot better and they have a good story now. Um, this is not always been the case with windows. I don't know if you follow the whole security thing at all. But like you know, we've had problems and and honestly, windows 11, I think, is in good shape right now from that perspective. So that's.

32:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is the perfect time. 10 goes out of support in 2025, at which point the tpm2 chip will be more than a decade old.

32:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep there is a, there's a. It's weird how many of these things interrelate. There's another story about vbs enclaves. We're going to get to. That ties into this.

33:04
Which another modern security feature requires this kind of modern underpinnings, not something they're ever going to put in Windows 10. And you know, yes, I still hear. I understand the complaints like, oh, you know, this Windows 10 would work for five or 10 more years, it'd be fine. What's the problem? Like yeah, to some degree, absolutely, but for mainstream users. Like yeah, to some degree, absolutely, but for mainstream users. You know connecting to the internet, you know doing stuff. Yeah, you kind of want to have the modern stuff, you know, yeah, and then this is the ideal time to release recall in general availability, because now we've got the whole secure thing going on in the underpinnings.

33:43
Let's screw it up with this feature. Everyone seems to hate so much. Um, you know, we'll see. I, there's been. There's so much fud around this thing. It kind of bothers me. I, to me, the I don't know if it's ironic or just the end game here is like I've used it and I just don't see the use of it, so I just disable it. I don't ever enable it. Well, I mean I've enabled it and disabled it, but I just don't see the use case for it for me, so I just don't worry about it. But if you do use it, it's like anything else related to security. If someone calls you and asks you for your social security number or your credit card number and you give it to them, I mean that's kind of on you, so there is that aspect to it. But as far as the actual like security, the steps they've taken to security secure these snapshots pretty impressive.

34:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's funny, we had this conversation on Sunday with Daniel Rubino from Windows Central and you know, in my opinion there's two camps. There's the people I I mean the reasonable camp, like you, paul is the third but there's people say oh okay, I was like I'm curious which camp I'm in it's a security nightmare. Is it one side?

34:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
and then the other ones are like I don't care, I'm in the camp where they dumbed it down.

34:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want it to cover not just one machine, but everyone I use. Yeah, everything I use it's not as useful. Oh, that's a different camp.

35:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah no, so you're that's the camp I'm in. That was the the first I met the guy who claimed to have made this feature and I said I have. Oh, I said, dude, I have some questions for you. And he's like here we go. And I'm like, no, I don't think you understand what I'm going to ask. It's not.

35:16
It's not what these other idiots are asking less I said, this feature is useless to me unless I can get it everywhere. Right, I want this on all my computers, I want it to sync. And he goes, yes, yes. And he goes, look, we will get there. But he says we can't do that now, like, like you, you understand, like there's going to be pushback on this. I'm like, oh no, I get that, but but what I'm saying is I use a lot of different machines.

35:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want this on my phone should be on the phone, your laptop, your desktop, your tablet.

35:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Imagine you're in just a simple scenario your other laptop, your other laptop.

35:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's our problem, because we have 20 devices.

35:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I do have dozens of devices, but no, but just normal person stuff. I'm in a store and I'm buying a pair of socks or whatever. You should know that. Well, I researched this earlier on my computer Right. Could you tell me about the green socks?

36:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I researched and then I can go buy them?

36:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, nope, because we're not crossing that machine divide.

36:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I sure the heck do that with one note in the loop. Yeah, exactly and um.

36:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look, I mean, there are ways around this, obviously, but I mean I ways around apps fine well, or just even like browser sync. I guess you could go try to find your history, or?

36:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
something. I've been using this in Melbourne where I go look something up on Google Maps on this laptop and then when I walk out the door with my phone and open Google Maps, the link that's showing for the next thing the last thing you search for is what I searched for on the laptop, and that's the way. And you have to have that moment where're like it just worked, like it.

36:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Literally they're there yeah, so, uh, recalls a little trickier because there was such pushback on it when it was first announced. We have to go through this, um, I don't know. I almost call it a triage phase. It's like we're just gonna have to endure it and see what happens, see if anyone actually uncovers some actual. The things I've seen so far that are recent are so stupid it makes me want to scream. And when you brought up the iNet pub folder, I thought you were going to bring this up and I was like, oh man, we're going to have to talk about this. And I'll just mention it very briefly.

37:19
You have to have Windows Hello, ess enabled, yeah, which means biometric security, yeah, except it doesn't completely mean that, because you also have to have a pin. So you have to have a pin. This is a requirement for any Windows computer that has a password of any kind. Right, it has to be a pin. If you bring up a new computer it doesn't matter what kind a Windows computer and you enroll your finger or your face or whatever into Windows Hello, the next thing you do is you create a pin. You can't get by that. You have to, right. So one of the complaints was well, I got a pin, doesn't even use biometrics. You can get in with a pin and I'm like yeah, okay, but the same security still applies. The other thing this was the most asinine one they use all these incredible technologies windows, hello, ess, secure enclaves, isolated ram, the whole thing to protect these snapshots. And the guy goes yeah, but I mean, if someone gets the disc, it's just encrypted. I'm like it that's fine.

38:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's what do you mean? It's just that everything's on that disk anyway.

38:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's encrypted is what you just said, like what are you talking about? Just encrypted, I can't. I look, I'm not saying. Something isn't or can't go wrong with this. It's microsoft. Obviously we could have problems. What I am saying is no one has actually highlighted a problem. Yeah, a real problem.

38:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think maybe that's it is that again it's this comes down to. I trust microsoft, yes, uh, and it, and so just the very fact that they're collecting all this information makes people nervous because we don't know how secure it's going to be.

38:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But I am on the camp where you dumbed it down to to so to respond to those nervous nelly's, and now it's less than useful so, as it turns out, they've also made it harder to use, because even if you're okay with using it on a single computer and this is not, it's not just um, it's not just recall, it's just uh. With the windows, hello experience in windows. Now, uh, which? I guess it's windows hello ass, but I believe it's going to be the common experience across all computers. It requires an extra step. Now, guess it's Windows, hello ESS, but I believe it's going to be the common experience across all computers. It requires an extra step now. And it's really annoying. It's really annoying. So if you're in your computer and you're like I need the password for this thing and it goes, here you go, paul, oh, we got to see it, make sure it's you and it's like bling, bling, bling.

39:47
It's like you see it's me. Do it, are you?

39:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
alive like an idiot. So it's only a matter of time before we have to do captures to log into our computer.

39:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I guarantee you if you actually want to use recall and if you are actively using recall. It is really annoying because that comes up all the time. Yeah, I, you know. It's like you go through a subway and the door closes on you and you're like it is really annoying because that comes up all the time. Yeah, I, you know, it's like you go through a subway and the door closes on you and you're like is it really you?

40:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is recording everything that happens to me. I wish it could also record everything that happens on my computers, send it all to whatever the Russian AI, I don't know the Chinese. I don't care, I just want to know what I did yesterday, do you?

40:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
mind, I know.

40:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's all I'm asking. So I really think the world is divided into these two camps and will be increasingly.

40:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There will be people who never trust that.

40:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right, but there's people who never charge anything on the internet either, because they don't think it's safe.

40:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't actually mind that those people exist, right, just don't get in my way. Yeah, I don't actually mind that those people exist, right, just don't get in my way, yeah. But what I don't like is that they're the ones who will write articles and be like well, you know, you can't trust these people. I know, and now you know I'm making this up. I didn't see this there, but maybe in USA Today there's like hey, here's this new feature in Windows. You're going to want to make sure you're disabled and they're coming from a place of ignorance and they're. They're preaching to people don't know any better. And what are you doing?

41:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they're just stirring up. What are you doing?

41:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
outrage yeah, I don't like it's good for views, let's.

41:12
Let's be honest, I think it's cheap and it's unfair cheap and, by the way, tomorrow there'll be a recall vulnerability. And by the way it does, it doesn't mean that I'm wrong on this point. It just means that nothing is perfect and maybe this was always going to happen. I don't know. But the reason it's in preview now, the reason it was going to be in preview last summer, the reason I don't call it not a preview right, is because of this they want to get it out in front of people and let's see how people use it, let's see what happens, because it's one thing to test it in some isolated group, small crowd, whatever you got, to get it out in the real world before you find out. That's one thing we have learned with Windows. You put it out in the world and oh, there's a little scenario.

41:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What happens when you have a billion users?

41:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All of whom go in a different direction and have different hardware. So we'll see.

41:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, I need to take a break. Yes Coming up. What do microsoft, windows and formula one racing have in common?

42:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
well, is it a crash and burn thing?

42:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, no, it's not what you think is it about?

42:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it's not what you think stay tuned.

42:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It has nothing to do with crashing that's full-on clickbait right there.

42:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's good clickbait, isn't it?

42:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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45:29
Visit uscloudcom, book a call today. Find out how much your team can save. That's uscloudcom to book a call today and get faster Microsoft support for less uscloudcom. We thank them so much for supporting uscloudcom. We thank you so much for supporting windows weekly. Now. Do you see what I'm talking about when I say what microsoft has in common with formula one? Maybe not. Maybe you don't know. There's a big controversy in formula one racing, which is a pretty, uh, intense sport. You know, those drivers are really the? Uh, the head of it passed a rule saying no swearing allowed and if you swear, we're going to fine you, and if you do it three times, we're going to suspend you. Now, these are the superstars of racing. Uh, they would have a problem in this league.

46:18
It's a little hard to not swear when you're under such stress. Anyway, microsoft's doing well. They're not going to fine you, but they're going to help you.

46:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so apparently so many of us are talking to our computers so much or to ai and using them for whatever purposes, but we're getting these transcriptions and it's not pretty for a lot of us.

46:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, yeah, I'm. I'm surprised just how mean, like this, if you were talking to a person, this is an hr violation like why are you talking to software this way?

46:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's kind of you should hear me I talk to myself this way, you know you.

46:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She does not say hey. Hey, you know who's top, I know she uses the f word every time, because Because anyone who's used Siri has.

47:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're just mad and then she goes. You don't have to be a jerk about it, and it's like you don't have to be an idiot either, but you are, you know, I just and then you realize you're arguing with software and like how am I like?

47:19
Listen, you got to get the little wins where you can. But so yeah, this is 24H2 dev and beta build, so God knows when this will ever appear. But when you're doing voice typing in Windows which could be anything, you could be dictating to a Word document, but really it's for AI there will be they're testing now a filter, a profanity filter so does it like cartoons?

47:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
swear them out. Is that what's happening?

47:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it just takes it out. That would be hilarious actually, like it would just go, you know, have like a little sound. He's like uh, oh, what do you think about this?

47:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
you know that's. That's what the charlie brown parents were doing yeah, exactly so I think that's pretty funny, but um that's fine.

48:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where does the filter I mean? Is it a filter for you or is it a filter for?

48:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't understand what's being filtered.

48:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's for voice typing, which could be globally in windows so if you swear, it won't put a swear word into the type if you could be using accessibility features that you know recognize apple. Does that they change every f word into the typing? You could be using accessibility features that you know. Recognize Apple. Does that they change every?

48:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
F word into duck. Right, there's a setting, now finally to reverse that it makes me really ducking mad.

48:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just gotta tell you so in Windows 13,.

48:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're going to have a filter to remove to bring the profanity back.

48:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

48:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Replace the ducks. No, there's some people very offended, I know I think most of it. You know, when I was a kid, the thing you would the version of this is you would hear yourself on tape for the first time.

48:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You'd be like I don't sound like that and everyone's like, yeah, actually you sound exactly like that.

48:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And now you know it's like I don't swear that much, like, yeah, you might have Tourette's, I don't know. So this seems like a fine idea to me, yeah that's fine.

49:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's fine. It's optional. It's off until you turn it on. That's fine.

49:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, one of the features that's coming out in the preview updates we now have in 23 and 24H2, and then will come out in Patch Tuesday, is a feature that Microsoft hasn't really given a name to, but it's improved window search. They briefly called it semantic search, but it or windows search with semantic indexing, which I think is a really good term because it goes back to the conversation that Richard and I had about it's. It's not really indexing, but it is indexing, you know, like it's. It's a different kind of indexing because you know you want instant search results. It can't just like it's a different kind of indexing because you know you want instant search results. It can't just. It's not going to then go and scan all your files, right, it's building an index of some kind, right? So improved window search for lack of a better term which is a bunch of things but built into search in Windows, whether you get it from the taskbar, the start interface, whatever the thing is called search highlights interface, or from File Explorer, right. Search for files, search for documents, search for photos, search for photos and then all documents that are in a cloud storage, but only OneDrive now, but in other cloud services in the future too. You need to sign in with a Microsoft account to get this feature. For for now they've just started testing the ability to uh use a work or school account, meaning an enter id account. So, um, you'll be able to do.

50:33
I think semantic search is to me seems like the right term. But, um, this improved windows search is coming, you know, again in the future. We don't know when, but sometime this summer, maybe. 25 h2, whatever it is, um is coming too. So the way they dribble this stuff out this came up a little early in that co-pilot plus pc bit where snapdragon tends to get these things first and then it goes to x64. This one is the worst example. It's like every sub feature of this feature has been tested like in different places at different times. It's just, it's very strange. So a year from now or something, we'll just have it everywhere, it'll work fine, I don't know.

51:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's kind of interesting I mean they could ship a thing called improved search every week, you know, yes, but no version numbers, no features, just this is, I should say, is a co-pilot plus PC feature.

51:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You were asking about GPUs and I raised the ugly possibility of CPUs. But why can't we do this kind of indexing? It doesn't matter if it's slow, and it won't be, but let's pretend it would be, because we don't have an MPU. Who cares? It's the index, let it run overnight. I just I want the search result to be fast, right, it shouldn't matter how you build the index, but it's not how windows works so.

51:52
So here's. Uh, if you didn't see this, richard, you'll enjoy this. Um, one thing we brought up repeatedly on the show is the illogical nature by which microsoft tests new features for windows in the Insider Program. They have Canary Dev Beta Release Preview. They have multiple paths in at least a few of those. Release Preview, for example, could have a Release Preview build of 23H2, 24h2, and Windows 10 all out at the same time. Someone asked online, as someone would why Well, a, what's the point of canary? And b, why don't new features follow this logical cascade from the top to the bottom? So brandon leblanc, who I've known for a long time he's a good guy. I'm not dumping on him for this, but as unfortunately as the mouth of sauron in this case it says there hasn't been a specific order for a long time now. There isn't a progression like we had with rings. That's why we move to channels. Features can and will show up and preview in Devon beta, often before Canary, simply due to the way code flows on our side and the code base.

53:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So this is basically yeah, it's different teams with different workflows.

53:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I don't know what to say to this. I just saw this right before the show started, so when I read this, I want to go back and read their announcement about moving to channels Right, because I don't really remember it that way. I'm not saying he's wrong, um, but I do question it as as a rationale, like the one thing, the one thing he doesn't say here is why. I mean, I guess he sort of does, but I don't understand how does it clear things up in any way.

53:43
It just that's what I mean, like I don't quite understand what's really an admission of guilt.

53:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like you can't feel like there's any order because there's no order no order well, there's no order to this, because there's no order in our universe. Okay I mean, you know so yeah, but there was four stages of entropy. Yeah, that's all there is.

54:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yeah, they're not racing down the same path, they're kind of just, yeah, you know, blooming off into different directions. I guess I don't. So anyway, that's I'm not again. I'm not dumping on brand.

54:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like brandon, I'd please this is his response to uh sean endicott from windows central, who said it does seem like the various insider rings are out of.

54:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, this is in our world, in our world. This is the complaint. Richard has asked this question out loud many times. We all wonder about this, like why have this system if you're not going to use the system? It seems like the right way to find bugs or whatever it might be is to have it go through all of those channels in order and then hit stable and to have the greatest possible outcome of success, and and I just were looking for the political perspective that the folks who set up that order have moved on.

54:54
Oh yeah, no, and nobody took charge of it, and so it's whatever you have access to you'll deploy to yeah, I, I see little glimpses of this, but I feel like a lot of the engineering has left the building and, um, sometimes that's not the case. I I don't mean to stump on the whole system, but 99 of it easily, you know, and it doesn't feel like there is a, like an adult no.

55:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, it also speaks to what is canary really right. Canary is really one team couldn't get out of any of the three existing channels, and so they made a new one and what's your peer review exactly?

55:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
we don't know yet. Uh, we're working on stuff. I don't know what do you mean?

55:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it's very strange I'm making the thing with this stuff and I'm only allowed to, you know, get my bonus if I ship.

55:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I'm gonna ship I mean there's a point to be made that there's kind of an industry accepted industry meaning for these. Yeah, things.

55:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, that you? I mean this is what I've been saying. I was like it's like words matter yeah, words matter.

55:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's what you just said.

55:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They don't in our world. They don't anymore, right? This is what I mean. Like it's like I, I why even use these names?

56:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, if you, because you do get to pick which one of these you want installed on your machine.

56:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You call canary random uselessness and then maybe would make more sense because it's like to subscribe to that, please, yeah it's like you never know what you're gonna get. It's like a box of chocolates, except for all those little crazy cherry things. No one wants like I don't. But they have this exciting new feature over here in depth. We'll join jeff idiot. Yeah, we don't do that here. Yeah, we do stupid things here. I don't know like, but that's not what they say, it is what they do.

56:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know well, and we were back in the day, sold this idea that there are progressively less stable versions between these choices and, depending on your tolerance to instability, you can right, that's right.

56:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And if you want to be on the case it is everywhere else in our world, everywhere else.

56:50
If you look at any web browsers that have like canary channel and whatever other channels, yeah, anywhere in software development, the canary version is always the first one. There's a reason they call it canary. By the way, yeah, there's a dead yellow bird in the bottom of a cage. Yeah, this is where you put new features first, when maybe they're not quite baked, except in windows 11 or in the windows insider program. Right, so I can't, I don't know anyway. So did he answer the question? I? He answered the question, I don't.

57:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He still didn't answer the questions I guess, is maybe answer the question left and resulting in less satisfaction, right? Yeah, right, right it's I mean, other than that part that says at least I'm not crazy I'm so glad you addressed it, and now I want to hurt myself.

57:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I like I just it's yeah, anyway, anyway, that's whatever. Welcome everyone to my world. Okay, uh, microsoft, uh, has always been less aggressive than, say, apple at deprecating and then removing features specifically from Windows. In this case, that has changed. In recent years They've gotten more aggressive. Windows 11, I would say the last two versions especially we've seen kind of rapid fire deprecations and just this past week they announced well, there's no announcement, they don't make a big thing, but if you go to the Microsoft Learn site, you can see the deprecated Windows feature list. You'll see that the Maps app has been deprecated and will be removed from the Microsoft store in July.

58:20
I mean not literally, no one, but no one uses this app. I will say, literally, no one should ever have used this app. It never made any sense. I mean not literally, no one, but no one uses this app. I will say literally, no one should ever have used this app. It never made any sense. I mean, like writing books about Windows 10 and then Windows 11, I would kind of half-heartedly cover it because I kind of had to. It was part of the operating system. It's like I don't understand what this thing's doing here. No one's going to use this. Now I'm going to hear from all of you guys that Paul for saying that a lot, but to me it makes sense. This shouldn't be part of the operating system. It doesn't make any sense. There was some backend stuff they had done with Bing Maps as an API and moving that into Azure Maps, and it's semi-related to this.

58:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you were saying they're getting more aggressive. It still seems to be a pattern of only removing apps that nobody's heard of.

59:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and right, which is the cynical commonality that we have in our industry is, no matter what it is like some it does not just microsoft some company will announce they're getting rid of some features, some apps, some cert, whatever it is, and someone, inevitably on some social media channel somewhere, will say they still make that. Yeah, dude, and that's the problem, because you know, like, when skype microsoft killed skype, microsoft uh, this coming month is about it will retire skype, this really good brand a week yeah, it's happening quick.

59:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um, there were still people saying that about skype and I'm like dude, I've made more skype calls in the past month out of pure nostalgia yeah, did you?

59:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, did you enjoy all the spam and the uh ai bots? Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely, and crashing and that will, that will, that will cause the or cure the nostalgia problem for it really quick.

59:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, just a reminder.

59:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You stopped using this for a reason um, there's a maps to me makes sense, right, we're getting rid of maps, it's fine. But there's another thing they're getting rid of, and this one, this one I'm. They don't really explain this well either, and I'm, I, I'm kind of logic to my way through what I think is the rationale here. But there's a security feature called uh, virtualization based security enclaves, uh, vbs enclaves. Right, I mentioned it briefly up front. It's part of the platform that is copilot plus pc. Um, it's part of now this windows resiliency initiative I think is the name of it which is itself part of the broader security whatever initiative, microsoft, who knows the new version of trustworthy computing, whatever, zero trust, yada, yada, yada.

01:00:41
This is when david weston pops up all of a sudden and starts talking about security in Windows, right, and you're like, okay, cool, windows 11, like I said, when it first shipped, didn't really have anything that required any of the hardware they said you needed. But now this is one of those features where these things are all tied in together. So Secure Boot, 2pm2, vbs Enclaves, windows Hello, ess, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, build on the things that came before secure boot, whatever, but these things all are part of the same thing. To me, the way that this has been shipped to the public was Copilot plus PC. It's what Microsoft uses to separate, literally separate the memory and the storage for your snapshots. Right, it's part of the security model for recall. It has been since day one, by the way, they didn't ever change that. But it's going to be something that's just in windows, right? But when they added it to windows, they added it to all supported versions of Windows 11, which, at the time, included 23H2. And they're deprecating it in 23H2 and older, but there are no older versions that are supported anymore.

01:01:53
I don't think this is actually necessary for 23H2. 23h2 is exiting support in October, imminently, yeah, so yeah, why not? I wish they had explained it a little bit because I kind of had to work my way through that argument. I think that is what it is. But, um, in the sense that, like windows, hello ess, here's a good one, in the sense that copilot plus pc is the canary, if you will, for uh, the uh, windows hello ess, coal mine. Um, that's true of these other security features too, right, vbs enclave, etc. So, um, I know there are lower level os features or whatever, and other features of the os that use vbs enclaves, but right now they're either relegated to pilot plus pcs or to high-end corporate pcs. That, honestly, they're probably. Most companies probably aren't even using this stuff yet, so there's kind of no reason to support it back on the older version. That's about to disappear anyway. So I think that's it. It was a weird thing to see them deprecate this brand-new security yeah.

01:02:59
But then it's like wait, so it's 23H2 and older, which is 23H2. They never brought it to Windows 10 and they won't.

01:03:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay, that's probably fine, and I wonder if they're finally getting to a feature, a set of features with like, hey, this is really a problem to do, regress and deploy.

01:03:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's right so we're not going to. They did make that. By the way, there was that platform shift low level with 24H2 that they never really talked about. That may tie into this as well, and it may tie into that conversation I had earlier about the Windows 11 not living up to the needs of these hardware requirements in the beginning but then actually getting there. I mean maybe 24-H2, if you will, is where they actually always wanted this to be, or whatever. I mean CrowdStrike is the real reason some of this is happening, but whatever the rationale, I don't know.

01:03:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The message has been pretty clear. We're not going to do anything to avoid another crowd strike.

01:03:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's not a thing. Well, it's a cynical take on it.

01:03:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, I yeah am I cynical or am I wise? I'm just not sure anymore.

01:03:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean it's. I was concise and correct. I don't't know. Yeah, I mean right, sure.

01:04:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What a world.

01:04:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sometimes, the power just blinks. As we pause for this philosophical moment, I'd like to take an opportunity to talk about a sponsor. You can reflect while I talk about CasheFly. For over 20 years, CacheFly has held a track record for high-performing, ultra-reliable content delivery - serving over 5,000 companies in over 80 countries. At TWiT.tv we've been using CacheFly for over a decade, and we love their lag-free video loading, hyper-fast downloads, and friction-free site interactions.

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Learn how you can get your first month free at cachefly.com/twit. That's C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y dot com slash twit. All right back to windows weekly. Mr paul thrott, mr richard campbell uh, what is this corporate stuff?

01:08:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's a new segment.

01:08:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, I figured this show wasn't boring enough and actually, we're gonna get quarterly results in about an hour, right, something like that, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that's gonna come in hot.

01:08:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That'll be interesting. Um, so I don't know if anyone's following world affairs, I'm not sure how to even walk into this. We have tariffs down in the United States. They're reciprocal, I think. They appear to be designed to punish our partners or something.

01:08:41
It's very strange, but Europe has begun looking at whether they could reduce their reliance on the United States and US technology, which is tough because US technology is big tech. Right, it's pretty much all of it, yep, although China would like to do something about that, but anyway. So there was this brief moment here where I thought the EU is going to ordain some Linux distribution as what everyone had to use or something, and it looks like it's not going to go in that direction. But I don't think anything was announced today. But there was a chance that as early as today the EU might have come out and said look, the truth is there's not much we can do about this. You know we kind of rely on the United States. But to reassure their customers in Europe, microsoft has issued a statement of sorts explaining what they will do.

01:09:32
This is I don't know if you this is, they're saying euos, right, so that's the thing I don't think is actually going to happen now.

01:09:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, yeah, it says this it is not a project of the european union. Yeah, but it should be. Oh, yeah, okay, I don't, I don't think they're gonna, I don't think they're gonna happen, all right.

01:09:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you know. Look, I mean um. You know, libera office, or whatever it was called, openoffice did great for Munich.

01:09:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know. They switched back, didn't they?

01:09:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They did yeah, yeah, I'd love to see that work. Honestly, I think that'd be great, but anyway, I was hoping to see something like that, but it looks now like this isn't going to happen. Interesting, yeah, interesting, yeah. Microsoft obviously is not number one in cloud computing, but they do a very good job about building data center capacity in the locales where they do business, and, of course, they have these data protection boundaries, et cetera, et cetera.

01:10:34
But you know, we live in a world where people fly through the United States or to the United States and get, you know, their phone searched and they end up in a camp in San Salvador or whatever it is, and Microsoft is basically saying look, we're going to protect your data from the United States government. If they try to access your data, we're going to take them to court and we're going to prevent it. So I don't know that. That's enough if you consider that the courts in our country are probably in the government's pocket at this point. So I don't know. I don't know that the courts in our country are probably in the government's pocket at this point.

01:10:55
So I don't know, I don't know, but it's an interesting thing. I mean, this is a problem for Microsoft if big customers in other parts of the world start walking away. History has shown us that when you do things like prevent the Chinese from accessing the latest cell phone and AI chipsets, that they learn how to build them themselves, and, instead of having the intended effect, what you've done is taught these places to not rely on you anymore, and companies like Huawei and other companies that are in networking and in smart devices, phones and computers and all that are just making their own stuff. So it could happen in Europe, I guess, if it gets bad enough, but this is microsoft's attempt to um, prevent that or my health first reassure their customers.

01:11:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Perhaps.

01:11:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, um, in other problems. Um, google is now lost three major antitrust cases in the united states, which is an astonishing sentence, to even say Epic online search and now advertising for three weeks, and I think we're in week two or three. The judge in the search case, which is the most damaging one so far potentially damaging is having hearings for the remedy phase. Right, like what will be? I call it a punishment. It's kind of a simplistic term, but what are we going to do about this? Like, how are we going to prevent future abuses? We've seen a number of companies line up to say I would love to buy Chrome. Oh, is Chrome for sale? I would love to have Chrome. Let's, how much do you want for Chrome? Like, we'll take Chrome.

01:12:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Wasn't OpenAI one of them.

01:12:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
OpenAI is one of them. Per Open AI is one of them. Perplexity DuckDuckGo, which claims it can't afford it. Yahoo has said they would do it.

01:12:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm still trying to figure out what Chrome is worth, because last time I looked they don't sell it, yeah right.

01:12:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, chrome is one of the avenues of distribution that works in their favor for making search the default, and then all the advertising revenues that come off the back of it. So tied to this, google Alphabet announced their revenues the other day. They're doing pretty good $90 billion in revenues for the quarter, $90 billion in one quarter. Advertising-related revenues were almost almost 67 billion of that figure, so 74 percent of their revenues come from advertising how's that income diversification thing going there, guy well?

01:13:23
I will say so, the, the things, the businesses they have that are not subscribed, not ad related, which is subscriptions, platforms and devices. You know pixel and all that stuff is 10 billion in revenues up double digits. You know 16%. Google cloud uh, 12.3 billion in revenues up 22%, also double digit. Um, so non-advertising based revenues from this company were about 22.6 billion, which is about 25%. Um, you know it's not bad, but it's not 90 billion. So I don't I mean I don't see a version of this where Google loses advertising revenue or anything like that, but is there a version where they lose 20, 25% of it or something?

01:14:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I mean and we are definitely. I mean, even before the AI wave, you had a lot more product searches being done on Amazon and and a lot of content searches done on Facebook, like they've been encroaching for a while.

01:14:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The big threat for them is the one that's happening right now, which is AI, and a lot of people are using open AI, chat, gpt especially. But whatever. And yes, but this is the argument Microsoft made in their antitrust case 20, 25 years ago. Whatever it was that you know.

01:14:36
The thing you don't understand government or court or whatever judge is that it doesn't matter how dominant you are, there's always another player right around the corner who's going to out-innovate us and enter some new market or whatever it is, and put us out of business. And yeah, but what we don't want is for you to ride that out by continuing to dominate the market that you illegally own now and abuse your customers, your partners, your competitors, prevent innovation, et cetera. It's like, yeah, it could happen. The fact that this is problematic for them which it is is okay, but it doesn't obviate the past 20 years of what you've done. So there's a big thing going on there, but this is an incredibly successful company. Microsoft is going to announce their revenues in the next 30 minutes or so and I bet it's not $90 billion. It's going to be a big number, but it'll be close. But they make a lot of money on advertising.

01:15:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, but I also think this is a pattern of antitrust that turns into a consent decree.

01:15:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, and I think we must have talked about this last week. I think the smartest thing Google could do and Apple too and whatever else is settle with the idea of like look, we get it, something's going to happen. We should have a say in this outcome. You know Google, their CEO came up, was on the stand and testified today. I didn't put this in the notice but, like you know, his argument was Google's argument, which is like you have these remedies that the US government has suggested taking away search, making us give our results to partners and competitors, or whatever. Yada, yada, yada. It amounts to a de facto divestiture of search, meaning you're forcing the company to break up. And it's like yeah, that is what it is, you're right, you know. It's like well, we spent all these years on research and we have all this intellectual property, and now you want us to open a kimono. And it's like yeah, that is what we want. What's your point? Like you didn't just do something good, you did the bad thing too. You know you don't just get to keep benefiting from it. So you know, we'll see.

01:16:47
I agree that what the government wants is extreme, but you might make the case that it needs to be extreme because the abuse is extreme. It's kind of hard to say, but I don't know. We'll see what happens. I don't think it. I don't think the worst case outcome is what's going to happen. But whatever, they're big and they're going to fall. I think, and speaking of big and going to fall, you know, they, they, there's they, they, uh, they're.

01:17:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
they're going to negotiate. They've been failing so far, but they're trying to get to that threshold where they've got to make a deal, I presume.

01:17:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like, at some point they just have to make a deal. If only there was some precedent, maybe one from the industry, that could guide them in this.

01:17:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, where's their Brad Smith going? Guys make a deal.

01:17:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right. Well, maybe it's Brad Smith. Maybe this is where he should go. I don't know. He needs a new job. Great Yep, We'll see. Intel also reported their earnings. Maybe the less said about that the better.

01:17:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Come on, flat earnings is good news.

01:17:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Flat earnings is better than what it has been. The problem is it was only like 10% of the announcement. The rest of it's really bad. So these guys are going to hit rock bottom. There's no doubt about it. They're planning on it, they're counting on it. So they've lowered their prediction for the coming quarters and the stock took a dump. The whole thing is falling apart.

01:18:12
So I'm trying to find something good in here. You know, like revenues from PCs declined 8%. Revenue from AI chips, you know, for data centers are up 8%. Intel Foundry, which is not really part of these earnings, but they're up a little bit. But these were small numbers, honestly, comparatively speaking. So I don't know. You know there was a TSMC, I think broke ground on like a third new facility in the United States and it's like this awesome gigantic Death Star looking thing. And then, like out in Ohio, there's like a lonely piece of rebar sticking up out of the ground with like a cricket. You know that's the new Intel plant that's never going to get built. I don't know, it just doesn't look good, but I don't know. And then I don't even know why I put this in here. Samsung's doing I guess their new phones are doing great, because people don't know how to buy good phones, I don't know. So they're doing fine. I guess Too much, too much editorializing, and then we'll get back to this when it happens.

01:19:10
But microsoft is going to announce their earnings during the show, so of course that's a rule yeah, yep, yeah, they used to do it like the day after the show, which I thought was inconveniently timed, and then they proved me wrong. It could be worse. So anyway, uh, we talked about build.

01:19:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, coming soon, richard and I are going oh, I want, oh, I wanted to ask you if you, oh, so you're going, are you going to do something there? Yeah, we'll do a show from there.

01:19:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, I'm gonna be there, I'm working on the schedule.

01:19:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I've got a, I've got a space because we were going to do the keynote in the club, but you're probably busy at that time.

01:19:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That would be monday yeah, let me, let me.

01:19:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I need to make sure, um, let me just make sure before I agree to do anything like that, but um, well, it's gonna be busy oh if only I could say things like that no, I'll be doing it, I'll be there anyway, uh, but we'd love to have you, but, or you can even pop in, right, so that's uh. Actually, 9 am pacific, we have it down for, okay, on monday the 19th. Yeah, yeah, uh, so we're gonna stream that, that, in our Discord. Look, I'm going to be there, I'll be doing my thing. If you want to join us, that'd be great. If not, that's fine.

01:20:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I understand. Yeah, no, I would like to. I'm just not sure if we have any requirements. It's possible.

01:20:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, yeah, so you're there as guests of Microsoft doing stuff for them press.

01:20:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But oh, your requirements are yeah, like interviews and stuff. Yeah, okay, well, they might, I don't let me just see I'm not sure what?

01:20:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, let me know. Let me know, it's no hurry. Theoretically, we're in the audience at all for the yeah, I'm hoping I'm not in the audience um but yeah, that could.

01:20:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That would be one of the possibilities, for sure if you're in the audience, you can join us yeah be in the audience.

01:20:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We'll be in the audience.

01:20:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, um, so this is kind of interesting because, uh, google, io and build are overlapping this week.

01:20:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're on the same basic days, right I think it's, it's almost seems like uh, you know, it's super deliberate, like it's absolutely super deliberate because google has their own place for this.

01:21:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They could do it anywhere at any time and they, they pick the exact same time and it's like, okay fine, okay fine, yeah, you're making people like me choose which one to go to. This one is easy for me. I'm obviously going to go to the microsoft event, but you know there are a lot of people like, oh, you know, they're going to think about yeah, we have to stream.

01:21:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have to get up early both days because we have to stream.

01:21:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, the next day the google keynote, yeah so for the first time ever, I think, google is going to have a separate android event before google io usually that's weird yeah, now I think it's tied to.

01:21:40
They changed the development schedule for android. They used to ship it in late in the third quarter and then it would go out new devices later. Um, they cited unnamed partners and their schedules and they meant samsung. Right, because samsung does the one big bang event for the S25 they just did in January, but they had been doing a foldable event in the late summer, early fall. This year.

01:22:05
They're allegedly going to have it early in July and now that the schedule for the next version of Android makes sense for that, they're able to, I think, move it where they wanted to put it. So I think that's why they're doing it and maybe that's why they're having a separate Android event, because this will be RTM. This will be when this thing is finalized. Like the next version of Android is going to land nine months after the previous one, not a year, so it's basically forward about a quarter Now. This also allows them to focus heavily on AI and if you look at their session schedules, this is Android stuff in there, of course. I mean, android is a big platform for them, but it's like Build it is all AI, it's AI, ai, ai, ai, ai, ai, ai. So this makes you wonder what about Surface? Like last year, microsoft announced CoPilot plus PC the day before Build, but at their campus, and they announced two new Surface devices, the first two Snapdragon X-based computers.

01:23:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And these are post-Panos devices.

01:23:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep.

01:23:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's kind of a big deal.

01:23:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean, maybe we need like a Windows Copilot plus PC something, event, I don't know. So we'll see, we'll see, I don't know.

01:23:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Anyway, nice that they would tell us.

01:23:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I wish I had a secret to tell you. I just I don't, I do not, but I'm waiting. You know I'm going to build. There is a pre-show thing that night and um, it's not like this, it's not like a co-pilot plus pc like announcement or anything, it's like a you know nothing. It's like the type of thing they usually have. So I don't know I don't know.

01:23:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and like I said a year ago, they were. This is co-pilot pc announcement. Like it makes sense. This is about the time to come out and say hey hey, here's v2, or you know, the next hardware right and I'm chomping at the bit to get into the call come chip stack, but I'm not going to buy the old chip. I want the new one. Where's the new one?

01:24:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, so it's been a steady stream of more of the same chipset, you know like uh, lower end versions, fewer cores you know, hitting that like lowering the price, which, by the way, is important. I I'm not dumping on it, but you know, yeah, like people like us are like okay, but where's the good stuff? Where's the one with the new GPU or whatever? Right?

01:24:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Give me to 100 tops.

01:24:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
A lot of rumors around this. I've been hearing September. I just saw something that I think is very much related, which is that Qualcomm is going to ship the next gen Snapdragon for phones in september, which aligns to what I've heard for the pc chip, and that makes sense because those will be based on the same underlying chips.

01:24:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So maybe, yeah, maybe, that is the plan we shall see not, not in the build time frame, they're not on a one-year cadence.

01:24:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But then neither yeah intel yeah and the problem is like when you hit like a one-year anniversary, like we're about to and the next gen is not happening for another whatever, that is, three, six months yeah, it's not a lot of excitement in this world right now. You know what I'm saying. So it's like I kind of wish there was something that they could announce. Even if it was something well not even if, I mean, this would be not great for Qualcomm. But like there are these rumors about MediaTek and or NVIDIA and or other companies maybe getting into the Windows on ARM chip space, which would bring competition to this part of the market but also require these companies to kind of play off each other, and maybe NVIDIA would come out the gate with really good graphics or whatever, as you would expect of that company. So I'd like to see something like that too.

01:25:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I don't know. If wishes were fishes, we'd all be riding bicycles.

01:25:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I still have the sense that all of those are different variations of the Snapdragon. Are really them trying to increase yield?

01:25:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, interesting yeah.

01:25:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.

01:25:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're bidding more aggressively, you think?

01:25:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, you got to get up to 80, 90% if you're going to make some money, right. So they find a way to trim the chip to make it usable and you had vendors looking for a less expensive chip anyway, like there's a market and you've made poor quality chips, so why not, perfect, sell them to the Chinese.

01:26:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what I.

01:26:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The big thing on the V2 is revised the design so that it prints more reliably. Right like I think it's a huge part of the the uh tsmc story is their engineers changing the design so that those very high density chips actually come out more reliable, and it takes a few iterations to get there right, yep, all right, let's take a little uh time out and we will come back with more excitement.

01:26:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just want to give microsoft time to get its quarterly results out before the show's over. I don't think that's going to actually happen you don't have to save those earning learnings for next week.

01:26:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh they're out, oh no, no, sorry, there's. It says get, I'm sorry, sorry get ready, get ready.

01:26:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It says get notification right, so that's 20 minutes off. And then there's usually a delay after that because sacha's got to get his hair did and all more of a shine all polished up.

01:27:03
Yeah, I'll polish that uh, I, just since we mentioned the club, I thought I'd just uh throw in a little uh pled, a little pleading, a little begging to get you to join Club Twit, because we're doing some great stuff in there. Let me just tell you what you get. First of all, it's only $7 a month and if you sign up today, you will be grandfathered in at that price indefinitely, forever. Even if we have a price increase and I have to say the way the economy's going, we might have to do a price increase at some point this year we want to grandfather you in. People did say we really want that yearly commitment and personally I was the one fighting against it because I felt like, well, now I'm stuck here for another year, but all right, I want to do it. So we brought back the yearly plan 84 bucks for a year, seven bucks a month. What do you get? You get ad-free versions of all the shows. I think that's reason enough. But you also get access to our Club Twit Discord, which is a great hang. Not everybody's in there. You don't have to join, certainly, but enough. I would say 10,000, maybe, I don't know, patrick knows how many people are in the club right now and we do a lot more in the club than just get together and chat. There's chatting all the time because it's a social group, but we also do special shows in there. For instance, friday, 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern Chris Marquardt will do his monthly photo roundup. We do a review, give you a new assignment, talk about the latest photography news. We also have micah's crafting corner coming up on the 14th next week or is that two weeks? I think it's two weeks from now. That's at 6 pm on wednesday. He does it every month and it's just a chance to get together with micah and he's doing some crafts. You could do your crafts. Uh, stacy's book club is the same day, not the same time. Actually, that's that afternoon.

01:28:55
We're going to do her book pick of the month, your book pick. I guess she gives you three people vote on them and I really like the one we're doing this month. The word for world is forest, marcel K Le Guin. It's a novella, so it's pretty easy read. So if you haven't picked it up yet, get it now. There's a great audio book version, but you could also read it in paperback or hardcover. A very good, I thought, a very interesting story. So we'll be talking about that.

01:29:22
As I mentioned, we're going to start covering keynotes in the club only. This is to avoid takedowns and strikes against our YouTube and Twitch channels. They haven't come from Microsoft, let's be honest. They're coming from Apple. But well, why not? So we're going to do Build in the Discord. That's, as I mentioned, monday, may 19th, 9 am Pacific. We're going to do the next day, google IO in the Discord. That's 10 am Pacific. On the May 20th. Oh, in between then, a little break.

01:29:52
On Friday, may 23rd, the giz whiz, dick didi bartolo, stopped by. I want to help him celebrate 2000 episodes. I'll break out all the old jingles and we've got some great uh memories for that. That'll be a lot of fun. Our ai users group is always the fourth friday of the month, may 23rd. This month, uh, just a couple. Last week we did it. It was really fun. Um, anthony showed how he's making all those cool moral panic videos we use on intelligent machines. Lots of fun. If you're interested in AI, I might show how I use Claude Code. I think this next coming episode is pretty cool. And then on the 9th of June, wwdc 10 am and we are going to do the keynote and the State of the Union. Micah and I will do that.

01:30:36
That's just part of all the fun you get in Club Twit. Seven bucks a month, I think it's a. I mean, for what is it? 11 shows a week, all the extras. There are 12,554 club members, but how many are in the Patrick, are in the Discord or members of the Discord? I think it's less than that. Not everybody goes in there. Anyway, it's, we'd like to have you in the club Please. Twittv slash club twit. If you're not already a member, join the fun. Scooterx, just getting around, to put it. We put in links as the show goes on, by the way Kev Brewer does at ScooterX so you can follow along. There we go. 7,456 people in the Discord from the club. Please join us Please. Twittv slash club twit. Join today or that kitten will get a spanking. Uh, back to windows weekly and uh, paul thurot, you may. Did I mute you? No, no, I did not. You may be muted yourself. I muted myself, you may take it away, sir.

01:31:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I didn't write about this, but there's a report in the Wall Street Journal about the relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI, which is mostly what I call dot and or hello, like. I mean, it's like all very obvious, but there's some interesting stuff in here because, you know, mean, the story's fascinating. This will be, this will generate a new round of books about microsoft, I think in the near future, where you know they, they see this up-and-coming company, you know kevin scott gets that relationship going. They invest a billion bucks. Um, they invest another 10 billion yeah, I didn't.

01:32:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I didn't think they thought it was that important. I think kevin scott was just looking for workloads for azure and it was that important. I think Kevin Scott was just looking for workloads for Azure and it was an opportune moment.

01:32:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was a customer, almost right.

01:32:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it worked out so well, except it kind of didn't also right. There's some little details in here that are kind of interesting because they, you know, anyone could probably step through most of the history. But this author claims that there was a period of time at the height of this relationship where nadella such a nadella excuse me a little dry here um satchin nadella, ceo of microsoft, and sam altman, the ceo, uh, for most of this, uh of open ai would like text each other all day long like five or six times a row, like little girls and like what's next?

01:33:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what's going on, sam?

01:33:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
what are you wearing today?

01:33:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
are you?

01:33:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
wearing these. So, but, uh, like sam altman would actually take screenshots of these chats and post them to the internal slack at open ai just to speed things along. It's just bizarre, right? So microsoft does the big reveal of their work with you know what, at the time was being ai, but like co-pilot, right. And at the time was Bing AI, but like Copilot, right.

01:33:27
And at the end of that year, when Sam Altman was briefly ousted from OpenAI this is referred to internally as the blip. The blip, that's quite a blip. That's good. But not surprisingly, this you, you know nadella immediately said look, we need a, an insurance policy here. We can't, this can't happen. Like this is. And you know, some of the stuff they had said publicly is actually really fascinating. If you go back to this time. Um, microsoft was like we'll just hire all of you, like, yeah, come on, come here.

01:34:01
So open air may have, I don't think they would have disappeared, but but most of those people, I think, would have followed Sam Altman, right? Yeah, quite possibly yeah. And it turns out that's a successful strategy, because it's what Microsoft did a little bit later with Inflection and Mustafa Suleiman, right, the guy who now runs the Microsoft AI org. Apparently it was, that month was that month. So this is november 2023, where um sam alton's out and they're like, all right, what, what, like, where can we go? And his top choice at that point was mustafa sullivan. Right, like what can we do? And they started talking. And then I don't remember the timing. I want to feel like it might have been march, maybe the next year, but whenever it was last year, they hired him you're exactly right 650 million dollars they paid hired him.

01:34:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you're exactly right $650 million they paid for him Right.

01:34:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, because you're not buying the company, sort of, but you're hiring the guy, one of the three founders. And most of the employees Like that company basically dissembled.

01:35:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it was an acqui-hire.

01:35:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you know, the second of two major examples of this kind of thing with Microsoft in the past three, four years. Like it's kind of bizarre, like it's that itself is really kind of crazy. Now this report claims that one of the first things that these guys ran into from inflection when they got to Microsoft was, like you know, actually it's gonna, it's gonna take a while. It turns out what these guys are doing is really good and it's going to be hard to duplicate this. And we had rumors, you know, I would say, in the intervening year. Every once in a while, like you know, microsoft's models are getting close. Oh, microsoft's models might be just as good as OpenAI, and by the time they had that AI event I guess it was early April, like tied to the Microsoft 50th anniversary. My question was are they going to talk about that? And they never talked about that. They still rely on OpenAI, obviously to some degree. But the other big break was, of course, when OpenAI keeps making demands, microsoft, we need more, we need more, we need more. One of the things I'll be looking for in the earnings today is what Microsoft says about the cost of AI and the CapEx cost. It's been roughly $20 billion a quarter. Are we going to see a scaling back of that this soon or not? Maybe it's going to happen eventually.

01:36:17
There are reports Microsoft has never acknowledged where they were in early agreements to build up capacity in whatever parts of the world at whatever data centers and have just walked away from those deals. They don't need that capacity anymore. But the big problem to me here oh, by the way, I don't think I don't know if this is in the report, but I also have something put aside that part of Microsoft's agreement with OpenAI allows them to block this corporate restructuring that OpenAI is trying to undergo, where they become a for-profit company. I'm not saying they're going to in fact, I don't know that anyone is saying that but apparently they have the power to prevent that from happening, which would be a weird alignment with Elon Musk when you think about it, but I don't, it's probably not going to happen. But the issue there, though, and the reason you might want to think about that, is that these two companies are the ultimate example of competitors and partners right, they're the co-op petition thing, and in this article, they have some cool graphs, some good graphs, and one of them shows the.

01:37:15
This is something I think it came out with the Google anti-heterosyromy hearings, where Google has given figures for how good they're doing or how well they're doing with Gemini and depending on how you look at this, it's really really good or really bad. But they're like half an open AI, maybe from a usage perspective. But the thing you have to remember about Google is they're giving Gemini AI advanced away to basically everybody. So you buy like a Pixel phone, you get it for a year. If you buy like Chromebook Plus, you get it for a year, whatever it is. So that stuff might run into a wall in the near term. But OpenAI's numbers are off the charts, like really good. They're just upward, you know, like rocket trajectory. And Microsoft's co-pilot numbers are the co-pilot right, the AI chatbot thing I've never grown like. They're 20 million compared to 300 million monthly average users or weekly whatever numbers.

01:38:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um, and that's a big problem. That seems to be true of most other models, like my debate here is is open ai that good, or do they have the brand recognition?

01:38:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, I think it's a little bit of the first one and a lot of the last one. For sure, um, I don't know how, I don't know. Well, there must be objective opinions about this from people who actually use these things.

01:38:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But the the problem is yeah, I don't know how objective they are, brother, like I'm always asking folks what are they using and why are they using it? And and they could never put a finger down on because it moves so fast it changes.

01:38:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It does this. You know, like brad this morning to me said oh, I've been like addicted to this cursor ai thing and I was like okay, but um yeah, it's great, but you know it has been out for months like I think there's an illusion that we're moving fast and it's open.

01:38:57
Ai that's creating that illusion with constant announcements I, yeah, I feel like the ultimate, the end game here is pretty obvious, which is that these things will all be roughly in the same place at some point, right, and that it's it is going to come down to marketing and partnerships and deals to get into different places and very effective.

01:39:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Fud right like well, that's marketing.

01:39:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's marketing, yes. Um, so open ai is clearly winning the race right now and in for microsoft. It's a little bit awkward because they've taken OpenAI products. This is a little harsh, but it kind of rebranded them as co-pilot products. They build on top of it. For sure, they talk about the secret sauce they have and they do extra stuff and they have all the Microsoft 365 tie-in stuff, which is great and very good for them and for corporate customers etc. But they do things like give away things that OpenAI charges for, and none of this has moved the needle, and I think this is the in the Microsoft space. We're very happy with the fact that Microsoft finally has a good brand for something Like Microsoft is horrible at branding.

01:40:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, Thanks GitHub. Yeah, I mean whatever, but they ran with it right for something like microsoft is horrible at branding.

01:40:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah thanks, github, you know. Yeah, I mean whatever, but they took, they ran with it, right, like they did that with surface right. Surface was this kind of stupid thing that nobody wanted, it was expensive and they moved it into something else that's less expensive and stupid doesn't matter. But surface is a good brand. It was. You know.

01:40:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Skype was a good brand, xbox is a good brand but they also over utilize them, like they do sully the brand, in the sense that they use the name everywhere.

01:40:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the company that named everything they were making Windows, something, including something called Windows Media Player for Mac, which you had to know no one would want. I mean, think so, yes, this is what happens when you can't do something right your entire life, and when you get it right, you just beat it to death but it doesn't seem to be working. And I think you know this is not an epiphany. I mean, this is obvious. These two companies are going to have. It's going to be ugly, you know what I mean. Like this ends badly.

01:41:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I mean you hope that they I mean clearly the press is for Microsoft to have a good enough model that you're simply not dependent on open AI. I don't know that that's come true yet, but I also don't know that we have a good assessment strategy anyway, Right, I think so much of this stuff is perception of the model, not reality of the model. I think you're right. It turns out to be what the product is every time yeah.

01:41:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this is true of anything but ai, it's it's um, the easiest thing to try. So someone will use one chat bot and ask us some questions like, oh, look at this thing, it's terrible, it's the worst. And then they move on to something else and maybe they get a good answer, someone else, and they use it for a while and they're like this is good and it's like, well, what about that other thing? Like oh, that's garbage. Like well, when did you use it? It was like 36 hours ago. That's way too much time. You don't have an opinion anymore. Like these things have been improving so fast.

01:41:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah well, no, I again, I'm I'm not convinced that they are. I believe that is part of the hype process. Okay, that's fair enough, right, because it's really hard to measure improvement that's right.

01:42:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I don't. Yeah, I don't know, maybe they'll you know, I'm sure someone has already ported chat gpt to the commodore 64 or whatever you know I don't know, I played doom on my dishwasher last month, so yeah, I love it.

01:42:17
That's good um, for some reason, every story today has ties to this google antitrust case, which was not actually part of the show notes. But Motorola was it last week recently announced their new phones, which normally I wouldn't pay too much attention to. But the Razr phones are kind of cool. There's a little compact style. You know flip phone, the original cool phone, yeah, but now in smartphone form it's cool.

01:42:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love the Moto Xs too. When Google first bought them, they were excellent.

01:42:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they used to do like the wood on the outside and all these different. Yeah, yeah, remember that. Yeah, yeah, it was fun Like I had a bamboo cover like for one, so they make a flip now.

01:42:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's kind of interesting.

01:42:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're cool. So, but the reason I wrote about this particular thing is they have partnered with four is it four or five? Four different companies for the AI features in their phone, and this came out during what Apple should have done. Yeah, well, they will. This. It is what Apple's going to do, by the way. So, but, but for now, perplexity has been trying to get on phones for the past couple of years and Google has been blocking this, right. So Google, I didn't know that, really, yeah, so this came out during the antitrust remedy hearing. So Google, which is trying to complain to the court that we should just be allowed to do what we've always done, is doing what they've always done in search, but they're doing it with AI. So what they want is for all of the phone makers to bundle Gemini, not to bundle open AI or perplexity or anthropic or whatever else. And they've been successful Wow, in the midst of an antitrust lawsuit For that exact thing, or bundling, or perplexity or anthropic or whatever else. And they've been successful.

01:43:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But because this court case Wow, in the midst of an antitrust lawsuit, for that exact thing.

01:43:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Or bundling? No, I know it's. You know pot kettle black. Or, as you know, the old Greg Kinnear joke. You know it's like riding a bike. You know it's easy to fall into this behavior, right, yeah. But now this behavior, right, yeah, um, but now this stuff is out in the public, and so moto, uh, motorola, announced this new phones. They have some variety of ai features, some of which seem kind of interesting, some of which are like whatever, but they've been very specific mostly about which ais they're using for eat, which features. So they've partnered with google, meta, microsoft and perplexity, and they're using them in different ways. This will be the first. These will be the first phones that actually allow you to use perplexity as a chat bot on a phone that's built in, like it's going to be built in. It's going to be able to replace search.

01:44:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is great. I'm so excited. Yeah, it's really interesting. That's what I do on the desktop now.

01:44:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and congrats to Modo for actually being clever about the implementation.

01:44:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So the reason this is good, like this, what this is is a good example of something that's hard to prove to people otherwise right. So when you think about antitrust, it could be Microsoft with IE and they're like what are you complaining about? They made browsers free. That's a good thing. Or Google search is the best, like who cares? If they're you know they do special deals with all these companies. It's the only choice. And blah, blah, blah, whatever. Like who cares, and it's like well, who cares? It's like when you see what happens when you don't allow that. This is like like innovation occurs. Now, it doesn't mean every one of these is good, it doesn't mean any of them are good. It just means, all of a sudden, when you are given choices, you know things can happen and those things that can happen might not be the things that that dominant company would ever want to happen, not just because it's not their product, but because it's just from a business standpoint.

01:45:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it doesn't make sense Like why would I disrupt my search market, which is actually the ad space I sell around your search? Because you're going to use a chat bot instead? I don't know where to put the ads.

01:45:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's why they sat on AI, because they designed or invented, or whatever, a lot of this stuff years ago and we're like this works really good and it also makes Google search way less viable, so they sat on it. You know so companies that aren't trying to protect a dominant product don't sat on it. You know so. Companies that aren't trying to protect a dominant product don't sit on it. You know they go forward. So, anyway, again I want to be super clear. I'm not saying any of this is any good, but I am saying some of it looks pretty good, like like this seems pretty good, like and the overall kind of strategy or whatever it is like. Yeah, and they're doing a manual version of this orchestrator thing that I've been talking about forever, which is we have these features we want to do, we have all these AIs we could use. What if we use this for this and this for this and this for this? Because those are the things that are good for those things.

01:46:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Sounds like something Apple should have done about a year ago, and it sounds like something Apple's going to do about two years from now.

01:46:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So 100% I mean, yeah, they'll get there and when they do it, they'll do it in that Apple way and it'll be great. Maybe It'll be shiny. It will be shiny and it will all buy new iPhones yeah, iphones, it will be fun. So the Duolingo thing man, god, these guys, I so, I use duolingo every day. I just surpassed like a two-year streak. Um, I hate this app so much. I hate it. Wait a minute. Well, I hate it every day now because you're using ai, is that why?

01:47:22
no, no. I just want to be clear about this thing. I I pay for it, I use, use it every day. It's like a taskmaster.

01:47:29
Yeah, it's like I'm in that boat going across the ocean and he's like have you tried the competitors? Like Babbel, I mean Yep, and I just keep going back like an idiot to this thing. And here's what happens. Dua Lugo is the big one. You know, I get stuck in this race. It's always someone named Susan, or like some woman who's studying English, maybe, and she lives in Spain, and she's like somehow got 30,000 points in one day when it's only possible to get maybe 2,000. And you know, it's like you just find yourself like every day going, you know, like it's just. It makes me insane. But I will say there was a time when I finished the lessons they had for Spanish and French and I went back and I think I did French the second time or something I don't remember. Now I will not live long enough to finish anything they do, because there's so much content there now.

01:48:23
They just added a bunch of stuff, and that's the thing. So the other day this blows my mind the CEO of this company announced internally that they're going to get rid of all of their contractors and replace them with AI.

01:48:37
And they're like no, no, don't worry. Don't worry, we're not getting rid of any of you guys. You guys are important, but we are going to teach you how to use AI to get rid of the repetitive stuff and make your lives easier and all that stuff. And yeah, probably in six years we're going to get rid of YouTube, but the point is, for now you have nothing to worry about. But he uses this industry language.

01:48:55
I read this to my wife, just to kind of see how this read to her, and he said one of the best decisions we made recently was replacing a slow manual content creation process with one powered by AI. And then you hear the record scratch and you're like what does that mean? You mean you got rid of people, a slow, manual content creation process. This is the thing where I said remember like I can make graphics for my website using AI.

01:49:19
I can say give me four images of this thing. If one of them is perfect, I'll use it. If one of them is close, I'll say this is pretty good, but make it a little different. And then it gives me four more and just doesn't cost me a cent and I have an image. But I also have a friend, one of my best friend's wives who's a graphic artist, and if I went to her and I said make me four high quality photographic quality images of this thing that I'm going to describe to you with my mouth, do it in 10 seconds, and then I'm going to tell you to correct one of them and give me four more, can you do that? And she'll be like what are you talking about?

01:49:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't do that. I'm like, right, I'll see you in a month.

01:49:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
She is the slow manual content creation process that the guy from Duolingo just mentioned. It's impossible. The other thing he said decades to scale our content to more learners. Oof, scale, that's good. Anyway, they're getting rid of people, is the message. Here's the problem with this. Okay, he told employees this. They posted this letter they meaning Duolingo, the company, not like a leaker to LinkedIn like they were proud of it. And then one day later, they announced 148 new language courses, all of them created with AI. You're like wow. And they literally referenced the scale comment. It said our first 100 courses took 12 years to create and now, in about a year, we're able to create and launch almost 150 new courses.

01:50:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
All right, Now this is the question of quality. It's a course, course, but is it good?

01:50:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
here's the problem. Yeah, probably it's just as good. It's probably just as good because they stole the content that was created by humans.

01:50:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, ingested it and now and now this reminds me, like we've all, uh, the notion that like, uh, some number of monkeys, given some number of years, could create shakespeare's. Of course, nonsense, but everyone's familiar with that. Everyone is likewise familiar with the fact that there are only a certain number of notes in the world, and so that if you threw them into a blender, you would come up with stairway to heaven, which actually, by the way, is the way they made that song. But anyway, and you know whatever, the works of the Beatles.

01:51:27
There are currently many monkeys working on recreating Shakespeare at monkeyszip. I own one of them and he's doing a fabulous job. Well, you know what? Let me tell you something that that monkey doesn't scale and slow content creation. That's all I'm saying. Anyway, nice you could. There's no doubt that AI trained on the music of the world will create music that we like. It will be similar, it will be nearly identical in some cases, but of course, they're going to be able to.

01:51:54
I said this about Call of Duty. Richard has been talking about this notion of using AI to create maps or open world environments where there's like an infinite number of quests and new characters and new things happening. And I think about it in terms of Call of duty and it's like look, we have this body of work that dates back 20 years plus. Now we know what multiplayer maps resonated with. People feed it into the ai and say make more of these. Yeah, and I gotta tell you, the problem with this is, as a, as a user of this or a gamer, I guess, guess I hear that and I think, oh God, please do that, because some of the maps that humans create are garbage and they take a long time, they don't scale, and then a new Call of Duty comes out and you're like, all right, hooray, let's see what they got. And you're like, oh, six maps, that's all you got. Why can't Call of Duty launch with 150 maps?

01:52:45
it will, you know so this is outrageous all right, this freaks me out, this is horrible, and it's the way of the world.

01:52:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, it's absolutely the way everything's gonna go you probably the people who made, uh, you know, horseless carriages. Yeah, uh are probably, you know, for a long time.

01:53:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
In fact, there was a great blog post that said the original automobiles steam automobiles were designed to look exactly like carriages of course, just like all of apple's uis were meant to look like a felt, you know cover, you know game thing or whatever, and it's like this is how you let.

01:53:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is how people make transitions at some time, at some point, the buggy whip manufacturers are gonna have to find a new thing to make.

01:53:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's sad, it's bad, it's terrible, but it's the way of the world. Let me ask you this, though why do you hate horses so much?

01:53:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like what's the have you ever had?

01:53:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
a horse, yeah, I mean yes, that thing could kill you by twitching its tail.

01:53:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It doesn't make any sense. They're expensive, they poop everywhere, they're mean they, they have you given they have their own ideas. But even if you have a sweet horse, it's not as easy as the thing in your garage right now.

01:53:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right it took a while to get there, but it did. I don't think anyone's aiming to go back.

01:54:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's, it's challenging. Look, nobody should lose their job ever. That's for so many of us. That's not just our kind of self worth, it's how we live.

01:54:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nobody thinks about this Like so, probably cause it's a hard problem. I mean, you know, when all the Appalachian jobs from coal and steel and whatever else, we're going away, you know it's like, well, what are we going to do? Like I, my family, has been doing this for generations. This is, I have kids and a family and a house and whatever. And I'm living in a place where now there's fracking occurring or whatever it is, and it's like, well, you should learn to you know, write software code. Yeah, no, my life has prepared me for that path. And then, yeah, two seconds later, ai comes along like well now, what am I?

01:54:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well now, what am I going to do? Hey, forget that thing.

01:54:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We told you. Yeah, I don't know, how do you feel about building data centers? I mean, could you do that? Yeah, I don't know, there's no good answers here, but this Duolingo thing freaks me out, because one of the things I'm going to do after I get off this show is go open up my app that later and use this app that I hate so much and but it's also kind of inevitable, you know, yeah, it's brutal it's hard, it's really hard.

01:55:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't. It is hard. I don't know what the answer is. Yeah, no, no, I'm right.

01:55:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The problem, you know what? There is no answer. That's the problem. The the net goal here is that the impact of any technology will be positive in the long run for most, if not all, people. It doesn't always happen, but that's the. There's always going to be those short-term problems that no one wants to think about, because there is a way we're doing things now and those jobs are going to go away. It happens every time. Some of the jobs are ridiculous. I always use the example of like the stagecoach driver or the woman in the tiny skirt walking out of the tray selling cigarettes and tea and stuff in the back of a plane. We don't see that anymore. Maybe in asia, I don't know, but we don't see that anymore. It's a stupid job that shouldn't exist and it doesn't mean I wanted to take it away from the woman whose job that was. That's not the point. But we look at it now from the future and we say, oh, I can't believe we did that, but, but we did.

01:56:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Meanwhile, my monkey is trying to recreate Shakespeare. How's it going?

01:56:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Not a single ear out of the sky.

01:56:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We just got all of the four-letter words in Shakespeare. My monkey's pretty good. Let me see. Here's a sentence he wrote.

01:56:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I utter a coat of trees to sate how's wage while ray asa have been axed, that's close okay that reads like an insider blog post, uh, by which I mean poorly um look he made up canvas revenue, liking assessed strange and accuse astray. Astrayia is a good one. Yeah, it's a word. I'm not. I'm not even sure that's true, but it's okay. Sorrier is a tough one on this story.

01:56:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah the word sorrier appears in shakespeare one time. Wow, the monkeys have written it 17 times. It was first written by rapo criskel four weeks ago, but mine did it as well. If you, some of the monkeys, are not working super hard, if you both, yes some of them are working the ones those are the contractors.

01:57:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Ai is coming for you, buddy. Some are typing with their feet banana.

01:57:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
See you later, but see, this is my monkey. He has earned many things, including a gold typewriter I.

01:57:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I like that he has a jaunty little hat. Yeah, he earned that cowboy hat. I also like that somebody cut the corners off of his sandwich.

01:57:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:57:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He also earned that.

01:57:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:57:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, he doesn't have. The typing style is a little odd. It's random. Is he wearing mittens?

01:57:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know. He's monkey paws, little monkey paws, oh boy, anyway. Yeah, that's my monkey. Would you like to touch my monkey?

01:57:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
wow, and now hr is on the phone. What's that from? That's mike, uh myers. Right, mike myers.

01:57:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The monkey now is the time on sprockets when we dance. This is the time when we dance. I always do. Yes, saturday night live yeah, yep, yeah.

01:58:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So we have an hr filter alongside the profanity filter we need that, I need that, I need the mike myers filter.

01:58:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh god elbows up um, this is just like this week in apple intelligence at this point. Uh, just more reorgs over there. It looks like what my apple is finally doing is orging AI, the way they've orged everything in the company, which is very different from the way like Microsoft, or probably Google, does things, which is, you know, in Microsoft you have like a Windows team. Right In Apple, they actually just have they don't do that, they don't do it per product. They have these cross product teams and it's part of the reason they're able to make these experiences that work across the different platforms right. So they might have a company, like a group, that's working on I don't know what. There's definitely well, some ai thing or whatever, right, and you're like, okay, well, where can we use this? It's like, well, iphone, ipad, mac, apple watch or something you know whatever it might be. So they just continue reorging and god love them. I don't know they'll get there um, we have a lot of.

01:59:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It speaks to how anomalous the apple intelligence announcement was, that they didn't already have a team in place that he yes, yes, yes, yes, they hadn't built anything.

01:59:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, all right, so microsoft earnings are out, so I'm gonna skip the rest of this, ai oh they are.

01:59:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh boy, here we.

01:59:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We waited long enough Only 13 minutes after close yeah, revenue, like I said, less than $90 billion. Yeah, less than $90 billion, which is what Google had. Revenue was $70.1 billion up 13% double digits. Net income almost $26 billion up 18% again double digits. I need to go look at their data to get anything super important out of here. Like I said, the big thing for me is going to be what they're spending on AI and how they address it. If they do, we'll see Windows OEM and devices revenue increased 3%. That's honestly good for Windows Content and services from Xbox is up 8% Search and news advertising revenue, excluding traffic acquisition costs, which means that's not revenues, because revenues it doesn't matter. Oh, no, that is revenues.

02:00:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess it's just not net, it's not profits. It's just cost them so much.

02:00:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So they didn't make anything. Yeah, they're probably giving that money away. Microsoft 365 continues to go gangbusters double digit across commercial and consumer. Uh, so it's as it always is. Is what it looks like to me. Um, I mean, do they have typically?

02:00:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
double digit increases every quarter. Yeah, that's amazing.

02:00:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is low double digit I mean low, you know 10 to 15. But yes, yep, yeah, you shouldn't be able to grow this much when you're this big.

02:00:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's amazing yeah, I mean, that's the thing. It's 10 of billions, it's not, you know many billions yeah almost 30 billion from productivity and business processes.

02:00:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's microsoft 365. Um intelligent cloud, which is azure, was 20, almost 27 billion. Um that one's up 21%, by the way.

02:01:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's crazy, microsoft 365 part was up 10% Because the AI wave was about hey, our cloud growth is slowing. This is a perfect time to jump on another horse to keep the numbers high.

02:01:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep. So for people like me it's of course personal computing.

02:01:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And that's a smaller increase 6%. At least it's increasing. I mean the smallest part of the company. You know it's 13.4 billion. I'm trying to, isn't that?

02:01:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
funny. That's the smallest part of Microsoft. It's the part that used to be.

02:01:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Microsoft yeah X gaming revenue overall up 5% year over year. Hardware revenue declined again 6%. By the way, that was probably double digits before, so that might be evening out.

02:01:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Finally, I guess you bought them out at some point. Uh, and that's most of what I can tell you right now, because I need nearly 10 billion in stock rebuybacks like wow. Remember when they were spending all that money on building new data centers?

02:02:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
dividends and share repurchases 9.7 billion in one quarter.

02:02:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah I'll have to compare that to. Yeah, I think we talked about this last week, but I went back and looked at the amount of money microsoft had earned in a fiscal year right after their antitrust ruling in the united states and then looked at one quarter of earnings from google, apple, uh, microsoft and and it's an order of magnitude difference the size of these companies. They're not comparable. This is completely different. $70 billion in the scope of big tech will put them in third place, I guess, behind Amazon. No fourth place, sorry, it will be Amazon, apple, google and then Microsoft from a revenue scale, so fourth biggest company by revenue this quarter Approximately 80 times the size it was.

02:02:54
No, not by margin, but yeah, I mean, I guess we could look at net income and kind of see where that falls. But this is a humongous company.

02:03:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, making lots of money and successful, stupid, stupidous company, yeah, and successful, stupid, stupid big company.

02:03:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, but again how many layoffs do they have in that quarter?

02:03:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the thing. The trick's going to be in the nuance and the nuance is going to come a little bit in the post earnings conference call. That doesn't start for another 45 minutes, I think, and then the 10Q filing. So I can't do that now. Obviously I'm on a podcast, but I'll look through that stuff, we'll see. We'll see what, if anything, I can pull out of this. But next week, next week earnings learnings.

02:03:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
All right, and it'll only be 5 am when I'm on. What time is?

02:03:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it. I don't want to take up too much time. There's a bunch of other stuff in AI. This is not a big learning of any kind, but every week, when I put these show notes together, it's like AI, AI, AI, AI, AI. It's like geez louise. So I just pulled two, maybe three of these things that I think are important, because this is just appearing everywhere, right? So? Google doing AI overviews in YouTube, Spotify using AI to make playlists, Adobe using AI, obviously in their models, but now adding third-party model support. Duckduckgo has a thing called DuckAI, which nobody knows about, which supports real-time switching between different models. So you don't have to have a new conversation.

02:04:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what Perplexity does. Now they, instead of giving you all the models to choose from manually, it says we'll pick the best model. Yeah, which?

02:04:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
is what people want.

02:04:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and then one of the how do they measure best?

02:04:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, yeah, I don't know, and maybe it's cheapest from, maybe best means yeah right, exactly best for them, maybe.

02:04:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe it's also still excellent.

02:04:44
I do kind of miss the ability to say I want to use jmi for this yeah, yeah, we get a payoff from um, notebook lm, which kind of came out of nowhere about a year and a half ago. Um, just the creepy ai generated podcast with the two hosts, johnsley, talking back and forth with each other, uh, has been updated continually since that point. Um, they just released, they have something called audio. Well, no, I'm sorry, that feature is called audio overviews. That thing now supports over 50 languages, wow, so you know, for example, and Spotify. So the Spotify AI playlist when I was mixing things up, do I mention? I don't even mention Pocket Cast.

02:05:22
So Pocket Cast released AI generated podcast transcripts for those podcasts that don't have their own transcripts. Right, this is something Apple added about a year ago to Apple Podcasts, but only on Apple devices, right? So Pocket Cast is cross-platform. And so I looked at that today and, yeah, guess what? It's great. You know what I mean. Of course it is, of course it is, of course it is. And this is what's happening. It's crazy. So now what you can do is write something or steal something. Don't write it. Why would you write something? Ai will write it. Right, get something written. Feed it into notebook lm. Create an audio view overview, which is a podcast. Translate it into Notebook LM. Create an audio overview, which is a podcast. Translate it into 50 different languages 50 different languages. Then feed that into Pocket Cast and let it make an audio, a transcript of it.

02:06:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It makes you wonder why are we doing?

02:06:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
all this trouble. It should be the original source material. That's how you know that it works. Done.

02:06:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Round trips Nailed it, but not really. I honestly still believe that this is good for podcasting. This isn't bad, this is good for understanding content, but human. This isn't going to eliminate human crafted stuff. In fact, I think we'll make it more valuable because it's going to be more costly to do, it's going to take more energy, and if it's better be more costly to do, it's going to take more energy and if it's better, it'll be more valuable.

02:06:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Anyone who's ever gone to a farmer's market or bazaar or whatever it is and you can buy homemade goods whatever they are. Like. Here they make these intricate baskets. People toil away at this for days and then it's like here you go, 20 pesos, cause like 25, nothing and they spent half their life on it. You know what I mean. Like those types of things. It could be anything. It could be a drawing, like you'll see people.

02:07:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They get more valuable.

02:07:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, those things will become more of the. Those will be the things people save. Those would be like the keepsakes.

02:07:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Our son studied German in high school. He could be doing Duolingo, but instead he pays a tutor a couple of hours a week.

02:07:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What's wrong with this guy?

02:07:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because it's better. Of course it's better. It's much more expensive. So for people who want a cheap, simple thing, Duolingo is fine. That's right.

02:07:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's for the masses, but if you're willing to pay, right.

02:07:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So my wife does Duolingo, but she also does a. It's like a Zoom based thing. Yeah, well, you human being, if you go out in mexico city and you go to your taco bar, and you talk with the guys.

02:07:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're gonna get a better oh my god, yes. Plus you learn all the slang and how to swear close. So now, when someone cuts me off, I'm like my daughter.

02:07:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She came back and said now you speak spanish. She said well, I do I swear in spanish. I have to be very careful because when I say things people get upset because I speak a very colloquial mexican spanish.

02:08:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, that is pretty profane yeah, the us equivalent is you're from boston. Yeah, hey, what are you doing? You're like a, you're a mex hole, as we call them yeah yeah, yeah but, she's fluent right in a real world way.

02:08:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right that fluid and fluid.

02:08:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No ai is ever going to teach you that right, I've a polish friend who learned english from an english person, and so she speaks english with a beautiful accent. I bet with an english accent yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:08:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so I think ai is. I don't think AI is a bad thing, no, I don't either, and in some ways it makes human created podcasts, I'm hoping, more valuable. We'll see.

02:08:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I say this all the time but like I keep talking about AI In my crowd, there's a lot of convincing that has to occur. They're still not sold on this.

02:09:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're very People are scared, and rightly so People are scared, but I'm always like no, no, you don't understand.

02:09:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like, if you're rejecting this at this point, you're just not paying attention. You got to get in there. Blah, blah, blah it's what's happening? And then it's like well, how do you use AI? That's ridiculous.

02:09:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I mean I Before the show, if we have time. Yeah, Before Intelligent Machines. Last week on Intelligent Machines we had a good friend of mine, Harper Reed, talk about how he uses Claude code to code. I played with it. I do In the intervening week. I will show you what Claude did. Okay, it's mind blowing.

02:09:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I won't do it in your show. It's funny the the way you say that like what have you done?

02:09:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What have you done? What you did is in seconds. Took what took me months to code.

02:09:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, so my, yeah, my, my experience, so that's the one area where I have used it. And if you think about it writing software code, writing text, I mean, what's the difference really? You're creating something, whatever I mean.

02:09:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's not exactly carving a long ship by hand.

02:10:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean the way I write it is but. But okay, fair enough, whatever. But for some reason I can't make that leap yet. I'm not actively blocking it, I just don't. It never occurs to me, you know, to do that. You know, for example, the the transcript from today's call will come up for the Microsoft thing. I'm not going to feed it into AI and be like summarize this for me. I'm going to read the damn thing Like to me, like that's how I do things.

02:10:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you know the second standard, like after you read it. You might do that and I bet you you'll get some interesting points out of it.

02:10:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Someone on Friday asked me a question I do like a weekly calm thing about like trusting AI, and his opinion was that like we were never going to be able to trust AI and I said the problem is we already do trust AI, so you don't. I get it, but you're the exception, or you think you don't, while still actually trusting AI, in fact using it, and you just don't realize it.

02:10:49
So when I explicitly use, I have what I would consider it's not a danger sign, but it's something just to be mindful of. Ai has been so successful for me with the coding stuff. I don't use it to write giant blocks of code or anything. I write code and then I'm like, could you improve this? Could you do this, whatever? And what happens is that causes you to trust it and that trust makes you a little bit blind to when it screws up. That's true. So I can't. There's no way I can demonstrate this here. But imagine a giant block of code. Could you make this more efficient, more concise, whatever? And it returns a single line of code. Could you make this more efficient, more concise, whatever? And it returns a single line of code. And if I'm being perfectly honest with you and I try, I would A for a fact I would never write that code, ever, even being apprised of it.

02:11:40
Now, I don't like it. It's too. It doesn't read right to me, but I, I test it, I know what the outcome's supposed to be and it works. So I'm like great, and, and there it's in my app. Fine, but the thing is flash forward two weeks I get another similar code, whatever. I'm like awesome, I'm running, I'm debugging and blah, blah, blah and I'm like I'm not getting the answer. It's 50% wrong. Like 50% of the time it's wrong. It's always going one way when it should be branching somewhere. So now I have to go and look at the code that it generated that I had just trusted and assumed by this point it would just be right. And I have to parse this and I can't read this very well because it's super terse.

02:12:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I have to look up how tertiary you know, tertiary area operators say what does this mean? That's what you do. You can ask it to say okay, do not ask a thief how he stole your stereo.

02:12:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So anyway, what I figured out was it was wrong oh interesting one of the one of the branches did the wrong thing.

02:12:41
It was just wrong, so I was able to fix it and this, this is what people will say. They're like, oh see, you need a human there and like, yeah, you do. But the problem is, most people use ai are just normal, mainstream human beings. They will trust, already do trust, and they are not going to do this fact checking and that is a concern. Um, until it gets so good it doesn't matter anymore.

02:13:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I guess I don't know, but it also speaks to a younger generation of developer that are using these tools and doing the two way street back and forth on. Is this correct? What are the side effects? Like you're pretty much putting one LLM against another.

02:13:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah Well, that's like a Stephen Wright joke. You know, I bought a humidifier and a dehumidifier. Put them in the same room and let them fight it out, All right. So it looks like you're summarizing the I've gone.

02:13:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I gave perplexity and chat gpt the microsoft results. They came up with fairly similar uh conclusions so we've got. Microsoft is nailing. It is that what it says demonstrate robust growth across its cloud and productivity segments, driven by strong demand for azure and microsoft 365. Significant investments in ai infrastructure underscore the company's commitment to maintaining its competitive edge, that's kind of bland.

02:13:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This tells me you did this with the press release. Is that what this is? Yeah, it's a summary. Yeah, because this reads like something microsoft would write.

02:13:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It feels like the press release, of course it is. It is open AI. Let me see this is perplexity Right and their brain mode says reinforces position as a leader in cloud and AI, with Azure's AI-driven growth outpacing expectations, companies' diversified revenue streams spanning Office 365, linkedin, dynamics, windows, xbox and advertising provide resilience against market fluctuations. This is actually a little bit better, to be honest.

02:14:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The substantial shareholder returns and robust profit it's wordy yeah, yeah, it's true it's a little. Yeah, that little strategic partnership with open ai bit is interesting because it did. Did it get that from the press release?

02:14:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I I first refusal rights, a new ai for leadership?

02:14:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know like that's kind of the new open AI deal.

02:14:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, but we, I know it is, you're right, but what I'm saying is was that in the press release?

02:14:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't imagine yeah, well, it may. You know, perplexity does in fact use, uh, you know, searches and so forth.

02:15:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I didn't it's getting. It's getting additional information right from outside of the. Yeah, okay, so actually that's didn't it's getting.

02:15:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's getting additional information right from outside of the yeah, okay, so actually that's good because that's providing context that's what I mean.

02:15:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's providing context.

02:15:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Exactly that to me let me ask it uh, should I buy microsoft stock?

02:15:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
would you like to give me access to your checking account?

02:15:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we can handle that for you. Uh, it's telling me, this is the deep research. So it's doing that deep, seek thing where it explains what it's doing while it's doing it. Oh boy, this might take a while, so I will let you continue on. What is this? This is crazy. This is kind of the thing that is the latest thing. This tells it what it shows its work. Basically, it's like thinking dot dot dot.

02:15:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, Thinking dot dot dot yeah, thinking, dot, dot dot.

02:15:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I will review microsoft's valuation metrics dividend yield, market cap, pe ratio, forward eps revenue forecast. Okay, the user is asking, let me start by looking at the search result this is stop, just right now. I would like stop. Put a graph in there. Stop, I can't keep up.

02:16:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look how fast it's going, holy cow leo, I just want to remind you and everyone else. You asked it a yes or no question yeah, should I buy that's.

02:16:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's all it's showing us how much of data like sancho nadella was born in india in 19. No, here it is a cautious buy for long-term investors. So yeah, wow, the stock's current pullback seven percent down year to date likely represents a buying opportunity for investors with a three to five year horizon was the airplane or something.

02:16:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The guys like, uh, you know, tell me the story start at the beginning is okay.

02:16:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
First they were dinosaurs, you know, it's like okay, but uh I don't know, I think you know, I don't know it makes mistakes, but you know what. Humans make mistakes too, and in greater proportion, oh for sure I don't know in many cases, but it covers it well.

02:16:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
In language it looks like an accenture report and it will only enable us to make those errors at scale yeah, faster than ever before.

02:17:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ladies and gentlemen, you thought we were inefficient but now, now we're killing it all right, we only have half an hour left, so I know I got sorry.

02:17:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't want to, so let me, I'm gonna be quick, it's a one item, xbox line oh right, well, there's nothing to say there. There's a game called tower born, yeah it's available in preview.

02:17:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it a tower defense kind of a thing?

02:17:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
uh, the name is all I know about this thing, it is a side-scrolling brawler according to of course not a tower. That's why they called it tower, something, um, but the reason this is of note is it's actually an xbox exclusive, meaning xbox the platform, not the console. But uh, it's only you know xbox pc and game pass oh look, they're side-scrolling and they're brawling well, there you go. Uh, oh, this is old school, it's. It's kind of cool looking. Yeah, it is actually.

02:17:53
I kind of like that it's like, uh, if you took mortal combat and made it a side scroller, this is the thing I always said about overwatch, which was at a time when it was hard for computers or consoles whatever to generate these 3d graphics and everyone's moving fast. It's like they made this cartoon looking game. Like yeah, there you go. Like these are easy to draw, you know, and the action could be fast and you know whatever, but yeah, the animation is more important than the fidelity and plus I think it's kind of fun like it looks good absolutely yeah, that's kind of the lesson of the of the last few years.

02:18:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, this is the switch. That's what the switch taught us, right?

02:18:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, you guys are like trying to do 4k. Ak, what are you kidding me like? Yeah, here's an idea mode because of uncanny.

02:18:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Have a good game you don't want it to look more realistic because it is creepier. Yeah, let it be a little less realistic and it's more fun. All right, you are watching windows weekly friends, and I am glad you have put up with this for this long. It's almost over your pain. You're suffering your melons.

02:18:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I apologize yet on this episode.

02:18:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like I owe an apology somewhere no, we're so glad you're here, both winners and dozers. We do windows weekly every wednesday, 11 am. Pacific, 2 pm, eastern 1800, utc. We stream live uh on seven platforms. We're not on tiktok today for reasons.

02:19:08
But if you're in the club Discord, youtube, twitch I'm chatting with people in both those Xcom, facebook, linkedin and Kik and we're working on TikTok, so watch live if you want. But of course, we're also available on demand at twittv, slash www, on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Paul, it's time for the famous back of the book and your tip of the week all right, I'm going to be brief here again.

02:19:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I want to give richard the time he deserves. Um, I I don't remember this came up. I think I did this last friday, but I tried to. I was trying to dual boot Ubuntu with Windows on a Surface Laptop 7 Snapdragon right Got into not a blue screen of death, but a blue screen which meant that my recovery environment was corrupt or something.

02:19:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Blue screen of sadness, then yeah.

02:20:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So that kind of put the brakes on the Ubuntu thing. While I tried to figure this out so on Friday or Saturday, I don't remember when I just reset Well, I used the Surface Recovery media I'd previously created and ensured worked to recover the system, reinstall all my apps. I was 80% or something done with installing my apps. So I thought to myself you know, I should probably make sure that recovery environment works it did not.

02:20:25
So I was like, well, maybe I could live with this, it's okay, but of course I'm me, so I'm obsessing over this. And so Monday maybe, or Tuesday Monday, I think I was like, all right, I'm going to kill this thing again. And what I was going to do was use the Windows 11 on ARM ISO download, which doesn't have any of the drivers I was going to use the. Microsoft gives you the drivers, uh, for every service device, so that's a download. Right, I'm like I will just and that will, because I can go in and reformat the, I can pave the disk. I'll repartition the entire thing. It will have to recreate the recovery partition. This will work.

02:21:00
I had to copy lots of stuff back and forth and in the end what I realized was wait a minute, this surface driver thing is actually called surface drive and firmware. And in the end what I realized was wait a minute, this surface driver thing is actually called surface drive and firmware and it's an ex. Well, it's an msi, but it's an executable. You run it. I was like, I don't know, maybe before I blow this away, I should just run this thing and see what happens. It fixed it, yep. So I spent four days on this and untold hours, and I was getting ready to destroy it again and I suddenly realized wow, actually I can fix this without doing anything. So here's the moral of the story. Has nothing to do with anything I just said.

02:21:34
The details of what happened to me are not important. What's important is I do things correctly on my computer, that when this thing would not come back into windows and would not boot properly, I did not have a single data file anywhere on that computer that wasn't backed up to the cloud, and that the way I do things is designed to prevent data loss. And it worked like so. When this happened to me because it happened without warning, I was not expecting not to be able to get back in the windows. It was fine. I didn't have anything on my desktop, I didn't have anything in some random folder.

02:22:09
Everything important, the all the work I do in books, my work, stuff for work, you know, for the site or whatever, whatever it is is cloud synced. So, um, I, if I had to pave this thing, it would have wasted time, would have taken time, that that stinks, but I could have done. It would have been fine. And the important thing is I was never going to lose anything and that's like the best part of it. And I so rarely get to say anything like that because you know usually the way you learn a lesson is someone punches you in the face. You're like, okay, maybe I shouldn't do that anymore.

02:22:37
Um and your nose is exactly where you left it yeah, I've been punched enough times to know, so anyway, you can read the articles. It's it's a long story, but the outcome was short, um are you gonna forget dual booting now?

02:22:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, is that it?

02:22:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's over no, but so it's wednesday and we're driving or driving. Yeah, we're flying home on saturday and what I'm gonna, what I've done, is I dual booted ubuntu on just a normal x64 computer, and when I get home I will have more computers. I don't want to screw around again with an x64 yeah, don't try. Well, no, I'm gonna. No, I'm doing it on snapdragon, but I'm gonna wait till I get home.

02:23:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I will do it bravo, bully, bully for you, buddy. I guess sure you could run it on intel, but why?

02:23:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, if I was a commoner I would do that um no, I mean it's fine, um, okay, uh, firefox has a new update every but for four weeks. I think it's very quick, like I think the other browsers are six and they're four, or is it four and two, I don't remember but it's gonna say 17 minutes, but okay yeah, it's, it's. Yeah, if you use edge you you know it feels like zen browser updates almost weekly now yeah, it's more than that it's based on fire.

02:23:50
It's like they're training us just to get used to this, but at least then it's finally in 2.0, which is, yeah, pretty exciting, yeah um, two things of interest in this one. If you're a windows user, which you are, of course, uh, they've adapted the. I don't know actually nothing. I've not seen this. It this, it's like they call this UI pop-up windows acrylic style menus for pop-up windows which is the Windows 11 look and feel I've not seen it.

02:24:13
I've been running Firefox. I don't see it, but they're adding profile management. This one's rolling out like Microsoft rolls out stuff, so I actually haven't seen this one yet, but you've used profiles on other browsers. So if this was a sticking point for you, there were workarounds, like you know, they had those containers and things like that, but profile management is actually kind of what you want. You know different account, different bookmarks, different tabs, different browsing history, et cetera. You know school work. However, you want to mix things up, so that's pretty good. That said, don't use Firefox. Use Brave you idiot, come on. Brave you idiot, come on wake up, you should be using brave, brave is great, so that's my epic.

02:24:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
All right, sorry, roger, dude, we got, we're fine.

02:24:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Relax, I'm begging you, I'm sorry ladies and gentlemen, you see that guy on the right. You see the guy in the lumberjack shirt. He is now going to tell you what's coming up on run as radio. Are you living in an apartment in melbourne? Is this like your place?

02:25:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
no, this uh, this is a hotel room, but it's got like a washing machine and a kitchen thing behind you looks like a.

02:25:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's really nice you got like a heat chamber or something like equipment, yeah you know, I stayed in a hotel in tasmania that had a bread maker and the maid, when they came in and made your bed, would also restock the bread maker. So they set the timer for 7 am and you'd have fresh bread when you woke up. Oh, that's nice. That's the coolest thing I ever.

02:25:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I the only hotel that I've ever been in that did that but I thought it was pretty cool and I've been in lots of hotels with kitchens, but this one's actually equipped like it has a knife block that has yeah I see it and you could.

02:25:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You could live there, man. You can move in this.

02:25:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think it's kind of a long stay kind of place. I'm on the 36th floor here, so I'm way out there nice yeah, yeah I.

02:25:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was in sydney for the melbourne cup. That's as close as I got.

02:26:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well on run as this week I talked to carolina katakura kata carry, and this is the fourth show I've done with her, so I've sort of been following her career for a while now and she changed jobs. She'd been an independent consultant for a long time and she's now joined a large firm in finland. She's based in finland uh, that's a financial group where she's now. Her title is head of modern work. So I mean, modern work has been this theme we've been doing on run-ins for the while, for, just from a system and in perspective, like, what are we talking about?

02:26:34
It was mostly about remote work during the pandemic, but now it's come into this mixture of we're going to spend a certain amount of time in the office, a certain amount of time remote, and how do you unify all the work strategies around that? What do they do different when they're in the office? And so the conversation very much focused on how the contemporary tooling and network demands and security privileges are needed so that you have this symmetry between everyone working remotely from their homes and everybody together, in sort of a bullpen setting or a meeting room setting, being able to collaborate. So yeah, she's, I mean so, immersed in it now that literally has been hired to do it full time for a large financial organization. It's a great conversation.

02:27:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Lovely, lovely. Now you promised us the beginning of the show, a little bit of a different whiskey segment.

02:27:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I had a whiskey experience this week. Friends Like it doesn't happen all that often, but it was sort of a friend of a friend moment that I was out for dinner and he said I really need you to meet my friend Josh. And then Josh said come meet me at Casa Divinas, which is a store in Melbourne which I highly recommend. While it's called the House of Wine because they used to do custom bottlings of wine, the proprietor, jose, has really switched to a focus on whiskey and rum and tequila. Oh, this looks super cool. It's a nice place, like a place you'd like to hang out at. Yeah, it's very enjoyable, uh. And. And what's funny is I I came in met josh for the first time. We chatted for a bit, we were talking to the lady behind the counter and I'm like well, I do this whiskey bit, so I'm looking for a whiskey for for this week.

02:28:18
And jose literally came from down, from upstairs down, and said what is this voice? I'm hearing? You know this giant radio voice, uh, and then you want to come back upstairs with the? And we went into his private collection, oh, uh and, and started digging. He had he, he's a proper collector of whiskey, uh, which is to say it's all the different editions. So he had 30 or 40 years worth of different Lafrois and then, like, this was the bottling in Japan. This is the bottling from this thing.

02:28:53
This is when the licensing rules didn't allow for 750 mil, so these are 700s. There was a limit of a maximum of a liter, so this was three additions each 333 milliliters, like that kind of madness. Each 333 milliliters. Like that kind of madness. Essentially and you know it's always a challenge when you have someone who's really interested in whiskey, sort of looking at your collection it's like what can I give you you've never had? Or that there's a new experience. And Jose pulled one on me I've never experienced before. I literally had to research it afterwards and it was actually bad whiskey. Oh, like but. But bad whiskey from good distilleries oh, okay, so and the ultimate example of this was a.

02:29:35
It was a scottish whiskey, a glengar 21, and he says try, this gives me just a half an ounce pour, a little tiny pour, and Josh got one too and I smell it and it smells like dish soap.

02:29:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But wasn't this maybe? Maybe it was the Whiskey Abbey?

02:29:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, no, this is later in the story, okay, okay, when I taste it it's literally like having my mouth washed out by lavender soap. It was unbelievable how bad it was, it was just shocking. And now I've gone on to read about this issue called sapification. Oh, it turned into soap, it did. And the issue here is and it exists in all forms of whiskey is when you cut the whiskey with water before bottling. So it never happens with cast-strength whiskeys. Oh, interesting.

02:30:30
But there is an issue where if you dilute with water quickly and then immediately bottle, the way the phenols break down against the ionization of the water can end up making soapy compounds that will ruin the batch. Wow, like as a whole. And so that some of the pieces I've read have said that if you're reducing from a, you know you're coming out of the barrel at 55, 57, you're going to go down to 43. It should take a month of adding water slowly and letting it establish and really arguably outgassing, like releasing certain compounds, before you put it in bottles. But if you're in a hurry and this was his argument, this was an old edition of 21, bottled in the 1990s and they were in a rush and they immediately they cut it hard, you know a lot of water, bottled it and ruined the whole batch.

02:31:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did he know ahead of time that it was going to be saponified?

02:31:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, oh no, no, ahead of time that it was going to be saponified. No, oh no. And and again, he bought it long ago. But it's this, and it's one of these areas that the whiskey professionals don't want to talk about. They've ruined with you because it doesn't happen immediately. It didn't taste soapy when they put it in the bottle, right, it's actually over time in the bottle, and so there's 101 excuses about it was mishandled, it was your dirty glasses, like, and now you know, bit by bit, the research come out that said this is kind of a big deal like, and it doesn't happen anymore, because I think they've learned yeah, you add water very slowly.

02:31:57
There's also an argument for what's the right amount of water anyway, like why are you going to 43? And sometimes it's a legal requirement, like I can't sell in this country if it's more than that. But most of the time you're just trying to get to a nice drinking range and high enough that it doesn't flocculate right in ice, because you didn't want a chill filter, and so you've got to pick a number and take your time on it. Anyway, I'm in 100% of a digression, but while we were on there, I'm like no, I'm here for the for the uh for australian whiskey, which you've got an amazing collection of and I'd done hell year the the week before for all of us here and uh looked at a lot of different whiskey, some really neat ones that I still want to get to, like lark and so forth, a ton of really good tasmanian whiskeys, but the one I selected was this one here, the highwayman, and and specifically their Whiskey Abbey 2024 edition. So Whiskey Abbey is an annual whiskey party, essentially celebration, at an abbey outside of Melbourne, and they've invited me for the next one, which is in November. So I'm tempted to come down and do that.

02:33:03
But this particular whiskey, the Highwayman and my goodness, it's so dark it is made by a guy named Dan Woolley. So Dan Woolley is a bit of a legend down in Australia as a guy who worked in the whiskey biz for years and years and lots of different roles, but his most famous role is as a brand ambassador for Suntory and so Suntory, owning all kinds of whiskeys all over the place, like Maker's, mark and Lafroix and a bunch of others. He retired in 2019, having built up this huge array of relationships to make his own expressions of whiskey and in fact, since 2019, he's made 50. And this is one of them specifically made for the Whiskey Abbey event last year. So the way he has all these different ideas about whiskey because he's tried so many and been so heavily immersed that what he does is, you know, pick a particular approach to the grain. He typically works with a particular distillery, the Lord Byron Distillery, which is in New South Wales, about an hour's drive south of Gold Coast, which mostly makes gins and rums. But they got all the right equipment and so he kind of comes there and he'll literally make a batch.

02:34:09
A single barrel run 200 bottles. They tend to be a bit pricey because they're small. This particular version is straight up barley, from Australia, so very localized because it was for Whiskey Abbey. But then it's all about what did he do with the cask? And this particular time he chose to go all sherry. So he did initial casking in a PX cask, in a Pedro Jimenez sherry cask, and then did it for a couple of years and then did a finishing step, a final year in Oloroso and then bottled it about 55%. There's only a 500 mil bottle. This is fairly common in australia because it's pricey stuff it's a half liter yeah, so a half liter instead of a three-quarter liter.

02:34:58
Right, uh, for 250 australians, so about 160 american if you could get it, but I see it's out of stock so is it out of stock already? It was when I was writing this up yesterday. They still had some wow, so it's just just sold out.

02:35:14
So just a huge sherry nose like hello, and for what's probably only a three-year-old whiskey look how dark right, that's all sherry in that oh, I bet it's delicious though oh man, and this is the magic of dan woolley, and I hope I sometime meet this fellow because clearly he's very serious about what he's doing for a young calf strength like no flare, no burn on the nose, not at all. And when you tasted it, it's. It's all that fruit, fruit and leather that comes from that sherry taste and then just a lot of heat going down, like it may be 7 in the morning, but I'm all warm and fuzzy. You know what a fantastic whiskey, and this is what we've always wanted from whiskey, and what Dan's really perfecting is hey, I'm going to get you a taste of this thing and you're never, ever going to have it again. I love this guy man. I got to go to Melbourne.

02:36:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's awesome.

02:36:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And in five years 50 different whiskeys Wow, and some peated, some. Not All these different barrel options, but just making one-offs and that's all he does so like all these different barrel options, but just making one-offs and that's all he does.

02:36:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So we said he does master classes. It looks like so you could.

02:36:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You could go there and do a tasting session you know, we have the new grandchild and one of the conversations was can we, while the baby's still highly portable, can we come to new zealand and australia and visit all the family and so forth? And they asked if I would come with. And now I'm like well, we're talking about november, gee maybe.

02:36:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, abby is so. Oh, I want to go down with you for my birthday.

02:36:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That sounds awesome so much fun and in some ways I feel like these 500 mils is perfect.

02:37:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, because it's a smaller bottle yeah, yeah, it's just part of that. It makes it precious.

02:37:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It makes it something special, yeah, and just a sort of one-time experience. So and I'm not taking this home I'm going to finish this with my friends at the ndc conference here, uh, today and tomorrow, before I have to fly out is that what you're doing in melbourne?

02:37:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what's the mbc?

02:37:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
conference. This, this is the tech conference that I do all over the world. They've got their main shows in Oslo. We've done a London one. We've done London and Copenhagen, porto, portugal and this year.

02:37:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Paul, how do we get on the Richard Campbell gravy train? That's what I want to know. Should I say the whiskey train?

02:37:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think we just throw it like live podcast Something, something I don't know.

02:37:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Surely they want a live podcast there.

02:37:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Pretty, something, something I don't know. Surely they want a live podcast there. Pretty sure? I've made that pitch to you a couple of times, leo, but can't seem to pry you out of that. Uh, that studio stuck here.

02:37:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I'm so jealous. Well, it sounds like you're there for a very good time and I'm so glad you are.

02:37:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We've been having a great time. My main talk is that today, after later on, after doing this, I hope you get a nap I'm doing that. I went to bed early. Uh, I'm doing my future of energy talk, but adapted to the state of victoria. So I've reviewed all the government documentations on power generation here and so I'm going to take the folks through. Here's how your state is currently making energy and what it's going to look like in the next 10 years see, that's great wouldn't you like to have richard at your next?

02:38:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
event. Wow, how cool is that richard campbell run as radiocom. You'll also find the dot net rocks podcast he does with carl franklin there uh, and of course you find him right here every uh wednesday. Thank you, richard. I appreciate it getting up at three in the morning for this that's one of the shower before we get going. Right, I don't blame you to get up early paul thorat he never showers, and that's, that's the beauty of paul thurot I if I had a shower here in mexico thurot is at thurotcom t-h-u-r-r-o-t-tcom.

02:38:56
His books windows everywhere field guide to windows 11 are available at leanpubcom. You set your own price and of course he, along with richard and I, will be here every wednesday. I hope you will too, all you winners and dozers. A special thank you to our club, to members who make this possible, at twittv slash club. Twit paul. Richard, have a great week. Sure are you gonna be in melbourne next week or new zealand?

02:39:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'll be on the farm, yeah, so you'll have that great view of hobbiton sadly, unless everything goes horribly right, i'll'll be home in Pennsylvania next week.

02:39:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You'll be in McCongee.

02:39:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm pretty sure you're home right now, Paul. Let's be clear.

02:39:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And a warning to the pilot. He does plan to install a dual boot Windows and Ubuntu on his car machine, but I like to do it while we're in just to maximum there's a sudden power surge from seat 16g.

02:39:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know why sorry, like os upgrades, that's the way to go does anyone know the command line parameters for grep uh? You remind me of the guy who was updating an exchange server on his laptop without the power brick plugged in. It's like there's a race for how fast the battery was going oh my god oh no, we were taking bets, it was.

02:40:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How fun is that that's nerd fun oh boy. Thank you, gentlemen, we will see you next week on windows weekly