Windows Weekly 939 Transcript

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

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thorat's here. Richard Campbell is here. We'll talk about the second or is it third round of layoffs that one of the most valuable companies in the world could be happening again. Also, the new Windows is here. You'll love the name. I'm sorry, I'm just teasing you. We'll talk a little bit about Microsoft Copilot now coming to the Mac. All that and more coming up next on windows weekly podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit. This is windows weekly with paul thuradod and Richard Campbell, episode 939. Recorded Wednesday, july 2nd 2025. The House Hippo. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we're covering the latest news from Microsoft. Hello, all you winners. There is Paul Therod. Sure, somebody said I can't call people dozers anymore. It's rude, but it goes with winners, winners and dozers. Get it windows anyway. Hi, paul thurottcom.

01:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Good to see you, my friend, in lower mcungee no, I appreciate you finally explaining that after two years or whatever it's been, you didn't know. I thought some of them are a little slow on the uptake windows.

01:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Winners and dozers anyway. Also richard campbell, who has already celebrated the fourth of july because canadians are that way now it's the first of july.

01:38 - Rich Campbell (Host)
It was confederation. We sang oh canada on the show yesterday.

01:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's nice. We're not really big fans of the confederation around here, but I see what you're saying um you. You guys have a revolution. We filled in the form.

01:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh canada on the show yesterday. That's nice. We're not really big fans of the confederation around here, but I see what you're saying um, you, you guys, have a revolution.

01:48 - Rich Campbell (Host)
We filled in the form.

01:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a little more civilized I decided I used to have you know, uh, on our, on our lower thirds, we have the locations, everybody's actual uh, locale and uh, you know. So you know you, richard campbell's in mad park and paul thropp didn't write his in but he's in the country. Sorry, but I decided I used to say petaluma, california, usa. Now I'm saying petaluma, the free state of california nice, oh boy, that's the path we're on we're all flying the bear flag from now on.

02:18
Here we are in the bear republic after uh post-apocalyptic, it's totally after the day, after all. Right, actually I'm being, I'm being, levitous. Is there a word, a noun? I'm being levacious, I'm, I'm exploratious, I don't know that that's the word. Um, maybe I'm trying to spread levity.

02:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There you go, levity you're being levitatious the news this morning was kind of gloomy yeah, I mean, we knew this was coming right. We'd heard about this in advance. I thought we'd just kind of rip the band-aid off and get rid of this one right up top. But microsoft has started implementing the layoffs we've been talking about for a while. I will tell you. They're, um, maybe predictably, a little touchy about this. Um, because we had written what we wrote and they actually contacted us. They were like where did you hear this? Where did you hear this? They wanted to talk about sources and and some of the claims we had made and it was like okay, so some of this we can't actually tell you, but uh, anywho, uh, through our own sources, through third parties, like the seattle times bloomberg windows central, the story that is emerging is that approximately 9,000 employees are being laid off. Many of them Microsoft says not most of them, but I have at least one source who has said it is, in fact, over 50% of them.

03:40
But whatever are from Xbox slash Microsoft Gaming of them, but whatever are from xbox slash microsoft gaming um, this is about four percent of the workforce, and this compares to, that's a lot of people, holy cow, yeah, I mean, it was especially on top of 6 000 that were laid off in may and then, whatever the what was the earlier one, february or march or whenever early, early in the year this from a company that's has historic profits.

04:06 - Rich Campbell (Host)
They are the most highest backer cap in the world yeah, we're gonna.

04:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're gonna address that in a sense because, um, one of the things that leaked that I didn't get personally but has been published in many places was a letter from phil spencer to the team, phil spencer being a head of xbox, kind of explaining it. This is a I don't want to not masterclass, but this was almost like written by. If AI was the legal department, this is the summary they would have written, and it's very careful not to be specific in places where people like me and you guys would be looking for some hint about the future and what this says about their strategy. And there is nothing there of that note. But he does sort of address, kind of upfront, the juxtaposition, I guess, of the most successful company on earth and then this business which, thanks to Activision Blizzard, now has more people playing games, more games. Business which, thanks to Activision Blizzard, now has more people playing games, more games, more hours spent gaming, et cetera, than ever before.

05:12
Okay, but why and he really I don't want to say puns it, but he kind of pushes it out to the broader corporate strategy right, based on tough decisions we made previously, make choices now for continued success in future years. Key part of that is discipline prioritizing the strongest opportunities. If this sounds familiar, it's because what Microsoft says generally about layoffs, especially in this AI era and this isn't in the notes anywhere, but there was a recent internal communication that was like you are using AI, so if you're not leave and this isn't in the notes anywhere, but there was a recent internal communication it was like you are using AI so if you're not leave and if you think you're going to work here, know how to use AI, because everyone is using AI here and one of the things they're very careful not to say is that these layoffs have anything to do with AI.

06:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I don't know, maybe. So what are they? Just right sizing, I mean, what are we so?

06:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
if you were to some. So I used to say this about um like a satchin adela speech right when he first became ceo, like if you put this in a word and like, use the summary thing, it would come up with a blank document because, honestly, it doesn't really say anything of import like. In other words, it doesn't say like, for example, one of the challenges we've had in xbox is selling hardware. So we're really going to back off from that and go at this from a game publisher perspective which, by the way, is absolutely what they're doing. But they can't say that. Right, they can't say that for so many reasons. But the big one is it would probably submarine the entire you know business if they did that, because a big chunk of the user base is still very much wrapped up in um. You know the xbox hardware, the consoles and things like that. So I think they're trying to ease into it. So you know the xbox ally thing and then microsoft will or will not make one too. And then, uh, myself and others have um, uh, supposed or, you know, guest or educated guest, whatever that they um are going to do, third-party hardware, windows, basically for consoles, and then that will let them kind of back out of it. Gracefully right, they're not abandoning that market. In fact, if anything, we're expanding that market.

07:20
You know this is you can kind of see the, the marketing that's going to occur there. But, man, you read this and it's like it really it doesn't say anything. The the success we're currently seeing, meaning an xbox or microsoft gaming is based on tough decisions we've made previously. Now, parsing that, I would say this means buying activision blizzard. Yeah, the success that xbox is seeing meaning games like actual games, and also that meaning on other platforms was the result of x. You know microsoft buying activision blizzard, right. The success microsoft xbox is not seeing is not addressed here, right. And that's hardware sales, all right, that's like they literally don't he doesn't really say that I mean.

08:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So hardware is in. Here are most of the people hardware people that they're letting go.

08:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, we don't know anything about that yet. No, I know it looks like this is pretty broad, honestly, so sort of tied to this. This is way later in the notes. But, um, there's a? Um, a game studio, it's called the initiative, and they were making a reboot of perfect dark. Perfect dark was og xbox and I think perfect dark zero, I believe, debuted with the xbox 360. So they were going to go back and redo this thing and they've canceled that reboot and yeah, I don't know. So, um, and there's a whole, and they also made, or were making, something called ever wild, which I think was like an open world kind of a game. But, um, yeah, so it's not. No, it's not just hardware, right, it's, this is more kind of broad gaming industry layoffs or whatever. Um, even uh, raven, right, which makes some of the call of duty games or parts of some of the call of duty games, is experiencing layoffs, right, um, so I it's likely in the next few days, weeks, whatever we're going to learn about maybe more studios either contracting or disappearing, even games that we were expecting not happening. Um, it's still kind of fog of war like this is just, you know, happening, like as we started writing about this today, we were getting more information and you know, as the day went on. So I guess we'll see.

09:39
But yeah, the phil spencer um email or I guess I guess it's an email is interesting to me only in that it really doesn't say anything. Prioritizing our opportunities yes, but this is legal, putting words in a sentence, that's what I mean. Someone had commented like I really like this guy, but man, this is so mealy mouth, this is blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, yeah, I don't know that he had a choice. Um, I look, whatever anyone thinks of Phil Spencer, he is a plain spoken, every man. He's not a. You know, he doesn't make stuff up, he doesn't blast, you know talk. He's not a marketing idiot, he's a. You know, he's a real human being.

10:27 - Rich Campbell (Host)
This doesn't read like something he would everybody's. You know, my, you really get the sense that they're very worried about a legal lab labor lashback. Uh, yep, yep, in this 9 000 are a lot of foreign workers which were really part of the may ones, and it's taken this long to get it through. Uh, just because it's harder to lay off in anywhere rather than the US. The US is, is, is a, uh, you know, at will work space. Everyone else has more rights than that, so it's just taking time to process those things. But uh, yeah, I mean, they still seen the numbers coming in yeah, there are little things that kind of address this.

11:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's interesting, you, you say this because employees that are being let go are encouraged to explore open positions elsewhere inside Microsoft gaming, where their applications will be given priority review, not language. I've seen before Right, and it seems designed to like yeah, I, you're probably getting ready to get a class action going, but hold on a second. You know, this is a business decision. You know, whatever, I don't know, he talks, it's just, it's bizarre. He talks about opportunities, he talks about momentum, he talks about success and it's like guys, you're, I mean, look, let's say 50% is correct, let's say it's less than, let's say it's only, you know, whatever 45, you're laying off several thousand people. Yeah, you know, it's um, I again I. We will someday know what happened this year or this couple years, but right now, right now.

12:01 - Rich Campbell (Host)
It doesn't make sense right now. Now their market cap is $3.7 trillion Yep. They've had record quarter after record quarter.

12:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's already up that high. Yeah, holy camoly, yeah. So what is it for the year? 25,000 people, something like that 20?

12:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's at least, yeah, it's probably close to 20.

12:22 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I don't know 18 to 20, something like that. It was 2,500. Yeah, it's probably close to 20, I don't know 18 to 20, something like that.

12:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was 2500 in january, but those were performance layoffs yep, another six and nine is 15 may 26, that's 17.5. So yeah, it's probably somewhere close to that the number two market cap company.

12:37
Apple has laid off nobody really yeah, so this is a thing with apple. I mean, they, um, when we came out of the pandemic and big tech started laying off, apple was like, yeah, we don't really try to. They did do a hand, you know, small amounts of layoffs at some point eventually. But, um, you know they, they act or operate a lot like a startup. They have small teams working on things that they're isolated from each other. They, you know they, uh, they may. I don't know how many people they employ. Microsoft is you know hundreds of what? Is it now 250 000 somewhere in there? It's a big, it's a pretty big number or whatever it is.

13:14
Um, you know, apple has always run itself more leanly. Does that make sense, I mean? But I, but I also feel like, given all of the push with ai, given that you, you, I almost said invested, you spent $68 billion on Activision, you're going cross-platform, I mean, it seems like this is the time to spend. You know, like this is when you actually, you know, let's plow this success that we're seeing and this momentum, as you know, opportunity, momentum, success right and actually invest in the business. This is like a holding pattern kind of a of an approach. It's actually worse, it's a scaling back?

13:53 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I don't know it doesn't make sense. There's another. The spin on this is that the company culture is not changing fast enough towards the focus on AI, and so they just keep smashing away at the company culture like that will make it better.

14:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're just going to hit this point, though, where you're maybe you're some low level programmer working on Microsoft word, or you're in a game studio working on some open world game, or you're rare, it doesn't matter where you are and you're like look, you know, oh, they come down and say, look, you said you were going to do this thing. It's not done yet. What's going on? And you're like, yeah, it turns out it's a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. It's going to take some more time to like ai it. It's like, yeah, but it's not, you know, like.

14:31
I think we're actually getting to the point where, um, ai is just the answer now to everything you know. And I again, they're being very careful not to say that they want they very much, don't want the messaging on this to be. Microsoft lays off several thousand people because AI, right, but they're also, at this moment, requiring everyone to use AI to make themselves more efficient, and one of the ways you can be more efficient is to have fewer people doing more things. I guess with AI or whatever.

15:02 - Rich Campbell (Host)
And so, yeah, I mean you could argue's, the part of the argument is, cut the teams back, so the only way they can still make their milestones is to utilize a. Yeah right, I got, I got to tell you I've been working with some folks these past couple of weeks. Where they have they, I have literally watched them in a day do a six-week sprint.

15:24
Yeah, and just deliver that much code Because of AI, because they're able to use the tools at a level I've never seen before and just literally as fast as we can write the specifications, they're spitting the code out.

15:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This suggests a belief that this stuff is better slash, more accurate than it really is. And this is the I think today is the problem with ai. Not that it's never going to get there, but just that you start to see good results and then you drop your defenses and stop challenging it yeah and you just accept what it does. And that's when it's going to bite you on the butt well, and it's absolutely part of.

15:58 - Rich Campbell (Host)
The problem is that they unique's a very skilled person and I've been working with a few of them to keep the tools in line and to get the results that you need, but the bottom line is that particular skilled person is working at a staggering rate. We talked about 20% 30% performance benefits with GitHub Copilot a couple of years ago and today it's a hundredfold.

16:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just so stunningly fast I, you know this falls into that category of I'm just resisting and I can't explain why, like I literally have no good excuse but I'll also say it's a very known problem that they're working on.

16:37 - Rich Campbell (Host)
It's very much a forms over data problem. It's a lot of rote work and the tools can pull it off. And, by the way, these are not necessarily microsoft centric tools. These are a the. These are a variety of tools, but it is possible and it's all the right operator for whatever it's worth.

16:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is also not just microsoft, right? Google is doing this exact same thing. Apple is talking themselves into doing this thing. I mean, yeah, they've been moving kind of slow. Um, amazon is a little more opaque, it's hard to say, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were also moving down this path. I mean, it's, it's just a. It's a hard thing because if you looked at this business and said, look, we're, we're, we're just throwing money away. We've got all these employees and all their benefits and all their whatever it is and they're not being super efficient, and if we just automated some of this stuff we could be more successful, and it's like I could see that. But they are the most successful company on earth.

17:34 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I already yeah yeah, I it's.

17:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just what makes this kind of bizarre.

17:40
It's very strange yeah it is oh, yeah, yeah well, for example, like perfect dark zero. So instead of canceling the game, you know, do you cut the studio in half and say you can do this with ai now and you can do it in half the time? So prove me wrong. You know, yeah, but no, they, in this case they just got rid of it and so there's more going on there that we don't know about. Obviously, um, but it's uh, yeah. I think I think the the big problem here is just the unknowns. You know, it's just um, like I keep saying, I like to be able to say well, I know it sounds off, but this is why you know, and in this case it's like I know it sounds off and that's the end of that sentence. It sounds like I just don't. I'm having a hard time understanding. Maybe they're using chat GPT-5 and it's working great. I have no idea. I don't know.

18:34 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I don't know the answer to that question. I feel for the folks and I see, you know, I'm looking through LinkedIn to see the wave of it's me, it's me, it's me. But I'm also seeing a lot of folks from May saying happy to now be at, and you know they're moving around, Didn't?

18:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they promise the FTC that the acquisition of Activision wouldn't result in a bunch of layoffs. I think they said that.

19:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They didn't say that the ftc claimed that this was part of the agreement, which it wasn't, and, at the time, what you know? Look, you're integrating a gigantic business that has overlap with your existing business.

19:19
Obviously, there are going to be there's going to be redundancies, like this was yeah, so you know, at that time, whenever that was probably a year ago, december, something like that I was like so the ftc is telling microsoft they're not allowed to lay off anybody. Now it's like this is there's never been a a corporate acquisition of this scope, probably period, but there's never been a corporate acquisition like this um, where there weren't layoffs because of redundancies. There have to be right. I mean, that's um, that's understand. Like that to me was that was like a year and a half ago, like that was understandable. Now we're at the point where it's like guys, like it's kind of it's mostly going great. It seems like I don't understand what's happening here was?

20:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
were there people laid off from blizzard activision?

20:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yes, king, people right, yep yep, that's what we know about so far. But also, like I said, robo Raven is part of Activision, blizzard is part of this, yep, yep. So we're going to, we're going to know more I mean even the Phil Spencer email mentions in the days ahead they're going to learn more internally and then we're going to learn more externally too, right, um, so we'll see how it goes. I don't know, but I, I, uh, yeah, I wouldn't want to be working on xbox hardware right now, personally, but I do think they look, they're the biggest game publisher in the world right now, actually, right, I mean, um, that part of the business is actually doing great, um, and so, yeah, I mean, I don't I, I, there's definitely a future there. It's just that, you know, um, it's not the business that Microsoft started, you know, 25 years ago, and it's certainly not the console centric business that a lot of fans still seem to kind of pine for. But I feel like that dream is over you like that ship sailed.

21:08
How else could I say that? Uh, you know, we've moved past that, I guess I guess.

21:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, nvidia is now the number one market cap. Just it's a race between microsoft changes every day apple any, any yeah yeah, it goes back and forth. Yeah, um, just for completeness, right? Um, I think I do remember for microsoft saying that the acquisition of uh blizzard would be a vertical acquisition, that they would retain independence and so they wouldn't have redundancies.

21:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But okay, well I, I don't, that was, I don't remember I I wrote about this a great length at the time, but I I could go back and just look it up if you want in fact, almost universally the case that during these trials, companies say oh no, you're on it, we're not gonna lay anybody off.

21:57 - Rich Campbell (Host)
And then, as soon as it's over, well, it's also normal really not to do that for the first year anyway, while you just take a while you have to figure, it takes a while to figure out, right yeah.

22:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What do we need. Yeah, right Now they're saying well, Blizzard was going to lay those people off anyway, so it's all part of the plan.

22:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
By the way, at that time, what the FTC was complaining about was an elimination of 1,900 jobs, which today we might refer to as the good old days yeah. 1900 jobs, which today we might refer to as the good old days, yeah. So Microsoft structured the Activision Blizzard deal as a vertical acquisition only to meet the needs of antitrust, where, if it got rolled back, it would be easier to roll it back. But they didn't actually promise not to lay anyone off. I mean that, no, you couldn't make that kind of a promise no, no, should you it would be, you couldn't.

22:51 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I mean you just couldn't. Yeah, you're a public company, you can't say stuff like that. It's not a thing, yeah but okay, it's not only gaming. Right, there are other parts of the company, but I also think a bunch of that's a hangover yeah yeah yeah and yeah and uh and there. But. But I'm also hearing it's the beginning of the fiscal year. This is it that this is the last of it?

23:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, I'm just looking at this now because I'm just I don't remember things like this. But um, when microsoft acquired activision blizzard, its um, microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard, its cost of operations in gaming went up by 38%. Just running that business just added dramatically to their costs Without adding significantly to the revenue. Well, no, it did add to the revenues. I mean, again, this is one of those things I don't remember. I did the math on this before the acquisition and then it's kind of shown up. There was a period of time, remember, when Microsoft would out the activision blizzard impact on their earnings specifically right, and it was obviously big for x, well, for more personal computing, which is part of you know where it's located in the business. But um, for microsoft overall, like revenue wise.

23:58
No, it wasn't that, it was a single digit percent you know, single digit percentage uh difference, but for more personal computing and for xbox especially, it was big and, more importantly, it was profitable, right, that part of it um, without the cost of you know, but that's the. The operating cost uh rise 38 percent. Is that's redundancies, right? I mean mostly right.

24:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, I don't know let's take a little break so we can all mourn in style and then we can talk about other things happier things.

24:33
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We found some things that had been running for three years three years which no one was checking. These VMs were, I don't know 10 grand a month not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spend on Azure. Wow, it must be a lot, but once we got 40 to $50,000 a month, yeah, well, okay, it really starts to add up. Yeah, it really starts to add up. Yeah, it does, doesn't it? It's simple Stop overpaying for Azure. Identify and eliminate Azure creep and boost your performance all in eight weeks with US Cloud. 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. Support for less us cloud windows. Weekly continues paul thorat, richard campbell uh, are we calling it windows 11.5?

27:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, I just did a hands-on windows episode about that and sadly now they've actually announced the real name, so oh well but it's just a number, what is it? Yeah, yeah it's even less than a number, as you'll soon discover, but uh, yeah, so yeah, the next version of windows will be windows 11, version 25 h2.

28:19 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Yay, we have a name yeah, it makes sense that it appeared in July.

28:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
White smoke is coming out over the buildings in Redmond.

28:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I feel like this could have been communicated back in March when they switched the dev channel over to the new build stream and blah, blah, blah, whatever. But okay, that's fine, it's water under the bridge. I don't know why I keep saying stuff like that. It is what it is. So it's not going to be Windows 12. That so it's not going to be Windows 12. That will be next year at the earliest, now, it seems.

28:48
And how do I best say this? So 24H2 was a big update. It was a feature update, obviously, but it was a major release due to foundation compatibility issues, etc. Etc. This one is going to be an enablement package. They are going to keep 24 and 25H2 aligned feature-wise, which they've been doing for the past couple of years, ever since they brought Copilot into Windows 11. And that kind of makes sense too, because we see dev and beta channels both being updated with the same exact features all the time. And 24H2 is on beta channel, now 25H2 is on dev. So that does make sense.

29:29
So come October, whenever this is officially released, it will be quick and easy. You're going to feel a small brick and then you have to reboot and then you'll be on 25H2. So this is just the difference between features being automatically enabled by default, which they will be on 25H2. So this is just the difference between features being automatically enabled by default, which they will be on 25H2, and then them rolling out over time on 24H2 through CFR, and then, as we go forward from there, every month everything will be on a CFR, meaning features will roll out to both and we'll see how that goes. It's going to be different on every computer, because we don't like certainty, apparently. So there you go. I think that's everything there, but I'm just kind of happy. It finally happened, like I.

30:12 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I don't know what took so long, you know, but here we are yeah, I wonder if they were literally waiting for a july one like that.

30:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That was a thing for that, yeah right, uh, yeah it just I, why not? Just what's the big deal? You know, we kind of know that date's coming.

30:27 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you know, it's not not.

30:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're not not sneaking up on us if you look at the uh support life cycle for windows these days, which is um, a pamphlet, it's not very long. Um, there's two years of support for the consumer versions like so home, pro basically, and then three years for enterprise, and then I guess, if you use pro with an enterprise agreement, um, and that that explains why 22 h2 is still being kind of supported, with some most of the same features we see on 23 and 24 h2, that will go out of support in october, I guess, technically november. So, as of this, once October goes by, we will have 23, 24 and 25 H2. And that's kind of the world, but for consumers it's basically going to be 25, 24, right, and then they'll be kept up to date with each other. So it doesn't, it kind of doesn't matter which version you're on, especially once you get past 24 H2, because that has the big foundational change which they still, by the way, have not really discussed a lot.

31:28 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Well, I think you and I both agree that 24H2 is effectively Windows 12. It's an OS change. It's huge. I've got interviews where they basically admit that it's just a huge change.

31:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That is the only thing in the windows 11 time frame that has been consistent with the past, which is that microsoft has never done that well. So you have things like windows 3.

31:52
1 was a humongous update, you know um and or you know windows 2000 was p2 yeah, exactly, humongous update, um, and then you just have these things that are presented like oh, it's just Windows 11. It's fine, don't worry about it. And then for the next six, eight months we have all these problems because actually there were compatibility issues and there were blockers, and I think, as of today, I think I'd have to go look. But if I go look at Microsoft Learn, it probably will tell me that they are past almost everything as far as compatibility issues, so should be good to go look. But if I go look at Microsoft Learn, it probably will tell me that they are past almost everything as far as compatibility issues, so it should be good to go.

32:28
24h2 was also unique because they did an initial release, remember, for Snapdragon mid-year last year and then it was still in the Insider program for X64 computers and didn't ship broadly for everybody until whatever. That was October probably. So that's not going to happen, I guess this year. 25h2 is functionally, I think, is kind of a big deal. We've been talking about this every month. It seems like there's a lot of new features, but you'll get those in 24H2 as well, so it doesn't really matter.

33:04
But that's the other thing. That's kind of weird. This is true in Windows 10 as well. When we're doing multiple versions of the same OS essentially, when you have those minor versions that aren't an underlying code change and have no compatibility issues, you would think instantaneous upgrade for everybody, like if you're on 24H2, you're just going to get 25H2. And I bet that doesn't happen only because it has never happened in the past and I can't explain that. But I don't know. Maybe part of it is just people who got the upgrade and then added some peripheral or whatever it is, external hard drive or something that maybe has some minor blocker on it and it works fine, but it's not going to let you go to 25H2 for it, and it works fine, but it's not going to let you go to 25 h2 for that reason, something like that. But um, for the most part you should just get it.

33:50 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Yeah, well, I think. Now the other thing is people are just jumpy because 24 h2 was so big, right and just and kept twitching around. It's like I would be hesitant now because you just don't. What kind of h2 is this one? Yes, this well, this is the minor one.

34:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is what you want to hear. You want to hear. I know that package. It's like reboot a bit flips and yeah, no biggie.

34:12 - Rich Campbell (Host)
No, no, search boxes change shape. Stuff doesn't move around your screen yeah, one.

34:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
One of the weird uh things I've in the dev channel, which this computer is actually on, is they did change the shape of a search box. It's funny you say that. So in the settings app, I think on Stable, there's a search box that's in that left rail, like the navigation pane. It's small, it's probably just a normal rectangle but with slightly rounded corners. But now it's on the top of the window, in the middle, and it's got exaggerated rounded corners and it just looks terrible. It's terrible looking. It's really bad. It's bad enough. I don't even understand why they shipped it, but it's not out there.

34:56 - Rich Campbell (Host)
It's on the dev channel. It's where things are supposed to be a little ugly. It's terrible.

35:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's really bad, it's unfinished. Yes, it's terrible, it's really bad, like it's just, but yeah, unfinished. Yes, yes, it is okay. Um so, all right.

35:11 - Rich Campbell (Host)
So now we know what we're doing, finally, um and so, unless you know what it's called, I don't know that we know what we're doing, but we know what it's called. Okay, that's fair.

35:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, I didn't say this explicitly last week because honestly I was a little confused by this. But if you look at the calendar, last tuesday was week d the day. It was the tuesday, week d. That is when we should have gotten preview updates for windows. If you go back over the past year and a half you will see things like the latest or the newest version, I guess, whatever it is, uh, often would not get it that day would come a day to three days later in the week, like that happened a bunch of times.

35:47
But that Tuesday came and went without any updates for Windows 11, or for Windows, I should say, in the Insider Program. I'm sorry, no, any preview updates for Windows 11 or Windows, just Windows. Broadly there were no preview updates. So when I was putting together the show notes, I was looking at the calendar and I always doubt myself. I'm like wait wasn't this week, so last week was week D and that day came and went without an update, nothing. But then we did the show Wednesday and then on Thursday they did release optional preview cumulative updates for Windows 11, 24 H2 and then another one for 23 and 22 h2.

36:28 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I thought 22 h2 was out of support, paul. Why are they doing updates at 22 h2?

36:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
because it's supported for enterprise. Uh, I honestly I uh the the features that are new on 23 and 23 h2 are not going to be enabled by default and if you're in a business you probably can leave them disabled. You could probably specifically configure it so you'll never see these things, but they like to spread the wealth.

36:53 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Well and honestly, other than security updates at this point, because you're looking at October you're all about replacing hardware and changing OSs and you don't care about any of these things, right.

37:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, I mean, it's not like any business has ever used a non-supported version window uh honestly, yeah, so, um.

37:12
What this means, though, is that we now have a an early peak, a slightly less early peak at the patch tuesday update that we're going to see. I gotta look at the calendar. I'm so bad at this because we're in July now. Yes, so next Tuesday, july 8th, is patch Tuesday, right, second Tuesday of the month, so I, looking at this, honestly, nothing major. So last couple of months major.

37:39
This one is not too bad, and I've already talked about a bunch of this stuff although I'm losing track if it was here or the other podcast but Ask Copilot has been added to ClickToDo on a Copilot plus PC, so when you Windows key plus click something and there's text and images, whatever it gives you these actions you can do. Ask Copilot just puts that thing into Copilot and then you can go from there. It's not particularly useful. Microsoft is updating the windows backup app, which, right now, is pretty lame. It doesn't do much, but is tied to that thing we were talking about earlier, where they want people to use this to migrate between pcs and, the coming case, between windows 10 and windows 11, right, right, kind of a big deal. So they're adding PC migration features to it. This release has the features that are in Windows backup. It does not have the features that will be in Windows setup, which is what you need to bring it back on the other side, so you can kind of get an early look at what they're doing, but you can't do anything with it yet because when you go to reset, you reset. If you reset the computer, you won't see the other half of it. So I haven't seen that yet myself. But I'm kind of curious about this because this is going to be a big part of the Windows 10 to 11 migration story, at least for individuals. So it's important and I don't remember when they did this, but Windows Backup was something they had added to Windows 11, whatever it was a couple of years ago. They've improved it over time. It's still pretty lame. But then they added it to Windows 10 and everyone was like why are you doing that? And this is why, right, they're going to smooth that, upgrade Some taskbar stuff.

39:10
The big one here, ironically, is sort of the return of small icons, right, this is something I would use broadly on my Windows 11 computers if I could, but it's not what I want. So in Windows 10, and I guess in previous versions of Windows, you could go in and say I want to use small icons. It would make the taskbar smaller, right, kind of a low profile taskbar. But if you enable that option, which is so smaller taskbar buttons, if you just turn it on it makes the icon smaller but it keeps the task for the same. Start, guys, come on, like, what are you doing? So it's not what I want, but okay, well, we're getting there, you know, and there are actually registry hacks you can do, I think, third-party utilities that will give you actual small icon, like small taskbar, right, but that is not. Yeah, it's not there.

40:00
And then, just beyond that, just you know, narrator, improvement, settings, improvements Windows share gets updated every two weeks, from what I can tell. So this is the one where they show you the preview of linked web content, like they show you a preview of images as well, and then you get those compression choices for images, and I was talking about how it's like I forget the wording, but it's like small, medium, large, basically, and like large compression, or whatever it's called, is actually awesome because it reduces the file size by at least 50% and the image quality is pretty much perfect in most cases that I've seen. So it's kind of a nice option, but that's about it. So actually nothing major. We waited for it and then it was disappointing. Yeah, typical Microsoft software, yeah, exactly. So there you go.

40:45
And then is that everything. Oh, no, no, paskies, right. So the build that Microsoft released where they were like, oh, by the way, this is 25H2, just to throw away, they also have the first that those builds. So this is dev and beta, meaning this feature will come to 25 and 24 H2 is integration with third-party pass keys. So right now it's. It's a terrible system. It doesn't work very well, but if you sign into windows with a Microsoft account, it creates a pass key on your computer and it's actually that pass key that does what I'm going to call pass-through authentication to things like Microsoft Edge or OneDrive or whatever, which is nice. There's not much interaction with it, but if you had to interact with it, you would use Windows Hello to authenticate yourself. That's how that works. There are some pass key providers that use Windows Hello for authentication, like Chrome does this, for example, um and what.

41:42 - Rich Campbell (Host)
This is always the problem with passkeys. Now, right, it's like you don't know what's popping up to take a passkey. Windows is your browser. Is it your password manager, like so war?

41:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's worse than you're describing and the reason is it's also inconsistent within an individual passkey provider. So, for example, I use my password manager to save passkeys. So I'll bring up a new computer and I'll sign into Chrome and it will say and it just pops in, you want to use one of these passkeys? Yes, I do, and I click the Google account and I sign in as nothing else for me to do, like it just works. It's awesome, love it. But I'll go back to that computer later. Maybe I haven't used Chrome for a while.

42:23
This just happened to me this morning and it's I bring up Gmail. It's like, oh, you got to sign in again. You're like cool, this is going to be one second. I have a PASC. It's like you want to use a PASC? Wait, but you saved a passkey in my password manager. It's right there. It's in the browser I'm using right now. Nope, gonna use a phone. So it shows you a qr code. You bring up your phone, take a picture of it. You're like okay, great, I guess. Now that took, you know, 30 seconds instead of two seconds. It still worked fine. I guess it will be good for a little while now.

42:54
But yeah, this is, this is a problem because, uh, you know, paskies are awesome, dot dot dot when they work and are consistent, right? Um, yes, so it is a problem. Um, the the pasky implementation that microsoft has right now in windows 11 is bare bones, to say the least. But the thing they're testing is you're coming to Windows with a password or a pass scheme manager. It's going to be well, one password is the one they're testing with right now, but eventually all those companies Dashlane, bitwarden, proton, whatever, whatever you're using will absolutely work. I'm in Bitwarden, I'm waiting for Bitwarden, I cannot wait to see this. Yeah, so this is actually very interesting.

43:40
So this is I guess it's how it works on mobile, right, when you're on a mobile device, you install an app for your password manager and you do pass. You can do pass keys that way and all the other stuff like autofill, whatever. Um, when you do it on a desktop system like windows or mac or whatever, you typically install the desktop, the um, the browser extension, and it works in the browser. Um, ideally, I mean, and some of these got, most of these guys actually have a standalone app too. It's just that it's not always super useful. Uh, you know, yeah, you don't really have to sign into standalone apps that much, although I guess you do sometimes. Um, and so this, this will require you to have that app, so there's a beta version of the one password this is what you run into with your phone, too is when you have real apps on your phone.

44:23 - Rich Campbell (Host)
You need the standalone manager right, and that's the thing.

44:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I really. That's, that's a nicety on mobile. That's not currently the case on windows and I guess with this it will be so, um, cool, right, it looks. You know well it looks. I I have a screenshot of it in settings so I guess I was gonna say it looks good, but actually it doesn't look like anything. So I will see.

44:44
But the goal here now is that, again, I really you're not gonna have to use this too too much. But maybe you install, well, a lot of apps do that kind of web authentication thing right. So, visual studio, you sign into GitHub orion, you sign in on the web. Zoom does this. They sign on the web. You go through a web browser, even though it's a standalone app, and then it goes back to the app and this will, I guess, just let you do it right there, and maybe there's a middleman attack there that I'm not aware is possible that they're going to mediate or remediate, I guess, through this, this method. But this is one of those things like, like I said, we use this on mobile. It works great.

45:22 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I yes, yeah, I don't know if it works great, but it's getting there like it works yeah yeah, you've got multiple vendors, different suppliers, like they've all got to try and figure out how to work and play well with each other.

45:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's it because I don't think microsoft itself supports passkeys, right?

45:37 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I mean they do that windows does, they do windows does.

45:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, but I mean before logging into microsoft no, they do, they do. Yeah, so I don't have to use authenticator, and well, I mean number and all that right.

45:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So that's the more common way. Um it's. That way is actually technically better because it will work anywhere where you have to have microsoft authenticator, whereas I can use bitwarden for my pass keys.

46:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, it's a sponsor.

46:06 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I'm glad you used it yeah she switched to bitwarden because it's really good too. Yeah, it's really great right, um.

46:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So if I that way, I have it everywhere.

46:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, right, this was like I had written something about Windows security last week because of this Windows resiliency initiative. I don't know if we talked about this in the show. I don't think we did Between shows. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in Windows that if you just kind of leave it alone and accept the defaults, it's, it's probably for the best for you in a security kind of way. But there are a couple of features in windows Like you actually do have to go in and manually, um, uh, enable and some of it's privacy related, which is one of those things A lot of people would think Microsoft would not actually be good at, right. Um, low level security features you can enable in the Windows Security app that actually require a small amount of anonymous data to go back and forth with the cloud for it to work properly, perhaps something like that.

47:09
But with regards to password manager, use a third-party password manager, right? Passkey support what do you use for that? Right? So I use pass keys in my password manager, but I do also have two of a authentication and I use an authenticator app for that. I could use my password manager for that, but I, you know someone said, well, why don't you just use the same thing for both, and I'm like that would be like storing the key to the vault in the vault. What do you mean? Like, like the other? The third part of that is there's there actually is a master password, which I hate that there is, but just when I have to sign into my password manager, that username and password combo is not stored anywhere. That's in my brain in your head has to be yeah, and that's.

47:55
This system is why this works, you know, from a security perspective and I also have a yubiKey set of YubiKeys.

48:01 - Rich Campbell (Host)
That would be the other way.

48:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Even better yeah.

48:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, a YubiKey hardware security key is, you might argue is kind of the original implementation of Passkey it's also portable, because you bring it with you.

48:16 - Rich Campbell (Host)
It's portable with you and you have more than one, because if you have one you are doomed doomed wow yeah, you lose that one, you're really in a bad place. Yeah, that's you're doomed. That's an interesting idea for like an article or a discussion.

48:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like the things people do that they shouldn't do so. For example, technically, if you use a pin on a computer or a phone, you should have a different pin on every single one of those, and I bet you almost the same pin every. Nobody uses different pins, but that's a part of my social security number.

48:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nobody knows that that's amazing.

48:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's the same combination I have on my luggage. Yeah, um, the two guys like um. So yeah, I mean mean, I'm sorry.

48:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't do that. No, but yeah, that's what you're saying.

49:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sorry, you just said something that was very similar to that, which is look, I'm doing the best security I can do. I have a physical hardware security key, right, nice, do you have like two or three of them, one in a vault? No, I just have one. You got to have at least two. No, but I mean it's the same thing, like it's the illusion of I'm doing the right thing, but actually you've created a new vulnerability.

49:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I bought some. Uh, I don't think yubikey does this, but I bought some other hardware keys and they require you to buy two. Google requires you to buy two, because there you go. One's never enough, because what?

49:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
if you lose, yeah, but if you buy two, the smart thing to do is put both of them on the same key chain, so that way, if you perfect right.

49:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's just common sense. It always makes sense that way. Actually, um steve, maybe I misunderstood, but you were saying don't put your one-time password in your password manager, so use a separate thing for that. Is that what you were saying, or was?

49:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that my yeah, so I I do, you know. No, you're not hallucinating. I do use my password manager for pass keys. I do also have, because you're supposed to have multiple level, like multiple ways to authenticate, right. So I still use authenticator apps, and I actually use two because the goal Now you're doomed, by the way.

50:17
by the way, that's bad Well not for the same ones, I mean for different accounts, right? So the Microsoft Authenticator app is actually best for Microsoft accounts. The way that thing works is pretty amazing and it randomizes the way it authenticates you. So sometimes you type in a code, sometimes you're agreeing to a number, sometimes you click on whatever it is, but Clicking on a?

50:34 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Yeah, they always move that around.

50:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I like that, I think that's smart. But they do backup and not sync, right. And so one day, when Microsoft does finally figure this out in a secure way that they can sync account data, I will just use Microsoft Authenticator, but I use Google for my other accounts because it syncs, and you know, if you think about that, like maybe your phone gets stolen or something, yeah, no.

50:56 - Rich Campbell (Host)
the exercise for me is you dropped your phone in the ocean.

50:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now what do you do? You have to kind of step through this, because I think most people maybe don't appreciate how important your phone number is and your phone, but your phone number to your personal security with regards to online accounts and all this stuff. It's astonishing how many things are tied to this. So eSIMs are wonderful for this, but you could go to an Apple store, buy it online, whatever it is, you could get a phone, download an eSIM, be online, sync with your Google account and have all of your 2FA codes within minutes, and to me, that is huge. It's just it's huge and I want it to be something that, if I get it by a bus, my wife and her kids could probably figure it out.

51:47 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I still need to make that you know eventuality document or whatever we're calling it. You have backed up your Microsoft authenticator.

51:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, yes, you should do that too.

51:53 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Yes, but where did you put? The question is where did you put the recovery codes?

51:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I put it in my Microsoft account, richard. Obviously Obviously, but I actually did. But the reason is that a Microsoft account is the only cloud service that I use that has that extra authenticated encrypted space. That's good for this kind of thing, right? I only have a few accounts in it. Every one of them has other methods for me to authenticate. It's just a little more tedious. So I'm actually not.

52:29 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I mean, look, if they take away my account, they take away my account but you need your recovery code somewhere other than authenticator because, yeah, you need those recovery codes when you're restoring authenticator without the original source.

52:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I understand, yeah yeah, it's a uh we. This is uh, uh, part of my. My next book is going to be called 10 go to 10 and uh, I don't, I don't really have a good answer to that. But yes, you, all of these accounts, all of these, I'm sorry, all of these, I'm going to call them. What are they? Security solutions, whether it's like a 2fa, like an authenticator app or a password manager or whatever. Has these recovery, different recovery methods?

53:06 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Right.

53:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And some of them involve a recovery code. I just created a new Microsoft account um, for the book and it gave me a. I'd never seen this before, but as part of the account creation, it actually gave me the recovery code. It really wants you to use an existing account. This is something we talked about before. But if you come to Microsoft, you're like look, I'm getting an Xbox or whatever. For some reason I need a Microsoft account, but I already have this Google account or this Proton account or whatever the heck it is. It doesn't matter. Microsoft really wants you to use that account. They really really want you to, Because that's like a built-in recovery method right there.

53:41
You already have this thing. That's protected in various ways. But if you come to Microsoft and create a brand new account, now you have Outlookcom, whatever the account name you chose, and now you've got to go through and secure that thing. It's a multi-stage process and the first time you sign into a Windows computer with a new account like that, it's fine. Like you do the thing you authenticate, blah, blah, blah, and then you reboot and you come back. It's like nope, you got to do it again. Like they really want you to secure this thing before you use it full time. It's a lot of work on their part, so it's better for them if you come to it with a good account. So I should ask you, richard, since you asked the question how do you, what do you do to? I started them in bitwarden and bitwarden, oh and bitwarden.

54:24 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Okay, and I don't secure bitwarden with authenticator, I secure it with the ub key.

54:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, there you go. Okay, I was gonna ask you, the security key has to be in there somewhere. Okay, that makes sense to me.

54:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, uh, this is one of those you still have a master password or no? Do you not have a master?

54:38 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Yes, but then I also have the UBK, yeah.

54:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So does it require both? Yeah?

54:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this is wrong. Most password managers now probably support a passwordless version of the account. I've just never turned it on. Yeah, and it's possible. Depending, depending on the solution, you might not be able to. After the fact, you might actually have to start a new one to get there.

55:01 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I mean, there's some complexity to it, but and I'm not unhappy with the situation that I'm in right now I feel like I have yeah, no sensitive numbers and things are sitting in bit warden and I can access bit warden with redundant set of ub keys yep yeah, so uh, I use proton pass by the way.

55:17
All of this is way more complicated. It needs to be like it's only because I hang around with the sammy lejos and and these kinds of serious security guys, that we, they walk me through this, that I got to this place where it's like, okay, I get it, this is that's important, because you have to know your threat model, right?

55:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, steve, we've talked about this in security. Now, when it came up, should I store one-time passwords in my password manager, which is very convenient? You know, bitwarden will let you do that, and then it fills it in and fill that in and I know why the threat model is that?

55:48
well, that's a mistake because it's a. It's a single point of failure. Yeah, but steve's conclusion was look if bitwarden is properly encrypting everything and they're secure, and their vaults. If Bitwarden is properly encrypting everything and they're secure and their vaults are secure, that's fine. And for somebody who doesn't have a, if you're not a member of Congress or a social dissident or something, that's probably adequate. So that's what you have to think is well, it may be not perfect security, but is it adequate security?

56:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's always this balance between convenience and, like true security, and most people veer way too wildly to convenience. This is why people have no password on their phone or whatever most people listening to this show might veer too far to the security. That's right, yeah no, so I'm trying right. To me it's just a common sense thing. But proton pass only just this past week started adding the ability to add any item into the password manager, so I probably oh, I love that.

56:41
I'll probably put my recovery codes in there now, but it wasn't I always did. Yeah, recovery codes are in their passports, in their social security cards numbers all that stuff yeah yeah, so anyway, I would just say for now, look you any online account that's important mic, microsoft account, google, apple, amazon, whatever. Secure it how you can, but you need multiple ways to authenticate yourself. That's the end of that sentence. You just do. You have to right, because if you lose one, you're not getting into the account. You have to have multiple ways, right.

57:16 - Rich Campbell (Host)
You have to have multiple ways.

57:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's simple as like a backup email account where you can, it can send an email and then you get. You know, get into there and then you type in the code it sends you or whatever something, because you got to have something.

57:27 - Rich Campbell (Host)
It can't just be the one thing no but and this whole thing is like I have the, I think the pass keys ends up being the low friction approach that you'll use most of the time.

57:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh god, it's the best when it's there.

57:38 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah like the ubk approach is a pain in the ass. Not only do you have to have the physical piece of hardware, but the interfaces are terrible. Yeah, but it's that. Oh, I need to make this work and the low friction weight isn't working, for whatever reason. I know this will work right.

57:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, I, I think I described this earlier. But you know, like I said, when I bring up a new computer, you just like install a browser, whatever it is, sign into Google for the first time, like usually by going to Gmail, I don't type anything. I don't type anything, I'm just, I'm signed in, I'm authenticated, it brings me, it shows me the. I have two pass keys I can choose from. I click on the one I want and I'm in. That's it. I mean, this is like a global entry for traveling. It's like everyone else is standing in line and you're like and you're right, and you're done.

58:23
It's wonderful, so yeah, anyway, this is something that probably comes up more on mobile than it does on PC, but I do like that they're adding this and maybe we'll see less reliance on the web for this kind of authentication. I guess because you can store a. I guess you could do it now. I don't know how you would. I mean, well, soon, you just do it through one password or whatever, using right, just have access to that thing you are using. It's better for look, browser, password manager, whatever. You're better off using a third party thing than the thing the platform maker makes um, and this will enable that in windows broadly right, because you'll be able to use it at the system level with windows hello, which is great we're going to make this uh poster.

59:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh for your, uh, your office there for best in security.

59:14
Always store your backup right with the original. Thank you, paul. Actually, our club has come up with a couple of interesting uh tips out of sync. Always store your backup right with the original. Thank you, paul. Actually, our club has come up with a couple of interesting tips Out of Sync mentioned that and I didn't know this that if you needed the thousand Bing bucks for getting your security updates after October of this year, all you need to do is open the Outlook desktop app. Make sure you sign up for Bing Rewards Points first, of course, and he says you get a thousand points just for opening the Outlook desktop.

59:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the real reason they're doing it, Leo. They want people to use the new Outlook. You just found out the reason.

59:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We knew it was something. The other really good tip that I did not know about and I thought I was a pretty good expert on Bitwarden is that Bitwarden and, by the way, other password managers I'll show you one passwords have a page for like writing down this important security information. Yes, they have a editable pdf which you could store, you know, somewhere and let your, let your loved ones be aware of it, and all that stuff. I think this is. I just downloaded it. I'm going to put this up on I don't know, put it on the wall so that bird watchers can see it. Sort of emergency kit, yeah, well, I've renamed it. In case of my death or dismemberment, yeah, like your go bag, yeah.

01:00:35
And it's just information for your loved ones so that they can, because they can get into your stuff if they, if they need to, and I guess one password uh has something uh similar. I think that's a that's a really good idea. So, thank you. This is why you want to be a member of the club, because, uh, there's good, there's use. These people in here are great. They've for everybody's, helping everybody out. It's like a giant user group because they all listen to you guys and they're inspired.

01:01:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what I'm sorry that's very depressed, but yeah, either way, whatever I can go, either way, yeah, whatever, whatever the influence is uh, yeah, and here's the.

01:01:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, here's the one password. Get to know your emergency kit. So one password has something as similar, another, another of our. We have two sponsors.

01:01:22 - Rich Campbell (Host)
By the way, this is an afternoon of work, right? Yeah, it is on a sunday.

01:01:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sit down with this site, work through all the steps yeah, put a game on it, whatever, and just make notes while you go, because you're going to need them later.

01:01:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is because, once you get it done, you're not going to think about again and you will forget, right, right although probably good to kind of make a note, to update it from time to time, just in case, because one hopes you're changing your master passwords once in a while and things like once in a while not too often no yeah, and then make sure you store it in that same place.

01:01:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You'll be fine, just uh. Just put it right there with everything else and go to 10.

01:02:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like the name of your auto 10, go to 10. You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Theriot, richard Campbell. Paul is one of the things Paul does to me is he forces me to change browsers on a regular basis.

01:02:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know if that's for security or something, but go on, there you go so so what's new with edge? Yeah, I've been, I can kind of kind of struggling with this one because my gut tells me no one should ever use edge ever.

01:02:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank, you, paul. Thank you, I appreciate. It's not that bad.

01:02:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, yeah, that's the thing, it actually isn't that bad. And like google chrome, it's doing all the tracking and stuff. And there is that in certification, stuff in windows where they drive you to use edge if you're using another browser, and the likewise terrible thing where you are using edge but you're not using it the way microsoft wants and they keep prompting you to, you know, maybe configure bing as the default search or blah, blah, blah, whatever. Okay, but if you can get, if you can get by that stuff, honestly, it is the browser that comes with the operating system, so it has these integrations that are really nice, the. I don't really find a use for it too too much, but it does have the co-pilot stuff built in. If you want that kind of stuff.

01:03:15
I like the look of it, um, I, it's to me, it's, it's just kind of modern, it's got that when you i3, kind of. Look to it, um, so I actually I found myself using this browser a lot this year and then, you know, hating myself and crying in the shower later, but it's, you know, whatever. So, um, it's, it's, it's on the same yeah it's, yeah, it's.

01:03:39
It's a lot of back and forth, but it's on the same release schedule as Google Chrome, where it's a Chrome-based browser.

01:03:46
So the most recent release, which came out this past week, edge 138, has several I'm going to call them AI search related features, the most important being this is on device, which is kind of interesting, where it actually uses natural language search. Now, if you want to find something in history, right. So this is kind of like a a low, a low boil, a low, low contact version of you know recall, in a way, where you just kind of not talk to it but you just describe what you're looking for rather than trying to remember the name of the site or something, and it will hopefully work well. I've not actually used this yet, and the other thing they're doing is integrating Copilot into the search box and into the new tab page which, by the way, no one should ever use. The edge of the tab page is hot garbage. So, even if you're going to use this browser like an idiot, use a new tab replacement, like I used something called Bonjour.

01:04:42
Momentum is good, you know whatever, but okay because, yeah, because, um, the Microsoft page is just a a black hole of Microsoft services. Uh, terrible news stories from MSN.

01:04:54 - Rich Campbell (Host)
You know what it reminds me of. It reminds me of the old news stands in on the streets of new york that were just tabloids that's what.

01:05:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, okay, I was right, those are the days, baby yeah, the national examiner, if that was news jfk jr has alien baby.

01:05:11 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Yes, you know, bad boy, yep yeah, that's exactly what it is.

01:05:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what it looks like it's common.

01:05:16 - Rich Campbell (Host)
And then I turned. Then I turned on bonjour and suddenly realized how much stress that default page.

01:05:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, exactly, I could just have the seven or eight links I need and I'm done. Yeah, beautiful photo every day sounds good.

01:05:26 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah exactly and the weather and the time, and just like thanks.

01:05:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Thanks, you made me hate my machine less right, instead of turning it on and going oh, come on, yeah. The other other problem is that stuff doesn't sync properly. Like, not all the settings on that new tab page sync between machines, so you get confronted by the garbage every time you go to a different computer, whereas if you configure Bonjour, you'll get a pop-up that says hey, are you sure you want to use this as the new tab page? You're like yeah, I am sure, and you'll never have to deal with it once. It'll follow you Exactly. Like that's really important to me, but so it's going to be interesting to see this.

01:06:04
Another thing I have started writing but haven't published is I'm thinking about web browsers and how they're about to change dramatically because of AI, and there are examples from the browser company like Arc and Dia that are, I don't want to say radical, but a rethinking of the browser, right? And then things like Opera, neon, which is another. Look, you know we make browsers. What does this mean for this? Ai? Or you know, let's think this over. Whereas, you know, google, microsoft, apple are taking a more conservative, subtle approach, right? So this is.

01:06:36
You know, there's a sidebar for copilot and edge, which is whatever. It's easy to ignore. You can turn it off. It's, you know, that's good, right, but there are these capabilities that you do get, uh, through copilot, which are useful, and they want to integrate more of that into the browser itself, which does make sense, and maybe this becomes a reason to, or a reason not to, you know use edge in the future. I guess we'll see. But, um, they want to give you those kind of intelligence features, um, you know, right in the browser. So we're starting to see that and and it's like again, it's not in your face, like maybe the browser company stuff is, um, not yet. But uh, yeah, they're, they're heading down. That, I guess, is the way to think of it, nice.

01:07:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so should I use it. No, no, no.

01:07:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, a lot of times you know like it's like when you read it, like someone will review like a low-end smartphone and they'll be like, oh, I would never use this PC, but but it's great for you, right? No, this is the opposite. It's like, no, I'm using it and honestly it's fine, but I think I know what I'm doing and I and you do too, right. But I mean, but I yeah, yeah, no, there's no reason. I don't know, don't do this, you got me on arc, you got me on dia, just in time to have it taken away yeah, I was sad

01:07:56
I don't know, I don't, I don't dia is not going to be my default browser, I gotta tell you as well, but once they add that sidebar thing back, right and it's arc light.

01:08:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, once it's arc, like yeah, they have said they're doing that, so so they're gonna put all the arc looks and because I use zen browser, which is a Firefox Arc clone. It's identical. It's crazy and I like it a lot. It's not 100% stable, but it's pretty close. I mean, look at this Firefox to me is more resource usage and it doesn't run as fast, but the UI of this is identical to Arc.

01:08:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's got the workspaces I which I really, uh, actually like yep, um, they need to figure out a way to onboard people into this and let them ignore it if they don't want it, because it's a little too disruptive. Right, and like one of the um vestigial features from arc that's india, that's I. I hate, and I haven't figured out how to work around yet is uh control tab goes to the last four or whatever tabs, not to the tabs in order, and that is not how browsers work and that makes me crazy. And in arc there was a way I can't remember how I did it, maybe in flags or something to uh enable I think it's a setting actually it's got to be, but it's not.

01:09:15
It's not there, like it's not in settings, like I've looked um because there's a ds what do you want?

01:09:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what do you want it to do?

01:09:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
the neck, the I want it to go in order through the tabs as they appear, as they are lined up. Yeah, yeah, you know, like a normal person, um, but I, you know, I. It makes me crazy that it doesn't do that. But other than that, it's okay, it's fine, I'm letting it learn about me. It's probably just going to come back and be like, look, it's, it's not us, it's not you, it's us. I would just not. This isn't working out. Um, they're going to say no to me, I think.

01:09:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think the thing about dia that bugs me, although I mean I'm a big ai guy, as you know, I'm a proud ai user, it's just. It's so ai focused.

01:09:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean it's like yeah, well that, but this is the bet that you know, like, yeah, I kind of, I will say, when they first came out with arc, they were talking about this notion that the browser is essentially an internet computer, that for many, many people, you do all, or most you work, in the browser, and this should be more sophisticated, yada, yada, I was like you know what, 100. And then, um, you know, dia, they're trying not to be as disruptive with the ux, which I sort of appreciate, but they're, but they're thinking ahead to like, okay, ai is going to change everything. How can we use this to make your life browsing more efficient?

01:10:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
whatever will be essentially an interaction with it at a chat but maybe browsing doesn't happen. Any browsing might be one of those things that becomes a past task you know that well, that's kind of I mean, I made perplexity my search. Yeah, maybe I'm going to go back to cocky, but uh, every search is an ai conversation now and I can see the value of that. But a lot of times when I search, I want, I just want an answer, you want to be done exactly. I just want to go to that page.

01:11:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't, yep yeah, there needs to be like two different kinds of searches. Yeah, they need to be well, or one that it knows what you're doing and gives you the right, right, right. That's the intelligent answer to that and that's why I think google will eventually do fine in this world.

01:11:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But um, their ai search summaries are awful. Yeah, they are. They're unbelievable terrible.

01:11:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's you know what. I don't know if we brought I brought this up last week, um, but it's fascinating to me that now that we have AI or AI chatbots, whatever that can code that everywhere, like it's everywhere. When you at what I? I ask, I Google questions about coding all the time and it will actually give me the answer now in that AI summary with code yeah, and it's like.

01:11:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hmm, and it's so cool and it gives you a little cut and paste icon too, it's so great.

01:11:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's kind of interesting. I mean it's almost there's a little like a middle finger to stat you know, stack overflow in the corner Like you know, sorry, sorry guys, we just took all this took all this.

01:11:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we, we just scraped it off your site, basically I so I uh, you know, every once in a while, just as a mental exercise, it's kind of like crossword puzzles for me. I do coding challenges and this advent of codes thing it's once a, it's only in december, but I'm so slow I'm, you know, I'm still still plowing through. I'm doing day 15 right now. So you know, december, but I had a bug that was driving me crazy. Right, just a little bug. And uh and darren oki, in our discord I'm mentioning it to them they're kind of my mentors, darren and paul, and they and darren said well, just ask, claude code, what, what's wrong? I said it'll be interesting experiment to see if you can understand what you've done so far in common lisp no yet, no less, not even right normal language and figure out where you went wrong. And it did. Yeah, oh yeah, you just didn't load in all the uh input.

01:12:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's three more lines so the next, the next level version of that is um, you try to figure something out, you have a problem. Whatever it is, it's like this thing is not doing what I wanted to do. Can you please fix it? Like oh, yeah, sure. And it's like, blah, change this, change this, and this is why. And blah, blah, blah. And you're like, oh, that's amazing. And then you run it. You're like okay, this doesn't work. So you go back and you're like this thing that you just told me to use doesn't work.

01:13:05
And they're like yeah, sorry, I we missed the you have to initialize this here and you gotta, now it's gonna work fine. And you're like, all right, and then I've done that. You're like, okay, it works. You know, it's like sometimes you have to like berate it a little bit, like yeah, oh method you gave me, you know, and like sorry about that, uh, I was I didn't let it edit the file, I just said what, what's wrong here?

01:13:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and it said you should put this code. This code would be better because you're missing some lines of code, lines of input. Yeah, and I went oh, you're right, so I just made the change myself. But uh, because I was, I have had an experience where it's taken my beautifully crafted code and put its own little imprimatur on it and I don't like that.

01:13:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
A lot of times, like when you're writing a line of code, it's not, something isn't resolving. So you're a little squiggly thing, whatever it is, and you get the error message, in my case from visual studio will say something like you know, whatever, it doesn't matter what the error, like you, this has to happen before this is going to work something. Whatever it is, you're like okay. So you're like, all right, copilot, fix it. And then what it does is it just removes the line that had the offending code, yeah, which I put in because the thing wasn't working to begin with. And it's like okay, you got rid of that problem.

01:14:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I'm trying to solve.

01:14:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a little superficial problem, yeah like it's a little too, you local it's being very literal, it's like solve the problem.

01:14:19 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I took the line away, problem resolved I like, we're gonna, like we are.

01:14:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you're a developer, you are the canary in the ai coal mine. There's no doubt about it, like we are. The things that these people are doing right now are a preview of what just basic productivity is going to be, or previous for some people right there. Exactly, yeah, it's getting there, but it's, this is, this is what's happening, like it's yeah, and and it's going to be. Uh, oh, I had to write a you know 30 000 word essay on whatever for school or god help you, illegal filing, and it's monday morning at 8 30 and it has to be done and yikes, and they're gonna use it. You know, yeah, like you know they are well, along those lines.

01:15:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I see now I can. I use perplexity, I use claude, I use chat gp. I pay for all of these things, uh. But now I can use co-pilot on my mac. Why do I pay for it? How do I get that? How?

01:15:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
do that work. So there's already a co-pilot app on the mac that came out february, something like that, um, and it looks and works a lot like the co-pilot app in windows. I don't know why anyone would use that, but now there is a microsoft 365 copilot app, right? So this is the one you sign into with your work and school account. You know, uh, enter id. It's part of m365, yep, and that's actually. There are good reasons to use that your work.

01:15:51
You're using it for work, so maybe you use a mac you're using, you know work's paying for it and you're using it for whatever reasons, like you're going to want that.

01:15:58 - Rich Campbell (Host)
So in some ways it's kind of shocked it's taking this long.

01:16:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah.

01:16:02
I mean, I guess they charge 20 bucks a month for like, yeah, I get, I mean you can go to the web, I guess. But yeah, in in windows, this is just built in it's part of the OS. Now, right, and so back in the day this was the office app. It became microsoft 365 app. Now it's the microsoft 365 copilot app, but it has um kind of front ends to the very you know word, excel, powerpoint, etc. Um with templates and blah blah, whatever. But the. I think the bigger piece there, the integration piece, is really uh, well, and recent documents and all that stuff. But uh, is the um, the right, the, the copilot capability. So, yep, you can get that on the Mac.

01:16:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, your.

01:16:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Mac is not stable enough.

01:16:48 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Which do you?

01:16:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what do you do? You use them all. I use them all. I.

01:16:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, I am humiliated. Uh, to say again, I don't use AI almost at all and it is not a strategy, it's not, it's just what's happening. I just don't find myself doing it. I mentioned this to my-. I type stuff into perplexity all the time. Yep, my wife uses it all the time. I said this to her the other day and she goes.

01:17:12 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I use it more now than I ever have. It's taking her off the search engines entirely. Yep, it's taking her off the search engines entirely. That's what I'm finding is folks that get on that path, and perplexity especially. They just never search again.

01:17:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, obviously for images, yes, and that's something that is. It's a one-to-one replacement, like I would go to Shutterstock or whatever those sites are to find an image, and those are fine, but they're also images that anyone can have. You know, and one of the nice things about the AI imagery is that it's yours, like it's. It may look stylistically like other images right, they all look the same, but you describe what you want. You get these sometimes crazy results back. One of them is like this inspired insanity and you're like, yes, this, this, like that halo picture with the last supper what the frick was that so brilliant?

01:18:01 - Rich Campbell (Host)
awesome, you know. But have you played with frame pack yet? I have not. It's on github and it's video diffusion. So you take your mid-journey image, or however you're making your images, okay, you feed it to frame pack and give it a set of instructions of what to do to make a 10 minute, 10 second video out of that, just to add some animation or motion.

01:18:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep this is yeah, so that type of thing is starting to become common and people or companies or whatever are using it to take these old photos that might be black and white. And the big thing before and we did this for my parents uh, I'm sorry for my wife's parents uh, anniversary a couple years ago was you take their wedding pictures were black and white, yeah, and take them and colorize them, yeah, and nice, like that stuff is really cool. It doesn't have that fake color like problem we've always had for a long time. But now you can also take them and turn them into short animated video.

01:18:55
You can tell it to do the sepia color too, if that's the look you want, yeah no, you may be right, you may be looking for that, but it's kind of amazing and so, like, uh, there have been movies where they well, like ken burns, remember, would pan through still images and do that ken burns effect, right where he's coming, give it some sense of some sense of depth. Yeah, uh, but there are documentary movies like there, I know, like um, the guy, what's that guy's name? The guy from uh weta that made um the lord of the rings? Uh, jackson jackson made that world war one document. Oh, that was so amazing which is amazing.

01:19:27
God, that was amazing and I think these things all kind of fall into the same general category where you have this content uh, maybe it's still photo in this case, that, maybe it's old, maybe the corners turn off or know it's black and white or whatever it is and not only can you make the thing look modern and beautiful, but now you can turn it into a video and I got to tell you, like if it's a loved one and they've passed, maybe, and now you have this video of them kind of interacting with other people in a. You know it's like oh my God, like this is. It's crazy, Right.

01:20:02 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I is, um, it's crazy, right, I mean, some of that stuff is really impressive, yeah. So, yeah, and it and it's it's still clumsy to do, but we're just not that far away from being able to.

01:20:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you know exactly I haven't done it yet, but I think, uh, the google one, I think, is called vo or vo vo. Yeah, you know, and I believe it does what we're describing.

01:20:17
It's mind-boggling and uh, yep, I mean this is uh. Look, that's going to replace browsing. Right, I suppose you could sit there you're sort of watching tv, but what you're really doing is browsing through facebook or something. Now you could just go back and like animate old photos of, uh, you know, maybe your grandparents or someone who's passed on by now, or whatever it is, and oh, we'll have incredible.

01:20:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We'll have, uh, virtual people all over our lives.

01:20:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, soon, like in the next few years yep, yeah, like if you're a little too excited about how well things are going on in life, you'll have like a paul ai thing that would make you depressed yeah, you know it could be better you know, yeah, it's like I mean you're pretty good, but this other guy is doing better than you are, so I don't know you really microsoft's doing pretty good, but I mean, I'm just saying they don't give out silver medals for second place.

01:21:10
Oh wait, yes, they do anyway. Um, yeah, this is it's. It's astonishing, I, I, it really is astonishing. And you know, there are still people who are like it's not real, it's a scam. It's like okay, but look at this thing.

01:21:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's getting hard. I'll tell you what it's getting hard to. It used to be. You could always oh, that's video. You know AI, it's getting really hard.

01:21:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, because 15 minutes has gone by. This is not like. This is a remember when Jurassic Park came out and it was like Holy crap, like that looks. That, looks real like that. And my takeaway from Jurassic Park was they can now make anything on film Like this is they've done this, that's over. But if you go back and watch Jurassic Park today, still looks great, right. That's the thing that's amazing about that. You would think something like that would start looking dated somehow and I feel like AI is like that. It's like all of a sudden, it just happens like it's on you know.

01:22:06 - Rich Campbell (Host)
If you want a real flashback on that, go watch the Canadian PSA House Hippo video on YouTube. What House Hippo? Is it all AI generated? No, because it's from the 1990s. It is a hand visual effect.

01:22:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, okay, yeah, let's find this All right, it's compelling. This is about a hippo, is this it? Yeah, there's a cat in a kitchen, but here comes the house. Hippo, it's the size of a mouse.

01:22:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this wasn't stop animation. No, it's digital. It's the size of a mouse, so this wasn't stop animation.

01:22:41 - Rich Campbell (Host)
No, it's digital, it's editing.

01:22:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, so it's like a Jurassic Park style special effect, except in reverse light size wise.

01:22:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want a house hippo. Where can I get one of those?

01:22:53 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Well, it's the best. This is one of the best PSAs ever. This is a talk about deceptive television, right? Ah, to teach you. Yeah, it was a public service. Good old Canada.

01:23:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think you'd probably snap your finger off that. You've got to be careful around hippos.

01:23:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You've seen their teeth? They look like logs.

01:23:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're lethal Like the tensile strength of like a hundred crocodiles yeah, they're saying here so don't, don't.

01:23:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're saying here don't believe the house, hippo when you see it.

01:23:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, although it's anti-children's advertising. Oh, that's cool, you see a little shadow running around in the kitchen. It's probably a rat, not a house hippo, but I I love about that one is it looks good. It's none of that technology, or looks real that technology.

01:23:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, but that's what that right now on your iphone you could make that video. Oh yeah, that's what's. Oh, that's easy. Yeah, it's unbelievable. Uh, here is more vo video. These look as real as can be. Yeah, uh, except you could tell his t-shirt is yeah is right, right, I love that. That's the mistake it still has, like the misspelling of words oh, actually that's the name of the of the website, but these they're made, they're talking, they're acting. You can make realistic video.

01:24:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We can't do integer math yeah, right.

01:24:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, how many hours of strawberries? I have no idea, but I don't even know what a strawberry is, but you know what I? It strikes me that, because this is a good example of this, is that it ingested so much influencer video right, that it's really good at this, thus ensuring that this will be entertainment for the rest of our lives, right?

01:24:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
idiot who knows nothing in some place talking to someone do you ever give to the poor?

01:24:37 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I? I gave my slave a compliment once. She cried You're welcome. Would you let your daughter date a gladiator? I wouldn't let her date a Greek.

01:24:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my god, this is ancient Rome.

01:24:57 - Rich Campbell (Host)
This is influencer interviewing people in ancient that's good, be humble, but also name a whole month after yourself that's awesome, unbelievable what they're doing.

01:25:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I swear to god, it's awesome. It's amazing. That's also impeccable, which which is, I guess, a YouTube channel. Okay, here's Joanna Stern at the Wall Street Journal turning herself into a Dr Chip motherboard robot designer.

01:25:32
The film you're about to see, including Chip and all the other visuals, this is all made up, this is inserted into a live action which is kind of like like the hippo, it's impressive, so it's kind of amazing anyway. Yep, we're living in a fun times. That's why we changed the show. Uh, right after this show from this week in google, which was getting pretty dull, to be honest.

01:25:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, uh to intelligent machines so, if I hear you correctly, you're suggesting that this should be microsoft 365 co-pilot weekly it could be no no, I mean I'm not saying I would do harm to myself, but no I am not super interested in that, yeah you saw that apple.

01:26:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh well, this is a rumor from mark german at bloomberg. He's usually pretty good that Apple is talking to. I don't think they're talking to Microsoft, but they're talking to OpenAI and Claude.

01:26:23 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and this Siri 3 package, perplexity, I mean, they're basically yeah or mic by perplexity.

01:26:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't want them to, because I love perplexity, I know.

01:26:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
When you were talking about perplexity, I almost said so what are you going to to do if apple? I mean, I'll be devastated. I know well, look I, whatever they do, they do. But I obviously, according to mark herman, I mean they're moving forward with their in-house work on models. Um, they apparently made an offer to anthropic and they came back asking so much money and wanted it on like an ongoing basis, which is so against the apple way of doing things. Right that they were. They were like, oh, this is no way. So they went to open ai and I open ai is an interesting option only because of the microsoft angle to me, like this is a way to play another gigantist company off Microsoft and maybe help facilitate that inevitable breakup. You know, but I don't know. You know this is just talk until it happens, I guess. So I feel like at some point in the next whatever number of months, we're going to hear something about Apple actually going in this direction.

01:27:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, I think they want to get this stuff going. It's kind of an acknowledgement that they've failed with Siri. They've failed to make Siri into the chatbot.

01:27:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I would say it's a deeper failure than that in a way, because what they've really failed doing is creating these models in-house. Their model of doing everything in-house, so to speak, has paid off big time for them, of doing everything in-house, so to speak, has paid off big time for them. And this is one case where they might have to go with a third party to realize the dream they had for this product. Right, and I guess that's part of it, because they've, at least with the Anthropic Cloud stuff and I would assume also ChatGPT but they've asked that company Anthropic, to create a special version of it that will run on their private cloud compute that they run themselves ah, so that way that is private, you're not, and yes, and specifically tailored for the tasks that they want siri to be good at, which has to be more than is it raining, and or tell me a joke, or whatever stupidity is this analog to what microsoft did.

01:28:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean co-pilot.

01:28:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Microsoft has its own models, but co-pilots open ai, right, yeah, so, yeah, so co-pilot, I mean, look, actually the truth is we don't know what the mix is right now, but yes, certainly at the beginning, when it was being ai and then the beginning of co-pilot, the way microsoft described it was open ai models and capabilities and then their secret sauce, uh, which is gross, but um is like the secret sauce you get on a big mac I guess it's orange and weird looking and it tastes vaguely pickly, but um yeah, it was basically ketchup pickles, yeah, but they were doing whatever tailoring of the prompts, but also using Bing search on the back end for those search results which you know you need.

01:29:24
But also it's Bing, you know. So you might have made the argument that maybe the chat GPT version of whatever the services we're talking about at the time might be better because it's not using Bing on the backend or whatever. I don't know. But yeah, I mean, microsoft since then has jump-started their own internal Microsoft AI group with Mustafa Suleiman and those guys. They brought in that guy that used to run I can't remember his name, I'm sorry, he was at Builder John Gendrea. Yeah, no, this is at no the Microsoft guy. The guy who I think he used to run the infrastructure at Meta. Oh, yeah, g J, I can't remember his name, but yeah, there were rumors some months ago that Microsoft's models were allegedly there. But I've heard since they're not even close and we'll see. Allegedly there, but I've heard since they're not even close and you know we'll see. But um, yeah, I mean the goal is to wean themselves off of that stuff as much as possible right in my mind we'll talk about it later on intelligent machines there.

01:30:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So meta is doing something similar to meta had its own llm llama, but now mark zuckerberg is going out and spending money trying chiefly to acquire uh, you know, like the top 12 guys exactly mostly from open ai, to start a whole new division called super intelligence. It almost feels to me like these big companies thought it would be easy to make their own AIs and in fact Anthropic OpenAI and maybe to some lesser degree, google kind of have a lock on it. So they have to go to these other people, these third parties. They don't want to.

01:31:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Listen, we keep bragging on Apple, but I do think there's a version of this where, yeah, they partner with someone and maybe that looks bad for two seconds, but the truth is, if they run this thing through a private cloud compute, I would have tailored it to some degree, yeah, for their specific workloads. It's going to be fantastic. I would immediately do it and yep, and I think today I bet I'd be interested to see what the numbers are on this. I bet apple doesn't want to talk about it, but apple intelligence is on whatever number of devices. You can actually go in and in and sign into chat, gpt you don't have to pay for it, but if you do, you get whatever benefits you get through that and I bet a lot of people do it because it's better.

01:31:47
You know it's as bad. I mean, in the same way that we all use Google maps, knowing they're tracking every single moment or direction we take, and now we suspect and almost certainly are true, is are correct that it is um taking us in directions that are better for traffic, not better for us. You know, like um, like we just drove back to and from boston and at some point I was like what's this leaf thing on the screen and my wife's like, oh, you're taking the most you know, uh gas friendly way, and I'm like I want to take the fastest way if I could fly to this place it's so ridiculous, I'll screw that and I turned that thing off and then it was oh, your travel time went down by 20 minutes.

01:32:27
I'm like, seriously, but there'll be these things. Oh, you can save some time if you take the side road. You can do this and, like in the past it seemed kind of crazy, but it usually worked, and these days, well, at least on this trip, it kept going back up to the original time and it was like I think they're just directing traffic to smooth traffic. I don't think this is for me anymore. I think this is for the general good, and I got to tell you I don't care about the general good.

01:32:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want the best thing for me. The tragedy of the commons it all came down to a leaf.

01:32:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Screw everyone else. Man, I just want to get there. If I could fly over them and blast them with the exhaust from my jet on the way by.

01:33:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All the rot is rolling coal, ladies and gentlemen, nice.

01:33:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just want to get there. You know I don't know.

01:33:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh well, yeah, grammarly, look Grammarly, look at Grammarly. They're an advertiser, or were an advertiser. They acquired another advertiser, coda.

01:33:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, that was a weird one because, if you are familiar with that deal, back in December they acquired that company but it was really a merger and the CEO of Coda became the CEO of Grammarly, as announced by the now former CEO of Grammarly, who apparently was okay with that and part, and they said this at the time. But they were like you know, we have bigger aspirations than being like you know spell checking, grammar checking, et cetera.

01:33:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So kind of smart right I mean in this age of AI?

01:34:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they're going to get steamrolled. I mean that capability, which good, bad and different, whatever anyone thinks of grammarly whatever but it's going to be built into everything. You on your apple phone messages has right tools built in. Windows has built, yeah, everyone's going to have. So that specific feature, not necessary, um, but now they they talked about and then did get some billion in funding back in whatever that was May, maybe with an eye toward further acquisitions. And then they just purchased a company called Superhuman, which I've never heard of, but they make a very expensive, by the way, email solution which is all. Ai native is the term that they use and now they're talking about we're going to go for the whole ai native suite. You know productivity, oh, that's interesting. So this is not necessarily unique. Um, in some ways, notion is doing something like this. You could argue that proton is kind of doing something like this.

01:34:53 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Um, they don't all 100 overlap yet, but they're all kind of you know, and this is an existential threat, you know it's happening with ai is going to destroy grammarly if they don't do something. That's right, just jumping on.

01:35:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's exactly right. Yep, that's exactly right they're doing. They're doing what they should be doing, because otherwise they would disappear. They would just disappear.

01:35:10 - Rich Campbell (Host)
That's right, but I mean arguably putting coda in charge. The coda ceo in charge is like we need to be an ai company.

01:35:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
they looked, looked at those guys and said, look, here's a whole bunch of customers.

01:35:19 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Yeah, they need more funding, they need more resources, whatever it might be and we can realize this vision, or whatever, it's a high risk play, but it's a high risk play because this RU die, so if you think.

01:35:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know what the year was, but whenever Google came out with what is now called Google Workspace, it was huge because they were taking on Microsoft. It was a monolithic, super successful office business, humongous with the Fortune 500 especially, but just with everyone really and Google Workspace saw and still sees, I think, some success with what I'll call startups and very small businesses. Yeah, 2020.

01:35:56 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

01:35:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm sorry, 2020, no, but yeah, but the. But the G Suite before that G Suite, and yeah, I mean it probably goes back at least 10 more years from there, I don't remember exactly, but but the. The point was to provide, uh, kind of a low-cost, web-centric, as Google would do, take on office productivity. That was, yeah, really big on email calendar, but also had the docs and spreadsheet and all that stuff and okay, like that, you know, whatever. Obviously, pieces of that are very successful. It's worked out pretty well.

01:36:28
But this stuff like this is interesting to me, like Notion, which I think of as like the everything app, buys a calendar company and then buys an email company and it's like, wait a minute, what's happening here? And then Grammar, grammarly, which is almost left field because literally spell checking and grammar checking buys coda and then by superhuman and is now talking about an ai native productivity suite that will take all of those things on right, um, and that's really interesting. And so you know notion, grammarly, proton, etc. What I think of as little tech. And then we get big tech microsoft, google, whatever, um, this I'm not saying it's an existential threat to microsoft- no, not at all not no, but but it is interesting that there's more competition like this all of a sudden and what this is, the?

01:37:10 - Rich Campbell (Host)
the play here is make an ai centric productivity suite. Yeah and yeah and the. And the exit is and you succeed. Start eating some of microsoft's lunch and they buy you, oh that's interesting, yeah, I that's the best thing about being a tech giant.

01:37:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You don't have to figure this out you wait for someone else to figure it out. Just be smart enough to see who figured it out. Yeah, okay that's fair and um.

01:37:33 - Rich Campbell (Host)
There's also, by the way, is the plan in the boardroom of the little guy. If we nail this, one of the big guys will show up with a three comma number hopefully not sales for us.

01:37:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But, yeah, one of them, uh, you know, um, yeah, that's a good point. Um, yeah, I, I just thought of this as we were talking. I didn't write this anywhere, but I I guess you could view this uh to uh like what I'll call office productivity, uh, which is very email centric, still right, uh, in the same way that you look at like dia or opera neon for web browsers. It's like we, we have this thing, we understand it. It's probably going to change a lot because of ai. What happens if we just go into it with that as the focus, like if you were going to start this thing over right now?

01:38:19
a thing Microsoft would not do, right, um, I think Google probably would not do. They're kind of entrenched, you know what?

01:38:26 - Rich Campbell (Host)
does that look like? This isn't, but this is an exercise that Microsoft people, senior Microsoft people, do occasionally. Oh yeah, then look at like does it make any sense? Yep, and this is the. This is what competitive analysis looks like. Like, if you had a chance to start over, what would you do? What would it look like?

01:38:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that lets you look for threats yeah, I mean there was a big push for a web-based or a java-based office suite from microsoft in the late 90s, early 2000s. They played around with it and you know, eventually the leadership of that part of the company was like actually, this thing is not going to destroy our business, it just makes sense for us to keep going with what we have and have it work with, uh, office document types etc. Etc. You can publish to the web or whatever it is and, uh, it seems like it's worked out. I mean, obviously, you know, as the cloud era happened, microsoft 365 now is gangbusters.

01:39:19 - Rich Campbell (Host)
It's gone great, and the focus of Office 365 all along was to compete with the G Suite. That's who they were afraid of, right, and so it definitely drove them, and that's why they had iOS and Android versions of Word and Excel in 2011. They weren't allowed to release them until when eight failed.

01:39:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right, as soon as when eight failed they came out, yeah, suddenly uh, meeting customers where they were started to make sense well, they, they there were.

01:39:51 - Rich Campbell (Host)
They were told by certain people you're not going to need any of that because windows 8 is going to. Windows 8 and windows phone 8 are going to sweep the market and it'll all be office all the time we were so innocent then it was a simpler time, paul, but simple people.

01:40:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Simpler time, paul, for simpler people.

01:40:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I know what I want.

01:40:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you're good. I want our Xbox and gaming segment and I want it badly. But before I do that, I just should tell everybody you're listening to Windows Weekly with Paul Thorat, richard Campbell, and we're so glad you're here. We hope you'll keep listening. We do the show live for your delectation. If you want to watch live, you don't have to. Most people don't. They mostly download the podcast. But if you want the absolute freshest version, every Wednesday, 11 am, pacific 2 pm, eastern 1800 UTC, and we stream live on eight different platforms.

01:40:47
Of course, in the club discord for club members, but there's also youtube, twitch, twitch, tiktok, facebook, linkedin, xcom and Kik. So if you're in the chats in any of those places, I see you. I see you Jamie and some knucklehead in YouTube that's his actual handle or hers. I feel like Romper Room, I feel like miss nancy, uh, and I see you chocolate milk, mini sip, and. And I see you el rao and joseph and all the people in all the chat rooms of all the world joining us every wednesday for windows weekly. So glad you did. Thank you, thanks to our club members for making this all possible. Now I've I've delayed long enough. It's time for the xbox segment. Mr thrott, I see you, I don't have a magic mirror or anything but I was, I mute and then I forget I'm mute.

01:41:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm mute I misplaced one of the stories just real quick. Uh, if you're familiar with the cursor ai code editor, oh yes, it's based on visual studio code, right? Yes, yes, um, they just announced something called cursor web this past week, which is actually for, um, well, desktop or mobile. Um, it's not cursor on the web, but what it is is a front end to the ability to manage, including create cursor agents, and these are the things that run in the background and do complex tasks for you. So I sort of think of it like the Adobe Firefly Firefly is that the right name?

01:42:23
Yeah.

01:42:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Firefly, that's the Mobile app, yeah, yeah.

01:42:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's their image generator. You're not going to sit there and, you know, do complicated graphics on your phone, but you might be out in the world, be like, oh, I have a really good idea and then you, you can say it or type it into the thing and have it create images and you can go back when you're at your desktop and work with them in the full experience, and this is sort of like that. But for uh, the ai agents that will work on your behalf and cursor is very popular for coders.

01:42:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like claude code, which is command line, but cursor is very popular.

01:42:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's interesting yeah yeah, I mean, yeah, I think, yeah, I I haven't used it in a while, but my couple of experiences with the cursor were actually very positive and the amount of feedback you got and because one of the things I think they did first it was certainly the first I had seen was it's kind of what I think of as like whole project code, not triage, but a code quality, you know, kind of look at the whole thing and then come back Cause you know, a lot of times with code you'd be like here's a method or a line of code Like how can I make this better? And it's like it would examine multiple files in an entire project and come back with this gigantic list of like here's all the things you need to fix or that could be better.

01:43:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's a little depressing too, but but impressive right um, I mean, there's some things you could do, like write tests for me that are really useful, right?

01:43:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yep, yeah, time savers, like just smart, so it's not the full cursor experience, but you know, again you're on the look. We all have whatever lives we have. You're thinking in the back of your brain about work and suddenly this idea strikes and you're like, oh, and you can just throw it in there. And the next time you sit at your computer, bring up cursor and you can see. You know what.

01:43:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm really excited, though, about my idea of having this AI server in the closet that you are.

01:44:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I really want your laser I love the local thing is blows my mind, because it's the one thing that's not really there yet. No, but given the speed at which this stuff I mean look, not every single week, but almost every single week there is an announcement from someone. It could be Microsoft Fi, it could be Anthropic, it could be the Lama stuff, where they take this tiny model that is now as good as what used to be an LLM that had to run in the cloud.

01:44:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I bought eight terabytes of storage. It doesn't have to be that tiny, and I bought a 28 gigs of RAM. It doesn't have to be minuscule. It's not running on an iPhone. Yeah, but you might.

01:44:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
but actually the reality for your machine, as well as any computer, really is. You're not going to be running any model. You're going to be running dozens of models all of them tailored to specific things, right?

01:44:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so the thing I am excited about is the idea that it will have all the context. See, I have to start different conversations, then the context is fragmented, but if it's all in that one box, right.

01:45:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You need like an aggregation thing where whatever conversation you have with chat, gpt or whatever you're using, somehow makes its way back.

01:45:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually they are working on that right now. The idea of having a consultation among the various ais. Today we call that exporting bookmarks, but it's uh, yeah, very similar seems to be upset today. Do you know anything about that?

01:45:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, yeah, he was uh trying to find a shirt the other day and uh could not find the right color.

01:45:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It'll be it'll be like that, uh, that, uh, that Pixar movie, where all the emotions in your brain are fighting it out. It'll kind of be like that I have a feeling inside my home AI box. Anyway, it's an experiment.

01:45:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You seem like supercharged about this. I just think the problem is local. Ai has amounted to like nothing so far. I know you know this is the only well.

01:45:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Some people use it. I mean some of our, some of our. Darren likes is a local. I think it takes some uh work and tuning right.

01:45:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yep no, but just like general chatbot stuff, you can do this right now visual studio code, ai, whatever, it's called ai studio, whatever. But I'm sure there are multiple ways. You just you can download models and then just interact with them from the command line as if it were. Cause it is, it's chatbot, it you do, you interact with it the same way you interact with chat, gpt or whatever in the cloud and you know mixed results, right, I mean, it depends on. It depends on a lot of things. I guess it depends on what you're doing, right and um, and they probably get better all the time. I'm sure eventually it will be fine. But I don't know, like you want to, you want this to go from being like barely acceptable to being good enough and then to being kind of roughly on par, at least, for what you needed to do. You know, like you don't always want to be behind with it, but right well, we'll see.

01:46:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, anyway, that's uh ai redux. We thought we were done with the ai, but like a bad breakfast burrito bowl, dragging me back coming up. Yeah, exactly now can we do the xbox.

01:47:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, now, now sorry so I already mentioned that microsoft was shutting down the initiative, which is the name of that game studio that was working on perfect dark, and also, uh, shutting down a game called ever wild, which is rare, which is the company that made perfect dark, if I'm not mistaken, the original one, I think. I think this is, I think it's all the same. Um yeah, so that's happening, whatever that's too bad, um same. Um yeah, so that's happening, whatever that's too bad.

01:47:34 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Um, this one was a game, right. Yeah, this is an open world. Uh, like what do you call mm? So the initiative is a studio, but there was everwild and perfect, dark, or two different games yes, I'm sorry, right, and two different studios.

01:47:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Technically, I mean, like rare made the original perfect dark and I think perfect dark zero. But then, uh, the initiative is doing was doing the was doing the next one. Yeah, they're reimagining or whatever it is, whatever it was, because it's not happening. Um, so, the xbox 360 we don't talk about this console enough, um, because it came out 20 years ago, really old. Yeah, it's really old. Um, but they're updating the dashboard. Um, don't worry, it's not to make it faster. Um, they're. They're actually gonna try to sell you a new xbox because this thing is 20 years old, literally 20 years old. I don't have any left. Yeah, I'm surprised anyone does, honestly, given how unreliable is it running?

01:48:21 - Rich Campbell (Host)
yeah, yeah, yeah, it's probably good as a space heater though um I, at 20 years, I would expect the traces to start becoming off the board now. Right, right, right.

01:48:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like the Atari computers. You got to drop from like a height of six inches just to see it. All the chips, you know that kind of thing. That's it. Yep, Uh, I wouldn't drop an Xbox, so the thing would probably explode.

01:48:41 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Um well, it's one way to get a new Xbox. Drop the old one I don't know, I guess, it had trouble loading Call of Duty.

01:48:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Something Was the best-selling Xbox of all time, by the way. Okay, so there's that it is July now, nope, well, I'm skipping it. I'll skip that. Who cares? So we have new Game Pass games across all the different consoles. I want to point out again, you know, Game Pass, whatever those versions are, game. Well, xbox cloud gaming, which is game streaming, um, xbox consoles, typically series x and s, but still xbox one, and then what we're now going to call xbox on windows, which I I know windows, what's called windows, um. So yeah, so we have a bunch of new games there, some of these you might have actually heard of. We were making fun of and talking about the tony hawk stuff, so that's there uh, the fun games, man, you can't be.

01:49:37
Yeah, no, I'm I'm just just for no reason really. It's just standard bully activity. Um, rise of the tomb raider, which is now, I mean, the precursor games. It just keeps coming. It's crazy, like how many times this has been everywhere. It's everywhere, yes, everywhere. Um, I've been noticing in the xbox app on windows that call of duty, world war ii, which was the most recent world war ii era call of duty game, is now available through game pass, so that's a first for that game. I think they probably announced that last, you know a couple weeks ago. But, um, that's actually still a good game, like uh I. The problem, once you've played like the modern Warfare games, is like you have all these advanced weaponry and like drones and airstrikes and stuff, and then you go back to it's not, you're back to an M1 Grand.

01:50:23 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Good, yeah it does.

01:50:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, exactly like you know it's. It's stupid, like hold on, I'll kill you in a second. It's stand still, you know. But but but that game actually did a nice thing, like they kind of balanced it out, so it actually made sense in a modern context, even though it was, you know, kind of classic weapons and stuff. But that's a good one. Um, and then this is crazy, but the, the, the studio that is making halo games now, has been renamed in the past year, I think, to Halo Studios. It used to be 343.

01:50:54
343 came about when Bungie left Microsoft. Right, microsoft kept the Halo franchise and then created 343, now Halo Studios. They have teased that they will later tease what's coming for the franchise in October. So it's a tease of a tease. I'm going to guess, going on the limb, it's probably going to be a Halo game. You know the game that begins with H and ends in O.

01:51:18
Crazy talk, yeah, but they had some time I think it was late last year shown off some early graphics of Halo ported to the Unreal Engine, which freaks some people out, just like Edge running on Chromium or whatever freaks some people out. But awesome, and it wasn't just graphical quality and all the other things you get with that. It was really about getting developers that understood the engine, because one of the big problems they had bringing people into 343 at the time was Halo had its own engine, which was unique and kind of weird, and no one knew how to use it. So it took months to get people up to speed on this thing, uh, and now they're hoping they'll be able to go to market more quickly. Um, october is interesting because we know that xbox ally will be out by probably around that time frame.

01:52:06
Um, microsoft has talked publicly about new hardware, specifically portable, like Xbox ally type hardware, but also next gen consoles working with AMD.

01:52:16
I think it was Richard who pointed out that semi notable we don't see a lot of big franchise games and some of the bigger ones have been delayed right till next year, and that these things may all be pointing to whatever the next console is probably PC based, right as we've been talking, and that these things may all be pointing to whatever the next console is probably PC-based, right as we've been talking, and that Halo, the next Halo, would be part of that, as it should be. I hope also, as they're doing this, that they do something on mobile too, because, as I keep harping on, they bought Activision Blizzard allegedly in part for this mobile stuff and have done nothing with it. And they do have a handful of really good franchises, halo being the best, and obviously there are some halo games on mobile, but they're not like what I would call real halo, and I'm sorry, but my iphone and ipad and whatever else, whatever mobile device you have could play those games very effectively. So, uh, we'll see, but we have to.

01:53:05 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Well and um, blizzard's got diablo immortal, which is you know. Yeah, it made the ibelo fans angry, but it was. It is a pretty good mobile game and it's a contemporary one game.

01:53:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like, yeah, that's actually a fun one, yeah, that's a good one. Yeah, I mean, to be fair, microsoft, the xbox games like uh, uh, sorry, the halo games, like halo spartan or whatever it was called, or sort of like. Sort of like that, the top down view, you know the guy runs around, they're okay. I mean, you get to see all the familiar, you know vehicles and characters and stuff. Yeah. But we want, you know, we want first person handling, we want the thing, we want the real thing so well, uh, how long has it been since we had a genuinely new halo

01:53:45
game uh, the first one come out 2000, 2001. Um yeah, maybe it's been a hot minute man it sure has.

01:53:55 - Rich Campbell (Host)
They're far more likely to do a remake, or you know yeah.

01:53:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So actually, I I do think part of the announcement is going to be another. I don't know if it'll be like a master chief box set, like they did previously for halo, but if not, certainly the first game, maybe the first three games, whatever. But another remastering, upscaling, whatever quality improvement, maybe port it to this new engine kind of a thing, and that means playstation. Right, it has to. Yeah, I mean it has to, and look, I get it. I can already hear people groaning, but you know what that's. If you care about this stuff like, you want it on, you want it on it everywhere, you want it there, you want, yeah, I want it on iPad, I want it everywhere. Yeah, exactly, we'll see. This is that's just speculation, but I, given the way this year has gone and the games that have come you know, cross platform and the other ones I talked about that haven't yet I think I don't know. I think it has to happen, I think it's the right thing to do. So we'll see.

01:55:00 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Did I mention layoffs?

01:55:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There were. There were some layoffs, so refreshing.

01:55:03 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Okay, he wants to talk about layoffs, honestly.

01:55:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sorry, sorry. I have been playing a expedition 33 on my game pass. I was very happy yeah so what years?

01:55:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that was available. So what type of game? You mentioned this earlier.

01:55:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a uh role-playing game. It's french, so it's not like anything. It's done in unreal engine. You know you're out there, I don't know it's. What would you do?

01:55:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
what would you call? Is it like? Uh, it looks like it's like a fantasy world thing like elves, yeah no, no, no, no.

01:55:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're a person. There's a bad person called the paintress who has somehow co-opted the world and slagged it over, and you're on an expedition with a bunch of other humans to go to her island to find her and destroy her, because one of the things she's doing is, when you reach a certain age, you, you turn into rose petals and disappear, and so, uh, so you just described a mash-up of the lion, the witch in the wardrobe and, um, yeah, it's actually, it's Final Fantasy, it's got a little.

01:56:09
Final Fantasy to it. Yep, it's a turn-based RPG, says Anthony Nielsen. That's what it is. The combat's turn-based, but the rest of it is kind of a lot of cut scenes, a lot of real-time story mode thing, I don't know. Anyway, I was pleased to see that, instead of paying 5050 for it, I could play it on Game Pass, and I did last night. I mentioned before the show began that I hadn't used my Xbox in some time. Yep, and logging in was a great big fail.

01:56:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I did this recently myself, but I didn't go through what you went through. I just wanted to make sure it was up to date, or whatever.

01:56:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It had been keeping itself up to date or whatever. Just it had been keeping itself up to date. I was very pleased. That's what I found too in my case. Yeah, I guess I left it on the inefficiency power mode, where it's always, like you know, sitting there sucking the bandwidth and yeah I was really pleased because normally when I turned I used to be for years when I turned on the xbox I'd have a 15 gigabyte update.

01:57:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're like I want to play call of duty like nope, it's getting not this week you're gonna be rebooting a couple times buddy it's gonna take a while, so I was thrilled it actually had updated itself and had the latest update but when I?

01:57:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
logged in and put up a qr code when I, when I said, okay, I want to be, it knew who I was. But it said you have to re-log in. I put up a qr code. So I took a picture of the qr code, took me to the Microsoft site. It said enter that code, that's on the screen.

01:57:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't mean to interject, but I mean obviously you had a seamless, excellent experience at work.

01:57:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Before I could enter the eight characters, it said nope, time's up Right.

01:57:41 - Rich Campbell (Host)
You're like what? You're like 20 seconds Go faster, and then it said request a new code.

01:57:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I said yes, stop request a new code. I said yes, stop time's up I did this four or five times and I was screaming louder and louder each time. So I went out and I googled it and said it turns out this is a common. This is not, well, I don't know, common, but it happens. This too short time out for the code and they said the fix is to either possibly removing your account and re-entering it. It can't be, but the best fix is just reset the whole machine, which I did man I feel like that could have been fixed otherwise.

01:58:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But well, if it happens again, I'll call you I just did this myself, like I said, but I don't remember what it was extremely frustrating.

01:58:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, I feel like it just once. I got it going and then I downloaded, of course, 800 gigabytes of worth of game, because it's yeah but, uh, I was able to play this game and I spent some couple hours last night, enjoyable hours. So now I'm saying you know I pay for this game pass. What else can I do with it? Yeah, there's a lot of stuff on there now.

01:58:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
New games are out yeah, oh, sorry we, I. I sorry, I did this one earlier, I skipped ahead. Uh, oh, you skipped ahead.

01:58:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, I'm sorry, I I did. I wasn't paying attention.

01:58:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I did I'm sorry, I did this in a disjointed way. That was my fault, you were ready for you disjointed the xbox segment.

01:58:59 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Yeah that's what happens.

01:59:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know it's crazy, but yeah sorry, did you use a butcher's knife to disjoin it?

01:59:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, it's like uh, when steve jobs like took the apple logo off his mac because he was mad and it's like a gouged hole in it.

01:59:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what I did, really did that the truth? Yeah, did that happen. He gouged the apple out of his apple mac yep, also late.

01:59:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
When he came back to apple, someone asked him if he wouldn't mind signing his apple keyboard. He said, sure, but I'm going to remove all the keys I would never put on there. And he took off the entire function row. The four arrow keys thing looked like a, like a. It was destroyed. He goes. Here you go, steve jobs use your toothless enjoy your stupid apple keyboard with a numeric keypad on the side and whatever else was on it. Yeah, that's hysterical he was a good guy, I miss him.

01:59:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, all right, before we get to the back of the book then, because that's what's next, right, or did you not do everything?

01:59:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
did you do everything? I'm sorry that I've introduced uncertainty. That is the next thing.

01:59:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, I'm sorry hey, if you just do uncertainty and don't fear, do fear and doubt. I'll be, I am. I didn't mean to embrace chaos.

02:00:03
I'm sorry well, let me tell you, folks, I would like to embrace our club, club Twit Time. Let me give a plug for the best darn club in the whole wide world. Club Twit, is how we make this all happen. To be honest with you, we realized Lisa, not me. Lisa, our CEO, our wonderful esteemed business manager, realized at COVID that advertising was kind of starting to disappear. It was getting turning into rose petals and flying, fluttering away, and we thought we're going to be. We're going to be. We won't be able to make payroll next week. So she said let's do the club, let's give our audience a chance to support us, and that has been a huge success. Now, almost five years in, we are so thrilled with the response and I think we've given you a pretty good deal on this. The club now pays literally subsidizes 25% of our overhead. So without you we would have to cut shows, we'd have to cut people. So it's really valuable. 10 bucks a month Now because you're giving us money. We don't have to show you ads or in any way track you. So you get tracker-free. You get your own unique, tracker-free feed with no ads, not even this plug for Club Twit in it, so you get a pristine version of the show. Uh, you also get access to the club twit discord, which I gotta tell you is, is more and more fun to hang out in. Smart people, interesting people, uh, really into you know all the geeky stuff that we're into.

02:01:43
And in the club we do a lot of events. All the keynotes the microsoft ignite keynote, uh, was in the club, as was the google io. The wwdc keynote we're also doing and I should mention this because we've been talking a lot about ai it won't. The ai user group will, normally the first friday of the month. We're moving it to the second friday because, guess what, the first friday of this month is the fourth of july, so we're going to do it july 11th this month. That's a great place to get club members get together and we could talk about how we're using AI best practices. We did a lot of vibe coding last time Lou Maresca joined us. He's the guy who's putting AI into Microsoft Excel and Python, and so he was great. I think we're going to talk a little bit about prompts and stuff and chat bots on the 11thth. We also, uh, we'll be doing right after, right before that, actually photo time with chris marquart, our photo expert micah's crafting corners coming up on the 16th.

02:02:40
That's a chill place to hang out. We've got stacy's book club coming up, uh. Yet last week we did a thing on music digital music versus vinyl. It was really fantastic, uh, and you can also see this. Oh, we've got a date for the book club. Thank you, anthony. This is how you lose the time. Where is the book? Fascinating book, quick read too. It's only a few hours on audible, uh. August 8th, 1 pm pacific. August 8th, 1 pm pacific. So all of this is a way of making it fun to be a club member, but also, I think the idea is giving you a reason to join and support us, and really that's the most important thing you do with the club is you show it's like a vote for what you want and what you want more of, and we really appreciate it.

02:03:31
If you're not a member, please do me a favor. Twittv slash club twit. We would really like to have you in the club. Enough said now, let's go to the back of the book with mr paul etherot.

02:03:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Paul yes, so I have kind of a combination of tip and pick, if you will, um based on or a ticket um, yeah, so I've been looking at.

02:04:00
You know the stuff apple's got coming out ipad, but also mac and you know mac is. It's got his pros and its cons. I still find Windows to be better. But if you look at, if you ever get that kind of Mac envy thing going aside from just buying like a Surface laptop instead of a MacBook Air or whatever, from like a software perspective, I was thinking about like what were the things I liked about the Mac and like what could I do to make Windows more like that?

02:04:26
So, for example, example, the mac has this full screen mode, which I really like, although it's inconsistent with other multitasking things. But basically the way they do it is they use their version of virtual desktops called spaces, where full screen apps each have their own space and then you can three finger swipe on the touchpad to go between them. Pretty cool, you can do that on windows. If you have a touchpad you can do a three finger. You know all tab kind of a thing. It's works similar, it's not as good, but whatever it does kind of work.

02:04:58
But you know we have this um taskbar thing that's on the screen Right, and so I was like all right, let's get rid of the taskbar, kind of like in in Mac OS, like I'll be, like let's get rid of the menu bar, you know. But what I found in both cases was that when those things aren't there, I missed something. I didn't realize I was using all the time, which is the stupidest, simplest thing in the world, but it's the time, and so you know, the taskbar has the time and the date down in the corner, and on a mac they have it on the menu bar up on the top. So, um, there are utilities that you can just put the time somewhere on screen floating whatever, and so I use one called DS Clock, which is actually pretty amazing, and I've started not displaying the taskbar on my computers and you get that kind of space back, you can use the full height of the screen, et cetera.

02:05:43
I'm trying it right. If you are not ready to take that step, there is a utility in the Microsoft Store and Windows that is called what, paul, I think it's called TB, translucent. Let me just make sure. Yep, our Translucent TB. This will make your taskbar translucent or transparent.

02:06:03 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I'm sorry. When I hear TB, I hear tuberculosis, yeah, exactly.

02:06:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's probably the same Toolbar. Yeah, no-transcript. And now they have a newer version called Command Palette, which is extensible and it can do, you know, run various shortcuts of different kinds and do different things, and if you have apps they can plug into it, et cetera, et cetera. But by default they want to use all space. I change it to Windows key plus space. That makes more sense to me as a launcher.

02:06:54
I wish I could just kind of get rid of the start menu, frankly, but that's not a thing. But you can use one of those tools and to me this is pretty much everything that's good about spotlight, but it's. We've had that on windows forever. So there are these things like just little things, so you can just maybe make windows more bearable or at least, uh, hold down that desire to spend a couple thousand bucks on mac hardware and software or whatever. But that's just a thought. Um, and then this is almost apropos of nothing. But about a month ago I started testing feed readers again, as I do from time to time, and I have. I have stuck with the same thing I was using ever since google reader went out, right whenever that was 2013.

02:07:33
it was a while ago yeah, a long time ago and, um, I at the time picked something that I don't think I know anyone who uses uh called the old reader. Uh, and it it is a super spartan ui, um, but you know, you could import from your feed from google reader at the time, which, which I did, and I've been using it ever since, until this year. So past month or so, the old reader was down for a full day, which is bad. I actually use this thing all the time and then it went down for another day and I was like, okay, I got to figure something out. There's a lot of good choices there, like Feedly and blah, blah, blah, whatever, but the thing I settled on not settled actually, I really love it is called uh. Well, I'm actually not sure what it's called, but I know reader, you know reader oh, I use in a reader, I love it I love it.

02:08:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the rss feed reader.

02:08:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah yeah, so it's. They have different views, um, which are all you know, which are interesting. Some of them are a little more like a magazine style thing, but I just just have a kind of a nice list view. It's fairly Spartan, you know, right click to open it in a different tab, all that kind of stuff. But the kind of almost the game changer for me on this one is there's a mobile app and I didn't have a mobile app for the old reader and so I would just use the web view, but it was like the desktop web view. They didn't have a like a mobile version, so it was always kind of terrible, so I didn't do it that much. But now that I have this on mobile, I can keep up with my feed when I'm not like in front of the computer, and I actually kind of love that. And uh, it has read it later stuff. I don't use that.

02:09:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I use, um Instapaper for that, but but you know you can just in instant paper, integrates with it on through the extension. So you just, you know this is, this is my feet, so it's all the new stuff that I have to.

02:09:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so look for you. You have it like, if you go to the top right, uh, the third icon and I think from the right, the third one is probably the different views yeah, yeah, so I think I used list expanded columns magazine magazine yeah, that one, I'm sorry that's it, yeah, magazine it's just you know, it's nice you know, yeah, it's pleasant, it's a pleasant read yeah, and it also like auto updates.

02:09:39
So if there's like an update, like if there are new articles in the feed, you just go to that tab and at one second it's like you're there.

02:09:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's ironic, because this is really what google reader was, right. Yeah, yep, until google gave up, because no one uses rss feeds I, I rely, I've.

02:09:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I use rss all day every day, every day. That's how I check the news for all of our shows yep, yep, it's not the only thing I use, but honestly, it's the primary thing.

02:10:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's yeah, it's good, me too, I do it on my uh ipad yeah right, I have it.

02:10:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have this thing everywhere now because I love it, I love it, I, I. My ipad is mostly for reading, and so every, most every app in my dock is a reading app of some kind, and that's in there now.

02:10:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's wonderful and uh now, uh, I save it out to raindrop, which then has a little zappier script which puts it in a spreadsheet which the producers then put into a rundown, because we don't use notion uh on other shows, we use google sheets. But uh, it's a very easy workflow and it has a little button I can just click and it's great yeah, yeah, nice.

02:10:47 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I've gotten smitten with raindrop. That's just a good, isn't?

02:10:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
raindrop the best. I swear I was a pinboard. You know, devotee have a lifetime subscription, but uh, I feel like raindropio. I pay for it you know it's worth that pay, for I know reader as well. Yeah, so I don't have to pay for it.

02:11:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's free. Free does most what you, you know it's worth that pay for. I know reader as well. Yeah, so I don't have to pay for it. Yeah, it's free. Free does most what you want yeah, it's mostly like a number of article or number of feeds you can have.

02:11:16
I think it's 150 on inoreader it's 100 and most other ones and it's fine for it's, it's fine for me, but I don't use like. If I use the other stuff in the app, like I might, you know I I'd be okay paying for it, but I just don't have to. Yeah.

02:11:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good choice for your app of the week. I love it. Now let's say hello to Richard Campbell.

02:11:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hello to Richard.

02:11:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Campbell and run his radio.

02:11:42 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Where did this Jewish mother come from? I don't know who.

02:11:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am, I don't know who or what you? Don't need enough you don't need to know what do you get. Have some, yeah, have some noodles. What's wrong with the other show? Uh run as radio. You had a pretty good guest there.

02:11:59 - Rich Campbell (Host)
It looks like uh, it's one of my, one of the build series. Uh, mr recinovich dropped by just always a great day, you know now, who is this man? No one's ever heard of nobody's ever heard of this guy have you ever read his mysteries or his novel?

02:12:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh yeah, absolutely. Are they good? I?

02:12:14 - Rich Campbell (Host)
thought I. I even hijacked one of my own run as is to talk about his books. He was a little.

02:12:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're a lot like the daniel suarez stuff. Yeah, honestly, but he hasn't written one in forever.

02:12:23 - Rich Campbell (Host)
It's been a long. No, no, I think he proved his point that he could do it, and then he moved on.

02:12:28
It's not a, it's no way to make money no, no, no, be honest with you, to write, writing, but he's okay with the money, but but he also did the old-fashioned way like he wrote it and then shopped it around for a publisher. Yeah, he didn't buy it, he felt like he needed the advance or anything, right. So, right, right, exactly. Yeah, he did just fine. But you know he's got a. He's got a pretty cool job these days as azure cto and he runs this group called the Azure Innovations Lab and a lot of experimentation happens in there, and so I don't know, every other year or so I check in with him. It's like what are you working on? What's fun for you right now?

02:12:59
And we ended up in a long conversation probably the first half of the show really talking about what they're doing with the optimized hardware in the cloud the ARM chipsets and things like that, and the fact that he has certain large customers with that that matters to them, like ultra large memory, ultra multi CPU configurations for these specific customers, and then, after they see how they operate for a while, they make it a publicly available product.

02:13:29
So you know, the right customer comes at them with the right problem space, they will literally build an innovative set of hardware solutions for them and then decide whether or not that's going to come available. So when you see these new lines of uh, of configurations for virtual machines and things in Azure, that's where it's from. It's from that these experiences and that's where the a lot of the ARM chipset stuff is living right now is that they are running with these custom implementations for specific customers before they decide exactly how they're going to land it publicly. So I appreciated that conversation just from the viewpoint of this is how products get developed at this scale and in the Azure space. So that was good fun. We did talk a little bit about the build side of things and he loved the material science demo where they came up with the new non-conductive fluid. Oh, wasn't that cool.

02:14:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I loved it too.

02:14:23 - Rich Campbell (Host)
It was a great play and so he had a role to play in that.

02:14:26
So we talked a bit about, when it went on there, this idea of actually developing material science things through generative AI software, and we finished out the show talking a little bit about Quantum, because of course they had the announcements at Microsoft Quantum on their new hardware design and if and when that's going to appear, and he's like you know, you're very unlikely to ever see this stuff in a machine at home.

02:14:49
This is going to live in the cloud. And we did end up speaking a bit about the whole when will you use quantum versus when will you use some other supercomputer, the HCI configurations, things like that, and the idea that eventually we'll have a coordinator to decide how to run our software for us, that we won't be making those choices and that you know they, though it'll be up based on cost time to uh, of render uh available resources, that kind of thing. So it's like it's not up to you, you don't care, it's what's the quickest I could do it, or what's the cheapest I could do it, and off it goes, nice. So, yeah, another great. You know can't go wrong with mark full stop. Well then, I can you know I see this on the stats right as soon as that show dropped late last night. It was a double download like immediately.

02:15:39
Yeah, yeah, you know I get a base download, I don't know 25, 30 000 normal, and then it's already. This is already over 50.

02:15:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's funny how do people know? I mean, how do they?

02:15:50 - Rich Campbell (Host)
oh wow I mean, I think, I literally think people have searches on the name, right?

02:15:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh, maybe when they grab it so they're not subscribers like that.

02:15:57 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Subscriber is the you know, you see that big hit when you drop the show, the subscribers kick in within the hour and then you see this next wave and then some you know it's. I find it really interesting. Sometimes some of that stuff makes press and you get another bump. Oh yeah, one of my other shows from a couple of weeks ago just got a press bump. It's just all of a sudden another 20 10 000 downloads out of nowhere. So those are good days.

02:16:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, we uh speaking of ctos, we have a um john graham coming, the cto of cloudflare. You're gonna be joining us in about half an hour for it wow, his ai filter.

02:16:27 - Rich Campbell (Host)
What exactly we?

02:16:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
need that yesterday, by the way yeah, no kidding that's the problem.

02:16:34 - Rich Campbell (Host)
So that'll be, that'll be interesting I like this thought that it might even be honey potted, like you're gonna poison the ai like they did that they've done that right, yeah, without a doubt yeah, um, but that's not what we're doing now, because today it's whiskey day. Yeah, it's whiskey day every day.

02:16:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Every day is whiskey day. Every day is whiskey day.

02:16:54 - Rich Campbell (Host)
It's also just past, it's the day after Canada Day, so of course I have to talk about a Canadian whiskey. You mean, there's something beside.

02:17:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Crown Royal out there yeah.

02:17:04 - Rich Campbell (Host)
And Crown's awesome and you know I've done what? Two or three different Crowns. So I've done what two or three different crowns, so I've given Crown a lot of love. And I have talked about this week's distiller before, alberta Distillers. I just never talked deeply about the distillery, but this particular whiskey I do not have a bottle here. It was at the Canada celebrations I was at. They were doing a tasting, so I had a taste of it and immediately wrote it up. This is Alberta Distillers 23- 23 year old rare batch number one. Uh, and what's rare about it? Well, for starters is a 23 year old whiskey from canada. That's weird, um, and it was pretty darn tasty.

02:17:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it was also a hundred percent rye, which is odd isn't, is I thought all canadian whiskey was rye whiskey well, they're often called rye whiskeys but they're not all rye.

02:17:51 - Rich Campbell (Host)
So let's, let's get into that. But first, you know, talk a little bit about alberta distillers. They're not one of the nouveau distillers, they've been around since 1946. They're founded in calgary. Uh, the tip three partners max bell, who was a rancher okay, alberta, that makes sense. Uh, frank mcmahon, who is an oil man oh yeah, okay, alberta. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. And george rifle, who was the distiller and a very skilled distiller. He'd worked in japan, he'd worked in scotland uh, he was making beer in his own spirits and they recruited him in in the founding of the company.

02:18:25
Uh, back in 46, when they built it on 23 acres at the edge of the city of Calgary Today that's now kind of the middle of Calgary. They expanded to 42 acres in 1975. They picked that location because, a they were all Albertans, so they wanted to be in Alberta, and B it was right on two separate rail lines. So all of their materials come in by rail because, of course, they're inland, they're also at altitude. That's the east side of the rockies there, so they're at about a thousand meters or 3200 feet or so, which means that this is not denver by any stretch of the imagination, but it's high enough that it does impact the environment that the whiskey is going to mature in, and so they build temperature controlled warehouses, because the winter time in calgary can get extremely cold negative 40 is. It does occur in a place like calgary. Uh, they get nice summers. Uh, famously, in wintertime there's these winds they call the chinooks, which are a warm wind on an icy cold day. Uh, so their warehouse and their warehouses are massive 600 you are a warm wind

02:19:25
on an icy, cold day and they yeah, they do both rack and palestine.

02:19:31
Um they this is this is not a place for a tour alberta distillers this is very much a factory and they've gone, but they've gone through the normal things that happen to whiskey companies over the years. They were acquired by american brands in 86, of course, american brands became fortune brands in 97 and then in 2011 the entities were reshuffled again and that's when Beam acquired all of the Spirit products and then Beam itself, that's Jim Beam out of Kentucky that was then acquired by Suntory in 2014 to make Beam Suntory and then recently, in 2024, that was renamed to Suntory Global Spirits. So that's the company and the column stills and pot stills. So their main products are a line of vodkas like Banff Ice and Northern Keep and Alberta Pure typical names for vodkas and then whiskeys Alberta Premium, alberta Springs and Rifle Rye, after the distiller, mr Rifle. They also make whiskey for a lot of other companies, many you've heard of, like Canadian Club, masterson's Rye, jefferson's Rye and Whistle Pig. I also think that Pendleton Rye, which we've talked about here before, came from them.

02:20:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They make Whistle.

02:20:45 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Pig and they make Whistle Pig and that's known. They admit that this is this big facility that produces an awful lot of whiskey, and remember the whiskey travels it used to at least travel easily back and forth across the border. Right now, nothing travels across the border particularly well. And I also mentioned another Canadian whiskey called Bareface, and when I looked at the description of how Bareface that was the one with the big slashes in the bottle. Yeah, yeah, I remember that one.

02:21:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

02:21:10 - Rich Campbell (Host)
And I remember when I was looking at how they were making the whiskey Because they were in British Columbia and I come out of nowhere with a seven-year-old plus whiskey it's that they were I was pretty sure they're buying from Alberta distillers a seven-year-old whiskey and then they're doing a finishing step they hungarian oak cast and age it for a year in the british columbia wilderness. All very cool, but you know that's where it comes from, because canadian distillers not just alberta uh distillers, but several of them do this thing. That's different from the way americans make whiskey, which is that they don't do mash bills. They don't combine different grains into a mash to produce the wort that will become the whiskey. They actually keep them separate. And Alberta Distillers, specifically, is famous for making true 100% ryes.

02:22:01
Now, why is that weird? And it's because rye is a very difficult grain to work with. The reason is that it has two things that are very important about the grain. Rye is a very difficult grain to work with. The reason is that it has two things that are very important about the grain rye when it comes to whiskey making. One is that it's mostly composed of complex polysaccharides, which really is a way to say they're even longer chain carbohydrate sugars that are very difficult to break down into sugar that can be digested by yeast, very difficult to break down into sugar that can be digested by yeast. And those long chains tend to make very thick, thick mashes that stick to the equipment and don't flow through pipes well and create lots of foam, and so it's hard to make a bunch of it when you're doing a fermentation.

02:22:43
If you ever get a chance to go on a distillery tour where a ferment is running, you'll notice that the mash tun literally looks like it's boiling. It's not. It's not warm enough, it's only about 30 degrees centigrade in there, but there's enough carbon dioxide being produced that it's constantly turning over. Well, the rye mashes are so thick that instead of having this steady turnover that keeps the temperature even so, the yeast stay healthy. It's so dense, it heats up in the center and kills off the yeast because it can't move around, and so they have to use stirring equipment to keep the mash evenly mixed and keep the temperatures even so the yeast stay healthy, but it sticks to the stirring equipment, which damages the equipment. It's really difficult to work with and this is the other aspect of rye besides the polysaccharides is that it doesn't have a hull, and normally whenever you make a grist you combine a certain amount of fine ground flour with a medium grind and some hull, and the hull is mostly about creating spacing to keep the mash a little more fluid so it's easier to move around.

02:23:52
And so the result is you just can't use as much rye mash per batch, which means you produce less alcohol, which means it's just a more expensive product to make. It's also a more expensive grain. I looked up today what the price per ton was for commercial grains. The cheapest is corn at about $165 a ton. Barley's number two at 170. Of course these temperatures change, these prices change. Wheat's at 195. Rye's at 220. So rye is more expensive. You can't use as much of it per batch. It's hard on your equipment. It's just. Why would you do this to yourself when you can combine it with a few other grains and make your life easier and make a good product still? So 100% grain-wise are just weird.

02:24:41
I also read a great piece about how Prohibition devastated rye making, that the rye whiskey makers, the few companies that were good at making rye, most of them went bankrupt through the past through the prohibition period, and so when people started back up, there wasn't a lot of people knew how to make rye and nobody cared. They were just in a rush to make whiskey quickly, and so that's when corn really emerged huge as the as the approach to whiskey for most places, and rush rye never caught on again. Now Alberta Distillers again is famous for making 100% rye because they came up with a reliable process for it. So they don't malt the rye, which is something you can do. You soak it in water, let it sprout and then try it to help break down the sugars, and that was used to be an older approach. But they don't do that at all. They only make a fine flour. So they don't do a mixed grist. They use a hammer mill grind on melted rye down to a fine flour. Then they add water and a custom-made proprietary enzyme called glucoamylase. So Alberta Distillers employs a microbiologist Her name is Dr Shannon Thomas and she has matured this unique enzyme that's primarily glucoamylase but also has a bunch of what they call side enzymes that work together to help break the rye down into sugars that the yeast can digest and also introduce the set of flavors that people like from rye that tends to be a little spicier, a little more interesting.

02:26:15
And then that successful digestion so you don't make any methanol, you're just producing ethanol can then be pushed as a wort into stills, and in alberta spring alberta distillers uses both column stills and pot stills. You knew that because they make vodka you need column stills to make vodka and then pot stills. So they do this mixed combination where they make a more high distillate and a mid distillate. They do a little finishing in the pot stills and then they split up the aging batch too. They use a bunch of ex-bourbon barrels. They will also reuse bourbon barrels after they've run through because they have a different flavor profile, and also new white oak out of Missouri American oak. They're also not afraid to go in at fairly high alcohol levels. So traditionally new bourbon goes into new American oak barrels at 62.5. And then the Scots and most everyone else, when they're reusing bourbon barrels, will go in at 63.5 because they can pick off a few other flavors.

02:27:14
Under certain conditions alberta springs will go as high as 78 going into the barrel. But because they're high and dry in places like in in alberta they actually lose water faster than they use alcohol. So their their barrels are known for increasing alcohol levels rather than decreasing alcohol levels, and it's atypical because of a low humidity, relatively warm environment at certain times of the year. In the cooler times it can go the other way they can lose alcohol. But this is the same problem Kentucky battles with, although, I would point out, they have actually bottled an 84% 168 proof, which apparently was a hit at the time when they made it. So in some ways it's more Kentucky-ish because it does deal with that high dry environment. They are willing to go to different alcohol levels. They're doing different kinds of extraction in the barrel. They also tend to go shorter term.

02:28:05
Most Canadian whiskeys are not aged more than three or five years, maybe seven, right? There's literally a standard commercial product that Alberta Distillers makes for other people, including folks like Barefaced. That's a seven-year-old, and then you do other things with it, except for this old, rare batch. This old, rare batch was barreled in 2000. It's been sitting ever since and they did a bottling in 2023, which is why it's a 23 year old and it is one of the most unusual whiskeys you'll ever taste, because it's a very old, pure rye whiskey. It's bottled at 50 abv and it is only sold in canada at about 150 dollars a bottle.

02:28:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
NABV, and it is only sold in Canada at about $150 a bottle, and so we can't get it here in the States.

02:28:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Thanks a lot, Richard. You have to come for a visit.

02:29:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Stupid Canada. Actually, I suspect this is a problem with a lot of Canadian whiskeys nowadays.

02:29:06 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's true, you have to get to a certain production level before it makes sense to ship south anyway, just from the cost perspective well, and you have removed all american whiskeys from your shelves. So at the moment, yes, um, hopefully these days that will pass.

02:29:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a trade war uh, and a foolish one at that, benefits no one, especially whiskey drinkers. Pretty sure it's hurting everybody right now. Every Every once in a while, a bird flies through the web. Yeah, I was just noticing that.

02:29:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It looks like the opening screen of a video game. Yeah, it's great.

02:29:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not all the time. Is that the Half-Life 3 home screen?

02:29:42 - Rich Campbell (Host)
They don't have a page for this old batch one.

02:29:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was looking. They only talk about their retail products.

02:29:47 - Rich Campbell (Host)
I looked around. The only ones I found are are showing on reseller sites. But uh, it's like I said, it's a relatively rare whiskey your state, but they are. I can get them. There's none on the coast or I would have gone and grabbed a bottle.

02:29:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, there's a couple in the city which I will get to another week when I was in toronto you used to have to go to a special state-run store to buy liquor is that yeah the lcbo the, the cbo is everywhere uh, every province does it slightly differently.

02:30:12 - Rich Campbell (Host)
For a long time, bc was like that as well, but we've started having, uh, third-party licenses for some spirits okay. So my my favorite whiskey store in vancouver, when I go, is a place called the legacy liquor store it's such a.

02:30:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's such a artifact of an earlier age. Totally it's like the blue laws in new England. We're like you can't buy fish on Tuesday.

02:30:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like, it's like unless you live near the New Hampshire border then it's okay.

02:30:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, richard Campbell. As always you make you make windows weekly fun at least a little drunker, anyway. At least that Richard's at, anyway At least that Richard's at runasradiocom. And of course he does that show with Carl Franklin. Both are at his website, runasradiocom.

02:31:01 - Rich Campbell (Host)
You're going to be home for the summer, huh A few more weeks, although I am taking a little jaunt tomorrow down to Snohomish to sit amongst the artillery fire that you call July 4th.

02:31:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's nothing like a rural July 4th it scares the dogs and the military vets, but the rest of us go hey.

02:31:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this is the special time of year where there are pop-up tents selling fireworks all over Pennsylvania, like in parking lots. We finally got rid of that in petaluma yeah, it's crazy.

02:31:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact, a kid just a few days ago was seriously engineered petaluma with yeah, yeah, this is the.

02:31:39 - Rich Campbell (Host)
Yeah, this is the place yeah, the we coast. We don't allow fireworks at all because of the fire hazard. It's just too much forest here. Right, there are a few spots in vancouver that have, um, like city-based fireworks that are typically on the water.

02:31:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, as they should be.

02:31:57 - Rich Campbell (Host)
It's bloody dangerous.

02:31:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have a friend who grew up in Pennsylvania farm country and they used to set up bleachers out in the cornfield Sure and uh, uncle jim sometimes call him three-finger jim would go go out there and do uh a uh homemade display.

02:32:15 - Rich Campbell (Host)
That was apparently quite amazing I wonder how far away we are from simply drones replacing our firework displays I don't.

02:32:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're not as fun. They're cool. No, they're not as loud, yeah, and which the dogs and the vets like, but uh, but also not as dangerous yeah, I don't know. It seems like it takes some of the spunk out of yeah you know we also used to not bother with pro sports. We had hangings and gladiators yeah, that's true, things are yeah oh, the good old days uh, paul thurott is at thurottcom.

02:32:49
T-h-u-r-r-o-doublegoodcom. Become a premium subscriber for the extra goodness. The cherry on top, as it were, his books at leanpubcom, including the field guide to windows 11 and windows everywhere, a lovely little kind of walk drive-by history of windows through its programming frameworks. Uh, let's see. We do this show, as I mentioned earlier, every every wednesday, 11 am, pacific 2 pm, eastern, 1800 utc. If you don't watch live, you can always get a copy of the show at our website, twittv, slash ww. Uh, there's a youtube channel. You see a link on that page, by the way. Uh, that's dedicated to the video. That's great for sharing clips. If you want to tell the world, you know, tell your friends about the show Best way to get any of our shows is subscribe on your favorite podcast client.

02:33:40
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