Windows Weekly 940 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show
00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Therot and Richard Campbell are here. We're going to talk about a big year for Windows 11 updates, and boy, there's a whole lot of new features we'll talk about. Plus, windows 11 finally has more installs than Windows 10. Took it almost the entire lifespan of Windows 10 to do it, and a little Xbox gaming. A lot of xbox gaming, including a warning about a version of call of duty from the store that you probably shouldn't download. All that more coming up next on windows weekly podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit. This is windows weekly, with paul thurad and richard campbell, episode 940, recorded on wednesday, july 9th 2025. The donkey always wins. Hello, you winners and you dozers. It's. I didn't want to wake the dozers up. It's time for windows weekly. Mr paul thurad is in der house. Actually, he's in his house in mexico. I'm in der apartment in der apartment.
01:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now I'm all screwed up again. What's going on with me?
01:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, you look beautiful. What are you talking about?
01:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
oh, I guess it's okay, I, I shrunk the window like a, like a doofus, and I like the giant hand reaching in uh also with us, ladies and gentlemen.
01:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richard campbell, who is in the beautiful madura park, british columbia it's not that night it's, it's kind of rainy today. Yeah, oh, it's pretty yeah, see, that looks pretty. You know a little bit of blue sky showing there.
01:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, look at that it's been a See that looks pretty on our shot. There's a little bit of blue sky showing there. Yeah, look at that. There's been a few squalls through and there's a bit of cloud layer on Texada. That's why everything's so green. Everything's very green right now. It's been a good 24-hour drizzle.
01:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're in California. We're at the point where things start to turn brown and dry out, just getting ready for the wildfire season. If you know, yeah, no, it's perfect timing, do you know we just get.
02:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We were just getting to brown grass, because we do not, uh, sprinkle our grass here.
02:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then the rain came sounds like a song, it's like your rhythmic song. Uh, all right, okay. Uh, you win. Let's talk about windows.
02:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
In fact, let's talk about patch tuesday yeah, which actually happened on schedule this week, unlike our week d update from two weeks ago.
02:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Freaking me out. That's weird. What's wrong? That's freaking me out, it's too weird to be on time yeah that's yeah um, I mean the truth.
02:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
the truth is, we've talked about all this, but keeping track of this stuff is really difficult, because when will then be now? Kind of a problem. So for 24 and 23H2, there are a set of updates. Some are for both, some are only for 24H2. One of them is only for Copilot plus PC. It's hilarious, windows 10 also got a a patch Tuesday. I don't usually mention that, but, um, this one has a semi important change, um, which we'll get to. So, um, the single co-pilot plus PC feature is, uh, that uh ask co-pilot addition to click to do, which I can categorically state is borderline useless. So enjoy that.
03:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's going to get better. It's just the beginning. Okay, do you like my optimism? I'm going to do optimism. I appreciate it.
03:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think we've both been around long enough to know it's not going to get better. But it's a glorified version of copy and paste, so you know you engage with click to do you get the shimmery color thing going on. It highlights all the text and graphics you can see on screen. You can select one and then ask to copilot. Ask. Copilot will be one of the and then it will just paste that thing into Copilot. So then you're going to run Copilot. I don't know, I'm not a big fan of this.
04:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's all about running Copilot. That's what it's about.
04:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, actually I'm going to step through what I hate about every one of these new features. This will probably be the easiest way to go through this. So there's that. Show smaller taskbar icons. Option 24-inch too. Only, I think I made this comment last week, but it does make the icon smaller, but it keeps the taskbar the same size. Part of the point of that would be to have a smaller taskbar.
04:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Look, we're still working on Windows 10 taskbar features, aren't we?
04:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, exactly, I don't have any complaints about this one.
04:54
But narrator narrator as I called it my article for some reason has a new feature called screen curtain, which is basically one of those deals where it will black out the screen while it reads content a lot.
04:59
So the point of this is you're probably using it because you have a vision impairment and thus you have no idea, perhaps if someone is just staring at your screen and maybe taking, you know, getting vital corporate information from you or something, so this will black out the screen for you, which is which, to me, makes tons of sense. On the other end of the spectrum is, if you use windows 11 as an individual, you know that the settings app has like a home screen now, like so it's not the system view by default. You have like a home screen now, like so it's not the the system view by default. You have like this home view, with which I don't ever find useful for anything but there it is. And now if you sign in with a commercial account, so an enter id, like a microsoft worker, school account, you can have that screen too, you lucky dog.
05:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So enjoy that um, I assume your, your administrator, gets to decide.
05:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can have that screen and they can customize it right so you can have company-specific information, which that's fine. I mean, that's fine. Windows Share keeps getting updated every three days, it seems. This is the update where you will see a preview of the web content that you're trying to share. If that's what you're sharing, they already do that for images, and there's a bunch of other stuff for images, including that three compression level thing I was talking about recently, which is actually super useful. So that's good this one is. We'll put this one in the half asked category. When Microsoft introduced Windows Backup to Windows 11, I sort of recognized how terrible it was and pointless. But I also saw the potential for the future where maybe, maybe, they would turn this thing into something useful, and they are in fact doing that, and so one of the major changes coming in the future is a PC migration feature for Windows 10 users coming to Windows 11, or in the future. You just buy a new PC, right? You want to migrate from one to the other.
06:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's something that the phones have had nailed for years, yep, and actually I think Apple's got this nailed too. If you buy a new Mac, it is just trivial to be back to your config.
06:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I couldn't do this off the top of my head, but Microsoft added this type of capability in Windows 8 and then scaled it back in Windows 10 and then scaled it back further in Windows 11 and then added Windows Backup and started rebuilding it. So much like the taskbar. We're kind of getting back to where we were, sort of how many years?
07:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
later.
07:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so there are two halves to the PC migration story. The half that has shipped in this update is in the Windows backup app, and so you will see a landing page and a pairing page, and it will preview what's coming. You can't do anything with it because the second half is not there yet, and that will be added to Windows setup. So at some point in the future 25H2 probably you could bring up your you know computer. You go through that wizard where you, you know the different steps, you sign up with your microsoft account.
07:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Probably you do whatever you do and it will ask you back up you made an hour ago and goes would you like this? And off you go right, and.
07:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But instead of doing it from the cloud, it will do it over the network from the other pc. Right, okay, and it will probably be more involved than what we have now because, the tiny bit faster yeah. So yeah, I mean I'm willing to give this one a shot. I I don't. I haven't seen the other half of it, so I can't really uh say I'm I.
08:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I have now ordered the parts for replacing both my workstations, one intel, one amd. Okay, I am going to do bare paves for both because yeah, nice, these are going to be desktop computer.
08:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, obviously I'm sorry, uh, and what are the? What did you get for chips?
08:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
an Ultra 9 and a Ryzen 9. I just went top for both. Yeah, I mean, I only do this every few years, right, and the main thing that got me moving was I met, um, a couple of young kids at a July 1st barbecue who want to build their own gaming machines out of my old parts. So as soon as I have my old parts, I'm like, all right, it's going to be a build party. I'll build the new ones, you get the old parts, we'll build machines together.
08:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It sounds like you're describing organ harvesting, but I assume that's not what you're saying.
09:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, when you do the build party, let us know, we'll stream it. It'd be fun to stream the ultra nine, is that? Do you know if it's arrow like?
09:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
or, uh, lunar lake, or what is that it's arrow like okay, yeah, which I figure is the more mature of the chips. Yeah, I mean there's going to be an update to that, probably this year. Well, actually, depending on the schedule, I don't know if they screw around with turns out that's always true, yep, but that will add. The one thing that's missing not that it's super important is the uh copilot plus pc capable mpu. Yeah, it's not a narrow lake, but I think well, I got a 50 80 in it.
09:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So there you go. Yeah, you don't top, I got your tops right, you'll be good.
09:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It'll probably play a solitaire pretty well.
09:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um, it'll be okay yeah, yes, it will be okay. High frame rates all the time yeah, um.
09:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then the last one. This is actually really cool. So, uh, we talked about this maybe two, three weeks ago. Microsoft um conforms to the legal requirements of the digital markets app act in europe. It has published a website publicly where they show what it's doing to each of the products. Itets Act in Europe. It has published a website publicly where they show what it's doing to each of the products. It only has to do things to Windows and LinkedIn for some reason, and I sort of appreciate, a, the openness of this, but also B they're not really quibbling about it. They're like yep, now we get it, we're just doing it just like Apple's doing. They're very similar.
10:25
So, I don't know, two, three weeks ago, a month ago maybe, uh, they announced some further changes, because there were some things that we're doing that we're still not compliant with the DMA, most of them related to the web browser, and what it basically amounts to is you'll be able to I think you today can already do this, maybe uninstall edge if you're in the EU or, uh, european economic area, but also changes how default apps work. So, default browser in particular, it actually gives you everything, not just part of it, and things like that. So this is actually pretty useful. And last week I had an app pick or somewhere in there, something about WinToys, which is a free utility you can get in the Microsoft store, different from PowerToys.
11:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, well, yes.
11:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yes, which is a free utility you can get in the Microsoft Store, different from PowerToys. Yeah Well, yes, yeah, yes, but there's probably some overlap. But this is a lot about. It's basically like just surfacing things that are registry changes or policy changes.
11:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
PowerToys is more utilities. Powertoys is just settings in Windows.
11:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That because we don't have enough setting screens in windows like well I mean we we do have a lot of setting screens, but we also don't have a setting for every setting, if that makes sense. You know that not every setting is promoted to a ui for some reason, probably purposely in many cases. So this you know a lot of it's kind of superfluous. But there are some really neat things about WinToys and one of them is you can just check a box and say I want to be DMA compliant and you reboot and you can uninstall Edge, you can do all that stuff. So it's actually kind of cool. I'm going to talk more about Edge.
11:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's also like a non-hostile way to do this, although I guess Microsoft is saying think, yes, we're going to be compliant, and then they're deciding what compliance looks like and then making it very easy for users to say, okay, I'm now compliant, whether or not that's actually what the eu wants. But then when does the eu ever make it clear what they want?
12:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
right? Well, they'll complain if it's not what they want. But they won't tell you what.
12:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Tell you what they want yeah, okay, you know, I think I think I dated that girl once, yeah, exactly.
12:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tell me what you want, but you really really want it Exactly.
12:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this is a cool update. This is also going out to Windows 10. So if you're using Windows 10 in the EU, if you're using Windows 11, by the time October rolls around, and then for the next three years you'll still be able to have that capability, regardless of the OS. So I should have been a little clearer about some of these things. So the Windows share improvements, the PC migration bit, the EU changes for the DMA compliance are across 24, 23, h2 and Windows sorry, those two versions and then the EU DMA compliance changes for Windows 10 as well. So across the board, and I would imagine Windows backup will also have to be updated for Windows 10 for well. So across the board, and I would imagine windows backup will also have to be updated for windows 10 for it to support the otherwise you see migration how do you?
13:11
migrate right yep, there you go, so honestly in terms of patch, there weren't gonna be any more new versions of windows. They told us that once this is how I know you're actually like a part of the microsoft community, because you never forget any promise that was made by any random individual from the company and you're like just hold it over them for the rest of their lives.
13:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Random individual. I'm pretty sure that was Gabe old.
13:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's Jerry, Jerry Nixon, and I'm no offense to Jerry, but he's kind of a random man, like he's not a C-level decision maker. It's a good guy. I'm not dumping on him, I mean, but yeah, I I sure I mean mac os or whatever.
13:52
Mac os 10 was the last. Got me the last version of mac os right now, but now that apple's not doing it, neither are we. So that's what that's how our world works. We are bitter, bitter people. That's going to come up later too. Actually, there's a lot of recurring themes here now that I think of it. So anyway, yeah, in terms of, um, uh, like patch, doozy, updates, it's been a big year. Yeah, this is actually one of the smaller ones it's july, catch your breath.
14:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I hope they're taking. I hope that everything slows down july.
14:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know they actually do take some holidays and things yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm still amused, like, for example, this computer is 24H2, obviously it's not on the Insider preview or anything. It's up to date. I do have preview updates installing, but Patch Tuesday just occurred, so that is the latest update and it has that new start menu right with the grouping at the bottom where you can kind of looks like that Apple iPhone screen or whatever, by default the category view. But it doesn't have the thing on the side like that weird little cancerous phone link growth thing on the side, mostly because I just brought it up and I'll probably add it later. But I had, you know, when I came here. I have three computers here, yeah, and I brought I don't even want to say this out loud, I brought four ish computers here. Um, as you do, well, you know I'm reviewing laptops and stuff and yeah, it's always a question what you leave behind, not what you bring yeah.
15:16
So the three that I left behind have been sitting here in a crate for two months and it is kind of amazing to me. You know you can kind of rail against microsoft for all the updates they're giving to windows 11, which I do, and for good reason. The counterpoint to that would be well, yeah, but you know, they've really streamlined it. So we have cumulative updates now. We also have mostly for I think, only for businesses now cumulative updates where only four times a year do you actually have to reboot after that. Right, that's good, you know. And, yeah, good point. Let me tell you something. You leave a computer for a month or two. Yeah, you're looking at two hours to update this thing.
15:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Those four machines, you got to pull them all out, power them all up and then go for lunch.
16:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, no, actually, and then go for lunch yeah, well, no, actually, so you can only click there. You actually have to babysit them, yeah, and this is part of the problem. So I just I mean, this is this is how I spend my time. So I'm ridiculous, but I I lay them out of the bed I finally know where the rage comes from I.
16:21
I have the. I have four screens. This is one I what I work on, and then the other three I'm going to update. They have been sitting in a crate, like I said, they're all x64 computers so they're not going to be happy about being woken up. So their batteries are either completely or partially drained in that time, depending on the computer. Typically, like with the laptop I'm using now, if you plug in power to it, there'll be a little light on the side that goes orange to indicate that it's charging right. These computers. The light goes white and white is a bad color. White means we're not ready and if you, we are not turning on. So even though you are powering the device, you have to wait, wait, and if you try not to wait, it will complain. It will do little blinky lights on the keyboard. It will do everything, but power on the computer actually do what you want to do, yep. So you give it a minute, it's fine. You boot up takes a while. It's a boot, it's not. We're not coming back from sleep here.
17:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
These things are coming back from the dead.
17:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, every single one of them was configured with windows hello facial recognition. Every single one of them failed to do that and I had to type in my pen. Okay, fine, two of them. One drive has a problem, one drive is out of date or something. I have to sign into that again, whatever. Okay, so I go to windows update two of the three. There were so many updates that went off the bottom of the page, like past the bottom of the screen. Right, because there's a lot of driver updates too, right, and firmware updates and all that kind of stuff. And look, if you do this all the time, like I do, you know you have to, from Windows Update, go into, like I think it's, advanced settings, optional updates, and optional updates are also driver updates and firmware updates and some other things, but those are the typical updates you see in there and do you uncheck all the software related stuff and let the hardware run first?
18:11
no, I just you know what, I just let it figure it out. Yeah, it's okay, you can do this, it will. You'll reboot and do things, I don't care. So I check all those. The one of the laptops there was only update, the other two had seven or eight. It's like seriously, and because these are Windows laptops, you'll see redundant recurrences of the same things in there too, with drivers. I don't know why it does that. Whatever, all right. So they're all going, they're all downloading the cumulative update.
18:45
The most recent cumulative update takes forever. I have no idea why, but they all take a long time because they have all these other updates right, and then the firmware ones, which, of course, they want to reboot and install that. And you have to look, it will do it while it's asleep. I don't have to have the screens on, but I leave this. You know I'm sitting there doing, you know, like I'm moving the trackpads around, like I want to keep them alive so I can see where they are. So I'm writing, I'm working on this other laptop, but I'm looking at these screens.
19:08
That took an hour. It took an hour, and they reboot and turn about the same time. They all do this offline thing. They're installing not just those offline parts of the cumulative updates but also firmware updates. Every single one of them, or all of them, you know, had a firmware update. And then you go back and you do it again because you never, you're not done. You know you're not done. There's more. So, um, actually in one case there was no more and Windows update, but the other ones there was more got those done, whatever. Now you go to the store same thing, go down to library I think it are downloads, whatever it's called and check for updates, check for updates, you know, and then it's like takes a lot, it sits there, it's like it doesn't do anything and then all of a sudden it's like, it's like I didn't even know I had that many apps. That takes a long time.
19:57
It takes a long time yeah the store app itself has to read you know, restart because it's updating, right? So all right, that takes whatever. Half an hour, 40 minutes, whatever it takes, and then you're done, right? No, you're not done. The next thing you have to do is open the terminal window and, with administrative privileges, and use winget to check for upgrades, because there are more updates and there are a lot more updates, man, there's like nine to twelve more updates, and I always do that. It's like uh, dash dash, all dash dash, silent, because I don't want to be, I want it just to happen. I don't want to do uac prompts and blah, blah, blah, whatever. I guess the point of this story is I go away for two months and it takes me about two and a half, maybe two hours and 45 minutes to just take computers that are just sitting there and make them usable again. You know what I mean.
20:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is Paul space. Only only the Paul's have this issue.
20:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, I'm going to go on a limb and suggest a lot of people listening to nodding their heads and they're like, yeah, no, I do exactly that same thing.
20:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It happens to me yeah.
21:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's just how we spend time.
21:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But you also have another machine with you that is up to date, so that you could just stare at those ones and be amused by them while still doing something yes, yes, no, I got, I got writing done during this.
21:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I didn't uh, this wasn't what I did, it was what I, you know, did on the side, or whatever however you want to describe that. But, um, yeah, yep. So I feel like this should be a little more seamless, but I don't know I guess, maybe, I guess, if you just left it alone, you know it would do it eventually.
21:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I mean you, you definitely have the seams cubed there right like you're.
21:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You see a lot more seams than most yeah, but this also helps me see that thing that I described up front, which is that I updated these three machines. They all came back, they all eventually were updated and I opened the start. You know, I'm doing whatever I'm doing on each of them, but only one of them has the new star menu yeah, and then, when you're done, turns out you're not done.
21:58
Yeah like I'm not gonna look. There are ways to get everything immediately. You know, a Vive tool or whatever but I'm not. I'm not going to do that, but it's. It just blows my mind, like how how much this is and how little attention this gets, that you know they're so proud of all this technology and their ability to update this thing. It's they never asked why they should, or whatever the phrase you know.
22:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Dude, you got to talk to sysadmins where they're like well, I got 600 workstations to update. Oh yeah, god.
22:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, yeah, there's a part of me that understands the user point of view, where it's like, you know, it is the blocker. They say no to everything, but then I see stuff like this and I'm like, yeah, there's a reason they'd say no to everything.
22:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
but then I see stuff like this and I'm like, yeah, there's a reason they're saying no, andy, uh, in our youtube chat once it says most of this can occur in the background, right? I mean, can you use the computer? Well, yes, of course, yeah, yeah yep, yep.
22:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So again, sometimes just kind of trickles in and maybe, yep, well, it will yeah, but you know the the uh part of what I do is I'm working on the book, I'm working on stuff like the hands-on Windows videos, whatever. Keeping these machines up to date is actually important for what I do, but it's also kind of a known quantity when it comes to it rebooting or changing things or whatever, like. I want these things in the same state, and the problem with Windows is that two Windows computers will never be in the same state, even if they are on the same version and updated equivalently, which is, I guess, half the point here. Which is why when I, you know, in the in the old days, I could write a book or an article and say if you click this, this will happen. And now I have to say things like this If you click this, this will happen. And now I have to say things like this if you click this, you may see this, or yeah, just put in weasel words, could happen, maybe not.
23:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we'll someday. Is this because they're doing kind of ab testing or?
23:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, ab testing. It sounds like it's some kind of a scientific or mathematical process, but what they're doing is controlled feature release which is random and see who hollers. Yeah, that's all it is, and there's no switch. You can't, as a power user, say just give it to me now I'll have it, just give me what you said is in the other releases
24:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think you should get a t-shirt that says give it to me now and see that also sounds like a song.
24:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, oh it is, it's an offspring song anyway. Um, here it is, come and get it I guess that long description was simply how I. I just just tried to describe how I spent my was it tuesday afternoon, I guess you know?
24:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, it's good we've got through the first line of the rundown and I think that I think that's pretty good for the first 20 minutes. At this rate, we'll be here till tomorrow. It's not true? No? Let's take a little break, though, before we get to the rest of the fine new features. All are coming your way on a big Windows update Eventually, someday Maybe, depending which group you're. Yep, the weasel words are always good you might have this you might not this could happen, this could happen.
25:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is it blue? No, then you don't have it.
25:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, like yeah they should like diagnosing yourself with ai a little uh a bug in the lower right hand part of the screen that shows you which a b comparison you're in, or something nobody at microsoft wants you to know what particular ring of hell you're in version. You're just you know, you're in the seventh circle of hell. My friend, I knew it, it was that guy with the goat bottom.
25:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That tipped me off.
25:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know. There was nobody. Nobody asked the guinea pigs their opinion. That's true.
25:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You wouldn't, otherwise you wouldn't be a guinea pig, right, right, right, right. Yeah, there was a funny meme I saw, which is it wasn't fair. I'll I saw, uh, which is it wasn't fair. Uh, I'll show you. It had richard stallman with his head you know the the open source guy, buried in his hands and says the feels when you find out that the start menu in windows 11 is literally a react native application that causes a spike in cp usage every time you press the start button. Yeah, except it's not. That's not really true. There's a react native component, apparently. Yeah, uh, the recommendation thing which every sensible person turns off.
26:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's definitely way better performance to load a compo, a component like an auto, an audit, what do you call it? An out of um process, you know, extension or whatever, like yeah, no, that sounds great, that fired that thing up you know, sorry, we're waiting till bing responds hold on hold on it's like why am I seeing that mac beach ball in windows? It's like hold on, it's loading a web component it'll be there in a moment.
26:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, all your files are right where you left them, don't worry. Our show today anyway, you're what you're listening to Windows Weekly and we're so glad you're here with Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell Our show today brought to you by 1Password. I know, you know the name. Over half of IT professionals say their biggest challenge in IT securing SaaS apps. See, there's a growing problem with SaaS sprawl. I think a lot of this is contributed by AI, right. And then there's this shadow IT issue, because users like to do their own thing and it's not hard to see why this is a problem for IT pros. But there's some good news. Trellica, by one password, can discover and secure access to all your apps, whether they're managed or not. This is a new thing. It's really cool. Trellica T-R-E-L-I-C-A by one password, it inventories every app in use at your company, just goes out, looks at them all and then pre-populated app profiles which, of course, you can modify if you want, but they're ready to go assess the SaaS risks of each and every app, letting you manage access, optimize spend, enforce security, best practices across every app. Your employees use even the shadow IT apps. Yeah, with trellica, by one password, you can manage shadow it and there's some nice side effects you can makes it very easy to securely on board and off board employees and, of course, meet your compliance goals, which is probably job two after after securing the sas apps, trellica by one password provides a complete solution for sas access governance and it's just one of the ways that extended access management helps teams strengthen compliance and security.
28:50
1password's award-winning password manager I know you know about that. It's trusted by millions of users, over 150,000 businesses from IBM to Slack, and now 1Password is securing more than just passwords with 1Password extended access management. And, of course, 1password is ISO 27001 certified. They have regular third-party audits and the industry's largest bug bounty. 1password exceeds the standards set by various authorities. It's a leader in security. So take the first step to better security for your team by securing credentials and protecting every application, even unmanaged shadow IT. Learn more at 1passwordcom slash windowsweekly. That's 1passwordcom slash windowsweekly, all lowercase. We thank them so much for their support of the show. So let's talk about what, after all of this churning and burning, you have accomplished I wish I you know I didn't put.
29:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I haven't posted this anywhere yet so I can't show this to you. But you may recall, two or three years ago we were here in july and we were awoken at two o'clock in the morning by what sounded like an invasion force I remember the street, the band, yeah yeah, the parade, yeah, so.
30:07
So I made a video of that. And then we had neighbors move in across the way and they those guys were here last july and we were not, and they we. I told him the story and he texted us. You're not gonna believe, it's three o'clock in the morning, that's exactly, and he had a video, just like I did, and I'm like yep and um every year yep. So this morning I woke up at originally at like 3, 30, but I I tried. I held out until, like I don't know, 4, 15, so I went.
30:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the worst you'll either, staring at the ceiling.
30:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's the worst, so I finally just like screw it. I have so much stuff I gotta unpack and get ready whatever. So I I'm sitting here and I heard what sounded like one of those like those kind of like Dukes of Hazzard style comical car horns.
30:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Somewhere out in the world.
30:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And I'm like it's four o'clock in the freaking morning, are you kidding me? But then I was like wait a minute. I was like that's the parade, it's coming. So I ran out on my balcony. Here it comes. I ran out on my balcony and I could hear it. It was going to come down the street the way it had come before. I couldn't see it, but I just started recording on my phone. So I got the beginning of it and as I'm recording it my neighbor comes out all like a silhouette because it's still like dark.
31:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Awoken by this cacophony.
31:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, my god and he's like standing there and you can see he's regarding this with the same mix of confusion and yet familiarity. And then he turns around and we're like I'm like good morning. He's like what's going on?
31:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
welcome every year, I guess they do this.
31:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I guess it gets a little later every year, but yeah, it's the new cadets marching down the street. It's clearly yes, it is some kind of cadet thing and it's the supposition before it was police related and it could be. It could be police cadets or something. It looks like a military kind of a parade.
31:58
It's like a graduation Same thing again, it's stretched from either end of the horizon. My wife wife, of course was woken up by this and uh, I'm like I'm so sorry. I I knew there was nothing I could do to prevent her from hearing like there's no amount of things to close, like she was gonna hear it. It's like. It's like the loudest. You'll see.
32:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll put the video up later, but it's it was insane and the trumpets always sound like they're a little bit cracked, like a little flat, a little like everything here is a little out of um tune, like they have those organ grinder guys.
32:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, uh, this was. These were a gift from germany in the 1930s or so. I didn't know that. Oh, that's interesting. They've never been tuned ever since they got them. So they're.
32:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm not joking there's, no one knows how to fix these things, and then'm 100 years old and then they're like could you give me some money?
32:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're like, yeah, fix the frigging organ.
32:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's charming myself, but in the middle of the night it might not be when they're out in front of my apartment. I can tell you, they're not charming.
32:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But yeah, it's the worst. Anyway, I love this place and I have no idea what we're talking about. Okay, so just. And I have no idea what we're talking about, okay, so I'll just that I'm exhausted. Yeah, so what did I accomplish, was the question, and the answer is literally nothing but the well, but the computers are up to date. So I I do move between them and work on them and I'll be using them to, uh, for book and article stuff, so nice. And then you know, it's important for me to know which one of them has the new star menu, actually, because that's something I need, you know, for pictures and whatever. So I only have that on. I think I, if I have seven or eight, I bet that might be the only one that has that star menu right now. It's crazy, it's certainly only the only one of those three.
33:37
Okay, um, apparently me owning a lot of computers has helped windows 11, because one thing changed this past month was pretty important, which is that usage of Windows 11, according to StatCounter, surpassed that of Windows 10. We're number one. I guess I'll do it for your direction. Windows 10 usage right, it's going like this. Windows 11 usage is going like this, and they finally did the little crash thing there.
34:00
So I would say uptick or whatever growth I guess in windows 11 usage has actually, um, gone pretty steadily this year, like it's gone up, uh, a lot where before it was kind of like really, and then this year, you know, suddenly it's finally happening. You know, somewhat I I'm probably more cynical than most, but I can be surprised by some people and, uh, someone somewhere in social social media thing was like, well, that only happened because windows 10 end of life, you know, and it's like, yeah, I, every version of windows it's end of life. Like, yeah, at some point you have to just admit they're shipping 300 million computers with this thing on it every year, or whatever the number is, and it's gonna be used by 250 okay, yeah.
34:42
So whatever the number is, it's still hundreds of millions and it's gonna be used by 200. So, okay, yeah. So whatever the number is, it's still hundreds of millions and it's it's gonna happen eventually.
34:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I don't think this is a uh 100 million here how many are there.
34:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I know that there are still people that like windows 10 or even preferred or whatever I. To me it looks so antiquated I right, right in front.
35:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Really it looks antiquated wow right now it's good.
35:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's that square, flat windows phone style ui that I just don't think has aged well um, just I don't know, making me feel like I'm cleaning the past.
35:16
I get it yeah, you are, but it's nope and in a way we all are right. I mean that's kind of. I mean we all are right, it's to some degree in some area. I mean it's, it's fine. I mean, I, just for me, I, I, I don't know, I actually and maybe I'm rare, I don't know but I, I do like windows 11. I, I do prefer it to windows 10, but I don't know.
35:37
nobody's perfect richard is my point. Um, so yeah, I mean I whatever this was gonna happen, so was going to happen, so it happened. There you go, and it's not even you know, not even four years. I mean I didn't look this up. I don't know how long it took previous versions to do this kind of thing, but the windows 10 numbers were skewed by the fact that windows eight was such a steaming pile of whatever that nobody wanted it and everyone was ready to embrace something that would give them that kind of Windows 7 experience and be relatively clean and just work and actually work like a computer and not like a tablet. So you know, that one I bet the uptick on that one was very fast, but that's an outlier. So this is something that's.
36:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think fairly confined, fairly uniquely to Microsoft, I mean Apple. Almost everybody gets the new operating system, chrome.
36:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, this is a problem with android too. Right like so, and that's true. Android, part of the android, yeah, and it's. It's just because of the way it's distributed. You know, the device makers don't like to think about a thing they sold last year, two years ago. They don't, you know, they just want to move on to the next one and like to them it's like you get this thing, maybe you get a version upgrade and you get the feature around security updates, obviously, app updates, but that's what goes with that. Don't worry about it. You know that kind of mentality, but I don't know.
37:01
Look, windows 11 was, despite the artificial limitations, was broadly compatible with PCs that were, for the most part, able to run it well, and then, by the time you get to 2025, it's like I don't even understand the argument of I have sixth gen intel core processor with four gigabytes of ram or whatever it is, and I should be able to run windows 11. It's like I don't know. Yeah, no, maybe, maybe move on. So, anyway, we're moving on. Um, it's happening. Yeah, it's finally happening. I bet the big hold up here was actually the enterprise.
37:42
Honestly, I'm sure they viewed this with totally suspicion, you know. Yeah, they still do yeah, they should.
37:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're not wrong, but they're also, you know, can't buy uh 10 on machines anymore, so they buy it with 11. So a lot of migration is just new hardware.
37:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and the rest are now that's fine, this happens on its own schedule and it's fine. You know, look, the compatibility thing is pretty much the same across the board. Obviously, anyone who is watching the show has some pet pee feature in Windows 10 that they don't get in 11, like, especially like the taskbar at the top. Apparently all three people that do that are watching the show and are really upset about Windows 11. But you know, this is the old. You know you don't upgrade until it's SP1 back in the day or whatever, right. You know this is the old. You know you don't upgrade until it's sp1 back in the day or whatever, right? Um, this os came in hot and fast and unready, yeah, and it wasn't until, I would argue, maybe even a year ago that I would say, okay, like across the board, it's kind of where it needs to be and it's kind of cheap to say years later like this is what they should have shipped in the beginning.
38:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like yeah, but but yeah first version like this is what they should have shipped. In the beginning it's like yeah, but, but yeah, first version of XP wasn't great either, you know, Right, that's right, yep, I always tell the story.
38:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like XP became so beloved, uh, no one wanted to give it up. When that thing launched, nobody wanted it, nobody.
38:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, like it was windows 20 2000 with the fisher price interface, right exactly and I.
39:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's exactly the way I described it. I later met the person responsible that it was very upset with me.
39:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um, I also called it a sea of blues and greens, you know um, but by service pack four and you know they've gotten over the exp, the sp2 stuff so far, like that's the thing everybody remembers. It had usb support, everything worked yeah exactly.
39:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They had good security, especially on wi-fi, firewall enabled all the time. They had all the protections for web browsing etc. Like yeah, I mean, when you know they shipped that thing, jim also went on vacation, got a phone call, you might want to come back. We have a small problem. Uh, it turns out upnp is uh super buggy and uh is being exploited right now and I put it in every xbox.
39:47
So just you know I had a preview of that, uh, when, at the launch event, I was in new york. You know, when they launched windows xp and you bring up a laptop, this is the first one that had integrated wi-fi capabilities. And with the story about um, you know two profiles. You know, if you have two, yk, you have three, five, whatever, he goes. No, that's impossible. You know two profiles. You know if you have two, why can't you have three, five, whatever. And he goes? No, that's impossible. You know, I opened a laptop at the event.
40:13
Look for all the wifi networks and there were a hundred of them because Microsoft had wifi networks everywhere for the stuff they were doing. But because it was wifi like 1.0 or whatever it was called, there were no passwords for anything. It was all open. So I could get on any Wi-Fi network I wanted, and I did. I took a picture of it. I browsed through the Microsoft machines that were on the network and you could browse through the parts of their file systems they were sharing which they didn't know they were sharing, because Windows again, not always in the most secure default configuration and you could copy files from their computers to yours. And yeah, I mean I noticed that at the launch I was like this doesn't seem safe, you know, but anyway, we got it there.
40:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I remember when cable motors first came in at my neighborhood and it was basically an open network across the board.
41:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Exactly, I had that exact experience.
41:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, made a text file explaining how to secure your machine.
41:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just dropped it on people's desktops what you just said is was exactly my experience. It was like my network neighborhood or whatever at the time it was. This was in phoenix in 19, probably 95, 94, somewhere there, well, 95, I guess, 95 probably. Um and my friend brian and I would, we would, we could print to each other's printers because they were shared on the network. So I would wake up in the morning to some like bit mapped porn photo, you know, like in on my printer and it's like thanks, man, that's uh, that's exactly what I wanted to waste my ink on um. But yeah, that was yeah. I mean it took us, you know, it took us a while to solve these problems, but yeah they were also self-inflicted and they shipped.
41:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the amazing part they shipped, yeah, yep, well I remember the big shift in xp2 was that they turned on that firewall. That was a big deal, right?
41:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, that was the trustworthy computing thing. It was literally because of what had happened with xp. They halted development of new features and new you know os's, whatever, put a bunch of longhorn guys back on xp and were like fix this, you know, yeah and arguably part of longhorn's problem was that most of the senior guys were buried in sp2 for two years.
42:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right ah, interesting yeah no, I look, I.
42:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
they did right by it in the sense that they get, they gave it away as a service pack. Right, they really did significantly improve the security of the system. They learned a lot from Windows Server 2003. They had done this work before for that, and this was the thing that led to the first 64-bit edition, remember, of Windows, which was xp. Like xp, they called it 64-bit xp, xp, 64 yeah essentially server. You know, with the desktop stuff turned on, I read it yeah, it was that guy, why not?
42:53
no, next year exchange box yes, it got a delicious 15 minutes of battery life.
42:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was great we've come a long way. It's so easy to forget how bad, really bad it was not so long ago.
43:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, yeah, it's so easy to be kind of cynical about it, but it's like I don't, you know, we don't. I think we actively try to block it out a little bit, you know what windows is a blue screen all the time?
43:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean you don't get many blue screen hardly. I haven't seen a blue screen in ages right blue screens.
43:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
These days are hardware failures right, right almost yeah, universally.
43:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean yeah, 100 I the greatest I when I was. We sometimes reference that delphi book, but when I was doing delphi stuff in the mid 90s or whatever that was, um, the greatest thing I ever did was get nt4 going because my the apps I would write could easily blue screen whatever 9X I was running at the time. I could not crash NT with that thing and you really tried. Oh yeah, I was like this is good, this is good. Yeah, that was a big part of it, obviously.
44:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it's simple. They had memory protection. All of a sudden, you couldn't access Ring Zero. You had to work in the user space, right um ask?
44:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
crowdspace about accessing ring zero but um, but yeah, no for the most, yeah, for the most part.
44:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There is I couldn't, I couldn't, yeah for this one of the pushes on for vista was trying to drive the video drivers to ring three and ultimately had to back off on it because it just was crippling everything. And then they had driver quality problems and ring zero with all new driver model and gee, another thing that went wrong.
44:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, we were talking about this yesterday on security. Now Steve Gibson was reminiscing about when Microsoft, for performance reasons, decided to put GDI into race zero.
44:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the dual edge sort of NT was. It ran so slow in existing hardware compared to 9x or whatever or 3x that they had to do that. And then the second little, not fatal blow, but the second big problem they did was the when they did iis and they had like something called the nt option pack. Yeah, they put internet explorer in there and they made it the show. Yeah, and this is unfair, but it's also fair. The children who are working on IE were in no way the seasoned engineers who were working on NT, and allowing that nonsense into the file system, into the deepest parts of the kernel, et cetera, was a huge mistake and it took them a long time to dig out from that one. So, yeah, look, they got it right eventually. But, um, just getting nt into shape for consumers and individuals was, honestly, it was our huge job, one it was a big deal, yeah, big deal.
45:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, and in hindsight, someone understandable that the first versions of xp would be a little raggedy, but eventually it got good. And then Windows 7 came out and it was fantastic yeah.
45:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, I mean Walked right by Vista there, Just like that oh what was that again? Vista.
45:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right. Actually I liked NT 3.5. I understand why you started using that. That was nice.
46:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The most solid Windows machine ever around was a 351 machine running, yeah, right side base Daytona. I think was that one day yeah, no gooey on it at all, and that thing was bomb proof which just went day oh, nostalgia, but now we have a one start menu on one computer and we have others.
46:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nonsense on this.
46:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think I'm gonna drum up excitement here but it's like well, in a way that's it makes sense. It's all now about the presentation layer, right, that's where all the stuff's changing. Yeah, because we got the, we got the, the guts pretty well down, yeah or no?
46:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
well, I, maybe no right. I mean honestly, there have been important security improvements. I mean I I can't say in every windows version per se, but honestly probably.
46:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean uh okay, yeah I mean yeah I guess it's you know this always a driver has driver model changed.
47:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Not so much yeah.
47:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but not for a while, right.
47:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, no See, there are actually big changes coming to drivers over the past year or so and then into the future, right? So Microsoft is taking over their printer driver stuff, right, they're kind of things happening.
47:23
Good, that's the big one, um, but there's no, you know, there's always another threat, that's the thing. So you can, I always think. I always think of this as like the tsa mentality, like, oh, they did something bad, let's really, let's like, overdo it and protect against that. It's like, yeah, the guys doing that have moved on to the next thing, you know, and their, their insecurity is always the next thing.
47:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So speaking of which, tsa has announced that you no longer have to take off your shoes yeah, take that shoe bomber rich.
47:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What was that guy's name? Richard that guy?
47:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
trying to light his shoe.
47:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, he looked like a real mensa kind of rocket scientist type you know.
48:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know a smart guy would use electric igniter. Why do you have a a? Why do you have a, a shoe lighter?
48:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He's like I picked the one that had nothing, no fluid in it, and now it won't start. You know, guy next to him is like what are?
48:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you doing, dude? Can you just read a magazine or something like that, stuart, this guy's trying to light his shoes on fire.
48:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so because of this imbecile, we've been taking off our shoes for years. For the past, what? 15 years, or?
48:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
something yeah a long time. It's unbelievable. So you have to have a real ID, though, right, which is hysterical. No, I have a fake ID. Okay, well, you better take off your shoes.
48:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, you better have two of them, then Okay, okay, two fake IDs is okay. Yeah, I don't know. Anyway, our world is insane. What can I say? Oddly, there's not a lot going on. In the insider thing, there was a single canary build. Unless something's happening as we speak, by the way, that could be happening. Actually, no new features just some bug pictures.
49:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got to show you this. On the FBI website there's a historical picture of Richard Reed shoes. Oh, there you go. It's a little piece of America, is that what?
49:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that is on the right side, is there like a hole in it?
49:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, where the, where the actually melted part of it yeah, yeah oh brother trying to detonate.
49:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Listen, I blame this guy for every sockless sandal wearing idiot putting, taking their sandals off and putting their feet up on the wall of the plane it's their fault it's his fault. You gotta wear shoes and socks. Just do it. Oh my god, guy's wearing a muumuu. He's got nothing on his feet. What's happening? What's his name, richard? What was his last name?
49:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
reed. What richard reed?
49:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
richard reed yeah, it's been 20 life terms 410 years yeah 24 years.
49:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we've been taking off our shoes, yeah, and now, 24 years later, the fbi has decided okay so many people like probably like velcro, just like slip-on shoes.
50:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now they couldn't like tie their shoe, just like they couldn't tie a tie, you know I see ads all the time for shoes for going on a plane, so you could slip them on and off easy.
50:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh yeah, I always go wear slip-ons for flying, for sure not anymore.
50:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you don't have to know our long national nightmare is over back to hiking boots.
50:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm delighted we have other problems flying or otherwise.
50:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, okay, so blah, blah, blah, let's see canary nothing there and then. So this one was actually interesting to me. This is one of those recurring theme things Microsoft Edge, a controversial browser. There's been some good work going on there, and a big chunk of it has been a series of improvements to the user interface of the application, not necessarily like the rendering or any of the other things you might associate with performance, although there has been some of that too to get these components all to run faster. So they've come up with this new way of creating a responsive user interface. It's not like, I think in the past it was basically this web technology, like React or whatever, which can be slow, obviously, and every you know three, four months.
51:21
They come up with a little update and right now what they're saying is that they've reduced load times by an average of 40% across 13 browser features. It's something you can see if you click on a UI element and it just kind of pops on Like it's real, Like it's actually pretty good, and that kind of a um, an improvement is, uh, really huge for users, cause, even if you don't explicitly acknowledge it, it's happening and you do know what's happening and it just feels. It feels fast, right, it's good, like it's real. And apparently there's a way to measure this. This is unbelievable. But it's called first conf content, full paint, meaning you bring up the browser, it's going to draw whatever the thing is in the, the, the tab that's open. If you can get that thing to happen below 300 milliseconds, the user is happy, right, like they actually recognize the magic numbers, yep, and they. The latest version of Microsoft edge is the first browser to achieve that score. They have a an FCP score below 300 milliseconds.
52:32
So we're going to talk more about edge later, but I will say it doesn't completely obviate the problems with the browser. But, as it turns out, you can almost completely obviate the problems of the browser. And there are good reasons to use Edge and we'll talk about that later. One of them is you know, like your mental no, I'm kidding, that's good and that's Windows specific. I mean, obviously, edge is um cross-platform and I'm sure there are improvements elsewhere as well, but you're going to see the best results on windows because you know microsoft?
53:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, so there you go.
53:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's their rendering engine, yep all right, yeah, uh, microsoft teams, everyone's favorite app, until they use slack, and then they realize the grass is really greener. Um loves teams nobody loves, nobody loves.
53:25
Nobody loves slack either. It's okay, it's fine. They're both terrible. I like apps where you get notifications and they don't clear on in other instances of the app, maybe on mobile or another pc. I love that. I love it so much. I love having to manually open an app on my phone to get rid of the little dot, even though I've already handled the conversation and question on some other device. I love it. And I would say Teams and Slack are equally awesome in that regard. Teams is inarguably one of the most full-featured apps Microsoft has ever made. It matured at such an incredible rate plus or minus a year or two of the pandemic. It was the singular focus of Microsoft 365. Really good job, so good. They got in the antitrust trouble but somehow they didn't do threaded, like a threaded view in the channel They've been talking about this for forever.
54:17
I know this has to have been on the original list of features we need it has to be on the first bit and out of the first bill.
54:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like we'll get to threading.
54:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They consolidated the consumer and work clients of this app before they did this. That's incredible, yeah, but they just did it. So there's one less thing to complain about, I guess, unless you don't like threaded viewers.
54:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, they're going to be very angry with threading. It's inevitable. You can never do threading right. That's impossible.
54:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, I mean it's not multi-threaded. I was like, okay, so that happened.
54:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I said I wanted threading, I didn't want this.
54:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, there was a big Samsung event today, so they have impact events I think twice a year.
55:04
This was the one for the folding device thing and things. There are multiple versions. I sort of drifted off when the price tag of $2,000 plus for the bigger folding I know, for a phone that folds came up. But there are a bunch of Google AI features. This is something they've been doing over the past couple of years with Samsung. So a year ago, january, this past January, a year ago August, and then now there's been these features that, because Samsung always has the highest end processors, et cetera, et cetera, and they have this big partnership, a lot of on-device AI stuff.
55:31
It's maybe semi worth looking at, but tied to this, looking at but tied to this, um, my google announced a, like a surprise, uh, pixel drop. So if you're a pixel user, you may know that you get a drop, yeah, every quarter, right, and they there's usually like dozens of new features across you know, phones, tablets, uh watches, android, auto, whatever it is like. Well, pixel, I guess, pixel vision and in addition to Android features, right, which also Android also gets new features, I think on a quarterly basis. The last one of those was in June, but they had a surprise one today and the reason they did that was because these things are also coming to Samsung devices, right? And they didn't want, you know, their fans to be like, uh, what they're fans to be like, uh, what about us, you know? So they just released an extra, extra, uh, pixel drop. It used to be called a pixel feature drop. They're all ai related and they're all actually really useful, so only for pro excel.
56:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What's that?
56:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's only for pro and pro excel well, each of the features is, it depends on the feature, right? So the the first feature, which is vo, vo, whatever three. The video generation model used to be something that was tied to their high-end 200 a month, you know, researcher type, uh, skew, but uh, but a week ago they made it available to anyone who's paying the 20 a month, whatever. They keep changing the name, but I think it's just google ai pro, I think it's. You know, you get two terabytes of storage and you get all the Gemini stuff, right? What's happening? Oh, this is the video.
57:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the video.
57:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is amazing, Like it is amazing.
57:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And this is all AI generated, which is good.
57:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, it's really good. Yeah, so this is. You know, this is honestly not really tied specifically to Pixel and you do need that subscription, but if you did buy a 9, you got this subscription for free for a year, so you can play with this. Wow, that monkey's good. He's better than the organ grinder guys here.
57:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
ironically, maybe they should get a Pixel. I love they put Gemini into every yeah right where they can. It is really good. This is a now in India announcement.
57:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So there's also Google has what's it called Not click to do. It's called circle to search, and this was like. One of those ideas was like okay, so we have a phone, it's a touch device, it could be a tablet too, but we want to be able to Search that thing that's on screen. So this is basic uh image recognition. And then you go from there to text recognition, uh, to ai. And so they came up with this thing called circle search, which, I remember correctly, might have actually debuted first on a samsung device, but it doesn't matter, it's across the board now in android and pixel etc. Et cetera. So that's been, you know, updated here and there over time.
58:20
If you live in the U? S or India and you have a pixel device, you actually get a AI mode integration now with circle to search. So the idea is you circle something, it tells you, gemini will tell you what it thinks it is right. It can often be very accurate, but now you can do the. The point of ai mode is now you're in that conversation mode so you can ask it follow-up questions and keep going, learn more about that topic, whatever it might be, um, and if you're playing a game, this one, okay, this is actually pretty useful too. This is we uh in on windows they have a feature that's part of game bar. Now that is a mini version of the Microsoft Edge browser that will, depending on the game, recognize the game you're playing and then, when you bring up the game bar, you get this list of hints for the game and, if it's really well supported, it will know where you are in the game and say for this part, the way you get by that thing you're having trouble with is this, and then eventually they're going to do the thing where it's kind of talking to you as you go and it will help you as you play, and that's how it's evolving there.
59:19
The way that Google is addressing this sort of need on Android is you're playing a game on your phone and you know same thing will happen. You're like oh, I'm really stuck here, I've got to. You know pause, go over to the browser, google it. How do I get by this? Oh yeah, circle to search works, is that it happens on whatever screen you're looking at. So now it works in games and it will see that you're playing a game and see where you are in the game, and it's a, it's just a slide up view from the bottom that gives you that experience like, instead of having to switch apps, you never leave the game. I mean it's it is over the game, but you don't have to do that context which is an overlay actually sounds like a good idea.
59:55
Now I, yeah, couldn't see a game on a phone of my life dependent on it, but I appreciate that other people can. Not for us, not for us, yeah. And the third one I have some questions about. But they brought Gemini to Pixel Watch was the Pixel announcement, but actually they brought it to all Wear OS watches, which is why they announced it today, because it's part of the Samsung watch. Samsung probably is the best-selling Wear OS type watch, but if you have a Wear OS 4 Plus watch, it could be made by OnePlus, oppo, samsung, xiaomi. You will get Gemini. And that means when you say, hey, gee, I won't say that because I don't want to freak everyone's phone out or whatever, but it will come up on your watch. You could press the side, you know, I think, press and hold on the side button. Obviously there's an app in there as well and it lets you interact with the gemini through the watch. And, of course, it interacts on the back end with gmail, google calendar, etc. All the google services. Okay, is it running on your watch? I mean, just two seconds ago we were talking about uh, on I, onice, ai and how primitive it is, relatively speaking. I think Google or Samsung, it doesn't really matter but was the first to do this on a phone. Well, in the Android space, apple has been doing this with the Gemini Nano models, microsoft's doing it with Copilot plus PC. Obviously they were doing it before with things like Windows Studio Effects right, it was an MPU feature in Windows which only ran on a few different computers but now runs on a bunch. But Gemini on a Pixel watch.
01:01:34
What chip could this be running? It's not running on there. It is no way. So the assumption, my assumption they didn't explain this. I looked for what chip could this be running? It's not running on there. There's no way. The assumption, my assumption they didn't explain this. I looked for this information. I didn't see it. It's going to be out there somewhere, but you must assume you have your phone in your pocket too, right? Not always, but most times, or I guess I could suppose if you have an LTE watch, it could just be on the cloud, right? Maybe that is the point it's. I guess it's cloud-based, but it can't be running on the watch is my point. But there is an app on your watch, so anyway, it's happening.
01:02:06
It's something yeah, there's something. There's something on the watch, yeah, which is like there's some. Yeah, this was like now you're going to talk to your wrist right yeah, hey, I, this is a topic that's come up before, but like as soon as people started talking into those bluetooth headset things, yeah, I, just, I don't even with rare exceptions.
01:02:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't like I don't immediately go to.
01:02:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This person is crazy anymore, like I used to like. People are always out there talking to themselves anywhere. It seems like they are, but they're talking to something, something else, I don't know.
01:02:35
Yeah okay, on the on the toilet in the public washroom exactly yes, I've had some interesting interactions with people talking to someone on a phone in the bathroom, um, but we'll save that for some other day. Good for another. Yes, um, one theme that's been pretty regular, for me at least, uh, this year, has been this concept of how web browsers are about to change dramatically.
01:03:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Because of ARC.
01:03:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and ARC was a big part of it, obviously, and a big part of that discussion, a big part of the reason for that discussion.
01:03:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was the first time they showed me a new browser. We're like this is different.
01:03:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right. And then if you look at DIA, you're like, oh, this is different too. Opera. At dia, you're like, oh, this is different too. Um, opera is doing this with their neon browser. Um, google, microsoft are taking more of a kind of a conservative approach, but we're gonna. You know, ai is gonna be everywhere. I mean, we all know this, but it's gonna fundamentally change the way we use these products. I mean, browsers are, I think, inarguably the most important app that we use, regardless of the device. I mean, it's a lot of people can do everything in the browser, really, which was the inspiration for the Arc stuff. But what that's going to look like is, you know, still up in the air. It's still debatable Perplexity. Today and I haven't had a chance to look at this a lot because it just had two seconds before I started to sign in for the show, I saw this you can now try their browser called comet.
01:04:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is an ai browser well, you can if you're a 200 a month per split okay, I'm sorry.
01:04:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, that's like I said.
01:04:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have not you missed that little detail, okay, uh, I will do it as soon as they give it to the regular I subscribe.
01:04:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They'll do over time, right? Yeah, yeah, I got you okay.
01:04:17
So, yeah, all of these ai, my ai, chatbot models, whatever have this 200 a month tier now for some reason, I guess it's like oh, people will spend that and people okay we'll do it too, yeah um, this could be very interesting for a lot of reasons, but if you look at the, the little video they made, it looks a lot like the things that the browser company which makes Arcandia and Opera and others have been talking about, which is it's a little hokey at first because it's kind of working with the UI as it is today, but you're basically seeing it run the websites to do the thing you want it to do and then coming back with whatever it is you asked for, and so that could be like filling out forms and like searching for different things or looking for the best price on a thing or whatever it might be, but it's doing it in the window or whatever, and then it's over on the side. It's like okay, here you go, and it's almost like a reasoning model, the way it will kind of sit there and churn text, but it's doing it with the content in the browser across services that it does not own or control. And, like I said, I think this is going to change things a lot. Some of it will be that co-pilot experience, which is such a great side-by-side experience, where maybe there's a long video and you just want to be like, okay, what's the point, or what are the 10 most important points from this that he makes in this demonstration, or whatever. And okay, fine, but a lot of it is this kind of I guess we call it a genetic capability, where it goes out and does these things for you. And I think I said this maybe a week or two ago.
01:05:52
But browser, the very name browsing, literally browsing. You know, we were just nostalgic for whatever NT, xp, whatever it was, and Geo cities and all the things that were common back then. You would browse through the limited selection of websites and you would literally browse, you would just, you would read and and whatever, and I think we've all lost our attention spans. But AI is also teaching us not to do any work at all, and now you can just be like look, I don't have time for this 6,000 word Thurad article, to stop. What is he saying? And it's like, as it turns out, you can condense it down to a single sentence. What a jerk. Here's the. You know, right, I got your rage right here. Yeah, there's a lot of complaining.
01:06:35
And then he just says this yeah, so, you know I mean but, but, or a video or whatever. It is right, I mean, and I think the fundamental change is going to be well, there's a couple, but browsing, as we think of it is, I think, is going to kind of go away by late, as the primary activity in a browser right Makes the name a little strange, but also, um, maybe the browser itself eventually goes away, because these things will essentially happen in the background. You might have a natural language conversation with whatever bots or agents or whatever you want to call them, and they just kind of do it for you and they contact you later to let you know and and maybe in the beginning it's running a website, but maybe those websites evolve to to address the back end, service based model that this is right, and you're heading towards the the AR world, right?
01:07:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's? This is the interface for the visor. Yeah, just show me what I want to look at. Like, right, I just cat videos at all times.
01:07:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm not sure I really want that much ai in my browser I know it's, it's a tough one, it's um, but this is like I. I have to remind myself of this. This is the argument that one would make against. This is the same argument that someone would have made when they owned one of the first vehicles and they knew how to fix it and then cars got good enough, you didn't have to be a mechanic, and they were like, oh, you know, I, I still want to do it that way. Or we've moved from stick shifts to automatics. Let's go, I want to control the. You know like there's always that resistance because you have built up incredible skills for the thing that it was. You know, and I, I, I do this. All, we all do it. It's not. This is not a criticism of anybody.
01:08:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I agree, and I think that's a real, very real thing, but I think there's also a very real and shitification of everything. Yeah, and I am not sure whether it's the former, what you just described, or the latter. What I just well, it's technology. So it's the former, what you just described, or the latter.
01:08:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it's technology, so it's both.
01:08:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like it may just be putting crap in my browser for no good reason.
01:08:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The first versions will be nice, and then they'll get possibly worse.
01:08:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm a lifetime reader. I have a hard time reading long things now. Yeah, that's true, I read every day. Every day. I read in the morning, I read during the day, I read before I go to bed every night, and I I struggle with it, and a lot of it is just this kind of implicit training of content consumption that occurs when you have the entire world at your fingertips and get an answer in two seconds, and you so.
01:09:12
My fear is the Isaac Asimov foundation trilogy. It's the future social. We have all this incredible technology. There is no one who knows how it works, how to fix it, and if those things break, we are devolving and back to cavemen, and that's that's the fear. It's the like I already am part of the problem like if, uh, society devolved you know the apocalypse app and whatever it was you'd have to eat me because I don't have a skill that would be useful to anybody. You can't even grow your own food, paul, right, I can't hammer two pieces of wood together. I can't fix a vehicle. I can't, yeah, grow food, I can't. I can be food, but that's like literally the only benefit I would bring to this story, right.
01:10:02
And I think we're all going to be like that eventually, like we're just going to be like the like, the wally guys, like the fat things on our ladders floating around, you know, like like, here's the turkey dinner. No, that's the guy.
01:10:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the guy running the show well then, the survivalists are probably right. They're out there chopping wood and, yeah, storing water and building their own.
01:10:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, beehives, sure I mean I, I look, I don't have an answer I don't I just I, I think like everyone, I, I, I have worries and I have, um, my, I don't want biases, I don't know what to call them. This habits. You know the way I do things, whatever it gets in the way. But I do look at things like this and I think, okay, this is pretty good. It's like why wouldn't you want to use something that could give you the best price on a flight or you know, or whatever like you could, if it really does that?
01:10:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and if it's not influenced by the airlines? You know they? They just nominated the ceo of an airline to be the chief of the faa. Conflict of interest much, no well, that's like the problem. And that's the thing we talked about locking the keys of the vault yeah, and the thing we're worried about with ai right is it is so expensive. It's inevitable that these results are going to start to be, uh, advertising driven.
01:11:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah and then they will counter. The faa argument is you need an expert in that role, and somebody who's run an airline is an expert. The question is, where are the conflicts of interest? You know, I'm listening to a wonderful book that I highly recommend.
01:11:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Robert carroll, the guy who wrote the power broker and is writing the multi-volume history of lbj. I wrote a short book about his working style, his, his working habits, working, and one of the things he told about one of the very first experiences he had as an investigative reporter. He was like an intern working the city desk on the weekend and nobody was there and an FAA representative called and said you better send somebody down here. There's nobody here right now, but I have some stuff I want you to look at. And he called her. He couldn't get anybody, so he went down himself, yeah, and he went through all the papers and he realized that the faa was was lobbying to take a large parcel of property in long island and make it an airport, not use it for what the people locals wanted to do, which was to to expand, uh, public education and build a campus for the state, for the local university.
01:12:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, uh, and there was like a whistleblower type.
01:12:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He was well, yeah, it was because, yeah, the smoking gun was in. There was that all the executives of the big companies that were headquartered in long island wanted to land their executive jets close to the company right. So they were lobbying.
01:12:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know, they were influencing the faa's decision and that's just a small example this happens, yeah, this happens everywhere and in big and small ways there.
01:12:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you're really putting the fox in charge of the hen house.
01:12:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I literally was looking to see what direction it was from where I'm sitting, but I'm not in Pennsylvania, so what I did didn't make sense. Well, it's way up north, yeah, from my seat, like this in Pennsylvania. Right over there is a field surrounded by trees that's unused but it's perfectly manicured. And I've asked about this a bunch and I finally found out it was because the executive of a nearby hospital lived in a mansion behind there and he wanted a helicopter pad so he could fly back and forth to work. Yeah, any traffic in an area that has no traffic. In a nutshell, yeah, so this guy would just fly a helicopter to work because he's rich, because he's rich and he doesn't care. Screw all the rest of you who don't want to hear that, yeah, yeah.
01:13:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, but my point being we're in late stage capitalism and unfortunately, yes, it's like stage four cancer. Yeah, it is, it's like that it's insurable and it's metastasizing, it's incurable and it's metastasizing. But it's why you can have these great technological innovations, but they get inshittified very quickly and this is a genuine concern now in AI. Is that?
01:14:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
soon the results will be tainted by ad results, right? Well, I mean, it is a fact that AI is evolving at a rate that we've never seen with technology, so it is reasonable to assume that the inshittification of AI will also occur at a rate that we've never seen with technology.
01:14:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So it is reasonable to assume that the inshittification of AI will also occur at a rate that you've never seen. You built it off data on the internet, and the internet was built off the, off the back of ads.
01:14:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's already in there that by itself at least it would be an equal opportunity vendor.
01:14:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
but then you have companies that come with AI. It wasn't?
01:14:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
like someone had a plan. This is how we're going to monetize the internet.
01:14:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The CEO of Perplexity said exactly that. No, I mean with the internet. In other words, that happened and we're here, and now he's like, yeah, that's what we're going to do again.
01:14:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just think that the influence of money and greed is pervasive at this point.
01:14:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's funny and these AI companies realize you is, you can have great technological innovations, but they get tainted very quickly by greed well, they and trying to make. Right now they're. None of those companies are making money right right, like they're on a short, they're on a on a burn right here. That's going to take them out if they don't find their way.
01:15:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It might not be great, might just be survival right yeah well, I really feel like pretty candid hand too like this has triggered some insanity, though right, I mean well look at the world's biggest companies are throwing away this week. Tens of billions of dollars a quarter to build infrastructure like, what are you doing?
01:15:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
like well, because they believe this is a disrupting moment yeah, there's nothing.
01:15:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They want to be in front of it. Yeah, there's the same reason, but this is what an uber for a decade without a wag a dog stuff.
01:15:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, they're making it a disruptive moment, right because now they're playing everybody off you know?
01:15:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, some people, but not you know. No, we only get so many chances to build a sovereign app like the first app that people touch. Yeah, maybe it was outlook, maybe it's slack. It's always a browser. It has been for a long time. Most people's first touch of a machine is to open a browser and then use that to install. Chrome.
01:16:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They want their product to be your sovereign app, so you make a browser.
01:16:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right. And then this is just basic antitrust that has dated back to the beginning of two people bartering for something where someone finally has enough power that they move from these win-win relationships where they're doing uh, providing a service to just protectionism and protecting what they have and then looking for other things they can dominate because now they have so much money they can afford just to buy their way into new markets uh I think, so just just scenarios to temper what you're saying about this, I just want to point out that the perplexity ceo says its browser this one they announced today will track everything users do online to sell hyper personalized ads.
01:16:49
This is from tech crunch so I don't, I feel like this is not the the way they would market it, but but, but he's the ceo, he's no, I know, I know, but I mean, but this is also tech crunch, taking that and making it the headline right, like he says that's.
01:17:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the quote. That's kind of. One of the other reasons we wanted to build a browser is we want to get data even outside the app to better understand you. Yeah, because some of the prompts that people do in these days is purely work related. It's not like that's personal, yep. On the other hand, what are the things you're buying? Which hotels are you going to? Which restaurants are you going to? What are you spending time browsing? Tells us so much more about you. Look, we plan to. This is the smoking gun. You're too smart for this.
01:17:31
We plan to use all the context to build a better user profile and maybe, you know, through our discover feed we could show some ads there, maybe. So here's the thing.
01:17:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, you're right, this is terrible. We, we just talked about why no one cares about what you just said, and it's because we don't read anymore. We don't think we've all given away everything so we can get to a location in the fastest way possible Google Maps or whatever it is Like when you tell people you shouldn't use Chrome because dot, dot, dot, they're like uh-huh, uh-huh, and then they just use Chrome. They don't care. We've already made this kind of implicit deal with the devil. So I have had people literally tell me when I've said to them disable the feature in whatever the product is Windows 11, edge, chrome, whatever.
01:18:18
That is personalized advertising and they said well, if I'm going to see advertising, I'd rather see something that's relevant to me, which is dumb on two levels because, honestly, personalized advertising is ridiculous. It's actually not any better than actually regular advertising. It's still advertising. How about we? Than actually regular advertising? It's still advertising. Like what, how about we don't see advertising? Would that be an acceptable outcome? But we're always like whatever, I don't care, I don't have to pay for it, we get.
01:18:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everyone gives up their soul it's as if, though, your gps said you know the best route would be the one that goes by Arby's Right.
01:19:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you would like, we will order you food, because they have the meats and it will be there waiting for you when you get there. Exactly, this will add three minutes to your trip, you know?
01:19:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I feel like we're not too far from that. That's exactly my point.
01:19:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, but listen. What you just said to any thinking person is ludicrous, should never happen. But someone out there is like oh, good idea.
01:19:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, why don't we do that? Yeah, that's the thing is. It's with AI. It's easy to kind of hide it, and we are getting more and more reliant on those little bullet points that the ai gives you, and so no, we've lost the ability to read, we've lost the ability to think, and now we're not going to know when it's wrong and we're just whatever yeah, do you think aravind was talking to when he said that?
01:19:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
like who was his intended?
01:19:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it was actually and uh, this new daily news podcast, uh, tbpn was an interview, right.
01:19:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And that's focused on the Valley. So arguably he was really talking to Google. We're coming for your lunch, maybe, yeah, yeah.
01:20:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He was, at this time, probably negotiating with Apple Right Exactly.
01:20:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What he's showing is business model and why this is a viable, good point. We're coming for Google's lunch.
01:20:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, doesn't mean he's not telling the truth.
01:20:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No right, he's saying what he needs. Ceos say what they need to keep the stock price where it is and make as many opportunities for the company as possible.
01:20:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The truth is another thing. No one cares about anymore. Apparently, right Like I mean, this is, the whole world is nuts. Yeah, yeah, this is the ideal time for ai. Yes, couldn't have happened at a better time to a less educated.
01:20:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's. It's perfect. Let's take a little break. Come back and talk more about all this good stuff. We've got the xbox segment just around the corner. Paul therot, richard campbell our show today brought to you by I, I'm happy to say, threatlocker Love these guys. They do zero trust right Now.
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Threatlocker works in every industry. It supports Mac environments, it provides 24 7 us based support and it enables comprehensive visibility and control. Just ask mark tolson. He's the speaking of infrastructure, he's the it director for the city of champaign, illinois, and you know that city governments are one of the prime targets of ransomware these days. So mark mark's on the front line. He says and this is a direct quote ThreatLocker provides that extra key to block anomalies that nothing else can do. If bad actors got in and tried to execute something, I'd take comfort knowing ThreatLocker will stop that. Stop worrying about cyber threats. Get unprecedented protection quickly, easily and cost-effectively with ThreatLocker. Visit Th, visit threatlockercom slash twit to get a free 30-day trial and learn more about how threat locker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. That's threatlockercom slash twit. We thank him so much for supporting windows weekly with paul thurott and richard campbell. That's all right. This is time to cheer up, because there's no inshittification happening in gaming.
01:24:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Gaming's going very well maybe we should just go right to the back of the book.
01:24:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no you want the whiskey too soon. You have to earn your whiskey now.
01:24:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look um look guys, come on. It's been a tough year. I get it, but honestly it's. I don't think it's as bad as it seems, but we'll get to that. So we talked about the layoffs famous last words paul, yeah I said the same thing on the titanic.
01:24:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That worked it's not as bad as it seems I mean, we just scraped the thing.
01:24:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What? What could happen?
01:24:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's just a little hole. It's a little hole.
01:24:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I'm trying to be cognizant of the past here, well, but I'm also trying to look at this like clear-headedly, in a clear-headed fashion or whatever. So there are still questions about the layoffs. I mean, frankly, there's been some contention over how many of them are gaming industry related, etc. I think one of the most compelling things I've seen is descriptions of studios, slash games that were canceled or gotten rid of or whatever, where these guys had never delivered on what they were supposed to deliver and were given more time to reach some quality bar and give more time and give them more money.
01:25:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Everybody's got a schedule in game development.
01:25:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like you're saying, it's Duke Nukem 3D all over again.
01:25:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Nothing is Duke Nukem 3D.
01:25:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, actually I'm not even sure that's an extreme example anymore.
01:25:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was at the time. Isn't that funny? It absolutely was at the time, yeah.
01:25:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And listen, listen it completely like two or three exceeded all our expectations when it arrived. So it was fine. Um, game was terrible. So I look there are going to be exceptions to what I just said.
01:25:49
I could be completely wrong, you know more generally, but so far what I've seen is a lot of this stuff was there's a kind of a shift that occurs at Xbox when Phil Spencer comes in. They've screwed up with Xbox One. They were trying to turn it into more of a general entertainment kind of a device and they kind of just lost the thread a little bit. And looking at the market as it was, looking at their position versus Sony especially, but also Nintendo, you know what do we do? What do we do? What do we do? So things have obviously changed. But you know Phil Spencer's been involved in some of the more difficult decisions, like they wanted Halo Infinite to ship at a certain point so it could be part of the new console generation. That thing was a steaming pile of garbage and they had to be like no, you're gonna, you're gonna take more time. And then there are examples of the opposite like that uh, what was it called? Red? Um, not red red. No, it was a terrible game, um, a couple years ago, the vampire game. They just threw that thing out there and it was garbage that could have used another six months or a year, right?
01:26:56
I think a lot of a lot of the work that xbox has been doing over the past decade has been looking at what the other companies in the market nintendo and sony were six redfall, thank you, kevin um were successful with. And what are we doing wrong? And what they were doing wrong was they didn't have enough first party games, right, this is the big thing Sony and Nintendo have. They have these franchises and they do really well, and they pretty much keep them on their own platforms, you know. So they bought studios and they bought a lot of studios, and then they bought really big studios and now they're kind of the biggest game studio in the world, right, and you know, they wanted quantity and quality, and I think they might've given too many of these small teams that are spread out all over the place and, god, like just Activision Blizzard by itself.
01:27:48
It's like this nightmare of whatever studios everywhere. Who knows what these people are doing? But they even before that, though, within Microsoft, there's so many of these things. I just think they were. It's too much of it, you know, and I I think this is them. It's bad timing and it's not maybe handled well. They're not being very transparent about it, but I think there's just a lot of like. You've been working on this for three years. You were going to be a launch game and now we're going on to the next gen years. You were going to be a launch game and now we're going on to the next gen.
01:28:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What are you doing? And you know it, it stinks, uh, to lose. The ai story plays into this too. It absolutely does there is no better example small teams starting to build extraordinary games using these new tools, and then you're turning around to your 300 person team. That's two years behind and going what is next month's payroll again?
01:28:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah Right, you've taken hundreds of people, hundreds of millions of dollars and you've created nothing. And we could do that for less. Basically, I mean so, yes, look, it's hard I am not saying it's okay or anything like that and look, like I said, there will be exceptions. We don't really know the full story here, but to me this is a big part of it. So there were a lot of just a couple of quick things that came out of this from last week I don't think we discussed. Last week there was a guy who was a big Call of Duty leaker who just said full stop, phil Spencer will retire as soon as they ship the next Xbox. And Frank Schott, chief Communication Officer at Microsoft, literally is like yep, that's completely made up. That's not true. He's not retiring anytime soon. I mean, I guess of course he would say that, but it's fascinating to me that he said anything.
01:29:33
You know, to something like that. It was just such a random kind of a weird blog thing. But Romero Games, which of course is John Romero and his wife and John Romero being half of the team well, half of the two John team was the core of the team for Mid that made Doom and Quake right Was forced to lay off 100 employees when a company they did not name that was sponsoring a first-person shooter that was going to run on the xbox uh said there was no more money coming. And I wonder who that company was. Right?
01:30:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
so that's an interesting survive die katana? So?
01:30:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
he, that's interesting because that's not owned by me, but that's not part of microsoft, right? He? That's an independent small company. So that's another thing. With the industry, like, when you think of like any given call of duty game, there's whatever studio, really studios doing the different parts of the game, but there's all these outside contractor guys too that you don't really hear about, um, the halliburtons, if you will, of the uh of the video game world, right, and and like romero games apparently was one of them, at least in this instance, and that's not happening anymore and um, and then this is kind of small, but there's a warcraft, um mobile game called warcraft rumble mobile, which they're not killing, but they're also not going to provide any more content for us, so it's just going to sit there in stasis for the rest of time, apparently. Um, and that is part of blizzard, which is part of blizzard which microsoft acquired because they wanted to get in the mobile.
01:31:07
Yep, and, by the way, I listen this. So I I wrote on the plane ride here a long article where I I looked at xbox, because mic, of course, is coming under a lot of fire from fans who are the most abused fans, I think in tech. In some ways They've taken over as the number one. Nothing is right and we hate everything. And why can't it be the way it was? And look, I've made this case a lot I.
01:31:35
The console industry has never been the same thing for any amount of time. It's always changed. It's always changed. It's just like the rest of tech. And just simple examples. I've talked about this kind of stuff. Xbox, the original Xbox, it was one. It was basically a PC. There was one version we were done Xbox 360. That thing got constant updates, and I don't just mean like red ring of death stuff, I mean 720p to 1080i to 1080p, uh, cost reduced but more powerful versions of the console. Xbox one same thing. Xbox one s and x 4k. You know, xbox one x s sorry, it was one of the most beautiful hardware devices microsoft's ever made. Um, you know, didn't sell too well. Whatever, sony and Microsoft both launched this generation with two consoles side by side, first time that's ever happened and different tiers of performance or capabilities. At least I think on the Sony side they're actually. It's just probably just the best.
01:32:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But that was also a fallout of our hardware is getting so expensive now.
01:32:37
And the potential cost of compute is so high and that makes the game more expensive to make. So we'll do two consoles, because if the lower one becomes more popular then we can dial this back, and that's not what happened. The high end one did all the sales, relatively speaking. Yeah, I mean because one and demanding essentially utilize my 4K for 88 inch screen for crying out loud, and it's part of what makes game development so costly you know, gaming is is interesting on a lot of levels.
01:33:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But whatever that pie is, whatever the amount is right, we all know it's like bigger than hollywood movies, you know, by revenue, etc. The biggest chunk by far is casual games and it's almost meaningless. It's like these kind of free games that maybe are ad supported or in-game purchase supported and a lot of people play for three minutes, whether you know, waiting in line at shopping or whatever you know. It's just a little throwaway, everything you can do to not be alone with your thought.
01:33:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Exactly which?
01:33:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
by the way, I can sort of relate to at this point. But yeah, um, but the as far as, like people who I would say are kind of hardcore gamers or like actually really like to game, like this is the thing right. Um, whereas you know, like my dad's generation, there was nothing like this. There was no, there were no adults that were dedicating huge amounts of their weeks of time to playing games of any kind, like I know they didn't have any.
01:33:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you've never been to the united states open chess tournament as I have so anyway, um no, but not to the degree we see today.
01:34:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like, like playing video games has become a an established. You know, it's a thing, it's, it's. There are esports that make money, like professional sports do, like actual athletes running around doing things right.
01:34:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, it's a big deal you know they used to have bridge columns every day in the paper.
01:34:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, okay but, but again, like, um, they, but to play a video game you are dedicating a lot of time, you know, and it's it's just. It kind of boggles my mind. Like, um, consoles are kind of this niche market where they sit between, like this, truly casual people and then the hardcore pc gamer types who are like I'm going to keep upgrading this, get the better graphics, you know I'm going to have the best experience, whatever, it's going to take a lot of work, a lot of money, it's complex, it could be problems, you know, yada yada yada. Console it comes on, it's, you know, it's pretty good and um, it's interesting because I feel like it's moving in both of those directions. Console the console is becoming and this is the.
01:35:03
This is part of the problem with xbox. For fans, they're like what is this thing now? And it's like it's what's everything? What do you mean? What's the difference? Like, if you have a phone, that's an xbox. You can play xbox games there. If you have an xbox console, obviously that's an Xbox. But if you have PlayStation, we have a lot of games over there now too. In fact, some of the best-selling PlayStation games this year have been made by Microsoft Studios, which is unbelievable. The next Xbox, if I'm correct, I believe is basically going to be a PC, which opens up the opportunity, which the last one was also.
01:35:34
Well, but to the point where you could have not just two tiers but any number of tiers and possibly again I'm just I'm speculating but this notion of in-place upgradability, that you have this box where you can pop out the graphics and pop in a new one and have a better experience on that same hardware, um, so, look, that's change, and people don't like change, but it's always change. I just described a very simple version of that, but I mean, it's always been changing, so I always, you know, look, xbox, microsoft, they're not going to talk. Now they're not going to talk. I could not go to them and say, hey, something's going on with Xbox, you want to talk about it. They'd be like, no, no, we don't, because they want to talk about it when they can talk about it, when they have something to announce, you know, when they have something to sell.
01:36:18
So I went to the Xbox site and I was like, how do they present this to the world? Like what is it? And they present it to the world as three things Game Pass, number one Games, okay, and hard devices right, and devices is not what it used to be. Devices used to be here's our console, now it's all kinds of things Windows PCs, these handheld gaming things. You know we're on mobile now. If you look at that, there's a lot there and there's going to be more, I think, in the future. And like, okay, that's kind of interesting. And I went through the entire. I wrote a really long article about this, but I went through the entire history of Microsoft's acquisitions under Phil Spencer. It is astonishing.
01:36:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like it's astonishing, they rolled up the industry.
01:37:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh my God, and they really. Really. You can say whatever you want about this guy or this organization. You cannot say they didn't try. They really addressed this problem. But the fundamental sell job that Spencer did to get Xbox to stick around because I think Nadella normally would have looked at this and been like, no, get rid of this thing was make it make sense in this cloud computing world. Subscriptions right. So they did.
01:37:29
Game Pass, and Game Pass was going to be like Netflix was in the early days. It was this bargain bin of videos nobody cared about. That was an agent to the, the disc rental service right. Netflix became interesting when they started doing their own content and it was actually good, right. House of cards, narcos, etc. Whatever.
01:37:48
Um, and so microsoft was like we're gonna do the same thing. We're gonna put all of our games on xbox game pass day one for free. Good, well, not for free. I mean, you're paying for it but you don't have to buy the game. We will be the Netflix of video games.
01:38:02
And, honestly, when it was just Microsoft Studios, that was okay. Right, there would be the occasional big game like a Halo. They owned Gears by this point Gears of War, flight Simulator or Forza games, etc. But we're not going, we're not gonna put Call of Duty on there. That's crazy, right? Um, I I think the conflicting desire to be a player, which means you need all those studios, which means you do have Activision, blizzard and Call of Duty in the other games. And then this cloud model that Nadella loved, where we have subscriptions and people are paying every month. They don't work. You can't put call of duty on game pass and get rid of the billions of dollars you make within two months when that game comes out and you can only buy it at retail. Yeah, like those things don't work.
01:38:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The netflix model works because first the movie goes into theater release for a few years before it gets licensed over to netflix and you know sometimes and some stuff doesn't, it gets made, made directly. But you're exactly right, the, they, the, because you've been building games like their blockbuster movies. Now that we're trying to go to, I wouldn't compare it to netflix, I'd compare it to Spotify and you want to pay tiny amounts of money for the product, the movie.
01:39:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
One is correct Is the most correct if that makes sense, because most people will watch a movie one time. Most movies make all of their money in the first two seconds. There's not this long tail anymore. It used to be Star Wars would play all summer long, it would come back in the winter. It would be like this re to be star wars would play all summer long, it would come back in the winter. You know it'd be like this re thing and it'd be amazing. Uh, but most movies they just whatever they make right up front, that's it, we're done, and then they shovel it everywhere else, whatever.
01:39:46
Yeah, residues are made from there and close and that's what video games are. So the problem, like netflix and spotify and music services, video services that are series based are things you can kind of. You pay per month, you binge, you could sit up all night and watch a whole season of a show if you wanted to, if you had the endurance or whatever, if you loved it enough, and then you move on to the next thing. Music is like that, like 100 million songs. There's an infinite number of playlists and combinations and music that sounds like other music that you like and that's great. But most video game players, as it turns out, just play a couple of games and and even though I, I and I love game, pass.
01:40:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Lots of people hang on to play music playlists for a long time too.
01:40:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, yes, and then yeah, and. But you may like the idea of game pass and when it was inexpensive enough and it was like this open opportunity, maybe I'll try some of these games that maybe were a big couple years ago. You know, back catalog games, whatever, yeah, okay, um. But now that it's like, you know, once they got activision blizzard, they were like all right, we got to scale this back. We can't do day and date. We're going to get rid of xbox game pass. We're going to have this game pass score. That doesn't offer that thing. So we don't screw that up. You know they basically insured it, right. I mean like it's. They didn't have a choice and I feel like the price, well, I feel like this spread.
01:41:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They do doing the cash flow spreadsheets a bit late, right, that's the thing. These are numbers you could have figured guys.
01:41:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You had a year and a half of antitrust time to run these numbers again and again and again. And at any point someone could have raised their hand and said you know, this doesn't add up ever right. Like there's no version of the future, that person has to exist.
01:41:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But but it also speaks to why are you laying off in the gaming industry?
01:41:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
because games need to cost less yeah, right, because as it turns out it is like movies. There are a couple blockbusters they do great. They do cost hundreds of million dollars to make, but they make billions. It's fine, but most of them do not, and once that time comes and goes, no one is going to go pick up. There's no version. I mean someone will make tell, prove me wrong, but there is no version of a game came out two years ago, it's on game pass now, or sony's whatever, that's called playstation plus, whatever, and all of a sudden it's the biggest hit in the world. Yeah, like it's just. I'm sorry, but like that game doesn't exist. You know asterix, it probably does exist, but yeah, it happens once in a while.
01:42:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But the bigger thing here is why we up the price of making games, thinking it would guarantee billion dollar winners, and it didn't yep right. Like the two don't necessarily correlate, every year we get an indie billion dollar winner there's got to be a term for this.
01:42:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's the smart people making stupid decision thing. But when covid happened, there were certain things that just went gangbusters because of the situation. Video games was one of them. Yeah, it was a lot of overhiring, yeah, without any thought of the future, but, like, this will pass and those people will go back to work or whatever. They're not going to have 14 hours to play games every day and they're not going to spend as much on video games, which, by the way, categorically is exactly what happened. And I but this, it wasn't just games, I mean tech companies, whatever, all kinds of companies I'm sure spent like overhired, spent more money than they should have and then scaled back really dramatically and it's just chaos.
01:43:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah so I just hopefully they're doing some market size analysis and so forth, just saying like you can't, you're making too many games to make money yeah, that's a big chunk of it.
01:43:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And that speaks to the thing I talked about in the beginning, where we have all these studios out there, out really literally out there, all over the place, spread over the world, working on games. No one is actually releasing any games, you know, not no one, literally. But and at some point someone's like hey, didn't we have this studio in montreal, something that we gave them $100 million or whatever? What are they doing? And they're hanging out playing Call of Duty. I don't know what they're doing because apparently they didn't make the game. So there's that kind of correction occurring. I think Game Pass has literally peaked. I think we might through the combination of making the right decisions for the business but they're contrary to each other we might've gotten to a situation where the price of that thing is too expensive per month, the Pete. Now, at that price people aren't just buying it, they're like well, actually I only play two games a year, so I'll spend 120 bucks instead of.
01:44:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're quickly getting to the Netflix scenario where it's like I've listened, I've watched everything on Netflix. I'm going to stop this account for the next six months and see if new stuff comes up that makes it work. Well, yeah, exactly.
01:44:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Exactly, and it's a problem. You know it's a problem. So I think for look, there's no doubt that this business can be profitable and successful and Xbox fans do not like to hear this but there's also no doubt that, for that to happen, microsoft can't make the hardware.
01:44:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They just don't make money on hardware it's no, they never have and the idea that they could convince third parties to make hardware in this scenario is awesome for them.
01:44:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know well, I think it could be. I don't know, awesome is a strong term, but it could be good for those companies too, because, a they're better at it, b there will be more choice and competition. It'll be good for consumers, but I think there are companies that could.
01:44:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Microsoft has not been able to figure this out, so do something else, maybe it will figure out.
01:45:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep. So if you get rid of the Xbox hardware as a cost center or whatever, everything's an Xbox. And now you've got your PC maker partners, whoever making devices, portable, desktop, like a console type devices, whatever they're really PCs, really right. You're licensing the OS to them. Maybe you're giving it away for a few cares, but now you have games. You know what implicit to everything is an Xbox? Is our games run everywhere, right? Which is the thing that drives Xbox people crazy. The most popular games that Microsoft owns sell on other consoles and devices, and they do really well there. Call of Duty is much bigger on PlayStation than it is on Xbox. So that they become a game publisher. And honestly, come on, this makes sense's Microsoft. They make software. They're good at this. They've proven to be pretty good at the subscription thing too, by the way, but we'll see.
01:46:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I think once you remove that anchor, this business makes sense, yeah, and it's big like really also think, and you know you're also admitting here and they don't know for sure. So they are trying things because what has been happening isn't working.
01:46:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right. So when I speculate about the future of xbox as we think of it now, as a console, as a pc like device or literally as a pc, I I part of. Built into that speculation is the thing you just said. It's the we see, we'll see. Part of the we'll'll see is originally, microsoft was going to come up with their own Xbox branded handheld gaming device alongside third parties. They still want to do that and still maybe will. But now we're going to go to market first with an Asus device and we're going to see how that does.
01:46:47
And if this stuff does well enough, where the third party devices are good enough and sell well enough that Microsoft doesn't have to make one, their consoles will disappear overnight. I mean, they can't do it immediately, but they can do it immediately in the future. They have to see and if it works, maybe the next gen Xbox hardware. There are third parties and first parties. We'll see. I do think we're going to see xbox branded hardware from microsoft, right, you know, as we would call it a console again, but I also think that that might be the end of it, right, but we'll see. Literally, we'll see, because it's based, it's going to be based on what happens then. So they're trying, they're trying they're, they are trying that's the big thing.
01:47:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I that I would argue against some the perceived cruelty in how they're doing this, but I also see they need to do make change. Yeah, in general, this this year's layoffs have seems especially cruel. That's right and the.
01:47:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The problem is, I feel like we this it's, but I also feel like we've had this conversation before and this conversation basically boils down to okay. On some level, I agreed that this had to happen. Could it happen all at once? Does it have to keep happening every three months? Does it have to happen in such ways that you've got a head of HR telling you to use chat GPT to get in touch with your feelings because you just got laid up? Is there some version of this where you don't come off looking horrible and this is the thing? I don't know. It's probably not specific to Microsoft, but this is the market I follow, so I don't understand it and I wish it was handled better. Yep, I agree.
01:48:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I also see the rationale. Yeah, as far as I understand it was handled better.
01:48:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, but I agree. But I also see the rationale, yeah, as far as I understand it right, we don't have all the details.
01:48:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.
01:48:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I think you're also seeing this. This is part of what's happened inside of Microsoft as well as in gaming. There is a disruption happening in the market. We have gotten fairly inefficient and while there could have been a more elegant way to go about this, they are going about it I, I didn't.
01:48:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is not in this article and I I have ideas for what might be the next one that might be like a follow-up to this and and one of the little germs of an idea. Anyone could go do this. You could just do this right now go find the list of 18 or 20 whatever number of companies that microsoft acquired in the gaming industry that are that make games like because there are other gaming companies, they uh hired that like technology, they make technology like havoc or things that aren't. They don't make games, but they game related. But just if you just look at game publishers, um, there's an interesting list to be made of. Here is why they bought them.
01:49:30
This company, this publisher, whatever it is, this game studio made this game or this couple of games that were awesome and sold awesome, and then microsoft bought them and the next game they made didn't do so good and the next game they made was terrible and or maybe they never even made it. This at least two instances I saw where they they bought these companies for billions, yeah, and they made nothing and very likely the key people to making great games inside of that company, got paid heavily in the acquisition.
01:50:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Of course they're yes, right even if they didn't.
01:50:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's another weird problem there.
01:50:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, you're so successful houses and yeah, yeah, just you know, just like ipo in the company today is really just a cash out. You wreck companies when you acquire them and throw that much money into leadership, or pull them into Microsoft themselves and put them on different jobs, but either way, the state that they were in that made those great games no longer exists.
01:50:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The two biggest takeaways that I got to. Going and looking at this Because I'm aware of it, obviously, but you kind of forget the extent of it. It's astonishing how many companies they bought. So when people tell me, oh, they don't even try in gaming, it's like I don't think you understand what you're talking about?
01:50:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, they tried really hard. There's another element to this. Like I had a buddy who built a company that made a great game, who then got acquired by Electronic Arts, did his two-year vest and in that two years made nothing meaningful. Then left, started another company and made another great game and got acquired again. One of the points back then he was talking about. I can't make what I want when I work for a big company. I have to be on my own.
01:51:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Which right speaks to to. There's a couple things we talked about that hit on this. This is the microsoft can't make money making harbor, but maybe these other companies can. Yes, and also this notion that maybe xbox, generally speaking, would be better off as a smaller company, meaning as itself, as what I would call Activision Blizzard, without the baggage of Microsoft and having to conform to the bigger corporate strategies that Nadella wants or whatever. I don't know. But yes, I'm sorry, I said earlier there were two big takeaways. One is how much Microsoft has just spent and how much effort.
01:51:52
And you don't see it. It's weird because the narrative is so negative. But my God, have they? They've tried everything Like it's actually rather incredible. They've given up in the broader consumer market to a much greater degree. They have never stopped trying with games Like it's kind of. It's kind of, at least under Phil Spencer, it's kind of's kind of amazing.
01:52:15
And then I forgot the other one. I'm sorry, but I get distracted very easily. But I don't remember. It will come to me at three o'clock in the morning anyway. So there's that. I guess I'm just trying to say it's easy to be negative, it's easy to be cynical. A lot of these people are very sensitive as fans. They're just take everything very personally. They're not willing to understand that for the thing they love to succeed and persist, it has to change. You know, um, there's a lot that goes into that, but I, when I look at xbox, if you can get past, you know the ter, the terrible is what's happening at this moment. Honestly, I think they've done what they can do. I don't know. I don't think he can go back and say, if they had just done this, then, you know, everything would have been okay.
01:53:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No.
01:53:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think you're exactly right. And uh, and they are. You know, sure They've dropped the ball on a couple of places, Like there is also the problem of working at scale, yeah, but you know, the other element of this is you don't know what makes a great game, Because if we didn't know we'd be more consistent on it. Right, Like, in some ways this is the old programming model where we can afford to make 100 crappy games, because then the one winner just makes so much money.
01:53:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean it can work, I, but I think the cost of games factors into why that becomes a little more untenable these days, because now you, the vast sums you have to throw at a problem, uh, become a big problem when you don't hit that one game.
01:53:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
you know when all you did was release 100 turns out, nobody can make 100 games to get the one winner. That's right, that's the reality. So you've got to share it around. And then you know, and again, I'm not going to be flippant about these layoffs, but it's like any of those people could go and start a studio and work at small scale and possibly crank out a hit. And it's not like the market, you know.
01:54:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And it might be the type of thing that would not have ever happened under Microsoft, because it is too big, quite possibly Too many layers of management bureaucracy.
01:54:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is how we used to talk about electronic cards. They cannot make games, they can only maintain franchises. I know Right, they buy games. When you make a hit, ea writes you a big check. You come on board, they move your franchise in and make a bunch of versions of it until nobody cares anymore. Then they let it die.
01:54:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, if you go back aside from Donkey Bass, that was co-written by Bill Gates for PC DOS 1.0, there might not be a single major example of an in-house created from scratch game from Microsoft ever Like. They distributed the game Adventure in the early days, for example. They did not create that. They uh you know things like uh well, flight simulator came from another company. Um, halo was bungee obviously. Uh, gears of war they bought from, uh, whatever cliff blizzins is uh epic.
01:55:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it was epic. You know you're coming at this angle now that it's. This is part of the problem, right? Is that the big companies stuck too much money into gaming? Yeah, you know, if I give you a $200 million to build a game, by golly you're going to spend it. Yeah, you know, it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
01:55:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
See, I don't know why anybody need anything more than this.
01:55:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is a perfect game in every room. Yep, this is donkeybase. There's nothing like 40 by 25 to just suit, I know.
01:55:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love it. What a game. Is this all that's all that ever happens is yeah, it's the whole game.
01:55:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But again, you know at the time, the fact that you get the PC in that era the initial piece it was not there was nothing going on graphically. The fact that this is even possible it's actually for the hardware is actually sort of astonishing.
01:56:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sorry, it's handwritten and basic, by the way right.
01:56:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, yeah, it's donkey dot bass. For a reason that's crazy.
01:56:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, okay, a couple more things real quick. So, okay, okay, a couple, a couple more things real quick. Um, so I just talked about this last week too, but now I feel stupid. Uh, back in june, uh, microsoft announced and then released um call of duty world war ii, ww2 for a game pass. Um, they also put it in the microsoft store. Apparently, when they did that, they really screwed it up, because there was the version that if you're in Game Pass, I guess you get the latest updates. It's fine, everything's good, you're not going to have any problems. But if you actually just download it from the store, it's an out-of-date version that is suffering from amazing vulnerabilities that will be immediately exploited by hackers. And actually, leo, it'd be worth watching the video of this because, uh, it's in the article, it's at the top of the article, that's kind of amazing.
01:56:58
It's astonishing like these guys are playing the game. Their computer is taken over by a hacker. Um, they send them harassing messages through notepad which is hilarious, by the way and, uh, you know, put gay porn on their desktop wallpaper. It's good stuff. Yeah, click where it says. One gamer tweeted right in the middle yeah, this is.
01:57:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He did a screenshot on the on the tweet. He did a video. Uh-huh, here we go, so you can see the command lines that come up oh, this is no notepad with the threatening message will come up right here what?
01:57:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
and then he goes to his desktop and fortunately he's clipped it in such a way it, it's, it's.
01:57:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, my God yeah.
01:57:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just like, just all you had to do was play the game and you were immediately exploited.
01:57:40
So, actually, this suggests to me that this game was in the same state as XP was when it was first released. The dumb thing is, this problem was patched years ago, years ago. So it's just that the version they put on the store does not have the patch. Wow, so they had to pull it. I believe as recently as a week ago, I was like hey, this thing just came out. It's actually a really good game. You should try out the multiplayer. It's surprisingly good, which is what you're seeing here.
01:58:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um, now with free hackers?
01:58:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
sorry about that is that a real hack, or I mean no, that happened. Is somebody just sitting there waiting for somebody to play this old game? They took over his computer, yeah it's a remote control, right?
01:58:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, yeah, it's an art. What do you call it? Rp?
01:58:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, remote code it's. It's probably just some cron job running in a closet somewhere, that's. I mean, how often is this? I don't know.
01:58:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I I don't know. I literally, um, I haven't played it yet because I was. I downloaded this game today so I could experience this. Um, I'm really I'm curious about this. Um, supposedly, if you don't have game pass, you won't see it in the store. So I didn't verify this, but when I I see it, I still see it.
01:58:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So if I go on that, so you paid xbox. I can get it right and that's why to play a place yeah, of course I.
01:58:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, look I, it's important that I experience what real people experience it's funny I can see this on game pass.
01:58:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm glad I didn't download it it's a good game I don't know. Wow, yeah, just get interrupted a lot so if you get it through game pass, you're okay.
01:59:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's only, that's my understanding, because it is still there for me or maybe they've already patched it. I I, but my understanding is it was only the, the standard downloaded version from the store. That was the store. The wow, the game pass version, I believe, is okay.
01:59:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's still there, so it must be somebody's got some security pipeline problems for their store. How does this ever get pushed?
01:59:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, and it's. This is like, um, I just spent 18 months bitching about them not putting call of duty games on Game Pass and they finally do one. And then it does this and it's like, yeah, you got what you asked for. Idiot, they should have obviously put the right version. I don't think this is the start of a trend, but it is notable that the first Sony published game PlayStation exclusive game, by the way is now coming to the Xbox.
01:59:59
Now this gets into a kind of a weird area because it was made by a game studio called Arrowhead, published by Sony. So Sony does not own Arrowhead, but they did commission them to make this game exclusive to PlayStation. I'm sure there was some money that changed hands, whatever. Blah, blah, blah. But this will enable gamers who sorry, it's called Helldivers 2. It's described as a. It's incredibly. It's one of the best-reviewed and best-selling games last year. By the way, it's new games in a while. Yeah, yep, Cooperative, third-person, multiplayer-only shooter Teams of four. Um, and it will work cross-platform, so you can. It's. Sony does put games on pcs. This is one of them. So, as of august, when this comes out of the xbox, you'll be able to play in multiplayer matches like we do in call of duty with people on playstations, pcs, xboxes, whatever mixed together. Right, and that's good, like that's.
02:00:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is the kind of thing sony is often um this is the thing that sony, you know, wrote a brief on. That would never happen.
02:00:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is exactly the thing that. Yes, yep, uh, it is exactly that thing, yeah which is why I? I wrote about it and pointed it out, because this has never happened and I don't know.
02:01:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean send this to the ftc excellent.
02:01:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, send it to lisa khan. I think we should just spam bomb lena khan yes, lena khan.
02:01:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sorry she's not around anymore.
02:01:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I refuse to acknowledge the word lena as a name. Okay, so, um, and then, uh this is semi-related, so everyone is familiar with uh, epic baiting uh, apple and google by putting their own in-app system into fort, both of them shutting Fortnite out of their respective app stores, epic conveniently having a lawsuit ready to fly as soon as that happened, and then they crossed to each other. Epic got kind of a mixed ruling, obviously in Apple, although recently they've kind of rebounded because of Apple's stupidity but they defeated Google handily. It was brutal and since then and I want to say like nine months later, whatever the timeframe was they actually sued Google and Samsung for colluding to put technology or, you know, features into Samsung's phones right, samsung being the biggest OEM, our biggest hardware maker for Android to do Google's bidding, but on Samsung's devices. So like, in other words, it's like we lost in court, so now we'll get our biggest partner and, by the way, a lot of Samsung-Google partnership stuff over the intervening year hasn't there been? I'm sure that's unrelated, but anyway, year hasn't there been? I'm sure that's unrelated, but anyway, um, there were, they were. You know they sued them for colluding, uh, and specifically going against one of the requirements of their um, of the ruling against them, which is that to for them to be blocked against partnering with another company to do exactly what they are. What they're alleged to be doing Today was the Samsung Unpacked event for the new folding phones, as they said.
02:03:00
Two days ago, epic announced very briefly that they have settled with Samsung. Samsung. The quote that came from Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic, was we're grateful that Samsung will address Epic's concerns. I believe there were two. One was this kind of auto-block thing where, by default, samsung's devices are configured to block these third-party stores, like Epic has, and the other one I don't remember the other one, but that was the big one, so we don't know.
02:03:30
I was thinking we were going to hear something about this at this event today. Maybe even Tim Sweeney would come out on stage like he did at the HoloLens event right back in 2019, I think it was for HoloLens 2. On stage, like, oh, they're great. Now, like I get everything's fine, as long as they do what I want, they're great. Um, so I I don't believe that happened. I didn't watch the event, uh, like I said, but we'll see what comes out of this. So I'm curious uh, did not drop the lawsuit against uh google for colluding. However, they still did do that, allegedly right. So but interesting um that, that they, yeah, they settled, so the case has been thrown in simple hey, you know, let's take a little break.
02:04:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then I think the back of the book is lurking it approaches standing in the shadows approach while we break.
02:04:32
I might want to just give a little plug to all the fine folks watching the show and the club today. Hello, club Club Twit. We started this about four years ago during COVID when advertising was scarce, shall we say, and the club has really become a very, I think, very big part of our revenue. 25% of our operating costs now are paid by our audience, which is ideal, I mean. I think that's what I would love to make it 100%. But here's the way that we do this. If you are a member of the club 10 bucks a month, 120 bucks a year there's a two-week free trial. You don't get any ads. You have ad-free versions of all the shows. You wouldn't even hear this pitch right. So that's one benefit. You also get access to the very fun Club Twit Discord. It's a great place to chat with our hosts, with other like-minded people and a lot of special events that go on in the Burke. You also get access to burke. A lot of events go on in the club. Coming up friday, our photo time with chris marquart will be looking at your quirky photos. This month we also have, right after, our ai user group. We're going to talk a little bit about some of the vibe coding twit apps people did. And then one of the things I'd like to talk about is local models. But there's lots of things we could talk about. We do home theater geeks for you in the club. It's a club only.
02:06:02
Show Micah's Crafting Corner. Ios Today is in there. Hands on Tech. Our book club's coming up in August Really great book. This Coming up in August really great book. This is how you lose the time war. All in all, I think the club is an extremely wonderful value. You cast your vote for the programming you hear on the network, you support it with your vote, your dollars, and you get some, I think, real benefits. If you're interested and I hope you all are, please do me a favor Go to twittv slash club twit and sign up today. We'd love to have you in the club. I'll see you in the club twit discord. Thank you in advance. Now back to the show and to Paul and the back of the book. Your tip of the week, mr Thurott.
02:06:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The back of the book your tip of the week, Mr Thurott. Tony Redmond is the primary author, one of the co-authors of Office 365 for IT Pros. We keep recommending this book, A book that never ends.
02:07:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.
02:07:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And this guy I love Tony, but he's an inspiration to me on a different level because I also work on these stupid big books and try to make sense of this and he's so nonchalant about it and the way he does it it's. You know, I've talked to him at length now a couple of times about how I could do this better or whatever, but he has a good model and, um he, this is the Bible for office slash. Microsoft 365, uh, admins, and the new edition is out. He's offering a $10 discount for Windows Weekly fans. The address to get. Well, this is kind of a tough thing to say. Maybe we could throw it on screen somehow.
02:07:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I could put it on screen. Okay, yes, it's a long URL. We'll also put it in the show notes.
02:07:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay, there you go.
02:07:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But you look at that list of names, half folks are run as radio guests like yeah, you know, yeah, no, this is, it's experts, it's a who's who of everyone in that community, like of note you know, like that knows what they're talking about exactly. Um, so it's neat. Yeah, unlike me. It's just me, like with a, like a pole out in the ocean by myself, um so yeah, anyway, that's a, it's a fantastic book and strongly strongly recommended.
02:08:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am working at getting it into the captions as quickly as my little fingers can type, okay.
02:08:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, I did this one with a heavy heart.
02:08:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh no.
02:08:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
My app pick this week is Microsoft edge.
02:08:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, hold on, Hold on.
02:08:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is one of those. I'm okay, I, you're okay, got a moment. So a week or two ago I uh I wrote about how I had come back from mexico in may, I guess a bunch of review laptops stacked up, configured them all kind of side by side at the same time, and then I got that horrible thing that happens to me where Microsoft auto-enables folder backup from OneDrive, even though I tell it no, and then suddenly I'm syncing my desktop and my documents and I explained. You know, I'm like you know what In my knee-jerk brain. I feel like this is bad, I don't like it. I know I have reasons for this, but I don't really remember them because I just don't do it. Maybe I'll just live with this for a little while. So I did, and it was terrible and I hated myself for it and I do not and I wrote a, we talked about it and I I wrote an article about it, but there was a little there's a little asterisk.
02:09:30
This because a big part of that default experience in Windows 11 is tied to Microsoft Edge, right, the thing we talked about earlier with the DMA changes, where, if you live in Europe, you can now, or soon will, be able to have the web browser experience you expect in Windows, where maybe you do choose Edge but you don't want to use Bing or you don't want to use whatever. You don't want to always use MSN news thing on your tab or whatever it is, and you change that configuration and they never harass you again, right? Or you just don't want to use edge, you want to use Chrome or something else and you change the browser and you actually it actually changes everything and you click on a search link in start, or you click on a story link in Start, or you click on a story in widgets and it actually opens in your browser like normal. But that's not what Windows does in the rest of the world, right? So I was like, well, okay, is it possible to use Microsoft Edge in such a way that it doesn't violate your privacy all over the place and is a good experience? And the truth is not just because of the stuff I mentioned earlier with the responsive stuff they're working on, but for all kinds of reasons. Edge is actually if you overlook the crap is a really good browser. Right, it has all kinds of reasons to like it.
02:10:51
I will say from my perspective, when people talk about things like the best cameras, the one you have in your pocket, you know the best app is the one you don't have to install. It's already there, right, and like it's. It's there, it's the same engine as Chrome. It should just work everywhere. It should have this. You know it should be the same, right.
02:11:06
But but it is edge and so, like, how do you fix these problems? And actually you can pretty much fix, I would say, almost all the problems. Obviously, you have to install the right extensions to prevent it from tracking you. Privacy badger, add block plus. Solve this problem nicely. The EFS EFF has has a website called cover your tracks. It'll tell you whether you are protected from your own browser. Use it Strongly. Recommend that there's a settings that you should change, you know, et cetera. There are things that edge does. When you first set it up, all like. There were three choices you get. If you agree to any of those, they're bad, all of them. You can reverse that third party password manager. That's something we've been talking about a lot.
02:11:52
Search engine change you can it from Bing, which I don't think many people like to. Whatever you want to use, it will harass you though, right, it will. Literally. At some point it will reboot or something or run an update. It will say, hey, you should use their desired configuration. It will make Bing the default search. Everything will be great, and it will never stop doing that. It will make Bing the default search. Everything will be great, and it will never stop doing that. It will never agree to you that you don't want that. It will just keep asking you. So there's a couple of things you can do to fix that. The easiest one is the thing I mentioned earlier Get WinToys from the store. It's free. Enable the Digital Markets Act option, reboot and it will stop asking, at least for some period of time. There is some worry I have that it will.
02:12:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Some update will come that will reset all that.
02:12:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is why I keep talking about the need for an app that I may write that monitors those things and says, hey, they just changed that thing you were looking at. Yeah, they changed it. I do want to know that. But whatever, it's something you can just re-enable, it will work. I would read the article. I would go through the article for all the stuff.
02:13:00
If you do not want to use edge you know the browser configuration thing where you set your own default, the DMA thing I just mentioned. If you don't want to have it launch edge when you click on, like a story in widgets, there's a tool called MS Edge Direct that you can get. That will prevent that kind of stuff. Right, it will use your browser. You can just use that, right. So there are utilities you can prevent Edge from running at startup. A lot of people probably don't know this, but Edge runs every time you boot Windows unless you tell it not to right. So you can disable that kind of thing.
02:13:32
Um, if you do live in eu or you do this digital markets act option, you could uninstall it. Let's get rid of it. So you do that. But honestly, I think if you take the steps to go through all the configuration changes, you have some which, by the way, do not sync to new computers, like you have to kind of do it again as you move on to other computers. Um, yeah, I mean, I think I this, to me, is less dicey than using a local account and I think, for this audience, a lot of people like I don't see the problem with using a local account. Um, okay, well, I don't think there's a problem using edge, but you have to configure it correctly and then you'll be okay, defaults do not, yeah, do not accept the does it store its settings in the registry or is it a separate?
02:14:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you really cool. Well, there were just simply a reg edit kind of thing you could, yeah yeah, so most features.
02:14:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Probably you could write a script that would just do those things. In fact I guess you could apply them even at every boot. But the problem with edge, which is the problem with office, which is the problem with windows, is that each of them has a setting sync capability that is so woefully underutilized and under-documented that I'll just make something up. Like, let's say there are 100 features in Edge it's probably closer to a million, but whatever it is and you configure five of them, half of those things will not sync and there's no way to know. You just have to try it and see what happens. So it will bring forward some of your settings and this is true of Office and Windows right, when you go to a different device but not all of them.
02:15:12
And this is the problem. It's a problem for me, especially because I use so many different computers. You know it's like you know you get a. You almost need like a checklist to make sure you get them all, because you know that's how they get you. They'll, you'll miss one and whatever. But, like I said, slightly uncomfortable about this. But the truth is I've heard from, like Richard uses reg right, use edge. So I've heard from enough smart people. I've heard from readers who were like I use edge. I mean it's like I hear you on the complaints, but I mean Chrome is is bad and way more people use Chrome.
02:15:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just use a lot of different browsers. It depends, yeah different browsers depends.
02:15:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and, by the way, I do too. I do too, but I I I have to say like I like it. When something happens that's so right in windows, you don't have to install something else. So, for example, like clipchamp is so good for my needs for video editing, I don't have to, I don't even have to think about it you know, yeah, like there are some tools in windows that are actually that good and or at least good enough, yeah, I would say all right, there you go.
02:16:16
This one is yeah, with the right configuration is not problematic without the right configuration. Extremely problematic, like no, it really is. Like this is a a nexus of the insertification that occurs in windows 11, like it's a big chunk of it, which is why it's part of that DMA thing, because the regulators at EU looked at this thing and said no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, which any reasonable person would say the same thing. Windows 11 especially, they got rid of the default web browser interface in the original shipping version of Windows 11. They've since brought it back, but it's still half. If you say I want this is my default browser. It will change three or four uh protocols and file uh types over to that new browser, but it doesn't change everything over and it doesn't do anything about those deep OS links like from search or widgets. So, uh, there are tools that help us get around that and so, yeah, leo asked well, this is a registered thing. Yeah, wintoys and the MS Edge.
02:17:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's a bunch of configuration settings in AppData that are just chasing the file. They're hitting the register.
02:17:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's how they do those things. Yeah, there's also programmatic stuff in Windows 11 that will help with ai later on, where you can programmatically change settings for things from an app, and that's actually really cool. Now, I don't know where edge is in that world. I'm not sure how many, or if any, uh features are like that, but you could write a utility just for edge that all people have right that you know. Give you a, I guess, a list of all you know. I don't want you know like they could be like a privacy section. Just turn everything off so I don't get tracked, and whatever it's possible, I don't it's.
02:18:06
I feel like I'm qualifying this a little too much. Everyone listening to the show is smart enough to do this and do it right. Yeah, I would be nervous about my wife using edge without. You know I, or meaning a normal person, I mean like my brother or you know whoever, like some person that's not technical but it's smart but maybe doesn't know what's going on behind the scenes here. Um, and you know they use dark patterns. The language suggests that this is the right thing for you to do, and it is if you have microsoft you know if you're using.
02:18:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If you go to the eff site for the eval link, you'll you'll get there yep, yep yeah, look at, look at what it looks like on like a default install of edge.
02:18:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's ugly. It doesn't quite laugh out loud but it's like, oh, this is not good. It's like you are not protected at all. Yeah, this, this thing is tracking you internally, like what you know? What are you doing? It's wide open, like if you yeah, microsoft is, you know, well, google does the same thing this makes money yeah uh, okay, I'm sorry, I have one. I think I had one little addition yeah, just real yeah, just real quick nostalgia wise.
02:19:16
Um, amiga forever and c64 forever, these software packages that have all the m latest for all those devices and in built-in games and apps and the whole thing. It's frankly it's kind of amazing. Um, the latest versions have just come out. They're reasonably. If you love this kind of stuff, if you're nostalgic for this, definitely take a look at these things. Um, they're kind of moving it toward like the mobile world where they're starting to do touch controls and stuff. So if you're using it on a device that has touch, you can interact with these screens and stuff from the 1980s or whatever with your fingers, which is crazy. But, um, I do have a a deep, deep affiliation with the Amiga especially. But the Commodore 64 is my first I'm going to call it real computer.
02:19:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought of you when I saw this story. I thought, oh, Paul B, there's still a part of me.
02:20:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that's like oh, can I?
02:20:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
run an Amiga now.
02:20:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Or some Linux thing that looked like.
02:20:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Amiga or maybe I don't know. Maybe it's like running donkeybass does that always wins.
02:20:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I might go play a little donkey dot bass after the show, but I don't know all right, all right.
02:20:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good job, paul theriot. You are in the middle of the back of the book. Yep, and don't let it slam you on the. Uh, keister, on the way out, as they say but we're we're gonna get to whiskey and more in just a little bit. You're watching windows weekly with paul thurott and richard campbell so glad you are all right, richard, you're on run as a radio ah, brought back louisa freeze for this week.
02:20:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Uh, she writes an epic blog. It's absolutely worth your reading if you care about power apps and that whole space. Uh, she's uh, she's got a little punk streak to her. She's very saucy in her writing and one of the ones uh posts that she wrote. I just pinged her and said we need to make this a show and and it was about growing Power Apps up, like making them into real software.
02:21:16
Now, power Apps is this tool inside of the Azure Wonderland that makes it easy for what they call makers or just you know, not domain experts to do automation and to ultimately can build some pretty cool apps. The problem is that they do. They are domain experts, so they're not programmers, so they focus. This is a very low code or no code situation you're working in. It makes for versatile software. It'll work on a phone, work on a tablet, work on a PC, can tie back to SharePoint data and other state data sources, that kind of thing, and that's fine for you.
02:21:51
But as soon as your co-workers are using using it, or as soon as another team wants to take it on, there's some trouble and this is where the administrators kind of have to jump in with some governance, and so Luisa sort of runs down this okay, what do you gotta do to actually turn this into an app that has a proper set of requirements and some documentation and a testing workflow and a deployment workflow and the security context set correctly and that kind of stuff. So it's just all right this is the checklist to go down, to take a piece of software and take it on. And, just to you know, we also talked about this from a celebratory point of view. It's like congratulations, you wrote a piece of software with these tools that is now important to the organization and now it needs to be cared for properly. So that was now important to the organization and now it needs to be cared for properly.
02:22:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, there you go the key to the whole. Thing there you go great conversation with louisa as usual she's she's a ton of fun to chat with sure there are other podcasts about microsoft you could listen to, but ask yourself this baby how many have the brown liquor segment presented by sir richard campbell? That's right, there's only one windows weekly this has become a thing, hasn't it? Yes, I love it.
02:23:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Thank you, joe I popped down, it was july 4th recently maybe you noticed and, uh, it's fun for a canadian to come down and experience the madness it's july 4th, especially in a rural area. Uh, because where did you go? Sounds like I went to snohomish, snohomish.
02:23:22
Yeah, so snohomish is the county north of king county, where seattle and redmond and all those places are, and largely a rural area, and I was staying with a friend and, uh, who's got, who's got a property amongst all the hobby, even horse farms, and we're in the kind of area where they make their own fireworks, oh yeah, so, uh, the explosions are pretty much continuous, though that for that day go till the wee hours of the morning. They literally had to sedate their dog. It was that that distressing. And uh, it was an opportunity to drink some bourbon and in fact I did, and this is a. I was introduced to the bolster road. Uh, maple rye whiskey, which is made by jp trotten, which is based in snohomish. Uh, that, although it's one of the new style distilleries, it was using the new tax code.
02:24:17
A fellow by the name of Mark Nisham, who comes from the restaurant biz, decided he was ready for a new career in the early 2000s and set up JP Troughton in Woodinville back in 2010. He named it for his grandfather, jp Troughton, who was in the private mail delivery business back in 2010. He named it for his grandfather, jp Troughton, who was in the private mail delivery business back in the day there and in fact, these still exist today. The US Postal Service had routes that you could contract out typically these rural postal routes and JP Troughton had what they call the star route. Star route is a general term for these rural postal routes, where they have stars instead of the zip code and an area known as okanagan hills, which is actually central northern washington, crossing into british columbia, and his grandfather worked in the 30s during prohibition and was known on occasion to uh be over on the wet side, as they said, and then came back with uh, you guys didn't have prohibition in canada, nope, only americans do that. That's why I, you know, just down the road from me is smuggler's cove right and all these sorts of things. It's a short smuggle, yeah, and so, yeah, he's apparently his grandfather. I don't know how much of the story is actually apocryphal. It's a good one. This is a very well-branded whiskey. We had a very Washington State vibe to it. Today, though, star Routes are now known as Highway Contract Routes, and, interesting enough, very likely the road that JP Trodden went down was what they now call the 97 Highway. It's called the 97 Highway both in Washington State and in British Columbia, just to make it contiguous, and it does run through the wine region we call the okanagan okanagan.
02:25:57
Um, just a few. You know some evidence of the nature of the jp trodden distillery. So mark sets up this thing in 2010. He does not make any vodka or gin, he decides to only make bourbon. So clearly he had money, because it takes a few years before you actually get a bourbon. So he was able.
02:26:14
He didn't, he was basically working by himself for several years, but he did stick strictly with Washington products. So he bought corn and wet winter wheat from a particular farm in Quincy, washington and the mash bill is a 70-30 split of corn and winter wheat. It is a very slow maturation, so a long steeping period before they do the full mash, a seven day long ferment and he got an american still rather than going to the scots. He had it built in oregon and I met that still because we went to the distillery and it is a lambic still. It is a large lambic still. The lambic stills are the sort of traditional like the greeks had lambic stills. This is the way stuff like armagnac and thing is made.
02:26:57
So, uh, mark had the able to get a still made that he really liked in this lambic style and he still runs it and it's the only still he has. So to make a bourbon he has to actually run it through twice, which is not that unusual, just speaks to they don't make a lot, they're're just not that fast in production. And of course, because it's bourbon, he ages it in American oak barrels. So you know, nobody pays much attention to a one man band trying to make whiskey. But within five years he wins double gold at the San Francisco World Spirits for a small batch, which is impressive, and at that point, of course, the sales just hockey stick upwards.
02:27:34
He starts positioning his whiskey in a bunch of nice restaurants. Because he used to be in the restaurant business. He knows what he's doing and by 2020, he needs a larger facility. So now he moves out of King County County, which has very high taxes in the home. It's just to the north. There, in a little town called Maltby, right by the big flower wholesaler, is where it was. It's in a very industrial area. He's still using the same stills, but he's got a lot more processing and storage area and also an awesome tasting room and you can take a tour. And they have a membership program. It's 400 bucks a year but you get these special events, you get a certain number of free drinks, and my friend was there, was there, so we had.
02:28:14
We tried everything. Uh, of course you do, uh, and he's he's kind of gone, see if you've recognized his name. So his base product, the one that won that small batch edition, which is a 45 alcohol, is now called the black label and then he has a that's a three-year-old product. Then he has a four-year-old product he now called the red label, and he also makes a four-year-old product at cast strength called the green label and then a six-year called the blue label, and they I like these bottles, they look kind of old-fashioned, very straightforward, yeah.
02:28:44
But the one we tried was the maple rye whiskey and it's different because it is uh, only 50 of the small batch, the black label, and 50 of a rye whiskey made for the purpose, and then he combines the two together and it spends a year in a maple syrup barrel, which is bizarre, right, because, listen, I'm from Canada and Quebec has the maple syrup strategic reserve and they definitely store their. They store several million pounds. I love that it's a strategic reserve. They definitely store their. They store several million pounds. That it's a strategic it is very strategic they also have a huge theft right.
02:29:20
People stole millions of dollars in the maple syrup, but those are metal drums they stored in. So the idea of storing in wood is weird, because maple syrup is almost entirely sugar, although admittedly it's like 67 sugar, which is almost completely bacterial or hostile a hostile. But you have to be careful with syrup. If it it can go bad. You can have bacterial growth and stuff on it. But um, typically, you know the the this is sort of a hip thing with the chef crowd.
02:29:48
They started aging bourbon in maple syrup barrels and vice versa, aging maple syrup and bourbon in maple syrup barrels and vice versa, aging maple syrup and bourbon barrels. And so this is what Mark got into with this bit of cross flavoring. The real question here is, we know, with barrel aging and getting the flavors out of the wood, it's mostly about the alcohol, the solvent aspect. How the heck does this work with syrup? And the answer is that they heat the barrel a bit when they're storing maple syrup in it to get more maple syrup into the wood and then pick up more wood flavors in maple syrup.
02:30:14
So he takes these, uh, maple syrup barrels and he puts his bourbon in it for a while and they pull up a little bit of the flavors and, it's true, they get absolutely tasted. It's got a unique, slightly sweeter character which I think you would have gotten from the corn, but it's got a real maple syrup flair to it. Um so a lovely whiskey, very drinkable, definitely nice color too.
02:30:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's not a bourbon, though, because right.
02:30:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, it's nominally a bourbon because it's made in the bourbon style. Yeah, but it's not um because of the change in aging it's still because of the change in aging it would not normally qualify, so that's why he's calling it a maple rye whiskey hey, speaking of that, sorry because this just came up last night.
02:30:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Go figure, I this is probably shocking. I spend time in bars sometimes. Um, someone said that to qualify as a bourbon it had to be made in kentucky. Now it's like I don't think that.
02:31:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no, that's an FDA regulations is anywhere in America.
02:31:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, Okay, oh, she couldn't make a bourbon in France?
02:31:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, but you can make a bourbon style whiskey.
02:31:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Even if it's a French word, you can't make it in France.
02:31:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think that you might you probably have heard of this. It was called 1792. And it's a well, I mean well, I think it was just it's uh. Well, I mean well, I think it was just it's a bourbon, but it's. It is made in kentucky actually, um, but there's like a uh, what do you call it? A butter washed version.
02:31:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, that is surprisingly awesome, but well, sometimes they, and sometimes, when they play like that, they violate the rules. Right, there's been all kinds of tricks to avoid violating the rules, but, angels, I mean blew that up because when let's once lincoln henderson said, listen, we're going to age in cherry casks and you need to get over it, because lincoln henderson is like one of the godfathers of american bourbon, they went, okay, we'll change the rules. Um, but right, you know, it doesn't really mean. Why is jack daniel's not a burman? It's called tennessee whiskey, not because it's in tennessee, but because they do a uh, charcoal, a maple charcoal filtration step, which is against the rules. Ah, that's the, that's the only one who makes those rules?
02:32:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The Bourbon Associates of America, big Bourbon, leo Big.
02:32:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Bourbon? Yeah, no, you're not wrong. Typically, you go to the FDA this is true of all kinds of products. You go to the government regulators and say, hey, we want a standard because other people are calling their stuff the same name as is our stuff and their stuff is awful. So this is. We talked about this when we're talking about japanese whiskey, because it's only been in the past 15 so years that the japanese have established a standard and it's because when there was only nikkei and yamazaki, everything was fine. But now that there's another 30 something distilleries in japan, that excited, they need a standard and it tends to be written by the incumbents.
02:32:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, because they kind of know what they're doing. We know what bourbon is because we make it that's right and so and but the?
02:33:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
the joke, of course, is that even the great bourbon makers are saying our rules are too strict and we should tinker with it. So it, that's fine. You know, the scots do the same thing with barley only, uh, but any kind of barrel, right, they go all over the map with barrels. The irish go put whatever you want in, like they're, they're groovy. Yeah, just make it in ireland. And the same thing's happening here with bourbon. So, uh, jp trotten does definitely make a bourbon. They follow the traditional rules for their black label and the other, uh, color labels very much like green spot or very much like johnny walker. They use johnny walker, which is funny. You know, the most expensive version is called blue, but this maple is off the side of that a little bit at 45. You know, it's interesting that it couldn't get any details on exactly where he's getting his ride from. I wouldn't be surprised if it came from alberta, um, alberta distiller. So she talked about last week. Just because they're the guys who make 100 rise. Yeah, uh, 60 bucks a bottle.
02:33:57
It is only sold directly. There's relatively few stores carry, can't find a total one or anything like that. They will do delivery, but only to certain states that allow it. That includes arizona and california, nevada, new mexico and oregon. It does not include pennsylvania. No, it's not include pennsylvania. And in montana, only in missoula, for some reason. That's hysterical. Yeah, it's very funny, yeah, and, oddly enough, going to be in missoula in august. So there you go. That's great, uh, but the the other thing is, after they make the uh bourbon with uh, with those barrel, with those whiskey, those syrup barrels, they refill it with syrup and they sell that syrup oh, bourbon maple syrup.
02:34:39
Now we're talking so it's like back and forth barrels being used everywhere. Yep, why waste like a low buzz at breakfast? They do make a note on the maple syrup to say there is no alcohol in this.
02:34:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I've seen a bourbon aged maple syrup. I've seen a bourbon aged maple syrup. I've seen all kinds of interesting maples yeah, people are playing around.
02:34:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Uh, oddly enough, I noticed that the latest win whiskey weekly that's gone up on the on the playlist is the one with the hellyer's road, harmony number three, which was the barrel that was that made whiskey, then made beer, then went back and made whiskey again. Like this, moving barrels around into different markets is becoming a popular thing, just to experiment, to try different approaches, and it's the same thing happening here and so legit. This was a nice whiskey for a fair price. You know, jd is still 20 bucks and you can't go far wrong, but this is a much more boutique-y small production kind of law.
02:35:41
I like that cool bottle yeah, yeah, and you're enjoyable.
02:35:42
I suppose it's not the case that boutique is always better than big, but I just like supporting the little guys, you know yeah, well, and again, this is all that new tax rules making it more feasible, like one of the things that, uh, that margaret is going to be up against and his son's work in there now is, as demand goes up and they start producing more, they're going to start bumping into excise taxes and things like that, and I think there's going to be a threshold where it's like it's fine when you're making about 100000 liters a year, but if you want to go over that suddenly you need to make a million liters a year, like you've got to suddenly go big. Yeah, this is a sam adams problem, but you know he's also big on. He's very particular about his barrel selections for given batches and most of these batches are like three or four barrels, so he's only making a thousand liters at a go yeah, yeah, tiny little batch, yeah, but um, you know he's got.
02:36:35
he's made whiskey that you can drink. Neat, and that's an achievement for something that's only existed for 15 years. Anomaly in this current location, for only five. He's pulled it off. Well done, impressive.
02:36:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Lovely. Well, I'll tell you what We've just done the whiskey segment. You know what that means.
02:36:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's time to go have some time to go drink some whiskey well, the bottle I had did not make it out of july 4th, which happens so do not handle fireworks and whiskey at the same time no, I did not touch any fireworks that whole day. I was not qualified to supervise you have a designated exploder I think that's probably the best thing and it's the, it's the teen. You know that household has teenage or 20 something kids, the kids love to they're all very keen and they can. They'll figures will regrow.
02:37:27
I hope they were oh boy, maybe we're a chain mail glove you're gonna blow things up and it was just all mortars all the time like it sounded like a war zone, just boom, boom, boom and all the neighbors were like just the sheer number of explosions per minute it was astonishing.
02:37:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We had a few uh here in petaluma, where it is illegal.
02:37:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Uh, that doesn't stop, it still happens actually I would say it's the most american thing ever. But I've been to an nfl football and the opening of an. Nfl football game is the most American thing Jets flying over.
02:37:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can tell you you're very close to what is the most American thing ever, which is the border between Pennsylvania and New Jersey, where on one side is our state liquor store and fireworks and on the other side is their pot store there. So you get your choice One trip.
02:38:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you're good, you got it all. You're good. Richard Campbell is at run his radiocom. That's where you'll find the run. His radio podcast, alsonet, rocks with Carl Franklin and he joins us every week to do this and we're so glad he does. Paul Theriot and I have been doing this show for some years now. Paul is at the rotcom. Even when he's in mexico he's at the rotcom. Become a premium member if you want to get that edge. I think that'sa really nice piece. You wrote about how to make edge be uh clean and that's a premium article. So make sure you're less terrible public service friend?
02:38:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
truly no. I think it makes a lot of sense.
02:38:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The same thing on my. On the mac. You might as well use safari. It's there, it's the, it's the browser. Yeah, you got right. Um, anyway, with the army you have. Uh, his books are at leanpubcom, including the field guide to windows 11 and windows everywhere, and both paul and richard and I convene every Wednesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern Time, that would be 1800 UTC, to do this show. You don't have to watch it live, but I wanted to mention that you can. If you are in the club. You can watch in the club to Discord and chat along with us there. But the public can also watch live on seven other channels, including YouTube, twitch, tiktok, facebook linkedin, xcom and kickcom.
02:39:38
So I'm gonna go take a look at kickcom you've said that enough I know it because they sponsor a formula one team, so I'm familiar with kick.
02:39:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
In fact, I wasn't convinced until this moment that this was real. But there it is they got a podium last sunday.
02:39:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that was pretty exciting nico hulkenberg's first after 230 some races. How horrible is would that be to be? You know, admittedly you're one of the best drivers in the world because you're racing in formula one, but you've never gotten, you've never placed right. Yeah, and it's not his fault. He's never had great cars, and so you know you need that perfect combination right.
02:40:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's kind of impossible. Great driver, great car, yeah, yeah anyway.
02:40:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know how I got into that. Oh, that's kick, yeah, yeah, that's why, sorry, uh, you don't have to watch this live. Of course, that's only for the hardcore winners and dozers. Uh, all the rest of you can download a copy of the show from twittv slash ww. There's a link there to a youtube channel dedicated to the video from the show. That's a good way, uh, to share a clip with somebody who might be interested and help spread the word about windows weekly. You can also subscribe on your favorite podcast client, probably the easiest thing to do. That way, you get it automatically the minute it's available. There's an audio version and a video version. Pick the format you want or both. And if that client happens to offer reviews, would you please leave us a good review and tell the world about Windows Weekly Helps us quite a bit. Thank you everybody for joining us. A special thanks to our ClubTut members. We appreciate your support and we will see you all right back here next Wednesday for Windows Weekly. Bye-bye.