Windows Weekly 941 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show
00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thorat and Richard Campbell are here. There are a lot of new features in the latest Windows Insider version of Windows. Paul will list them all, every one of them. We'll talk about why Microsoft laid off all those people. Is it really AI, or maybe it's not? The acquisition of Windsurf, which didn't happen, and Cyberpunk coming to the mac all five years late? 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 Theriot and Richard Campbell, episode 941, recorded July 16th 2025. K and Q. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, all you winners. It's Paul Theriot there. Mr Theriot, from now Mexico City of theriotcom and leanpubcom Over to. Oh, I'm supposed to do the switching, aren't I? Who's the adult in this room? Yeah, I'm here. What about you? What am I looking at? I don't know. I forgot. I'm the button pusher. I'm the captain now. Uh, also to paul's left is mr richard campbell there of renna's radiocom. He is in british columbia, so it's a north american show today.
01:35
yeah, yes, three countries all three countries united in brothership and high tariffs. It's exactly, yeah, exactly what we're looking for. Oh boy, oh boy. Hey, you keep your soft lumber to yourself, buddy boy okay, we.
01:52
We just put new tariffs on steel, so wait for grumpy noises from an orange man um, today on the program, we shall be talking about such things as windows 11, ad blocking, no, microsoft 365 maybe, I don't know xbox and whiskey notice I say that correctly, whiskey. But let's start with windows. Mr T, yeah, I'm sorry, I'm a little perky today. You obviously still jet lagged from your long journey. I've been here for a week.
02:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I no I'm not sure how to approach me having good news.
02:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh no, what do we do?
02:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm very distressed. It's a little, uh, it's a weird feeling. Um, oh, geez right, sorry, I just clicked on a link and it opened in the proper browser, which is not the one I want anyway. Uh, so microsoft has a tech community blog that's, um, you know, typically aimed at et cetera. It's interesting how often they reveal information through this blog. It's kind of innocuous, whatever. So sometimes you'll see a headline. You'll think, well, that's no big deal, whatever. It's like we've updated the install media for Windows 11 and also for server 2025. Big deal, except this is a big deal.
03:25
So what they have decided to do finally and I've always kind of wondered about this is ensure that the install media has all of the inbox apps updated fully. Right now that sounds obvious, but if you think about the typical you know path that someone would follow installing, especially if they know what they're doing, they would get through setup, get to the desktop and then you have three or four avenues for updates. At that point you want to go to Windows Update and install those updates. You want to go to the Microsoft Store and install the app updates. You should go to Winget windows package manager command line and fully update things, because there are things that are not updated those things immediately, but will be updated through winget and, depending on the apps you're using, they might have their own updaters, like microsoft edge. So part of the problem with the updating process with windows is that microsoft updates their install media the back backend, the ISO, essentially, that they're using. However, you obtain it right through the Microsoft media creation tool If you just download the ISO. If you're in IT, you have other places you can go to get ISOs for Windows.
04:40
It's not clear to me. I tried to find this out. I know they update those ISOs essentially from time to time. Obviously, when there's a version upgrade, they do it then, but they update it mid single month and what that means is that 36 built-in apps in Windows 11, all the famous ones notepad, paint, phone link photos, weather, et cetera will all be up to date for that month. So you may still have a couple of updates, but instead of that giant scroll of you know that takes a really long time to get through you can have this ISO or this install media that is completely up to date.
05:33
Now for end users, it especially that also means you have to keep your install media up to date, right, if you want the benefit of this, and so for most people, for individuals, if for some reason you needed this, you would get it at the time. You would then be up to date, you would use it, you wouldn't think about it. If you're like me and you're maybe a little more compulsive, you keep a copy of the ISO, you keep a copy of the USB media. I'm not aware of a way to slipstream that or automate it. So unfortunately you're pretty much looking at a monthly download than in the case of the media creation tool, a monthly media creation.
06:09
But this is actually good news for users. It's more secure. This is the primary point. But it's also a big chunk of that first hour, maybe even hour and a half, of what I do when I'm sorry, what I do when I install windows. Right, it's not everything.
06:26
You still have to go to windows update. You still are going to want to go to wind, get you know, and actually you still want to go to the store. But again, instead of the what looks, you know, it feels like a hundred app installs or app updates. You should have to, as an individual, keep your stuff up to date. Right, I'd rather do it offline like that than wait while Windows does its thing. Because that's one of the weird things about Windows If you run an app right away, depending on the app, it will either be completely out of date or, in the case of something like the Xbox app does this it will say, hey, there's a newer version of the app. When you go get that first, because we're not going to run until you do so, you know that's on you.
07:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, I like VS Code and I think what is it? The Azure Storage Manager are really good about popping up a bar that says hey, there's a new version. Do you want to install now or when you're finished?
07:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
and full visual studio does this as well, which I really like, because one of the options is install on close. Yeah, install on close.
07:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I really appreciate. So I do get around to my installation, but you don't interrupt me right no, it's really good, really good.
07:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, app updates. You know like these inbox apps are modern apps. They're small, they're usually really focused I mean, it's not as mission critical, but, um, but you want them up to date for security vulnerability reasons, right, like there are a lot of this. Is microsoft described this almost as like a zero-day protection of sorts? Right, um, because these are vectors for attack.
08:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, I mean and to be clear, interrupt me if it's really that important, but most of the time it's just not that important I'd rather be interrupted than have it just do it.
08:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know you ever turn on windows and start doing something like oh sorry, time to go.
08:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The one thing when it gets me is android, like my android phone renders itself unusable until I finish a system update like hey, you know, now I can't unlock the car and you know the radio won't turn on. And like all of this stuff, it's like I have to complete a system update that it couldn't complete on its own for some reason.
08:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is one of the random areas where Windows is somehow much more sophisticated than these mobile platforms. You know They've gotten better. For sure. Apple because of the foundation at the time of Mac OS 10 and how they built iOS on top of that literally had replaced every single file on your system as part of those version upgrades. It took forever. They're doing this thing where they've separated out parts of the system, kind of componentized it, so that they can be updated individually, typically through the store or however, it doesn't matter how they do it, but outside of the whatever it might be monthly cumulative update type system, whatever they have, they're all very similar in that regard. But Windows is actually they do too many updates. This is the bed, the dark side of this sort, if you will. They've gotten so good at it. They're like, oh, we can just do it all the time, and actually that's kind of disruptive. Yeah, okay, and that's the end of the good news.
09:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I appreciate you led with that. Only 10 minutes into the show and already. Yeah, how are you led with that? Only 10 minutes into the show and already we've only got that. Yeah, what's that? Yeah.
09:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Seven minutes. Welcome back to the darkness. Now back to normal. You're welcome, all right. So last night Microsoft posted an update to the Copilot Vision feature, which is a part of the Copilot app in the Insider program. So if you're in the Windows Insider program on any of your PCs, it doesn't matter what channel you can download this app update and you'll get two new features for Copilot Vision. The first one is full desktop support. So it has supported through, I should say, copilot Vision. So Copilot Vision is a way for Copilot, the app, to integrate with other apps on your computer. So you can point it at an app window and say, okay, we're doing something with this, and now you can do it for your entire desktop, right. So whatever you have visible on screen, it can interact with the whole thing. It doesn't need just the app window itself. And then there's also voice integration. So Copilot voice is that way that you can speak to Copilot instead of typing a text. Prop, right, natural language, et cetera, et cetera.
10:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Copilot Vision now works with that I'm getting excited about a sort of complete suite here, that you're starting to see a transformation of the operating system.
10:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and you know, from a timing perspective, this is part of the chaos of the updating we were just talking about. Right, I mean, this is, this is part of it. Um, but it. But yeah, I mean, in keeping with everything ai related, co-pilot and all of the features in co-pilot and all of the other things in windows 11 that are ai related are being updated very quickly. That's the nature of this thing. It's brand new still for a lot of people, you know, for everyone or whatever, and it's capabilities, capabilities.
11:28
So you know, when Microsoft integrated Copilot into Windows 11 about almost two years ago now, about 18 months ago not a lot going on there. And you know, just like the Copilot Plus PCs, when they first launched from a AI perspective, it was like, eh, it's kind of a non-event. But in both cases, those things are getting better, much better. Right, that's happening, that's happening pretty quick. Yeah, I want to add something to the notes here because I realized I forgot something. Okay, so that's for everybody If you're in, if you're in the Insider Program, if you have a Copilot plus PC and you're enrolled in the Insider Program, in Dev or Beta, remember, dev is tied to 24H2 and Beta is tied to 24H2.
12:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Click to do.
12:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What's that?
12:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, 25. I'm sorry, Dev is 25. And Beta is 24.
12:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Beta is 24. There I was looking at the notes to make sure I wrote that down right.
12:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just love that that's actually the right order. Right. It's like you remember, when these were supposed to be different, like at this moment. They are different.
12:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, right, and with the exception of Canary, which we'll make fun of later, they all kind of make sense.
12:39
I think there's a different team that has the is Canary is it's like it's like a silo and they're all by themselves and every once in a while someone opens the door and they're like, hey, is there? Did we add anything to the other channels recently? And I'm like, yeah, there's 118 new features you don't have and so we'll get to that. We'll get to that because there's a. There's a big update if you are a canary for some reason. So, despite the fact that these are essentially testing features for different versions of Windows 11, they're both testing exactly the same features. So there's three of them. Click to do is getting a new image action called describe image, which seems fairly straightforward. The administrator protection feature, which I think might be the single biggest security change to Windows since UAC maybe.
13:23
I mean this is a big one. So if you, if you approach these security initiatives that microsoft has done over the past 20, 25 years from a from the standpoint of an individual um uac big, impactful in the sense that you saw it and were annoyed by it, but it was highly disruptive, but now we live with it and it's fine. I mean, there were other things well it got.
13:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It got less disruptive, you know yes.
13:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they gradually did suck less, they calmed it down, yeah, yeah, and you know, apps were updated and things to be better about, whatever those things, whatever those protections are.
13:56
That was a trustworthy computing era change to Windows. This is the new Windows resiliency initiative, you know, era of the, or what do they call the Secure Future Initiative, brought more broadly at Microsoft right, so this is for individuals, is that thing? And what this does is protect against the use case, which is 99.99% of all people on earth who set up one account on a computer. It is, by nature, an administrative account, and then they use it and they stop thinking about it. But you're running everything at that elevated level, yes, and so one of the pieces of advice over the past forever is that you then set up a standard account and you sign up with the standard account and then you provide the administrative account privilege through your PIN, probably now, but a password, whatever it might be, when you need to elevate a process. For some reason, nobody does that right, and I don't mean nobody. Literally no to elevate a process.
14:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
For some reason, nobody does that right, and I don't mean nobody, literally no, and this is why they're changing. You know, I did this to to vps that wanted a system in account, where I created an account that had the word admin in it and they just gave it no privileges at all. Yeah, because they never logged in with it. That's right. So it's like listen, I get that you want an administrator account. I can't apply it to your main account, so I'm going to give you another account for that yeah.
15:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then you get that you're the lord of the manor. Uh, that's right.
15:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And then you know, but then I would deliberately give it no permissions so that just to find because I immediately know if they tried to log in with it they go hey, this didn't work I know there are well-intentioned technical people who do do what I described, that standard account type of thing, right, and I think a lot of people, because you're trying to do the right thing, right?
15:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe it's a little bit of a pain, you know, and you're like, whatever look, this might be foisted on you by your uh it admin staff, right, depending on how you're doing things. But as an individual it's unusual, right? People don't do this. So administrative protection to me is the most obvious feature in the world, which is basically it's going to mostly run everything at a lower elevation level, regardless of the fact that you are an admin. But when you have to elevate, because certain tasks that you perform in Windows do require elevated permissions, you will go through a Windows Hello, preferably Windows Hello ESS, whatever authentication. So it is like UAC, it's interruption, but you know you're doing a facial recognition thing, maybe a fingerprint recognition, a pin if you, if that's all you have. But uh it, it's a different kind of interruption.
16:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I yeah, whether it's more or less the salient point that, uh, those, the caliber of the interruption has gone down. It not. Now it's a pass key or it's a, or it's a a YubiKey or it's a pin. Right, there's a lot. It's a lot less difficult.
16:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean when. Well, yeah, when UAC was first implemented, which would have been Windows Vista to oh no, I'm sorry, uac was always just a checkbox. It was just like a check. It was like a. You were running as an admin, right, but if you needed to elevate as a standard user until Windows 8, you were typing in a password or sending a request to someone to do it right. But they were, you know, they were doing a password Like it's a lot of you know, especially if you're doing good password policy, it's a lot of work.
17:07
So this is a lot more seamless, it's a lot more secure. It is that kind of combination of can we make it as easy to use but also as secure as possible? So you try to hit that kind of compromise somewhere in the middle. So I'm eager. This is one feature, that's. I think this just happened yesterday or the day before, but I really, really want to test this feature. I'm very curious about this.
17:24
And then the other change is relatively minor, but there's when an app shows a permissions dialogue. So, for example, when you're a notepad and you've got text in there and you go to close the tab, it will say wait a minute, do you want to save this first right, like a confirmation dialogue of some kind. There is a system dialogue type where it actually kind of grays out the window. It's modal, so you can't do anything else in the app until you've dealt with that dialogue. And now they're making that the default for all apps. So I think you had to program it a certain way to make it do this. But now those permission dialogues will always be modal, will always be centered on top of the window you're looking at, will darken the rest of the window to give you that kind of visual effect and, uh, you have to deal with it before you move on. So they're they're doing that in that build as well.
18:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
you know, I think there's another angle on this, which is that for sysadmins, we've been going through this process of hey, live in a domain user account and only log in with your administrator privileges when you need to Right this protection approach allows. What it really says now is hey, you can live in a sysadmin account, just not have any sysadmin privileges until you need them, but it saves you from logging out.
18:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Logging in right, yeah, right, that's a good point. So it's automatically lowering the elevation level of most processes you're working with. You don't see those things. I mean, you know behind the covers, um, and only in those times when it has to be elevated, whereas before everything was just elevated. Right, it was just to presume elevation.
18:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right. It was just once upon a time. An admin account meant you had admin privileges.
19:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now, an admin account means you have the possibility of admin privileges, but only when needed and with an additional step of explicit use case, like you are confronted by, you only get admin privileges when your whatever your action you're taking requests them.
19:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, which is another way to get to this other thing that administrators have been really struggling with, which is just enough permissions. Right. Right where we were now. We were now making multiple admin accounts. Oh, you want to do work on exchange? Well, we have an account just for exchange, yeah oh, you want to do work on backups.
19:34
We have an account for backup, like we're. No, we're trying to stay away from super user accounts. This is a solution to that. I'm in a super user account. It's just not that super right. It only gets the permissions it's supposed to get when you need them.
19:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean, we're almost 25 years after trustworthy computing when that started. Yeah, a big part of that effort that we wouldn't see as individuals, right, that's not something that concerns normal people or whatever, but behind the covers, microsoft's apps and third-party apps are all being updated to be kind of more granular on a elevation level, if that makes sense. So rather than the whole thing just having to be always admin, you must be a god for this app to run.
20:14
Yeah, you can instead. Well, the system does this for it. Essentially, it will elevate when it has to, and when it does, it's going to prompt you somehow. Right, uac would be the standard way to date, but now that we have administrative protection, we should see how this changes. I think we're probably. I guess we're still going to see both. Actually, I'm not sure. Does this mean the end of UAC? I don't know.
20:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm curious to test this. I think it's just an advanced version of UAC. I test this. No, I think it's just an advanced version of UAC. I mean, you think about it, it's the same exact action except with fewer dialogue boxes.
20:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yes, from the user's perspective, right, it's a different authentication process, but it is an authentication process of a sort. Well, actually UAC isn't technically an authentication process, it's just a hey are you sure? Hey, are you sure you know that kind of thing? And it does get in your way and if you don't address it, whatever's trying to happen will just not happen. So I mean, there's some security to it there, of course. But yeah, I like this. I like how explicit this is. Again, I didn't think of this 15 years ago, so I'm not like some genius, but I look at this now and I think, yes, this is the way this should be.
21:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This seems smart to me? No, it's very, very clever and we're coming at it. It does address all of the issues, while also and, in some respects, by lying to the user.
21:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm all for lying to the user, especially when the user is me, so that's fine. Oh man, this is going to be a tough show for me, because I can't get this thing to load links now my devolve browser. God damn it. All right, so I'll do those. I'll try to batch those ahead of time going forward, but anyway, um, I didn't have this if you want, I can read you your notes yeah, actually. Could you read me the url so I can type it into my browser?
22:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I will if you want me to no, no it's, it's just, you know, I'm simple.
22:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I expect things to happen when I click on them.
22:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, Normal.
22:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's okay, this is what I get for doing this. At the last second I had changed stuff on this system because I used it for hands-on Windows and I did an episode where it defaults Okay. So, in addition to the dev and beta channel updates I just mentioned, there were also updates to the release preview. So, yeah, these are particularly interesting because it's release preview right. This means they're coming soon to stable. So, based on the timing this was released on July 10, which was probably the end of last week, probably Thursday last week we can expect that next Tuesday, the 22nd, will be when we see these in preview for stable and then the first, the next patch Tuesday, which is probably what July 12th is, when these things will go live. And I think I mentioned this recently, but I think I'll get straight here. I think it was April. May were humongous updates, june not so big, and this one's kind of in the middle, in the sense that there's a lot. Well, there's actually two, I should say. There's two different builds One for 24H2, yeah, 24h2 and 23H2. The 24H2 release preview update is pretty humongous, but mostly small stuff. So, on the co copilot plus PC front, there are improvements, to recall if you live in the EU, and that means you'll be able to export snapshots, share them with apps and websites that you trust, using a unique kind of export code that is generated when you say you want to export it and can only be used one time and will never be repeated again. And this is the first baby step to that thing we've been talking about, which is like recall is, is or is not interesting. I mean, whether you want to use it or not, whatever, whether you think it's a security nightmare or whatever, you're wrong. But as far as functionality goes, this is okay on a PC, but really what you want is something that gives you your history across all the devices that you use Right PC, but really what you want is something that gives you your history across all the devices that you use right. And so exporting is not live syncing over some encrypted cloud service or whatever, but it's a way to get the data out, and I think that was actually the point of it. If you think about the DMA and what they're trying to protect here, this is really about you not locking your data into a single vendor's software. Basically, right, that's what it's really for, but I don't think we're going to see a lot of third-party apps that work on recall data. If you use this thing, you're just going to use recall, but, okay, fine, click to do more improvements there.
24:36
There's a practice in reading coach text action. It's kind of a tough turn of phrase, but there used to be exhaustive reading, comprehension, reading help tools built into Edge. Those have been scaled back a little bit, but this is interesting to me because it suggests that maybe this is going to become more of a system level tool, which it should be right that you should get these reading tools wherever you're reading. It shouldn't have to just be that one web browser. So that's kind of interesting to me.
25:06
Also, a read with immersive reader text action, which is basically giving you that capability. That's in the browser, the Edge browser, where you can get that distraction-free, ad-free experience for reading, but now it's in click-to-do so you'll get it for anything, right? So this is gonna be like a full screen experience. Yeah, that works with everything. It's cool. And then the third action for Microsoft Teams, and so this is the first Microsoft 365 action we've seen Click to do and basically what you have done is selected a thing. It's probably going to be text in this case, but you can then send a message based on that text area it would work with an image too right or schedule a Teams meeting. All of those things I just described do require a Copilot Plus PC, but because that's where you get clicked.
25:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And so is this only in the release preview or is this in the release preview? It's in the release preview, yeah.
25:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it will be in stable in preview next week and then three weeks Yep, it's imminent, that's right. Yeah, and you just said this. I mean it's fascinating watching how quickly these AI features improve. I mean, think about what I just described. I mean text actions are the latest in a long series of things that date back to copy and paste, to com and olay, and I have information here. I want to do something with it over here. Right and click to do is interesting to me because it's system-wide. It will. It's not app dependent. It will work with anything. It started off small as text and image actions, the obvious ones, right, you select text, summarize, rewrite whatever. But now they're kind of building it out and it's yeah, it's getting really interesting.
26:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And you know, as these features start to grow, suddenly it's like hey, I want a co-pilot plus pc, I want these features, or yet it's still a half a dozen laptops I don't want.
26:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm looking at my desktop, right well, that's it.
26:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, well, are there going?
26:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
to be howls from the security. This is click.
26:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is click to do not, right, oh, for one thing, but, but okay, both. But both of these features you don't have to use. So, in the sense that all pcs will likely be what we now call a co-pilot plus pcs within a couple years, um, you don't have to use this, right, like I don't have it on this computer anyway. So, um, I mean, in my experience, half the time I try to use it it's not available for some reason. I have to go switch it on. But, um, but yeah, it's not. Click to do is not by default. There is an icon for it now, so you can just enable it. The way it was going to work in the past was that you would do whatever the keyboard shortcut or key plus click to get it to come on, and then it would say hey, oh, you want to use this? Cool, say yes to this agreement, whatever. Now it's just off and there's an icon and you can explicitly just turn it on. So, yeah, if you don't want it, just you don't have to use it. So yeah, the recall stuff and the click to do stuff, those are copilot plus pc. Everything else that's on this list is um for everybody, right? So improvements to the settings app, where you can use natural language, right. This is um, actually I'm sorry that's a copilot, sorry, uh, that one is copilot plus pc. In fact, that one's a little weirder because in its initial release it will only be Snapdragon X, but AMD, intel will get it probably the next month.
28:09
It's usually pretty quick, quick machine recovery. This is now, by my count, the 117th way in which you can recover and or fix something that's wrong with your Windows PC, but that's, it's okay, it's okay. Pc, but it's okay, it's okay. This one's good because it's automated. So if something's wrong with your computer and you're like I don't know what's going on, maybe it's a bad driver, you have no idea. And then you come up and it won't boot, normally this thing kicks in, does its thing. It basically goes into the Windows recovery environment, brings it back to a last known good configuration and you'll be up and running. So it's good. Like you don't have to worry about this. You can kick it off from windows, but typically the experience will be you get it during boot.
28:50
The big news here, of course, is that, uh, tied to this update is the end of the blue screen of death. Yeah, and now we're going to have the black screen of whoa and um, it's uh, no, it's whoa. Yeah, no, no, no, it's what? My no it's whoa, yeah, no, no, no, it's well, but I screened it suffering. Yeah, exactly, yeah, it's the black screen of don't want to be you. So it's just, it's black now, not blue, but it's also kind of a different layout, different look at windows 11 style. But in case they're going to make it pretty, it doesn't matter. Start menu improvements for admins Not going to worry about that one too much. Stat improvements.
29:27
This is something I was so delighted by this feature because it reminded me to disable this feature. I hate it so much. If you open a window that's floating yes, you have to disable it on this computer and you move it around just like even a millimeter, this little bar drops down. You're like oh, oh, what's going on there? And then you drag it up and it comes down further. It's like it's inviting you to drop it in there and then it gives you these little snap layouts you can use um, snap, snap suggestions.
29:54
I guess we'll call that for snap layouts, and I hate it. I never want that. I never once wanted to use this feature. I have never found a suggested layout to be something I wanted. It. It's terrible, I hate it. So now it will describe what this little dropdown thing is, Cause I think a lot of people like what the heck is that thing? Like what is that? That's crazy. So now it has little text descriptions of all the things and what it's doing and it says, hey, this is what it's doing and you're like nice, thank you for reminding me. I'm going to turn that off and you can turn that off. So if you go to set I think it's setting system multitasking under snap, drop that thing down. I've never, ever, wanted snap features. I do use snap, by the way, but, but I use it like a normal person. But you know, if I just want a side-by-side thing, it's the typical configuration. Yeah, keyboard shortcuts, the dragging stuff, I don't like. Uh, but that's me. Maybe you love it.
30:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know, sometimes you need to do it, yeah yeah, no, I'm using, I'm doing it right now on this screen.
30:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have uh, the notes and um discord or snapped, you know so yeah, I mean, obviously you could always use.
30:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess you could always use the shortcuts. I'm just thinking that sometimes it's just easier to say, oh, I'm going to arrange this by with the mouse together.
31:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so the way I want I should be super clear about this kind of thing, because there's like the real insurification, there's the things we don't like, you know. But then there's things like this, where this is a feature I don't need, and I would argue to you not to you personally, I mean to any person using Windows 11, look, there are these features in Windows that you wouldn't know how to use if Microsoft didn't promote them in some way.
31:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, for example, on the taskbar there's a search box.
31:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
there there's a task view, there's widgets, you know whatever. So they're there. None of those things have to be there for you to use them. But because they're there, you might mouse over it, you might click it. You'll discover it. If you use Windows Search all the time from the I'm going to call it the start menu, really but from the taskbar, you don't have to have the button there, you can use keyboard shortcuts. You can get to it from start. You don't need it. So the snap thing, by having a description, it's letting you know the function exists. You might think it's the greatest thing in the world and use it every single day and love it. Great, you may decide you don't want it, like I did. But whatever, now you know about it and now you can get rid of it. So that's fine. You know, save some on-screen real estate. You don't need it.
32:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
but yeah, it's fine. I have no problem with this. It's about discoverability. This is always the challenge, especially, for my sure, there's so many features. How does how to remember the charms thing you had to know to drag your mouse to the right?
32:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
hand, it was worse than that, because you would discover it accidentally right.
32:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's the only way to discover like what's that, but the?
32:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
problem is you might have triggered something inadvertently, and you don't know how you got that and you're like, wait, yeah, how do I get it back? You know, and that's bad ui I mean, it's just bad ui.
32:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know how I got it, I don't know where it went and I can't bring it back yeah, it's like a one-way dead-end street.
32:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know how I got here, but now I can't leave. She's up to something. Anyway, this is fine. I know people see this stuff and are like, what are they doing? But no, actually it's fine. This is good.
32:54
Windows search improvements in settings. This is not a big deal, but it is. So, microsoft, that to configure every setting that's related to search you had to go to two different locations in the settings app. Now they're all in one location. So fantastic. So just right, when it doesn't matter, because we're going to have natural language search anyway. They have finally made that more logical. That's fine.
33:17
Small improvements to the touch keyboard that doesn't matter too much. I should mention, too, that Windows 10 is also getting a release preview or did get a release preview update. This is just fixes to the underlying code that's going to enable the Windows 10 extended security update enrollment screen. Right, that you're going to see that's going to be a lot of fun. And then some fixes across the board, but yeah, so kind of a. It was a lot of stuff, but, but from a, especially if you don't have a co-pilot plus pc day-to-day it's not. There's not not a lot of major stuff going on there, um, but you know, the quick machine recovery stuff, great. I the co-pilot, I'm not sorry, the, uh, the click to do stuff has emerged as this almost genius use of a like, really smart like, just interact with the screen, like I really like it, like I actually think that's nice all right let me take a little break because I was gonna say I can burn through this quick if you want.
34:12
There's actually you know what if you don't mind, let me just I maybe I will burn through it quick because it doesn't matter, right? I'll just say this really quickly the canary channel also got an update. I think that one might have been friday. Um, it's. There are no new features. If you've been paying attention, it's everything, not everything. It's many of the things that they've given to uh or provided in other channels of the insider program, so they're bringing it up again.
34:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We don't know what canary is actually for what am I?
34:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, it's crazy.
34:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, that's it all right, still some more to talk about in the new windows 11 updates. We'll get to that in just a second. But I, I'm sorry. I'm so excited I can't. I had to interrupt you now. Why didn't my eyes? Why did you go full screen? Let me push my button. There we go. What are you doing on my screen? I am very excited. I've been running up and down the stairs from the attic because the guys are here with our new mattress. I'm very, very excited. Our Helix is here.
35:08
This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. So I don't know if you know this, but I did a little search on the AI. I said AI, how often should I replace the mattress? And it's actually surprised me. It said it depends, but every six to 10 years, depending on your mattress. If you start to feel it sag, that kind of thing.
35:28
People will keep a mattress for 20 years. In fact, when I mentioned that, somebody in our Discord said mine, I haven't changed in 20 years. Yeah, you might not be doing yourself a favor. You might want to get a new mattress. You will be amazed. I mean first of all. You will be amazed.
35:45
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36:21
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36:56
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37:10
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37:57
Go to helixsleepcom slash twit for 27 off sitewide during the 4th of july sale. Best of web offer extended. That's helixsleepcom slash twit for 27 off site-wide, exclusive for listeners of windows weekly. This offer ends on july 31st. Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you and if you're listening after the sale ends, still be sure to check them out at helixsleepcom slash twit. If, if I could, I would take a camera with me and go right now and lie on this mattress. I am, in fact, you know what. Keep doing the show. I'm done. I'll see you in an hour. I'm gonna go take a nap. Helixsleepcom slash twit. We thank him so much for supporting windows weekly. Back to you, my friends fellers yes, let's see.
38:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This time I laboriously copied in all of my stories so I could get to them from the browser. Okay, so I don't remember when this happened. Earlier this year it might have been late. Last year, microsoft started testing eight, what they were describing as a simplified system, trade daytime display, right. So if you look down the corner of your taskbar it says says the time and the date when Windows 11 first arrived, there was a notification bell there by default. It would change colors based on whether or not you had notifications. I think in Windows 10, I don't think this came to 11, but there would even be a number there. Remember telling you the number of notifications? Right, something nobody ever needed. But anyway, they were like look, we can simplify this thing. I think part of it was they're still. They kind of want the windows 11 taskbar to be a little more symmetrical. You know they got the one widgets like on over the left, but this thing is kind of overloaded on the right. It's yeah if ocd.
39:37
It's gonna be a little bit of actually all the stuff that I need to know that that part yeah, right, I, I thought that was fine, but they took it out of the insider program at some point and someone Zach Bowden, actually at windows central asked Brandon LeBlanc over at the insider team hey, what's going on with this? Is this? This thing was pulled? Are we going to bring it back? And they're like Nope, we're not bringing it back. We? He said the feedback we got was not pleasant. So, oh my um, and I believe in a a later part of this quote uh, he or this, uh, whatever you call it thread on x now or twitter or whatever, was uh, well, why not making an option? And he said because 12 people enabled it, an option. And he said because 12 people enabled it, like, when it's not, it's just not worth the support cost of doing that. So, um, anyway, that's gone. So there you go, if you're wondering about that you probably wonder where it went.
40:33
That's why yeah, it's good, there's 12 sad people in this world, yep um, a couple weeks ago, idc uh, chimed in on pc sales from the second quarter. It was A couple of weeks ago. Idc chimed in on PC sales from the second quarter. It was good news actually. But I held on to this because I like to commingle the data from Gartner and IDC and so once Gartner jumped in, I did that. So PC sales grew 5.2% in the second quarter. Pc makers sold 65.8 million units. That's good, that kind of growth, honestly, in this kind of a market, really good.
41:12
But that's the problem, because of all of the economic uncertainty this year tied to tariffs and whether or not they're coming and what's going on there, and blah, blah, blah, whatever. Plus, we know that we're getting into this Windows 10 upgrade cycle. Businesses are actually starting to move to Windows 11 and, appreciable members, I think last week we probably mentioned that Windows 11 usage overall has finally surpassed that of Windows 10, et cetera, et cetera. But this has artificially skewed the sales and both companies are saying actually, the second half of the year is not going to be so great. So, um, if I remember correctly, pc sales overall last year were not much more than flat. I can't remember the exact number.
41:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But also, come on, I know, right like this, what did you think was going to happen, like we've. We've been at saturation for a while, we've gotten through the crazy that was the pandemic, like the idea that you would predict any of this to me seems absurd. Yeah.
42:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was thinking about this actually earlier today, just because I happened to see this article that I was quoted in, cause. I talked to the guy but it was about 1995 and windows 95 and what a an incredible industry event. That was right, and the thing I was trying to communicate to him at the time we talked was 90, 1995 was this kind of nexus of timing for all kinds of things. Um, computers had gotten more powerful and, with windows 95, simpler to use. That that was going to trigger some kind of an upgrade cycle of which we had never seen before. The internet happened, right, so we had the web. So all of a sudden we get on netscape and soon internet explorer and, um, you know, it's just really good timing. You know the mac was in the bucket, was that company was about to go out of business, they were doing nothing. Um, it's just a lot of factors, you know, that made it such a big thing.
42:56
And if you've been following along for the past 20 years, 30 years, sorry, um, you'll notice that there haven't been any big Windows events in a while. Right, like we're not the big platform anymore from enthusiasm perspective, whatever. So there was an event for Windows XP, there were events for Vista and 7 and 8, actually 10, 11, subdued. We're also doing updates all the time. We keep talking about this. The notion of a major version of Windows triggering anything is unfathomable. I mean, like we have well, three right now different versions of Windows 11, all of which have all the same features. It doesn't really matter which one you're on. And so the way that PC upgrades have gone because of all that stuff and then others I'm not mentioning, is you buy it. Most people I mean not me, but most people buy a PC just when they need one right, and they need them less and less most people right?
43:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, no, lifespan on machines are only getting longer.
43:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah and yes. So, whatever anyone's predictions were for the Windows 10 to 11 upgrade cycle, I don't know what to say to this. I remember a year ago, and maybe even further back, there were some of these analyst organizations were estimating oh, this is going to be this, is it? This will be the biggest thing we've seen in a long time. It's like why? Like, what are you talking about? Like, why would it? Like? That's not what's happening, right. If anything, individuals have kind of fallen into lockstep, in a way, behind businesses in this regard.
44:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They only upgrade when they really have to, and they do it begrudgingly you know, the usual is coming out of warranty right, it's the keeping machines for four to five years. We used to turn them in two, Now we turn them in four or five In some cases, especially when we had some economic wobbles. I heard lots of folks say oh, we're buying extended warranties to extend these strategies another year before we start on replacement.
44:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But even I mean you know, most people, just individuals, probably don't even think in those terms, right, I mean like they're just using it. I I coincidentally, right before I came to Mexico, one of my sisters texted me and said it was like oh, sorry to bother you, but like you don't have a like do you have any extra computers? I'm like no, I don't have any extra computers. I have 28 laptops in my office, but you can't have any of those. No, I was like, of course, you know. But in talking to her, my first question was like what are you using now exactly? And she was using a. It was a Surface Pro 7. Wow, and she's like actually, it was my brother-in-law who initially raised this complaint, but she was saying like you click on something and then you're like wait, wait, wait and then it like happens, you know. And I was like okay, but I think that's what people do, right? You don't think about it until it's become a problem so often that you're like, okay, now, how much these stupid things, stupid things cost. You know, you don't even want to spend the money. Um, so, anyway, look, 5.2 percent in the legacy market like this yeah, uh, 2025, that's fantastic now granted by the end of the year. If we're lucky, this will just be flat and not negative, but it will probably be flat or flat-ish, I would imagine. So we'll see what happens. But, um, no changes to the top five pc makers, if you care about this kind of thing. Macintosh 9% market share, so that hasn't really moved the needle too much. And then this is kind of a competitive thing.
46:13
But I bring these things up from time to time because you know Apple we talked about a bunch when they were doing stuff. Google has, I guess, fewer platforms than Apple, but they're going to have even fewer soon right? So Google has Android for phones and tablets and IoT and all that other stuff and car and whatever else. And then they have Chrome OS for laptop-type devices. Chrome OS started off super simplistic, almost ridiculous. It's gotten much more sophisticated, it's actually pretty good. And then last year there was this news that they were going to start replacing key parts of the platform with the corresponding parts from Android, because it's so much better supported by hardware makers, because there's so many more Android devices. That actually makes total sense. But of course this leads to the speculation like, okay, so Chrome OS is it going away? What's going on? And then you get this contrary information. So google has gone back and forth over what the right big screen os is. Right, we've had tablets that run chrome os, we've had tablets around android and we now have foldables. Those are all android. Um, sometimes it's chrome os, sometimes it's android. Last year I think october ish they announced chrome book plus, which are these like kind of co-pilot plus pc type pcs. Before there were co copilot plus PC type PCs, before there were copilot plus PCs with better specs, et cetera. And now they have an ARM based version. It has a copilot plus PC capable MPU, by the way Interesting.
47:35
So Google IO comes around in May. Google doesn't talk at all about Chrome OS, talks a little bit about Android. But they did an Android event before the show, nothing about Chrome OS. But then they did the thing afterwards and it was just a couple of new features, no big deal. And you're like, oh, what's going on here? It turns out they are in fact merging these platforms. Right, and so for Android, nothing's changing. Android is Android. It will still be used on whatever platforms. It's used on Chrome OS. The first time it just was blurted out in an interview. So the guy who currently runs Android on, I guess, chrome OS now. Google president Samir Samat, who you would have seen at IO he was a big part of that Just told someone in passing you asked something about the laptop the guy was using and blah, blah, blah, and he said I just asked because we're going to be combining Chrome OS and Android Anyway, and then they just kind of moved on. It's like what? Wait, wait, wait, wait what.
48:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What's happening to you? I've got a few headlines.
48:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's all the leadership for Android and Chrome OS turned over it just seemed like you don't need two and you don't have the political clout to protect them both. So it's inevitable.
48:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this is actually smart to me because Android is Android right, so Android is whatever it is. They subdivide it into different things. You know, iot, car, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Okay, but they have Chromebook On the Chromebook side. They have Chromebook and Chromebook Plus the kind of different tiers.
48:59
By putting Chrome OS or those Chrome OS features on top of Android and calling that thing a Chromebook, they get all the benefits of all the hardware, compatibility and popularity. Blah, blah, blah that stuff underneath the covers, but you still get all those things that Chrome OS brings that people really like, like the desktop version of Chrome and all the simple management features that schools rely on and all the other stuff that's part of Chrome OS. It's good. So, unfortunately, because of the way he said this, everyone was like what's going on? There was a flurry of activity, like what's going on, and so he got onto Twitter X or whatever and he said, okay, sorry about that, super excited that you guys are really, uh, happy about that, are interested, um, and he acted like they had sort of said this already and if you read what he I'll read it and I want I want to give credit to lance ulanoff, who got the scoop.
49:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He was writing for a tech radar and it was his laptop and something it was.
49:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was weird because samir so.
49:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And lance is a great guy, old friend, yeah, oh yeah, he's been around forever.
49:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah but no, he didn't drag it out of him or anything because, no, he just wanted to know that. I see that laptop he was using apple devices on mac.
50:00
Yeah, yeah and he said I'm just curious because you're in this ecosystem, like whatever, I, I. It was bizarre the way it kind of came out because it had nothing to do with io or you know any of that stuff or whatever. But, um, technically everything this guy says is true, right, but no one got almost any of this out of the original announcement. So what he said was we're building the Chrome OS experience on top of Android. We're doing so to unlock new levels of performance, iterate faster and make your laptop and phone work better together. I was like hold on a second so I paid attention. I'm like I wrote about this. I don't remember anything about laptop and phone working better together, but you know what, if you go to this June 2024 blog post, actually it does say that it's.
50:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like a little throwaway thing. Oh, interesting, so it wasn't describe it. Yeah, interesting.
50:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so the net result here is that if you do care about Chromebooks or Chrome OS, whatever, nothing bad is going to happen. It's all going to work as it does. One of the nice benefits of Chrome OS is you can run, if you want to run, android on it as well, and that gives you access to command line, obviously, but also graphical apps. That lets you do things like run Visual Studio Code right, which one's on Linux, so it turns it from this kind of almost kiosky little laptop thing into something a little more powerful.
51:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just actually bought I'm really liking it the new Lenovo Chromebook plus that they announced with the 60 tops, for it's got an NPU. It's a weird, it's a media tech processor, right. So the two milestones in there is got an npu. It's a weird, it's a mediatek processor, right so, but the the two milestones, it's an oled screen. It's a gorgeous screen yeah, really nice.
51:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So last year, when qualcomm and microsoft announced the first co-pilot plus pcs, I was like, okay, this platform's real. This is amazing. This is going to benefit windows. I can't help but think this would benefit chrome os even more, because this thing is more of a lightweight system, et cetera et cetera like this there's not a lot of legacy back end stuff you have to worry about.
52:02
Like I'm surprised they weren't doing anything and nothing happened last year when intel did their ifa announcements. I guess there are three things. Uh, in september they the first person that came on stage that wasn't from Intel was from what company guys? Do you remember Google to talk about their exclusive arrangement for the next year on or for whatever period of time, for the next gen of Chromebook Plus, whatever they were going to be on Intel Core Ultra, not on ARM? And I'm like, oh, that's interesting, Okay, but now, or a couple months ago, oh sorry.
52:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I pressed your button. I'm sorry. Okay, a couple months ago Pushed the wrong button.
52:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm sorry, a couple months ago, mediatek announced these what I would call Copilot plus PC slash Snapdragon X class CPUs, specifically said we're going to put these things in Chromebooks. And I'm like, here we go. This is going to be really interesting. So that one that Leo has is the first of those. This is to the Chromebook World what a Copilot Plus PC is to the laptop or Windows. Right. So it's got that MPU. There's not too much there yet, but they're going to be doing it.
53:06
16 gigs of RAM. Yeah yeah, those are solid specs.
53:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's only $750. It's not you know, no.
53:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So for a premium PC, a good premium Windows laptop, would be closer to $1,500. Right, sure, you can get a Chromebook for like $100 or something. If you want a piece of junk, you're just not going to like it. Yeah, you're not going to like it at all. But yeah, those specs, that level of components and so forth, it's a good price. And there's not a lot there. Yet Google does most of their device side ai first and phones because of the volume. But this is the beginning of the on-device stuff. So when you think about the co-pilot plus pc type capabilities, those are the things you want to look for. On chrome modes like they'll happen over time, but you know, through gemini or whatever- somebody's asking about battery life.
53:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I haven't tested it yet, I just got it, but they're claiming 18 hours. They're claiming massive battery life.
54:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it should be really good yeah.
54:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And fingerprint reader, which is kind of nice.
54:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
On a Chromebook oh.
54:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
God, I can't stand.
54:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, yes, I can't stand typing in pens, especially on Mac and Chrome OS, because it's six digits.
54:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm just saying oh no, you can put it, you can make it down to four, so back.
54:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Actually, you can set it up with a pixel, which is cool, yes so, right, with apple devices, you can unlock your mac or your phone, or I think your ipad too, maybe with your watch. Yeah, you can do that on the google side as well, right, so if you have a pixel watch or a samsung watch, whatever it is, um, you can do that kind of thing.
54:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's convenient because the the manual sign-in stuff is yeah, it's heading automatically, so I'm going to scan the qr code it's putting up on the screen on the phone and then uh, and if I'm not mistaken, leo, I think you get a year of gemini ai, you do and two terabytes of drive. Yep, it's good stuff it's a good deal yeah, I didn't get it for me. I got it for my daughter, who's a chromebook user. She doesn't, she refuses, to use a mac.
55:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
She's like samir samad no, but it's also impressive to be productive with yeah, oh, she writes, she writes books with it.
55:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, she's, it's really.
55:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
She got her master's degree with a chromebook most people who are like the it's fine the windows or mac. Most people who are like the Windows or Mac bigots are like what are you doing on there, Drawing crayon pictures your mommy can put on the refrigerator? It's a little more sophisticated than you think. I don't know.
55:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I will say I got a Chrome OS tablet that did not last the pandemic. The battery blew up on it and there were some workarounds In order to run Signal. I had run the linux host and, but there were workarounds I'm actually.
55:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can also use it, the pixel tablet, to set it up.
55:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, there you go um, I, the one little. Well, chrome os has not really exploded in use outside of schools or whatever, for some reason, but okay, um, what the problem?
55:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
what do people think of when they think of a of a chrome os device?
55:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
cheap, that's what they're right right yeah, maybe cheesy right yeah, well they were. They were horribly underpowered and terrible in the beginning, but they've gotten a lot better.
56:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah um, depending on the one, they're still horribly underpowered ones too.
56:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, oh yeah, no, if you want. If you want one that stinks, no problem, you can still get that.
56:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can get one right now, yeah.
56:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The problem for Chrome OS. Now, though, is iPadOS right, like all of a sudden. Ipados is awesome. That's why.
56:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Apple did it, I think.
56:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you want, like a device-like but also PC-like capability thing. I mean, I connect. So the thing I'm looking at here, which is, you know, it's kind of similar to what I have back home, is I have a in this case, a Thunderbolt dock, and then I'm using a laptop and I was using an external display like a big one. My wife's using that now, so I have a smaller external display and just before the show I did a second external display because I'm an idiot, and so I've got this thing arrayed here.
56:57
Whatever I plug my iPad into this, I'm like I wonder what will happen. You know what happens it works and it's like yikes. And you do have to go into settings and say I don't want the screen to be mirrored, I want it to be extended. But once you do that, I mean I can't get this mic to work and I can't get what was the other thing? Oh, the web, the external webcam. But the iPad is a terrific web camera. Most iPad guys are going to have AirPods or whatever. So who cares? But I mean I, I. This is like the uncomfortable reality that even I could get worked on this thing, and it's like other than the fact that I actually have to see windows to write about it, like I could in fact do everything I do. I have really good versions.
57:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You keep your ipad next to your windows pc and then it's perfect because you can look back and forth.
57:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And you can, you don't, you know it would be perfect, as if I could use it as an external display, which I can do with a mac and screw everything. I hate these stupid walled gardens, but okay, it's okay that's okay.
57:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, it's fine, we're all fine. I do use a usb monitor as an external display.
57:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have to say that like, yeah, I mean it's incredible that you can do that, but this this chromebook drives two 4k external displays right, so you can have a massive setup.
58:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's got a good camera with a shutter.
58:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is gonna be almost audio it depends on what you do right. So, on the chromebook, one of the ways you're limited is if for graphics editing, there's a web version of Chrome. I'm sorry of Adobe Photoshop, which you have to pay monthly for to get, but you can get it and that does work and it's pretty good. But the Photoshop that's kind of native to iPad. And then Affinity Photo too, which I have because I paid for it but I've never used it, is even better and that is rather incredible. It's not exactly the same. I mean to be fair, but the tool I use in Windows is on the iPad in many cases, but not on Chromebook. But it depends, right. I can use Clipchamp on Chromebook anywhere. It's a web app, right? Um, it just depends on the. It depends on what you're doing, right. But oh man, apple really threw a hand grenade in the room. When they do this, it's crazy, like I don't know. We'll see. I like chrome OS, but I don't know.
59:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's nice to have choice, I don't? I mean, I don't think they threw a hand grenade, as much as just give, give us some choice. This has a touch screen too, by the way. For the price, you're getting, in many ways, a very similar device to that iPad, I mean.
59:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I love this, but the apps is the thing right, yeah.
59:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And also the OLED screen is really nice. That's beautiful, yeah, it's light, it's two pounds.
59:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you know, I was just looking at that crystal tablet with, especially with its base. Then I was looking over at the uh, my polycom team's phone, which is just a source of hate and loathing for me. I'm thinking, you know, it would fit in the same spot. Yeah, it would be more versatile.
59:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It'll run the team's android client, which can't possibly be worse than the polycom one, which is cannot I'm sure it's updated more frequently anyway oh no, this thing's perpetually rebooting for something I don't know what the one thing it's not doing is trying to do things to make it easier for me to make a call right, I'm never going to do this on windows weekly because you guys are so particular about audio video quality, whatever, and would notice immediately. But I think sometime next week I'm just gonna plug the ipad and then do like a first ring daily show with brad and I bet he doesn't even notice. You know what I mean? Like I bet it just works.
01:00:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, when he got the first uh release to develop release of ipad os 26, did a whole this whole podcast on it. Because it now has background oh right, right exactly I, that's a, that's a.
01:00:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And he made that article available to everyone because that's actually really interesting yeah what's that called like? Five colors is?
01:00:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that six colors.
01:00:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Six of them now yeah, um, yeah, six, now sorry, um five fingers.
01:00:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Six colors, that's how you remember, yeah okay yeah, uh, I actually don't want to give this to abby. I'm kind of it's too late, though I've already promised yeah, promised, but this is a nice laptop I I'm very impressed. Now I have to power laptop or nice tablet, no, this is the laptop so this is the chromebook plus and I the pixel tablet. I'm sorry, I don't really recommend it. I've had it. I love it. I I bought it because I thought the dock thing was so cool.
01:01:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, slick.
01:01:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but the speaker doesn't play without a dock.
01:01:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it makes me crazy. I hate that. It should but it doesn't and it's like a. I think it might be 16 by 10, but when you flip it in portrait mode, it's like, and in the end, most of the time, I just want to speak to my Sonos anyway.
01:01:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, my sonos anyway. Yeah, yeah, the sonos app, oh I speak to my sonos all the time.
01:01:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm like I hate my honestly. All mine's showing is right now is the security cameras all the time.
01:01:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's all it is. Yeah, it's like a dashboard. Yeah, it's a dashboard. Yeah, um, okay, and then, just because there are probably still some lingering windows phone, in random news.
01:01:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is such a random bit you've I want a windows phone.
01:01:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are they bringing it back?
01:01:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, no, no so um you would have better luck making your iphone look like windows 95 than you would making any phone look or work like I can't make obsidian look like windows 95.
01:02:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I don't recommend it, but it's a hoot.
01:02:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I like having 16 colors, it's fine. Um, so the history of this I, there's a part of this I actually didn't know, but uh, hmd was a company formed of former Nokia employees that wanted to bring back the phones. So when Microsoft dumped all that stuff, um, they were like all right, we're gonna do this again, we're gonna bring them back, right, and of course, it's android phones, right. And uh, they started in china, then they went to europe, the rest of the world. They came to the united states through verizon and I think I want to say t-mobile. You know, their phones were okay. Um, I like the vibe of the company, like hmd stands for human mobile devices, like cool, and if you go and read like all their, you know rah, rah, rah, rah, rah stuff. It's kind of fun. They brought back the little Nokia candy bar phones, right, those little fun little phones from all the movies in the late 90s and early 2000s Running the same OS as before too. Right, they actually got that. That's pretty cool.
01:03:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but I got to say yeah, but because of the tariffs.
01:03:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nokia has announced that the hmd which makes them yeah, that's the, that's the, that's the point, it's uh sadly if you live in the united states. Uh, these were hard to find to begin with. Now they are not possible to find, so there's some left in amazon and things like that, but they they're exiting the us market quick, although maybe that's not a good idea so you know I I can't speak for everyone, but I I in the United States other than those candy bar phones for like 10 seconds 20 years ago.
01:03:41
They weren't really much of a presence in the United States. So I used to travel to Europe a lot and I was always struck by Nokia advertising everywhere like giant billboards, like a building size billboards, like they were everywhere. They were the biggest thing in the world. So when this company announced that under under steve vanilla, that they're going to adopt windows phone so this probably was 2011 somewhere in there um, I, this was the biggest thing in the world and what they did to support windows phone was incredible across uh, their first well for them, first party apps, back-end services and hardware, peripherals right, they had all the fun little speakers and the color cases and all that. They were awesome. They just brought this whole kind of legitimacy to Windows Phone for about 15 seconds, because it didn't last long and they never recovered and Microsoft had to buy them, or essentially buy them to save Windows Phone, and then they ended up killing it anyway and we all know how that went.
01:04:39
So this is like getting stabbed in the back after you've recovered from being stabbed in the back, I guess, depending on how you look at it. But I appreciate that HMD tried to do this. They're still around. I mean, if you live in Europe you can. I'm sure they'll still have new phones or whatever. Maybe they're great, I have no idea. But um, not here, not in the united states, so no sorry sigh.
01:05:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I actually owned quite a few nokia phones I really like them.
01:05:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think I owned I almost owned every single one of the windows phones. Anyway, yeah, I loved the windows.
01:05:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know if I've ever told you this story. It was from the early 90s. Well, for the late 90s I had one of the Nokia candy bars, when text messaging was still relatively new and like 25 cents each or 75 cents each.
01:05:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It came in a cereal box.
01:05:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and the local telco gave us an API to be able to send text messages, so I was trying to use it. I wanted to stop carrying a pager, right, so we built this little interface for certain classes of our message that would normally trigger a pager message to send a text message instead to a tester on my phone first, anyway, little bug, just a little bug.
01:06:02
Little bug I sent I, I ran it, it sent me a text message and then back then it literally pop up and say message, and you would click on it and it would pull in the one message and then you had the you could delete it.
01:06:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I delete it and it goes oh, message and I pull it up and it's the same message and I delete it.
01:06:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I go back and look in the code, it's like 32,767 messages. Got to read them one at a time. So I call tech support for the telco. I get tier one. He has no idea what I'm talking about, but I've scared him enough. He kicks me up to tier two. Tier two flips around with me for a while. We're talking APIs and so forth. They're all vaguely confused. It's not in the book, and so on. He finally pushes me to tier three. I've been on the phone for half an hour now. Right, I get to tier three and he goes hi and he says and you can hear it, he goes. Oh, it's you.
01:06:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He knew all about it.
01:07:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You were responsible for 99% of the text messages.
01:07:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He had been staring at this number and going what am I going to do about this? So I'm like, okay, what do you want to do? And he's like I'm going to delete them all from my end. You're going to have to pull up the next one. Every one you've read, read, you have to pay for, but the rest are gone. Uh, we'll go.
01:07:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Goodness, okay, because you would have had to pay for those do it again.
01:07:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, they charged you at the point you refetched each, each text. So yeah, that's a lot of us when you had to pay for texts yeah, but the solution and the solution there was no interface controls or anything like that, right, so it was literally be more careful next time. That was just yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You knew you got the right guy when he's immediately angry with you tuesday.
01:07:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I cannot type on a phone like to save my life. No, I type amazingly quickly on a regular keyboard. What I got is really stupid.
01:07:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I saw, type a lot of the reading into it thing, you know whatever.
01:07:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But in the early days, like on those phones, and then, um, like the first flip phones, which was just a numeric keypad there's a name for this but you could type on it. You know one, two, three, three, so type words, right. So there was no chance I was ever going to learn this. I had a hard enough time going from like keyboard and mouse to play video games to a controller. Like I can't do these things, geez, I can't even use my hands correctly. So I don't think you would mind me now saying who this was, but we were at Build 2003. That's a long ago and I had one of those little candy bar things there's no way I was ever typing a message on this.
01:08:35
And brian livingston, who I was working on, um, what became windows vista secrets? Uh, sent me this text. I swear to god, it was 500 words and it was like all right. So I'm gonna go to this, I'm going to this meeting, we're gonna do this, we should meet at lunch. And then blah, blah, blah and it went to a whole thing and at the bottom he goes is this okay?
01:08:51
and I'm like k and it was the first text message I ever sent was the letter k nice and like I. I just you know I just couldn't.
01:09:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just couldn't do it. Arguably, it's also the perfect text message yeah, well, it answered the question.
01:09:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I guess it's funny that you should say that, because I just read a study that said it is the most hated text message.
01:09:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, okay well, yes, I mean it's. It feels dismissive, but in that era at least, you could argue that nobody had been.
01:09:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I send you one letter.
01:09:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They didn't know he was yet he was living on the bleeding edge in that sense. I mean, I, I don't know that is so funny.
01:09:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, okay, all right, okay, all right, okay, let's take a break and when we come back, more of this nonsense called yes, yep, windows weekend weekly. Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. Actually, we're going to talk about Microsoft 365 and AI, but first a word from our sponsor. The wonderful folks at Bitwarden love the, the Bitwarden and they love you. You know what Bitwarden exists to make your life better. It really does. That's why they're open source. That's why you know they do so much to protect you.
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It's really easy to move to Bitwarden. If you're already using another password manager, good for you, but you really ought to try Bitwarden. It's the best. Their setup only takes a few minutes. They can import easily from most password management solutions. I moved over in just a matter of minutes. Steve did the same thing. Bitwarden's open source code can be inspected by anyone. I think that's really important. It's regularly audited by third-party experts too, and they meet it by third-party experts too, and they meet SOC2, type 2, gdpr, hipaa, ccpa. They're compliant. They're also ISO 27001, 2002 certified. That means they adhere to the highest security standards. Your data is safe with Bitwarden and because it's end-to-end encrypted, even Bitwarden can't see what's in your vault. It's yours and yours alone. Get started today with Bitwarden's free trial of a teams or enterprise plan, or get started for free across all devices as an individual user at bit wardencom slash twit. That's bit wardencom slash twit. Thank you, bit warden, for all you do for us and for supporting windows weekly with paul and richard happy user huh, so are you?
01:15:00
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01:15:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
With regards to the k thing, I I don't know why. I just thought well, I do know why, actually, but whatever, we were sitting at a bar, my wife and I, and we met this couple and the guy's name was q. I'm like q no, really I'm like you're kidding me I looked at his wife and I said so what's your name, r? And she goes no, my name is k and I'm like I can't talk to you two people, I can't you meet such interesting people.
01:15:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't do it so good, I can't do it.
01:15:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's crazy city yep, k, q, k and q. Wow, her name was really k, but his name was something else it was k-a-y, it was a long name with a. Q in the beginning. That's pretty funny Nice.
01:15:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, okay.
01:16:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, since we're going to talk about this every week now, forever Microsoft layoffs. So a lot of questions about the rationale, the cause, et cetera, et cetera. Brad Smith, microsoft president, the guy who got them out of all their antitrust problems back in the early 2000s, right, helped push through the Xbox sorry, the Activision Blizzard acquisition is at a Microsoft event in Redmond to talk about an initiative called Elevate that nobody cares about but is now in front of the press. So, of course, all they want to talk about is the layoffs. So I'm sure he had some questions about the Elevate event. I don't know, I wasn't there, but somebody asked if AI was a predominant factor in the layoffs and he said that AI efficiency gains were not. Oh well, that's a relief that AI productivity boosts somehow led to this. He said no, that's not what happened.
01:17:05
But then in a follow-up interview with Todd Bishop at GeekWire, he did say I'll just try to quote this as close as possible because I want to use his words that it was the capital expense spending of the past years that raised pressures internally to rein in operating costs, those costs that were more about the number of employees than anything else. So Microsoft's CapEx spending, as we call that is going to be at least $80 billion. The most recently concluded year, we don't know. End of this month we'll get the exact number Over $20 billion a quarter. Rounding up, I'm going to say 100% of those expenses are related to AI, right, because they're building out this infrastructure. It's probably 99 something percent, whatever it is, but most it's AI.
01:17:55
So actually AI is to blame for the layoffs and if you want to look at it from that perspective, in the sense that because they're operating expenses have grown so much because they're investing so much in AI infrastructure that to cut costs in that area the number of employees is the big bucket a way to save money there. I would just say, maybe don't spend as much on AI, but I'm a simple man, so whatever I mean, look, I think it's fair to say Microsoft is perhaps overly big from an employee account perspective, like a lot. They're not alone in this, by the way. You'll see a lot of stories about this from other tech companies, but over the years they've just added levels of management between the top and the bottom, and it's a little you know a little talk.
01:18:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The problem I got with this is it's 15 000 people. Even you're paying them 200 grand each, and you're not right, it's three billion dollars. It's not enough money.
01:18:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I'm not disagreeing, um, because I think I don't know if you and I, independently or we did some show. We kind of talked through the math of this. There isn't a straight one-to-one argument. You could make cost, right. The only thing I would say to that and I'm not a money guy is just that Microsoft, at least until last quarter not the quarter we don't know about the last quarter we got a report for, so the first calendar quarter of 2025, calendar year 2025, this might not have been true, but before that they were essentially paying for that infrastructure cost that 20 billion plus with, I'm going to say, cash it's not really cash, but in other words, it came right out of. They had enough profit to pay for it and not notice it, like they didn't have to take money from anything to make that work.
01:19:42
I think that's starting not to be the case and this is one of the many reasons I'm really curious about what happened in this most recent quarter. But those costs are a one-time thing, right? Like once you've spent $20 billion in one quarter. It's not a subscription, right? I mean you can stop. Maybe not fully, because whatever there's, obviously with infrastructure there are ongoing costs, but I mean, I think the problem with employees and this is a little simplistic is that they are an ongoing cost, if that makes sense, and then they're an enduring cost in the sense of health insurance benefits and benefits and all that stuff. Right, so right. I'm not disagreeing, I mean, I'm actually, I'm positive, you're correct, but I, I but I'm not a, I'm not, I'm not the um, what do you call it? The uh, cfo of microsoft, like I don't have a full understanding of their expenses or whatever. Um, they're probably a little more complicated than mine.
01:20:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So without a doubt they're not, and I mean I do have a couple of other insights. One is that they changed HR leaders in March. Yeah, and by all accounts, this new HR leader, amy Coleman, is much more of a numbers person. So there's been a lot of looking at the organization from. You know, do managers have enough direct reports, all of that sort of stuff? And so they've been going after that.
01:21:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
By the way, I mean sorry to interrupt, but that might be tied to what we just talked about, in a sense Like when you remove layers of management, so you've taken people out of the equation, you've laid them off, let's say, right, so there's a savings associated with that. Wall Street loves it, whatever. So there are these kind of soft benefits. I guess the Microsoft stock price went up because of whatever they're doing and great, we paid for our layoffs or whatever. That's not how it works, but whatever. When you remove layers of management, when you remove friction between a decision and an action in an organization inside of Microsoft, there are also cost benefits. I guess, if that makes sense, it's not just the expense of the employees for holding up the process or whatever. You're able to move more agilely and make things happen more quickly and there might be financial benefits to that as well. Maybe he says not being a money guy.
01:22:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, I'm with you and I don't. I don't disagree on that and that they're definitely doing that. You're also seeing Satya seems to have a real fixation on small teams get things done more than the big teams. So there's also been a wave of these quote unquote little tiger teams six to eight people pulled from their regular workflow to work on a project, and that must be wonderful for those people.
01:22:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
In a way, right, you get out from under the infrastructure of the company, which is humongous, and you get to act like you're in a little startup, you know, um they're, they're probably benefit just for the individuals, I mean alone but yeah, if that's true, is it also bumped into someone who got laid off in march, got rehired into a new role before her time period ended and got laid off again in may.
01:22:55
Yes, and then got rehired again, wow uh, yeah, I wonder if it would have been less expensive for the company just to leave that one alone. You know, yeah, it's kind of hard to say, but it's crazy.
01:23:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It is a little nuts, uh, and I do think a lot of the. In some ways, I'm also wondering I would be interested to see the stats just around how many people have actually gotten pulled back in, because some of this is putting pressure on managers by moving people off of them and literally eliminating their role. Even those people are valuable and if they hustle, can come back in.
01:23:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know there's a lot of 60 day earnings going on there's also the people who basically consult with microsoft after being laid off and are still in that way involved with the company, and yeah and apparently they're bashing a bunch of that apart too.
01:23:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You can't have all contractors right, so there does seem to be. I do get the sense that this new hr leadership is, uh, shaking things up across the board. Okay, um, but I'm not going to disagree. I do think that the way they're going about it has been unusually cruel and it's very demoralizing.
01:24:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right, yeah, very poorly done. I whatever anyone thinks about any of this stuff. The the way they've handled this is poor and it this is not an isolated thing. This has been going on since they finalized the acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which isn't 100% tied to that, but just timing-wise.
01:24:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's all post-pandemic, post-pandemic behavior. It's changed. The way they do this and I think I sent you the link to that article about the pact has changed.
01:24:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, the implicit understanding, understanding as a microsoft employee. This is the situation, this is what you can rely on.
01:24:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's gone and that creates a great uncertainty. You'd get a gold watch after 50 years.
01:24:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Those days are long gone, well so my by the way, this dates back literally to the beginning of this company was look, look, we're not going to pay you as much, maybe, but for a period of time. Stock options big thing, obviously through the 90s that kind of slowed down at one point. But the overall benefits package and then you do own, you know you do get stock grants and so forth, that's big. But was this in that article too? There's a problem with Microsoft stock prices so high that it's actually expensive for the company to do this now. And it's a problem for those employees that maybe would have left, naturally, but are like I mean, this thing went up a thousand percent this year. Why don't I just hang around and do nothing for a year? You know there's a whole cascading series of effects, or?
01:25:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
whatever. That are kind of Well, and one of the arguments for the pact was the 10 years of bombers time where the stock price did not move, meant, you know, we had to be the sort of kinder gentler thing. But now that the price is on the move, satcha could go out into that whole. You've got to be a high performer or you're out kind of mindset and and push and push and have higher expectations on your employees. His transformation to the dark side is complete. I have to agree with you actually. Yeah, no, I think exactly that's what's happening. He finally has a thing. He's got ai in his teeth. This is his win, this is his legacy, and if he has to kill people along the way, get ready to die.
01:26:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yep, it's going to be a lot of collateral damage here, but I I mean again very high level, because it's me speaking here.
01:26:24
But when I think about the over hiring that occurred during the pandemic, which I keep saying, I keep thinking too, should have been understood to be temporary right Like this isn't going to last forever.
01:26:36
You know, people aren't going to be playing games to the level they did before, whatever I almost.
01:26:42
At first, the layoffs and whatever that were occurring across the industry seemed vaguely commensurate, but I feel like now they're actually cutting a lot deeper and I think it's tied to what you said earlier, this new way like someone looking at this with fresh eyes from a different perspective, because when people come into companies at that level, they impact in ways that we don't really think about too much right, as individuals or fans of the company, if that's what you are but, and that you know, microsoft maybe emerges on the other side of this as a it's never going to be small, right, but a smaller company.
01:27:17
As a, it's never going to be small right, but a smaller company, not on that same trajectory of growth. Employee ranks wise, but hopefully nimbler right and faster moving, whatever, and I do think AI is going to play a role in this more directly, in the sense that AI already is being used in the hiring process at Microsoft, for example. They don't really talk about that too much, but it will be used in decision making across the board well, and there's been a joke that these, these firings have been so random.
01:27:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Maybe ai is doing it, but that may not be a joke. I do feel like hallucinations. Yeah, yeah, but I also get that that this new hr lead is using more empirical data of presumed optimal management structures to make changes did they?
01:27:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
where did this person?
01:27:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
come from, do you remember or no? She was hired, she was brought, she was promoted. Kathleen hogan headed the job since satcha became ceo. So the, the old hr lead, moved as soon as satch took charge. So hogan had it from literally when satcha started. And this is the first change and it makes sense because we just changed satchas. I guess we need to change hr just yeah, we did.
01:28:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, there was a late night kidnapping.
01:28:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Uh, he looks just like the original 10 years on, dark satchas arrived and he needs a day like a dark hr leader. Oh boy, okay, all right, but the and the goal here is that he believes he needs to compete aggressively. Like you said, the pact has been broken. We're now a leading tech company and you will be leading employees. The beatings will continue until morale improves.
01:28:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, that's an actual quote from a memo that he sent out. So it's good, yep, so that's not the only drama. This week, open AI everyone's favorite company tried to acquire or was going, was, in early May, going to acquire a company called Windsurf, and I think for four was it 4 billion or $3 billion, somewhere in there, something like that. Was it 4 billion or $3 billion, somewhere in there, something like that? Windsurf makes a code editor, an AI code editor, so it's a competitor for GitHub Copilot right, a competitor to cursor or whatever. This is one of the pieces of that puzzle that OpenAI does not have in-house. So they were going to acquire this company and get their little code editor right. Problem is, microsoft owns 49% of open AI, I guess. Or right for now, for now, and that's a. That's definitely shifting sands, but they also have this sort of right of refusal to these kinds of deals.
01:29:50
And the windsurf guy there were two deals that open a was open I was trying to make recently. One went through and one did not, both of which had to the Windsurf guy. There were two deals that OpenAI was trying to make recently. One went through and one did not, both of which had to go to Microsoft. One was Johnny Ive's company, right, I think, which is IO. Microsoft okayed that one because Microsoft is never going to, in their words, make a consumer AI device. Yeah.
01:30:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So they don't Well and they can if they want. It's just not going to go well. History is very clear on this.
01:30:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, so they were upfront about that. We're not doing it, okay, no problem. Windsurf the guys from Windsurf had issues with their IP being given to Microsoft or having that company have any insight into the way they do things, and what they wanted was an exception where they could be part of OpenAI, do their thing and never have that go back to Microsoft. For that to happen, microsoft has to approve that and Microsoft said okay, no, but they said no, so, and they can do that. So the little exclusivity period that they have between the two companies, where it was or wasn't going to happen, expired. The second it expired, google hired their CEO, one of their co-founders and some of their top R&D staff and then paid I think it was 2.4 billion for a non-exclusive license to the Windsurf technology.
01:31:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They basically hollowed out the company.
01:31:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep. Now if you think about the other 99% of the people who are working at Windsurf and we probably don't think about them at all, but if we did for one second what we would realize is they all just got screwed, because if OpenAI purchased them, they would all as stakeholders, essentially would have financially benefited announced this.
01:31:36
They were doing this and I think it was two days later. A company I had to, I sort of vaguely understood, existed cognition, which makes AI agents and does, is in this space, purchased windsurf. We don't know the number, but one of the points they made was we're going to make sure all of our employees benefit from this financially, because they didn't from the Google thing, and their shares will vest more quickly now. So this, this, these things were definitely happening together. It's just that they were announced a couple of days apart. Um, I didn't consider the the fate of the typical windsurf employee when the google thing happened. It was just like this only happened because microsoft was like, yeah, screw you, you're not doing that. You know you, this would compete with github copilot like we don't.
01:32:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, you also put yourself in an impossible situation. Trying to protect ip like that, like it will fail. If we say yes, it will fail, we might as well say no yeah or look regardless of the way these things are created.
01:32:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
if you look at anything that google has done in gemini, if you look at anything that open ai has done with chat, gpt, there is that corresponding thing in Copilot just every time. So, oh, you have a memory thing? Oh, we have a memory thing now. Oh, you have a notebook thing? Oh, we have a notebook thing now. Oh, you want to make audio pocket? Oh, we can do it. We can make audio pocket Like this is the world we're in, right. So, as AI is happening, what you call this, it's like you have a bullet list of features of your product and some of them are those things that just are to answer the complaint.
01:33:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Checklist items.
01:33:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you want that for Copilot. You don't want a big customer of yours to go to chat GPT because they have that one feature that your employees really want and Copilot doesn't do it. So, yes, if whatever Windsurf does that's unique in this space that maybe GitHub, copilot doesn't do, microsoft would do it. And then, of course, windsurf would be like what the heck guys, you told us we weren't sharing IP and it's like, oh, they reverse engineered it or something. They're Microsoft, I don't know. So, yeah, huge problem. Anyway, not going to happen. So I also feel like this we're careening toward this future where open AI and Microsoft openly and the whole thing just falls apart.
01:33:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, they have to fall. You knew this was inevitable, but I feel like it's escalating, right. No, no, you're watching it happen, yeah.
01:33:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is.
01:33:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I keep comparing it to a- the tide is going out, the tsunami is coming, yeah, yeah.
01:33:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is. I keep comparing it to a the tide is going out, the tsunami is coming. Yeah, I compare it to relationships. So it's like we're going to stick with this until the kids are out of college and we're splitting up after that. You know like they can't stand each other. They sleep in separate bedrooms. Now you know like they're really upset with each other and they make it's like, oh God, I could kill him. I can't stand the sound of him chewing, can you?
01:34:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
eat more quietly, please.
01:34:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like can you eat in the other room or something? I don't want to look at you. I'm trying to digest food over here. So yeah, tied to that, openai was recently you know what was it? Perplexity last week announced and released, I guess, for some people who pay $200 a month a browser, 200 bucks a month, a browser Comet, I think it was called, is called, and OpenAI is doing the role of Microsoft in the 90s. They're like, hey, we're working on a web browser too.
01:34:43
And smart, because that may or may not have written one line of code for all I know, but what I do know is that if they came up with this thing today, it would instantly have millions, if not tens or hundreds of millions, of users. And the reason is ChatGPT is such a good brand and is so successful, and the rationale for this is smart. It's exactly the same rationale for Google making Chrome back in the day, which was in whatever year that was 2010 or whatever. We cannot trust the companies that make these things to make them so that our web services, our websites or whatever, work as efficiently, as fast as possible. We have to do that work ourselves.
01:35:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We have to and have the same priority. Google's always going to optimize for Gemini, microsoft's always going to optimize for Copilot, and it's just a browser. It ain't that hard. What you've got is the real problem, which is a brand that people care about.
01:35:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Based on my difficulty making a simple text editor, I might disagree with you. But okay, fine Browser, whatever, but yes, I presume they'll use Chromium, right?
01:35:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's the logical thing to do. It is an open source. It would be hilarious, I hope.
01:35:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's the logical thing to do. Man, it's beautiful. So Google deserves open AI in the same way that Microsoft deserved Google. It's like this company comes out of nowhere, kicks you in the nuts, laughs and then releases a version of everything that you make. And there was this period of time we kind of forget this because I used to always write it from this perspective I don't remember exactly but 2005 to maybe 2015, where Google was just coming up with stuff that Microsoft did, like Google Workspace, as we call it now. Google Docs was like oh, they have a word processor, okay, we have one too. Now you know like they would just do the. You know they would do the same thing. They approached it from their kind of Google-y, you know, web-based perspective.
01:36:31
But that's what makes this stuff so fascinating. Like the web browser. You know we're getting a handle on what these things might be like. Oh man, what was the? I heard a really good oh crud. I can't think of this example. I'll get to it in a second, but a couple of days after this story about the web browser, this had actually happened back in late June. It somehow had escaped my attention. Turns out, openai is also working on what's described as, but is not really an Office productivity suite. Nice, it's like are you trying to antagonize Microsoft? I mean, do you like if you, is there something that they dominate? Can you think of one thing You're going to do that?
01:37:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, next you'll be building an operating system.
01:37:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean, if you think about Google Doc docs, from day one it was recognizably a word processor to toolbar and menus and text formatting and all that stuff that ran in a browser. But it ran in a browser. That was the Google thing. Now you're not going to see a download. Well, maybe you are, I don't know. This is more described as features that will be added to ChatGPT. There are some building blocks in there right now Canvas and projects. Data storage is kind of a problem, Like there are enterprise customers that want to do more with ChatGPT but they don't offer their own data storage service. Right, they have to go through whatever Microsoft probably. So this will be an open AI approach to office productivity, not a word processor.
01:38:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And there's a logic to this. I mean, irrespective of the antipathy and competitiveness, there's two ways to address a revolution. You either take the existing products and AI-ify them, or you take the AI and you productize it. Richard.
01:38:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I swear to God, if we were sitting together, I would hug you right now, because 100% no seriously.
01:38:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm pretty sure there's already an AI image of this shot of us hugging you are literally channeling my brain.
01:38:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So there you go. Yes, literally, the name Copilot means two things side by side. The other thing, the one thing is the legacy app, the thing, the word processor that dates back to the 1980s, and art in this case, um, and one of the ways you can add ai to it, because you know, I'm not going to rewrite it from scratch. You're going to have this thing on the side and interact. You can build it into the product, but it's still a thing on the side, right, they're not. It's not ai first or ai native, it's a co-pilot, but it's still a thing on the side. Right, it's not AI first or AI native, it's a co-pilot. But that's not how OpenAI thinks of things, they're just AI. We're not going to build a word processor. And so one of the great examples that's just not great because I came up with it, just because it's simple and it's obvious is that thing I talk about where every January, I have to make this chart in Excel which I never use and I always forget how to use it, and I spend all this time and sometimes I can't get the colors right and I'm like screw it. And this was the type of example I saw in one of the articles about this chat GPT office productivity stuff, which was the CEO of a CTO or someone, a CFO, whatever it was of some company heavily engaged with ChatGPT. You said, look, I had to become an Excel master and we have all this data and you crunch the numbers and what I want to do is show a chart to people with the data there for those that want to see it. But really, what I'm looking at is this chart that says this is why we got to do the thing we're going to do. So this would take me days. But now I just go to chad gpt and I say make me a chart that da, da, da da, whatever the thing is, because it's grounded in their data. Now, yeah, and it just happens. So I don't like.
01:40:11
In my case, I would. I did, I would relearn this one thing in Excel like I'm flowers for Algernon every January. Or I could go to the thing and say just do it. And it doesn't have to. I don't even. Not only do I not have to master Excel, not only do I not have to use the thing sitting next to Excel to make Excel do this thing, it just does it itself. You're only using ChatGPT. Guess who wants that, you know open.
01:40:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
AI. So it's, I mean. But you get to the logical reality, which was you never wanted to make a spreadsheet, you wanted to derive an answer Exactly Leadership needed, exactly Right.
01:40:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is why, like there have been little steps like this in personal technology that kind of led us here. In a way, like the traditional view of like productivity apps is you have this, you run this app, you create a document, you save it to some disk, yeah, you back it up and manage it, you do all this stuff. You know, the ipad sort of came along and was like well, maybe there are versions of this where you don't have, uh uh, documents right. Onenote worked this way from 2002, whatever year that came out. Notion works this way. There's probably a file somewhere, but this thing is sort of documentless. You know, and I think, if you, I mean it's open AI, so it's going to be a much broader world. But these people and these things are coming from a different angle entirely and it's going to be confusing to people like me who are kind of traditional and been doing this for a long time and have their own certain way of doing things or whatever. Microsoft isn't going to do this.
01:41:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, the funny thing is this is what Gates wrote about in the Road Ahead. He always hated the fact that there was a separate app for documents, a separate app for spreadsheets and so forth. Like, just do the work. And here we are looking at a potential path to just do the work.
01:42:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Microsoft works used to be that one integrated suite where it had all those functions together and apple did it too. Claris works long exactly open doc focused.
01:42:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean this is the holy grail has been forever. Why?
01:42:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
has it never happened.
01:42:16
Because change is hard. It's hard to do. Yep, okay. So this August, about a month and a half from now, will be the 30th anniversary of Windows 95.
01:42:27
Everyone remembers Windows 95 for different reasons, but we talked about this perfect nexus of timing and all this stuff. Right, it was the big explosion of GUI computing, the big explosion of PC buying. It was our initial step into the internet, first with Netscape or whatever. But there were a lot of firsts and things going on there. But there were a lot of things we all forget. And there are things that have continued through the years, like the start menu and the taskbar and blah, blah, blah, whatever. But there were some UI things in there, ux things, whatever you want to call them that came and went and are gone and you probably most of you forget this. So the big one was that this UI was described as a document centric interface, the traditional process of what I just described.
01:43:15
We all do this every day. You sit in front of your computer and I'm like I need to write something. So I'm like, okay, I use Microsoft Word for that. So you're like, okay, start menu. There it is, there's, the icon is blue, I remember that and you click on it and then you maybe you open or create a new whatever.
01:43:33
So they were trying to doing into it with windows 95 and the idea there was that you would work, instead of thinking of the app, you would just think of the thing you were going to do, which was writing something, and you could just start a new document and it would provide you with the toolbars, depending on what you were doing that you needed. So if you were writing texts and stuff, you'd get the word toolbars right. Word uh 90 or office 95 had that, I don't even remember the name of it. But there was this thing where you could open an excel spreadsheet inside of word and you would get the excel toolbars in word and then when you went out back into the text, you'd get back and it was a compound document or whatever they call that stuff.
01:44:06
That stuff did not fly like people hated it. It was sophisticated, it was all based on uh olay original com, probably by that point, whatever. But um, it's just, it's. Sometimes these things are like arc is like this to a minor degree. It's like too much of a, it's like ugh, like most people, like I can't do this.
01:44:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's hard to change in the metaphor I have a workflow.
01:44:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know I'm used to doing things a certain way, so microsoft that has a market to protect is never going to come up with this thing I was just describing. They can't do this. They tried it like in a small way with document-centric ui and windows 95 failed. They tried the people-centric thing with windows phone and elsewhere. You know you're the center of everything. You know they talk about this all the time. It's a good idea, but it doesn't work.
01:44:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
My argument would be this is why the layoffs, this is why the chaos inside of the company, because satchatch is trying to find a way for Microsoft to do that.
01:44:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
To actually do those things, right, right. So maybe it needs the right people. In some ways, the people who have been there the longest are the worst to oversee this work, because they'll never be able to. They'll be like, no, I don't understand. What do you mean? I still deal with people to this day.
01:45:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Who are?
01:45:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so Microsoft and you're not wrong about the stock price.
01:45:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I remember years ago talking to someone about how are we going to evolve Windows? It's like listen, dude, there's several thousand people here that have been here for more than 30 years and, unless they have eight wives and a cocaine habit, they don't need the money. How do you persuade them to do anything Exactly?
01:45:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can't. They can't even agree on the drop shadow on a dialogue box. Like, exactly, I can't. They can't even agree on the drop shadow on a dialogue box. Like I you know, yeah, you want them to do what with AI? There's no way. Yeah, you need new blood for this. I mean, this is and this is look. Whatever any I'm, I can't say I'm positive about open AI in any way. But whatever anyone thinks about this company, just like Google did 20 years ago, whatever they now are approaching our world from their perspective and it's different, it's weird, it feels weird. It's not the way we do things. Yeah and uh, sometimes they'll have a win, sometimes they won't. But, um, expecting. Look we're. We're navel gazing over where their apple can handle ai and apple intelligence and all they're trying to do is add features to all the apps they already have, like they're not even they're not coming up with like an ai suite of ai first, anything they they're just. They just have their platforms they're trying to add. They can't even do that which?
01:46:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
like well, they can do that. That's not really what the issue was. It was they were trying to add it to siri, yeah, and that siri didn't like it math is hard it could never get to work. But no, they. They're in fact in. All these new os's apples put it's nice, putting intelligence in. They have an api for developers to put it into their. Yeah, well, okay, but I think they're doing it the right way, which is just simply a thin layer so, all right, um, uh, what did I?
01:46:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm reviewing a samsung phone, so one of the things I I'll publish it after the show, actually, but one of the things I write in there is that the way they're doing ai on samsung phones, there's all these problems with samsung with all their bloatware, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But it's like apple, like they're doing it the right way, like, in other words, but it's also the old way, right? I?
01:47:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it is the old way you're you're using. That's the irony of this. You're like I want to send a text message to richard I gotta think about this for a second.
01:47:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Richard and I actually use. We don't use text, we use whatsapp. So I gotta go okay, green icon or text, I'm gonna find rich in there. I start typing the system can. Whatsapp will have their garbage, but the system, whatever it is, samsung, android, if it's on apple, apple will have their little writing tools, things that are built in. That's the right place for that to be right.
01:47:37
What I'm saying is like this is the. This is the next level up. It's like actually five levels up, where this open ai strips and says text message up no, no, you're chatting with this thing and you tell. You say I want, I want to tell richard happy birthday, because it's richard's birthday, by the way, today. Happy birthday, richard, happy. And it will be like great and it will just do it. You know what I mean. I don't have to know what the app is. I don't have to think about the app. I don't have to think about a document, I just ask it to do the thing and it does the thing. That's the goal. So it's a completely different perspective and it's like even it makes me a little nervous, like I don't like it, you know.
01:48:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, the funny thing I just read a a kind of an exit blog post from an open AI guy. I've been there for a year and a half, loved it, and one of the things he said I found very interesting was everybody at open AI was convinced that the interface for AI should be a chat bot. Yeah, and I. You know, that's not what I'm looking for. I mean, I use them Correct, but honestly I want search like perplexity, so I could type in or research it's all text-based. Or I want these little tools built into my apps and Apple can do both of those.
01:48:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The search is a little trickier, so what you're describing sorry to interrupt, but real quick, at a high level is orchestration Like what you're asking for. Is that's right? I have a question or a thing I'm trying to accomplish. You do the thing to make that happen.
01:49:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't want a persona, and that's what. That's what chat GPT has ended up focusing on, which is weird, so there was a oh boy, where was this?
01:49:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a good long form article about that new DIA browser somewhere and some mainstream publication. They talked to the guys from the company. Yeah, I just read it. I know it's okay, so then you know what I'm saying. So, yes, it is doing internally what I've been talking about for the past year and a half because the times that mentioned it, the washington post, something like that yeah, it's definitely one of those.
01:49:29
And they were like well, how does this work? Like, what model are you using? And they were like, oh no, we're using multiple models. What we're doing is we're evaluating every request you make and then we're doing the right thing with it. I'm like, oh, you're orchestrating it Exactly. Right now. We live in a world where you open up a copilot to some degree, but definitely Gemini and a chat GPT. You as an individual are choosing a model from a drop down. What are you talking about? Like that is a crazy thing to ask an individual do to do. Um, it's a little bit like I want to format a disk to make that windows 10 or 11 install media, it's like, and then you get a choice like x, fat and tv yeah, I make a decision that'll affect everything going forward, that you don't have any information to make a decision about chat gbt.
01:50:14
I need windows 11 install media. Here's my disk. It just does it.
01:50:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm, by the way, just and just do it. Don't even tell me how.
01:50:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Today I'm just, but I'm. But. This is an example of who cares how it works right. Just do it the right way and that's orchestration and that's or or what sometimes they call mcp or agentic ai these are all, but this is all essentially orchestration, in other words, you give it a.
01:50:39
Here's the thing I want. Whatever it is, it could be a I want to know the name of the capital of Maine. Simple, that's an answer, but sometimes it's more complex. It's one of those agent things where it's actually multi-agent and it's doing all this stuff on your behalf and all this stuff on your behalf, but it's like I'm not like a general on the field, like all right, I want you to ride your horse over there and go around the corner. Okay, I want you to take the AI. What I say is win the war Right, and then the AI does the stuff Right. So this is where we're heading.
01:51:09
This is why there are so few details about this office productivity thing. It's essentially a set of features that will be added to chat, GPT, right. So you know we have to speculate a little bit here. But the one thing I feel really strongly about is that they will approach it the way they've approached everything, because that's what they are. They. This is the world it's not going to be. Here's an app with a toolbar and you save documents and you worry about where it goes, and it's up to you to back it up, and maybe microsoft makes you sync it to the cloud? No, it's not going to be any of that. I'm not saying it's going to be better, we'll see but it probably won't be right. I mean probably, um, but it's going to be different. I can promise you that. So this is fascinating.
01:51:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me take a little break before we go on. You're watching windows weekly with paul thurott who is waxing philosophical. Today he is, I know, I don't know what's going on, the philosophical paul and I crawl under the desk again.
01:52:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'll be better, I'll be okay, I'll be okay richard campbell is also here.
01:52:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're gonna get more in just a minute for the xbox segments coming up, microsoft 365, more ai news than you could shake a stick at. But first I want to tell you about our sponsor, us cloud, the number one microsoft unified support replacement. We've been talking for a few months about us cloud. Now they are the global leader in third-party microsoft support for enterprises, now supporting 50 of the Fortune 500. And there's a good reason for it. Switching to US Cloud can save your business 30 to 50% over Microsoft Unified and Premier support, and it's faster. It's better Twice as fast on average time to resolution versus Microsoft, and they're going to save you money in ways Microsoft may not want to save you money.
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01:55:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We thank them so much for supporting windows weekly by the way, while we were, while you're doing the ad, I just checked the feed and everything so open. Ai has signed a deal with uh google to use their cloud host like cloud google cloud.
01:55:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was the other thing that, uh, that it said, um, in this blog post about goodbye open air, that all of their stuff was with azure. So that's the big shift.
01:55:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That is the kind of yeah, the the work loads that uh, chat gpt uses on azure. There were four of them, so it's chat gpt, enterprise, edu, whatever they were, or also on gemini or a cloud wow, that's it.
01:55:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a big win for google actually.
01:55:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's big and uh, yeah, the rift is growing. It's like what do you mean? You're dating someone, we're sleeping, okay, um, okay, it's smart, what you don't want to be single sourced for anything.
01:55:53
No it is smart, but it's also, I would imagine, microsoft has to be okay with it, right, because of the current situation they have. Like it's, what are they gonna do? Yeah, well, they obviously said it was okay, right, they announced it. So microsoft is like, yeah, go, we don't care, go, go off with your friends, you know, we don't care anymore, like these people openly hate each other, yeah, so that's kind of interesting, um okay, but that started with the oracle.
01:56:21
Deal with stargate right like yes oracles right oracle is one and a code weave, which I don't 100 understand um, must be a code. Codeweave is a coding tool, right Like a. So I'm not really sure what that is, but I guess they have some infrastructure as well.
01:56:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I think the Stargate move was the first time we said oh, it's not just going to be Azure, but and it sounds like they were just making such crazy demands on Azure that at some point you know Microsoft's like no, we're not doing that.
01:56:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can do it somewhere else, right? The code we've name is somewhat, uh, deceptive. They actually are, uh.
01:56:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They provide servers service I think of them as like a hyperscaler. Was that the name of like a mac-based programming code weaver? It was a web.
01:57:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It wasn't in a web design tool, I think it was. Yeah, it's like something. I it was that or was that that gary? What's his name? Song code weaver, I believe you can make it through the night.
01:57:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think you're thinking of dream weaver, which is was also a web development tool right that was bought by adobe macro media back in the day, right and the song that was dream weaver also okay, that's how my mind works, but paul understood me I 100 I'm.
01:57:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're in the same mental space but I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, okay, um, uh, yeah, so open ai has said they're working on a browser. Open ai, according to reports, the information others is working on not an office productivity but office productivity features that would be native to chat GPT. That you know. We'll see One of the AI tools that has emerged. That is one of the few ones where I'm like, yes, I get it, this is awesome is a notebook LM. And notebook LM is interesting for a lot of reasons, but the big one to me is that it's specifically designed to be grounded on your data, so you feed it a document or some set of documents and then you ask questions and that's how it works. It's. You can do this with other AIs, but it's kind of specifically for this thing.
01:58:20
This is the, the Google tool that also does that audio overview. That sounds like a podcast with two hosts, right, the problem this solves. Well, there's two problems. One is hallucinations it doesn't solve it, but hopefully alleviates it to some degree because it's grounding in your data and the other one is just trust, right, because you're only working with your data, you kind of think, well, okay, I can trust this thing. When you're working across the internet, you're like, okay. Well, everyone on the internet is insane, so the things that this thing is looking at are insane. And how can I trust this thing? So Google has added a feature to this called featured notebooks, which are curated notebooks, notebook, lm, notebooks from third parties of high quality sources that you can use just standalone, like you can open the notebook and ask your questions, learn more about whatever topic, or you can use it use them more broadly as one of the several sources of information that you might be using.
01:59:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's brilliant I think, yeah, this we were going to set us up we had scheduled steven johnson from google's notebook lm for today's intelligent machines, to talk about this announcement and he's on a plane, so we're going to move him to next week. Actually, neil dash will join us, which is even just great, yeah, I this is smart like this there's eight or ten to begin with.
01:59:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like some of them, they're all over the map, right. So they're working with the uh publications like the economist and the atlantic good. Perfect, trusted sources, in other words. Yep. And then some individuals, plus or minus, whatever.
01:59:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Some of these you're still curating what the source of truth is. The other approach to this will ultimately be I would like to live in the manosphere. Please, please, select all of the truth that complies with my current worldview. Well, that's what rag is right.
02:00:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You get to choose the sources the probably right.
02:00:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So that's funny. That's, this is a missing piece. Um, I was talking about earlier before the break, about how important it is for it to do the work right, but you have to trust it for it to do the work, and and it is that thing I just said. The problem is you're like no, no, no, just only use trusted sources, do this. And it's like ah.
02:00:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So when you say trusted sources, what do you? The body of information?
02:00:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
we have is not a lot of trusted sources. You know what my wife writes about health and wellness and whatever, and she has to make sure that the sources are correct. When she uses ai, when she at, she'll push like an interview that she did with someone through this thing and say this person has made this assertion, this type of food lowers your blood sugar, or something. I need the five most recent trusted sources with that have our research based and known to be good. As for you to cite and I need to be able to check those individually and make sure it's true that's her doing a lot of work, so what you're saying is correct, but do we trust this thing to you? Know, just to do this? Yeah, I don't know.
02:01:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know if we're there yet but this is a good interim step, right, I mean yeah, well, and this is structures to try and build trust, yeah and it's.
02:01:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you look at this list it's kind of interesting. Like science-backed parenting advice based on psychology professor jacqueline neil's nessie sorry popular sub-stack newsletter techno sapiens okay, that's kind of narrow. No, it is. It's super narrow, but that's I think that's part of the point. Like a science fan's guide to yellowstone park. Longevity advice from eric topple best-selling offer of super ages can you add more than one?
02:01:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
can I like have several?
02:01:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
okay, yeah that's the point of this, right. So this is, this is, this is a little bit like when yahoo started, and they were like we have browsed the web and here are the 10 sites we recommend. You know, it's uh, it's, it's, it's manual, but I mean in this case, like, if you want to have fun.
02:02:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do the discover button, because then it just randomly picks. It says I'm feeling curious, it randomly. So I just got like 20 things on lidar, detection of karst formations. That's awesome, uh, but they're all. But if you were writing about that here, I just did it again. I got the difference between biofluorescence and bioluminescence, so it's all about biofluorescence and there's like five that yeah, light up at night or whatever, and there's like 10 sources, a bunch of them.
02:02:44
I think it's pretty cool yeah, hopefully one of those sources is not bob rantscom or whatever, but but, this is kind of the problem Like one of them is newsweek so, but it is a stunning new video, so that this is different.
02:02:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, one of the things I think that's smart about this is there is some hesitancy in some thinking people right when they're like I want to use this, but I can't trust it. Yeah, and this might be a way to get over this right.
02:03:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But you always get pokey. So what do you trust and why do you trust it? Yeah, well, I mean, I see something like this. It's built on this.
02:03:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think to myself like well, maybe I pump my book documents into this and have a field guide bot or something or a eternal spring bot or whatever it is called, and then I trust myself. I guess, I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I don't know, I mean it's, this is interesting, it's interesting.
02:03:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, it is. I mean I already do that. I have you know notebook LM, that's for lisp, common lisp, you know.
02:03:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
and I put in the sources, that's just rag Yep. So this way you prayed for students uh, people, I mean, or like your wife, is good because you could uh do what you did. You, you know that the the language, the official language guide, is a good source, or you know that this book, I know where to go exactly yeah, it's good, we're just not that far away from you, enter a university class and up on the whiteboard is the mcp for the textbooks.
02:04:05
That's a good professor, that's a really good idea I love it so, and one of these uh speaks that. So the complete works of william shakespeare for students and scholars to explore. Right so perfect. One of the big concerns today is like students are using ai to cheat. Of course, students are like the dinosaurs in jurassic park they'll survive, meaning cheat any way they can.
02:04:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They'll get away with. Find a way to get away with yes exactly.
02:04:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I love it and look, you could ask this thing. You know what does it mean in this particular work? Uh, that you know in this book or whatever play, whatever it is that he said this to this guy like you. You can ask it questions and learn more about this stuff. This kind of puts that on its head a little bit because you could cheat with this. Like there's no doubt. Like just tell me what the plot is of this book so I can write this stupid report and get by it. But if you actually want to learn what the plot is of this book, so I can write this stupid report and get by it.
02:04:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But if you actually want, to learn, like these seem like incredible resources, yeah, so to me this is this is good I think we have. There are possibilities through to a better world on this, you know yeah, or we could just and everything, and oh well, you know, no, it's listen, there, it's gonna press the button.
02:05:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're gonna be first we gotta figure out what's profitable yeah, that's fine, it's all good.
02:05:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, it always starts promising yeah, yes, and I always, I want to go with that, I like that, I, I want it to be promising yeah, remember when we thought the internet was a good idea yeah, it seemed like such a good idea at the time listen I that are to be clear, our societal collapse can literally be tied to the internet, like it's it's the
02:05:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's the unintended consequence of something that seems, and is, on the face of it, wonderful, which is I don't when I read the news. I don't want to see fashion news or beauty news or celebrity news. I want to see maybe you know, sports, politics and whatever. That sounds great, right, sounds great, but the end result of that is now I only see the things I want to see and I don't know anything about anything else. I don't see other viewpoints, I don't you know, and it narrows your view.
02:06:04
And then we get to this kind of Verificated society we have today. Like I don't have a solution, I just have an observation. But it's like the notion, like when I was still in America, online you could access what do you call them Newsgroups, like a use that newsgroups right From within AOL. I was able to buy things when I was living in Phoenix that were video game cartridges that were unopened and pristine from the early 1980s, from the crash, had been sitting in boxes in california and they were selling them to me for a dollar a piece and I could sell them online for like five dollars a piece, but because the internet existed sorry about the noise, um, I could ship these things around oh my god, are you in a dentist's office?
02:06:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I could ship them around the world so that's the end of that.
02:06:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So do you want me me to move on to Xbox and gaming, or do you want to um?
02:06:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you move on because I am done with the ads. We'll do a one more club twit pitch. I will make this quick. We're actually kind of running out of time here All right.
02:07:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, uh, the Xbox in windows 11 and 10, I guess. But windows 11 is obviously turning into this big thing, but right now, what it is is a front end to the games that you can buy and install through the Microsoft store. If you have a Game Pass subscription PC or Ultimate you can get whatever games you get there. If you have Ultimate, you can stream games through there. And Microsoft has been talking about this new functionality, I think for the past year, but the ability to stream Xbox games that you own because you purchase them digitally right At some point through games yeah.
02:07:38
Side by side with Game Pass games, and I was like, okay, that's interesting, right. So I looked at this and to get that you can get this right now the one thing you have to do is download the Xbox Ins insider app from the store. Uh, basically enroll into this program and then you go to the store and update the xbox and then you can get features more quickly. So I'm looking at this thing. I'm like where is this? Like where, how do I find this? Like I don't see anything obvious. And where this is is, let me see, is it I think it's in, I guess it's in cloud gaming? There's a header that says you know it's like stream these games, stream these games. And one of them says stream your games.
02:08:19
I'm like, oh cool, I don't know how many hundreds of games I bought on xbox since day one, but what I can tell you is that seven of them work through the system. So, yeah, the primary view in the app it's they're co-mingled together so you don't see them. But if you actually go to the place where they're called out individually, um, you can see the list, and for me it's seven. So a couple of assassins, creed games, a couple of uh, there's no quality games in this list, because if there were, I would have all of those. Um, but that's okay, that's cool. Um, there are new uh game pass games across all platforms. I'm really just hoping he stops at some point. There we go uh that, because we're now hitting the second half of july, um the big one. There is grounded too, but also there's a robocop game in there. There is a farming simulator in there, yeah, and then I'm just mentioning this mostly for humor's sake but uh, cyberpunk 27 7 is uh coming to the mac for some reason.
02:09:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um, cyberpunk 2077 is a great game.
02:09:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's very oppressive, it's definitely and I feel like it's really going on. She's making frozen.
02:09:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you wanted to play this, though you would have played it on the place two years ago. Yeah, you know what I mean, so I'm going to uh no, I'm excited.
02:09:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't, don't harsh my mellow man look I, I have a.
02:09:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I feel very strongly that the Mac is almost certainly like an excellent gaming platform. I think the stuff they've done with Metal.
02:09:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't wait.
02:09:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think it's incredible. There are five games on the Mac right now, so it's like it's not a big thing yet. But you know I play things like some of the Resident Evil stuff. Right has come.
02:10:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and they have Death Stranding which is okay.
02:10:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm excited about Cyberpunk honestly, that is five years old now. I mean it's not and I played it, but remember when it came out, it was buggy as hell. It was buggy exactly. So these guys, unless they pull a Microsoft with Call of Duty thing, they'll have like the latest updated version. It should be good.
02:10:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, in fact, I think you get a dlc. One of the dlc packs comes with it. Okay, I'm excited. I played it so little when it came out because it was so buggy, right, right that I'm kind of excited. I get to start over. Okay, and honestly, in five years, game qual, the, the visual quality of games has not dramatically improved, right I for the types of games I play, which by which I mean the.
02:10:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The game I play, um, it kind of doesn't matter in a way, because I visual quality is important. But you know, for multiplayer online you want performance and frame rate and all that stuff and like that's, to me it is more important. But it has reached that level where you know it's kind of at a plateau a little bit yeah, like after the 3080, like really yeah yeah, the uh call of duty.
02:11:15
That game we talked about last week, the, the ww2 version, which I still, by the way, cannot run because they still haven't fixed it. But that game is several years old. The graphics quality is great, like it's. Is it any different than the? Whatever?
02:11:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the thing and people are playing eight bit games games. They're very popular. Valheim, the game I played for a long time in COVID, was very low quality relatively. I mean, it was designed not to be. It was almost a retro feel. It's a new game. All I can say is it's calling the blinds. Oh, richard, you got a 5080 for the new one. Oh yeah, I went for it. Nice, are you doing any air cooling on the? On the connectors? They've got a new connector system.
02:12:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Uh, actually that distributes across three sets of boxes. So wow, you know, we're gonna, richard's gonna assemble his new pc.
02:12:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, we were gonna do it this friday, but the ram hasn't arrived. Yeah, so next thursday, 1 pm civic, 4 pm eastern. This is for club twit members, by the way. Yeah, uh, that's gonna be really fun.
02:12:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I can't wait to do that, richard, thank you totally looking forward to it.
02:12:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's gonna be a riot. Paul, is there anything you'd like to put together on camera?
02:12:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
blind my life.
02:12:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, no, not really I'm doing that uh, I just find this is why we love club twit. This is what club twit is all about is, uh, kind of a meeting of the minds. I for a long time, you know, I kind of considered what we did as a giant users group of the airwaves you know, like uh users group were. So I loved users groups. I mean I went to a mall when I was younger, in the 70s and the 80s and even into the 90s. Well, now we're like your user group and we're international, we're everywhere.
02:13:03
Uh, you get not only these great shows but if you join the club, you get access to the discord, which is a place to kind of hang, just like a user group, but it's 24 7. That's cool and we talk about everything. I mean, it's not just about the shows. We have a very active, very interesting advent of code thing, not just december, all year long. I'm working on it. It's so fun, and we talk about games and tv, all sorts of stuff, tv shows. So there's that that kind of you know, club aspect of it. You, you get ad-free versions of every public show we do. You get video with all the shows that we currently only put out as audio, like Hands on Windows, paul's incredible show about Windows. So you get the video for that. As a club member, you also get these special events like Richard's PC assembly Tonight, micah's doing his monthly crafting corner. We've got an AI user group. Stacy's book club is coming up in a few weeks. We've got the photos. I mean we have so much stuff so we try to make it.
02:14:01
I think we're doing, I have to say, and I have nothing to do with it, but I think the team is doing a really good job of making the club a lot of fun. But you know what's missing you. We want you to be in the club. Now. You may say, well, you just want my money, leo. No, we want your participation, we want to have you in the community. Admittedly, the price of mission is 10 bucks a month, 120 a year. There are family plans and and corporate plans. There's even a two-week free trial. So if you want to just see what it's like, I would recommend doing that. But the reason the 10 bucks is the reason the club was started in the first place.
02:14:40
We can't count on advertising dollars to make sure that we cover all of our expenses. In fact, right now they only cover about three quarters of our expenses, 25% of our operating costs come from club memberships. That's how important that is to us. We don three quarters of our expenses, 25% of our operating costs come from club memberships. That's how important that is to us. We don't want to cut back, we want to keep growing, want to keep doing new and exciting things, like Richard's PC built. So please join the club. That's all. I'm just begging, pleading, wranging you. Twittv slash club twit. We would love, love to have you in the club. Now back to the dental uh office and paul thorat for his uh tip of the week, paul.
02:15:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So um, most people are familiar with the fact that the apple store has a refurbished section, which is a great way to buy Apple equipment because it tends to be very expensive. But I actually I've done that a ton. I also use the refurbished stores that Lenovo and HP offer and in fact the laptop I'm using here I got through HP's store but it was refurbished right or on sale Otherwise. I can't remember exactly in this case, but most people are probably not familiar with this. It easy enough to find these things. Just, you know, google it. Like I had gotten an email from lenovo the other day. That was they call it, but like doorbuster sale. Lenovo stuff's always on sale, but the um like they're some of that stuff is amazing. They have, like the, the latest gen amd ryzen uh 14 inch lenovo uh thinkpad p series work state portable workstation it it's like $1,300. I think this thing was $2,800 originally. It's like this is the way to go. So just think about that. We're talking about this PC upgrade cycle. Nobody wants to upgrade.
02:16:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And these are typically lease returns.
02:16:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, get a high quality. Never barely used something, something for a lot less. That's like a business class premium PC rather than a piece of junk that's not going to last that long. Yeah, these are, these are really good. These are good. Do they give them a warranty? Yeah, yeah, the normal warranty. Well, yeah, just like same as apple like it's yeah, yeah.
02:16:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like a lot of times these are open box, like somebody uh bought it and returned it without using.
02:16:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can do this at best buy. Does this too right? You know, this is one of the. This is one of the weird problems with, like the popularity of something like amazon, where because amazon, by the way, does this too, you know, I I buy a monitor stand, let's say I get it, I set it up, yeah it's not right.
02:17:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I said I would never buy anything refurbished from amazon.
02:17:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
On the other hand, no, no I'm just okay, but I'm just getting from the manufacturer. I mean, what I mean is I bought it new, but then I opened the box yeah, get out, didn't want it yeah, send it back.
02:17:17
They don't charge me anything for it. Amazon covers this whole thing. But now they've got this thing that's open, that nobody wants, so it's good for this to you know, to be able to find at home or whatever. I'm sure this is built into their business model, whatever, but this is kind of a problem, okay, um dell has uh.
02:17:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Dell has refurbs too I think, yes, they do.
02:17:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I didn't. I just highlighted those because I literally everybody does. Literally everything in front of me is an hp, something except for one external display, which is a lenovo, and all of them were either the refurbished or just on sale or whatever, because they both of these companies have incredible sales. So this is like a like a thrift shop of, uh, yesteryear's high-end lenovo and mostly hp, uh equipment. It's you know, it works good.
02:18:04
I, this is a laptop that has three displays, like right now, like it's like it's now, like it's like it's working fine, like it's good. Um, okay, uh, epic. Um is you know, in the sense that I once said I would never pay for AI and am also a hypocrite. Um, I do pay for this AI, which is a language tool. Um, not for I wrote for desktop, but language tool. So language tool is an alternative to Grammarly. I find it to be better slash, more accurate.
02:18:32
However, you want to say that I do pay for it and I use it mostly through the browser extension, because it's that last kind of edit pass when I paste a document into the form that will put that thing up and onto my site, right, and it has all kinds of things I like about it, but the big one for me is it's it has a sort of style guide kind of feature so you can train it as you go so that it recognizes the way you write.
02:19:00
And even though there are certain things like whether or not you capitalize the first letter after a colon, which I have opinions about, or, uh, the like complex sentences that have a semicololons, which apparently are growing out of style, I love them. Or m dashes and whatnot, like it's. For someone like me who writes a lot, it's great, but I also think it's you don't have to pay for it, necessarily, but for anyone who's going to submit text in any form anywhere in the world, like having something look at that before you hit enter super important, right, like you don't want to miss a typo or whatever it is, this tool is awesome for that. And look, someday this will just be awesome. And some browser I'm using and I won't have to pay for this. But, um, this is the one that has emerged, uh for me and I like it so much. I got my wife, uh, um, like a year subscription or whatever as well, because I'm like look, this will make your writing better.
02:19:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's good nice, I'm still on grammarly, but only because they send me an email each week telling me how awesome I am. I know I love that email yeah, language still doesn't do that, but this is just an easy win, like just an easy win okay there are some open source now ai grammar checkers.
02:20:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I use one called harper okay, which I've not heard of, yeah, and another one, uh, just came out um the idea, the idea being it's uh, you know privacy first, you're running it locally, oh, my god you know. Meanwhile, let's see what's happening on the run as radio program well, I, I'm doing a little dental project over here.
02:20:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, no, not so much. This week's show was from the sessions at Build. This is with corporate vice president of Azure Data, the man who owns data for the whole company, arun Ulaik, who I had on a year before. So it was fun to bring him back because he's the Microsoft Fabric guy. So before he got the role as Azure Data, he ran the Power BI group, so very much about analytics and so forth, and when he got this new role, he had an opportunity basically to rethink how Microsoft provides analytic tools to the world. And that's what Microsoft Fabric became, and last year when we were talking, it was really, really new. There was still very much the existing suite of products where they're trying to coordinate better. So it was fun to come back and say, all right, how are we doing a year in and so big conversations just talking about some of the new product lines they've gone into, like real-time analytics, which I've talked to about on the show before, or what they call real-time intelligence, but also much better integration, a lot of work on what they call, you know, data estate issues or data protection services for AI, so that you understand and can control what the various co-pilots and things that you're using are actually having access to inside of your organization, separate from the users. We had a big conversation there about how agents have their own identities and so they can have their own restriction set so you can keep your existing workflows running while you're experimenting with the new tools. He's a brilliant guy, super excited about what he's making. It was very, very fun to talk to him. So a great conversation, conversation literally from the leader of the group, and then I'm all by myself, so I might as well have a drink. Sorry not to worry.
02:22:25
So, uh, this week's whiskey was purchased by my wife when we were down in the US, actually for July 4th, she found ran across this have you ever talked about this? I'm like nope. So she's like, oh, you should have it. And it is. Slane is the name of the distillery and this is their basic product. They slain triple cask, their basic product. The slain triple cask uh, it's a blended with. It's a breadless irish whiskey from, uh, meath county in ireland. It's specifically the boyne valley, which is where the boyne river boyne runs. So that's about 50 kilometers north northwest of dublin if you go down the m2 and the name, if you're a history buff, is familiar because of this thing called the battle of the boyne in 1690.
02:23:17
I remember that oh maybe I don't historic, incredibly historically important, because this is william of orange, right, right? So, uh, if you go back a little bit further, charles ii's ruling england for 20 or so years but never has an heir, but his younger brother, james II, tries to take control. When Charles II dies, people don't like James, mostly because he's a Catholic, and this is at a time where for 100 years or so, protestantism has been the full swing there and so close ties to the French king, louis XIV, and so this is kind of a big deal. And he gets married, declares himself king. Nobody really has an alternative. He then almost immediately has an heir, james Stuart, which really gets people upset. And Charles, who was not a Catholic, had made arrangements before his death to have his niece, mary, mary ii, to get married to william of orange or william iii, and so that marriage had happened. But he, william, is still in the netherlands. And so there was a group of highly influential people they literally refer to as the immortal seven. This is five different earls, sort of the most powerful nobles, along with the viscount lumley and the bishop of london, who then send a letter to william of orange to take control of england. Uh, william decides. What the heck of a fun idea.
02:24:42
And in 1688 lands with 15,000 troops. Uh, as soon as he lands in the far south and a bunch of the nobles come on board with him and start heading towards London, james fields an army larger still, about 24,000, because nominally he is king. But there's enough turmoil in all of that. He has a he. Basically James panics and withdraws before they actually conflict, and to the point where, as soon as he starts defecting, more noble sign on with William, and so all of a sudden it's like his army's falling apart. So James actually splits to France, goes hangs with King Louis, and so in April of 1689 William III is crowned king of England, having no one killed by military conflict at all. Remarkable, remarkable achievement for the era. But you know, james isn't quite happy with the situation and so he's still in France. But there is a large Catholic contingent and the large Catholic contingent is in Ireland who's currently being suppressed by the English Protestants, and so they're kind of pro James. So they say they'll sign on with James. So then James gets a bunch of French troops, heads off to Ireland and rounds up some more troops. The Earl of Tarkhanel signs on with him and they start pushing the Protestants south, to the north. Right, you can see the beginnings of what we would call the contemporary troubles, of what we would call the contemporary troubles. And so William then sends one of his best lieutenants, an older general by the name of Schomburg, to defeat what they call the Jacobites, and he lands near Belfast. They have a standoff. Schomburg doesn't really move forward. There's some skirmishes but it doesn't get too far. So William himself comes over with more troops and they finally collide in the Boyne Valley.
02:26:35
James II has a force of about 25,000 in a town near called Old Bridge. William puts his fort, has his forces north of there, but he actually does an exploratory run through Slane, recognize the and Old Bridge. Then he was not happy with the surveillance he did so he actually brought the King's forces himself forward to Old Bridge, which is kind of nuts. James's forces fire on him and William III is injured in the incident. Some folks say he's dead, but he's not. He survives. But he sees the situation and so he sends 7,000 troops up to slain, which is a good 10 kilometers wet further up the river and the rest hold at old bridge.
02:27:19
James now sees the count and probably should have withdrawn. He's definitely outnumbered, but instead moves about two thirds of his forces 18,000 men, towards the folks moving in through slain, although they end up crossing at Rosner E, and so that leaves only about 8,000, facing the bulk of William's forces who then come across the river at Old Bridge. The crazy part is, almost all of the Jacobites have the forces because they actually went into this face-off with the diversionary group and didn't actually ever fire a shot in anger. There's a series of battles at the riverfront, the forces of james's are grossly outnumbered and they get pushed back and ultimately, uh, the jacob conflict largely collapses there. Within a within a few months, james flees back to uh france, where he'll die uh in 1701, and uh william gradually takes control of ireland along with england and scotland, and you have the william era. So, uh, the battle of boyne is the pivotal moment and that is literally the region we're talking about.
02:28:20
In fact, there is a slain castle which was there at the war, but that largely gets changed over because, as will O'Revange takes control of Ireland, he confiscates a lot of land from the Jacobites, including the land in the area around Slane, and this is where the Cottingham family jumps into that. These are folks originally from Scotland but had moved to Ireland in 1611 in Donegal, and then they actually fought in that Battle of Boyne. Both Albert and Henry Cunningham were part of that battle, henry being one of the generals, and it was Henry Cunningham that purchases the land in 1703 around the slain castle as part of William's repossessions of lands from the Jacobites. So there was an existing castle going back to the 14th century. There were monasteries and things even older than that, but they take over the initial castle and a couple of generations later, in 1785, the castle is largely rebuilt. That's the castle that is still standing there today, although it is expanded further in 1796, including a set of stables that today are the Slain Distillery. So that's the setup for the area and there was whiskey making back in the day in that area, but it had all been shut down for various reasons. The castle, of course, continued to operate and related to this entire story.
02:29:48
In 1981, lord Henry Cunningham so many generations later from the Henry that bought the castle originally, but from the same family used his property to create these things called the Slain Concerts. This is in 1981, which in many ways was a very difficult period during the Troubles. That's when the Mays prison hunger strike was going on and so forth. That's when the Mays Prison hunger strike was going on and so forth, and so Lord Henry had the good idea that we could put on concerts to sort of do a positive building space. There's a natural amphitheater that's part of the property and it is massive. There's room for 80,000 people there. And so they still do these concerts to this day. But it began at that time as a way to have something positive going on in ireland during the troubles.
02:30:36
But let's get to the whiskey part of the story, which is much more recent. So a the yet younger generation, in 2008, a son of an of the same lord henry, the one that started the concerts in 2008, alex cunningham, uh, decides he wants to start making whiskey and so he starts doing blends from the new middleton distillery, including a triple casking. Not all doing blends from the New Middleton distillery, including a triple casking, not all that different from the one I have today, which he actually launches in 2015. But as he starts to get his head around what it actually takes to make whiskey at scale and it's a bit out of his depth he establishes a relationship with Brown Farnham. That's from Kentucky, the American company that makes Jack Daniels and Woodford Reserve and Old Forester, but also owns a number of Scottish whiskeys, including Benriac and Glengloss and Glendronac. So Brown Fornham commits millions of dollars to build a proper distillery on the Slane Castle site and opens it in 2017. And so now all whiskey for the Slane distilleries are actually produced on site.
02:31:34
They do 100% Irish barley, most of which actually comes from the Cunningham farms and is unmalted barley. If you recall, the Irish at one point were being taxed on the amount of malted barley they use, so they probably started using unmalted barley. Now they don't quite have enough. Plus, there's a need for some malted barley, so they also bring in malted barley bowl that is also irish. You know the whole unmalted thing started as a tax judge, but it actually turned out to make a really interesting flavors in the whiskey. So they still use both of this day.
02:32:04
Their mashing processes are separate from the malt and unmalted. This is not that unusual. They use a typical whiskey process with a lot of tons for the malted. For the unmalted you have to do a few other processes to break down the sugars because it has been malted and you know the whole malting process is about using the natural plant reactions to break apart the long carbohydrates into short sugars, and so when you're not going to do that, you have to grind it a little finer. You've got to heat it and little finer you've got to heat it and mix it and add enzymes to it to actually start to extract the sugars from it, and then that can go through the lot of time as well. So the grain run and the malt run go separately.
02:32:42
They have three wooden washbacks of about 26 000 liters each. They do a very long fermentation, about 120 hours, and then they do a split distillation as well. The malt distil, the, the malt wort goes into pot stills. They do a triple distillation. So there's two thirteen thousand liter uh stills they call the wash in the intermediate still and then a four thousand liter spirit still, and then for the grain whiskey they use a column still. It's actually six smaller columns side by side, three of which are stainless steel and three of which are copper, and then those distillates.
02:33:20
The resulting product is barreled in three different kinds of barrel Jack Daniel's barrels because they're obviously part of Brown Farnham and Jack Daniel's, the largest producer of whiskey in the world. So they have a lot of barrels are only allowed to use once. They also do new American oak barrels, also from Kentucky, although they are planting thousands of acres of oak trees on the Slane Castle property to start producing their own local oak and Oloroso sherry casks from Spain. So that's your three barrelings. Two different distillates, so that's six combinations. Barrelings, two different distillates, so that's six combinations. Right down there they do a bunch of aging and then they combine back to make a particular version. Now this is a blended whiskey. It has both green and malt in it. So it's relatively inexpensive $27 a bottle I found on BevMo for a 40%. For a 40%.
02:34:11
This is very Irish, which is to say it's beautiful. There's no big scary nose on it. It smells real gentle, it sips lightly, it's rich and creamy, the way that grain alcohol effect has. The way they process it They've taken all the harsh notes out of it and you're warm all through. Process it They've taken all the harsh notes out of it and you're warm all through. Just like listening to an Irish jig. It's fantastic and it's inexpensive.
02:34:39
Normally your default whiskey, your default Irish, is a Jameson. Let's face it, it's the most popular Irish whiskey out there. It's easy to come by. It's about the same price? You know no big deal. So why wouldn't you buy this lane instead? Because everybody sees Jameson coming. This is just a little bit different. It has a bit of character to it and, you know, in some ways it almost reminds me of Woodford Reserve, which is also a Brown Fornum product in its particular style, except it's barley instead of corn. So it's just not as sweet. So you don't get that big sweet up front head. It goes down super nice, like every irish whiskey should, but for a really very reasonable price nice, I like irish whiskey I think it's good for beginners like me.
02:35:24
Yeah right, it's not peaty, it's often sweet uh and well and, but this is inoffensive, right? It's easy to get along with inoffensive like paul theron there you go? I don't think that's not I can't put my finger on it, but I don't think that's, I don't know, maybe but you're right, it's a good intro whiskey in the sense that it's not going to frighten you, it's not going to try and poke your eye out or anything like that. So you can.
02:35:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can start off pretty easily and then, when you're going to look for more adventures, there's adventures to be had adventures to be had should be the name of this show, because god knows it's been adventurous, uh, from drilling to whiskey and everywhere in between, so I need to bail, because he's going to start right here.
02:36:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Ladies and gentlemen, that's paul thurot.
02:36:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He is bailing out the boat as we speak. You'll find him at thurotcom.
02:36:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Become richard goodbye and uh, of course his books are at leanpubcom.
02:36:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, paul. Thank you, go get a taco you deserve. You've earned something. Maybe get out of the noise, okay. Okay, richard campbell is at run his radiocom. That's where his shows are, of course, and, uh, including dot net rocks with carl franklin. Uh, we do this show every wednesday 11 am. Pacific 2 pm, eastern 1800 utc.
02:36:45
You watch live and I apologize for the crackling. We're not sure why that's happening. We don't think it's on the recording, we're pretty sure it's not. But, uh, I do apologize to our people watching live on the stream. That's one of the downsides of watching live is you get the rough, uncut edges, unedited, bad version of the show, but you get to see it before anybody else does. We stream live, of course, for the club and the discord, but also youtube, twitch, twitch, tiktok, facebook, linkedin, xcom and Kik Watch. Where you choose. I can see the chats. Thank you, brett Jones, and YouTube and David Hales and all the folks watching all over.
02:37:22
You don't have to watch live. That's why it's a podcast. It means you can download it either from our website at twittv. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to the to video, which is a good thing to have if you want to share a clip with somebody, but of course, the best way to get it is subscribe to the audio or video or vote, or both. You can get. You get your choice. It's free. Uh, in your favorite podcast client, do leave us a good five-star review. If you would help spread the word about the best darn windows show on the planet windows weekly you're going to be, uh, out of pocket in a week.
02:37:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Richard, I'm here next week, but the 30 next week I'll be here and then the week after that will be, uh, the cruise thank you, richard.
02:38:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Have a great time, uh, on the cruise, but we'll see you next week I'll see you next week.